REVIEWS
Robbins, Richard & Hausknecht, Murray & Hoffman, Robert L. & Davis, Devra Lee
THE AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL ELITE, by Charles Kadushin. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 395 pp. $8.95. THE LONG DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL: THE AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL LEFT AND THE VIETNAM WAR, by Sandy...
...And how about the scientist or the journalist with an editorial-page column...
...Apparently Goldberg believes that our presently patriarchal society fosters such relationships and contacts between females, and males...
...249 pp...
...Did Cambridge or the philosophical profession comprehend him or what he intended his words to say...
...Goldberg says that if one asks, "'does that mean that if half the members of every society were white and half were black and all societies were ruled by whites (or all by blacks) then you would say that one race was superior at attaining power for biological reasons, the answers is, of course, yes...
...At best they can only be shown, indicated through poetic communications...
...A collusive divorce, after all, is nothing more than a divorce by consent (which the law expressly forbids) arrived at through collusion (which the law holds to be an impediment to divorce) to appear to be a divorce based upon marital misconduct (which the law accepts...
...Someone has...
...The radical opposition to the war gained continual strength, so that when the "Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority" was issued in the New York Review, "most intellectuals" responded to the "move from dissent to resistance" because "to resist was to take a moral stand...
...Using this clue and internal evidence, and applying the pornography "recognition rule," it is clear that Kadushin did talk to real, live intellectuals...
...THE BOOK would be important were it just a persuasive attempt to change the interpretation of a major thinker's work, but it is much more...
...We have only to examine Kakanian Vienna, the problems that preoccupied its intellectuals, and the ways they led each other to engage them...
...In a recent review of a collection of Shils's essays on intellectuals Robert Nisbet maintains that historical experience suggests a need for reshaping the definition so that it "implies a political thrust, a kind of rootlessness, a view of knowledge as primarily a weapon, and a certain adversary position with respect to culture, convention, and tradition...
...During the March on Washington in November 1965 Carl Oglesby's speech "signaled the ascendance of radicalism in the peace movement...
...These are powerful stimuli and make it easy for the intellectual to find himself enlisted in the armies of the night and standing (literally) on the steps of the house of power demanding that his voice be heard...
...As I have noted, some of the differences between Kadushin and Vogelgesang are artifacts of different methods...
...Yet the differences also probably reflect the basic structural ambivalence of the intellectual role...
...318 pp...
...BUT DEFINITIONS tell us nothing about the actual behavior of intellectuals at given times and places...
...Contrary to popular belief, intellectuals tended not to see the war as an inherent imperialistic concomitant of the economic and political structure of American society...
...Biology is no more destiny than is society...
...Numerous feminist critics grant the prevalence of patriarchy, not as proof of its biological inevitability, but as a reflection of historical and social factors that may well have initially stemmed from biological factors, but after thousands of years can no longer be viewed as physically determined...
...Your sons being what they are, you could never fully regret your marriage, despite its dreary end...
...But even those who could overcome their reluctance to become involved were politically ineffective...
...6.95 cloth, $2.95 paper...
...But he does not appreciate that the decision to collect certain kinds of data itself reflects certain interests and assumptions...
...If Goldberg's discussion were restricted to out and out ideological claims, bereft of empirical support, it would be possible to engage in polemics on the inevitability of patriarchy, male dominance, or impeachment...
...It requires, as Kadushin points out, long, patient hours of talking to and cajoling legislative technicians and bureaucratic experts in (literally) the corridors of power...
...But, of course, actually to influence the course of events, more must be done than addressing elegantly reasoned arguments to "key decision-makers...
...After asserting that an advanced technological society could not develop on matrilineal lines, Goldberg speculates: "but if one did exist," it would differ most notably from our society "in the dearth of male-female contacts and tenuousness of malefemale relationships, in the total separation of the male and female roles...
...Whether rich or poor, scorned or accorded high status, men are only mean creatures crushed by their own artifacts, material and intellectual...
...Perhaps there is still hope for the power of rational intellect and its propositions...
...His honest and humane description of his own divorce and single parenthood (two sons, living with him) is woven into an analysis of the institutionalized mismanagement required for legal divorce...
...Andrew M. Greeley, for example, states, without any definition, that "the stupidity of the intelligentsia dabbling in politics is unforgivable...
...For the intellectual is also the "guardian of moral standards," and therefore peculiarly susceptible to moral fervor and ideological fever...
...Built into this conception of the role is a set of contradictions...
...For the logical positivism originating in postwar Vienna, it had comparable stature...
...Divorce, middle-class American style in particular, is endlessly discussed and little understood...
...they attempt "to provide moral standards and maintain meaningful general symbols...
...These differences in method partly account, no doubt, for some interesting differences in their reports...
...Along the way low-keyed advice slips in, but derived from self-knowledge and reflective reading, not from those new authoritarians, the over-30years - of- practical- experience - in-counselingtroubled - families - have - convinced- me- that specialists...
...Thereafter, emphasis was to rest on radical reconstruction of the American society...
...On the dubious consequences of a healthy junking of old sex codes: "Alas...
...Society and culture are atomized, devoid of spirit, with a vitality that is nothing but wheels madly turning while producing nothing worth desiring...
...Though they spoke in different vocabularies, verbal, visual, and musical, Wittgenstein's fellows drew upon the same leading ideas and upon each other for inspiration, and for each the purpose was explicitly conceived as ethical...
...My book draws the limits of the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous way of drawing these limits...
...It is too familiar to disentangle all the manifestations, except through occasional flashes of insight or through the studied and abstract analysis that loses the substance in its words...
...This characterization of the reaction against modern culture can be applied to organicist conservatives and anarchists, neo-Marxists and fascists, surrealists and expressionists, political revolutionaries and apolitical intellectuals and aesthetes, to men of lustrous genius and to average men who only struggle to survive...
...We develop powerful techniques for the expansion of knowledge and the rejection of incomplete, misconceived, and muddled attempts at understanding...
...Indented sections on the unraveling of Epstein's own marriage are followed by a portrait of why marriage in general seems more and more troubled...
...It proved to be just what philosophers wanted to become solidly professional, the rigorous method for clearing away confusion impeding the progressive development of their trade...
...Legal scholars and jurists face similar problems in defining pornography...
...This is a book about men as leaders, authority figures, and high-status persons in society...
...The Tractatus is a generalized critique of language and its logic, demonstrating with precision just how language gets and conveys meaning...
...Devotion to moral purity made many intellectuals shun political compromise...
...For, if as a "fountainhead of ideologies" he is to be found loitering in the antechambers of the powerful, he cannot be a staunch defender of "moral standards," which are always under assault by his masters...
...A rather different picture emerges from Vogelgesang's analysis...
...Neither sophistication about "amicable divorce," nor sociological analysis of divorce data by class, race, and religion, nor a critique of the idiocy called divorce law helps us to know the personal pain and confusion, along with the resiliency, that follows from "uncoupling...
...Since the latter realm is one's special responsibility, distancing oneself from the powerful and their retinues is almost a reflex action—a politically disabling reflex...
...But most intellectuals, Kadushin reports, were "wary" of any involvement with power...
...Rather than succumbing to Goldberg's dichotomy of female or male dominance and its focus on biological determinants of the "appropriate" aggression, we might consider a society where "aggression" of any kind would not be highly valued and Goldberg's grand theory would become irrelevant...
...We can analyze the logic of our propositions, and hence the logic of the facts represented...
...The stress on communication with a "general audience" allows Kadushin to specify his universe of intellectuals as those who have written for 20 "prestigious journals" like the New York Review, Ramparts, Commentary, Dissent, New Republic, Partisan Review, etc...
...Current technology supposedly requires male dominance and patriarchy, according to Goldberg...
...At the same time, reflecting about divorce in general must lead to a tempered conclusion about the future of the nuclear family as an institution...
...We can see and respond to what is shown, but we cannot know it rationally...
...Societies conform their institutions and socialization to the sexual directions set by physiological differentiation...
...GOLDBERG CONFUSES the commonly understood notions of human nature with some presumably accurate reflection on human nature...
...8.95 The systematic study of that amorphous category of people called intellectuals presents more than the usual problems of definition...
...The difficulty of translating intuitive understanding into conventional legal definition led Justice Potter Stewart to confess that, while he cannot adequately define pornography, he can recognize it when he reads it...
...However, having garbed his analysis with social scientific language in the assumption that there are relevant, decisive data to be gathered in behalf of his grand theory, he tries to place his argument beyond ideological considerations...
...Janik and Toulmin: "So the stage was set [in 1900] for a philosophical critique of language, given in completely general terms...
...The latter must inevitably be involved in the hurly-burly of the marketplace when he is not gliding through the corridors of power, and these involvements will offend those who prefer intellectuals to live at a greater distance from such profane concerns...
...Obviously there is a biological base to human life...
...New York: E. P. Dutton...
...A tempered conclusion to an honest book, one that need not be ratified, personally or objectively, by a second volume, Remarried in America...
...It is this moment in the intellectuals' response that Vogelgesang pins down...
...If the intellectual is seen against the 199 ground of "the sacred" and "core values," he is a more unworldly figure than the individual who will "articulate interest and desire...
...In this regard, technology takes on the role of the slaves in Plato's Republic, performing the labor necessary for a communalistic republic of free persons...
...a man and his ideas...
...Epstein obviously has achieved this sense of distance...
...The methodical employment of rational faculties provides the professional standards to determine what is worthy effort, as contribution to knowledge either for its own sake or for practical application...
...Theirs is a normative function to prescribe what ought to be...
...204 BOOKS Wittgenstein's position reflects an attitude so common in modern culture that we have difficulty in perceiving it in all the varieties of ways it has been expressed...
...Goldberg's book is a kind of rearguard action attempting to bring people closer to commonly understood views of human nature...
...Although most thought the intellectual role required a critical stance, only a minority thought that it also meant an obligation to elaborate or support specific policy proposals...
...Yet some agreement on the problem of definition is emerging...
...Such a society would rest, not on paternalistic or matriarchal relationships, but on a socially contracted egalitarianism...
...After all, what can be more persuasive than a demonstration, using the standards of the powerful, that the war is a failure...
...Still, Goldberg is assuredly right in saying that a matrilineal society would separate male and female just as much as the present patriarchal system does...
...There is a possibility that intellectuals' responses to public issues are oscillating responses, and that Kadushin and Vogelgesang are picking up intellectuals at different moments...
...On realism, beyond the law's farcical search for "grounds": "You both had your cases, you both viewed yourselves as plaintiffs, but it all seemed pointless next to the major fact: feeling was dead and the marriage was done...
...to cope...
...New York: Harper & Row...
...Ask the divorced themselves or the children of the divorced...
...This makes scientific knowledge possible...
...Her conception of intellectuals is derived from the mainstream definition: "They are the men and women of ideas who explore and challenge the underlying values of society...
...At this level, one has traveled a long way from the "more general realm of meanings and ideas...
...policy within foreign affairs agencies," focuses her stimulating book entirely on reactions to the Vietnam War...
...And so Wittgenstein became the oracle of analytic philosophy, linguistic analysis, logical positivism, and the like...
...Intellectuals are familiar with the phenomenon...
...but, by Janik and Toulmin's corollary to George Santayana's aphorism, those who are ignorant of the context of ideas are destined to misunderstand them...
...THE INEVITABILITY OF PATRIARCHY, by Stephen Goldberg...
...Someone ought to write about American divorce as a peculiar institution, a mixture of private pain and public concern, where the court's award of custody leaves the father (or mother) free...
...a culture and its preoccupations...
...THE LONG DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL: THE AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL LEFT AND THE VIETNAM WAR, by Sandy Vogelgesang...
...There is no mystery here, despite the elliptical and aphoristic character of the Tractatus, which has so mystified its readers...
...In the course of his discussion Coser quotes Edward Shils, for whom intellectuals are those showing "an unusual sensitivity to the sacred, an uncommon reflectiveness about the nature of their universe, and the rules which govern their society...
...These were interviewed about their views on the Vietnam war and other issues, and the usual statistics about their social characteristics were collected...
...That, finally, was why most leftist intellectuals turned to resistance...
...it is rather more difficult to specify the role in a way that unambiguously distinguishes it from other social roles...
...a society and its problems," and their aim "to use each of our four topics as a mirror in which to reflect and to study all the others...
...but this base is socially transformed in radically different ways by kinship structures, sexual norms, and the exchange values accorded to the different sexes...
...As such, their special vocation is a critical stance: "they are those who `think otherwise,' the disturbers of intellectual peace...
...Genius was abundant in Vienna's last imperial years...
...For all the rhetoric on the death of the nuclear family, for all that a clean divorce may be preferable to a miserable marriage, for all the contemporary emphasis on one's personal right to opt out as freely as one enters in, some kind of family structure remains an essential linchpin between individual and society...
...jealous guardians of the moral standards that are too often ignored in the marketplace and the house of power...
...In a letter quoted by Janik and Toulmin, Wittgenstein wrote: The book's point is an ethical one...
...He adds, however, that people in fact learn these tasks, first because they must and second in order to function most efficiently...
...After studying there in 1912-13, he served with the Austrian army in the war, working at the same time on a philosophical declaration...
...The fun is coupled with the excitement of discovering BOOKS 203 through this adventure problems central to the experience of modern man, revealed in a light undimmed by academic games and aridity...
...But Wittgenstein journeyed to Trinity College, Cambridge, several worlds away, and became celebrated as a Cambridge philosopher of logic and language...
...all that can vary is who dominates and who submits...
...society," he will be caught in the cross fire of those who bless him for being a "disturber of intellectual peace" and those who damn him for his "rootlessness" and contempt for the decencies of "culture, convention, and tradition...
...This should be the approach to any substantial study of ideas, literature, or art: that it most often is not is a consequence not only of the limited vision and capacity of scholars and critics, but also of a process in modern culture against which Wittgenstein and many of his contemporaries reacted...
...Lacking affect, they can no longer have any social relationships but formal or functional ones...
...If the stance of Kadushin's sample of intellectuals is not atypical of intellectuals' behavior generally, neither is that of Vogelgesang's sample...
...not be represented...
...This recognition rule is implicit in many comments on intellectuals...
...The gap between what was perceived to be the reaction of intellectuals, even by intellectuals themselves, and what the interview data revealed about the attitudes of leading intellectuals is symbolized by the figure of Noam Chomsky...
...Yet Vogelgesang's is a narrower range of journals and more skewed to the Left...
...Sandy Vogelgesang, who, according to the bookjacket copy, is "chairperson of the Secretary of State's Open Forum Panel, an in-house channel for new or dissenting views on U.S...
...In Kadushin's sample the moral and ideological impulse is subordinated to a reasoned, analytical appraisal of the war...
...And it is precisely this second part that is the important one...
...Yet while she scrupulously draws our attention to these voices, they tend, in her description, to be drowned out by a larger chorus of moral absolutists...
...Their vocabularies and foci of attention differ widely, and they can only see through their several glasses darkly...
...Abstractions become reified, and once reified they come to dominate the real substance from which they are drawn...
...In a society beyond scarcity, there can be no human zoo...
...314 pp...
...An intuitive grasp of the distinctiveness of the social role is relatively easy...
...Whatever early differences between the sexes may have obtained, bulldozers have no sex...
...We can be shown what disturbs our culture, and we can see it, but we need to say it, and that we cannot do...
...Joseph Epstein has written a wise, warm, and ruefully comic account of middle-class marriage and divorce "in an age of possibility...
...For one thing, it is great fun to read, a marvelous excursion into the life of Kakania, of intellect, of ideas in vital interaction...
...Whether in philosophy, fiction, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, or music the prob1em was one of language, of the nature and structure of communication, of the authenticity of expression—and of its contemporary gross inadequacy...
...The divorce rate continues to rise (the remarriage rate as well...
...Janik and Toulmin begin by declaring that their "subject is a fourfold one—a book and its meaning...
...Intellectuals only want to "talk to people at the top rather than assistants, legislative aides, and the like...
...If Jimmy Walker's remark a propos the controversy over Ulysses, "No good girl was ever ruined by a book," is taken as a comment on both pornography and intellectuals he may still be proven as right about the latter as the former...
...instead of shedding guilt and developing inwardly, we have the bedroom olympics, with their accompanying tyranny of performance, unreal expectations, and misplaced salvationism...
...Their reaction inspired the Tractatus, and this book in turn—a fine irony—induced a perfect example of the process that so disturbed them...
...If something exists for a group of people and appears, moreover, to occur widely in many different cultures, then Goldberg's kind of functional analysis looks for physical determinants of a presumably fixed human nature...
...Here, black and white supposedly represent biologically distinct races, whose very biologies dictate their positions...
...What can be shown cannot be said...
...only seems to, however...
...q 206 BOOKS...
...My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written...
...Effectiveness depends upon making contact with "established points of view" in an essentially "conservative and consensual society...
...Retracing one's own divorce while searching out other people's views on divorce in general must lead to a certain distance from the subject and thus to a final personal accounting, without rancor, of how and why it happened...
...Given such determinist notions, one is hard pressed to criticize any existing social phenomenon...
...We have had a succession of fashionable ways of discussing and exploiting it, have accorded varied and changing levels of esteem to the different forms in which the reaction is expressed...
...Theoretically, America could lower the level of male aggression in America to that of the Pygmy society, where such aggression is relatively low, but only at what Goldberg considers an impossible price, namely: "if we were willing to give up science, bureaucratic organization, industrialization and democracy...
...We are of course limited by our own rationality...
...Although this is empirical sociological research, Kadushin has chosen to report it as a "sociological history of leading American intellectuals of the late 1960s," and as such it will remain a valuable source, principally of intellectuals' opinions and attitudes toward the war...
...Intellectually, we are supposed to "take account" of Max Weber's nervous breakdown, or Norman Mailer's multiple marriages, but only as contributory to some larger argument about the economy or literature...
...And probably because of that, he remains, as he says, "a divorced man whose bias is on behalf of the nuclear family, a man who, despite all its flaws, really cannot imagine any other arrangement being any better...
...These inherent contradictions in the role of the intellectual may explain why la trahison des clercs remains a persistent theme in discussions of intellectuals: the contradictions never allow the intellectual to satisfy anyone—perhaps, not even himself...
...But only facts can be represented—only they can be said...
...The work of the Columbia University sociologist Charles Kadushin is an important and valuable attempt to do just that...
...The results of a question about which books and articles had the most influence on the respondents' own thinking on the war indicated that Chomsky's work ranked twelfth in actual influ200 BOOKS ence...
...Moreover, in each case of divorce, however necessary, some kind of intimate human relationship has collapsed...
...As reason's claims to potency have grown ever better established, men have reacted by seeing monsters born of reason...
...Again, not all intellectuals took the same position...
...Rather, they saw American involvement as a step-by-step series of policy blunders, and their opposition was not moral but pragmatic: "The war was a mistake because it could not be won...
...From among the most prolific contributors to these magazines he interviewed a sample of 110 writers: a mixed bag of humanities and social science professors, editorial and staff members of periodicals, and free-lance literary people including journalists, essayists, novelists, and poets...
...On the secret everybody knows, the corruption built directly into legal divorce by the twin charades of "fault" and "consent": "What we have, then, is the bizarre legal spectacle of great numbers of people forced to break the law...
...policy, the moral imperative to protest or the immorality of silence and inaction—proved paramount in attracting leftist intellectuals to the peace movement...
...The pragmatic orientation would seem to make it easy for intellectuals to influence or, at least, approach the men of power, a notoriously pragmatic lot...
...Most simply stated, he found that in language we construct propositions, verbal representations corresponding in form to the facts whose essential elements are represented...
...Quoting both Coser and Shils along the way, Kadushin defines "an elite intellectual" as "one who is expert in dealing with highquality ideas on questions of value and aesthetics and who communicates his judgments on these matters to a fairly general audience...
...Of course, some were radical and others took purely moral positions, but it was the pragmatic rather than the moral, the liberal rather than the radical cast of attitude that prevailed...
...Their primary concern is with "the core values of the society...
...Ludwig Wittgenstein, Musil, and their companions confronted Kakania with intense intellectual passion and diverse but related creative activity...
...But his speculation only confirms that he takes for granted a society based on dominance and subordination...
...Repelled by the stultifying anachronism of the dying empire and the pretensions of a mean-spirited modernity, by artistic and intellectual activity vapid in its elaborations of past accomplishments and barren in its innovations, they evolved a clear pattern of response in which similar themes were repeatedly asserted and developed...
...Institutionalized divorce has reached the point where "getting divorced" seems to carry the same weight as "getting married...
...Reflecting the current vogue for the human zoo—which celebrates human capacities from love to murder as naturally dictated—it is a sexist book...
...Pornography and intellectuals share another common feature: both are conventionally thought to have deleterious social consequences (vide Greeley on intellectuals...
...Values, all that really matters in life, can...
...He completed it in 1918 and, believing that he had, quite literally, said all that could be said, discarded his philosophical vocation...
...Except for Studies on the Left the journals are also part of the basis of Kadushin's sample, so there is some overlap between the two sets of intellectuals...
...Recent systematic work on the effects of pornography suggests that it is relatively harmless, but the consequence of intellectual work is still an open question...
...On the contradiction in marriage: "the only real preparation for marriage is marriage itself...
...The male animal supposedly rules the human zoo, while the female meekly follows...
...He does not consider the possibility that society can be built, not upon aggression, but upon an egalitarian, communalistic spirit...
...The intellectuals ignored the mood of the society and failed "to maintain the necessary balance between the moral and the political...
...The historical record shows that American intellectuals, especially the "cultural vanguard," have been leftist in orientation, and this justifies her relying on "an in-depth analysis of four publications of the leftist intelligentsia: The New Republic, Partisan Review, Studies on the Left, and The New York Review...
...BOOKS 201 DIVORCED IN AMERICA, by Joseph Epstein...
...WITTGENSTEIN'S VIENNA, by Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin...
...From this perspective, inequality, sexism, racism, and war can easily be seen as inevitable aspects of society...
...He assumes we will know when we see one...
...In his Men of Ideas Lewis Coser describes intellectuals as less concerned with concrete problems and answers than with penetrating a "more general realm of meanings and ideas...
...It was the capital of "Kakania"—the name Musil coined for imperial Austria, signifying through word play both the realm's ambiguous political condition and also "Excrernentia...
...Far from technology requiring male dominance, as Goldberg argues, it can provide for the liberation of instinctual needs previously tabooed or repressed...
...the statistics no longer surprise, let alone shock...
...It was the tool for every task, the means for uncovering in the morass of verbiage all truths that need knowing...
...Thus in addition to a reluctance to enter the house of power, there is a maladroitness in making friends and influencing the inhabitants...
...Every society accepts the existence of these feelings [of male dominance] and conforms to their existence by socializing children accordingly, because every society must...
...3.95...
...Mastery of technique has yielded unchallengeable practical benefit, and it has made possible specializing and professionalizing intellectual efforts, without limit...
...WITTGENSTEIN'S OWN CONCLUSIONS were congruent with those of his Kakanian contemporaries...
...he ignores or knows nothing of the womanized ghettos of the everyday world of millions of housewives...
...For Goldberg the inevitability of patriarchy dovetails quite "naturally" with the inevitability of inequality, and not for women alone...
...The very advanced technology, in Goldberg's view, requiring male dominance, can easily be interpreted as evidence that biological influences can be effectively transformed through technology...
...The work was published, in both German and English, as the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and in the mainstream of Anglo-American philosophy it soon assumed the status of this century's most important philosophical work...
...An easy distinction is that intellectuals are concerned primarily with "ideas," but does that mean that all college professors are also intellectuals...
...Naturally, the respondents are anonymous, but most of a previously published list of "most prestigious intellectuals" are represented in the sample...
...Because of their ability to "articulate interest and desire" better than others, intellectuals are "gatekeepers of ideas and fountainheads of ideologies...
...He intended just the opposite, to determine with finality the limits of rational discourse and thereby to demonstrate that all that really matters lies outside those limits...
...318 pp...
...It may be as difficult to be an intellectual as to be a Jew...
...A place where one would like to spend one's life, or at least a place where it would be smart to stay, even though one may not feel any particular inclination to be there"— thus was Wittgenstein's Vienna characterized by his contemporary, Robert Musil...
...New York: Morrow...
...Most thinkers revolt against reason by rational means, and usually in the name of reason...
...Glorification of the "natural" often in fact rationalizes a continuation of oppression, since what is "natural" naturally cannot be changed...
...Janik and Toulmin show us much by departing only a little from conventional ways of saying things...
...She says of the teach-ins, "The stress on such considerations—the morality of U.S...
...This seemingly deliberate attempt to adopt the pragmatic orientations common to the marketplace and the house of power may be understood as a way of reaching out to the men of power...
...Kadushin's theme is the absence of a radical ori, entation toward the war among elite intellectuals...
...It assumes that biological, sexual characteristics necessarily, or "inevitably," determine people's lives to such an extent that one can speak of male dominance and patriarchy as anthropological universals, chiefly reflecting hormonal distributions...
...To insist, after 10,000 years of human history, that biological differences between males and females play the same role they played at the beginnings of history, and that we are in fact limited to our unmediated biologies in a human zoo, is to ignore the considerable impact of technology on society...
...could not [if it wanted to] limit the social manifestations of [male dominance] as much as a primitive society could...
...In fact, the only dispensable part in Divorced in America is the short Epilogue on the shattering of "The Dream of Family," where quotations from friends and enemies of the traditional family are cobbled together, with Epstein concluding, sensibly, that if divorce is frequently necessary and nearly always unpleasant, it is still possible to make the family dream real "and only those who have lived it know what an immense advantage it can be in an otherwise unconcerned world...
...Divorced in America is aimed at a reader, the bigcity professional like Epstein himself, who may be uneasy with a book of this sort...
...and that, probably, was the ruin of it...
...But the response, she feels, indicated a lack of proportion that precluded the possibility of intellectuals becoming an effective political force...
...With its material needs met by the technostructure, society has no need for competition, aggression, dominance/subordination, or repression— all of which may have been necessary in times of scarcity...
...Yet, elsewhere, there are readily available encyclopedic discussions of the crisis of the Western family and the sociological ramifications of what Morton Hunt terms the Stations of Divorce...
...Reason provides a powerful technique, and with the technique to do whatever is wanted, men no longer have need for feeling, at least in their active, socially functional roles...
...ONE COMES AWAY from this book with the feeling that in writing it Joseph Epstein undertook a therapy far more bracing than the conventional kind...
...In 1929 Wittgenstein returned to philosophy and Trinity, as a Fellow of the College and from 1939 on as a professor of philosophy at the University...
...Tenderness, sensuousness, and sensitivity become traits for all people, female and male, rather than exclusively feminine properties...
...Without it, there would have been no them...
...Messrs...
...Goldberg acknowledges that "no one is born knowing how to fire a rifle or change a diaper...
...New York: Simon & Schuster, Touchstone Books...
...They engaged as an essentially ethical dilemma the realities of a society where decay and vitality impressed themselves upon consciousness with extraordinary force...
...Propositions," he asserted, "can express nothing that is higher...
...But in response to a question about whose work they believed had the most influence in thinking about the war Chomsky's name led all the rest...
...Thus, "the U.S...
...Impressively reviewing anthropological literature and hormonal studies of sexual differentiation, Goldberg argues that there has never been BOOKS 205 a society that failed to associate leadership and authority with men...
...The logic of the Tractatus made it possible to distinguish problems from nonproblems and philosophical achievement from muddleheadedness...
...On that American optimism now curiously applied to "creative divorce" or "successful divorce": "One might learn something, a good deal even, from having gone through a divorce, but it is finally 202 BOOKS a defeat which cannot be turned into a victory...
...Hers is also the conventional historian's approach of analyzing the written word, while Kadushin ignores it almost entirely in favor of interview data...
...There were intellectuals, Vogelgesang points out, like those who wrote for Dissent, who argued against the simplicities of the moral purists and New Left radicals...
...Janik and Toulmin say no, and the case they make in their book ought to convince most who read it...
...On the other hand, if he restricts himself to thinking deeply in "the realm of meanings and ideas" or to reflections "about the nature of [the] universe, and the rules which govern...
...Yes," wrote Musil, "in spite of much that seems to point the other way, Kakania was perhaps a home for genius after all...
...But just as Kadushin finds that some of his pragmatic respondents also stressed moral and ideological factors, she finds a strain of intellectuals who stress a more dispassionate approach...
...divorce there are only smaller and larger disasters...
...On children and one's marriage, beyond technical custody: "In an odd way, those boys represented solace...
...Analytic philosophers and logical positivists may derive great benefit from using Wittgenstein's writing as they please...
...Goldberg maintains that women may be better off in what he calls primitive societies, but they certainly are "inevitably," to use his term again, subordinate to men in all advanced industrial societies...
Vol. 22 • April 1975 • No. 2
