Jurgen Habermas is in Ireland to receive the James Joyce Award.
An Irish journalist covers his address at University College Dublin and summarizes his view of the public intellectual.
The intellectual’s sole remaining ability in an age when television has reinforced an iconic turn from word to image is an “avantgardistic instinct for relevances”, he writes in a book of recent essays published last year, Europe, The Faltering Project. “They have to be able to get worked up about critical developments while others are still absorbed in business as usual”. That includes a mistrustful sensitivity about any damage to the normative foundations of politics, or threats to its mental resources. More positively it requires “the sense for what is lacking and ‘could be otherwise’ ”, including “a spark of imagination in conceiving of alternatives” and “a modicum of the courage required for polarising, provoking, and pamphleteering”.
Along similar lines, there’s this, from a review of Christopher Hitchens’ memoir:
In 1987 Russell Jacoby published a mournful elegy to untamed public intellectuals. He argued that the unruly, iconoclastic thinkers that had dominated the New York intellectual scene well into the 1950s were a disappearing species. They had a literary cast of mind; they knew how to write about large scale questions in a way accessible to an educated public without obfuscating their texts with unintelligible academic lingo. They were not domesticated by the perks of academia, think tanks and public grants. They were irreverent and value driven.
Well, there is good news. The above is a perfect description of Christopher Hitchens. Gifted with a phenomenal memory, with the ability to form sentences that give the reader the pleasures of linguistic precision combined with watching a good knock-out punch, Hitchens is exactly the untamed public intellectual that Jacoby mourned.
The philosopher Simon Critchley, in Truthout:
I’m convinced that the conditions which we find ourselves in give us modest grounds for belief in emancipation and hope. One of the figures I continually come back to, is the figure of passive nihilism and I think we live in a time of pervasive passive nihilism. In the face of a chaotic and bloody world, one withdraws into oneself to cultivate practices of self-perfection. This can be linked to all sorts of new age beliefs, as well as to those that cultivate a sort of literary or aesthetic pleasure. I don’t share this feeling. I feel that human beings, in concert, in the right conditions, are capable of extraordinary outcomes.
I hate cynical irony, the form of knowing irony that’s just a form of protection from any sort of engagement with the world….
Properly understood, cynicism isn’t cynical – it’s opposed to moral hypocrisy, pride, pretension, luxury and people who think that they know what they’re talking about. To that extent, I’m amenable to certain forms of cynicism.
Critchley is moderating a new blog at the New York Times about philosophy.
[Republican Senate candidate Tom Campbell’s] brains and demeanor could collide with the prevailing political winds this year as no other. A consummate and genteel academic who holds degrees from two of the nation’s top universities, he is seeking election [from California] at a time when white-hot anger and verbal flame-throwing is more likely to arouse the GOP primary voters who will decide his fate in June.
At 5.38pm on 29 January, the German social theorist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas apparently tweeted the following: “It’s true that the internet has reactivated the grass-roots of an egalitarian public sphere of writers and readers.” At 5.40, he tweeted again: “It also counterbalances the deficits from the impersonal and asymmetrical character of broadcasting insofar as . . .” At 5.41: “. . . it reintroduces deliberative elements in communication. Besides that, it can undermine the censorship of authoritarian regimes . . .” At 5.44: “But the rise of millions of fragmented discussions across the world tend instead to lead to fragmentation of audiences into isolated publics.”
Had the 80-year-old doyen of the Frankfurt School for social research joined the twitterati?’
… [O]n 1 February, the blogger Jonathan Stray (jonathanstray.com) revealed that he had contacted the real Habermas at his home, and asked him if he was on Twitter. “No, no, no,” he was told. “This is somebody else. This is a misuse of my name.” …
… from Norway.
… to be told, and we few, we happy few here at University Diaries, are settling ourselves in to a front seat. Croyez-moi, there’ll be a piece on this in the New York Times in the next few days, one of those arch little numbers observing the French and their ways with description but no comment…
But why wait for that? I’m giving the thing to you here and now. Plus I’m telling you what to think about it. So listen.
The fiftieth anniversary of the death of Albert Camus is coming up (January 4), and Sarkozy wants his remains transferred to the Panthéon. This article about it in the Irish Times (only English-language piece I’ve seen so far) duly notes l’absurde squabbling about it, right left and center, in Paris.
This Le Monde thing announces that Jean Camus, the man’s son, has in any case refused permission because Camus just wasn’t a Panthéon type…
So why did he accept the Nobel? Nobel yes, Panthéon no? Sartre turned down the Nobel, but Camus didn’t have any trouble… I doubt he would have minded the Panthéon.
But anyway. The spat guarantees plenty of publicity for the writer, and will certainly generate the sort of statements you and I love to make limericks out of.
The Moscow Times:
A debate between philosophers at an international forum ended in a fistfight Monday that left two people slightly injured, Interfax reported.
A woman and man were injured in the fight at the International Philosophical Forum, held in the House of Scientists of the Russian Academy of Sciences on Ulitsa Prechistenka.
One suffered a bruise, while the other one was left with a scratched face, a police source told Interfax, without elaborating. It was not immediately clear what prompted the fight. Several squads of police officers were called to restore order.
Readers are welcome to offer their theories about what might have prompted the fight.
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Update, from Russia Today:
[T]he fight had little to do with arguments over the meaning of life. The incident’s instigator turned out to be a former Moscow State University student, who was withdrawn from the Philosophy Department a couple of years ago.
A witness told Interfax that the man attacked the Philosophical Department dean, Vladimir Mironov, during a scientific conference.
He had earlier tried to break into the Philosophy Department office and “argue” with Mironov, the same source said. The source did not elaborate on the reason behind the man’s vitriol towards his former dean.
… responds to the controversy described here [subscription], in which a new book about Heidegger’s Nazism goes beyond intellectual attack and calls for the criminalization of his writings as hate speech.
UD thinks, by the way, that the New York Times, in quoting Richard Wolin about the issue —
Richard Wolin, the author of several books on Heidegger and a close reader of the Faye book, said he is not convinced Heidegger’s thought is as thoroughly tainted by Nazism as Mr. Faye argues. Nonetheless he recognizes how far Heidegger’s ideas have spilled into the larger culture.
“I’m not by any means dismissing any of these fields because of Heidegger’s influence,” he wrote in an e-mail message referring to postmodernism’s influence across the academy. “I’m merely saying that we should know more about the ideological residues and connotations of a thinker like Heidegger before we accept his discourse ready-made or naïvely.”
— should have revealed that he signed a petition in support of the book. He is more partisan than he appears in his remarks to the Times.
Spot of nice writing from a British columnist, who reflects on the special respect in France for intellectuals like Claude Lévi-Strauss:
Yes, Britain has scholars and pundits. But on the intellectual spectrum they enjoy a status somewhere between being and nothingness. France’s “intellos” serve as the moral conscience of their age, speaking freely on the political and social mood. Intellectuals lift the national debate. They fertilise political thought. A country too embarrassed to embrace them is, well, too stupid by half.
… at one hundred years of age. I’ll have more commentary in a moment. Gathering my thoughts about him. I’ve just returned from the beach.
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Here’s the best piece on him so far, full of wonderful British skepticism and humor.
… While Lévi-Strauss’s capacity for creating complex intellectual jigsaws was never in question, it was not always obvious what relation his hypotheses bore to reality. The English anthropologist Sir Edmund Leach drew attention to the Frenchman’s propensity for discovering exactly what he was searching for.
“Any evidence, however dubious,” Leach complained, “is acceptable so long as it fits with logically calculated expectations; but wherever the data runs counter to the theory, Lévi-Strauss will either bypass the evidence or marshal the full resources of his powerful invective to have the heresy thrown out of court.”
… The son of a painter, Claude Lévi-Strauss was born in Brussels on November 28 1908. When the First World War broke out he was sent to Paris to live with his grandfather, a rabbi, in whose household he soon lost his faith.
… After completing his studies, Lévi-Strauss taught in secondary schools. Among his colleagues was Simone de Beauvoir, who remembered him warning his students “in a deadpan voice, and with a deadpan expression, against the folly of the passions”. [And this is coming from de Beauvoir, queen of the ice queens.]
… After the fall of France he escaped to the United States, where he took up a visiting professorship at the New School for Social Research in New York City. In this post he was greatly influenced by Roman Jakobson, who had developed a mathematical view of language which stressed not so much the meaning of individual words as the overall configuration of the grammatical relationships between them. [Three degrees of separation: Jerzy Soltan, UD‘s father-in-law, was a close friend, and a close neighbor in Cambridge, of Roman Jakobson.]
… A work of enormous erudition if, at times, almost ludicrous complexity, [Les Structures Elémentaires de la parenté (1949)] established Lévi-Strauss as one of the foremost anthropologists of his generation.
… [His masterpiece, Tristes Tropiques (1955)]… was an intellectual autobiography concentrated on his pre-war travels in Brazil. Lévi-Strauss described how the book sprang out of depression: “So I said, ‘I had enough, I shall never come to anything, so I can write very freely about whatever passes through my head.’ I wrote without scientific scruples, without worrying whether the result was scientifically sound. The result was a sort of wild fantasy.”
In the book, Lévi-Strauss formulated his distinction between “Nature” and “Culture” based on language and man’s unique ability to see an object not merely as itself, but also as a symbol. It was in this ability to symbolise, a characteristic shared by all humans, no matter how primitive, that he sought the unconscious similarities of the human mind.
These “universal attributes” were the inspiration for Lévi-Strauss’s intellectual quest. But in detecting them, he was also accused of reductionism. Even his severest critics would not deny his importance, however, his immense influence beyond his chosen field, or the sense of intellectual excitement he was able to generate. This lay in his highly original interpretation of data, in the poetic scope of his associations and in his methodology, which was always capable of shedding new light on established facts even if his conclusions were sometimes subject to doubt…
From The Telegraph.
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A good definition of structuralism, from Edward Rothstein:
… Levi-Strauss rejected Rousseau’s idea that humankind’s problems derive from society’s distortions of nature. In Levi-Strauss’ view, there is no alternative to such distortions. Each society must shape itself out of nature’s raw material, he believed, with law and reason as the essential tools.
This application of reason, he argued, created universals that could be found across all cultures and times. He became known as a structuralist because of his conviction that a structural unity underlies all of humanity’s mythmaking, and he showed how those universal motifs played out in societies, even in the ways a village was laid out.
For Levi-Strauss, for example, every culture’s mythology was built around oppositions: hot and cold, raw and cooked, animal and human. And it is through these opposing “binary” concepts, he said, that humanity makes sense of the world.
This was quite different from what most anthropologists had been concerned with. Anthropology had traditionally sought to disclose differences among cultures rather than discovering universals. It had been preoccupied not with abstract ideas but with the particularities of rituals and customs, collecting and cataloguing them.
Levi-Strauss’ “structural” approach, seeking universals about the human mind, cut against that notion of anthropology. He did not try to determine the various purposes served by a society’s practices and rituals. He was never interested in the kind of fieldwork that anthropologists of a later generation, like Clifford Geertz, took on, closely observing and analyzing a society as if from the inside…
One hundred years ago this month, Freud
traveled from Europe by steamship with Carl Jung and Sándor Ferenczi, the three of them psychoanalyzing one another en route [to the United States]. When they arrived, they spent several days touring Chinatown, Coney Island and other New York sights.
Then Freud went on to Worcester, Mass., where on the morning of Sept. 7 he gave the first of his famous “Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis” at Clark University.
Emma Goldman and William James were in the cheering section.
Peter D. Kramer makes Freud sound very old-fashioned. He “displayed bad character in the service of bad science.” Rather than, like the leading practitioners featured on University Diaries, using bad science in the service of greed.
… has died.
I’ll have more to say about him in a bit.
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I’ve now sent off a post about Kolakowski – about, in particular, his interest in religion – to Inside Higher Ed.
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The post is now up. Remember that you can use the list over there… over there to your right… now down a little… the one that says LATEST UD BLOGS AT IHE … to read any of my Inside Higher Ed pieces, starting way back in 2007.
… Inside Higher Ed column in response to this, Scott McLemee’s thoughtful discussion of Isaac Rosenfeld, a tragic and compelling figure.
It’s now done, and should appear pretty soon.
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