It is clear that natural entities can be preserved – they can be preserved because they can be harmed or destroyed, or in various other ways adversely affected. I argue that in light of the rise of scientism and other forms of philistinism, the political, religious, mythic, personal and historical meanings that people find in those entities can also be preserved. Against those who impugn disciplines such as fine arts, philosophy and sociology, I contend that this sort of preservation (...) requires the efforts of those whose work exemplifies the core values of the arts, the humanities and the qualitative social sciences. (shrink)

It is possible to pose many difficult and fascinating problems and criticisms for the various theses and arguments in Escape from Leviathan (EfL). This occurred while writing it, and various sharp minds did it on reading drafts or the final product. However, some reviews misunderstand, or ignore, what is written and reassert conventional views. But it is best to answer all published criticisms if only to show how they fail, lest anyone thinks they are sound, and even poor criticisms can (...) sometimes elicit elucidation. Thus, we now turn to the review. (shrink)

The aim of this article is twofold. First, I want to offer an introduction of and a comparison between three accounts of philistinism. Secondly, I show how the phenomenon of philistinism, a failure to speak for oneself, helps to develop an original perspective on Wittgenstein’s moral thought. It is often claimed that Wittgenstein’s personal ethics were quite unorthodox because he repeatedly seems to have supported destruction, war and slavery. I argue that, in the light of my discussion of (...) philistinism, the remarks upon which such conclusions are based should be read differently. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to analyze the semantic change of the German ideal of Bildung in the time of Nietzsche and the reinterpretation that the philosopher proposes of the concept. Bildung is one of the fundamental concepts of modernity in Germany, and in its classical formulation designated a moral imperative of self-improvement of the individual and humanity as a normative ideal. Nietzsche criticized the degradation of this ideal in mere general culture and the cultural philistinism of his (...) time. In its place, Nietzsche proposes a typology of cultures. He reinterprets the concept of culture as a unit of style and the idea of cultivating individuality as a new imperative of the individual who has disengaged himself from traditional morality. (shrink)

Obscurity is not the worst failing, and it is philistinism to pretend that it is. In a series of brilliant essays written over the last fifteen years Stanley Cavell has consistently argued that more important than the question whether obscurity could have been avoided is whether it affects our confidence in the author. Confidence raises the issue of intention, and I would have thought that the primary commitment of a psychoanalytic writer was to pass on, and (if he can) (...) to refine while passing on, a particular way of exploring the mind. Indeed this is how Lacan himself proposes that his work should be judged. “The aim of my teaching,” he writes, “has been and still is the training of analysts.” For decades now Lacan has been insisting that the nature of this commitment has been systematically obscured, particularly in North America. Training has become “routinized”, and analysis itself has become distorted into a process of crude social adaptation. There is much here to agree with. Yet two questions must be raised. Has Lacan devised a more effective method of training analysts? And, would one expect this from his writings? Neither question gets a favourable answer. All reports of his training methods, over which he has now brought about three distinct secessions within the French psychoanalytic movement, are horrifying. 13 It is now, I am told, possible to become a Lacanian analyst after a very few months of Lacanian analysis. And what pedagogic contribution could we expect from a form of prose that has two salient characteristics: it exhibits the application of theory to particular cases as quite arbitrary, and it forces the adherents it gains into pastiche. 14 Lacan's ideas and Lacan's style, yoked in an indissoluble union, represent an invasive tyranny. And it is by a hideous irony that this tyranny should find its recruits among groups that have nothing in common except the sense that they lack a theory worthy of their cause or calling: feminists, cinéastes , professors of literature. Lacan himself offers several justifications for his obscurity, about which he has no false modesty. At times he says that he is the voice, the messenger, the porte-parole , of the unconscious itself. Lacan's claim stirs in my mind the retort Freud made to a similar assult upon his credulity and by someone who had learned from Lacan. “It is not the unconscious mind I look out for in your paintings,” Freud said to Salvador Dali, “it is the conscious.”. (shrink)

Comments on Arendt's views on the link between politics and history, referring to her work on antisemitism and on the "Jewish question" (pp. 44-51). Defines Arendt's historiographical method as non-temporal - she focuses on individualized experiences which express a historical conflict; she prefers biographies, portraits, and chronicles. Arendt's non-temporal approach is expressed in the assertion that the tragedy of the Jews in Europe was rooted in the paradox that the political powers granted them rights and privileges, but excluded them, in (...) differing degrees, from political participation. This fact made the Jews a strange implant in European society. Pp. 84-92 present Arendt's definition of evil, based on her experience in the Eichmann trial. While the Christian philosophical tradition defines evil as a deficiency in character, Arendt considered it to be a banal component of the human personality. The deeds of the Nazis were, consequently, the result of Philistinism and lack of moral judgment. (shrink)

John Kinsella’s fiction emphasizes similar themes of environmental activism, political protest, and critique of Australian society, as does his widely acclaimed poetry. As in his verse, his orientation as a fiction writer is both local and global, regional and cosmopolitan. But in his fiction Kinsella engages in a double interrogation of both mainstream society and his own posture in opposition to it. In the novella Pink Lake a film director is interviewed by an uncomprehending journalist and driven to desperation by (...) the philistinism of Australian society. But his own arrogance, unexamined white and male privilege, and illusion that just because he practices what he calls cinema vérité he has in fact attained the truth mean that he is part of the problem as well. Kinsella examines the problematics of social critique in a neoliberal world, noting their ironies while still believing in their possibility and necessity. (shrink)

Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century by Scott Soames reminds me of nothing so much as Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov. Both are works that arose immediately out of the needs of undergraduate teaching, yet each manages to say much of significance to knowledgeable professionals. Each indirectly provides an outline of the history of its field, through a presentation of selected major works, taken in chronological order and including items that are generally recognized as marking decisive turning points. Yet (...) neither Soames’s work nor Nabokov’s is a history in any conventional sense, both being immediately disqualified from that category by the general absence of coverage of minor and middling works and writers. The emphasis is pedagogical rather than historiographical: the emphasis is on introducing the student to the field through very close examination of the limited number of key texts selected for inclusion. The author’s distinctive personality is also apparent in both works. Each writer has a favorite theme he repeatedly sounds: for Soames, the danger of conflating the analytic, the a priori, and the necessary; for Nabokov, the philistinism of expecting an uplifting “message” from works of literary art. Each also includes some quirky, individual selections: The Right and the Good, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Few others would have taken R. L. Stevenson to be up there with Dickens, Flaubert, and Proust, or W. D. Ross with Russell, Wittgenstein, and Quine. Each also sets aside for separate treatment elsewhere a major body of work one might have expected to be covered. Nabokov reserves Russian literature for a companion volume, while Soames gives only slight coverage to what he describes as “work in logic, the foundations of logic, and the application of logical techniques to the study of language” — a category that in practice turns out to include the bulk of the relevant material (by such writers as Frege, Carnap, and Tarski) that published originally in German without simultaneous English translation.. (shrink)

The advent of democracy in nineteenth-century Europe was resisted by a set of thinkers who shared an 'aristocratic vision'. These aristocratic thinkers rejected the view that the greater good of the majority was of greater value than some higher good of a smaller number. It was the noble minority that was the more valuable part of society. This view corresponds in part to the philosophical tradition known as perfectionism. Matthew Arnold and Friedrich Nietzsche, thinkers rarely considered together, represent significant exemplars (...) of the liberal and radical versions of the aristocratic vision, and their similarities and differences are representative of the broad spectrum of aristocratic thought. Their common rejection of philistinism was part of an aristocratic vision of cultural perfection which was, Alexis de Tocqueville suggested, the natural reaction of a minority against the overwhelming materialism of democratic society. (shrink)

In this classic volume, written at the height of the Cold War, with a new preface of 2006, Peter Viereck, one of the foremost intellectual spokesmen of modern conservatism, examines the differing responses of American and European intellectuals to the twin threats of Nazism and Soviet communism. In so doing, he seeks to formulate a humanistic conservatism with which to counter the danger of totalitarian thought in the areas of politics, ethics, and art. The glory of the intellectuals was the (...) firm moral stance they took against Nazism at a time when appeasement was the preferred path of many politicians; their shame lay in their failure to recognize the brutality of Stalinism to the extent of becoming apologists for or accomplices of its tyranny. In Viereck's view, this failure is rooted in an abandonment of humane values that he sees as a legacy of nineteenth-century romanticism and certain strands of modernist thought and aesthetics. Among his targets are literary obscurantism as personified by Ezra Pound, the academicization of literary culture, the rigidity of adversarial avant-gardism, and the failure of many writers and cultural institutions to conserve the very heritage their political freedom and security depend on. Viereck represents their attitude in a series of satirical dialogues with Gaylord Babbitt, son of Sinclair Lewis' embodiment of conservative philistinism. Babbitt Junior is as unreflective as his father, but the objects of his credulity are the received ideas of liberal progressivism and avant-garde mandarinism. Ultimately, Viereck's critique stands as a timely rebuke to the extremism of both left and right. (shrink)

This article analyses Nietzsche’s commitment to the sublime. Focusing on his early writings, it demonstrates how the sublime informs both Nietzsche’s conception of philosophy and his ideas for cultural revitalization. His appreciation of the sublime is embedded in four contexts and problems: his exploration of what philosophy is in its beginnings; his attack on D. F. Strauss and cultural philistinism; his conception of culture as transfigured physis; and the critique of the science of history. Nietzsche is committed to the (...) sublime because it captures how humans transcend certain limits. (shrink)

It is a well-worn trope to view Plato’s banishment of the poets in Republic as a crude form of philistinism. In this paper I defend Plato against this charge. I argue that Republic does not present a final view of poetry, for it leaves room for a philosophical love of poetic beauty. First I analyse the political nature of Plato’s critique of poetry. I suggest that Plato does not reject the political order of change and decay, but opens space (...) for a new kind of political project. I then suggest that Plato’s discussion of tragic poetry in Book X supports this claim, for it contains the hope for a reconfigured love of poetic beauty. I conclude that Plato does not limit aesthetic experience to artistic solace or metaphysical escapism, but opens a way to see aesthetic experience as a vital part of building a world in which it makes sense to live. (shrink)

Critics, then, who label theories such as objectivism or deconstructionism as “authoritarian” or “subversive” are committing a fallacy of overspecificity. To call Hirsch’s theory authoritarian is to assume that such a theory lends itself to one and only one kind of political use and that that use can be determined a priori. To refute such an assumption, one need only stand back from the present in order to recall that today’s authoritarian ideology is often yesterday’s progressive one, and vice versa. (...) Indeed, there’s considerable historical irony in the fact that objectivism has now acquired the status of a right-wing idea, while Nietzsche and Heidegger have emerged as heroes of literary leftism. As recently as a few decades ago, these alignments were different. George Orwell, for instance, thought that the tendency to deny the possibility of objective truth reflected a totalitarian mentality. “Totalitarianism,” he wrote, “in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the existence of objective truth.” He added that “the friends of totalitarianism in this country tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or, on the other hand, that modern physics has proved that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of the senses is simply vulgar philistinism.”10It’s not that it hadn’t occurred to Orwell that the notion of objective truth could easily be used to justify the actions of tyrants and oppressors. But Orwell’s experience of Fascist and Communist falsification of history showed how the denial of the possibility of objectivity could also justify oppressive actions, perhaps in a more disarming way. For various historical reasons, Orwell’s insight is easily lost today. His is one of those Enlightenment concepts of truth which have been compromised in usage. As the Enlightenment has come to be associated not with progress, democracy, and equality but with the ideological exploitation of those concepts in the interests of social control, a great moral and political transvaluation of the epistemological vocabulary has occurred. Enlightenment thinking is frequently associated with the bourgeois complacency or the menacing technology of Western democracies or is identified with the totalitarian regimentation of the Soviet Union. Thus the concepts of objective truth, nature, essence, identity, and teleology have come to be viewed as conservative or reactionary ideas, as if these ideas had never operated, and never could operate, in quite other ways.11 10. George orwell, “The Prevention of Literature,” The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols. , 4: 63-64.11. As Frederic Jameson has noted, “it is certainly the case that a belief in the natural is ideological and that much of bourgeois art has worked to perpetuate such a belief…. Yet in different historical circumstances the idea of nature was once a subversive concept with a genuinely revolutionary function, and only the analysis of the concrete historical and cultural conjuncture can tell us whether, in the post-natural world of late capitalism, the categories of nature may not have acquired such a critical charge again”. (shrink)

E. P. Thompson's poetry and poetics are rarely considered by commentators on his work, but they are central to his thought. Thompson, who for a long time identified as a poet rather than a historian, struggled to find an alternative to both the Bloomsburian modernism he associated with decadent British capitalism and the chilly philistinism of Stalinist socialist realism. Thompson's unique and ingenious poetics emphasizes the political nature of poetry, yet denies that poets ought to subordinate their work to (...) political concerns. By understanding Thompson's poetics, we can understand his critique of the 'positivism and utilitarianism' which he came to believe were inherent in most forms of Marxism. Thompson's poetics also helps us to understand the peculiar forms that some of his most famous political polemics take. (shrink)

Theodor Adorno’s philistine functions as the other of art, or as the ideal embodiment of everything that the bourgeois aesthetic subject is not. He insists on the truth-content of the derogation, while recognising its unjust social foundation, and seeking to reflect that tension in a self-critical turn. His model of advanced art is negatively delimited by the philistinism of art with a cause and the philistinism of art for enjoyment, which represent the poles of the aesthetic and the (...) social. The philistine is also the counterpart to the connoisseur, with the interplay between them pointing to his preferred approach to aesthetics, in which an affinity for art and alienness to it are combined without compromise. However, Adorno fails to realise fully the critical potential of the philistine as the immanent negation of art and aesthetics. (shrink)

Surveying a wide range of cultural controversies, from the Mapplethorpe affair to Salman Rushdie's death sentence, from canon-revision in the academy to the scandals that have surrounded Anthony Blunt, Martin Heidegger, and Paul de Man, Wendy Steiner shows that the fear and outrage they inspired are the result of dangerous misunderstanding about the relationship between art and life. "Stimulating. . . . A splendid rebuttal of those on the left and right who think that the pleasures induced by art are (...) trivial or dangerous. . . . One of the most powerful defenses of the potentiality of art."--Andrew Delbanco, New York Times Book Review "A concise and . . . readable account of recent contretemps that have galvanized the debate over the role and purposes of art. . . . [Steiner] writes passionately about what she believes in."--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times "This is one of the few works of cultural criticism that is actually intelligible to the nonspecialist reader. . . . Steiner's perspective is fresh and her perceptions invariably shrewd, far-ranging, and reasonable. A welcome association of sense and sensibility."-- Kirkus Reviews, starred review "Steiner has succeeded so well in [the] task she has undertaken. The Scandal of Pleasure is itself characterized by many of the qualities Steiner demans of art, among them, complexity, tolerance and the pleasures of unfettered thought."--Eleanor Heartly, Art in America "Steiner . . . provides the best and clearest short presentation of each of [the] debates."--Alexander Nehamas, Boston Book Review "Steiner has done a fine job as a historian/reporter and as a writer of sophisticated, very clear, cultural criticism. Her reportage alone would be enough to make this a distinguished book."--Mark Edmundson, Lingua Franca. (shrink)

The article analyzes the phenomenon of ownership in its legal, economic, political and philosophical perspectives. Ownership is considered as an opportunity and as a guarantee of sustainable development. Comparative context is used to identify the specificity of the bourgeois model of owners’ power (social state) and the domestic concept of power-ownership (including socialist state). The author draws conclusions about ways to overcome the competition between the state and the market for the human resource and proposes to explore the ideological provision (...) of power-ownership in order to appreciate its progressive potential and predilection in relation to the liberal model of social development . (shrink)