Not Thinking Like a Liberal

Philosophers should write about their own lives, was Ludwig Wittgenstein’s advice even though he himself never tried to do so. He was probably thinking of Augustine’ Confessions as a template – a work that sought to be both biographical and philosophical at once, not just an unreflective retelling of its author’s life.[1] Augustine initiated in this way a form of writing that confronts the self with the thought that prevails in its world.[2] Montaigne rightly counts among the great practitioners of this art and Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo has to be seen as one of its most memorable examples. Raymond Geuss’s latest book, Not Thinking Like a Liberal, is no doubt, an original and captivating contribution to this genre.  Augustine, Montaigne, and Nietzsche were evidently among Geuss’s inspirations for his new book, though obviously in very different ways.[3] Augustine because, like Geuss, he was much preoccupied with the course of his education, Montaigne because he expressed himself in an essayistic style akin to Geuss’s way of writing, and Nietzsche most of all because, like Geuss, he was driven by a sense of alienation from his own world. “We feel disfavor for all ideals that might lead us to feel at home … in this fragile, broken time of transition,” Nietzsche had written in The Gay Science. “As for its ‘realities,’ we do not believe that they will last.”[4] The words might well have served as the motto for Not Thinking Like a Liberal.

Instead, Geuss has chosen a passage from Robert Musil’s novel Die Verwirrungen des Zōglings Tőrleß in which the young hero begins to read a book “with so many parentheses and footnotes hat he did not understand a word” and “had the feeling that an aged, bony hand was slowly extracting his brain from his skull, winching it out as if winding it around a screw.” (p. v) This is not the last moment when the reader of Not Thinking Like a Liberal will experience a sensation of this sort. Geuss’s book is full of unforeseen turns, unsettling insights, challenging opinions richly interspersed with qualifications, parentheses, and footnotes. It is a book by a philosopher on philosophy but quite unlike most of such productions. It is a piece of autobiography that tells us only a few, select things about its author. It illuminates its author’s state of mind as well as the state of our contemporary culture but in depicting both as puzzles. Geuss concludes his preface appropriately with the words: “The exact relevance of my account is something I must leave up to the reader’s judgment.” (p. xv) Like young Tōrleß, we may find it difficult to reach a settled judgment on the book but with the worrying sense that this uncertainty is precisely what the author intends to leave us with.

What contributes to this feeling is Geuss’s way of writing. He explicitly repudiates the style of writing that has become common in philosophy today with its linear argument leading from sharply defined premises to definite conclusions. His way of writing is exploratory rather than argumentative. The examination of one idea leads him to that of another often in unexpected transitions until the circle is in some way completed. Geuss explains his way of writing in words reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s preface to his Philosophical Investigations: “It often seemed like aimless wandering in a singularly inhospitable environment.” (p. xiv) He has perfected this distinctive style of writing in recent years in a series of essays published in books with intriguing titles like A World without Why (2014), Reality and its Dreams (2016), and Who Needs a World View? (2020).  His new book is probably best read in conjunction with those earlier works – as an extended essay of reflections on a variety of interrelated topics rather than a straight-forward autobiography. It expands in fact on the lead essay of Who Needs and World View? and it may be fully accessible only in company of that piece. The reader of Not Thinking Like a Liberal is, in any case, well-advised to ask constantly: if not like a liberal than like who? To which the answer has to be: like its author who refuses to be pinned down.

The book begins and ends with an indictment of liberalism and that theme maintains a constant presence in the book. The reader may, for this reason, want to look at the discussion of liberalism as the first, upper-most layer in the critical reflections of the book.  Geuss fastens initially on the Anglo-Saxon world with what he takes to be its abiding faith in the conjunction of capitalist economics and liberal democracy. That world is now in steep, even staggering decline, he insists, citing the financial crisis of 2008, the rise of Donald Trump in the US, and the UK’s break with the European Union. But the rot goes much deeper in his eyes and extends beyond the Anglo-Saxon sphere and the West. Our species as a whole appears to be set now on committing suicide by destroying its natural environment.  (p. 167) What has brought about the rise of the West and its increasingly evident decline and what is also bringing ecological disaster upon us now is the “fantasy” we have of ourselves as sovereign individuals with its accompanying illusion of “purity, absolute autonomy, and self-dependence.” (p. 41). Geuss considers this fantasy to be the core of a deeply entrenched version of modern liberalism committed to the inviolability of individual taste and opinion and the protection of unfettered individual choice and free commercial enterprise. His judgment on liberalism (or, rather, this particular form of liberalism) is uncompromising. He finds it impossible to see “how the traditional remedies of liberalism will be of any help in the world we now inhabit.” (p. 165) Liberalism, he adds, has begun to show itself “in an increasingly unmistakable way to be at best irrelevant and at worst actively deleterious to human well-being.” (pp. 165-166) The paradox is that our world is increasingly out of control while we stubbornly hold on to the belief in human autonomy. Given this state of things, Geuss concludes, liberalism is “not the place to seek insight into anything.” (p. 161)

Such bold assertions would seem to need backing up. But that is not what Geuss is after. He writes: “I am not, that is, trying to refute liberalism.” Readers may come to change their views as a result of reading his book “but I realize that that is largely out of my control.” (p. 167)  One has to look for an argued critique of liberalism elsewhere in Geuss’s oeuvre.  In his History and Illusion in Politics of 2001 he had characterized liberalism as a historical movement in which notions of toleration, freedom, individualism, and the limitation of power coalesce in various and contingent ways and he had then proceeded to subject each of those notions to detailed critical analysis. Some of them, he had concluded, were highly confused, others extremely implausible, and several of them stood in severe tension with each other. For all that his judgment had not been completely dismissive. In his 2008 essay on “Liberalism and its Discontents” Geuss acknowledges a “continuing vitality of this tradition” and  allows that a  certain kind of liberalism – one that is anti-Kantian and anti-Rawlsian in spirit – may provide a “promising orientation for thinking and acting politically in the future.”[5] But since writing those words Geuss has become profoundly more negative in his assessment of both liberalism and the situation in which we find ourselves today. He has also become more pessimistic about the use of philosophically systematic arguments than he was twenty years ago. Over the years he has come to see that despite everything that has been or may be said against it, the liberal ideology still prevails. Argument, seems thus unable to dislodge it. Despite all its weaknesses, which Geuss does not tire to point out, the faith in liberalism persists.

His book is, however, by no means a single-minded diatribe against liberalism. It is just as much a critique of authoritarianism and this critique forms what we might call the second layer of Geuss’s book. His initial statement that the world is in the unwavering grip of an individualistic liberalism was, of course, in any case a wild overstatement. So is his unqualified assertion that “the vocabulary of ‘liberalism’ is the dominant and virtually all-pervasive idiom of our thought and speech.” (p. 163) This may hold true in some corners of the world and in some powerful places, but liberalism is surely no longer an uncontested political ideology. There exists today a whole roster of authoritarian powers, starting with China and Russia down to numerous petty autocracies sprinkled across the globe. In the West, too, there have arisen authoritarian parties, politicians, media outlets, and websites with millions of followers. The critique of authoritarianism proves therefore just as urgent as the indictment of liberalism. Geuss can have no doubts about that even when his eye remains mostly focused on the challenge of liberalism.  Some of his critical remarks on liberalism appear, in fact, due to nothing other than his strongly anti-authoritarian sentiments – but directed in his case against the liberal claim to authority

In reflecting on this situation we are in danger, Geuss argues, of assuming that the choice is between liberalism and authoritarianism. And that would generate yet another misconception. It is true that liberals tend to see no other alternative. But “Liberalism or authoritarianism” is a false dichotomy. We must refuse to reflect on these matters in binary terms. Geuss makes his case for such a refusal with what he calls “a kind of ethnographic account, with a strongly autobiographical component.” (p. 2) His goal is , he writes, “to paint a picture of a form of life” which depicts “one particular niche in the ecology of modern societies,” and thus “to trace one life-path that diverges from the liberal consensus without being authoritarian.” (pp. 2 and 9)

Having grown up with “the general authoritarian tendency of the Catholic Church in the United States,” Geuss sets out to describe how he found himself by luck in an extraordinary Catholic boarding school that was both “anti-liberal and non-authoritarian” (p. 43). And later on as a student of philosophy at Columbia University he became acquainted with teachers who, in a very different way, combined the same attributes. To be more specific, he encountered two extraordinary teachers: a Hungarian émigré priest, Father Bela Krigler, at his boarding school and the philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser at Columbia. “None of the many philosophers I met later in life, despite the evident intellectual power and seriousness many of them had, had nearly the real, continuing effect that Bela and Sidney did,” Geuss writes in his essay “Who Needs a World View?”[6].

For Krigler, liberalism was “a clumsy and completely unphilosophical rubbish heap of narrow-minded prejudices, bits of wishful thinking, and random observation,” a debased form of ancient humanism.[7] He thought that there were only two major spiritual powers in the world, two coherent world-views: Catholicism and Communism.[8]  But he also  dismissed traditional Thomism, considered the authoritative philosophy of the Catholic Church,  as “a particularly sclerotic form of late Aristotelianism” and nurtured a passion for contemporary philosophy (including Heidegger) and psychoanalysis which he freely communicated to his students. While he rejected liberalism and its belief in the autonomous individual, his exposure to Communism also made him shun any kind of authoritarianism. His entire school operated, in fact, on such principles.

In contrast to Krigler, Morgenbesser did not address himself directly to liberalism. Instead, he bypassed it in his thinking. The most important thing Geuss learned from him was a distinction between accepting a philosophical theory on the basis of conclusive arguments and accepting it on the basis of a commitment that outruns the evidence.  Ideally, one should of course, be guided, in one’s beliefs, engagements, and actions by evidence but that is often lacking or inconclusive. Commitment to a theory (we might even say to a faith) or. alternatively, refusal to commit oneself to it can thus not be accounted for entirely in terms of its evidential support. The distinction serves Geuss to explain  Morgenbesser’s attitude to liberalism. Influenced by Dewey, Marx, and the Jewish sense of community, liberalism proved a view of the world that was deeply unsympathetic to Morgenbesser’s way of thinking. He could not even be bothered to find arguments against it. “He simply found he lacked motivation to engage with it on its own terms.” (p. 135) Geuss adds, that he discovered quickly at his boarding school that he lacked similarly the motivation to accept Krigler’s version of Catholicism even though he was deeply attracted to his rejection of both liberalism and authoritarianism.

From Columbia, Geuss moved on to Freiburg as a result of a flirtation with the thought of Martin Heidegger. There he discovered the poet Paul Celan and the philosopher Theodor Adorno. Celan’s poetry taught him the sobering lesson that “the basic fact about the universe that it is infinitely pointless, utterly lacking in any kind of meaning.” (p. 150) It is in this stark condition, according to the poet, that humans “encounter each other, can experience human contact and even a certain limited understanding.”

Geuss found that that this harsh lesson to be re-enforced by Adornos’ observation that there is no right way to live in our false society: “Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen.” (p. 82) Adorno’s Minima Moralia appealed to him thus as “an extended criticism of some of the central tenets of liberalism.” (p. 157) Adorno ‘s reflections showed him that the subject is not naturally autonomous, that the self is constituted by social relations, and that we can hope to achieve at most a partial autonomy but that only by recognizing our dependence.[9]

By telling this story of his own intellectual development, Geuss seeks to subvert both liberalism and authoritarianism. And he is surely right in thinking that such a narrative, when  properly told, will undermine the belief in a naturally given human autonomy as well as that in a naturally determined order of submission to authority. For the biographical story will make evident that the development of human individuality takes place in a shared environment, that there are always others who have guided and accompanied the narrator, that the individual is embedded in and defined by a surrounding world and inherits from it much of its way of thinking. It will also reveal that this course of development allows a degree of liberation from authority, a partial escape from dependence, and it shows how to achieve that partial escape. In Geuss’s account, Father Krigler, Sidney Morgenbesser, and the author himself are meant to illustrate that complex reality.

The indictment of liberalism, the critique of authoritarianism, and the search for a way of thinking that is neither liberal nor authoritarian constitute successive moments in Geuss’s reflections. Those consideration are, however, not their end-point. They take us, rather, to a further and deeper layer of thought Liberalism and authoritarianism are world views (or follow from broad views of the world) and that is one reason why neither of them can be defeated by argument. In order to oppose and defeat them, it may seem necessary to come up with another more satisfying view of things.  One might for that reason assume that Geuss’s autobiographical account is intended to make such an alternative world view plausible and attractive. Developing such an alternative worldview had been Father Krigler’s project. Through him, Geuss learned of the work of progressively minded Catholic philosophers and theologians in Europe who were engaged in devising such a world-picture. For a while Geuss himself became an avid reader of the  Austrian magazine Wissenschaft und Weltbild which actively pursued that agenda. But he did not, in the end, make it his own. While Krigler was sure that humans must have a world view, Geuss writes: “I did not find myself able to respond to Father Krigler’s eloquent appeals… His project didn’t seem to be likely to be achievable… It certainly had no attraction for me.”[10]

His association with Sidney Morgenbesser at Columbia and his reading of Adorno in Freiburg were, in any case, to take him in a different, more skeptical direction.  Morgenbesser was convinced  that the logicians Tarski and Gōdel had  dented the idea that there could be a comprehensive world view.  According to Tarski there can be no single all-encompassing definition of truth and according to Gōdel there can be no single complete theory of elementary mathematics. How then could there be a single true theory of everything, a comprehensive Weltanschauung?[11] And from Adorno, Geuss received the idea that philosophy cannot be “directed at producing detachable propositions or theses that could be extracted and taken away from the whole of the text at the end.” (p. 152)

Geuss concludes from this that “we have become rightly suspicious of all totalizing constructions.” This, he writes, may, indeed, be “the defining philosophical difficulty of our time.” (p. xiii) Our paradox is that we can see the untenability of total world views but don’t seem to be able to do without them.  We need them, so it looks, even though it is evident that none of them is likely to be satisfactory. And because of this need our views of the world will not be defeated by showing that their claims are false. No formal refutation will dislodge them. We should then not be surprised to find that formal arguments against either liberalism or authoritarianism are useless. We need to identify, rather, the underlying needs that give rise to them and hold them in place.

Not Thinking Like a Liberal seeks thus to diagnose the seemingly primal needs that make us hold on to the picture of ourselves as autonomous beings. The need in question may turn out to be that of affirming our power over a world that proves our transparent and growing powerlessness. Not Thinking Like a Liberal also seeks probe the need that makes us cling to an authoritarian world view. It appears as the natural counterpart of liberalism. It is motivated, like liberalism, by a fear of powerlessness but turns that fear – as it does in Calvin’s Geneva – into a belief in absolute authority. Geuss’s reflection on the life of Father Krigler is thus meant to show us what needs support the adoption of one world view as against another. And his account of the life of Sidney Morgenbesser and his own autobiographical narrative intimates how to overcome those needs.

With this we finally reach the final layer of Geuss’s reflections. Philosophy as we have understood it so far has either concerned itself with specific arguments or sought to devise world views (or pursued a combination of the two). But if neither argument nor the construction of world views can help us to overcome our illusions, philosophy itself becomes problematic. Geuss concludes his book by writing that “philosophers cannot pretend to be the voice of universal reason or propose an all-encompassing worldview.” (p. 164) He returns at this point to a theme of his 2017 book Changing the Subject. Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno. The philosophical tradition that started with Socrates, he claims in that book, has come to an end in the late twentieth century. He quotes Celan’s description of poetry as “that form of speech which declared that mortality and futility were infinite.” But he adds immediately that philosophy, by contrast, presupposes a minimum of optimism though certainly not the “almost dementedly sunny view” that the tradition has drawn.[12] There remain philosophical questions that are worth exploring and, as he adds in Not Thinking Like a Liberal, some of the analyses and proposals philosophers have offered may still be of interest. But it is clear, on Geuss’s view, that philosophy cannot in good conscience continue along its well-trodden paths.

The lessons he draws for himself are stark: Not to think like a liberal and not to think like an authoritarian either; and not to look for an alternative world view that is both non-liberal and non-authoritarian; in fact, not to look for any world view; not to expect to sort these matters out by constructing deductive arguments; not to follow the dried-up main-stream of philosophy; not to expect a positive answer. Geuss is surely right in maintaining that critical thinking does not have to come up with positive conclusions and that action does not require hope its ends will be realized. We may still want to ask: what is left after all these negations? It is thinking reflectively and in personal terms, writing in the form of an autobiographical essay, continuing in the task of changing the subject. There are no fixed routes in the place in which we are traveling. Our journey through it will have the character of a ramble characterized by spontaneity, even whimsy and occasionally by the pleasure of the moment. “The text that follows,” he writes in the preface of his book, “tells the story of one individual path through this landscape.”  (p. xiv)

Notes

[1] See in this context Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 1

[2] Thomas Mathien and D. G. Wright, Autobiography as Philosophy. The Philosophical Uses of Self-Presentation, Routledge, London 2006.

[3] The three are included among twelve philosophers Geuss examines in is 2016 book Changing the Subject. Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno (Harvard U. P., Cambridge/Mass.) though not specifically with respect to the autobiographical aspects of their work. While Geuss takes a favorable view of Montagne and Nietzsche, he writes unsympathetically of Augustine’s “repellent self and … the unattractive flabbiness of his written style.” (p. 95)

[4] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 377.

[5] Outside Ethics, p. 28.

[6] Raymond Geuss, “Who Needs a World View?” in Who Needs a World View?, Harvard U.P.,  Cambridge/Mass. 2020, p. 39..

[7] “Wo Needs a World View?”, loc. cit., p. 6.

[8] “Who Needs a World View?, pp. 6 and 2.

[9] Not Thinking Like a Liberal is a book full of diverse ideas. But there is also much that it leaves out. Its autobiographical narrative, for one thing, is highly selective. The book covers no more than a dozen years of the author’s life. And even those are retold with great circumspection. We never even find out what the main protagonists of the story, Krigler and Morgenbesser, looked liked. They remain mere voices. Geuss himself appears mostly as a listener who records what others have said. One emotional outburst is recalled in the essay “Who Needs a World-View?” where Geuss tells us of his irreparable break with Morgenbesser.  We have to assume that Geuss’s intellectual development did not end around 1970, as he claims. What did he learn from teaching at Princeton and Columbia? How did the move to Cambridge and England change him? At the end we may feel that Geuss has not told us enough about himself. He certainly does not seek to bare his innermost self to us. In Changing the Subject he dismisses the “Christian-inspired” probing of the depths of the self that he finds in Augustine. He prefers, instead, Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo “with the extensive discussion of his life by reference to his preferred diet, the landscapes he loves, and his favourite meteorological conditions.” (p. 191) Not that he follows Nietzsche in this respect.

[10] “Who Needs a World View?” p. 14.

[11] Ibid. p. 20

[12] Changing the Subject, pp. 299-300.