Spiked, August 2, 2019

Bryan Magee brought philosophy to the massesHe explored the big questions without ever dumbing down. RIP.

The Catholic Herald, March 8, 2019

Diderot's self-centred rebellion
Patrick West on the 'utter scoundrel' of the Enlightenment Diderot and the Art of Free Thinking
By Andrew Curran,

Other Press, 320pp, £22/$29

The late, great, arch-reactionary Fr Jean-Marie Charles-Roux often began his sermons at St Etheldreda’s Church in Holborn, London, with a denunciation of that atheist figurehead of the Enlightenment, Denis Diderot, best known as the editor of the landmark Encyclopédie. Diderot was an appropriate target because he was a fervent atheist in the way we understand the term today. For the most part, thinkers of the Enlightenment weren’t atheists. Voltaire, for example, was typical of this movement, being a Newtonian deist and non-Christian believer in some higher power, designer and creator.

The paradox is that, like Friedrich Nietzsche, Diderot came from an intensely religious family, with many ancestors who belonged to the clergy. Diderot even became an abbé himself in youth, before renouncing religion, not primarily for theological reasons. His rebellion was principally one against authority.

While so many philosophes had been driven to reject Christianity by having read Spinoza’s anti-Theist theology, Diderot “had an ingrained tendency both to chafe at authority and to question the ideas upon which authority is founded”, writes Andrew Curran. He was particularly horrified by the bitter squabble between the Jesuits and Jansenists, which he saw as a ludicrous and appalling, akin to Jonathan Swift’s depiction of the wars between the “big-enders” and “little-enders”.

It was this propensity to cock a snook at authority which led Diderot to include in his Encyclopédie under “Cannibals”, cross-references to “Altar”, “Communion” and “Eucharist”. There is something almost juvenile in doing so, in what was purported to be a serious compendium of knowledge and progress in the 18th century.

As Curran explains in this marvellous and eye-opening book, Diderot’s life story was more nuanced than the reader might assume. He is remembered for clashing with the Jesuit order on account of the Encyclopédie’s perceived irreligion and potentially corrosive influence. But there were liberal, intellectual Jesuits – “priests of letters” – who objected to the Encyclopédie not for its dangerous atheism, but because they weren’t included: they had assumed that they were going to contribute to the endeavour.

“While some historians who have written about the ‘battle of the Encyclopédie’ tend to assign the Jesuits to an ‘anti-Enlightenment’ group,’’ writes Curran, “the truth was that this Roman Catholic order of priests had long considered themselves key players in the scholarly arena.” These liberal Jesuits objected to the perception that the Enlightenment was a project diametrically opposed to traditional religion.

The hugely industrious Diderot contributed 7,000 articles to the Encyclopédie. And despite some schoolboy lapses of taste, most of his entries are sober and serious, addressing subjects such as anatomy, architecture, astronomy, clock-making, gardening, hydraulics, medicine, physics and surgery. By the time the Encyclopédie was finished in 1772, Diderot “had carried the ideas of the Enlightenment forward in a way that no person, not Voltaire, and certainly not Rousseau, had done”.

By this time, Diderot had largely abandoned writing and publishing under his own name, having been spooked by his arrest and incarceration in 1749. His later works on sexuality, race, theatre, morality and politics would not see the light of day in his own lifetime.

Despite Diderot’s erudition, Curran details what an utter scoundrel he was in real life. He was a serial adulterer, sponger, dilettante and swindler.

It was perhaps destiny that he should have befriended Rousseau. We should not be surprised that these two selfish reprobates eventually fell out. A final ignominy came in the 1790s when the protagonists of the French Revolution that he had inspired came to denounce his writings. Diderot’s atheism was deemed incompatible with Robespierre’s deism and notion of a Higher Being.

Although Diderot influenced subsequent thinkers such as Marx and Freud, he never achieved repute as one of the finest exemplars of the Enlightenment. He is not a literary great, unlike many of his contemporaries. Yet his thought does warrant him the place in posterity that he was so keen to achieve, and he deserves to be remembered alongside Voltaire and Montesquieu as one of the giants of his time. He spoke out against slavery at a time when abolitionism was in its infancy and was in favour of tolerance for gay people at a time when it was deeply unfashionable in France.

What is more, he remains relevant in 2019, in a Europe in which the notion of democracy has come into question. As Diderot put it: “There is no sovereign except the nation; there can be no true legislator except the people.”

TLS, November 18, 2016

Gary Hayden 
WALKING WITH PLATO 
A philosophical hike through the British Isles 
224pp. Oneworld. £12.99. 978 1 78074 656 2 

Friedrich Nietzsche used to walk for up to eight hours a day, often rising well before dawn. “I am always on the road two hours before the sun comes over the mountains,” he wrote from Switzerland in 1877, “and especially in the long shadows of afternoon and evening.” His fellow philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was of a similar disposition, writing to his niece thirty years before: “every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it”. It is no coincidence that these two men, each physically and mentally tormented, were both keen walkers. 

As Gary Hayden, the author, previously, of You Kant Make It Up!: Strange ideas from history’s great philosophers (2011) observes in his latest book Walking with Plato: A philosophical hike through the British Isles, there is something about walking that soothes the spirit and frees the mind, especially for those with a less than cheery temperament. Walking with Plato has the appearance of a semi-serious travelogue, in which the author and his wife make the sometimes arduous and often dreary hike from John O’Groats to Land’s End. One might expect Bill Bryson with a dash of Alain de Botton. But Hayden, by his own admission, isn’t very interested in the landscape. He hasn’t even taken a notebook with him. It’s mostly an inventory of damp campsites and nondescript hotels, where “we lounged on the bed, ate crisps and chocolate and watched Strictly Come Dancing. But, apart from that, it’s all a blank”. 

Candid throughout about his own sombre constitution, Hayden is here, rather, on an inward journey. The physical act of trekking becomes a challenge in itself, the landscape a sideshow. He introduces us to other characters for whom the simple act of perambulation was an end in itself. The cast includes Bertrand Russell (“The secret of happiness is to understand that the world is horrible, horrible, horrible”), Charles Dickens, who composed A Christmas Carol in his head in a series of nocturnal ramblings in the winter of 1843, and Plato, who came to learn that physical vigour promotes intellectual vigour, and that the two promote psychological vigour. 

The author emerges at the end a happier man in this affable affair. “I did take pleasure in pitting myself against these obstacles, day after day, and overcoming them.” At Land’s End he surfaces as a naive, everyday Nietzsche – the philosopher who proposed that life was about accepting strife in order to overcome it. 

PATRICK WEST

Spiked, June 24, 2016

In praise of dead white males
Freud, Marx and Nietzsche continue to shape our world.

Spiked, May 13, 2016

The fallacy of happiness
We must stop pathologising normal human emotions like stress and anxiety.

Spiked, November 6, 2015

The rise of the new reactionaries
A new generation of French intellectuals is speaking to the man on the Metro.

Spiked, October 23, 2015

Nietzsche takes on Twitter
The great philosopher would be aghast at the culture of social media.

in The Tablet, September 19, 2015

in Spiked, July 3, 2015

Foucault: from libertine to neoliberal
Was the French philosopher really a Reaganite in poststructural clothing?

in The Catholic Herald, October 24, 2014

 

Poseurs, frauds and pseuds have taken over philosophy

 

The elegant writers of old are gone, says Patrick West. Now philosophy is full of exhibitionist gobbledygook

Philosophy at 3:AM

by Richard Marshall

OUP, £20

What’s the point of philosophers these days? Not much, if you ask your average lay person or journalist. Philosophy, most of us would say, has become arcane, obscure, too technical and trivial. Such a perception was made manifest during the notorious Alan Sokal hoax of 1996, when the scientist concocted an essay of pure gibberish and successfully submitted it to an academic journal. It seemed to confirm the view that modern philosophy has become obscurantist, and a repository for frauds and pseuds.

 

It’s this impression that Philosophy at 3:AM seeks both to explain and to redress. Based on the cultural/literary website 3ammagazine.com, it’s a collection of question-and-answer interviews with 25 contemporary philosophers of all hues, from metaphysicians and logicians to ethicists and linguists.

 

The cry that “philosophy has become too obscure” is akin to “the young are badly behaved” or “our language is becoming debased” – it’s ancient and eternal. Sure, modern analytical philosophy can seem overly technical, and the continental variety can veer into exhibitionist gobbledygook. This appears especially so when you compare both schools to the beautiful literary philosophy of yore: Camus, Freud, Nietzsche, Rousseau. 

 

But there has always been dry, technical philosophy: Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Hume’s Treatise, Aristotle, Aquinas and Hegel. As the America metaphysician Eric T Olson argues here: “Philosophy is hard. That’s its nature. No one would expect serious works of physics or mathematics or economics (as opposed to popularisations) to be immediately accessible to intelligent readers with no training in the subject. Why should philosophy be any different?” Philosophy at 3:AM thus emerges less as a book on philosophy than one about it. And here lies a problem – or perhaps the problem. 

 

I’m not sure a lay reader would want to read a book in which philosophers talk about their own discipline. Such navel-gazing only seems to reinforce the perception that philosophers are out-of-touch. This collection is thus a symptom of the problem it’s trying to address.

 

The use of the impersonal female pronoun from the outset is a case a point. When speaking hypothetically, I would prefer an alternating “he” or “she”, or even a “s/he”, to a question-raising, flow-stopping impersonal “she” and “her”. Keep it simple: the first rule of good writing. There is also the name-dropping. “Philosophical enquiry,” asks one philosopher, “is that the sort of thing Aristotle and Hume were doing, or the sort of thing that Kripke and Gettier were doing?” The last two are hardly household names. Add to this, the often sycophantic tone of the interviewer: “Your ideas blow away many so-called radicals such as Foucault, and your conclusions, couched in very cool, precise language, belie their corrosive impact...” Yuk!

 

It’s a pity, because if you persevere, there is much interesting matter here. Patricia Churchland suggests that moral behaviour preceded religion by 200,000 years and religions evolve into monotheism – yet Confucians, Buddhists and Taoists continue to live without deities. 

 

While Gary Gutting rightly derides Derrida’s writing as needlessly obscure and repetitive, he defends him as a serious and valuable philosopher. The meaning of words are forever unstable, and we shouldn’t be afraid to accept this. Brian Leiter dismisses Derrida as a “poseur”, while standing up for Foucault, who diagnosed how “individuals in the modern era become agents of their own oppression”. To be sure, Foucault belongs to the category of seductive literary philosopher, but it was Freud who first truly elaborated how people internalise rules, becoming the oppressors of themselves.

Eric T Olson explores the Theory of Forms using the tale of Theseus, the mythical king of Athens who builds a ship and goes to sea. He occasionally returns to port to replace the ship’s worn pieces until eventually every one of them has been exchanged. In the meantime, the local museum has been collecting the cast off pieces, which it manages to assemble just as they were when Theseus first set sail. So there are now two ships: the repaired ship at sea and the reconstructed ship in the museum. Which of the two is Theseus’s original ship? Olson concludes that both are.

 

Michael Lynch regrets the rejection of objective truth in modern philosophy. “It is not just a metaphysical mistake; it is a political one,” he says, while Graham Priest delves into motion, contradiction and paradox: “For something to be in motion is not for it to be in one place and one time, and another at another, but at one and the same time to both be and not be in a place.” It can indeed be difficult to resolve place and movement: this is why prepositions are so different and difficult in foreign languages (in Italian you say you are “at” a city, irrespective of whether you are going there or situated there; and you say you are “in” a country whether you are heading or actually there). 

 

Finally, Eric Schwitgebel asks why professors of ethics slam doors, talk rudely during presentations, leave behind rubbish at their seats – and why among university libraries, textbooks on ethics are stolen more than the average.

 

This is all very interesting, but it’s also very bitty. What could have been a good book is ruined by its presentation in a deeply unsatisfactory format.

in The Catholic Herald, May 2, 2014

The Enlightenment was an age of wizards and weirdos

Patrick West sees a medievalist take revenge on an era that mocked all that came before it

The Dark Side of The Enlightenment

By John V Fleming

W H Norton, £16.99

In academia and among the intelligentsia it’s long been fashionable to deride the claims and pretences of the Enlightenment, with its dual principles of detached reason and objectivity. Ever since the thoughts of postmodernists Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty et al became voguish in the 1970s among red brick universities, the belief spread that the tenets of the Enlightenment were not only arrogant and spurious, but also actually dangerous. The application of reason, logic, categorisation and industrial progress led us, after all, to the atom bomb and Auschwitz. 

Although postmodernism isn’t spoken of today with the breathless reverence it was in its late 1980s and early 1990s heyday, Enlightenment values are still disdained. We live in an age in which everyone’s subjective opinions must be valued and in which we have become more censorious to spare the feelings or “deeply held beliefs” of others. Perspectives, not objective knowledge, are what matters in an age in which Voltaire’s first principle – the right to be offensive – is anathema.

This isn’t an entirely bad thing. The advocates and devotees of the Enlightenment have often been unwilling or unconscious of its debt to a Christian world perspective. The concept of the individual (and from it the Rights of Man) evolved from that of the soul. Progress is a secularised form of Providence, while egalitarianism was promoted, especially among low church Protestants, by those who had read in the Bible that we are all God’s children.

It’s in this spirit that John V. Fleming has written The Dark Side of The Enlightenment, criticising its boastfulness, and especially the manner in which it belittled much that came before it. As a professional medievalist, Fleming feels the Enlightenment cast a permanent slur on the Middle Ages, caricaturing it as an era of “brutality, disease, ignorance, and superstition”. This “Gibbonesque view … has become permanent in our lexicon”, he says. So, if the Middle Ages weren’t that “medieval”, in the pejorative sense of that word, maybe the Enlightenment wasn’t so enlightened. 

“One of the paradoxes of the Enlightenment,” writes Fleming, “is the fascination of many of the enlightened with the occult.” It was an age in which knowledge was sought as much through the “dark arts” of magic and alchemy as detached, objective enquiry. It was a time in which Freemasonry did not wither, but enjoyed a rebirth, as did the associated cult of Rosicrucianism, which in the early 17th century declared there to be a secret brotherhood of sages and alchemists ready to transform Europe scientifically, politically and culturally.

There was no dichotomy between reason and mysticism, Fleming observes. The pursuit of truth came in many guises, some ostensibly rational, others not, and many indistinguishable from either category. 

We tend today to differentiate alchemy from chemistry, but that is merely a linguistic nicety: the latter emerged from the former. (The author might have added that astronomy emerged directly from astrology.) 

Nevertheless, Fleming does not believe the Enlightenment was an era of clean, delineated materialism. “The mainstream of European thought was not materialist but sacramental,” he says. “In the sacramental view, the material and visible world paralleled another that was immaterial and invisible.”

Like John Carey’s recent book, Victoria’s Madmen, The Dark Side of the Enlightenment follows the format of a potted biography. Likewise, it introduces us to a bizarre collection of motley characters and ostensible charlatans possessed with esoteric beliefs in the so-called Age of Reason. As a result, the book veers from bitty to sprawling to chaotic. It concludes by veering off into a dual biography of an Egyptian wizard called Count Cagliostro and the novelist, preacher and mystic Julie de Krüdener. The book has no conclusion, leaving the reader to wonder whether it could have actually done with a rigorous dose of Enlightenment-style rationalisation.

Ultimately, The Dark Side of the Enlightenment tells us nothing new – at least in its overarching thesis. You don’t have to be a Foucault scholar or post-structuralist to appreciate that the Enlightenment contained its own contradictions or fundamental elements of superstition and religiosity. Anyone who has read the Fortean Times in the last 30 years can tell you the same: that the men of reason could also be quite barmy, or imprisoned by their own delusions (or meta-narratives, if you will). No one has believed in the absolute division between post-Enlightenment positivism and pre-Enlightenment primitivism for decades. Even today’s popular arch-rationalists such as Richard Dawkins and Professor Brian Cox can talk of nature in poetic and rhapsodic ways. 

Ultimately, I fear that John Fleming isn’t fighting a war with today’s ostensible rationalists. He is, in fact, still quarrelling with those long dead arch-prophets of the Enlightenment – Kant, primarily – who thought so little of his beloved Middle Ages.