The rise of the so-called ‘social question’ (soziale Frage) marked a milestone in thinking about society in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century. Society was getting increasingly complicated and traditional ways of talking about society were unable to address this complexity. Contractarian theories had been designed to explain society as an autonomous system based on the free association of independent individuals. But they could not really explain either the constraints on this autonomy (an increasing need to adapt to an international order) nor the increasing differences between the individuals constituting society (social classes based on a global division of labour). Meanwhile, the science of the state (Staatswissenschaft) had been designed to be a discipline that covers legal, financial, law enforcement and social studies, that is, every field of knowledge that was needed to govern a country. But it could not really explain social dynamics that did not originate from top-down social policies. A new discipline was needed that would study society as a separate subject and not as a consequence of the state. The science of society (Gesellschaftswissenschaft) was born.
Stephan Moebius’s Sociology in Germany: A History (Palgrave 2021) starts from this defining moment and presents the fascinating consecutive episodes of the history of thinking about society in Germany. From the establishment of the German Reich in 1871 to the contemporary trends of sociology in Germany, this little book addresses the history of the analysed discipline over a surprisingly long period. One of the chapters addresses how the 1968 generation of students and young professionals managed to induce large-scale social changes, among others giving a boost to sociology. Another discusses what happened to sociology in Germany in the Reconstruction era after World War II. A third engages with the history of sociology in West Germany during the Cold War, a fourth deals with the hostile attitude against sociology in the German Democratic Republic. The last chapter examines sociology in the unified Germany from 1990 until today and offers insightful discussions of what is going on and what to expect.
One of the dangers of writing disciplinary history is that it becomes too internalistic, that is, limiting itself only to the sequence of results of the studied discipline without paying much attention to the external factors underlying the practices of making science. Stephan Moebius brilliantly avoids this common mistake. The narrative of the volume is a skillful amalgamation of various strands. The complex topic of the history of sociology in Germany since World War II is presented from multiple angles. Inquiries into political, social and intellectual history complement inquiries concerning specific sciences, mostly sociology and its perceived ‘anti-sociologies’ resulting in a well rounded, socially sensitive and interpretative historical account of the period. Geographical and institutional strands, too, are present in this sociology of the history of sociology in Germany. The most relevant cities, universities, research centres, journals and their specific contexts are discussed to the degree it is necessary for this endeavour.Yet the whole narrative feels simple, clear-cut, accessible and exciting. The volume gives an introduction to the topic without being too reductionist or dry. It manages to present both the political and the disciplinary tensions and conflicts, as well as their perceived stakes in specific settings, and by doing so, developing a ‘feeling’ for sociology in the sense Evelyn Fox Keller (1983) used the term. The narrative also stays critical and provides disclaimers where necessary without discouraging novice readers of sociology or intellectual history by including too many layers to follow. It is rich but easy to read.
If two things could be considered missing from the book, then these are not flaws because both would lay outside the well-defined scope of the volume. The first would be a more extended discussion of the prehistory of sociology. Several fascinating organic or vitalist theories of society were developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that might be seen, perhaps in an anachronistic way, as precursors to later theories of society as an organism. Kant’s organism, Hegel’s geistiger Organismus, Fichte’s state, Müller’s nation, Roscher’s volk, Knies’ life force, Lilienfeld’s social neurons, Schäffle’s social tissues. While some of these theories were not developed in Germany (e.g., Paul Lilienfeld’s), they might be relevant for understanding the early evolution of social thought in Germany. The second thing that is missing is a more systematic treatment of the co-development of science and technology studies (STS) and sociology. The author does briefly mention the interdisciplinary field and even addresses some slight changes in the most popular theoretical approaches of younger scholars engaged with STS, but he does not thoroughly explore the tensions and conflicts between the various schools within the field. Science and technology studies faced serious challenges and perhaps even an identity crisis from the 1970s onward. This disciplinary coming-of-age story might come handy either as a foil to emphasize the uniqueness of the road taken by sociology in Germany, or by emphasizing the similarity of the challenges these fields faced and the similarity of the solutions they delivered.
Stephan Moebius’ skillfully written and engaging book can be recommended both for undergraduate and postgraduate students who seek an accessible introduction to the history of sociology in Germany. The exciting and easy-to-read narrative, the surprisingly comprehensive, socially engaged and critical nature of the volume and the fact that the book is (currently) open access suggests that it will be read by many. It is reasonable to expect that this charming little book will shortly find its way into the syllabi of sociology courses not just at German universities but in higher education all around the world.
Stephan Moebius (2021) Sociology in Germany: A History Palgrave Macmillan: Cham. ISBN 978-3-030-71866-4 222 pages, Hardcover, 32,09€
Dr. Gábor István Bíró, PhD, is a member of the MTA Lendület Morals and Science Research Group and an assistant professor at Budapest University of Technology and Economics.
Henry Hardy, the main editor of Isaiah Berlin, has invented a new genre, a sort of “making-of” for academic publishing. If Hardy will not have many emulators – and I doubt that he will – this is only because of the lack of stories equally suitable for such an approach.
Hardy’s book, with the seemingly odd title, “In search of Isaiah Berlin. A literary journey” consists of two independent parts. First, Hardy tells the story of an editor (himself) who struggled with an author (Berlin) unusually reluctant to have his works published. In the second part of the book, Hardy discusses some perceived obscurities within Berlin’s writings, which he had the chance to address in a vivid correspondence that lasted for slightly more than two decades, from 1975 until Berlin’s death in 1997.
Hardy first met Berlin in the early 1970s when studying philosophy at Wolfson College, Oxford, where the latter served as president. Hardy had already some experience with editing, an activity that suited his temperament. “Evidently the process of gathering together a jumble of material and turning it into a presentable form appealed to my somewhat obsessive and organizing nature” (p. 24), Hardy observes. A friend of him, who knew of those qualities and who understood that Berlin’s scattered and widely unknown oeuvre was in dire need of editing, suggested to Hardy to contact Berlin. Once the later had agreed that a couple of his writings be published as a book, Hardy started by compiling a bibliography; an undertaking that proved hard in a time before the internet and with Berlin remembering only parts of what he had written. When done, the list of Berlin’s writings contained 137 items – even those close to Berlin were astonished, not least since Berlin had been regarded as a great thinker – a great thinker – but one with a rather poor publication record.
In between spring 1978 and autumn 1980, four volumes with ‘selected writings’ appeared: “Russian Thinkers” (1978), “Concepts and Categories: Philosophical Essays” (1978), “Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas” (1979) and finally “Personal Impressions” (1980). It followed a comparatively quiet decade for the duo Hardy/Berlin, which nonetheless produced the fruit of yet another volume; in 1990, “The Crooked Timber of Humanity” appeared.
Isaiah Berlin at the Erasmus Prize ceremony in Amsterdam, 27 October 1983 (Source: Nationaal Archief NL/Rob C. Croes, released to public domain/Wikimedia Commons)
At the end of the 1980s, Berlin had reached the conclusion (or perhaps better: had been convinced by others) that it was best to ensure that his ‘posthumous writings’, as he mockingly called them, were better edited while he was still alive. Once the funding was secured, Hardy became Berlin’s full-time editor, dealing with the massive treasure of unpublished material that he had discovered only shortly before when he was allowed to take a look at the heaps of unsorted and half-hidden unpublished papers in Berlin’s Oxford home, Headington House. Hardy continued his work beyond Berlin’s death in 1997 and when he ‘retired’ in 2014 had edited (or co-edited) 22 books, mainly comprised of compilations of lectures, essays, and letters; most of them had been substantially improved in the editing process in terms of accuracy while some had even been compiled from different manuscripts and recordings.
What may sound like a smooth story of success was, in fact, the result of a constant struggle. Not only was Berlin hesitant to publish, but he also changed his mind regularly. On one occasion – the “Philosophical Papers” were ready for print, all the editing was done, and the unavoidable minor fights about what papers to include and which not had been fought – Berlin suddenly doubted that the volume should be published at all (p. 41). As Hardy reports, “throughout our relationship I felt I had to push as hard as I dared, at every step, in order to secure the best outcome that I could in the face of Berlin’s ingrained self-doubt, hesitancy and caution.” (p. 31).
Why, one inevitable wonders, was Berlin so reluctant to have his works published and re-printed? In some cases, Berlin gives the impression that he doesn’t take himself too seriously and hence couldn’t care less whether his writings were being published. There is a certain plausibility here, since, how could it otherwise be that such an enormously productive author did not take any action whatsoever to further his reputation by (re)publishing, many of his already written texts?
However, indifference can not be the whole story, as this would explain his lukewarm reaction to the offer to get his writings (back) into print, but not his active resistance to it; indifference would have meant to not care either way. Apart from a couple of reasonably plausible objections against the publication of this and that particular piece, what seems to lay at the bottom of Berlin’s notorious reluctance to publish is captured in a sentence of a letter Berlin wrote to Hardy: “‘Fear shame’ (…) I think this is probably the governing motto of my life.” (p. 78). Berlin must have suffered from an almost neurotic fear to embarrass himself in public. A character trait that also let him prepare lectures and public speeches with extreme care: “Lectures always involved compulsive over-preparation, endless refining from sixty pages to thirty, then to ten, and finally to single-headings on a single piece of paper, which were ignored when he entered seance-like state of performance” (Ignatieff, p. 225).
If Berlin might be called a perfectionist in this sense, he surely wasn’t one in another sense. When, for instance, asked by Hardy if he could possibly give him the source for a quotation used in one of his texts, he replied: “Again, you don’t need a reference, it is a very famous formula (…), always attributed to Barrès, nobody bothers about where it is to be found – like ‘blood and soil’ as a Nazi slogan (did Hitler use it in Mein Kampf or somewhere else? Who knows, who cares?)”. (p. 77). On which Hardy comments: “For me the fact that nobody so bothers is an increased incentive to pin down the original source. I care.” (Hardy, p. 77). Their striking difference in temperament – also a source of tensions on rare occasions – must be considered a fortune, as it led to an extremely productive work relationship. Hardy’s pedantic nature not only led him to detect – like a tracker dog, as Ignatieff puts it – every missing source and incorrect quotation but also ask for clarifications when he felt Berlin was being vague or contradictory in his arguments. The later partly served the practical purpose of getting manuscripts ready for print but was also driven by Hardy’s personal obsession with specific questions. “My close work on his texts”, Hardy explains, “reopened for me questions about his thought that had long preoccupied me – even tormented me – and I began to ask these questions in my letters. I am astonished today at the patience and thoroughness with which he replied, and it seems to me that, taken together, his answers constitute an important supplement to his published work, clarifying it at certain crucial points and preventing natural misinterpretations at others”. (p. 133). Selected parts of this correspondence combined with interwoven commentary by Hardy form the second part of the book, evidently of particular interest toexperts on Berlin’s thinking.
The book’s second part contains delightful passages such as when Berlin explains that he had always felt that there should be a third category in addition to ‘atheist’ and ‘agnostic’, as he doesn’t understand what ‘God’ is supposed to mean; “‘agnostic’ means one who doesn’t know,; ‘atheist’ means one who doesn’t believe; but there is no word for one who doesn’t understand”. (p. 216) Apart from such beautiful passages, the second part of the book can best be understood as an inherent critique of some of the central concepts of Berlin’s writings with the attempt to reduce internal inconsistencies and present Berlin’s ideas in the most precise way possible. This attempt manifests in the form of selected passages from their correspondence as well as taking the form of posthumous philosophical comments provided by Hardy.
Although Hardy worked hard in his letters to lead Berlin to a clarifying explanation of this or that passage or idea, there are occasions where he does not succeed and is left with the impression that this might be because Berlin simply does not know the answer himself. Hardy – on a different occasion – makes the interesting observation, that Berlin’s later writings suffer from a lack of productive critique:
“When Berlin turned from pure philosophy to the history of ideas, and increasingly took on the role of a public moralist, he moved into territory that was sparsely populated in his immediate intellectual environment, and populated, if at all, by persons not specially inclined or able to subject his observations to the exact and exacting challenge of a Frank Hardie [Berlin’s tutor at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, “who taught him philosophical self-discipline”; Ignatieff, p. 49]. In short, he became intellectually imprecise because no one stood up to him. (…) Again and again, I have had occasions to regret that Berlin was not challenged earlier and more rigorously. If he had been, we might today be less puzzled about some features of his outlook.” (Hardy, p. 170-171)
“In Search of Isaiah Berlin” is the testimony of an editor that devoted the better part of his life to a search for Isaiah Berlin – literally, when digging out unpublished texts buried in Headington House, and metaphorically when trying to find the appropriate meaning in blurry or even contradictory passages of Berlin’s writing.
The second part of the book is an essential contribution to the study of Berlin’s ideas, providing not only helpful commentary but – through its drawing on many hitherto unpublished letters – entirely new insights and bases for further debate. In the first part of the book, Henry Hardy shares his “literary adventure”, starring two unequal heroes with opposite talents, whose meeting let the one find his true vocation while turning the other from an alleged “salon virtuoso” into one of the most important political thinkers of the 20th century.
Henry Hardy: In Search of Isaiah Berlin, A Literary Adventure I.B.Tauris, London/New York 2018. ISBN: 978-1788312448 320 pages, £20.00.
Michael Ignatieff: Isaiah Berlin, A Life. Metropolitan Books, New York 1998. ISBN: 978-0805055207 356 pages, US$32.00
Mario Clemens is a staff member of the Institute of Conflict Management (IKM) at Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder).
Minds Without Fear attempts to showcase the intellectual agency of Anglophone Indian philosophers living under coloniality. The book’s thirteen chapters are framed by the acute professional anxiety many of them experienced then, and its rippling effects which continue till today. Like their predecessors, contemporary Indian philosophers worry that colonialism has crippled their intellectual abilities. Authors Nalini Bhushan and Jay Garfield argue that this anxiety is simply a type of “false consciousness” (38). The book follows on the heels of their anthology Indian Philosophy in English: From Renaissance to Independence (Oxford University Press 2011). While the anthology simply collates the material of important Hindu philosophers living under coloniality and in the early years of the Indian Republic, Minds without Fear seeks to show how all the collated material hangs together. In addition, the latter also references the work of Muslim contemporaries, who were conspicuous by their absence in the anthology.
Brajendra Nath Seal (1864-1938), Source: Wikimedia Commons/public domain
The introduction actively encourages readers to approach the book’s material with a fearless mind. One should not buy into any narratives that claim philosophical originality died in India under colonialism and has been dormant since. While the reasons driving the aforementioned anxiety should be taken seriously, one should neither be cowed down by it nor should it negatively affect our own engagement with, and evaluation of, the work of these “denizens” of “masala modernity” (318). Furthermore, one should be ready to concede that some of these positions curiously helped (and continue to help) bolster, even if inadvertently, several one-sided narratives about India’s philosophical past (a point I will return to below). Moreover: This period was “one of prodigious philosophical activity,” which contributed to the development of a philosophical nationalism within India and to a “global philosophical culture” beyond (5). Only minds without fear can take stock of the new narratives these very philosophers initiated—narratives which are still subcutaneously present in debates about Indian philosophy and about a public philosophy for the Indian nation. Only minds that are ready to cross disciplinary boundaries again and again, will be ready to plumb into the creative depths of some of these positions, even when these positions do not always neatly segue with their philosophical counterparts in Europe and America.
The first chapter sets the stage by sketching the intellectual alienation experienced by colonial Indian philosophers, as philosophers. The colonial situation confronted them with the self-image of European philosophy, which positioned itself as being neutral, self-evident, objective etc. This self-image was transported through a language (English) which was complicit in promoting the universalizability of this self-image too. Access to indigenous norms and ways of seeing and interpreting the philosophical significance of the world was severed inasmuch as educational institutions in colonial India adopted this ideologically-charged conceptual framework. As philosopher Krishna Chandra Bhattacharya (1875-1949), who spent his whole career at the University of Kolkata (then Calcutta), put it, “habits of soulless thinking that appear like real thinking” (8) were cultivated; the springs of creativity and authenticity were lost. The only cameo role reserved for a colonized intellectual was that of an obedient imitator.
This subjective, critical self-assessment forced upon a colonized philosopher the difficulties of finding an apt self-description for one’s own work. Did one engage in “Indian” or “Western philosophy?” One’s own positioning in these very colonial educational institutions came in the way of actively seeking to integrate indigenous ways of practicing philosophy into academic philosophy. The latter self-description was found inappropriate too. As Daya Krishna (1924-2007), an important figure in the development of philosophy in post-independence India, said: The “deepest anguish of an Indian intellectual” was that one was not treated as an intellectual equal in Europe (11). Struggling to find an appropriate self-description of one’s work, these intellectuals were also plagued by methodological concerns. Should one disinterestedly, and systematically, pursue philosophical truths like European colleagues? Not only would one then take up the cameo-role mentioned above, one would, more importantly, also stray from one goal important to the Indian tradition: liberation, mukti. Concentrating on the history of India’s “embalmed tradition” (10), an alternative canvassed by some European Indologists, was not viable either. It conflicted with these philosophers’ own endorsement of political independence for colonial India and with their mastery of, and immersion in, indigenous languages. The latter pointed to resources within the tradition itself, which were by no means completely embalmed. As Brajendranath Seal (1864-1938), the first King George V Chair in Kolkata, envisaged, some of these difficulties could be countered by engaging in “comparative philosophy.” Some critical voices found this third alternative wanting too. Daya Krishna, for example, warned that trivial comparisons with Indian philosophy would “turn it into a mere object of the European intellectual gaze” (15).
Chapters 2 and 3 deftly endeavor to upend several interrelated, conventional narratives still in currency. One such narrative doggedly holds on to the view that premodern India’s pristine, linguistic and philosophical purity was conserved by Sanskrit. In the wake of British colonialism, a “radical discontinuity” between this pristine past and colonial India was thought to have ensued (37). A second such narrative ties the onset of modernity to processes initiated under colonialism. According to this view, the professionalization of philosophy is considered a British import; scholarly philosophical prose, as well as the development of a private and public audience, are traced back to the advent of the British. A third narrative sets up a sharp dichotomy between a purportedly sublime and spiritual “East” as opposed to a rational “West.”
Rabindranath Tagore in conversation with Jawaharlal Nehru, 1940 (Wikimedia Commons/public domain)
The authors don the hats of cultural historians to debunk such narratives. Epistemology, they show, was not transported to Indian shores by the ships of the East India Company. Philosophers in India were not “hermetically sealed in a subcontinental philosophical bell jar” (38). Intellectual communities like the karaṇam in medieval South India and the later munshī class in North India, produced written texts for a learned, trans-local, polyglot audience, despite certain internal differences. In both cases, the audience dictated the choice of an idiom and conceptual frameworks which were secular and not parochial. Communication with this large audience necessitated the medium of other (vernacular) languages and conceptual frameworks, which could be comprehended across different contexts. By virtue of their professional work, these intellectuals placed themselves—and their work—in a larger world, and engaged with it philosophically. Even later movements like the Navya-Nyāyā (albeit being centered around Sanskrit), did not step into unchartered territory when its proponents sought to engage in a philosophical dialogue with the outer world. In fact, their engagement with the work of Descartes and Gassendi (through their Persian and Sanskrit translations) is only another episode in this intellectual encounter. Having brought into view this trail of early modernity in precolonial India for its readers, the book turns to another salient question: If the sub-continent’s scholarly tradition was woven with a rich warp and weft of different languages, why did colonial intellectuals like Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) express their acute discomfort in using English? Why was English not quickly appropriated across the board as yet another potential vehicle of philosophical expression?
In offering a historical explanation for this discomfort, Bhushan and Garfield place their philosophical protagonists in a broader, political context. Notably, the younger ones were socialized in institutions which arose after the British refurnished India to better access its markets. In Bhushan’s and Garfield’s reading, Thomas Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Education’ (1835) becomes a “pastiche” (41) of a crafty, “middle-brow” employee of a global company, who sought to find the right balance between his Utilitarian mentor-supporters in England and his partners in India (English Orientalists and Hindu anglophiles). The ‘Minute’ mirrored the interests of this relatively-mixed coterie. It also established the centrality of English as the only language which could enable the future of a modern India, while simultaneously allowing the East India Company to grapple with, and further strengthen, its role in a “globalized labor market” (49).
Unsurprisingly, it was easy for younger colonial philosophers, or “Macaulay’s children” if you will, to believe that philosophy in India was a promise to be achieved in the future, in a language, which, as these institutions made them believe, was not, and could not, be their own. Their own classical languages (like Sanskrit or Persian) were “deadwood” of the past; only English, the “language of modernity the world over” (56), could lead them into a new future. (Notice how this reading directs attention to the manner in which this European vernacular fashioned itself as a language of philosophy under colonialism, at least in the Indian context.) However, as some of the then-young, political talents like Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), who went on to become the first Prime Minister of independent India, seem to have guessed, the promise of education (and philosophy) in English came at a price: it would never become fully desi for one simple reason: Becoming desi, was akin to going native, “it was to fall from the norm” (58). To be philosophers, Indians had to, as their professional creed demanded, engage with (social) reality. However, the language in which they philosophized (English), operated with the understanding that it was simply not applicable to this reality. Thus, their philosophical ruminations in English were either removed from their own (social) reality or if they referenced the latter, their reflections were rendered unphilosophical. Contemporary Indian philosophy’s anxiety-syndrome was born.
Bhushan and Garfield are not caught up in the web of this anxiety. In their endeavor to show that it is ungrounded, Minds Without Fear now sets to work out different aspects of an “Indian Renaissance” (chapters 4, 5 and 6). Their choice in applying this highly valorized term to the Indian context is mainly two-fold. For one, it accords with the use of the term by some of the participants themselves, a prime example of which is the nationalist-philosopher-saint Aurobindo Ghosh (1872-1950). For another, we can ex post facto track certain “renaissance tropes” (64) in the works of individuals working in this period. These individuals perceived themselves as initiating a new future through an intercultural encounter, a future which would significantly differ from India’s recent, “degenerate” present, as well as from European modernity. Through their efforts at rejuvenating their tradition, these renaissance efforts took on an Indian inflection as well. Together, they distilled the essence of an Ur-Indian soul. This soul took on different garbs through its wandering in different historical epochs and also at the hands of those who cast it in these garbs.
The Indian-renaissance lens does important strategic work for the book’s larger philosophical project. The book, firstly, perceives philosophy as one of many social activities. Its practitioners’ views and interests are actively informed by their social positionings; they cannot honestly claim that their discipline allows them to retreat to a transcendental space which is completely uninflected by the social. Secondly, placing modern Anglophone Indian philosophy in a broad socio-cultural setting adheres to one core component of the self-understanding of Indian philosophical traditions themselves: In their philosophical musings, these traditions did not seek to sunder their relation with this world. Even highly abstract ruminations were grounded in this wordly life. Thirdly, and related to the other two, this lens allows us to draw in, and where necessary separate, different dimensions. Taken together, all these dimensions promise to reverse the “contemporary amnesia” that has befallen knowledge about contemporary Indian philosophy. Separating them, puts the spotlight on different moments of this intercultural encounter.
Deploying the cultural-history register, for example, one can ascertain how secularization processes initiated by social movements like the Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj (founded in 1828 and 1875 respectively) went on to deeply affect the formation of modern Anglophone Indian philosophy. By layering a fine, permeable, political dimension over the first, we can perceive how Indians under colonialism challenged the “colonial industry of national narrative production” (91), which tended to portray India as a “subject nation” (92). In reaction, colonial Indian intellectuals developed a multiplicity of narratives underscoring the social unity of India (whether as a promise or as an actuality). Despite their internal diversity, all these narratives posited India as a “distinctive cultural space” (99), although some, warning about nationalism’s dangers, demanded a more sophisticated and sustainable alternative to better fit India’s intellectual heritage. Tagore, for example, pleaded with Gandhi to understand that the “egoism of the People” (i.e. nationalism) cannot be a viable alternative for “true” India, which for Tagore was “an idea and not a mere geographical fact” (142). Tagore’s wariness about the nation was shared, albeit from another perspective, by the pan-Islamist Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938). Perceiving a hiatus between Islamic political theory and modern notions of a secular state, Iqbal, for his part, endorsed the development of communities within India. However, throwing out the baby (the Indian nation) along with the bath water (nationalism) was easier said than done for Macaulay’s children (see chapter 7). As the biting rhetoric of Aurobindo Ghosh observes, why should the “enlightenment [ideals] so kindly vouchsafed to us” (134) not be expressed and implemented by colonial subjects in India? Ghosh’s rhetorical question reflected the reality on the ground only partially. While Macaulay’s children were not allowed to implement their thoughts, they were indeed able to develop rich swaraj accounts, in which epistemological, ethical, political and aesthetic dimensions of social and political freedom were fleshed out (chapter 8). In this vibrant interaction about how best to (if at all) materialize Indian modernity, some voices noted the importance of spelling out modernity in India by placing her in a larger world. India’s intellectual traditions, they reasoned, did not place any heightened value on rejecting an idea simply because it arose elsewhere. Layering another permeable dimension over this political one, we would be able to glimpse Hindu and Sufi remappings of idealistic trends provocated by encounters with speculative philosophy (chapter 9 and 10). But Bhushan and Garfield press upon the reader not to stop here. At what might appear to be a dead-end, they promise, await rich, desi accounts developed by colonial Indian philosophers (chapter 11). A closer study of their works will reveal just how fearless these philosophers really were. The lesser-known A. C. Mukerji (1888-1968), for example, drew on a host of resources (like Advaita Vedānta, Buddhist idealism, British neo-Hegelians) to achieve a plausible synthesis between idealism and realism, correspondence and coherence and metaphysics and science. His contemporary, the aforementioned K.C. Bhattacharya, leaned upon elements of Vedānta, Nyāya, Vaiśnava tantra, Kant and Husserl in explicating different modes of subjectivity, and drawing up nuanced interrelations between them and progressions in freedom. Imagistic, idealistic and spiritual thought were placed on a graded plane, all of which are grounded in an imaginative-reflective subject experiencing itself being in different modes in the world. But this is not all. Minds without Fear promises us a glimpse into yet another philosophical vista: Masala modernists like Mukerji and Bhattacharya expressed their deep dissatisfaction with a comparative philosophy, which in Mukerji’s words, “contented itself with discovering stray similarities between the Western and Indian thought” (258). Rather than treading down this barren path, they chose to draw upon all registers to make sense of the world they found themselves in (Bhattacharya, in fact, developed a theory of aesthetic experience which was related to his ruminations on subjectivity; see chapter 12). By engaging philosophically with a broader, global context, their philosophical efforts helped to renew and reinvigorate a living Indian philosophical tradition. They developed desi and modern Indian philosophical conceptions in an Indian vernacular (English). Interestingly, these were no lone rangers; their attempts at making sense of a hybrid world were matched by artists and aesthetes in the public sphere too (chapter 12).
We see how at least two of the aforementioned narratives begin to tumble under the weight of this analysis: (1) that colonialism brought intellectual activity to a complete standstill and, (2) that Indian philosophy is solely driven by spiritual concerns. Notice too how the—almost nonchalant—use of the renaissance-lens itself makes short shrift of the powerful narrative that the renaissance is unique only to Europe.
Famously, “comparative philosophy” began in India with a glint in B. Seal’s eye when he seized upon the opportunity afforded to him through, as he put it, the “fortuitous juxtaposition of two great cultures” brought on by colonialism (13). Today, this project has found its place in at least some niches in the modern global academy. Minds Without Fear makes us consider the possibility that simple compare-and-contrast exercises may be intellectually empty for reasons elucidated by some of Seal’s progeny. The book nudges its readers to seek a truly free knowledge, a knowledge which honestly faces up to its social grounding. With a wink towards those philosophers, who still await conclusive proofs of philosophical activity in non-Euroamerican philosophical traditions, the book would say: Sometimes, the “confirmation [may simply be found] in the kheer [a pudding-like dessert in India]” (69).
Nalini Bhushan and Jay L. Garfield: Minds without Fear, Philosophy in the Indian Renaissance Oxford University Press, 2017 ISBN 135798642, 334 pages, US$49.95 (hbk)
Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Konstanz.
Oswald Spengler is best known as the author of Der Untergang des Abendlandes, ‘The Decline of the West’, a classic doomsday vision, first published in 1917. Describing the inevitable slide into intellectual, social, and cultural decay of our ‘Faustian’ culture, it was followed, two years later, by Preussentum und Sozialismus, which called for martial virtues, like discipline and self-sacrifice, as the best, most heroic responses to the doom awaiting us. Both the dark vision of history and life and the celebration of martial heroism persisted into Spengler’s next book, Der Mensch und die Technik, first published in 1932 and reissued, last year, by Routledge as part of their ‘Revivals’ series.
Unfortunately, this new edition is a flat reprint, lacking an introduction, therefore leaving readers in the dark about how the book fits within Spengler’s oeuvre. That’s to be regretted, since in certain respects, Man and Technics, its English title, represents a change of mood for Spengler. Its subtitle – ‘a contribution to a philosophy of life’ – strikes an oddly positive tone, where the ‘life’ spoken of is the raw, almost primal thing spoken of by early twentieth century Lebensphilosophen, like Spengler’s French contemporary, Henri Bergson. Certainly Man and Technics has many things in common with Der Untergang – its brooding character, grand ambition, and agonistic vision of life. But there is also, underneath that, something different. To see what this is, though, a little context might help.
The historian Jeffrey Herf classified Spengler as a ‘reactionary modernist’, one of a loose group of German historians, philosophers, cultural critics, and others, that included Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, and others. The reactionary modernists aimed, says Herf, to ‘reconcil[e] the antimodernist, romantic, and irrationalist ideas present in German nationalism’, with the ‘most obvious manifestation of means-end rationality’, namely, technology. An older cultural spirit filled with Geist, völkisch identity, and Nietzschean will-to-power was merged, remarkably, with new industrial and military technology, fulfilling the idea of a reactionary modernism – an embrace of the modern, but reacting against what Spengler lambasted as the ‘devastating shallowness’ of its liberalism, utilitarianism, and materialism. Profit, utility, and other bourgeois values stifle the true ‘essence of technics’, complained Spengler, who inveigles against ‘progress-philistines’ who fail to perceive in machines a pulsing Will zur Macht.
Cover of Ernst Jünger’s Der Arbeiter. Herrschaft und Gestalt (1932)
Only when the depth of ‘technics’ is properly grasped can the ‘soul of man’ be set free. Such is the aim of a genuine ‘philosophy of life’, fuelled by a philosophy of technology and history, focused on the release of vast energies and power. Understandably, Spengler’s vision in Man and Technics was welcomed by the National Socialists, with Josef Goebbels’s proclaiming the inauguration of ‘an age that is both romantic and steellike’ – a vision of a reactionary modernist state. But Spengler, for his part, resisted their efforts, complaining, if obliquely, that their militaristic zeal was just as shallow as those of the bourgeoisie. ‘The essence of technics’, he wrote, is identical with ‘the soul of man’, not the ends of military ambition. Man and Technics is less a manifesto for a militarised technological state than ‘the history of Man from his origins’, that affords, at its most portentous, ‘a provisional glimpse’ into our ‘destiny’.
Talk of destiny is, of course, not new to Spengler. Decline of the West offered a ‘morphology of world-cultures’, a description of the cyclical processes that dictate the movement of a Kultur into the degenerate form Spengler called a Zivilisation. With a sweeping historical gaze, the waxing and waning of these ‘world-cultures’ is described, from the Classical culture of ancient Greece and Rome, through the ‘Hindu’, ‘Magian’, and, finally, the ‘Faustian’. In the beginning, these cultures are potent and energetic, generating original images and values that coalesce in a ‘Prime Symbol’, like the nude statue of Rome, a symbol of pride, power, and autonomy.
Such ‘cultural-forms’ (Gestalt) are, however, swept up in irresistible transhistorical forces, destined to gradually decline, losing the vitality and energy that sustained their rise. In time, they degenerate into civilizations, orderly and stable, lacking vigorous energy and so declining into defeat or extinction. It was, of course, Spengler’s explanation of the decline of German culture into Weimar civilization as a product of historical forces beyond knowledge or control that made Decline of the West so popular in its day. Scholars, of course, attacked Spengler’s procrustean historiography and his vast generalisations, but the German public was captivated. Socially depressed and politically exhausted as much of Germany was, it’s easy to see why Spengler’s appeal to ‘morphological’ forces was an attractive diagnosis of decline, even if it came at the cost of profound fatalism.
By the 1930s, though, the appeal of Spengler’s original pessimistic historical determinism was fading. Emboldened by the rise of National Socialism, the new mood was more optimistic. Germany’s political and economic fortunes were changing, pushing out talk of inevitable decline. Certainly it now came to seem premature for Spengler to speak of German decline, with so many signs of activity, life, and power. Similar sentiments flowed through writings by other reactionary modernists in the early 1930s, always with industrial technology as a proof and symbol of this restoration. Among the most important of these fellow-travellers was the war hero, writer, and rhapsodist of battle, Ernst Jünger.
A couple of years before Man and Technics, Jünger published two landmark works, a vivid essay, Die totale Mobilmachung (1930), and its longer companion, Der Arbeiter (1932). The titular concepts pull together in a vision of a ‘totally mobilised’ society, whose entire energies, resources, and people are concentrated into a singular goal, pursued by a vast collective of ‘Workers’. These are not muscular fellows labouring in overalls, but creatures, at once ‘bees and titans’, utterly dominated by an inexorable desire to ‘summon … all possible forces’, deploying them for the purposes of struggle, domination, and violence. Technology, on this vision, is an expression of this primeval impulse to ‘total mobilisation’, to generate and unleash a collectivised will-to-power upon the world.
Spengler, too, celebrates the violent, transformative character of ‘technics’. Man and Technics describes a restlessly stirring ‘will-to-power’ that ‘embraces the world’ in the ‘gigantic power of its technical processes’. Sleepless factories, roaring furnaces, tireless production lines – all of these show the on-going manifestation of ‘technics’, the dynamic, agonistic force that Spengler conceived as a metaphysical force. Channelling Nietzsche’s Der Wille Zur Macht, ‘technics’ is characterised as ‘immemorially old’, ‘immensely general’, underlying all of life and history.
Through much of our history, ‘technics’ was manifested mainly in natural forces and processes, but with the age of technology – of Jünger’s world of ‘totally mobilised’ Arbeiter – we enter a new stage in the history of our species. Indeed, ours is the final stage, the dramatic point of culmination. ‘The creature is rising up against its creator’, warns Spengler, since under loathsome bourgeois influence we are ‘becoming the slave of the Machine’. Seeking comfort, profit, and utility, we are being lulled to sleep, dominated by ‘technics’, surrendering our vital power and spirit. Man and Technics contributes to a ‘philosophy of life’, then, by awakening in us a sense of our ‘doom’.
It is at this point that Spengler combines his earlier historical determinism with the new sense of agency and power. Ultimately, we are ‘doomed’, he says, to live in a stage in the history of human cultures where the release of those underlying energies reaches its final stages. Mass mobilisation, mechanised warfare, and other dimensions of modern industrial and military existence force us into ‘a grim, pitiless, no-quarter battle of the Will-to-Power’, the ultimate expression of ‘technics’. Unlike every age before, the ‘active, fighting, charged’ nature of the ‘soul of man’ finds total expression – a vast outpouring of power, able, on the one hand, to display our potencies, but, on the other, to culminate in our destruction. The ‘curse and … grandeur’ of the modern age, declares Spengler, lies in our being witnesses to – and, indeed participants in – the historical moment of the total realisation of ‘technics’, when the ‘soul of man’ finds its fullest, most satisfying expression.
The cost, of course, is our destruction, eradicated in a titanic, global release of violent energies, insatiable strife, and vast chaos, that will leave our ‘Faustian civilization … in fragments, forgotten … in ruins, like old Memphis and Babylon’. For Spengler, however, this is no cause for despair, since it affords us something momentous, ‘the Choice of Achilles … a short life, full of deeds and glory, [or] a long life without content’. Although the bourgeoisie of Weimar Germany urge the latter, those who appreciate that the ‘essence of technics’ is identical with the ‘soul of man’ will see – acutely, keenly – that a short life, ‘active, fighting, and charged’ affords our only true satisfaction.
Man and Technics is full of these sorts of remarks, testaments to the evocative style and vision of its author. Spengler is, if nothing else, a fascinating read, captivating and frustrating in almost equal measure. Certainly no-one should read his works as historical analyses, much less as prognostications, even if his vision of the relentless extension of technology into all areas of life does ring true. There are many technophiles writing, during this period, among whom Spengler sits among the most dramatic. In a sense, the interest of his work lies in its emotional appeal, his capacity, in the words of one historian, to ‘bewitch’ you, the way he ‘compels you to forget that we know better’. Perhaps it’s best to explain Spengler’s appeal in terms of his capacity to dramatize an ideal, better than any other reactionary modernist. The ideal or vision is what Thomas Mann called a ‘technological romanticism’, infusing technology with ‘soul’, even with ‘Destiny’. If ‘technics’ goes deep, an embrace of it is a source of depth, a way to be, says Spengler, ‘in the silent service of Being’.
There’s a rich resonance, here, with deeper currents in German intellectual history. A full account of Spengler needs to include German Romanticism, Kant, Lebensphilosophie, Hegel’s vision of history, Nietzsche’s metaphysics of the will-to-power, the later Heidegger’s ‘history of Being’, among others. If locating Spengler among such philosophically illustrious company seems overgenerous, one should consider, to take one example, his influence on Heidegger’s later writings, themselves so important to modern cultural criticism and environmental thought. Man and Technics describes how ‘we think only in horsepower now’ – a waterfall appears as a source of electric power, a field of cattle is ‘a source of meat-supply’ – and we see the origins of the later Heidegger’s conception of ‘technology’, a ‘way of revealing’ things and the world in the narrow terms of human use. Both Spengler’s ‘technics’ and the later Heidegger’s ‘technology’ offer a vision of reality and human life – totalising, violent, dramatic. The difference is, however, that the former ends in our inevitable doom, whereas the latter offers the enigmatic prospect of a ‘saving power’, an eventual emergence into a post-technological world.
Spengler’s own life ended without the drama and vigour described in his books. His criticisms of Nazi ideology, such as its racist biology, made his final days uncomfortable. Declining invitations to honours, professorships, and invitations to address the Nazi elite, Spengler awkwardly played up to his lone prophet status. ‘I do my thinking independently of parties, tendencies, and interests’, he said, and for that reason ‘see more keenly’. Studying the morphology of world-history, then, meant staying away from local and particular manifestations of its deep rhythms and dynamics.
Fortunately for Spengler, the Nazis froze him out, leaving him to live out his days reflecting on his Cassandra status as an unheeded prophet. By 1936, his influence was almost nil, although interest in his work would sporadically recur, not least among scholars of Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and other cultural pessimists. Certainly the existing scholarship on Spengler does not exhaust his interest or influence on twentieth-century history, politics, or philosophy—barely a handful of books exist, alongside a small scholarship.
It is to be hoped that the reissue of Man and Technics might encourage others to look again at Spengler, although this Routledge edition – a straight reissue of Charles Francis Atkinson’s 1932 translation, with no introduction or scholarly notes, priced at seventy pounds – is overpriced and underserved. The few who read it, though, may find something more interesting than they might expect from the brooding, pessimistic author of Decline of the West.
Oswald Spengler: Man and Technics. A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life Translated by Charles Francis Atkinson London: Routledge, 2016 ISBN 13-978-1-138-23180 (hbk) 104 pages, hardback, GBP 68.00
Ian James Kidd is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Nottingham, UK. He has research interests in the history of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Austro-German philosophy and co-edited Wittgenstein and Scientism (Routledge, 2017).
In 2015, Robert S. Cohen and Ingeborg K. Helling edited Felix Kaufmann’s Die Methodenlehre der Sozialwissenschaften as Theory and Method in the Social Sciences. Kaufmann’s book, originally published in German in 1936, at the peak of the logical positivists’ activities in Europe; but given Austria’s highly unfavorable circumstances (before and after the Anschluß), Kaufmann, in 1938, like many logical positivists, emigrated to the United States. After his arrival, he was invited to produce a similar work as his 1936 book, but instead, during the arrangement of the publishing process, he completed a new manuscript which, in 1944, became the Methodology of the Social Sciences (New York, Oxford University Press).
Thus the new book was not just a translation of the older, but a polished and updated one, adapted to the new American environment: it was injected with John Dewey’s pragmatism and logic of inquiry. The English-speaking world had to wait almost eighty years for a translation of the original book – but, as I will attempt to show, it was worth it for various reasons.
Felix Kaufmann, 1895-1949 (source: public domain)
A few words of contextualization may help the reader to appreciate Kaufmann’s work both in its original and contemporary circumstances. The history of twentieth-century philosophy may be considered as the development of nineteenth century thought into the so-called “analytic” and “Continental” philosophies. Though there are numerous definitions of these types of philosophy most of them cannot be viewed as exclusive and comprehensive. A few names and debates shall suffice to motivate this distinction: Whereas hermeneutics, existentialism, phenomenology, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty are typical examples of the continental movement, logical positivism, ordinary language philosophy, Rudolf Carnap, W. V. O. Quine, Saul Kripke, and David Lewis are examples of analytic philosophy.
These two traditions or canons are usually held to be separated by their problem-horizons, definitions of key term and notions, their historical self-estimation, their goals and aims, and their scientific-philosophical character. These features in themselves should not be expected to stir up more than some heated academic and institutional debates conducted in professional journals. But given the highly questionable and isolated character of much of contemporary philosophy, as practiced in university classrooms, any inside debate about its very legitimacy – and the debate between Continental and analytic philosophers has often tended to degenerate into existentially loaded disputes about who is a real philosopher – may come at the detriment of the discipline as a whole.
In recent decades, however, there has been a growing awareness of the hidden dangers behind the divide that characterizes the profession and people have started to work out different strategies to bury the hatchet. This could be done, in very general terms, as either a normative or a descriptive project. (i) One might attempt to show that even if there are few prima facie substantial connections between the traditions (besides both calling themselves ‘philosophy’) one has to work out such connections for the greater good. (ii) Or it might be shown that there is no need to work out such a faux rapprochement since the required connections and linkage are already there; scholars just need to dig deeper into the history of philosophy.
Occasionally, the second approach even tries to show that back in those days the aforementioned deep-seated divide within philosophy as we know it today either did not exist or surfaced in very different ways. The typical examples in this respect are the problem of non-existent entities (with the names of Bertrand Russell, Alexius Meinong, and Edmund Husserl), considerations of relativity, space and physics (with Husserl, Nicolai Hartmann, Ernst Cassirer, Hugo Dingler and Rudolf Carnap), the status and meanings of metaphysics (Martin Heidegger, Carnap), and the philosophy of mathematics (Husserl and Gottlob Frege). Finally, a lesser-known example is Oskar Becker’s ‘Mathematische Existenz,’ which appeared in Volume 8 of Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung (1927), founded by Husserl. Becker is interesting for two reasons. On the one hand, he tries to combine mathematical intuitionism with a vaguely Heideggerian philosophy. On the other hand, Becker’s work was published in the same volume as Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit and did not become as widely read and discussed as the later.
Interestingly a quite similar story can be told also about Felix Kaufmann. He published his Das Unendliche in der Mathematik und seine Ausschaltung in 1930 (the English translation, together with other articles, appeared in 1978 as The Infinite in Mathematics – Logico-mathematical Writings, as volume 9 of the Vienna Circle Collection): in it, he tried to give a systematic and comprehensive account of mathematical intuitionism from the viewpoint of Husserlian phenomenology. While Kaufmann’s work did not get much attention (though Carnap made an effort to debate Kaufmann’s ideas in his Logical Syntax of Language), it is still an important historical document. It was written and published the year before Kurt Gödel announced his incompleteness theorem, one of the cornerstones of twentieth-century (philosophy of) mathematics. Thus, it was not only the nature of philosophy and metaphysics in general, and mathematics and phyics in particular, which provided a common field for many philosophers during the first decades of twentieth century; the philosophy and methodology of social science, too, meant a shared interest for analytic and Continental thinkers. Kaufmann’s aforementioned Methodenlehre der Sozialwissenschaften, in this sense, may be just what one needs to turn to if one is looking for a documentation of that shared interest.
Having been only a peripheral member of the Vienna Circle, Felix Kaufmann (1895-1949), philosopher of law, mathematics and social science, contributed knowledge and perspective beyond the empiricist ideal. His basic interest, and the influence of friends, directed him to another philosophical school, Husserlian phenomenology. This detailed and conscientious work led Kaufmann to his — unfortunately, and unjustly, neglected — Methodenlehre der Sozialwissenschaften, published recently, in an English translation, as Theory and Method in the Social Sciences. The English version consists of two parts: the first is an editorial introduction written by Helling, which runs to some 100 pages, the second is the actual translation of Kaufmann’s book.
The introduction aims to serve as a general account of Kaufmann’s overall work, and in particular as a shorter contextualization of his 1936 book. The adjective ‘shorter’ is justified by the fact that it is only slightly longer than 30 pages: Helling discusses some biographical dates, Kaufmann’s original context regarding the social sciences in the interwar Vienna-period, his position in the book, his relation to the Vienna Circle and Austrian economists (he participated in many discussion groups, among others, the Schlick Circle and the von Mises Group), and his position in the philosophy of law (Kaufmann’s first doctorate was in law, while the second from philosophy). These topics are considered in the first half of the first part of the introduction (pp. 2-19); the second half (pp. 19-34) is devoted to Kaufmann’s relation to Alfred Schütz and John Dewey, so the reader gains some insight into Kaufmann’s American period, his intense correspondence with Dewey and some of his phenomenological context; unfortunately Schütz, whose important role in Kaufmann’s life is beyond doubt, received more attention than Husserl, who was one of the heroes in the 1936 book.
The second part of the introduction is a collection of interviews and recollections of friends, colleagues, students, and his family (pp. 34-94). Helling conducted interviews, amongst others, with Ernest Nagel, Friedrich August von Hayek, Ilse Schutz, and George Kaufmann. Though the interviews contain many repetitions, and they are quite hard to read given their oral style, the documentation, which runs to some 60 pages, is still a very important part of the book: it does a good job of offering the so-called emic, that is, inner perspective of the milieu in which Kaufmann worked in Vienna and later in the United States. To mention just one example: Helling did not ask whether Kaufmann was a logical positivist or a phenomenologist, but which of the two he was considered to be by his associates. We almost never get a straightforward answer, though. The reason behind this might be that Kaufmann was not interested in labels, so he never cared about what he was called: a phenomenologist or a logical positivist (pp. 91-92). Tellingly, however, Kaufmann was not listed in the Vienna Circle’s manifesto whether as a member, or as a close associate, though the latter he indeed was – it is known from Carnap diaries that they discussed Carnap’s Aufbau, as well as Kaufmann’s work in the philosophy of mathematics, and he often participated in the Circle’s regular Thursday-meetings. On the other hand, Gustav Bergmann, in his recollections, claimed that Kaufmann was from the phenomenological school, and though Moritz Schlick, the informal leader of the Vienna Circle, was usually a patient and sober person, he occasionally showed signs of impatience and sometimes even interrupted the Circle’s discussions when it was Kaufmann’s turn to speak.
Kaufmann indeed was very close to the phenomenological movement. He held a course in the United States about Husserl’s Ideen (p. 90), admired Husserl’s work which he discussed with Schütz many times; furthermore, he wrote a piece for Husserl’s 1940 Festschrift edited by the founder of the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Marvin Farber. In that article, Kaufmann compares Husserlian phenomenology to logical positivism and gives a critique of the latter’s atomistic epistemology. Even when he wrote a review of a collection of articles by Philipp Frank, the founder and director of the Institute for the Unity of Science in the United States, he complained about the neglect of the Husserlian insights in the works of logical positivists.
Most of the time, however, Kaufmann was regarded as a bridge-builder between phenomenology and logical positivism or, at the risk of sounding anachronistic, between Continental and analytic philosophy. And his major step toward the unity of philosophy was his 1936 book whose aim it was “first to attain a clear orientation with respect to the research goals and research procedures of the social sciences” (105). The social sciences and their methodology provided the subject matter and some clarificatory remarks are in order.
Edmund Husserl (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
By the ‘methodology of social sciences,’ Kaufmann did not mean the actual, technical practices of a professional social scientist. He never talked about collecting empirical (social or economic) data and performing statistical analysis, about preparing objective questionnaires for interviews, about the nuts and bolts of preparing anthropological fieldwork. “A methodology of the social sciences, as we understand it”, Kaufmann claimed (p. 106), “has to set as its task a systematic analysis of types of problems and types of procedures.” Therefore ‘methodology’ is a meta-investigation of the scientific field, a philosophical inquiry into those problems and practices that might be overlooked by social science practitioners: what do they count as the cornerstones (i.e. analytic, a priori) statements of their theories? what would they willing to revise (synthetic statements) in light of their experiences? Therefore, the majority of the Methodenstreit’s content (the well-known debate about method in the early twentieth century German-speaking world) is embedded in the debate about the relation of natural to social sciences. The path could be cleared only if we clarify the nature of “mathematical and physical lawfulness” (108), and that is the point where the logical positivists’ philosophy of mathematics and logic proved handy to Kaufmann.
Nonetheless, he was quite critical about some of the most important thoughts associated with logical positivism like the unity of science, physicalism, and the supposedly atomistic approach to experience and knowledge. Connecting the second and the third, Kaufmann summarizes the typical positivist position regarding the ‘interpretation of statements about other human beings’ as follows:
‘All knowledge about one’s fellow men arises by means of establishing links between observations of their body movements, and thus all control statements must be directed toward such observations, and accordingly the thesis, that sentences about one’s fellow men have an added meaning that goes beyond that, is uncontrollable, unverifiable in principle, and thus unscientific (metaphysical).’ (p. 215)
He claims that “[n]ot many words are required to refute this argument” (ibid.), but still provides some typical analogical arguments.
Some of the main strengths of the book lie in the last two chapters, where Kaufmann utilizes his methodological and philosophical achievements to reconstruct the logical structure of the scientific theories of law and economy (pp. 307-337 and 337-353). As a regular participant in economics meetings and as a law lecturer, Kaufmann was in a rather good position to attempt a synthesis between these fields and the approaches of logical positivism and phenomenology. He thus argued for the thesis that even if there is some important and essential difference between the natural and social sciences (somehow undermining the thesis of the unity of science, pp. 207-208), that does not mean that one should immediately draw the conclusion that social investigations are thereby unscientific in character.
A few words should be said about the recent edition itself. Though the editors did an excellent job on the translation, initiated first by John Viertel and Carolyn Fawcett (always, for example, providing the important original German notions and phrases) and though the introduction is likewise full of helpful material for the interested reader, some more care would have been desirable regarding the edition in general. Three things should be mentioned.
First, there is no detailed table of contents – what we have, instead, lists only the major parts (the introduction, Kaufmann’s work, and the index); given that the original book has many subsections, it would have been useful to see them (and not just a photo of the original book cover, p. 103) in order to facilitate navigation. Secondly, the page breaks are handled in an unfortunate way – often they aren’t there where one would expect them. Part 1 and Section 1 begin on the same page the Introduction ends on – with barely as much as a blank line in between. Thirdly, though Kaufmann mentions (p. 105) that the book has two indexes (for names and subjects), and there are indeed two of them in the original German version, yet in the English translation we find only the index of names, and not of subjects, which would, in fact, be quite important to keep track of the various approaches, ideas, and notions used by Kaufmann in the book. Given the richness of the content and the importance of the material, the reader rightly expects more editorial care and better production value.
Nonetheless, Theory and Method in the Social Sciences is both a very important historical source, a document of the early synthesis of what would later become Continental and analytic philosophy, and a useful text for anyone interested in the general philosophical-methodological problems of sciences, especially those of the social sciences in relation to the Naturwissenschaften.
Robert S. Cohen, Ingeborg K. Helling (eds.): Felix Kaufmann’s Theory and Method in the Social Sciences. Series: Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, Vol. 303 ISBN: 978-3-319-02844-6 Price: $179.00 Springer, 2016, x + 357 pages, hardcover
Ádám Tamás Tuboly obtained his PhD at the University of Pécs and is now a junior research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He works on problems in the history of analytic philosophy, especially in the historical reception of Rudolf Carnap and logical empiricism.
(c) 2016 The Berlin Review of Books
This article was first published in two parts (29th June and 2nd July 2016; it was subsequently re-issued using the first date).
Peter Sloterdijk’s sociopolitical essay Rage and Time tells a compelling cultural history of the mediations, exploitations, and translations of rage through (and into) the great religious and political ‘cosmologies’ of Western civilisation. Rage and Time is a powerfully written book about the sociopolitical ordering, coding, and accumulation of rage; a book which, in sum, acknowledges and investigates the role of rage as one of the driving forces of human history.
Comparable with Sloterdijk’s earlier work – amongst which Critique of Cynical Reason (1987) and the 2,500-page long Sphären (‘Spheres’) trilogy (1998; 1999; 2004) are but the most acclaimed examples – Rage and Time captivates through its multifaceted and at once strident and joyful style of writing. Divided into four main sections, the book not only makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the constitutive role of affects in world politics – which is still dramatically underexplored by political theorists, despite important recent work, for example by Chantal Mouffe – but also provides a solid historical contextualisation of the most recent violent eruptions of anger, from 9/11 to the 2005 French riots.
“Of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, sing Goddess…”: Sloterdijk starts his ambitious world history of ‘rage and time’ with the opening line of Homer’s Iliad, the first words of the European tradition. For Sloterdijk, Homer’s epic poetry not only highlights that in Europe literally everything began with rage, but also exemplifies the antique roots of the critical question – to which the sociopolitical and religious ‘cosmologies’ are constantly responding – of how to relate collectively to the affect of rage. Sloterdijk’s reading of the Greek heroic epos, the imaginary space of gods, half-gods, and divinely chosen angry heroes, underlines that in ancient Hellenistic mythology the origins of rage and anger are neither located in the earthly world, nor attributed to individuals’ personalities. Rage is rather understood as a possessed, divine capacity, a god-favoured eruption of power. Hence the birth of the hero as a prophet, whose task is to make the message of his god-given anger an immediate reality (pp. 8-9). For Homer, to sing the praises of Achilles’ heroism also – and ultimately – means to celebrate the existence of divine forces, which are releasing society from its vegetative daze, through the mediation of the godly chosen ‘bringer of anger and revenge’.
Hand-coloured etchings, “Vessels of Wrath”, from Francis Barrett’s “The Magus” (1801). (Source: Wikimedia Creative Commons; public domain.)
It is from the Greek mythological relationship with rage and anger that Sloterdijk derives his own conceptualisation of rage through the figure of Thymos. Originally denominating both the Greek hero’s specific organ for the reception of god-given rage and the bodily location of his proud self, Thymos later with Plato, and following the general transformation of the Greek psyche from heroic – belligerent to more civic virtues, stands for the righteous anger of the Greek citizen as a means of defence from insults and unreasonable attacks (pp. 22-25).With the figure of Thymos set against the psycho- analytical focus on Eros, anger, for Sloterdijk, is not only a vent for frustrated desires, but also, and rather, a reactive manifestation of offended pride. Yet, and in the tradition of both Sloterdijk’s earlier (1985) novel on the birth of psychoanalysis and of his critical study of psychoanalysis in the first volume of Spheres (1998, p. 297), Sloterdijk does not per se negate the merits of psychoanalysis for an understanding of the affective realm of human existence. Rather, Sloterdijk’s critique focuses on the limitations of the libido-centrist psychoanalytical vocabulary and thinking.
In conformity with its basic erotodynamic approach, psychoanalysis brought much hatred to light, the other side of live. Psychoanalysis managed to show that hating means to be bound by similar laws as loving. Both hating and loving are projections that are subject to repetitive compulsion. Psychoanalysis remained for the most part silent when it came to that form of rage that springs from the striving for success, prestige, self-respect, and their backlashes. (p. 14)
From this standpoint, a theory of rage, for Sloterdijk, is primarily a theory of the politico-religious mediations of the processes of overcoming offended pride and of longing for revenge.
As we move from the ancient Hellenistic to the monotheistic Judaic world, the politico-religious coding of rage is fundamentally altered, as Sloterdijk shows in the second section of his analysis. In the Jewish faith, the angry hero becomes the metaphysical, wrathful God. Rage is thus conceived as the exclusive privilege of God, the very condition of his absolute sovereignty and power, which is directed in punitive form against his own people or against his chosen people’s enemies. As Sloterdijk subsequently shows, this cosmology of wrath of the Old Testament undergoes another set of structural changes in the medieval rage-conception of Catholic teaching, based on the double process of the earthly demonisation and of the metaphysical suspension of rage.
Had Europeans not heard about pride – or likewise rage – from the days of the church fathers, when such impulses would have been taken as signs pointing to the abyss for those cast away? (p. 17)
Based on the Christian axiomatic association of rage and eternity, God thus becomes the location of a transcendent repository of suspended human rage-savings and frozen plans of revenge.
What is important to note in this context of the Christian depictions of the Inferno is that the increasing institutionalization of hell during the long millennium between Augustine and Michelangelo allowed the theme of the transcendent archive of rage to be perfected. (p. 97)
In this light, and relating to the theorisation of human affects more generally, Sloterdijk’s analysis of ‘rage and time’ points towards the need to consider the world of affects not only in its fleeting and intimate, but also in its relational, resource-like, dimension, as the object of specific rage-administrating projects. Hence the possible reading of Rage and Time as a theory of the accumulation of affect.
This problematisation of anger and resentment as the objects of politico-religious accumulation and regulation is further developed in the third section of Rage and Time, relating to another ‘thymiotic’ revolution in Occidental civilisation with the emergence of the communist ‘World Bank of Rage’. Unlike the Christian referential of a metaphysical archive of rage, Sloterdijk shows that the communist ‘rage economy’ offers an earthly rooted programme for the canalisation and sociopolitical actualisation of individual rage-investments. The communist code of rage thus implies another project for the suspension and delegation of anger (to the earthly instance of the professional revolutionary) as a means to concentrate and maximise the power of individually deposed rage-investments, linked with the promise of substantial interest payments in the form of a better, newly created society. In Marx and Engel’s words, “all history is the history of making wrath productive”.
As the counterpoint to the communist doctrine of a party-led collectivisation of rage, Sloterdijk discusses the bourgeois-biased individualisation and romanticising of rage, exemplified by Alexander Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo, as yet another exemplary ‘instruction manual’ of how to deal with rage. This individualist-capitalist approach to rage is further explored in the last section of Rage and Time, referring to the contemporary world of mass culture and consumerism, which is interpreted by Sloterdijk as a general transformation of rage-dynamic into greed-dynamic and lust-dynamic systems. Sloterdijk argues that in the aftermath of the Western rage-projects in their red, white, and brown colours, the figures of the resolute warrior and the prolific mother are substituted by the ambitious lover and the luxury consumer.
Yet, if consumerism conceals and redirects individual, pent-up rage towards new civic duties of enjoyment and desire, it also creates an explosive ‘multiegoistic situation’, which is deeply shaped by rather unarticulated and unregulated manifestations of disappointed rage communities. Pointing to the remarkable lack of political collection and administration of the thymiotic energies erupting in the 2005 French riots, the contemporary world, for Sloterdijk, is also a world of multiple decentralised movements of disoriented rage-holders. It is in a sense a postmodern world, in which no theory or project of global meaning prevails as a unitary mediator for the suspension, accumulation, management, and goal-directed increase in value of entrusted, individual rage investments. “Neither in heaven nor on Earth does anyone know what work could be done with the ‘just anger of the people’.” (p. 183) We hence rediscover one of the leitmotifs in Sloterdijk’s oeuvre, referring to the causes, modalities, and effects of the Enlightenment-induced destruction of unconditional, absolute truths in respect of both ontology and morality. For example, in Critique of Cynical Reason, Sloterdijk addresses this problematic through the notion of ‘cynicism’, as a diffuse, generalised attitude of discontent, following the loss of the great ideals and truths of older cultures. In Spheres, this theme emerges somewhat reformulated, in the opposition between the globalising spatialities of classical holistic thought and the foam-like spatialities of modernity.With Rage and Time, Sloterdijk further pursues this investigation through the discussion of the contrasting politics of anger in the past and present world.
On the last fifteen pages of Rage and Time, Sloterdijk asserts the potential of political Islam – based on its missionary dynamism, battle-centred cosmology and demographic strength – as an alternative ‘World Bank of Rage’ in the contemporary sociopolitical context. On the one hand, Sloterdijk acknowledges the actual and future power of political Islam to reunite parts of the disappointed Muslim world; on the other hand, he questions the ability of political Islam’s creative forces to develop an alternative oppositional movement of global meaning to the current capitalist mode of existence. In this, Sloterdijk stresses the current technological, economic, and scientific shortcomings of political Islam and thus its general limits in creatively shaping the socioeconomic conditions of humanity in the 21st century. Sloterdijk’s reading of political Islam thus focuses more on its high-risk potential in the form of intensified Muslim civil wars, or further amplified conflicts with Israel, than on its oppositional role within the Western world itself.
However, whilst Sloterdijk’s analysis of communist and Judeo-Christian anger-semiotics expands on a broad body of historicocultural insights, the investigation of current mediations of anger in the Middle Eastern world and in the context of post-9/11 Western politics appears to have been somewhat slighted. Readers of Rage and Time may search in vain for a more profound analysis of the differences and parallels between the historical and the contemporary sociopolitical coding of anger and revenge, which could have resulted in a more substantial prospective examination of the upcoming sociopolitical challenges in the 21st century. In this light, Sloterdijk’s open-ended conclusive consent of a general need for a morally based “education program” and a “great politics” of “balancing acts” (page 229) remains relatively vague, resembling a well-intended, yet somehow unrealistic, wish.
The main strengths of Rage and Time certainly lie in its very rich, cultural-historical approach and in its immense suggestive power for further analytical and empirical research into the complex role of rage and anger in contemporary politics – from the current semiotics of the war on terror to the Western imaginaries of modern forms of heroism, for example. Sloterdijk’s analysis strongly confirms the critical importance and high potential of such a research agenda. From this perspective, and in addition to Sloterdijk’s exclusive focus on the various forms and mediations of rage, one of the central challenges for future analyses will be to undertake detailed and comparative investigations into the ways in which political and religious semiotics and practices are combining and mediating different human affects simultaneously. This will – for example – allow a more substantial engagement with the widely developed body of empirical research on fear and hope. Rage and Time provides the perfect starting point to address these questions and to further elaborate upon the complex relationships between the political and the intimate (affective) dimensions of social existence.
Peter Sloterdijk: Rage and Time. A Psychopolitical Investigation. Columbia University Press, New York 2010. ISBN: 978-0-231-14522-0 Cloth, 256 pages, US$34.50.
Francisco Klauser is assistant professor in political geography at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. His work focuses on the relationships between space, surveillance/risk and power; he also has research interests in urban studies and socio-spatial theory.
An earlier version of this review, based on the German edition of Zorn und Zeit, was first published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 27 (No. 1/2009), a publication of Pion Ltd., who have given kind permission to reproduce part of the material in the present review of Rage and Time. Reproduction of the present version requires permission from all the copyright owners concerned. (c) 2010
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