by Kristóf Fenyvesi

(PR material, Chicago UP)

I was much looking forward to reading Robert Pippin’s new book: The clear and well-designed appearance of the work and its surprising brevity — the volume comprises just 139 pages—suggest graceful elegance combined with explicit restraint. The mild anxiety that should overcome any reader who is somewhat familiar with contemporary Nietzsche studies quickly turns into zealous interest by the first impressions the book evokes. By giving the book its descriptive title, Pippin promises to offer helpful orientation for readers attempting to navigate the complex relationship between “Nietzsche, Psychology and First Philosophy”. The lack of any limitation or subtitle that would define a thematic focus, of course, means that Pippin is setting himself a formidable task. Not only does he have to face several crucial questions in the Nietzschean oeuvre, but he also needs to introduce his readers to an issue that is crucial for Nietzsche studies, or, if one prefers a simplistic label, to the “Nietzsche problem.” He needs to guide his readers through a discourse that was among the first to emerge in international Nietzsche scholarship and has been at the forefront ever since – and he still has to come up with an original view. The endeavour to meet a grand challenge like this in a mere 139 pages book (plus roughly four and a half pages of introductory remarks) is worthy of a truly “free spirit”, an aristocratic gesture in the Nietzschean sense, which I cannot but applaud.

My high spirits rose even higher when I studied the table of contents. Chapter 1: “Psychology as ‘the Queen of Sciences’” (22 pages), Chapter 2: “What is a Gay Science?” (21 pages), Chapter 3: “Modernity as a Psychological Problem” (21 pages), Chapter 4: “The Deed Is Everything [Das Tun ist alles]” (17 pages), Chapter 5: “The Psychological Problem of Self-Deception” (19 pages), Chapter 6: “How to Overcome Oneself: On the Nietzschean Ideal” (16 pages), “Concluding Remarks” (4 pages). The items in the table of contents initially led me to expect that the book would actually present the most important psychological aspects of Nietzsche’s works, following a clearly structured, original train of thought. The page numbers assigned to them suggested that Pippin would deal with all of these grand issues with impressive brevity, perhaps even with the Horatian economy of expression that Nietzsche valued so highly. However, my initial enthusiasm soon diminished irrevocably when I begin to delve into the book. Pippin  doesn’t seem to be aware of the diversity and the comprehensive nature of the problems that he implicitly took upon himself when he chose such a bold title. I grew increasingly convinced that the brevity of the book was mostly due to the scarce amount of substance rather than to his following the Horatian or Nietzschean stylistic radicalism.

Pippin dedicates his own work to the memory of Bernard Williams. The acknowledgements at the beginning of the book indicate that the first four chapters are identical to the edited version of a series of lectures delivered by Pippin in the fall of 2004 at the College de France in Paris and published in 2006 as Nietzsche, moraliste francais: La conception nietzschéen d’une psychologie philosophique (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006). The dedication of the book to Williams and the summary of the book in the introduction refer back to Pippin’s previous paper on Williams’s Nietzsche interpretation, which appeared in 2005 under the title Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology and the French Moralist Tradition (in Volker Gerhardt & Renate Reschke, eds., Bildung – Humanitas – Zukunft bei Nietzsche [= Nietzscheforschung Vol. 12], Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2005).Yet, surprisingly, there is not a single reference to it in Pippin’s present book, although that paper and the present book have a lot in common, even literally – in addition to the fact that both follow Williams’s reasoning. Just as in his earlier paper, in his new book Pippin provides a summary (pp. xiv-xvii) of Williams’ paper Nietzsche’s Minimalist Moral Psychology (first published in European Journal of Philosophy 1 (1993) pp. 4-14), thus prompting the reader who knows the Williams paper to entertain the uncanny idea that Pippin’s book should perhaps be seen as simply a rather lengthy commentary on Williams’s fascinatingly dense paper, which is full of innovative and original ideas. Unfortunately, Pippin has included no caveats regarding the commentary-like nature of his book, nor does he offer any instruction that would assist the book being received in this spirit. The “in memoriam” dedication of the book can hardly be considered adequate in this sense, nor can the closing section of the acknowledgements (p. XII) where Pippin mentions Williams as one of the main sources of inspiration and a stylistic model.

In particular, Pippin builds his book on Williams’s basic assumption that Nietzsche, like Wittgenstein, cannot be the source of any philosophical theory in a traditional sense, since his texts are based mostly on the operation of textual “booby traps” that protect his thoughts from theorization and systematization. This does not mean, of course, that whoever tries to interpret Nietzsche should avoid philosophical theories when attempting to analyze, first and foremost, the minimalist features of the Nietzschean moral philosophy and the consequences that result from the resistance of minimalist moral philosophy to theories and systems. These issues involve the Nietzschean critique of classical naturalism and, also, the Nietzschean need for the naturalization of moral philosophy, the disclosure of the illusory nature of ego and self, as well as the observation of the psychological importance of the epistemological fallacy that stems from the separation of active subject and action, especially with respect to free will and its subordination to causal thinking.

The first chapter of Pippin’s book, “Psychology as ‘the Queen of Sciences’”, with reference to the notable section of Beyond Good and Evil – the 23rd aphorism, which no book on Nietzsche’s psychological stance can afford to ignore – is mainly concerned with the role Nietzsche assigns to psychology and the provision that although the theory of philosophical psychology cannot be created (p. 2), it can still become “first philosophy,” and psychology in the Nietzschean sense can alter, or even supersede, metaphysical thinking. In this context, Nietzsche sees himself as a late successor to the French moralists – primarily, in Pippin’s view, to Montaigne (p. 8 ) – and it is mainly his views on the will that connect psychology and moral philosophy in his work (p. 4), in addition to keeping together the far-reaching research on Nietzsche. The statement on psychology as the queen of sciences is linked by Pippin, with due sensitivity, to the Nietzschean remarks in Section 3 of the introduction to Beyond Good and Evil, which emphasize the feminine nature of truth (p. 13) and wisdom (p. 15). What follows from this is a brief analysis by Pippin (pp. 13-21) on the psychological aspects of the tradition of “philosophical eroticism” (cf. Friedrich Nietzsche: Götzen-Dämmerung, Streifzüge eines Unzeitgemässen, 23) and the Nietzschean amor fati.

The second chapter, “What is a Gay Science?”, raises the issue of “first philosophy” addressed in the first chapter in relation to intentionalism (p. 25), where the discussion on philosophical eroticism which began in the first chapter is expanded by the analysis of the diverse problem of commitment, whichcan be addressed both from a psychological and from an intentional standpoint (pp. 26-28). The aspect of corporeality emerges several times in the course of Pippin’s analysis (p. 28, 36, 38, 43); however, Pippin assumes Nietzsche has much less corporeal reflexivity than what could, for example, be derived from several passages in The Gay Science, which is at the heart of this chapter.  

Chapter Three, “Modernity as a Psychological Problem”, starts out with Nietzsche’s pictorial, figurative language (p. 45), examining topoi such as the “mad man”, who makes his appearance in aphorism 125 of The Gay Science and announces the death of God. Here Pippin makes an explicit distinction between his arguments and those of more literary-oriented analyses, such as those by Sarah Kofman. Pippin discusses the death of God in connection with the moral psychological aspects of nihilism and evaluation, and the problem of intentionality introduced earlier is further discussed in regard to faith (p. 52).

Chapter Four, “The Deed Is Everything [Das Tun is alles]”, presents the process of unravelling certain aspects of the problem of agency that, in Nietzsche’s view, are important to the topic of intentionality. Although this chapter includes nothing novel with respect to Pippin’s earlier comments on the Nietzsche discourse, it can be regarded as the culmination of the book. Continuing with the analysis of the metaphors discussed earlier (p. 60-70), the centre of the discussion presented by Pippin is  Nietzsche’s famous analogy on the mistakenly assumed separability of lighting and the flash or doer and deed (p. 71-72). In addition to Nietzsche’s criticism of subject, causality, and naturalism, there are references to how Nietzsche’s concept of agent is reflected in its position with respect to Christian ethics (p. 79-82), and how all this influences the Nietzschean constellations of promise, commitment, and responsibility (p. 82-84). My only critical remark on this chapter is that it might be read as a creatively rewritten version of a noteoworthy paper of Pippin’s, which has already been published twice, in two important volumes in 2004 and 2006 [see references below], yet Pippin makes is no reference to these earlier versions in either the text, the footnotes, or the bibliography.

In Chapter Five, “The Psychological Problem of Self-Deception”, the main question discussed is how psychology as first philosophy can be captured in a philosophical sense (p. 85). This analysis includes issues regarding the relationship between consciousness and instincts (p. 86), intentionality and corporeality (p. 87), the Nietzschean avoidance to postulate extra-psychological phenomena (p. 94), and the connection of all these to the main issues in the previous chapters. This chapter conveys the impression that the ground has been prepared for, at last, making good on the promise contained in the title of the book, and suggests that now is the time to develop an extremely original, far-reaching interpretation of Nietzsche’s psychology and first philosophy, using the tools that were developed in previous chapters in the course of expanding the disturbingly narrow initial focus of the book, as suggested by its title. However, it is a serious reason for concern that, at this point, Pippin is fast approaching the end of his book, and the only remanining part, the short 16-page closing chapter, can hardly be expected to fulfill the reader’s expectations.

In Chapter Six, “How to Overcome Oneself: On the Nietzschean Ideal”, which is the book’s final chapter, Pippin’s deals with the question of how the Nietzschean positions regarding agency, self-knowledge, value and erotic desire in the philosophical sense can be connected to the complex problems of modernism. In particular, he inquires into whether Nietzsche cares about the individual’s freedom in any classical sense of the philosophical tradition, and how this issue can be seen in terms of self-knowledge, spontaneity, self-fulfilment, autonomy, independence from external obligations, morality, rational action, authenticity, identification with the actions of other people (without “alienation”), and from the point of view of power. Finally, combining the Nietzschean requirement of going beyond one’s own self – the ‘will to power’ – and returning to Nietzsche as a kind of late “French moralist”, Pippin claims that Nietzsche was never able to achieve a sort of cheerfulness (Heiterkeit) and balance that characterized Montaigne’s works. Nietzsche failed to do so precisely because his desire to discover the results from a total distrust of philosophical theories, also noted by Williams, led him to address issues that Pippin’s book presents. Such topics would no longer be grounded in a causally independent subject, constantly transparent to his own self and possessing his own intentions and thoughts. Rather, they turn into ‘anti-theories’ that would unfold from images, metaphors and analogies, creating a mirror image of philosophical theories; as such, however, they are unable to break out of the conundrum created by the author’s systematizing ambition (p.121).

If there were only few analyses on Nietzsche and psychology, and if Pippin had not previously published nearly every important thought contained in this book, then this little volume would certainly have the charm of novelty – in accordance with the author’s intent to create a synthesis. However, the issue of Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology is one of the questions that, early on, found their way into the international Nietzsche discourse. 116 years before Pippin’s lectures in Paris, the Danish literary historian Georg Brandes put due emphasis on this issue in his 1888 Nietzsche lectures – whose topics were received with enthusiasm even by Nietzsche himself – and he did so again in a 1889 essay on “Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism.” In his correspondence with Nietzsche, Brandes identified psychology as an especially effective and crucially important tool of philosophical investigation in the Nietzschean oeuvre, and – with Nietzsche’s personal agreement – localized its roots within a stimulating interdisciplinary and interartistic environment. In particular, when Brandes portrayed Nietzsche’s  personal psychological stance, he foregrounded Nietzsche’s Dostoevsky interpretation and Ibsen, Strindberg and Kierkegaard’s “psychological problems”, in addition to the influence of French moralists and early psychologists. Thus, Brandes and Nietzsche explicitly referred to several crucial psychological sources that Pippin does not even begin to touch upon in his book.

The “psychologist Nietzsche” has been in the centre of interest ever since Nietzsche’s days; in nearly every decade since can we find at least three or four works that are relevant to the Nietzsche discourse at large and whose title includes ‘psychology’ or some cognate concept. During the triumphant years of psychoanalysis this number increased by several orders of magnitude. Among the great, “national” (i.e., German, French, North-American, Spanish, etc.) Nietzsche discourses that have proved to be crucial for the whole of philosophical thinking, it is the North-American Nietzsche discourse, e.g. that of Pippin’s, whose main pillar, Walter Kaufman’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1950) also presents the Nietzschean oeuvre in explicit psychological context. This does not mean that it would necessarily be difficult or impossible to say something novel and substantial in this matter. Not even Pippin’s book can make us forget how modestly contemporary philosophy utilizes psychology in the Nietzsche research, how scarcely Nietzsche scholarship is exploited in contemporary psychology, and how difficult contemporary forward-thinking representatives of psychology find it to deal with Nietzsche. This is extremely unfortunate because Nietzsche discusses many issues that should be addressed in the framework of contemporary psychology, a discourse in which moral issues are constantly being “rediscovered”. Philosophers should also take a larger share in building a bridge between philosophy and psychology. Significant attempts to build this bridge, however, are yet to come, as is unintentionally demonstrated by Pippin’s book.

References

Robert B. Pippin: Lightning and Flash, Agent and Deed (GM I:6-17). In: Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays. Christa Davis Acampora, ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006), pp. 131-146.

Robert Pippin: Lightning and Flash, Agent and Deed (I 6–17). In: Friedrich Nietzsche: Genealogie der Moral. Otfried Höffe, ed. (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2004), pp. 47-63.

Robert B. Pippin: Nietzsche’s Moral Psychology and the French Moralist Tradition. In: Bildung – Humanitas – Zukunft bei Nietzsche (=Nietzscheforschung. Jahrbuch der Nietzsche-Gesellschaft, Vol. 12). Volker Gerhardt & Renate Reschke eds. (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2005.), pp. 313-331.

Bernard Williams: Nietzsche’s Minimalist Moral Psychology. In: Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals. Richard Schacht, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.), pp. 237-247. (First published in European Journal of Philosophy, 1993, 1 (1): pp. 4-14.)

Robert B. Pippin: Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy.
University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2010.
ISBN-13: 9780226669755
Cloth, XVII + 139 pages, US$29.00.

Kristóf Fenyvesi is completing a PhD in the Department of Humanities, Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, where he recently (2010) organized the 2nd International Nietzsche Symposium.

(c) 2011 The Berlin Review of Books

by Francisco Klauser

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.

Hand-coloured etchings, "Vessels of Wrath", from Francis Barrett's "The Magus" (1801). (Source: Wikimedia Creative Commons; public domain.)

“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’.

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

By Stephen John

Martha Nussbaum’s latest book opens with a chilling warning: we face “a worldwide crisis in education” of “massive proportions and grave global significance”. The crisis is that the arts and humanities are losing their place in the curriculum at all levels of education. Indeed, even “the humanistic aspects of science and social science – the imaginative, creative aspect and the aspect of rigorous critical thought” are being lost. This is to be lamented, according to Nussbaum, because the proper goal of education is the cultivation of citizens who can play a full and active role in democratic societies, and such cultivation requires exposure to the arts and humanities. Such concerns are, she thinks, not reflected in contemporary thinking about education, which stresses the teaching of narrow technical skills, and associated “thin market norms”, in the name of economic growth. Nussbaum proposes an alternative to the market paradigm, according to which education should be child-centred, and include a full and proper understanding of global history and economics, training in Socratic reasoning skills, and creative engagement in artistic activities. Such an education will create citizens who can feel compassion for others, whom they also respect, while making wise judgments about political issues which reflect a broader understanding of global interconnectedness without an exaggerated respect for tradition. As a side effect, such citizens will also be more economically productive.

Clearly, no-one could reasonably hope to prove all of these claims within a book of 170 pages. This volume is, I assume, intended more as a political act, rather than as a scholarly tract. Furthermore, I find myself more-or-less in agreement with what I take to be Nussbaum’s key political aim: to ensure a place for the humanities and arts in schools and universities. As such, it is tempting to overlook this book’s deficiencies in the name of political expediency, or to defend Nussbaum by stressing that her book is polemic, rather than careful study. Unfortunately, the entire point of this book is to defend an ideal of “Socratic critical inquiry”, where “only the nature of the argument counts”. Even taking into account issues of genre, Nussbaum’s arguments are bad. They rest on sweeping sociological generalisations, confuse different concepts, and fail to engage with possible criticism. 

A liberal arts education -- good for those who can afford it, but does it save democracy? (Photo: ECLA, used under a Wikimedia Creative Commons Licence)

One key flaw is Nussbaum’s tendency to speak ex cathedra on extremely complex empirical topics. For example, at one point, she describes the Indian state of Gujarat as “well known for its combination of technological sophistication with docility and group-think”. Not content with stereotyping fifty million people, she later asserts that the deadly anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002 were the result of “no critical thinking in the public schools and a concerted focus on technical ability”, combined with “propaganda purveyed … in state history textbooks”. To be fair, this extremely tendentious causal claim is supported by a single reference (to her own earlier work). However, it is surely an egregious simplification of an extremely complex social phenomenon. The sweeping generalisation mentioned above is not, it should be stressed, a slip into Orientalism; we also read, for example, that European academics (all?) “have no training” in teaching and so, “would be horrible” at small group teaching. Similar examples abound in the text. I suppose that such exaggeration might be justified by saying that Nussbaum’s examples are not intended as literal truths, but as vivid summaries, designed to illustrate, rather than support, her more theoretical claims. These more general claims about the declining prestige of humanistic education, and about the proper role and value of education are interesting, and of more general import. In the rest of this review, then, I shall resist the temptation to list implausible claims and focus on two key issues: precisely what Nussbaum thinks the current crisis is and her account of why we need the humanities. 

Nussbaum seems to diagnose three threats to humanistic education: first, an emphasis on the teaching of narrow technical skills in the name of maximising GNP; second, attempts to twist the teaching of history and social science to stoke nationalist and ethnic agendas; third, an increasing emphasis on standardised testing. I agree that a narrow, economically-driven curriculum, a desire to stoke nationalist sentiment and a focus on bureaucratically tractable outcome measures each poses a potential threat to humanistic educational ideals. I was far less convinced by Nussbaum’s apparent assumption that these three threats are all, somehow, inter-related. There might be Marxist arguments that capitalism survives best when the workers are stoked up to their eyeballs on religion and their energies focused on ethnic, rather than class warfare. However, on the face of it, inculcating rampant ethnic nationalism in workers seems in tension with creating workers who will play a docile role in multi-national corporations. Furthermore, it is unclear how either the neo-liberal or ethnic-traditionalist trends which, according to Nussbaum, threaten humanistic education relate to her real bugbear: standardised testing and quantifiable measures of educational “output”. Whether hatred has been inculcated is rather hard to measure; it may be easier to measure whether people have marketable skills, but it is unclear that the market itself demands excessive testing. Distinguishing different trends which might threaten humanistic education is not merely of theoretical interest. Rather, even if Nussbaum’s book is part of a political struggle, it is important to recognise that different societies face different problems: Indian academics who lament the BJP-driven rewriting of textbooks face different challenges to UK academics who wish to resist proposals for allocating research funding on the basis of “impact”. 

Furthermore, in in . Nussbaum herself notes that those who value economic growth might often have reason to value humanistic education. However, she seems to overlook deeper grounds of agreement. Nussbaum draws a very sharp boundary – between an “old”, “growth-based” model of development and society with an associated narrow technocratic model of education – and her proposed alternative, which sees the promotion of capabilities “ranging from life, health, and bodily integrity to political liberty, political participation, and education” as the goal of a good society. One obvious worry about this distinction is that it seems to overlook alternative mixed models of development, which, arguably, actually motivate many policy-makers. Furthermore, and more seriously, Nussbaum also seems to overlook why people might adopt a growth-based model of development, and, in particular, how such a model might be compatible with her own concerns. Even if the main goal of education is to promote citizens who can contribute to political debate, and this requires exposure to the humanities, such citizens might democratically agree on the value of economic growth. Conversely, full democratic participation might be a dream in a country where all are extremely poor. Nussbaum writes as if we are faced with a stark choice, but it is unclear that the choice is as stark as she paints it, and even that we have a choice to make at all. Along similar lines, Nussbaum seems to ignore the fact that even if actual bureaucracies have adopted stupid and self-defeating measures of educational attainment leading to what she calls a “pedagogy of force-feeding for standardised examinations”, there are excellent democratic reasons to seek to measure and assess the success of publicly-funded education. 

In short, even if, as a matter of fact, humanistic education is under threat from a variety of directions, and even if, as a matter of principle we think that growth-based models of development are incomplete or problematic, the threats to humanistic education are not all necessarily motivated by concerns which are deeply incompatible with humanist or democratic values. Again, I stress, these claims are not solely of scholastic interest; rather, they point to a serious problem with using this book for the political purpose of defending the humanities. On the one hand, Nussbaum tells us that training in the humanities produces citizens who “understand other traditions from within” and who can “think well about political issues affecting the nation”. On the other hand, her own arguments seem ill-suited to forming political alliances based on an understanding of others’ concerns. Not only does this tension rather undercut Nussbaum’s own assertions, but it makes it unclear who Nussbaum believes will be convinced by her arguments; were I a supporter of increased technical education, of the BJP or of standardised testing, I would find nothing in this book which spoke to my concerns. 

One resolution of this tension is that Nussbaum is preaching to the converted: rousing humanists to fight their corner, and providing them with tools with which to do so. The tool Nussbaum provides is an argument that the arts and humanities are valuable because their teaching is part of an education for “a more inclusive type of citizenship”. This is an interesting proposal, because many humanists seem tempted to defend teaching and research in their subjects by appeal to something like the intrinsic value of a humanistic education, and, as such, to resist attempts to justify curricula and research programmes in terms of “impact”. Nussbaum seems to suggest, however, that, rather than resist talk of impact, humanists should, instead, challenge prevailing conceptions of what constitutes impact. In general, this strikes me as an excellent proposal: given that continued teaching and research in the arts and humanities depends to a large degree on taxpayers’ money, it seems incumbent on humanists that they can provide a justification for their subjects which clearly relates to political concerns and demands. What worries me, however, is that Nussbaum seems to confuse two different issues. The first issue is whether we should conceptualise the good society in narrowly economistic terms or in broader terms, which include a concern that citizens are able to make reasoned contributions to debate. The second issue is what we should teach in Schools and Universities. Nussbaum’s argument seems, often, to run together these two questions, because she seems to assume that there is some very strong relationship between what we teach and the health of democracy. While I agree that there might be some relationship here, I was uncertain precisely what Nussbaum sees this relationship as, and without further specification of the precise relationship between curricula and democracy, it is unclear how best to use Nussbaum’s argument. 

An obvious worry here is that it seems that we have excellent inductive evidence that those highly trained in the arts and humanities can, often, fall very far short of Nussbaum’s ideal citizens. This is a point she herself notes in a brief aside on the anti-semitism of Wagner and Humperdinck. Furthermore, to choose an example Nussbaum does not mention, we might note that Nineteenth Century English public schools and Oxbridge turned out many men who had an excellent education in the classics, but who went on to administer a brutal Empire. In short, it is unclear that exposure to the arts and humanities is sufficient for crafting good citizens. In response to such concerns, it might be suggested that it is not exposure per se, but the right kind of teaching which suffices for good citizens. However, if this is Nussbaum’s thought, then it is unclear how useful her arguments are for practical purposes, given that, as she herself sometimes seems to acknowledge, there is a huge gap between actual current educational practice and her proposals; even if the curriculum set out in this volume would create a new kind of citizen, we might worry that this does not represent a practicable ideal. 

An alternative way of reading Nussbaum’s arguments would be as claiming that some exposure to the arts and humanities is necessary for maintaining democratic societies; in a rousing phrase, we read that “knowledge is no guarantee of good behaviour, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behaviour”. In a nearby passage, we also read that in the absence of humanistic education human interactions are “likely to be mediated by the thin norms of market exchange in which human lives are seen primarily as instruments for gain”. Leaving to one side the complicated issue of why Nussbaum assumes that we are faced with a stark choice between markets and democracy, the general thought she expresses here may seem plausible. However, they are exceptionally hard to pin down once we recognise that the vast majority of the world’s population has had little education; either Nussbaum must think that most of the world’s population are likely to engage in “bad behaviour” or she must think that the merest touch of a humanistic education can avoid “bad behaviour”. Neither of these claims strikes me as particularly plausible (furthermore, the claim that the particular form which the bad behaviour of those not educated in the humanities must take is a tendency to see others as instruments for economic benefit seems completely implausible: to return to some of the issues mentioned above, whatever else went wrong in Gujarat it was not that Hindus saw Muslims in merely economic terms). 

It is a favourite trick of philosophers to say that X is neither necessary nor sufficient for Y, and, therefore, that there is no interesting relationship between X and Y. This is a bad trick, and not one I want to play here; there might well be a relationship between humanistic education and democratic citizenship, even if that relationship is not simple. Intuitively, such a claim seems plausible – how could people educated in the arts and humanities fail to be better at arguing over policy? – and politically appealing – what even minimally enlightened policy-maker could disagree that strengthening democracy is an important end? My worry is that Nussbaum provides no way of spelling out such concerns. Furthermore, to raise a final worry, it also seems that one aspect of Nussbaum’s approach is likely to be particularly problematic in this regard: her insistence that all education from the kindergarten to undergraduate study should be understood in terms of the creation of better citizens. 

This strategy is, unfortunately, rather ambiguous. It is unclear whether Nussbaum believes that the needs of democracy demand that all citizens receive at least an undergraduate level education (with a strong focus on the humanities, and so on) or that the needs of democracy demand that all those who receive a University education are trained in critical thinking and so on. The first claim seems excessively utopian; were Nussbaum engaged in what political philosophers call “ideal theory”, then the claim that democracy requires that all citizens be educated until 21 might be a valid claim. As a basic assumption in what is essentially a polemical work, however, the claim seems, at best, to engender despair. Even in a developed country such as the UK, fewer than 50% of 18-year-olds attend University. Matters are, of course, even worse in Nussbaum’s beloved India, where female literacy is about 54%. Not only do such facts make the normative claim that all must be educated to University level seem excessively utopian, but they also make it difficult to understand the precise relationship between education and democracy; clearly, if democratic citizenship requires a University education (with a stress on the humanities), we are, and always have been, a long way from democracy. 

Maybe, then, Nussbaum’s argument is intended to be that, for as long as citizens are educated, their education should stress humanistic and humane virtues. This strikes me as a pleasant enough claim, but deeply problematic if the value of such virtues is because of the ways in which they equip citizens to function in democracies. After all, if some do not receive the training in democratic virtues accorded to others, then it seems all too easy to argue that, under real world conditions, it is the well-educated (specifically, those well-educated in the humanities) who should hold greater power in political debate. It is undoubtedly true that in modern societies, it is the well educated who tend to hold real power, and, as such, it may well be true that it is they who most need critical skills and the virtue of tolerance. However, to make such an argument is, in effect, to acquiesce in a form of oligarchy, where what really matters is that decisions made in Whitehall or Wall Street or the World Bank are reasoned and humane. (In this regard, it is a striking feature of Nussbaum’s argument that she thinks that it is a good thing that many US Universities rely on private funds from alumni who appreciate their “liberal arts” training, and a bad thing that UK Universities must rely on government funding. She is also keen to stress how enlightened businesspeople appreciate their humanities education, and employ others with a similar education. A strange undercurrent of the book, then, is that the real dangers to the humanities are posed by small-minded policy-makers and close-minded parents, rather than by big business.) Were Nussbaum asked to clarify her position, I have no doubt she would deny that it has such oligarchic implications. However, it strikes me that there is an important distinction between viewing the ends of compulsory primary and secondary education in terms of the promotion of democratic capabilities, and also viewing University, non-compulsory education in the same way. Even if there is a plausible argument that humanistic training needs to be part of the curriculum all the way through the education system, it seems that we need to be careful that this argument is compatible with the values of democracy more generally. 

This book has an important message: if we think that a good society is one characterised by relationships of democratic equality, rather than merely by the maximisation of GNP, then this should be reflected in debates over educational policy. In turn, such a framework seems to suggest that we should value the arts and humanities, as they can play an important role in shaping citizens’ capabilities. Unfortunately, what Nussbaum fails to provide us with is a clear sense of how we should develop this argument, who opposes it, and how we should respond to such opposition. Furthermore, in failing to do any of this, this book leaves an unsavoury impression that its contents belie its conclusions. 

Martha C. Nussbaum: Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities
Princeton University Press, Princeton 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4008-3422-8
Hardcover, 177 pages, US$22.95 

(c) 2010 The Berlin Review of Books.

By Gloria Origgi

In one of his perfect narratives, Heinrich von Kleist tells the sad story of two secret lovers separated and condemned to death just before the earthquake that was to destroy Santiago de Chile in 1647. Having miraculously survived, they enjoy for a few days the mercy of an enchanted social atmosphere. Their judges and executioners, transformed by the tragedy and the ensuing chaos, multiply gestures of altruism and generosity. The blissful mood persists for a short while, but soon the rules and norms of civil life are being reinstated and a Mass is celebrated during which the crime of the two poor lovers is denounced as the cause of all the evil. The lovers, unable to escape the fury of collective condemnation, are clubbed to death. The reciprocal altruism and the disinterested society that the cataclysm had spawned turns out to be ephemeral, unnatural, as if the ferocious end were a way to compensate for the uncanny sense of self that the people had experienced when acting in such a disinterested manner.

Jon Elster’s latest book, Le désintéressement, based on his Collège de France lectures in 2006-2007, discusses the very possibility of disinterested action. Is it possible for a human being to act in a truly disinterested manner? Do disinterested actions have a psychological unity or are they the mere product of circumstances? Is disinterestedness an individual or a collective phenomenon?

From a strictly rational point of view, that of utilitarian economic rationality, to the critique of which Elster had devoted an important part of his work, disinterestedness looks irrational. It violates the rules of maximisation of utility. As if human action without the kind of rational and interested motivation that optimise the individual utility was bereft of justification, irrational or at least arational. Elster’s aim, in this first volume of a trilogy that will be dedicated to the critique of the classical theory of Homo Economicus, is precisely to combine a critique of the motivational model of interest with a methodological individualistic approach, and not to go along with holistic explanations in terms of superstructure characteristic of other social science traditions such as Marxism and structuralism. Pierre Bourdieu for instance reduces the possibility of disinterested action to the social mechanics of distinction, assuming that it only occurs as a means of increasing one’s symbolic capital in an economy where not all exchanges are material. Elster, on the contrary, seeks individual motivations for disinterested acts, disinterested reasons to act that are moreover independent of the social superstructure.

There are two defining features of Homo Economicus that disinterested actions may undermine: rationality and interested motivation. Elster’s approach saves rationality at the expense of interested motivation. Actually, if classical economic theory insists on the univocity of interested motivation, it is first and foremost for reasons of simplicity and elegance. Leaving out interest, the theory gets lost in a thousand directions since, writes Elster paraphrasing Tolstoy, “if all interested agents are interested in the same manner, disinterested agents are so each in its own way.” Still, rational choice theory is so equipped that, while it could not do without the presupposition of rationality, it could do without interested motivation.

So Elster, equally familiar with French XVIIth century moralists and with current experimental research in behavioural economics, gives up on a univocal explanation and sketches a taxonomy of disinterested motivations that are, all the same, rational. Altruistic and disinterested action is typically suspected of having in fact other motivations: self-pride, desire for the approval of others, awareness of the benefits of a good reputation. To these essentially ‘allocentric’ social motivations that could be reduced to a form of indirect egoism, Elster adds motivations that are not egoistic but that may be ‘egocentric’, for instance: 1) disinterested consideration for others’ welfare (altruism, egalitarianism, everyday Kantianism), and 2) internal approval of disinterestedness, that is, the desire we have to appear, in our own eyes rather than in the eyes of others, as motivated by disinterested consideration of the interest of others. For Elster, these motivations are independent of the mechanisms of social recognition and intrinsically disinterested.

A series of case studies complements conceptual analysis: the mechanisms of disinterest are being brought to light in behavioural economics experiments on cooperation and reciprocity, and people are shown not to maximize their own utility in exchanges, in intergenerational donations, in reparation among countries, in decision processes in assemblies, and in the motivation of kamikaze terrorists, all cases that Elster had analysed in previous work.

The wide range of phenomena analysed and of explanations is typical of Elster’s style, who, to reductionist social sciences that aim at being “exact”, opposes a model of vectorial explanation that proceeds by articulating a variety of causal mechanisms. There remains a doubt regarding the unity of the phenomenon: if so many forms of disinterestedness are possible, and so many different motivations may underlie it, are we still talking about one and the same thing? Is there then a unitary theory, a mechanism that explains in an integrated way this “ivresse du désintéressement,” and that provides the phenomenology of this ecstatic freedom from our egoistic drives, that Kleist illustrated so clearly with a few strokes.

Jon Elster: Le désintéressement. Traité critique de l’homme économique (tome I)
Seuil, Paris 2009
ISBN-13: 978-2020965903
Paperback, 376 pages, 23 EUR

Gloria Origgi is a philosopher and a researcher at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. Her most recent book is on the issue of trust as a philosophical problem (Qu’est-que la confiance? Vrin, Paris 2008).

A version of this article, with minor modifications, was first published on the website www.cognitionandculture.net under a Creative Commons Licence (which also applies to the present article); reproduced with permission of the author.