Book review: Philosophy and the Gods of the City - Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft’s “Thinking in Public”
Thinking in Public - by Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft
Reviewed by Jon Baskin
Of course, it is not just Strauss, Levinas, and Arendt who have thought about the relationship between the philosopher, the intellectual, and the public. Wurgaft might have focused on Jean-Paul Sartre, or Alexandre Kojève, or Karl Jaspers, to name just a few 20th-century thinkers who come up repeatedly in the course of his story. Yet his choice is not arbitrary. What makes Strauss, Levinas, and Arendt such fruitful objects of comparison is that their differences emerge against a background of similarity. Strauss, Levinas, and Arendt were all European Jews, born within 10 years of each other and educated in Weimar Germany. All three studied with Heidegger, and all three were personally and intellectually impacted by the rise of Nazism that Heidegger endorsed and supported, above all in his speech accepting the Rectorship at Freiburg University, in 1933. Levinas, after gaining French citizenship in 1931, was conscripted to the French army and spent four years as a German prisoner of war. Arendt left Germany in 1937, first for France and then, after a spending month in Camp Gurs in 1941, for the United States. Strauss left Berlin for Paris in 1931, and eventually settled in the United States in 1937, first at The New School for Social Research in New York, and later at the University of Chicago... read more:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/philosophy-and-the-gods-of-the-city-benjamin-aldes-wurgafts-thinking-in-public/#!
Reviewed by Jon Baskin
IN AN article published
earlier this summer in The Revealer, the intellectual historian
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft identifies a recent hunger in the United States for
“public intellectuals.” As he amply documents, different people mean different
things by the term. Predominantly, though, it is used to signify a desire for a
more thoughtful and informed public conversation, bolstered by the input of
those educated in the humanities. Most of us assume, in other words, that
having more “intellectuals” engage in public life would be a good thing,
probably for intellectuals themselves and certainly for the rest of society.
(Having spent nearly a decade in graduate school, during which I helped start a
magazine based on the idea of public philosophy, I’d count myself among those who
have staked this claim.)
Wurgaft’s article
gently lays out some of the contradictions inherent in our demand for the
public intellectual at a time when we can agree neither on what constitutes the
public, nor on what qualifies anyone to speak to it as an intellectual. Yet in
his deeply researched book on the same subject, Thinking in Public,
Wurgaft reminds us that such questions, although they take on different
valences today than they did in the middle of the last century, have long
histories. The book is devoted to three philosophers — Leo Strauss, Emmanuel
Levinas, and Hannah Arendt — who both theorized about, and exemplified the
difficulties of, thinking in public. Of the three, Arendt is the most
recognizable as a “public intellectual” (Wurgaft will teach you to keep the
term in scare quotes), but they all, in Wurgaft’s words, “displayed a common
preoccupation with the question of philosophy’s place in public life, a
question for which ‘the intellectual’ sometimes served as shorthand.”
Wurgaft’s study is
informative to the point of embarrassment. Following him as he tracks the
thought of the three figures reveals the shallowness of our own conversation
about such matters. Today we speak about funding for the humanities, how
scholars communicate online, and whether academics can learn to write for
general audiences, as if these were the fundamental questions. But these are
only tiny tributaries of the fundamental question: what good does
the intellectual do in public? Strauss, Levinas, and Arendt were all skeptical
of what Wurgaft calls the “pan-European enthusiasm for ‘intellectuals,’ which
imagined intellectuals as public guardians of truth and justice and opponents
of political corruption.” To the extent that today’s calls for intellectual
engagement reflect a version of this enthusiasm, Wurgaft has furnished us with
a reminder and a challenge. It is not only the public that can succumb to
corruption; the intellectual wishing to think in public will first have to
learn how to be truthful with herself.
Of course, it is not just Strauss, Levinas, and Arendt who have thought about the relationship between the philosopher, the intellectual, and the public. Wurgaft might have focused on Jean-Paul Sartre, or Alexandre Kojève, or Karl Jaspers, to name just a few 20th-century thinkers who come up repeatedly in the course of his story. Yet his choice is not arbitrary. What makes Strauss, Levinas, and Arendt such fruitful objects of comparison is that their differences emerge against a background of similarity. Strauss, Levinas, and Arendt were all European Jews, born within 10 years of each other and educated in Weimar Germany. All three studied with Heidegger, and all three were personally and intellectually impacted by the rise of Nazism that Heidegger endorsed and supported, above all in his speech accepting the Rectorship at Freiburg University, in 1933. Levinas, after gaining French citizenship in 1931, was conscripted to the French army and spent four years as a German prisoner of war. Arendt left Germany in 1937, first for France and then, after a spending month in Camp Gurs in 1941, for the United States. Strauss left Berlin for Paris in 1931, and eventually settled in the United States in 1937, first at The New School for Social Research in New York, and later at the University of Chicago... read more:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/philosophy-and-the-gods-of-the-city-benjamin-aldes-wurgafts-thinking-in-public/#!
