On Raymond Geuss’s Not Thinking like a Liberal (2022)

     In 2019, on the occasion of Jürgen Habermas’s 90th birthday, the philosopher Raymond Geuss published a short essay offering a highly critical evaluation of central features of Habermas’s thought. Geuss remarked that a “soft nostalgic breeze of late liberalism wafts through the writings of Habermas.” A central feature of Habermas’s writings, according to Geuss, is the claim that contemporary social institutions seemingly lack legitimacy, and that the appropriate philosophical response to this lack is to develop a justification of political institutions out of conceptual resources provided by a theory of communication. This theory in turn centered on the claim that everyday communication presupposes and so commits everyday agents to a kind of normative demand, namely that the agents come to an agreement through free and undistorted further communication. Geuss, asserts that Habermas’s theory has an obvious ‘natural affinity’ to motifs in traditional liberalism, in particular in its high valuation of free discussion, with the corollaries that free discussion is always possible and indeed always a good thing. Geuss counters that these corollary claims are empirically false, and counter-poises to Habermas’s theory of communication the assertion from Habermas’s teacher Theodor Adorno that the claim that any and every thought is universally communicable is a pathological ‘liberal fiction’. More substantively, Geuss advances John Dewey’s naturalistic theory of communication, whereby communication is always context-specific and inherently limited, and clarification in human life arises more typically from action than from unlimited discussion. Dewey’s theory of communication was part of his self-described ‘experimentalism’, and the radical experimental stance, so Geuss asserts, had little chance for a hearing in post-War Germany, as opposed to Habermas’s account, which comfortably fit in with the political project of the integration of the German Federal Republic into the West.

     There was a swift reaction to Geuss’s essay from academics prominent in the reception and propagation of Habermas’s theory, in particular the political philosopher Seyla Benhabib and the historian of ideas and social commentator Martin Jay. Both Benhabib and Jay dispute Geuss’s characterization of Habermas’s thought, and suggest that part of Geuss’s error stems from his neglect of Habermas’s writings of the past 35 years. A striking feature of their responses is their vehement and personalized character: one or the other or both accuse Geuss of misanthropy, tastelessness in publishing something highly critical on such an occasion, and anti-liberalism, even to the extent of playing into the hands of Vladmir Putin (!). Nothing is said of Geuss’s previous writings critical of liberalism, while his critics claim that he mis-represents his own attitude towards Habermas in his celebrated first book, The Idea of a Critical Theory. I don’t find the narrowly construed cognitive dimension of Benhabib’s and Jay’s remarks worth discussing—neither bothers to address, for example, Geuss’s presentation of Dewey’s account of communication as an alternative to Habermas’s; Jay’s response in particular is like the scatter-shot maledictions of an enraged innocent who simply cannot tolerate talk of that sort of thing in fine company--, but the quickness of the vehement responses suggests that Geuss had touched a nerve. Which nerve?

     Geuss’s new book Not Thinking like a Liberal suggests an answer. The book is an autobiographical account of Geuss’s education, first in a Catholic boarding school in Pennsylvania, then at Columbia University including a year as a research student at Freiburg im Breisgau. Herein Geuss attempts to show that his unusual and highly particular course of education predestined him, as he puts it, “to not be on good terms with liberalism,” (p. 15) and so at least partially to stand outside of what he calls “the real total ideology of our time, the conjunction of democracy, liberalism, and capitalism,” an ideology that even in some of its more sophisticated forms “presents itself as the anti-ideology par excellence.” (p. xiv) Geuss evidently views Habermas, along with the political philosopher John Rawls, as the most prominent instances of liberal political philosophers who claim to tinker with bits of the internal mechanisms of this total ideology while accepting the basic structure; so it is perhaps unsurprising that their equally comfortable acolytes like Benhabib and Jay are on high alert for any sign of dissent. While insisting on the Nietzschean claim that historical phenomena have no essences and so no formal definitions, Geuss treats liberalism as a cluster of attitudes and beliefs embedded within modern and contemporary institutions and practices. The most prominent central attitudes are toleration of differing tastes and beliefs and approval of discussion oriented towards making decisions to which all participants can be seen as consenting. These attitudes seem to flourish in the neighborhood of a kind of economic arrangement often characterized as the ‘free’ market. At the core of this, Geuss claims, is a peculiar fantasy of ‘the sovereign individual’, something offered under various conceptions in the philosophies of John Locke, Adam Smith, and J. S. Mill. The sovereign individual has free will and is capable of free consent. He is self-transparent in the sense of knowing the contents of his own mind, and knowing his own wants, desires, and interests. He lives surrounded by a private domain of intimacy; others may only legitimately enter his domain by invitation. The sovereign individual nonetheless shares the world with other sovereign individuals, and their appropriate political framework is one that is neutral towards their differing beliefs and tastes. This neutral framework is accordingly one to which each sovereign individual can and should give their consent. (pp. 23-5)

     The central figure in Geuss’s education was a Hungarian priest named Béla Krigler, the teacher of religion at Geuss’s boarding school. Krigler had studied philosophy in Hungary after World War II, and was additionally keenly interested in psychoanalysis. He was a member of the Order of the Pious Schools, a rival to the Jesuits, and accordingly he was opposed to the Thomism of the Jesuits and favored rather aspects of the thought of St. Augustine. After the failed Hungarian revolution in 1956 he was imprisoned by the Communist authorities and then emigrated ultimately to the United States. Geuss rejected Krigler’s Catholicism, but Krigler’s views and arguments directed against Thomism, Protestantism, and liberalism permanently marked Geuss’s outlook. In this book and elsewhere Geuss frequently quotes Adorno’s remark that ‘the piece of grit in your eye is the best magnifying glass’, and avers that his “peculiar Catholic education was such a piece of grit.” (p. 42) Abstracted from their religious context, Krigler’s arguments undermined the core aspects of doctrinal liberalism in attacking the fantasy of the sovereign individual as false and unsustainable. No human being is ‘independent’, but rather always lives in relations with others (and for the Catholic, with God as well). Human beings are not self-transparent, but rather obscure to themselves and at best capable of a highly partial and perspectival self-awareness and self-understanding. The liberal fantasy of the sovereign individual cannot recognize the existence of irreducibly social goods, that is, goods that are not simply the aggregate of sovereign individuals’ goods. Discussion does not necessarily lead to greater understanding nor a fortiori to unanimity, nor does it constitute an ideally free-standing realm, for in a great many areas discussion is at most incomplete and only consummated in  experience and action. And the idea of a neutral framework presupposes the illegitimate reduction of transcendent claims and identity-constituting commitments to mere beliefs and tastes.

     Further aspects of Geuss’s Catholic education, though mostly independent of the critique of liberalism, contributed massively to his mature views and settled intellectual inclinations. Students learned Latin and at least one other language, and Krigler and other teachers emphasized the impossibility of single term-to-single term translation for concepts given in terms like logos, agape, or auctoritas. (p. 53) Translating such terms always involves elaborate explanations that considered the terms’ history, presuppositions, range of meanings, and varied contexts of use. Readers of Geuss will recognize the fruits of this education in his masterful genealogical accounts of the concepts of the state, liberalism, democracy, and rights in his second major book History and Illusion in Politics, or in his appreciation of Marx’s and Engel’s remark that the only science (Wissenschaft) they know is the science of history, or in his numerous essays on Nietzsche on philology and genealogy. The headmaster of the school, Father Senje, delivered the Sunday sermons, and seized the occasion to lecture on the lives and poetry of the poets Paul Verlaine and François Villon, and conveyed the sense not just of the greatness of their poetry, but of the peculiar amoral attractiveness of their lives. Senje’s sermons emphasized “the inherent complexity of human life, the difficulty of judgment, the unsurveyability of choices, and the obscurity of eventual outcomes.” (p. 74) These sermons combined with Krigler’s explicit teachings on the variety of holy lives of the Saints to show that liberalism had no monopoly on the appreciation of the plurality of worthwhile human lives.

     The second half of the book treats Geuss’s education in college through his mid-20s, and mostly provides reinforces a secular version of Krigler’s and Senje’s teachings with more intellectually elaborated arguments and examples. The undergraduate teaching and writing of Robert Paul Wolff and the writing of Geuss’s dissertation adviser Robert Denoon Cumming showed the internal incoherence and fruitlessness of central doctrines of liberalism, especially in the wafflings and self-undermining qualifications of John Stuart Mill. The coruscating brilliance of Sidney Morgenbesser provided a charismatic exemplum of a life lived without concerned for liberalism. Geuss’s discovery of and subsequent attachment to the writings of the poet Paul Celan and Theodor Adorno inoculated Geuss against the appeal to clarity; again, readers will recognize the fruits of this in many of his essays including ‘Celan’s Meridian’ and ‘Vix intelligitur’. Geuss ends the book with a reflection upon an aphorism from René Char’s Hypnos, ‘Don’t dawdle in the ruts of results’ (‘Ne t’attarde pas à l’orniére des resultats’), a poetic version of the teaching also in Adorno to permit oneself criticism without attempting in advance to provide some positive alternative to what one criticizes. One acts, or ought to act, not in hopes of some result, but because of the kind of person one is. Criticism is among other things a kind of action.

     What is life like for those of us who have never been tempted by liberalism in Geuss’s sense: the conception of the free, self-transparent self; the idea of unfettered discussion leading to unanimity; the ever-vigilant policing of borders between inviolable intimacy and free markets; the evisceration of identity-constituting commitments and orientations into beliefs, preferences, and tastes?  Given that liberalism is part of the real, total ideology of the present, for Geuss “there was no way completely to escape participation in interlocking and mutually reinforcing social institutions that were structured so as to embody “liberal” conceptions.” So Geuss and anyone like him “must be constantly bi-ocular and bi-lingual,” (p. 163) in the sense that while one maintains something of the alternative orientation, one nonetheless falls back in everyday conversation into talk of such liberal conceptions as rights, just as the atheist might say that “If that happens, then God help us all.” This final realization, too, comes to fruition in Geuss’s other writings, especially in his book Changing the Subject with the account of Augustine’s doctrine that we are bi-ocular in living simultaneously in the city of man and the city of God, two cities offering incommensurable understandings of human life, desire, belief, and the good, wherein the imaginative construction of the Divine city provides an alternative framework for criticism of the secular one.

     Geuss’s education was, as he repeatedly insists, highly peculiar, and only possible for a brief period where something of a bubble of non-liberal and non-authoritarian Hungarian Catholicism briefly survived in an isolated institution in the United States. In one sense, the most that the book demonstrates is that such an education was possible, because it happened. No arguments are presented, other than the fascinating summaries of Krigler’s considerations. I do not imagine that the points Geuss advances against liberalism here will sway liberal critics like Benhabib or Jay. One finds a considered, but hardly more temperate, version of such liberal criticism of Geuss’s outlook in the philosopher Charles Larmore’s book What is Political Philosophy? Larmore quotes an early version of Geuss’s criticisms: “The multiple forms of life that liberalism recognizes are always assumed to be embedded in an overriding consensus that has latent moral significance.” Larmore asserts a standard counter to this: “Nothing could be more wrong that to suppose that the liberal vision of society is one essentially of moral consensus. That would be to miss the problem to which consensus is the intended solution [to the problem of persistent disagreement on religious and ethical questions] as well as to misunderstand the nature of the consensus in question . . . The basic principles on which liberalism seeks agreement are not, moreover, principles people are presumed to share already, but rather principles it holds that there is reason for them to accept.” (Larmore (p. 13 and note)) Following Krigler, Geuss would urge that the conjuring trick has already occurred in Larmore’s so much as thinking that the basis for political philosophy is reflection upon what unspecified people would or wouldn’t have reason to accept. And like Benhabib and Jay, Larmore descends into abuse in referring to Geuss’s alternative conception to liberalism advanced as a kind of ‘neo-Leninism’ in his book Philosophy and Real Politics is “silly if not irresponsible,” while adding his disdain for Geuss’s and Adorno’s refusal to give the ‘normative grounds’ of their criticism. (Larmore (p. 73n)). The non-liberal can only note that what counts as serious, and what counts as silly and irresponsible, is itself a political question embedded in particular contexts and frameworks.

  

References:

 

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (1951)

Seyla Benhabib, ‘Jürgen Habermas’s 90th birthday’, medium.com@arendt_center

Paul Celan, ‘The Meridian’ (1960)

René Char, Hypnos (Feuillets d’Hypnos (1947))

Robert Denoon Cumming, Human Nature and History: A Study in the Development of Liberal Thought (1969)

John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (1929)

-----Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938)

Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory (1981)

-----History and Illusion in Politics (2001)

-----Philosophy and Real Politics (2008)

-----‘Celan’s Meridian’ in Politics and the Imagination (2010)

-----‘Vix intelligitur’ in World Without Why (2014)

-----‘Augustine’ in Changing the Subject (2017)

-----‘A Republic of Discussion’ (2019), The Point

-----‘The last nineteenth-century German philosopher: Habermas at 90’ (2019), Verso blog

-----Not Thinking like a Liberal (2022)

Martin Jay, ‘”The Liberal Idea Has Become Obsolete”: Putin, Geuss and Habermas’ (2019), thepointmag.com

----‘Geuss, Habermas, and the Rose of Unreason’ (2019), medium.com@arendt_center

Charles Larmore, What is Political Philosophy? (2020)

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (1846)

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971)

Robert Paul Wolff, The Poverty of Liberalism (1968)

-----In Defense of Anarchism (1970)