To my mind a new book by the philosopher Raymond Geuss is among the most welcome of publishing events. I’ve written several reviews of his books from the past two decades, books that have for some of us established and supported his position as the eminent philosophical essayist of our time. The new book consists of seven essays, two of which have been previously published in English, together with a short introduction; the topics, themes, manner of presentation, and tone will be familiar to Geuss’s readers. There’s the familiar concern with the nature of criticism, the suspicion of any claims to normativity, the genealogical approach to issues with an emphasis on their formulation in Classical Greek authors, the rejection of any claims to definitiveness or comprehensiveness in epistemology or inquiry generally, the emphasis on the contingency and empirical details of anything discussed, and the occasional flashes of mordant wit, especially when British politicians pop up. Most of the first half of the book consists of discussions of three of Geuss’s favorite figures, Montaigne, Rabelais, and Nietzsche. The latter four essays range widely. One essay, ‘Autopsy and Polyphony’, considers how historically varying appeals to the distinctively different human senses of sight and hearing buttress different conceptions of knowledge and ethical orientation. ‘Speaking Well, Speaking Correctly’ starts from the idea that a grammar provides for any language what it means to speak a language properly, then undermines the presumption of a grammar’s invariable authoritativeness through consideration of the various roles (and non-roles) of grammars and rhetorical handbooks in Ancient Greece and Rome. ‘Succeed, Fail, Fail Better’ ends with the short discussion of Samuel Beckett suggested by the title, but is much more Geuss’s fullest statement of his often-expressed rejection of Aristotle’s claim that human lives can be judged successful or unsuccessful as a whole in light of a single small set of criteria. The short concluding essay ‘Hope’ sets itself against the idea that philosophy and human life generally are presented with an absolute dichotomy between either offering constructive solutions to problems that would offer hope to those concerned, or a cynical refusal to take a position.
Aside from Geuss’s fullest statement of his rejection of Aristotle’s conception, does this collection offer anything to someone who is (unlike the author) not already a dedicated follower of Geuss’s fashionings? One way of getting the nature of Geuss’s philosophical contributions in this latest collection begins with noting his durable concerns and problems. The philosopher Alain Badiou in his book on ethics (praised by Geuss in 2001 as “by far the most interesting work of philosophy I have read in the past decade or two”) proposes that ethical life begins for any individual with their ‘events’, where in Badiou’s technical usage an event is a contingent and striking “occurrence that impresses itself on people in such a way that they experience it as imposing on them a positive commitment to it and what it represents, and bringing about a change in their lives so that they act in a certain (new) way” (Geuss (2001), p. 410). Geuss’s recent autobiographical book Not Thinking like a Liberal tells us that for him something like such key encounters were for him reading in the late 1960s the poetry of Paul Celan and the philosophical writings of Theodor Adorno. Surely part of what is so striking about Celan’s poetry, especially of his writing after the seeming success of his poem ‘Todesfuge [Deathfugue]’ in the 1950s, was the combination of unrelieved seriousness of purpose with its fragmentariness, allusiveness, and seemingly irremediable obscurity. On Geuss’s account he was struck by Adorno’s agreement with Celan in rejecting easy comprehensibility, and also Adorno’s rejection of the assumption that philosophy does or should produce ‘results’, that is, propositions or theses that are detachable from the process of reflection wherein they arise. (Geuss (2022), pp. 147-58). Elsewhere Geuss has stressed Adorno’s stance of relentless criticism and the refusal to feel comfortable in the world, together with his seemingly determined rejection of proposals for reform or improvement. It does not seem to me a great exaggeration to say that the encounters with Celan’s and Adorno’s writings are Geuss’s events, and that his philosophical writing, from the canonical The Idea of a Critical Theory in 1981 to the present, is, in Badiou’s technical terminology, his ‘process of truth’ wherewith he ‘maintains fidelity’ to those events.
One can see more proximally models for his most recent essays in two of his greatest earlier pieces. ‘Outside Ethics’ of 2005 discusses successively the ways in which Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Adorno attempt different kinds of radical practical thinking that cannot readily be subsumed under the label ‘ethics’. He notes in conclusion that one “might have the feeling that what I have described in this paper is a disorganized battery of various, very different, objections to different aspects of the way ethics has often been studied as an academic subject in the English-speaking world for the past hundred and fifty years, not a unified countertradition.” He immediately counters: “That this is no coherent countertradition is, I think, no objection. Rather it is a conclusion I welcome.” (Geuss (2005), p. 63) Why welcome it? Geuss does not directly say, but his thought seems to be that the something of the variety “could have the advantage of allowing people a glimpse beyond a monolithic and massively entrenched status quo” (p. 64). Further, Geuss notes that we have an “extremely weak cognitive grasp” on practical philosophy, but since “there is a strong aspirational or self-constructive element in practical thinking,” and that any or all of the ‘outside ethics’ approaches might induce us to move outside the cultivation of “the tiny garden of our own welfare” (pp. 64-5). In ‘A World Without Why’ of 2014 asks how it might be possible to escape from our ‘networks of institutionally anchored universal ratiocination’, in particular in academic philosophy with its “endlessly repeated shouts of “why,” the rebuttals, calls for “evidence,” qualifications, and quibbles” Geuss (2014), pp. 232-3). One way might be like Hegel and Heidegger to work from within academic philosophical discourse to turn the ‘why-game’ against itself. Another would be to abandon philosophy for action. Geuss says that neither of these ways suits him, so he’s left with a third way: inviting people “to observe, look at, or consider something”, then juxtapose that thing with something else in a way that “may cause someone to ask a question or to initiate a line of reflection, or even to develop some hypothesis or theory” (p. 234).
So, following the methodological lines proposed in Geuss’s earlier writings, the seeming heterogeneity of topics in the new book and its lack of obvious focus are not prima facie objections to it, and the topics and points that are discussed fall comfortably within the ‘process of truth’ initiated by the events of Celan and Adorno. The book’s preface opens with a brief description of the famous rock garden at the Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto which, according to Geuss, requires the viewer occupy at least two different viewing points to see the entire garden. The sense of the garden as a whole is then an imaginative, and not simply perceptual, product, one that could only result from (at least) double vision. The garden’s design then seemingly express “a deep negative truth about the world, that vision always operates from a particular limited perspective and that human knowledge is like that, too, and can never encompass the world as a whole (certainly not in a single synoptic view)” (Geuss (2024), p. vi). I’ll briefly summarize two points in the book that strike me as of particular philosophical importance. The aforementioned attack on the idea that there is a single goal the attainment of which determines whether one has led a life ‘successfully’. Since “we are living creatures, which means that we are essentially active and teleologically oriented toward interaction with our environment”, we can always set up a single criterion of success in life: either we do or don’t succeed in, say, finding the food that will sustain us as living organisms (pp. 158-9). But since human beings are not just organisms, but also social animals, we have things like food taboos, based in cultures, ideologies, and religions, and that another criterion of success would be whether we succeed in following the strictures of those groups to which we find ourselves attached or committed (pp. 158-9). This necessarily introduces an irreducible multiplicity into criteria for success. Further, and more importantly for Geuss, even construing actions, and so the great collection of actions that make up a human life as a whole, as simply meeting any one of the pre-given relevant criteria is already an abstraction and idealization. Crucially, “[g]oals, motives, intentions, value criteria: all are not only complex, but in many cases antecedently indeterminate . . . My criteria for assessing success or failure in action in some domain with which I am not familiar may in the beginning be inchoate and indeterminate and may only gradually crystallize into something that has a particular shape and meaning”. Indeterminacy “is pervasive in our lives”, and the degree of determinacy required to so much as apply standards to actions will always only ever be a local, contingent, highly partial, and ephemeral phenomenon. (p. 162)
Anyone new to Geuss’s thought would do well to begin with the earlier essays I’ve mentioned here. The new book is of course essential for the rest of us.
References:
Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2001)
Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory (1981)
-----Review of Badiou’s Ethics, in European Journal of Philosophy (2001)
-----‘Outside Ethics’ in Outside Ethics (2005)
-----A World without Why (2014)
-----Changing the Subject (2020)
-----Seeing Double (2024)