Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, QAnon, Fox News, etc., etc., etc. have kidnapped the last century of intellectual thought and philosophical investigation: poststructuralism, quantum physics, deconstruction, the current “crisis” in “nonfiction”-journalism- media-“truthiness.” If the perceiver, by his very presence, alters what’s perceived, Steve Bannon, Vladimir Putin, Vladislav Surkov (performance artist turned Putin strategist), et al. have quite consciously created—and are all still quite consciously creating on a day-by-day basis—a universe in which nothing is true and therefore public discourse is, in effect, over. Dominion Voting Systems was founded to rig elections for Hugo Chávez; Italian space lasers modified voting machine data; the FBI staged the January 6 attack: this is a strategy that goes back at least as far as Dostoevsky’s underground man. God is dead, so everything is permitted. Or is it? How We Got Here—provocative, accessible, persuasive, and addictive—is a crucial intervention in which David Shields argues that Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of (Allan) Bloom times Žižek (squared) equals Bannon.
Today, we’re thrilled to share an excerpt from this “TED-talk-on-speed, thrilling slideshow, and unnerving intellectual history of the last 170 years.”
A Timeline
I.
1850–1900/Melville, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche:
God is dead, and we have killed him.
II.
1917–1945/WWI and WWII:
Heidegger, Camus, Sartre, et al:
There is no “essence”; there is only existence—being and then
nothingness: only Sisyphus pushing his boulder up and down the
mountain until he dies; nothing “matters” absolutely; implicitly,
everything is relative.
III.
1950–1970/Derrida, Saussure, Barthes, Foucault, et al.:
Deconstruction: “truth” is dead; explicitly, everything is relative.
IV.
1980–1990/Allan Bloom, William Bennett, Lynne Cheney, Patrick Buchanan, et al.:
Deconstruction, relativism, and poststructuralism are a threat to religion/
democracy/America: there are essential truths rooted in the
Bible and the US Constitution, and we must restore these “truths.”
V.
2000–2020/Putin, Surkov, Bolsonaro, Berlusconi, Trump, Bannon, Rove, Xi, Modi, et al.:
The weaponization of deconstruction as political subterfuge: there
is no truth; there are only alt-facts; “Democrats” are reduced to trying
to pretend that the twentieth century never happened: there
are stable truths, etc. The two “sides” have, quite absurdly and impossibly,
switched “positions.” Giuliani: “Truth isn’t truth.” New York Times ad: “The truth matters.”
VI.
2020–2024:
The left, traditional media, academics, intellectuals, and “Democrats”
finally get it: The authoritarian right has rather brilliantly
(consciously? unconsciously?) hijacked the last 175 years of intellectual
history and transformed it into hourly political theater. The question
becomes: How do we retain Werner Herzog’s notion of documentary
film as the embodiment of the “ecstatic” rather than the
literal truth without also signing on to a completely carnivalesque
political life?
Preamble:
From Ancient Greece to Kierkegaard
The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.
—Socrates
Socrates claimed to be the wisest man in Athens, not because he knew nothing or had no wisdom but because he knew that he knew nothing. Another way to explain what Socrates’s claims to ignorance meant is this: those who claim power are ignorant; those who claim power are weak.
Before and during the time of Socrates, seeking knowledge was understood to be the same thing as seeking power. To discover what’s right—to know the truth—meant learning the right way to live, which meant knowing how to rule or what should rule your life. The history of reason is also the history of power and of social power.
Plato and Aristotle said, We’re done with Ares; we’re done with paganism and polytheism; we want a rational foundation.
If there is some end of the things we
do, which we desire for its own sake,
and if we do not choose everything
for the sake of something else, for at
that rate the process would go on to
infinity, clearly this [goal] must be
the good and the chief good. Will not
the knowledge of it, then, have a great
influence on life? Shall we not, like
archers who have a mark to aim at, be
more likely to hit upon what is right?
—Aristotle
Thomas Aquinas turned Aristotle, who had been viewed as the great risk to Christianity, into proof of Christianity. In the time of Aquinas, the Crusades resulted in the recovery of ancient Greek philosophy and literature. For centuries, Aristotle’s works had been the bounty of battle and occupation. The Holy Roman Empire absorbed the Greeks; the taking up of Aristotle by the Catholic church was preceded by the spilling of blood. In his own lifetime, Aquinas was condemned; in the next generation, he was sainted.
In 1274 Aquinas died unexpectedly, and many, including Dante, believed he was poisoned at the request of Charles I, the King of Sicily. In 1277, when Aquinas was posthumously condemned, Pope John XXI was newly elected. The new pope assisted the king in claiming Jerusalem for his kingdom and further assisted him by excommunicating his opponents from the church.
The possibility of Christian atheism began with Martin Luther, who tried to integrate the human and the divine in the figure of Christ. Luther’s Reformation arose when the German princes grew resentful toward the church, especially King Charles V of Spain.
The princes wanted to break from the church and establish a German faith, declaring that German money should be for a German church. In 1525, the aristocracy crushed the German peasants’ revolt against the Empire; nearly 300,000 peasant farmers were slaughtered. Luther sided with the aristocracy.
Luther’s nominalism: nothing exists other than real objects in space and time. There are no universal truths, only particulars. Nominalism flourished when the church embraced a form of Platonism. For example, the church’s doctrine of transubstantiation held that since the Communion wafer and wine were said to be the blood and body of Christ, a process of transformation occurred during the Communion ritual. What had been a wafer and chalice filled with wine are converted by God into the literal blood and body of the savior. However, without a belief in a Platonic realm of universal categories, there’s no reason to suppose that some essential property of the wine and bread had to be altered in order for the Communion wine to obtain the property of blood. Instead, the wine is physically wine and is only figuratively the blood of Christ.
What’s more significant than the philosophical disagreement that Lutherans had with official Catholic doctrine, however, was that the rejection of Catholic doctrine rested upon the rejection of the church’s authority. The acceptance of transubstantiation didn’t rest upon theological reasoning; it didn’t rest upon the logic of Aristotle or Aquinas; it rested solely upon the authority and power of the Catholic church.
Rene Descartes enlisted in Prince Maurice’s Protestant army during the Thirty-Year War against the Holy Roman Empire. While a soldier in Breda, Descartes studied with the Dutch philosopher Isaac Beckman and was exposed to the leading scientific ideas of the day. He wound up switching sides and joining Maximilian of Bavaria, a Catholic duke.
Descartes, deciding to work out
what he was sure he knew, climbed
into a large stove, in order to do
so in warmth and solitude. When
he emerged, he declared that the
only thing he knew was that there
was something that was doubting
everything.
—Mike Holderness
Descartes didn’t know if he had a body, but he knew he was a thinking substance. He believed he could go from there to proving mathematics and God. I might be in a gaseous cloud. I might be in a computer program. But I’m thinking.
In nineteenth-century Europe, truth, beauty, and goodness formed the holy trinity, science flourished, and Christianity presided over everything.
In 1804, allegedly snatching the actual crown from Pope Pius VII’s hands, Napoleon rejected the authority of the pontiff and declared himself Emperor. Napoleon’s defeat of Francis II of Austria led to the dissolution of all the hierarchical institutions that, together, comprised the Holy Roman Empire, which ended in 1806. In 1848, Europe was swept up by revolution against monarchical rule and for liberalism and republicanism. In general, Lutherans optimistically welcomed the revolutions.
G. W. F. Hegel’s all-encompassing dialectic: Rather than be repelled by contradictions, he located within contradiction a spider’s web of vibrational spirituality. Everything is always in movement. In the decades following Hegel’s death, a group calling itself the Young Hegelians emerged as political radicals. David Friedrich Strauss, a Hegel scholar and a Protestant theologian, wrote Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, which proposes that Jesus was an important person in history but not a supernatural figure. No virgin birth; no walking on water. This historical and materialist understanding defined the Young Hegelians.
The nineteenth century’s question: can we get truth without God? Soren Kierkegaard wanted to find a truth that was true for him—the idea for which he could live and die.
Purity of heart is to will one thing.
—Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard: knight of faith, trembling. When the March Revolution began in Denmark, Kierkegaard was 35. By the time he died in 1885 at 42, Denmark was a constitutional monarchy under King Frederick VII. The constitution established that the Evangelical Lutheran Church was the official Church of Denmark and that all Dutch citizens were free to worship in the manner of their choosing, so long as their faith was not at variance with good morals or the public order.
Preorder David Shields’s How We Got Here.