Our Intellectual Desert
“Most thought-provoking for our thought-provoking times is that we are still not thinking.” – Martin Heidegger
Intellectually, and not only, we now live in a desert. The desert is a kind of void. And we indeed are today immersed in the void: the void of the Internet; more broadly, the void of the much discussed and lamented “public sphere”, first of all the medias – which by now are increasingly on the Internet, so in the virtual void as well. Our very smart but not so wise scientists now want to convince us even to live in space, so in the absolute void – which a few decades ago was only theme for science fiction.[1]
The void is the greatest desert, it multiplies and spreads the desert, and nothing produces so efficiently a desert as the fully open and public medias. The void is the great equalizer; in a void anybody can talk; and in the void the outcome of such talks depends not on individual qualities and merits, but on the blind processes of mimetic contagion – which however, and exactly as they are blind, can be directed by those who are smart and ruthless enough to exploit human weaknesses – by those who we call, with Agnes Horvath, tricksters, or mimes, or parasites – as many modalities of evil.[2]
Living in the void implies a full-scale civilizational crisis, as Voegelin, among others (like the Hungarian thinker Béla Hamvas (1897-1968), or in our days Johann Arnason), again foresaw long ago.
Talking about a “civilizational crisis” is anathema to many, especially those who “believe” in “progress”. Believing in “progress”, however, is just that, a belief, and any serious scholar of long-term historical trajectories is well aware that the opposite is true: the only inevitable historical “law” is decay. There are sudden, liminal periods of almost inexplicable, bourgeoning prosperity and growth, as it happened in Egypt, in Minoan Crete, in Athens or in Rome, or during the various “Renaissance”-s; but these events, after a short or occasionally somewhat longer flourishing inevitably yield to a slow and inexorable process of decay. A famous documentation of this process is Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the foundational classic of modern historiography. His “philosophy of history” becomes transparent in the following passage, which perhaps – as it is bound to happen with such statements – is not without its excesses: “the destruction which undermined the foundations of those massy fabrics [meaning ancient Rome] was prosecuted, slowly and silently, during a period of ten centuries”.[3] The historiography of modernity certainly needs its own Gibbon – though probably this will not come for at least some centuries – and the 6-volume project by John Pocock, entitled Barbarism and Religion, one of the most important undertakings in contemporary historiography, by a member of the Cambridge school of intellectual history, is certainly a major indication, emphasizing the eternal contemporaneity of Gibbon, in this regard.
This article hopefully will be the first of a series which try to make a small step in this regard, by exploring the contemporary intellectual desert, the reasons for such a “voidification”, and possible ways to overcome it.
Desert Explorers
Voegelin was a major diagnost of our civilizational crisis, through his “modern Gnosticism” thesis, and a related explorer of our intellectual desert, produced among others by the destruction of language, which since then progressed further by leaps and bounds. However, this article will not start by resuming his main related ideas, assuming that these are well known to most readers, rather will try to establish direct connections with some thinkers who are rather often classified into the opposite, if not outright “enemy” camp, focusing on Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault.[4] It will then focus on a main and still most influential force of desertification, the ideas of Marx, and its current perpetuation by the “Frankfurt School”.
One of the earliest explorers of our desert was Heidegger, who already in 1939-40 perceived that the inevitable outcome of WWII will be a desertification, a devastation. By then Heidegger was long beyond his unfortunate flirting with the Nazis – a stupid mistake which more than anything else reveals his low origins, and the subsequent proneness to serious errors of judgment. For him, “[t]he desert is the sanding up and dispersal of all possibilities of existential decision. […] This desert, entered in advance and only slowly opening itself, is the hidden ground of that which consumes Nietzsche’s thinking and which, despite all the adverseness, has its necessity” (2017: 12). The desert is the outcome of devastation, and “[t]he devastation within the domains of ‘refinement’ and ‘cultural pursuit’ has already progressed essentially further than it has in the field of the coarser concern for the needs of life” (36).[5]
However, the Voegelin-Heidegger axis about the problematization of a civilizational crisis with modernity can be extended into a trio by incorporating Michel Foucault. The possible encounter between Voegelin and Foucault did not take place in the Fall of 1979, due to the indisposition of Voegelin, as Paul Caringella told me, but as concerning Heidegger, for Foucault he was very much a central figure, even if this is not known well, or even denied. Much of the story has not yet been told and has its relevance here. One of the very first books on Foucault was a 1982 monograph by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, published in the same year as Barry Cooper’s book on Foucault – a project suggested to him by Voegelin. “First books” are often the best, certainly in this case; however, Dreyfus and Rabinow had the truly royal road of a personal access to Foucault while doing their book. Dreyfus (1929-2017), now considered mostly as a main “scourge” of AI, was one of the major US Heidegger scholars, and a central interest of him in the book, he told me, was to show how closely Foucault relied on Heidegger in the Order of Things. However, once the book was already with the publishers, Rabinow called him, telling him that the discussion on Heidegger must be taken out. The evident reason was that Rabinow has just received some information about Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism. The story is important because neither then, nor later had Dreyfus any interest in reassessing his views on Heidegger – though he had just as much reason to be worried about Heidegger’s presumably in-depth Nazism as Rabinow. Rabinow, however, wanted to “purify” Foucault so much of Heidegger that he refused to acknowledge the famous “last interview” of Foucault (1994, IV: 696-707), where Foucault explicitly discussed the major impact Heidegger had on him. Paul Rabinow (1944-2021) was an excellent anthropologist, professor at Berkeley for over four decades. His book Making PCR is most helpful for understanding the background of current biotechnological developments, including Covid measures. Given our long-standing acquaintance, I asked him in 2020 to give me an interview for IPA, about the contemporary relevance of his book, but he declined, stating that he told everything he wanted to say in the book.
Some Reasons for the Intellectual Perpetuation of the Desert
Still, a real-world (quasi-)desert is one thing, and an intellectual desert is another. Real-world difficulties, various, even excessive hardships, crises often only reinforce character and multiply intellectual efforts. Why is this evidently not happening now? Or, at least, why it is that current efforts, even the most well-meaning – as most efforts always are well-meaning – are weak, misleading, side-tracked?
There are three points I can offer here towards an answer – at least, as pondered suggestion. To start with, a desert, or a void, is different from a hardship. The latter is something substantial, concrete, a challenge that impresses upon those involved and that must be met. A desert, however, is a nothingness that does not provoke a response, only saps one’s energies, renders everything pointless. The central issue is that when a pressing problem does not go away, though cannot be solved, it is transformed into a permanent, lasting, impossible unease – of which one solution might be to go literally into the desert, as it was done, among others, by the “Desert Fathers”. This is close to the idea formulated long ago by Alasdair MacIntyre, about the need to return to Benedictine monasticism – and he knew what he meant, as for a time he had in-depth familiarity with a main desertifier of our times, Marxism. I have discussed this through the term “permanent liminality”, while Agnes Horvath with the related terminology of the “liminal void”, and I will not enter this here, as the issue of this essay is the failure of meeting intellectually this “desertification”, when it was still not so overwhelming.
This leads to the second and third points, which are quite connected. The second point is that this our current global desert has a profoundly intellectual character, and a paradoxical animating source, which is the media, understood in the broadest possible sense, back to the very idea of “mediation”, especially its purported “necessity”. The media is a reality; we all read, watch, and discuss it, increasingly hardly doing anything else; and yet, it is an unreal reality, as whatever we encounter in any media is not the real reality, only its representation, which is usually staged, in various kind of ways, and so inevitably and irretrievably alters our sense of reality, and sense of judgment. But also, at the same time, and exactly because of it, everything related to the media is an intellectual activity, from its staging to its reception, and so at the same time when the media creates a desert of our reality, it also creates a desert of our intellectual capacities, making desertification at once global and total. Even worse, the dominant forms of our thinking only support this desertification, both idealizing and ideologizing it, claiming that such mediatic constructs are necessary, even nothing else than thinking itself. The two most pernicious forms of ideological justification are constructivism, which can be directly traced back to the philosophy of Kant, constituting one of its foundational aspects; and the philosophy of Hegel, the idea that there are no immediate experiences, everything is mediated, one of the foundational aspects of his thinking. Everything is a construct, everything is mediated, proclaim the two founding fathers of modern thinking – and so the prison doors are closed on our desertification, which of course is a paradox, as the prison is a closed world, a desert is a wide-open void, but the two together capture our current condition, which is oscillating between the two – remember Covid measures – rendering entrapment and desolation complete.
The third point, closely connected to the previous, concerns the pernicious influence of Marx – though again, with a difference. I will not offer here the standard opposition to the very stance of Marx, presuming that everything is fine with free market economy, representative liberal democracy, technological progress, and so on. Quite on the contrary, starting from and for a long way following Max Weber, I accept that Marx was quite right in noticing that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark”. The problem is not here, but that Marx gave a quite wrong, even desperately wrong formulation to the problem, and so his proposed solutions were also fully mistaken, and thus Marx and Marxism tragically misled any effort to come to terms with the genuine problems we are facing; and as a result, most efforts to face and overcome desertification only further promoted it.
The Problems with Marx
The problems with Marx and his followers are triple. The most important is that intellectually, Marx does not offer any way out of standard, mainstream, scientistic rationalism. This can be shown in a very simple manner. Marx famously claimed that he is only taking further the insights of classical German philosophy, especially Hegel; British political economy, especially Ricardo; and utopian socialism, especially Saint-Simon. However, the problem therefore is that, by his own acknowledgement, Marx accepted as a starting point exactly those approaches that should be problematic for those who are seriously trying to identify the problematic aspects of contemporary modernity. Concerning modern philosophy, Marx not only relied on Hegel, but in an almost taken for granted manner on Bacon, Descartes, and Kant, or the entire lineage of modern scientistic rationalism, of which the real dissenters, and not simply “critics”, are Pascal, Vico, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dilthey, to list only the most important – not Marx and the Marxists. Concerning political economy, and economics, Marx’s approach, as it has been shown by Piero Sraffa, takes as its departure Ricardo, accepting his entire perspective, except for trying to show how within the limits of Ricardo’s theory one can demonstrate the presence of exploitation. This might well be the case; however, if somebody does not accept Ricardo’s approach as a starting point, rather can demonstrate how much it is deficient in offering an approach for understanding human life and its concerns, then Marx’s presumed improvements lose any interest – constitute just “a few surface ripples; but they are no more than storms in a children’s paddling pool”, as Foucault argued in 1966,[6] towards the end of his conclusive assessment of Ricardo. The problem is even more serious concerning Saint-Simon, and extend directly to Durkheim and his sociology, given that Durkheim was a great fan of Saint-Simon. The issue is not limited to ‘Utopian socialism” but includes the very idea of a “social science”. Saint-Simon was a rather complex, though extremely problematic thinker, and person, and his central idea, transmitted to Comte, then to sociology, then to the social sciences, and by now virtually a commonplace, is that in order to probably study social life, and human beings, one must follow, all but slavishly, the “natural sciences”. This, however, is evidently non-sensical, as only we as human beings can understand and study other human beings; the obligation to study social life through the “prism” provided by neutral, “objective” methods is identical to prescribing the wearing of distorting, magnifying – or reducing – glasses in our social life, instead of just relying on the testimony of our own senses and our subsequent understanding, following the dual meaning of “sense”. By explicitly relying on Hegel, Ricardo, and Saint-Simon, only trying to improve them, Marx made it crystal clear that intellectually his ideas are boring, trite, and overall irrelevant.
However, he made up for this in other ways, which explain his lasting influence – though also the even greater problems his work generated.
The Trap of Enthusiastic Critique
The first concerns the “critical” character of Marx’s ideas; his relentless attacks on the powers of the modern world. However, this very word, and especially the uses Marx made of it, has its own serious problems. To start with, “critique” as an activity certainly did not start with Marx, rather with Kant – and by the early-to-mid 19th century it was the establishment philosophy. Kant, however, was not completely out of line with previous modern modes of philosophizing, rather fitted into the line of Locke’s tabula rasa, Descartes’ doubt, and Bacon’s efforts to attack practically anybody who lived before him, pretending to start everything anew – but not much before. Thus, as it is increasingly realized, it is exactly this “critical attitude” which was the very intellectual heart of the problems of modernity – and “criticizing critique”, with its evident circularity, certainly does not move ahead things.
What is truly required is something else than offering another “radical critique” of modernity. What this could be, is another million dollar question, to which a small article cannot possibly offer an answer – except for giving a few indications about this direction: like, the quest for understanding; or, first, what exactly is modernity; second, a search for the proper formulation of the problem, which is a task just as important as giving the right answers, and for which Weber used the term Fragestellung, while Foucault invented the word problematization; and third, instead of pretending to sweep away everyone, giving finally a new and universally valid foundation for thinking, rather trying to recuperate, after the many wanton attacks of modern and modernist thought, whatever still stands from past modes of thinking and using this, if anything, as the foundation.
In contrast, Marx managed to gain such an effect because he added to his excessive radicalization of the already problematic attitude of critique a literally boundless enthusiasm – especially concerning the possibility of political change, and the desirability of another revolution.[7] This enthusiasm worked both negatively – whoever is not joining us is simply serving, possibly consciously and for a reward, the interests of those who are in positions of influence and power, where Marx “socialized” Kant’s already misdirected intellectual ideas about “radical evil”, implying that all the main institutions and holders of pre-modern power, Church, State, aristocracy, bourgeoise, everyone, conspired against the “masses”, keeping them in ignorance, thus were “radically evil”; and positively, motivating his followers by naming them as the avantgarde, the new “salt of the Earth”, preparing the future earthly paradise of mankind.
Most of the ideas contained in the previous paragraph(s), about Marxism as a secular religion and a political Messianism, are well known. However, what perhaps has not yet been realized, properly, is the reason for its enormous success. This is because most critics of Marx – apart from repeating the same problematic attitude, of being critics of the critic of the previous critics, to be continued into infinity – themselves were quite happy with political and economic modernity, though perhaps agreeing with Marx that indeed there were some difficulties in the otherwise glorious path to full modernity and the “end of history”, but such difficulties were only temporary, due to a transition or adjustment “process”. But this is not the case; the problems with modernity are constitutional and fundamental; however – and this is the central point of this paper – such view became practically impossible to hold due to the success Marx achieved with his combination of radical critique and boundless enthusiasm. The gravest problem with Marx and Marxism is that this approach, while intellectually meagre, managed to monopolize the dissent from mainstream modernity. I’m trying to convey here a very delicate dynamic process by which the more Marx and Marxism gained a foot in intellectual life, entrapping people who perceived that something was not quite right, with their combination of radical critique and boundless enthusiasm, they placed increasingly everyone in front of an impossible position: either persist with the recognition that the problems of modernity are serious, and thus take up a position inside or close to Marxism; or to come to the decision that joining the crowd of Marxists is impossible, and thus both accept, grudgingly, that nothing is that wrong with standard mainstream modernity, while being subjected to the charge of the Marxist left that they just stood into line because of their cowardice, making a compromise with the powers that be, a charge that was all the more powerful as it indeed could incite or tear up some lingering feelings of guilt. I’m not trying to make here, concerning any of the sides, for or against, a moral claim; rather indicate, as far as possible, the nature of the mechanisms by which it became institutionally and constitutionally all but impossible to take up a position that recognizes the depth of the problems with mainstream modernity, and yet does not in any way accept the positions of Marx and Marxism.
And yet, even this can be made worse: due to the intellectual conventionalism of Marx and Marxism, its reliance on mainstream scientistic rationalism, German idealism, and British political economy, once inside the academia, they could claim that they have a just, rightful, reasonable position, in contrast the “irrational” and “right-wing” positions of the other dissenters of global modernity. This view was formulated first by Lukacs, in his Dethronement of Reason, which infallibly denounced every single worthwhile approach and idea of the previous century as being “irrational”, and perfectioned in our days by Habermas, who managed to make the best of both worlds: being the “last Marxist”, on one side, while at the same time the Benjamin of establishment rationalist Kantian liberals.
In my view, it is this overall situation that produced our intellectual desert.
A Force Behind Accelerated Intellectual Desertification: The Frankfurt School
Still, this outcome was by no means inevitable. Such spiraling processes must be set in motion by some people, and then be given a spin by some others – and still further others. This short article cannot even sketch the history of the rise to intellectual dominance by Marxism, only makes a few comments.
To start with, in spite of the tremendous influence of Marxism in the social and human sciences, especially in social theory, the main figures who managed to produce that dominance are quite few. Two of them, Jean-Paul Sartre and Georg Lukacs, I discussed in some detail in my previous works (Szakolczai 2005: 420, 2022: 137-41), and even made there a few allusions concerning their character that I do not want to render more precise here. I would rather say a few words about a third group, the Frankfurt School, a term which has almost become synonymous with “critical theory” – another crucial problematic term.
The Frankfurt School in our days exerts a tremendous influence in Social Theory all around the world; it might even be called an ascendancy. Just as an indication of the weight of the school, in a recent meeting of an international group of social theorists the current organizer had to state explicitly that it is a group of social and not just critical theory. This is so in spite that most of the concrete individual members are by no means generally read in our days – of the “first generation”, hardly anyone today consults Marcuse, Ernst Bloch or Erich Fromm, even Adorno considerably less than earlier; they certainly did not “age” well. The most famous figure of the school is Jürgen Habermas, who is certainly very widely discussed and read, and considered a liberal philosopher, all but representing at least certain parts of the philosophical establishment – except that he maintains, a claim repeated quite systematically, that he is the last Marxist – which, unless it is a sheer provocation, which I don’t think it is, is worth pondering upon. Still, at any rate, Habermas has very serious dissenters, inside Germany, in Europe and outside, and many of these dissenters have very serious and basic objections to his ideas. One can therefore quite seriously challenge the justness of the intellectual weight of the Frankfurt School. Far from being a powerhouse of genuine thinking, it is rather a kind of balloon. It should therefore be pricked. But what prevents this? And what keeps the balloon a-floating?!
Answering such questions would require a real history of the Frankfurt School, and not the hagiographies that are being produced – as it was already indicated by an interesting fringe member of the school, Jacob Taubes, with whom Voegelin waged a quite extensive correspondence. A few episodes towards this can be mentioned here – only in an anecdotical manner. The first concerns the persistent and recurrent interference of the media. The tight connection between the media and the intellectual history of the modern period is still a theme to be explored, which in my guess goes even as far back as Kant, whose fame originated more in his media engagement that in his philosophical works. The Frankfurt School, practically since its foundation, was strongly supported by the medias, at least certain medias, though by now practically by all, as an unprecedented intellectual avantgarde. This connection awaits the kind of study that Arndt Niebisch made about the inherently parasitical relationship certain avantgarde movement in art had with the media – meaning, they only existed as a force in and through the media.
The second point concerns the extremely puzzling, tight connections between the Frankfurt School, literally since the moment of its foundation, and the highest circles of “capital”. The School was funded by Félix José Weil, through his father, Hermann Weil, a wealthy merchant who at the early part of the past century was the biggest grain trader in the world. This point gains further weight by the similar and intrusive role played by George Soros in contemporary intellectual life.
Such a perplexing link between “critical theory” and the highest circles of “finance capitalism” receive a further illumination if we add that a specific feature of the kind of Marxism promoted by the Frankfurt School and its “critical theory” is the incorporation of the ideas of Freud – the reason why it is often called “Freudo-Marxism”. Classical social democrats were certainly Marxists, way more than their more contemporary equivalents, but they had no interest in Freud, or in gender and sexual politics – they certainly would have, and actually did, consider this as a bourgeois trick. Linking Marx and Freud was by no means self-evident: it could only have been done through the “repressive hypothesis”, or the argument that the exploitation produced by capitalism, helped by the repressive state machinery, is identical to or analogous with sexual repression, as discussed by Freud. However, this incorporation of Freud into the heart of Marxist critique blatantly ignored that Freud’s ideas about desire came to play a central role in modern “capitalism”, among others through advertisement and the rise of consumer demand; and that Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays was a central figure spinning modern advertisement and marketing. From this angle, the strange collusion between the radical critics of capitalism and their super-capitalist supporters gains a new angle, as their point of convergence is the destruction of classical European culture, or Western civilization, whether by a political, a gender, or a sexual revolution, hand in hand with the technological revolution, based on the prior, joint, economic and scientific revolutions. This is not a minor issue and cannot be reduced to the “conspiracy theories” of the “extreme right” – another media trick.
There is a concrete case where the persistent effort to insinuate the Frankfurt School at the center of social theory can be tracked and traced, and this again concerns Michel Foucault. Foucault was centrally influenced by Nietzsche and Heidegger, his main reading experiences, thinkers who were – and still are – anathemas for the Frankfurt School. He came to be interested only in the work of Rusche and Kirchheimer, considering them as precursors of his Discipline and Punish; while the following book, the first volume of the History of Sexuality series, was explicitly written against the “repressive hypothesis”, focusing on Wilhelm Reich, a major source behind the Freudo-Marxism of the Frankfurt School. Yet, since a certain moment, there was an evident pressure on Foucault to discuss the Frankfurt School, to associate himself with their writings, which he accommodated by repeatedly listing the Frankfurt School among those intellectual undertakings that were close to his own.
However, this never amounted to a serious and sustained engagement with Frankfurt School ideas. Apart from the clear public record, the absence any substantial reference in Foucault’s books and shorter works, there are two less known but important indications. First, while Foucault owned a few books by members of the school, they were at best leafed through, and abandoned after the first few pages – quite in contrast not just to the shelf of books Foucault had from Dumézil, but even the few books he owned from and about Gadamer, which were substantially consulted. Second, he never had a genuine respect for the work of Habermas. This is particularly significant, as there is practically an entire industry trying to establish contacts between the thinking of the two, considering them together as shining stars of contemporary “critical theory”. But this is just another balloon, and this was pricked by the second book Didier Eribon dedicated to Foucault, entitled “Michel Foucault and his contemporaries”.
In March 1983, Habermas was actually invited to give a series of lectures at the Collège de France, and persistent rumours claimed that he was invited by Foucault. But this is not true; Habermas was invited by Foucault’s friend Paul Veyne. And not only – when Foucault learned that Veyne invited Habermas, he was furious: “Look, how could you invite him? [Mais enfin, qu’est-ce qui t’a pris de l’inviter!]” (Eribon, 1994: 290). His acts confirmed the account Paul Veyne gave of his immediate reaction. Foucault failed to attend any of Habermas’ lectures. He kept the formalities, saluted Habermas, entered in the morning of 7 March the already full rooms from a back door reserved for professors, but then “taking advantage of the general chaos that ruled the start of the lecture, he discretely left the room and returned to his office” (290). In fact, Foucault had better things to do in those days than listening to Habermas, as he was preparing for his own Collège de France lectures, which were discussing Plato. The 2 March lecture was devoted to Plato’s Apology, as example for philosophical parrhesia (courageous truth-telling), while the 9 March lecture, the last lecture of the 1983 course, for which he evidently went to prepare, instead of listening to Habermas, discussed the shift from political to philosophical parrhesia, from Pericles to Socrates, focusing on the presence of the ‘courage for the truth’ in both ancient and modern philosophy, in contrast to questions of truth being reduced to science, and finished with a study of Gorgias.
I have not met, or heard, Habermas, but met Alex Honneth, main figure of the “third generation” Frankfurt School, on the occasion of him receiving honorary doctorate from the University of Salerno in May 2013. His talk, as expected, was devoid of any interest – he did not mention a single idea that made me think. This only confirmed the similar judgment of Alessandro Pizzorno, who repeatedly met Honneth and tried to discuss with him in substance the question of recognition, central interest of Pizzorno and source of fame for Honneth, but could not hear one interesting or meaningful idea. These points, just as those concerning Foucault and Habermas before, are not gossips, but informed and comprehensive judgments that must be conveyed. If the emperor, unfortunately, is naked, somebody must tell it.
Returning to Foucault, Veyne claimed that Foucault was simply irritated by the presence of Habermas, and “even more by the tenor of his conferences” (Eribon 1994: 291). He goes further in a letter of 20 June 1993 to Eribon, describing the dinner Foucault had with Habermas on the same 7 March 1983. According to Veyne, it was not possible for Foucault not to invite Habermas; but the conversation they led had the character of an “ ‘icy politeness’ ” (291). However, once they started to discuss philosophical themes, as it was bound to happen, the latent clash came to the surface. At the end of a sentence by Habermas Foucault first fell silent, then broke into a broad, shark-like grin, and asked: “so perhaps I am an anarchist?!” (291-2).
While one might try to limit the confrontation between Habermas and Foucault to matters of personalities, not to be extended to the entire Frankfurt School – even Eribon seems to go this way – this is not acceptable. I maintain that Foucault never had serious interest in the ideas of the Frankfurt School, and the positive evocations only had two reasons: complying with the insistence of some of his main, especially American leftist interlocutors; and trying to detect signs of companionship, easing his solitude.
There is a final and truly ultimate proof that the recurrent references to the Frankfurt School were an empty signifier, and this is that Foucault never really named any of its members; he just talked in general about the “Frankfurt School”. He never mentioned Fromm, Ernst Bloch (of whom he owned books), or even Adorno – a most serious omission. He mentioned Horkheimer once or twice, without any specificity – but Horkheimer was considered the founder of the school; mentioned quite a few times Marcuse, but only negatively, as belonging to the ambit of Reich, “culprit” of proposing the “repressive hypothesis”. The only person associated – wrongly – with the Frankfurt school (a reverse of Pilate in the credo) whom Foucault explicitly praises is Max Weber. But here we enter another puzzle: his most important statement, where Foucault claimed that “if Nietzsche interests me, this is only to the extent that Nietzsche for Weber was absolutely determining, even if in general this is not stated,”[8] was left out of the version published in the Foucault Reader. Paul Rabinow, the editor told me he could not remember the reason. The only name of the Frankfurt School Foucault frequently evoked was Habermas. With this, we are back to the points discussed above. In conclusion, associating Foucault with the Frankfurt School is just as misleading and irrelevant as the earlier efforts to incorporate him into the structuralism practiced by Lévi-Strauss, which he explicitly repudiated: if he used the word “structure”, it was in the sense of Dumézil.[9]
The greatest problem, and loss, is the tremendous amount of good-willing thinking that has been wasted on the empty banalities, and even worse avantgarde suggestions, of the Frankfurt School. This is not all; as under the pernicious influence of the Frankfurt School, due to the joint impact of Kant and Hegel, Marx and Freud, even benevolent and intelligent people came to assume, quite systematically, malevolent intentions behind anybody disagreeing with their views.
This leads to a series of questions. Who are systematically supporting the inane theories of the Frankfurt School, force-feeding them to those who are looking for ways to understand the genuine and systemic difficulties of the world in which we live, at the same time forcing those who are not interested in these ideas, which at one level are intellectual banalities, at another affronts to good feeling and thinking, to stay satisfied with the similar or even more inanities of “empirical research” and “rational choice theories”, joining the hunt for funding? Or, in still other words, and going to the heart of the matter, who has an interest in maintaining this intellectual desert, a parallel in thinking to the desertification of human emotions, connections, social life, now taken to a new level through increasingly interconnected developments in telecommunication technology and biotechnology, through the new “magical words” of AI, algorithm, machine learning, and the like?
Well, somebody does, and it is pretty evident who they are – and what is the source of their influence: at once most public, and absolutely hidden.
Voices Crying in the Wilderness
As this article repeatedly indicated, Voegelin was not the sole voice crying in the wilderness. Still, there are few if any similar outlets like VoegelinView. One might wonder about the reasons, which range from the two legs Voegelin always kept, in Europe and the States, so in a way being at home in both places, that few if any others managed to perform – certainly not Nietzsche, Weber, Heidegger or Foucault, and even Bateson, for various reasons; to the persistence of his former colleagues and students.
Whatever is the case, we are certainly here, living in the desert, void, wilderness, intellectually and not only, whether called global modernity, post-modernity – rather hyper-modernity –, post-secularism, post-truth society, or any of the other “post”-prefixes, Absurdistan, Trickster Land, or whatever. All the forces around us, academic, institutional, funding, governmental, non-governmental, animated by all medias, public, professional, or social, try to convince us to give up our mind, our judgment, our sense, our nous, our independence of thinking – in the sense of thinking from the heart (Pascal) – and join this or other established perspective on the prefabricated horizon of the intellectual and political map. And we certainly must belong, as human beings, and to many “circles of recognition” (Pizzorno), starting with family and friends, and moving into the broader cultural and even spiritual spheres.
However, as thinking beings, the real difference and heart of human beings, even human Being, we can only belong to what Plato rendered almost single-handedly possible, about 24 centuries ago: to those who keep thinking, reflecting on what is happening with us, and refuse to sell our souls to any of the devils or demons around us.
References
Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Paul Rabinow (1982) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Eribon, Didier (1994) Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, Paris: Fayard.
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Notes
[1] See the cover page of the October 2023 issue of Scientific American, “Will Humans Ever Live in Space?”. About the lacking wisdom of scientists, see especially the works of Gregory Bateson, and the related article of her daughter: Mary Catherine Bateson, ‘Daddy, can a scientist be wise?’, in J. Brockman (ed.) About Bateson, London: Wildwood House, 1978.
[2] See Horvath and Szakolczai 2020. It was reviewed in the February 29, 2020, issue of VoegelinView, by Tom Boland.
[3] See Gibbon, vol, III, p.425.
[4] For a recent contribution to VoegelinView in this direction, see “The Crisis of Modern Philosophy” by Tom Marven, September 22, 2023.
[5] Concerning the Voegelin-Heidegger connections, see in particular the 2011 essay of David Walsh, reproduced in VoegelinView, April 5, 2012.
[6] See Foucault (1970: 262).
[7] About the “enthusiasm” of Marx, see Agnes Horvath, “(Without) the Reason of State, with the Autonomous Technicality of Disease Prevention”, VoegelinView, November 6, 2021.
[8] See the interview of 20 April 1983, with Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Foucault Archives, D250(8)*.
[9] See for eg. Foucault (1994, II: 635-6).
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