Books
How to be popular. A series of bluffers' guides reveals unexpected connections between the Marquis de Sade, Darwin and Hitler. Terry Eagleton on the pros and cons of a much-mocked format
Published 21 February 2005
How to Read Darwin
Mark Ridley, Granta Books
ISBN 1862077282
Freud by Josh Cohen
l Hitler by Neil Gregor
Nietzsche by Keith Ansell Pearson
l Sade by John Phillips
Wittgenstein by Ray Monk
Granta Books, £6.99 each
Packaging complex ideas for popular consumption can be defended on the half-a-loaf principle. A grossly oversimplified grasp of Einstein is better than no grasp at all, just as a fiver is worse than a grand but better than being penniless. If a job is worth doing, as G K Chesterton sagely observed, it's worth doing badly. A blurred photograph of someone, Ludwig Wittgenstein reminded us, is still a photograph. Indeed, for some purposes, a blurred photo may suit us best; sometimes we want the bare outlines, not the intricate detail. And this, in intellectual matters, is when we turn to the bluffer's guide.
Effective popularisers, however, are rare birds. Young academics tend to fight shy of the practice, even though it can be a fairly painless way of adding to their CVs. This is because it is too easy to suspect them of knowing no more of the subject in question than the simple-minded account they give. Old-timers with a few scholarly tomes under their belts are less suspect in this respect, but may well regard popularising as beneath their dignity. And because academia is all about footnoting, hair-splitting and going on at interminable length, those who know most about a topic are often the least well equipped to communicate it clearly. It remains one of the great mysteries of modern civilisation that a PhD is considered to be a qualification for teaching rather than an obstacle to it.
Any new batch of guides to great thinkers, such as this How to Read series from Granta, has to carve for itself a distinctive niche in an overcrowded market. How to Read does so by contrasting its own "first-hand" commentaries with the "second-hand" ones of other series. Whereas other guides give you condensed summaries or potted biographies, these books let you encounter thinkers eyeball to eyeball by analysing passages from their work. This, it must be confessed, is a bit of a cod. For one thing, it makes it sound as though rival series never quote from the great minds they investigate, which is untrue. If you write a volume for Phoenix's Great Philosophers series, for example, you are asked to devote about a third of it to quotations from your author. Modern Masters, Past Masters and Very Short Introductions and the like are stuffed with the thinkers' own words. For another thing, you do not necessarily learn how to read an author by probing scattered passages of his or her prose. In any case, of these first six studies, only Neil Gregor's Hitler really takes the brief seriously and gets down to some detailed textual analysis.
Darwin, Freud, Hitler, Nietzsche, Sade and Wittgenstein would seem linked by no common thread. These, presumably, were simply the first half-dozen manuscripts to land on the series editor's desk. Yet they have more in common than the publishers might have noticed. All of these writers pose a challenge to orthodox western reason, while remaining profoundly in its debt. The Marquis de Sade challenged reason by pressing it to a scandalous extreme. Deeply indebted to the materialist phil-osophes of the French Enlightenment, he found in their mechanistic, godforsaken world a fine excuse for sexual transgression. Nature knows no crime, so neither should we. Reason, pushed to its limits, flips over into perpetual orgy.
Charles Darwin has a similarly ambiguous relation to Enlightenment thought. As a natural scientist, he was one of its heirs; but the theory of evolution challenged the sway of reason. It was random variations, not human consciousness, that governed the world. Just as Copernicus had dislodged the earth from its pride of place in the universe, so Darwin displaced humanity from its sovereignty on earth. It was then left to Sigmund Freud, another scientific rationalist, to turn the tools of reason against itself. The masterful ego was now merely the tip of an enormous iceberg known as the unconscious. We were no longer masters in our own house. But to discover all this required a mercilessly analytic investigation.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had a certain wary respect for Freud (it took one Viennese to know another), got his start under the grandfather of all 20th-century English rationalists, Bertrand Russell, but later came to see this style of thought as his deadliest enemy. As Ray Monk points out in his excellent study, Wittgenstein was "too mystical for logicians, too technical for mystics, too poetic for philosophers and too philosophical for poets". In his early phase, he championed an austerely logical view of the world, though with a curious mystical quirk; the later, more laid-back philosopher preferred poetry, anecdotes, jokes, bad movies and Saint Augustine. In the end, this eccentric patrician believed that knowledge was a matter of knack and know-how rather than a question of logic. And yet, to arrive at this position demanded an inclusiveness of mind that Hume and Voltaire could only have envied.
Adolf Hitler ditched rational inquiry for myth, blood and soil. Fascism, however, is a triumph of technology as well as a carnival of unreason, a brutal march of progress as much as a retreat to the archaic. It remains fiercely contested as to whether the Nazi death camps were the ruin of the Enlightenment or its tragic consummation. It is not inconceivable that they were both. The questions posed by this dark epoch remain with us. Is liberal, enlightened thought enough to defeat a savage irrationalism, or does it not go sufficiently deep to grapple with it? Yet how can one sink to this level without surrendering to it? In the era of Hitler, it was the fiction of Thomas Mann that framed these questions most memorably.
It is never easy to draw the line between a creative challenge to orthodox reason and sheer barbarous irrationalism. If feminism represents the first, fascism belongs to the second; yet where exactly do we place Jung, Rilke, Yeats, dadaism or D H Lawrence? Hitler stands unquestionably on one side of this divide, but a great deal of modernism straddles it uneasily. As, indeed, does Friedrich Nietzsche, who shook western rationality to its roots with his breathtakingly original genius, but who also went in for eugenics and displayed a contempt for democracy.
All six of these volumes do an efficient job, though Monk and Mark Ridley, both of them old hands at popularisation, are crisper and more pedagogically minded than their colleagues. Both Gregor on Hitler and Ridley on Darwin are lucid, erudite and informative. John Phillips fails to plumb some of Sade's philosophical depths, and his book is rather loosely structured; but he is brave enough to confess that the marquis's writings can be morally outrageous, rather than take the boringly fashionable line that pornography is boring. Josh Cohen's lively account of Freud doesn't always keep a steady eye on the reader, but it packs in an impressive amount. So does Keith Ansell Pearson's admirably wide-ranging study of Nietzsche, which manages to recreate something of the profound strangeness and excitement of his work while remaining coolly judicious. Another eight volumes, including Marx, Shakespeare, Sartre and Foucault, are in the pipeline.
Terry Eagleton's most recent book is The English Novel: an introduction (Blackwell)
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