Abstract
An examination of the evolving position of the public intellectual since roughly the era of Nietzsche and Zola demonstrates the importance of clarity and confusion in debates over the political purpose of criticism and intellectuals. Discussions of Matthew Arnold ’s “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” and Culture and Anarchy alongside Thomas Mann ’s Reflections of an Unpolitical Man and Julien Benda ’s The Treason of the Intellectuals argue that what have often been read as passionate apologies for apoliticism are in fact better understood as agendas for an intellectual activism that achieves ultimately political ends through non-political means, as an indirect route to broad social transformation that operates at levels more fundamental than those of surface, partisan, immediate political content.
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Notes
- 1.
As David Schalk points out, Romain Rolland voiced the same feelings in an emotional letter to Gerhart Hauptmann begging Hauptmann to speak out against “the German invasion of Belgium” (10). “In such a moment,” wrote Rolland on 29 August 1914, “silence itself is an act” (qtd Schalk 10). Consider, too, George Orwell ’s characteristically blunt claim in “Why I Write” that “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude” (Collected Essays 1.7); and Bertolt Brecht’s assertion in 1948’s Short Organum for the Theatre that “For art to be ‘non-partisan [unparteiisch]’ means only to ally itself to the ‘ruling’ group” (Brecht on Theatre 196/GBA 23.87).
- 2.
In 1924’s The Magic Mountain, Mann places strikingly similar words in the mouth of the rational humanist Settembrini: “The man who loves his fellow man [der Menschenfreund] cannot distinguish between what is political and what is not. The apolitical [Nichtpolitik] does not exist—everything is politics” (505/704).
- 3.
See Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity, and Intellectuals (Cambridge: Polity, 1987); Charle; Bruce Robbins’s introduction to Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics; and Michel Winock’s Le siècle des intellectuels (Paris: Seuil, 1997). Stefan Collini’s Absent Minds contains a detailed pair of chapters on the history of the word “intellectual” (15–44) and the definition of the assumed role of intellectuals (45–65). On the responsibility of intellectuals more generally, see, for example, Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848–1932 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987); L. Bodin, Les Intellectuels (Paris: PU de France, 1964); Ian McLean, Alan Montefiore and Peter Winch, eds., The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991); Jacques Rancière, The Intellectual and His People (London: Verso, 2012); and Edward Said, “Speaking Truth to Power,” in Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage, 1994): 85–102.
- 4.
In 1875, when “he attacked Otto Jahn , one of his former teachers in Bonn,” Nietzsche “was above all dissatisfied not with historical scholarship as such, but rather with its political orientation: Jahn’s rectorial address at the University of Bonn in 1859, ‘Die Bedeutung und Stellung der Alterthumsstudien in Deutschland,’ is a largely politically oriented piece intended for a wider audience to safeguard the already fragile integrity of classical scholarship in the changing intellectual landscape of the nineteenth century” (Emden 101–102).
- 5.
Mann injects emphases with reckless abandon in the Reflections, and so all are his except where noted.
- 6.
In addition to Schalk’s attention to Benda’s turn to engagement, Jean Sarocchi’s Julien Benda: Portrait d’un intellectuel (Paris: Nizet, 1968) makes the case that Benda was engaged all along and that The Treason of the Intellectuals is best seen as disingenuous in light of its author’s frequent polemics in favor of—and direct support for—explicitly political actions. Michael Walzer echoes this in his chapter on Benda in The Company of Critics, saying that the ideal critic’s part “is not an easy part to play, not, at least, if one takes the script literally; nor did Benda himself play it with any consistency” (29).
- 7.
On the use of Nietzsche in the Reflections, see Hermann Kurzke, “Nietzsche in den Betrachtungen eines Unpoliticschen,” in Wagner—Nietzsche—Thomas Mann, ed. Heinz Gockel, Michael Neumann and Ruprecht Wimmer (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1993. 184–202). Mann’s contempt for Zola in the Reflections must be weighed against his later claim, in 1940’s “On Myself,” that Zola was a “god” to Mann, along with Turgenev and Tolstoy (134). This later claim makes perfect sense, however, when we recall that, by the 1940s, Mann’s views of the relationship between literature and politics had utterly changed.
- 8.
One other bit of shared topical terrain is their patently un-Nietzschean understanding of the Greeks, and Socrates in particular becomes a contested figure. Stefan Collini claims that “the Greeks are the unacknowledged heroes of Culture and Anarchy” (Arnold 84), and Dickstein reminds us that “Arnold falls prey to a typically idealized image of Greek wholeness and serenity” contrasted by Nietzsche’s “darker, more irrational side of Greek culture ” (486). This is especially visible in the Hellenism/Hebraism opposition that organizes a whole constellation of values in Culture and Anarchy. See also Malcolm Bull’s Anti-Nietzsche (Verso, 2011), which maps Nietzsche’s Greek figures (Dionysus, Apollo, Silenus, Socrates) onto Arnold’s spectrum of art and ethics. As for Arnold and Benda, both laud Socrates for his commitment to reason above politics—Benda concludes the essay with the image of Socrates and Jesus Christ, his exemplars of clerks who did not abandon their posts (203)—and this, too, sees them at odds with Nietzsche’s hatred of Socrates, in The Birth of Tragedy, for the effects of his rationalism on Greek tragedy. See Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (67, 211) and Benda (51ff).
- 9.
Mann quite often voices his opinions in ironic parrotings of his opponents’ views, something we might dismiss as a rhetorical difficulty but that acquires perhaps formal weight in light of his defense of irony as a posture. In other words, irony is not just a method but also a form.
- 10.
Political undertones are insinuated in the idea of this “choice,” since the word Wahl also denotes “election.” To choose either irony or radicalism, one might say, is to cast a vote. Later, in the Magic Mountain , Mann will have the rational humanist Settembrini warn explicitly against “the irony that flourishes here. … Beware of it in general as an intellectual stance [geistige Haltung]. When it is not employed as an honest device of classical rhetoric, the purpose of which no healthy mind can doubt for a moment, it becomes a source of depravity, a barrier to civilization, a squalid flirtation with inertia [Stillstand], nihilism [Ungeist], and vice” (217/306). Mann’s novel, whose title is borrowed from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, ultimately performs a literal duel between Settembrini and the nihilistic Naphta. Critics have often read Naphta as a cipher for Nietzsche, and at one point in the Magic Mountain Naphta even parrots the values of The Birth of Tragedy’s aesthetic of confusion: “The individual, in all the dignity of his critical faculties, did not exist, just an all-devouring, all-leveling community [Gemeinschaft], and a mystical submersion in it” (455/634). Naphta’s suicide in the aborted duel against Settembrini might lead one to believe in the novel’s sponsorship of clarity over confusion, but the ending, with the onset of trench warfare attributed to “science gone berserk [verwilderte Wissenschaft],” makes this problematic (705/983).
- 11.
See “Making a Spectacle of Ourselves: The Unpolitical Ending of Thomas Mann’s Mario und der Zauberer” (Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 45.4 [2009]: 353–68. Print).
- 12.
In an essay so certain of uncertainty, Mann’s ideas are laid out in a manner Mulhern labels “regular to the point of schematism” (5). Mulhern is even able to include a handy chart in two columns in Culture/Metaculture showing Mann’s fairly consistent alignment of certain values into certain columns. This schematic thought is worth mentioning as a point of contrast with the Reflections’ case against being overly schematic.
- 13.
Benda picks, as a prime example of improvements he acknowledges, the unfortunate one of the treatment of prisoners of war: “the historian … is amazed at the transformation of a species which only four centuries ago roasted prisoners of war in baker’s ovens” (200). It is impossible to believe that he would have said this with the benefit of hindsight after the Second World War and the Holocaust .
- 14.
Not lost on him, Sartre refers to precisely this point of disagreement in What Is Literature? (69/72).
- 15.
This is emphasized to varying degrees by numerous critics, though rarely explained in concert with Arnold’s epistemology. Tillotson reminds us that Fitzjames Stephen ’s negative review “hoisted [Arnold] as a transcendentalist self-duped into believing that ‘reason’ … had power to touch the field of practice. … Stephen did see that it was with practice that, for all his transcendental stuff, Arnold was concerned” (45). Bill Bell more haltingly suggests that, “For all of its complex difficulties, in its unremitting concern for the relationship between the aesthetic and the social, Arnoldian criticism has probably contributed more in Britain than any other—Marxist and Leavisite included—to the creation of that space in which literary criticism even today claims to engage with the political” (217). See also Trilling (204-71), Raymond Williams (Culture and Society 128), and Garber (20-22).
- 16.
Adrian Del Caro argues that Mann’s ardently conservative position makes the Reflections already political. He quips that the essays are “perhaps the greatest political treatise ever to have sailed under a non-political flag” (22).
- 17.
Bennett, Kimball, and others repeatedly referred to the “conservative,” preservationist role of traditional education as they conceived it, often leaning on their own readings of Arnold’s “best that is known and thought” (see Kimball 45, and xiii, where he actually misquotes Arnold’s phrase). Kimball wrote an introduction to the edition of Benda I cite here, and Jack Ayres pointed out to me that Kimball’s New Criterion colleague Samuel Lipman has edited an edition of Culture and Anarchy (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1994).
- 18.
Christina Wald’s excellent chapter “Martha C. Nussbaum versus Judith Butler oder ‚Old-style‘ Feminismus versus poststrukturalische Gender-Theorie” has already situated the Nussbaum/Butler division as one of practice against theory. I lean on her essay here but hope also to show both the longer roots of this division and the manner in which it speaks to the late-nineteenth-century schism between the political potential of clarity and that of confusion. Attridge, interestingly, in an essay (“Arche-jargon”) discussing the animus against jargon, ascribes this animus to “a demand for clarity” (Reading and Responsibility 78). See also Kevin Lamb and Jonathan Culler, eds., Just Being Difficult?: Academic Writing in the Public Arena (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003); and Robert Alan Brookey and Diane Helene Miller, “Changing Signs: The Political Pragmatism of Poststructuralism” (International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies 6.1/2 [2001]: 139–153). On the Collini/Mulhern discussion, see James Walter Caulfield’s Overcoming Matthew Arnold: Ethics in Culture and Criticism (London: Ashgate, 2013).
- 19.
Such accusations and defenses of actual engagement occur in a weaker form in the exchange between Mulhern and Collini. Mulhern accuses Collini of lacking “specific commitments” and of being “scarcely political” as a cultural critic (“What Is Cultural Criticism? 36, 48). Collini responds in a section titled “Scarcely Political?” with a set of examples from his own work, in which specifically political stances or evaluations exist both implicitly and explicitly (“On Variousness” 84–86). One is also reminded here of Heinrich Mann ’s careful distinction, in his essay on Zola, between Zola’s activism of “Spirit [Geist]” and activism of “Deed [Tat].” These are the titles of two consecutive chapters in Mann’s essay, which clearly builds toward the apparently more important latter one, the chapter of pure action that details Zola’s intervention into the Dreyfus Affair .
- 20.
This follows many published sentiments about academics by activists and intellectuals alike. Stuart Hall , for example, famously cautions that “there is all the difference in the world between understanding the politics of intellectual work and substituting intellectual work for politics” (286). Mark Rudd , of the Weather Underground, describes one of his fellow SDS members as “a Columbia graduate and brilliant sociology graduate student” who “might have had a career as a respected professor, talking a great game about revolution. But he believed in throwing in his lot with the oppressed of the world, no matter the consequences” (308).
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Baker, G.A. (2016). Between Theory and Practice: Matthew Arnold, Thomas Mann, Julien Benda, and the Purpose of the Intellectual. In: The Aesthetics of Clarity and Confusion. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42171-1_4
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