A World Without Why by Raymond Geuss (review)

Especially in recent works, Raymond Geuss has expressed an unabashedly bleak view of the practice of philosophy and what we can expect to gain from it. In his latest collection of essays, A World Without Why, Geuss continues to write in this vein. Although he characteristically addresses an impressive variety of topics, the book is held together by a general engagement with the question of authority and by Geuss’s ongoing effort to philosophize outside the bounds of contemporary philosophy. Indeed, one of the forms of authority with which he most takes issue is that of philosophy itself. Nonetheless, Geuss has a favorite cast of philosophers who he frequently enlists in his unique brand of philosophically informed critique, including Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Adorno, and Foucault. And throughout his career, Nietzsche has consistently attracted much of Geuss’s attention. Geuss has written two influential essays on Nietzsche—“Nietzsche and Genealogy” and “Nietzsche and Morality,” both in Morality, Culture, and History: Essays on German Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)—and he has edited two volumes of Nietzsche’s writings for the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series. A World Without Why certainly does not rely solely on Nietzsche’s thought, but Nietzsche and Nietzschean themes loom large. It is, therefore, appropriate to pay particular attention to the book’s Nietzschean elements.

In his essay, “Nietzsche and Genealogy” (4), Geuss explains that a genealogy can uncover the role of the “historically contingent conjunction” of separate processes in forging subjects that we mistakenly take as having a coherent unity or single point of origin. This understanding of genealogy guides many of the essays in A World Without Why, insofar as they aim to destabilize assumptions about unified coherence through discussions of multiple meanings and origins. In “Goals, Origins, Disciplines,” Geuss argues that it is a mistake to view philosophy itself as having a “unity.” Noting the historically contingent conjunction of various modes of inquiry, such as the study of physics, mathematics, language, and politics, in shaping philosophy, he writes, “[t]his story is a tempting development of Nietzschean themes about the artificiality of what has its origin in a series of contingent encounters of originally diverse and heterogeneous elements” (18). Geuss proceeds to reflect on the prospects for a future dissolution of philosophy into separate disciplines. But he never specifies what has happened in contemporary philosophy to warrant speculation about its dissolution. On the contrary, throughout these essays, he seems entirely indifferent to everything that is happening in philosophy, rendering his characterizations of it suspect.

Presumably, Geuss is unbothered by a potential dissolution of philosophy. In the closing essay, which gives the collection its title, he voices his personal distaste for his chosen profession and a desire to find a way out of the “why-game” he thinks dominates it. Geuss sees the current practice of philosophy as repressive in its “endlessly repeated shouts of ‘why,’ the rebuttals, calls for ‘evidence,’ qualifications and quibbles” (232). Two essays specifically address the values that he thinks prevail in the habits of thought of philosophers and nonphilosophers alike. In “Vix intellegitur,” he criticizes the emphasis on clarity in writing and speech. He thinks that this desideratum inhibits our capacity to express ourselves and that we accept many things as clear only “because repressive social forces impose restrictive, determinate forms on our behaviour and on our modes of thinking and imagining” (44). In “Must Criticism Be Constructive?,” he again raises the issue of social control, arguing that the expectation that any negative criticism be accompanied by a positive, alternative proposal can stifle truly radical criticism. While questioning such values and recognizing how they can repress more enriching modes of experience is in keeping with Nietzsche’s own critique of philosophical values, Geuss’s talk of social control and repression is worrisomely vague. Which social forces? How are they repressing?

Consistent with genealogical practice, Geuss’s preferred approach to dealing with topics of present relevance is by...