Self-Appointed Legislators to Mankind: Intellectuals and Tyranny

university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 2, spring 2003 T.H. ADAMOWSKI Self-Appointed Legislators to Mankind: Intellectuals and Tyranny You wondered ... whether the worst enemies of civilization might not prove to be its petted intellectuals, who attacked it at its weakest moments. Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler=s Planet Bernard-Henri Lévy. Le siècle de Sartre: Enquête philosophique. Bernard Grasset 2000. 668. $36.95 paper Mark Lilla. The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics. New York Review Books 2001. 216. $39.95 Richard Wolin. Heidegger=s Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse. Princeton University Press 2001. 276 $46.50 Here is Heidegger on the university: What is taking place in this extending and consolidating of the institutional character of the sciences? Nothing less than the making secure of the precedence of methodology over whatever is (nature and history), which at any given time becomes objective in research. On the foundation of their character as ongoing activity, the sciences are creating for themselves the solidarity and unity appropriate to them. Therefore historiographical or archaeological research that is carried forward in an institutionalized way is essentially closer to research in physics that is similarly organized than it is to a discipline belonging to its own faculty in the humanistic sciences that still remains mired in mere erudition. Hence the decisive development of the modern character of science as ongoing activity also forms men of a different stamp. The scholar disappears. He is succeeded by the research man who is engaged in research projects. These, rather than the cultivation of erudition, lend to his work its atmosphere of incisiveness. The research man no longer needs a library at home. Moreover, he is constantly on the move. He negotiates at meetings and collects information at congresses. (The Question Concerning Technology, 25) If Heidegger=s >research man= seems familiar (we need add to his résumé only grantsmanship), it is because he is the archetypally successful university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 2, spring 2003 professor of the modern university, and more than any twentieth-century philosopher it is Heidegger who has taught us to be wary of the modern. Modernization: for Heidegger, it has been, since Descartes, the expresstrain of what he called the >metaphysics of subjectivity,= of the will-to-will, of the insistence on truth as correct >representations= for the >subject,= of the calling-to-attention of both history and nature (even when it >environmentalizes = the latter), of the >en-framing= (Gestell) of nature that makes it little more than a cupboard out of which we pull whatever canned goods we intend to put to our own use. Or, as Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut describe it: >in Heidegger=s view metaphysics as the search for a supreme reality (a Aprimary being@) who is the foundation and model for all of reality, has been realized since Descartes in the form of an Aanthropology@ or, in other words, in the form of a philosophy in which it is man as Amaster and possessor of nature@ who confers on every being its real substance and assigns it its real place in a world he organizes for his own purposes= (Ferry and Renaut, 20). In Heidegger=s term, this metaphysics is >humanism= in action. Even if he be an earnest scientist, a busily consulting economist, or a utilitarian engineer, Research Man is always a humanist-in-residence. Of course, Research Man is also found everywhere in the humanities. No longer much interested in using the quaint word >scholar= to define his activity, humanities Research Man busily reproduces himself by training newly arrived PhD students in the first law of the researcher: >the precedence of methodology over whatever is.= Professors enframe poems, novels, plays, stories, and paintings, calling them before the bar of whatever >methodology= currently interests them and insisting that these cultural >productions= display their social and political credentials. >Tell me, Shakespeare/Kant/Wordsworth, where did you stand on the gender /race/class/colonization question?= That not all currently active critical enframers may have read Heidegger is neither here nor there. This is merely a question of who they are. Undoubtedly, they have read Barthes or...