Philip Rieff adopted the categories and language of Freud, but reinterpreted them in a way that supported culture and the moral life. Batchelder and Harding have edited a new volume of essays on Rieff, who they argue is a key thinker for any attempt to diagnose late modern cultural life. They join host James Patterson to discuss Rieff, Martin Luther King Jr., Susan Sontag, and unimaginable depravities.
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The Philosophy of Philip Rieff: Cultural Conflict, Religion, and the Self
Transcript
James Patterson:
Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty in this podcast are published by Liberty Fund. Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. My name is James Patterson, contributing editor to Law & Liberty. With me today are my guests, William G. Batchelder IV, and Michael P. Harding. They are co-editors of a new edited volume titled The Philosophy of Philip Rieff: Cultural Conflict, Religion, and the Self.
It’s just come out on Bloomsbury Press and we’ll be talking at length about why we should take an interest in Rieff and what insights he has to contemporary life. Drs. Batchelder and Harding, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.
William Batchelder:
Thank you, James.
Michael Harding:
Thank you.
James Patterson:
I should mention that we are all very good friends and know each other from many meetings of the Ciceronian Society. So if things get a little informal, it’s because of my lack of self-restraint. Drs. Harding and Batchelder, who was Philip Rieff?
Michael Harding:
I’ll let you take it, Bill.
William Batchelder:
All right. Philip Rieff was the Benjamin Franklin Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. That was his highest professional attainment. He was born, I think, in 1922 and died in 2006. As a young man, before he’d even finished his doctoral dissertation, he was teaching at the University of Chicago, where he met his first wife, the young Susan Sontag. He was actually married to, of course, one of America’s leading cultural critics. It was a short and tumultuous marriage. They were divorced, I think … Was it eight years later, Michael? Six years later?
Michael Harding:
It was relatively a short order, yeah.
William Batchelder:
And he was the author … He arrived on the scene intellectually with the publication of his first two books. The first was Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. And the second was The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud. The first of those was published, Michael, 58?
Michael Harding:
I think so, yeah.
William Batchelder:
Then, in the early ’60s for The Triumph of the Therapeutic. It was those two books that first made his name as an expositor of Freud. The second was an exposition of Freud, but also a departure from Freud in a couple important ways as he limbed other intellectuals who had departed from Freud, focused most particularly on Wilhelm Reich, on Carl Jung, and to a lesser extent on Adler and some other people who found Freud to be unsatisfying in the deliverance he could offer the afflicted in one way or the other. We can get into what that was to him. He turned his guns as it were on the academy in a work called Fellow Teachers, which I think is, Michael, 1973?
Michael Harding:
72, maybe 74.
William Batchelder:
And after Fellow Teachers he had a poet who admired him, called his great silence. It wasn’t really silent because there were three major articles that he published and a book review that somehow was half of My Life Among the Deathworks. He really did not … He had been on top of the world academically. He’s at Ivy and an endowed chair with two major publications, and a lot of people regarded Fellow Teachers as deliberate professional suicide. He didn’t divide it into chapters. He certainly didn’t divide it into subheadings or subchapters. As one of his essayists wrote about him, “He hid most of the important arguments in the footnotes.” Why did he deliberately do this to himself? There are a lot of different arguments about why he did this, but at any rate, save three or four important articles.
He was silent until the year of his death in 2006, when the first volume of what we call the Sacred Order/Social Order trilogy came out. That first volume is My Life Among the Deathworks. It’s hard to sum up one thing that My Life Among the Deathworks is about, but we can talk about Deathworks. Then, after he passed away, they published as the second volume, The Crisis of the Officer Class. The third volume, The Jew of Culture, came out the year following, and around the same time, posthumously, his students, bless them, put together and edited and put out the work that he had been doing apparently on and off for decades on Charisma, where he goes after Weber in one of Weber’s most important concepts, and revisits the idea and demands a correction in our conception of Charisma.
And this came out shortly after his death as well. We had this great silence, and at the end, really, what Sacred Order/Social Order is doing is offering his fully developed theory of culture. I think it’s fair to say that was the purpose of those books, particularly the first two volumes. Particularly Deathworks and Crisis of the Officer Class. Michael, would you add anything to that?
Michael Harding:
All right, I would add one little thing to it, yeah. In Crisis, chapter six, toward the fourth culture, he does make a comment that seems to apply to the entirety of his … At least his later work. He says, “These reading exercises have been an experiment in preparing the way for the teaching and symbolic institutions of a fourth culture.” One hesitates to call it a practical intent, but there is this … I guess we will call it a practical intent behind it or political intent, right? He’s not just saying, “Well, here’s my theory of culture.” He’s trying to actively shape the future to some degree, albeit with a lot less optimism about the possibility of doing it than somebody like Nietzsche.
James Patterson:
This is an interesting account because I suspect most of the listeners are only somewhat dimly aware, if at all, of Rieff. Did Rieff have any major students? Why is it that maybe he’s become more obscure? And why bring him back the way that this volume intends to do?
William Batchelder:
My favorite way to illustrate this, if students ask me about it, is to go to the third edition of Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. The third edition was published on the 20th anniversary of the original publication of his first book. It was 1978. And in the third edition of Mind of the Moralist, you have the original forward to the book and then you have a second forward and an epilogue that he wrote on the occasion of the release of this 20th anniversary edition. And it reads like it’s written by a different person. He adopted a style of prose which can charitably be described as impenetrable. And if you look at Mind of the Moralist and The Triumph of the Therapeutic, you’re dealing with a very erudite person wrestling with very difficult concepts, but it’s traditional academic writing.
When you look at beginning with Fellow Teachers, but then especially everything after that, he deliberately adopts a prose style, which is absolutely forbidding. Both his publishing pattern and the manner in which he was writing suggest that he is deliberately being off-putting, that he is deliberately shunned. The popular success that his ex-wife had, Susan Sontag. Michael, would you add anything?
Michael Harding:
Yeah, the obscurity partly, I think. You’ve already addressed it. The man did make a deliberate choice to commit what Zondervan refers to as academic suicide with Fellow Teachers. From an academic perspective, it is a somewhat bizarre book. Then there is the difficulty of his work. And then I think there … I’m tempted to say he really did need to think more than he needed to write. I think that his turning away from the academic industrial complex activities that a lot of us are compelled to do, I think for him that was necessary for formulating this theory of culture. The manuscript history of Deathworks, I want to say, traces back to the ’80s. Parts of it were written in the ’80s, and there are, I guess, multiple different versions of it that were found in his files, if I remember correctly. In his papers.
James Patterson:
Oh wow. The prominence of psychoanalysis of Freud, something that seems very hard to recapture, but it was such a major phenomenon in the twentieth century. What is it that he had to say about Freud: Mind of the Moralists? Also, the nature of the therapeutic as it began to transform the culture?
Michael Harding:
I’ll leave that to you, Bill. You know the Freud element.
William Batchelder:
Well, in essence in our book, The Philosophy of Philip Rieff, one of the things that we say is that the reason that Rieff is interesting is he is a Freudian who has developed some serious problems with Freud. I think we used the word descents seriously from aspects of Freud and that he’s a modern who comes to regard modernity as a catastrophe. This is one of the things that’s so rich about his thinking. In the case of Freud, he accepts the Freudian economy of the soul. The idea that you have an ego, which is the self that you experience as yourself. You have these deep-seated drives that are part of you since birth, right? The id. Then when these desires run into the demands of family and community, you develop the super ego. And the superego is the cop inside your head.
And remember, a lot of people confuse superego for conscience. But, of course, in Freud, the superego is irrational and persecutory and reactive. It’s not a conscience in the sense that you want to activate a conscience by going to a Catholic confessor. Any rationality you have is in the ego. It’s not in the superego. Rieff accepts that economy of the soul. He accepts the importance of repression … He ratifies the importance of repression in works early in weight. He believes in the process as Freud understands it. In that sense, we have someone who’s Freudian and, who, a lot of his terminology harkens back to Freud. However, very often the most interesting thing about Rieff is how he will simultaneously honor a thinker while dissenting from him. Or learning from a thinker and then … the most distinctive things about Rieff are very often the places he departs from his most important influence.
In the case of Rieff and Freud … there are different places that you could say he departs. For example, one of the places that Rieff, along with other critics of Freud, seems to depart from Freud is that Freud is very much the therapist and the patient are a negative community. And if things go well, the patient can resume being a more or less rational individual with no need of the therapist, right? The point is that you don’t need even the therapist anymore. And obviously you have transferences, it’s complicated, but what Rieff believed was, in fact, that your community, that your social group is actually really important to your well-being. That’s one place very different from Freud, but I think the most important place is that Freud said, “Every renunciation of instinct becomes a dynamic source of conscience.” Let me say that again. Every renunciation of instinct becomes a dynamic source of conscience.
And you might say, “Well, that sounds almost Christian.” Right? But, of course, what Freud believed was that when you renounce the instinct conscience, which he does not regard as moral or rational, but as persecutory, increases your suffering. That’s where your neurosis comes from. It’s a bad thing. Freud believed that it was going to be necessary to relax the requirements that society, that the group has of the individual, in order to ease that individual’s suffering. Rieff agreed that’s probably where suffering comes from. But he thought it was a good thing, not a bad thing. That is to say when you suffer because of renunciation, you aren’t necessarily contributing to neurosis. Instead, you may very well be contributing particularly in a culture which is functioning correctly. You may very well be contributing to the strengthening of your own character. Sometimes he calls this inwardness. In other places he calls it soul-making.
And this departure from Freud, there’s a deeper one. Freud believed that the primary process in the psyche is the drives, is the desires. Zondervan’s book, which is just outstanding, and everyone who’s interested in Rieff should read Zondervan’s book, and I endorse it wholeheartedly. Zondervan actually corresponded with Rieff about this because Rieff never made it super clear in his own work. But what Rieff argues is, “No, the primary process can’t be the drives because the drives are not only irrational, they’re utterly disordered. If you want to know how conscience is ordered, you can’t start with chaos.” What he believed is that conscience is ordered by what he calls a primary cultural process. That the culture which is around you, when it’s functioning, when it’s working correctly, sinks deep into you and orders your conscience rightly, and conforming to this right order strengthens your character and makes you a more graven person, that he called the idea of being carved into stone.
That your character is developed precisely because you come up against the desires of the id and don’t give into them. It doesn’t necessarily make you sick. If you’ve got a functioning culture, you don’t get neurosis from that, you get character. He’s sort of departing from Freud in thinking about what is most fundamental about the ordering of our own psyche. From this departure then, if he’s going to think that culture is primary … First of all, he obviously doesn’t mean being able to recite Lord Byron and go to the opera. That is high culture. Sure, that’s a form of culture, but that’s not what he means. What he means by culture is the morally restrictive demands of the group sunk into you early and reinforced by what’s around you, and then you reinforce it yourself by obeying. The technical term he used for this no is interdicts.
And the culture which functioned best, clearly in his view though he never puts it that bluntly, is the Jewish and Christian culture. He said that when the Jews met God, the first thing they had to learn is what they were not allowed to do to each other. That culture is conveyed by this sacred no. What’s interesting is while he accepts … Much of Freud’s economy … I shouldn’t say economy of the soul, because Freud doesn’t believe in one, economy of the person. He accepts much of Freud’s economy of the person on really fundamental grounds. He turns it upside down. And the relationship to Freud is one of both acceptance and rejection.
James Patterson:
This is heavy stuff. This is a redeployment of Freudian concepts in a way that returns to a more traditional anthropology. And maybe this explains partly why his own colleagues, especially people who worked in the same sort of study as him, didn’t like him. Right? In many cases what they see Freud as partially or entirely dismantling, he’s part of the big three with Nietzsche and Marx, right? The three moderns that will undo modern life. What accounts for the rise of the therapeutic and Rieffs concern for its displacement of a more traditional religious culture?
William Batchelder:
Well, I think what’s happening with the rise of the therapeutic, and you and I get into this some, James, in our article about Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael for the book, and Chris Anadale does a beautiful job in the book where he talks about Self-Knowledge after Rieff. He has a chapter called Self-Knowledge After Rieff, and he really gets into this in a way, frankly, Chris made me understand it better than I understood it before I read Chris article. It’s really quite good, but in a sense if the idea is the only way to help people deal with their neurosis is to lower the demands of culture on them. So to lower the moral demands, lower the restrictive demands, lower the group demands. However, it is that you want to think of it. If you have a truly therapeutic character, that character gradually becomes unbound by any of these demands.
They’re largely artificial and understood self-consciously to be artificial. Well, it’s only … It’s not much distance at all before you go from that to the idea. And Rieff was deeply disturbed with this. Carl Trueman, in his article or chapter in this book, talks about this too. You get to the idea that it’s forbidden to forbid. The idea is that you can’t forbid anything at all. Now, if it’s forbidden to forbid, then the problem that you’re going to have, and it’s a pretty serious one, is that contra Rieff who thinks that interdicts and prohibitions and their obedience grows character, if it’s forbidden to forbid, how do you get character at all? And Rieff says, “Well, you don’t. You get an actor.” He says, “The triumph of the therapeutic is a person who can self-consciously remodel herself or remodel himself.”
In one place, I think, he calls it an amoral form of knowing, but that might be Christopher’s phrase. That doesn’t mean that this person is a monster. That doesn’t mean that this person is any more wicked than someone with a traditional worldview. They may or may not be. But they simply are not bound by any unchosen obligations or strictures. And having been so unbound, they can’t form a graven self. Because in Rieff’s view the graven self is formed by the denial of the instincts, which carves character into something that is more permanent and more unmovable.
James Patterson:
This seems like something admitted by at least some of the people who have no issue with this sort of new culture. Camus advocates in The Myth of Sisyphus for people to adopt an actor’s approach or … What are the three? There’s the actor, there’s the dawned one, and then there’s a third. And these are the people who best approximate living in a therapeutic culture in which it is forbidden to forbid. He doesn’t use those terms. But he uses those same paradigms. The therapeutic culture, does it have any kind of explanation for a lot of the infusion of therapeutic language and contemporary discourse?
Michael Harding:
One of the things that comes to mind is that for Rieff, I think, part of what leads to this rise of the therapeutic is the collapse of second culture. We haven’t quite talked about this yet. But one way to understand what Rieff is concerned with is what happens to human beings when that authority with a capital A is no longer recognized. It’s forbidden to forbid, precisely because there is no principle which one would appeal to in order to judge what is to be forbidden. What Rieff talks about is he talks about the primacy of possibility. And the primacy of possibility is what we might call the complete range of possibilities open to human beings. If we want to use moralistic language, we could talk about it in terms of the heights of virtue and the depth of all imaginable depravities. And what culture does is culture kind of says, “Well, we do this. We don’t do that.” Right?
Culture forbids. Culture helps us shape character by saying, “This is a desire you don’t act on. This is a sentiment or a thought you don’t pursue.” What the therapeutic does is in the wake of the collapse of that authority with a capital A, which is a very big complicated issue for Rieff, the nature of this authority. In the wake of the collapse of that authority with a capital A, the therapeutic doesn’t give you something to replace it. The therapeutic doesn’t give you some principle by which you would limit yourself. Does that sound fair to you, Bill?
William Batchelder:
Yeah, he says that a religious man is born to be saved, but therapeutic man is born to be pleased.
Michael Harding:
Yeah. And you can see this. I think that you can see a lot of this today, even in the way we structure political and social debates in our society. A lot of it comes down to, “Well, if somebody wants to do this, what is the possible objection? As long as they’re consenting adults, why should we care?” Rieff … There’s a point in … It’s either in Deathworks or Crisis of the Officer Class where he says something like, “Consent seems to me to be the same as no principle at all.” Because what you’re really doing is saying there really isn’t a limit to what you can do. There was a case in Austria, maybe 20 years ago, where … I think it was Austria. It might’ve been Germany, where one gentleman went on Craigslist looking for someone to consume his flesh. He wanted to be killed and eaten, and this other guy wanted to kill and eat.
And if we accept that consent is the only principle, we can’t look at that and say, “Well, wait a minute. Something’s gone very wrong here. We need to have some principle other than mere consent.” Which is part of the point Rieff is driving at. The primacy of possibility is this truly dangerous thing? And what culture does is culture … Or at least first and second culture, put restraints on that. We defined ourselves. We’re the ones who don’t do this. We’re the ones who don’t do that. And that, in turn, leads to the establishment of this graven character and everything Bill’s been talking about.
William Batchelder:
And maybe we should talk about the synchronic, what he calls the three synchronic cultures so that your listeners aren’t lost. Essentially, he said that all three exist at the same time, but all three also can be attributed to particular times in history. He is a historicist in this sense. The first culture is the culture of pagan antiquity, and essentially what he says is the primacy of possibility to them is the meta divine. It’s this immense energy from whence spring the gods, even themselves. First-culture people understand and respect and fear the meta divine as it is a menacing power, right? It’s my favorite phrase in all of Rieff, he refers to it as the … What is it? “The constant energy of menace.” That’s how he refers to this primacy of possibility. It’s the constant energy of menace.
And the way you wall that off is by taboos. Taboos are not the same as the interdicts that come from the Jewish God, because they’re not always so easy to explain in mutual moral terms. But you obey the taboos so that you do not touch the constant energy of menace. You don’t touch … Again, even the gods are subject to the meta divine. If you think about polytheistic myths, the Aesir will be destroyed in Ragnarok. Zeus is limited by the fates. There are powers even above the gods that the gods have to respect and fear and how much more human beings need to respect and fear those. He calls that it’s a ethic of fate. Then he says, the second culture, which is born in Jerusalem and then through Christianity goes all over Eastern Europe and the near East. The second culture is the culture of faith. In the culture of faith there is no primordial meta divine.
The absolute highest power and authority is God himself, who speaks the whole world into creation, so there can’t be anything above him. And instead of taboos, you have interdicts. You have direct thou shalt nots, that build a moral order. And Rieff is absolutely insistent that the beginning of culture is always the no, the what you can’t do. Over and over, he insists on this. This held for a very long time and only begins to come apart with the dawn of the third culture. Now, Rieff says, because they’re antecedent, in other words, human nature can make any of these available to itself, in a sense. But the third culture as a force historically comes into being in the late nineteenth century, and it’s ushered into being by what he calls an officer class, which is why his second to last book is called The Crisis of the Officer Class.
And this officer class that he has in mind are principally that the most important are Nietzsche and Freud and Weber. Artists like Duchamp, in particular, Picasso, James Joyce in literature, and what they’re teaching is that there is no final authority. There is the interdicts are false. And that it is essentially forbidden to forbid. But because they cannot offer any highest authority anymore, their whole purpose is to dethrone that highest authority to end the interdicts. To say that’s forbidden to forbid, what you end up having with the third culture are intellectuals who are in Rieff’s words, “God threatened.” That so much of the third culture is dedicated to some very often creative and brilliant and stunning and often trashy and absurd ways of tearing down the second culture. What you see is over and over and over an adversarial address to the second culture and to the authority above it without really offering anything at all in its place.
You have this kind of hammering negative culture that emerges. If it’s forbidden to forbid, then it’s only tearing down. Whereas the old function of culture, again, it goes far beyond some piece of art you might create, and is the demands of the group sunk into the individual internalized very young. Then to the extent that it’s obeyed and understood, that character is strengthened. It’s a really profound mutual arrangement in the second culture, right? The group in some way sinks these interdicted demands into the person. Each time the person obeys those, he is strengthened. But also the society around him is strengthened by its obedience. When they make an address to authority, those addresses to authority, cathedrals and poems and Psalms and proverbs, those also strengthen the interdicts. You have this constant building and strengthening and thickening of these interdicts through lived experience and through artistic expression.
Well, in the third culture, that ain’t the function of high art, but it’s also not the function of the group which is increasingly individualistic. And really what’s left to artists is either politicized art, which we see a very great deal of. An attempt to have this weak sauce version of an address to ultimate authority where it becomes politics, or you just have the nihilistic hammering of the culture which came before it, as Serrano’s piss Christ. These kinds of blasphemous attacks. Joyce’s mockery of the liturgy. And, of course, a thousand absurd Norwegian black metal debased versions of the same thing. Just the unending assault on the old culture. And you think, “Why is it that it’s so astonishingly negative?” But again, if you understand as Rieff does, that culture is essentially interdictory and you don’t believe in interdicts, then you’re not building anything. And all that’s left is to tear down the culture that came before.
James Patterson:
We talk about this in our chapter where we mark the moment … Ours meaning Bill Batchelder’s mind, where you see a transition in the civil rights movement from a figure like Dr. Martin Luther King, who’s a man of interdicts, at least in his professed belief. But somewhat attracted to therapeutic language, right? He has this temptation to use that language … Especially because it’s very evocative. People are rhetorically moved by addressing the kind of experiences of people rather than making claims about violations of duty or moral law. Then the rise of the opposition in the figure of Stokely Carmichael, who is a man of tearing down. Not just rightfully wanting to tear down the authorities of Jim Crow, but also the authorities that Martin Luther King uses to demand justice. Why don’t you explain how Rieff works out that distinction between the two and how it’s a good example of why Rieff’s ideas deserve a closer attention?
William Batchelder:
The text to look at for this is Charisma: The Gift of Grace, and How It Has Been Taken Away from Us, which is published posthumously around the same time as the end of the Sacred Order/Social Order trilogy. And they actually did a paperback version. It is like his other late work, a daunting and unfriendly text, in many ways. It starts out in a more traditional academic approach. By the middle, it’s even more impenetrable than parts of Deathworks. I offer that as a caution, but he has profound things to say regardless. And one of the things that he has to say is that Weber misunderstood charisma, which is like saying Marx misunderstood class struggle. It is an ambitious charge to make. And essentially what he said … Again, one of the reasons that Michael and I love Rieff so much is the respect and honor he shows to people even when he’s disagreeing with them. The respect and honor he shows to Nietzsche when he disagrees with them. The respect and honor he shows to Freud when he departs from him. The respect that … And he does the same thing with Weber.
He basically says, “Look, Weber got to this idea before me, but his intellectual commitments were such that he couldn’t admit it, so he turned away.” Rieff basically says, “I’m not even saying something that Weber didn’t deep down know.” But essentially Weber makes charisma dependent upon recognition. That is to say, at the end of the day, the charismatic can be identified because the people around him identify him as someone to honor, respect, follow, obey, and look up to. It’s purely the phenomena of their recognition that makes them charismatic. And, of course, Rieff points out how nihilistic that is. Imagine a category, if we just look at Rieff’s mid-century … Or look at King’s mid-century contemporaries, imagine a category which would include Mao Tse-tung, Sonny Barger, Mick Jagger, and Martin Luther King.
Now, every one of them has been described as charismatic, and that shows that the modern use of the term is utterly meaningless. They are nothing alike and in some ways morally opposite. What Rieff says is, “If you want to understand charisma as it functions in …” What he calls, “A working symbolic.” In other words, a culture that hasn’t failed, “Then the purpose of the charismatic is …” I think this is an exact quote, “To ignite the fire of a new no.” That is to say the purpose of the charismatic is to bear the burden of the no on himself, on his body, in his character, in his actions. We think of ascetic saints in the Middle Ages, right? Saint Wulfric, for example, in England in the twelfth century was visited by King Stephen. He spit in his face and slapped him and was unpunished. Why? Wolfric was a holy anchorite who is known for his devotions and for his miraculous ability to weave chain mail and give little links as holy gifts by his hands.
And because he embodied the thou shalt not in his self-denial, when the king himself showed up, Wolfric lets him have it. And this is accepted, right? Because he has embodied the sacred no. Whereas if you take Jesus, some people misunderstand Jesus and they think, “Well, what’s charismatic about him is that he overthrew the ritual law.” Very often in Weber, and then much worse later as this idea is popularized. The charismatic is a rebel and overturning of old moral structures. And Rieff says quite the opposite. Jesus may seem like he’s overturning old moral structures, that is parts of the ritual law, say for example. But only because Jesus is moving those demands from the outside to the inside where they’re even more demanding. Where they’re even more rigorous, so that real charisma upholds the sacred order by embodying the interdicts. It’s not simply a person who is recognized by others as being somehow persuasive or beautiful or moving or whatever.
And if you look at King, the argument for his being a true charismatic is his beautiful commitment to nonviolence. Anyone who refuses violence even when his own home is bombed by white supremacists. And when his children and his wife were home, right? And says, “Yeah, still no violence. Still no violence, even when this nearly cost me my family, and had I been home, my life.” That is the mark of a charismatic. Now, it’s not so easy as James and I argue in the chapter. The problem is that Rieff adds a further stricture to his definition of the charismatic, which is, “No one may speak of sacred order, who is not living it.” And, of course, the problem we’ve learned about King’s private life is that it was disordered, even though his witness to nonviolence was heroic. And Rieff, I think, would argue that he was not a true charismatic, but he is what a true charismatic would look like.
Carmichael, on the other hand, is the consummate therapeutic. His own biography who admires him very much, and there’s much to admire about Carmichael, says over and over, “Look guys, the consummate actor.” Wherever he is, he summons the character he needs to be, sometimes down to the accent. To be the person that people around him need him to be. He never commits to a worldview. Grows up Methodist. Comes into his intellectual maturity around communists in New York. Never adopts Methodism. Never adopts communism. Goes off to school. He is introduced to King’s Christian nonviolence. Uses as a tactic. Never adopts it as a immovable principle. Later on, becomes interested in Marxism. Completely throws off nonviolence. Stokely Carmichael, for all his heroism, 27 times arrested, beaten, friends killed, everything else. Carmichael will not commit to unchosen bonds. He will not submit to these disciplines outside himself, which are unchosen.
Whereas King, nonviolence comes from agape love. It’s set forth by God. It’s not a choice. And he’s not in a position ever to disobey it. That’s the difference between a therapeutic character. It’s not that King is a better person and Carmichael is a bad person. That’s not what James and I argue. What we’re arguing instead is that Carmichael’s character remains unbounded as the modern therapeutics must. Whereas King for all his faults, has things that absolutely cannot be changed. Nonviolence as example.
James Patterson:
I wanted to ask Dr. Hardy, Michael, what is a deathwork? And it doesn’t sound like something I want, right? I don’t want to … It sounds bad. You were the one who said unimaginable depravities, and then literally told us about one in Germany.
Michael Harding:
Yeah, I used that as a footnote in my chapter. All right, a deathwork. Obviously the term itself is provocative.
James Patterson:
Right.
Michael Harding:
And I’m tempted to say that just like subversion of the reigning order is bad when it’s a good order and good when it’s a bad order. A deathwork is bad when the order it’s aimed at is good, and good when the order it’s aimed at is bad. But there’s a handy little definition for anyone who has deathworks handy and who wouldn’t really. This is on page seven of My Life Among the Deathworks, and he writes, “My life as deathwork. By deathwork I mean an all-out assault upon something vital to the established culture. Every deathwork represents an admiring.” And that’s I think the key word here, “An admiring final assault on the objects of its admiration.” People familiar with Nietzsche might remember there’s a point where he says he only attacks those people and causes that have done him some good, right? He admires them.
You think about his presentation of Christianity and beyond good and evil. He clearly admires Christianity for all of his objections to it. Rieff says, “Every deathwork represents an admiring final assault on the objects of its admiration. The sacred orders of which there are some expression in the repressive mode. As part of my futile effort at a disinterested work, and as part of my severely limited talent for lying, from which any deathwork separates itself at the peril of its aim, I shall merely number the established culture here and everywhere in the West, at least.”
Third, which we’ve already talked about. “This, my own life work as deathwork is intended to strike a fatal blow at the culture I consider now established. Deathworks are battles in the war against second culture and are themselves tests of highest authority.” He’s saying that what he’s doing, his life and his work, is meant to be a death work against third culture. Third culture is the outcome of the success of death works against second culture, so he’s going to try to make a death work against third culture, which as I mentioned earlier is going to try to set the ground for the emergence of a possible fourth culture. Oh, go on.
James Patterson:
What is a fourth culture? Do we even know or does he know?
Michael Harding:
Yeah. Well, in very vague terms.
James Patterson:
Right.
Michael Harding:
Let’s see. Where is the passage I’m looking for?
William Batchelder:
While you’re looking for that passage, the stakes couldn’t be higher. One of the things that Rieff emphatically says, he defines culture as the form of fighting before the firing begins. This isn’t something like, “Well, I like Mozart, but I don’t like Bach.” These are not the idle hobbies of the wealthy and highly educated. He believes it’s, I guess we could use the term, existential, but it shapes the whole way people are in the world. Did you find it?
Michael Harding:
Yeah, I found the passage. I had it marked and completely ignored the mark. He writes, and this is on 168 in Crisis of the Officer Class. He says, “The orthopraxis of the fourth culture in no way different from the unbridled individualism of faith, can only occur in a culture devoted primarily to teaching the interdicts first and every skill after that supreme one is acquired. No skill, no knowledge need be feared once the interdicts are inseparable.” From what Freud called the body ego. “This fearless mass demands an inversion of the present teaching of the interdicts.” Which is aimed at abolishing them. “And aim no more achievable than living without paying the price of life.” Which is death. “There are ample examples of how to go about creating the fourth culture. Fences must be built within which people are clamoring to live in order to escape the consequence summed by the least canonical of teachers, Ecclesiastes, he who breaks the fences bitten by the snake. Surely, the snake will bite without enchantment.” Then there is, of course, the other passage where he speaks of Christians and Jews becoming united in their orthopraxis.
William Batchelder:
In essence, what he argues is that Christians need to be become more like Jews in being very mindful of the interdicts and very thoughtful about Orthopraxis. And Jews must become more like Christians in the intense inwardness of their faith. And he actually calls for reunification almost, a union of two, which is very interesting because in his early writings he’s very hostile towards Christianity, and almost equates Christianity with anti-Semitism. But in Deathworks, he’s speaking of Judaism and Christianity very, very early in the book and he just says, “We.” As though Jews and Christians are the same people. He seemed to have had a journey there himself in his attitude toward Christianity and Judaism over time.
Michael Harding:
And I think maybe it’s important to maybe make explicit that what he’s talking about here is not a return.
James Patterson:
Yeah, it’s not return with a V, like return to tradition.
Michael Harding:
Right. Fourth culture is not going to be second culture. We can’t go back. He says we cannot repeat the mythic truths of the first culture nor the historic truths of the second nor the psychological truths of the third. Whatever fourth culture is going to be, it’s going to be something new in this historical scheme.
James Patterson:
It’s a shame because that fourth culture might’ve been TikTok, which will be banned. No, okay, that’s stupid.
Michael Harding:
It’s going to affect you a lot more than me.
James Patterson:
No, how dare you. My joke has always been, “If the Chinese want my data, they have to buy it from Meta.” A good American company. Let’s get a little bit more gossipy at the end of the podcast. What on earth was this marriage between Philip Rieff and Susan Sontag?
William Batchelder:
I think the intense attraction of two absolutely brilliant people.
Michael Harding:
Yeah.
William Batchelder:
If you look at how it’s written about … Moser writes this book about Sontag, and he decides to make Rieff the villain of the piece. Kevin Slack and I get into that in an article for VoegelinView, but clearly he decides that Rieff has to be the villain of really the whole book, which is, of course, absurd. It wasn’t that long a marriage for one thing. But she, of course, is absolutely brilliant. If you’ve ever seen her speak or if you’ve read notes on camp, right? To imagine these two absolutely brilliant people in the same space, apparently the attraction was immediate and overwhelming.
It’s also fair to say that while we correctly identify Sontag with the left. She’d be the first to say that. Rieff, at one point when he and Sontag were together, they were roommates with Marcuse. Rieff as a cranky and pessimistic conservative culturally. That was the development of a lifetime. Kevin Slack talks about this a little bit in his chapter of our book called Rieff, Strauss, and Heidegger. I think Kevin believes that Rieff was always a man of the left right to the end. It’s not as unlikely as it might seem to read History backward and see where they both ended up, ideologically.
James Patterson:
Yeah, it’s always been one of my … I guess just puerile interests about what that must’ve been like. And now that you’ve added Marcuse to the mix, I can’t even fathom. What do you think it’s going to take for people to become students of Rieff, at least his works? We’ve seen successful introductions of some of these figures like … Leo Strauss being one of them. But he had a large number of students as acolytes. And you see this with public choice people working out of the University of Virginia, Buchanan, but Rieff didn’t really seem to have much in the way of students. Is there a way maybe that there’s people who were not even working with him or his colleagues might be able to introduce this? Is that the idea behind this book?
William Batchelder:
Well, he does have students who are immensely loyal to him and to his memory. Also, colleagues are near colleagues. I think of Jonathan Ember. I think of Stephen Grosby, both of whom have been immensely kind and helpful to us. I think one of the troubles Rieff has is we just heard recently from a student of his who may not be crazy about our interpretation of his work. But he and, I think, probably others as well. I know for sure of at least one of other as well. They became full-time therapists or psychologists. They didn’t necessarily stay in the academy. And Rieff didn’t probably do his students any favors by practicing a form of sociology so unique, that apparently he was never more pleased than when someone would approach him at a conference and say this is from Ember’s memory of him, “But is it sociology, Philip?”
When you have someone who’s that idiosyncratic, I think the problem is a school of Rieffianism would have to have a home and a discipline. And that’s awfully difficult for him, and I think for some of his students too. I don’t know, does that make sense? I think that might be some of the answer about why we don’t have … Because we’ve been very impressed with the Rieff students that we’ve had an opportunity to talk to and to interact with and of the people that knew him that we’ve had the opportunity to talk to and interact with. But I do think he had some challenges. Whereas Leo Strauss, he may have reinvigorated political philosophy, but what he was doing is at least very easily recognizable as political philosophy. And I think Rieff created as disciplinary challenge for himself with his unique genius. I don’t know. Mike, what would you add?
Michael Harding:
Yeah, the thing that struck me about Rieff, and I’ve talked about this before. I got interested in Rieff because, I guess, maybe about a decade now. You sent me My Life Among the Deathworks as a Christmas gift.
Michael Harding:
And I read it very quickly. I kind of devoured it. And one of the things that caught my attention was at a certain point in your academic life, you reach a point where you can say, “Okay, I see where this argument or this text or this thinker fits into this kind of narrative I’ve built up for myself of my discipline and how things relate to each other.” And when I was reading Rieff for the first time in a long time, I was excited because I felt I didn’t know where it was going to go, when I was reading Rieff for the first time.
And I think one of the difficulties Rieff faces is that he was ostensibly a sociologist, but he wrote his master’s degree for the political science department and his dissertation on Freud for the political science department. He ends up in sociology. And if I’m being perfectly honest, I tend to read him as engaged more than anything in a philosophic project. And I think this is part of the difficulty. He is an idiosyncratic teacher and what he’s doing, it’s not quite sociology. It’s certainly not sociology in the sense that I think most of our colleagues in sociology today would recognize it. It’s a weirder and I would say much more deeply philosophical project, and accessing what is really going on has made that much more difficult by Rieff’s prose. I think it might’ve been Rick Brookhiser who compared it to chewing marbles as though Rieff is saying, “I am as difficult and dense as Heidegger.”
I think a Rieff resurgence or a Rieff school is made much more difficult by the fact that Rieff is very deliberately off-putting. In a way that someone like Leo Strauss is not. Strauss writes, let’s say for multiple audiences, but he also writes very well and in very eloquent, accessible language. You can pick up Strauss and you can read him very easily and it’s not the difficult thing that Rieff is doing. Rieff is using a lot of the tropes of the high post-modernism of the ’80s and ’90s. He loves the up-level pun. He loves the deliberate obscurity and he’s using these in a way as an attack on post-modernity. But that makes him much more difficult to read.
James Patterson:
My guests today have been Dr. Bill Batchelder of Waynesburg University and Dr. Michael Harding of Montgomery College. The book is The Philosophy of Philip Rieff: Cultural Conflict, Religion and the Self on Bloomsbury Press. Thank you both of you for coming onto the Law & Liberty Podcast.
William Batchelder:
Thank you so much for having us. We really appreciate it, and …
Michael Harding:
Thank you very much.
William Batchelder:
Yeah, we’re very grateful.
James Patterson:
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.