Simon Critchley's Reading List

"Yes, it’s a bit cheeky because obviously it’s common to every approach to philosophy. I guess, I’ve been writing on it recently; I’m writing a book on philosophy and tragedy at the moment that I’ve been working on for years and years. So, I’ve been looking at the Republic closely again and thinking about it. The first thing to say is that ‘philosophy’ as a term, as a term of art, is something that Plato coins. So, we’re justified in coming to Plato in order to answer that question. And there are literary aspects of the Republic that are really important and fascinating, and there’s the whole question of the form of the dialogue. There’s the idea that philosophy begins not with a treatise – an essay – it begins with a dialogue, a drama: a drama set at some point in the recent past with a hero, Socrates, who is killed by the city. “The Republic is something that we could do well to go back to and think about the value of democracy: why are we so committed to it?” The other thing to say is that the Republic is a perennial book in the sense in which it’s perennially read but also the ways that it shows up will be different at different points in history. If you think about the Republic right now, one’s eye is drawn to the critique of democracy. The main argument of the Republic is that democracy is a fine and ‘a many-coloured’ political form, but it leads ineluctably to tyranny. The key value in democracy for Socrates is freedom, and he says that freedom flips over into private licentiousness and that licentiousness gives rise to the licentiousness of the tyrant. So, democracy will lead to tyranny. That seems to be very germane to what’s happening in countries like the United States where freedom becomes a kind of licentiousness, a tyranny of private pleasure, and the country is now under the tyranny of the king of private pleasure, Donald Trump. So, to that extent, negatively, the Republic has a great deal to say to us at this point: there is something wrong with democracy. And then, positively, the argument that Socrates makes is that there must be guardians: people trained to govern the city. This would be an abomination for western societies to follow; it would be against the whole idea of the open society, going back to Karl Popper. But maybe Plato has a point. Maybe society should be governed by the people who actually know something, rather than tyrants. But going back to the Republic now opens that question about democracy. Philosophy has always had a very odd relationship to democracy, overwhelming negative up until about John Dewey really. So, the Republic is something that we could do well to go back to at this point in history and maybe think about the value of democracy: what is the value of democracy and why are we so committed to it? Because it is a rather peculiar way of governing society, if you think about it. I’m in favour of it, of course, but philosophy does raise some questions. Yes, for sure. Continental philosophy from Hegel onwards – and particularly in Nietzsche – is deeply deeply anti-Platonic, particularly on the question of the arts. Plato’s thought in the Republic is that if we admit theatre into the just city then we’ll end up with the tyranny of spectacle: people will just end up gawping at things that they are attracted to, that they like, because they’re excessive and wild and they don’t seem to directly involve them. So, there’s a kind of tyranny of aesthetic experience in place which needs to be controlled in his view. And we find that outrageous, but then maybe it’s a question that we need to think about. What is going on when we wake up listening to the sound of gunshots from the Mandalay hotel in Las Vegas on the television? Am I just concerned and shocked by that – or am I getting some pathetic aesthetic thrill out of that experience? Plato lets us question those things in ways which I think are unsettling. We think of art as just a good. Is it? Maybe it’s like feasting at a time of plague, something we shouldn’t necessarily be proud of. It’s a question that Plato reasons with, let’s put it that way."

"Yes, I wanted to choose this for a number of reasons. Firstly, the history of philosophy is taught as a history of blokes, largely, and that’s a problem. There’s a problem in the way in which the term ‘continental philosophy’ has been constructed around certain key male figures. I’ve been teaching a course over the last five/six years on mysticism. I’ve just had an interest in what’s going on in mystical experience, in the same way that William James was fascinated with mysticism in The Varieties of Religious Experience . And the philosophical tradition, certainly from Kant onwards but arguably earlier than that, is premised on the refusal of religious enthusiasm – mysticism, fanaticism and all the rest. I’m interested in pressing that a little bit. Also, if you look at the mysticism tradition so-called – the mystics didn’t call themselves mystics, they were just interested in spiritual experience, let’s say – they were largely women. They were women writing in a culture that didn’t allow them to write, therefore writing in the vernacular language. Many of the earliest vernacular texts we have in the European languages are written by women mystics like Julian of Norwich who wrote the first book in English by an English woman, which should be studied in every canon of English literature in my view and isn’t. “Many of the earliest vernacular texts we have in the European languages are written by women mystics” Marguerite Porete is this fairly obscure medieval French mystic who was burnt as a heretic in 1307. She wrote this book called The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls which is an extraordinary book. What she’s trying to describe in this book is her relationship to God as she understands it, but the core of the book really is an understanding of love. That’s why I wanted to mention her in connection to continental philosophy. First, it’s a book by a woman; philosophy is meant to be the love of wisdom but actually it’s a love of wisdom which would appear to be a uniquely male preserve. Going back to the Republic , there are eleven people present in the discussion, six of them speak, and they’re all men. What is going on? What kind of love is that, where one half of the human race is dropped out of the picture? Marguerite Porete, like Julian of Norwich and many other spirituals in that tradition, is concerned with this question of love and that’s what I found powerful in this book. She talks about love as a process of what Simone Weill will call in the mid-20th century ‘decreation’: a process of ‘decreating’ or undoing the self. This is the way Porete puts it ‘one must hew and hack away at oneself in order to make a space large enough for love to enter in.’ Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s that idea of love that I find really interesting, that kind of profound existential sense of love as something which requires an annihilation or stripping away of the self. That contrasts very strongly with the way people often talk about love where love is something that one individual has for another individual when they say ‘I love you.’ Love becomes a sort of mutual exchange of favours, you do this and I do that, and eventually we move in together and buy some furniture from IKEA. So, love risks this kind of flat, tepid experience, whereas in someone like Porete it’s this much deeper and more dramatic unsettling experience and that really interests me. That’s why I wanted to focus on her. It’s a very strange disturbing book to read, written by someone who was burnt as a heretic who didn’t think of herself as a heretic, she thought she was just asserting the truth of how she understood Christianity. She sees love is a transformative act which transfigures the self, rather than something more minimal and neutral and cognitive. Without having a faith in God, which I don’t have, I want to hang on to that dramatic idea of love as a key idea of what it means to be a self in relationship to other selves."

"What did you think of it then? We should talk about your reaction to it! Absolutely, he’s a very shocking figure. There’s something powerfully repulsive about Nietzsche. He’s a figure of rank and of the mountaintops; He’s a thinker who’s for the few. As he’ll say over and over again, he’s a figure who has ‘come too soon’, he is ‘born posthumously’, he says ‘I am not a man, I am dynamite’ in Ecce Homo . The first part of Beyond Good and Evil is called ‘On the Prejudices of the Philosophers’ and I love that part because he shows how ridiculous the philosophical pretension at rendering intelligible through the use of reason is and how preposterous that claim is. Everything you’ve said about Nietzsche is true, but I also see Nietzsche as a kind of sceptical realist: he is someone who is deeply sceptical about what philosophy thinks it’s up to and, indeed, what human beings think they’re up to in moving towards a theory of everything through a mixture of neuroscience and Buddhism or whatever it might be. He wants to claim that we don’t know. All that we can do is to peer through the lens of tragedy as the highest aesthetic experience at what we don’t know. “There’s something powerfully repulsive about Nietzsche” There’s a scepticism and realism in the Nietzsche of that period, in 1886, when he’s no longer the wild Wagnerian Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy . He’s a bit more crabby. Nietzsche is at his best when he’s really sticking it to people, as a powerful essayist pointing out the delusions that we have, particularly the way in which he grinds away at the prejudices of philosophers which is that through the activity of the intellect achieve a knowledge of that which is, and from that follows these moral proscriptions. Philosophers’ claims are never just ontological claims, they’re also moral claims. So, it’s Nietzsche’s attack on morality that I find incredibly powerful and in particular on Christian morality as he sees it. He wants to claim that Christian morality is a reactive formation that is at war with affirmation and life, which is what he wants to assert, and that leads him off into some pretty strange directions. Yes, Nietzsche’s project, which he never finished, was the revaluation of values. The claim is not that Nietzsche has no values, but that the values that we have and the values that we’re given, particularly through Christianity – the values of good and evil – that’s what he’s against. We have to revaluate the experience of values. So, Nietzsche is not an amoral thinker at all. He wants a deeper, more sustained experience of ethics which would be based for him on strength and the will to power and things like that which might disturb us a bit. This comes out clearly in The Genealogy of Morals , where he wants to show that the moral categories by which we understand things in our seemingly enlightened ways have this consequence of a history by which human beings have vivisected themselves, as he says. Human beings have lost access to their instinctual force and power and strength and their courageous inner truth. They have lost all of that and that needs to be regained. So, Nietzsche is at war with morality in a very powerful way. I don’t necessarily agree with everything he says, but I think Nietzsche’s negative critical destabilising side is incredibly powerful. It shakes you up. Yes, there’s a kind of realism and a return to the mud, the chaos, the messy complex stuff of what it is to be a human being and not to delude ourselves that we are pure beautiful moral souls, because we’re not."

"The interesting question is how could the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century – and he was, just quantitatively, the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, in terms of the effect that he had on generations of thinkers after him in different traditions – have also been a Nazi? There’s that question which I won’t get into now but it has to be considered head-on. In the same way as in Plato’s Republic the arguments for philosophy are arguments against democracy, in Heidegger, the arguments for his conception of philosophy lead him to a sustained commitment to national socialism. And that has to pondered, not used as a basis for not reading him but using him to think more carefully about these questions. So, there’s that issue. “How could the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century – and he was – have also been a Nazi?” As to why Heidegger’s Being and Time is important, there’s a line very early in the text where he says something like Dasein – which is his name for human beings – is not enclosed in a ‘cabinet of consciousness’. Dasein is out there with and alongside things in the world. So, the primary message of Being and Time for me is that human existence and human life is literally ‘ecstatic’; the answer to it is not going to be found by looking inside our heads or through brain scans, it’s going to be had by engaging with what’s out there in our being in the world. Heidegger really shifts the focus of philosophy away from its concern with the self and the subject, towards a concern with our being in the world. That is a kind of fundamental shift in the way in which philosophical activity is understood and a lot follows from that. So, that’s the primary discovery of Being and Time. It means that the fundamental question of philosophy is no longer the question of epistemology, namely how can a subject know an objective world, which the question that we’ve basically inherited from Descartes and Kant. The question is now given that we’re already out there in the world, what sense can we make of it? Given that we’re out there already in the world, and the world is not a meaningless world, it is a world that is configured and hangs together as a world of significance, how can we understand that? How can we find the grammar to get hold of that? So, that’s what he tries to do. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Heidegger gives us the analytical tools for understanding human existence in the world. If you begin philosophy from that starting point, it fundamentally changes the way that you understand the activity. It’s not about sense data pouring into eyes, and minds inside heads which might or might not be attached to brains, all of that is just left by the wayside. We’re out there, with things, with stuff, and that makes sense. How does it make sense, how does it hang together, and what can we say about it? Absolutely. This is a fundamental revelation that Heidegger brings us. We don’t begin philosophy by going into a room like Descartes and then abstracting away from everyday experience because we’re not sure when we look out the window whether the people walking down the street are robots or human beings and therefore we fall back onto forms of geometrical proof in order to rebuild the whole thing from the standpoint of the subject – of the human being – as a thinking thing. For Heidegger, it’s exactly the opposite. We begin philosophical activity – the activity of thinking – by focussing on the average and the everyday in their average everyday character and finding something there, rather than inside us or in some ideal world. It’s a much rich way of doing philosophy in my view and also connects philosophy with sociology, with anthropology, and with all sorts of other areas. So, for me, Heidegger gives us a fundamental shift of orientation. We can get to the same point with the later Wittgenstein and his concern with the everyday and the ordinary but Heidegger gives us a more systematic picture of parcelling out our relationship to the world, to others, and to ourselves."

"I think it’s a really important book and it’s a book that’s been hugely influential particularly in Britain but also here in the US and elsewhere, but it’s largely been forgotten. R D Laing was training as a doctor in a clinic outside Glasgow. But he was immersed in Sartre and existentialism and phenomenology, and he was treating people that were deemed institutionally insane. So, he puts those two together. The Divided Self I think is an extraordinarily vivid text to go back to and read. The question that he’s asking in the book is about how we categorise the mad and the sane, in particular the way in which certain people are declared to be schizophrenics. He’s trying to show the difference between the sane and the mad is not an absolutely difference: it’s not as if it’s a frontier that you pass, but there’s a kind of line of degrees. The crazy person – and Laing did think that there were crazy people – is at one end of that, and we’re at the other end of that, and we have lots of things in common with them. The great thing about Laing’s Divided Self is that in talking about the mad in this humane way, he thought that the way people were treated institutionally was horrific and he wanted it to change, and in doing that he says a great degree about so-called ‘normal’ human life. And, if you like, the takeaway for Laing is that we’re all a little bit mad and that’s good because that’s what makes us human. What the schizophrenic person is experiencing, that sense of loss or division of the self, we also experience in a more moderated way. When we isolate ourselves, when we experience loneliness and depression and phenomena like that, we’re a little bit mad too. “The takeaway for Laing is that we’re all a little bit mad and that’s good, because that’s what makes us human” So, picking up on the rich phenomenological descriptions of people like Sartre, Laing is able to provide these rich descriptions of cases of schizophrenic people which are both humane and powerful, but also lead us to reflect upon ourselves and this idea of what he calls the normal ‘schizoid self’: that we’re also, insofar as we’re reflective beings and self-conscious beings, we’re also divided against ourselves and we’re also at war with ourselves and, therefore, our relationship to the so-called mad should not be one of incarceration and exile, it should be one of sympathy and inclusion. It’s also a work which had direct social and policy implications which I think are still germane, because the way we treat the so-called mad is still horrific. It’s also just a great page-turner of a book. It was very important to David Bowie who is a hero of mine. Bowie read The Divided Self probably in the sixties, and when he listed his hundred favourite books it was in there. A lot of the cases in the book are cases of people who adopt personae, who adopt masks in order to retreat behind them. He talks for example of a couple of cases of people who play a role. He talks about the case of a student who dresses up in a cloak, who was very dramatic and appears to act out in all sorts of ways. He goes into what’s what making them do this and he thinks it’s a kind of retreat from the horror of the outside world. So, Laing gives us a rich phenomenology for describing the landscape of our inner lives which I recommend to people very strongly. It’s a great book."