Ahmet Demirhan
Philosophy has nothing to say about the political crises the world is facing today, not even in terms of diagnosis, let aside solutions. This is a situation that requires asking more serious questions about the place to which the activity we call philosophy has attached itself for a long time, rather than questions such as “should it has such a duty?” or “does philosophy have such a duty or responsibility?” This situation is not also a reflection of frame of recent times that we are accustomed to and that drawing political boundaries with thick lines, accompanied by a few philosophers’ names and a few philosophical concepts, mostly in interviews but generally in newspaper commentary columns, on current developments.
Philosophy has nothing to say about the political crises the world is facing today, not even in terms of diagnosis, let aside solutions. This is a situation that requires asking more serious questions about the place to which the activity we call philosophy has attached itself for a long time, rather than questions such as “should it has such a duty?” or “does philosophy have such a duty or responsibility?” This situation is not also a reflection of frame of recent times that we are accustomed to and that drawing political boundaries with thick lines, accompanied by a few philosophers’ names and a few philosophical concepts, mostly in interviews but generally in newspaper commentary columns, on current developments. I don’t mean Jürgen Habermas’s nonsense on Gaza, as one of the most famous examples, or the “statements” of figures like Slavoj Žižek, who, after Ukrainian President Zelensky was reprimanded live in the Oval Office by US President Trump and US Vice President J.D. Vance, in a manner admittedly violating all rules of decency, let alone anything else, made that Ukraine was defending not only its own sovereignty but also the freedom of Europe and ultimately the US, or that, following the PKK’s decision to lay down its arms, not only European but also the entire world should see that the terrorist organization is participating in the process because it demonstrates its commitment to peace. The political reality is much harsher than the imagined scenarios of people like Žižek, which mostly reflect their own self-image. I am also not referring to how such “statements” fall short of answering even the simplest “why” question, and thus reveal how little grasp there is of the events at hand.
What I mean is that, in the third major war that, some asserts it has began with the downing of a Malaysia Airlines plane over Ukraine in 2014, even before the open Russian military attack on Ukraine, the words of figures like Žižek who, turned a blind eye to the West’s excessive response to Russia that, reached to the point of banning Russian writers and composers, no longer reach a level that can produce an impact in the political arena. While Habermas once took his place in the speeches of our military tutelage’s spokesmen, he was unable to produce any impact beyond being a campaign figure; but when viewed from the philosophers’ perspective, the situation is even more worse. Habermas’s rabmlings about Gaza isn’t even worth analyzing; so let’s look at Žižek’s words regarding the rebuke in the Oval Office, which he regards as the end of diplomacy: “Was the discussion in the Oval Office a spontaneous outburst? At the very least, this filthy debate was being nurtured, was awaited to outburst. We must remember that, at least in terms of substantive content, nothing happened. In Hegelian terms, this was the becoming of what was ‘An sich’ (in itself) into ‘Für sich’ (for itself) – the content of mere background presence finding explicit expression. This transformation changes everything: once something is said directly, it can no longer be taken back. Everyone in a group may know something only within themselves and interpret it as a misunderstanding; but once it is revealed, it is a different matter.”
What do these words tell us? In the most optimistic and forced interpretation, when seen as a Hegelian moment, the debate in the Oval Office could be a sign of a major change, and Zelensky (not as a person, but as the synthesis of the moment) could begin to represent the Hegelian truth against Trump. Moreover, both parties could be seen as actors, and their views within that moment as a kind of self-deception, while the real issue is that a greater truth has been revealed. If we were to be deceived by this optimistic interpretation and attempt to make an assessment, since these are words that can neither be denied nor verified, we would ultimately have no choice but to say that those who believe can believe, and resort to freedom of thought, which has become a meaningless tongue twister. After all, there is no such thing as the observation of a black swan that falsifies the proposition that all swans are white (and moreover, the philosophy of science open to such propositions seems to have disappeared, with the recent blows of the likes of Paul Feyerabend after Popper and Kuhn, turning at best into probability studies and post-Truing computational varieties). Another option might be to begin to investigate what Žižek, who is for some reason referred to as a Marxist philosopher and has been severely criticized within the Marxist tradition, reveals in terms of agency or spokespersonship in the Hegelian moment.
But does it really make sense to take Žižek’s statements that seriously? Besides, Žižek is just one example. In fact, Hegel is being used as a flavor in his expressions; his claiming, through that flavor, in an admittedly absurdly rapid way, that both nothing new has happened and that something has changed irreversibly is equivalent to saying a lot of things, that are considered to be of serious importance but meaning nothing, happened, and the history of philosophy bears witness to many similar examples. The history of philosophy is full of such examples. Žižek’s luck, or rather his misfortune, is that it is suitable for consumption in university cafes or on social media (likely Žižek, like similar figures who make incredibly bold “statements” by combining various rote learnings from their repertoire on many subjects they don’t actually master, he probably heard the information about the Kurds, whom he equates with the PKK, from various interlocutors who were making propaganda during various coffee breaks or side conversations. With his visibility, he’s a perfect figure for an agency campaign, a marketing star. Nothing more. There is nothing further, that’s it).
On the other hand, why the idea that Ukraine generally defends the West and its understanding of freedom, as Žižek insists on, is more appealing than the idea that this former Iron Curtain country, which claimed independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union, defends its own territorial integrity, certainly needs explanation, and has deeper roots than cafe or social media chats. To simplify matters, however, it is difficult to understand why a general idea of united Ukraine in abstraction, far removed from the actual situation on the ground is much more important than the Russian annexation of Crimea, which happened much earlier, for the West’s freedom. Philosophers no longer have simple answers to such simple questions (let us remind you that the question of whether there should be any, remains).
But what can be said about the history of the public intellectual that whose duty, as propagated so diligently by people like Edward Said, is to tell the truth to authority and that has risen so rapidly and disappeared so quickly through examples like Žižek and others?
To be fair, if we were to make a rough periodization, we would need to state that the public intellectual figure developed in parallel with America’s imperial aspirations and its role as the guardian of the new international order. The painful irony is that Said himself, who called on such figures to take responsibility, could not be all that public when it came to his own life, beyond expressing opinions within the general framework of freedom of thought. Other similar cases could be cited, for example, he did not publicly resist when his lecture on Freud’s views on Europeans and non-Europeans was banned by the Freud Institute in Vienna. One could hardly say he tried to shout the truth to authority; the issue was quietly swept under the rug. When he later gave this lecture at the Freud Museum in London, the occasion turned into a rather contradictory presentation in terms of its content. Yet Said, like some other intellectuals, was able to express quite bold opinions about American foreign policy. In other words, except for the reactions of various writers during the Dreyfus affair, the most well-known example in Europe, and similar ones, which should be evaluated separately, the scope of the public intellectual prototype in America (with the exception of certain campus issues and attitudes towards public scandals) was generally limited to American foreign policy. Noam Chomsky’s political activism confirms this. The likely turning point was the Vietnam War.
This type of public intellectual stance, which didn’t concern itself much with how America’s political structure was formed, or how it shaped its foreign policy as an extension of that internal structure, actually seems to have emerged as the result of a specific moment rupture. Hannah Arendt’s work, Eichmann in Jerusalem, which fused political philosophy and journalism, is quite famous; however, her work, Truth and Politics, which she wrote in response to some works on the parallel subject of Lying in Politics and Eichmann in Jerusalem, has remained unnoticed for some reason, except by some experts. Yet all of these works, including Eichmann in Jerusalem, were written from the perspective of a broad philosophical tradition and a particular understanding of political philosophy in response to contemporary events. In fact, other similar works, from Kant to Kojeve and, in the case of those after Arendt, to Derrida, can be cited as examples of efforts advancing on the same subject, without necessarily referring to the current situation.
Of course, Arendt’s works are interesting in that they approach the subject with a certain philosophical tradition and political ideal while looking at the current situation. However, Lying in Politics is particularly striking, not just because it was published in non-academic journals like Truth and Politics, but also because it marks a clear rupture in response to certain actions in American foreign policy. In other words, in Arendt’s work, we find both a deep relationship with philosophical tradition and a reflection on contemporary American foreign policy and in this way, Arendt possesses a quality that can hardly be compared to so-called public intellectuals.
Lying in Politics is a lengthy article written about the publication of the leaked Pentagon Papers, which reveal America’s activities in Vietnam since 1945 and how these activities differ from what was portrayed to the public. What is interesting is that Arendt compiled this article along with her other articles in a book called Crises in the Republic, and thus, in her work On Revolution, she actually placed what she said about the character of revolutions in the context of the rupture in American foreign policy, especially in the comparison she made between the American Revolution and other revolutions, especially the French Revolution. In this respect, it can be said that Arendt combines a certain political philosophy, a certain political institution in terms of republicanism, and the present. This is a rare example, because among the intellectuals who emigrated from Germany to America, Arendt seems to have adapted quite comfortably to an American mode of intellectualism. For example, while Adorno, a leading figure in the Frankfurt School, published works on American jazz culture and authoritarian personality that vaguely addressed America, he preferred to return to Germany at the first opportunity, and while Erich Auerbach, who spent a certain part of his life after emigrating from Germany and also wrote his work Mimesis at Istanbul University in Istanbul, experienced serious adaptation problems after settling in America and was unable to participate in public life, Arendt, who had the advantage (or perhaps handicap) of being a student of Heidegger, was able to directly address American politics and its current repercussions, unlike figures like Leo Strauss, whose influence is claimed to have been primarily in the upbringing of the neoconservative elite but who remained distant from public debate. This is a pointer that Arendt’s example can help us understand why public intellectuals are disappearing today. It’s also a pointer that we can connect to debates like post-truth, which briefly flared during Trump’s first term, and indeed to other observations about how politics works today, not just in Republicanism or America.
In the next article, we’ll try to examine why this is the case by looking at how lying in politics and philosophy appears in Arendt’s work, how this reflects a particular tradition, and why American foreign policy marked both the beginning and end of the public intellectual. This picture is not independent of liberalism, which is, above all, the place to which philosophy attaches itself.
Ahmet Demirhan was born in Ankara. He graduated from the Sociology Department of Boğaziçi University. He completed his Master’s and PhD in the Sociology Department of Selçuk University in Konya. He has prepared various compilations on the forms theology has taken in the context of modernity and postmodernity. He is currently studying on the development of the idea of homeland in the West and the formation of the concepts of sovereignty in the East. Some of his works: Modernity (2004), The Islamist and the Puritan (2012), Breaking Free from the Spiral of Foundation: The Ottoman Empire and Concepts of Sovereignty (2019), The Psychoanalysis of the Man Scratching His Belly (2019).