studeronomy's reviews
97 reviews

Is it sacrilege for an Orthodox Christian to dislike this book? Some moving and insightful moments but, on the whole, rather dull. Sorry Franny....

Informative introduction, which was the main reason I read the book (I was already familiar with many of the primary sources). Good collection.

David Bentley Hart is an intellectual juggernaut. This is an extraordinarily well-argued and energetic book. He describes three realms of experience—being, consciousness, and bliss—that post-Enlightenment science cannot (by its own self-definition) account for, three realms of experience that traditional theology provides striking and convincing accounts of. If you’re interested in watching DBH slam contemporary atheism, read Part One; if you want the spiritual meat of his argument, skip ahead and read the beautiful final chapter, “Illusion and Reality.” The middle sections sometimes drag on a bit and suffer from redundancy; per usual, DBH could use a stricter editor. Nevertheless, this is a gorgeous and invigorating argument for God’s immanence.

Not nearly as shrill as the title would suggest. At his best, Scruton provides a devastating and knowledgeable critique of mid-century leftist intellectuals, particularly those in the Anglosphere (Hobsbawm, EP Thompson, Galbraith, Ronald Dworkin). And his account of leftist American thinkers (Galbraith, Dworkin), though incisive, only serves to underscore the degree to which the U.S. has never had a strong "revolutionary" or socialist left-wing movement.

So I'd recommend the chapters in which he takes on English-language intellectuals. Despite his internationalist reputation (he was involved in dissident networks in Communist nations during the late Cold War), Scruton is less sure-footed in his critiques of Continental philosophy. He seems to genuinely understand the stuff (a virtue not shared by most critics of Continental philosophy), but he relies a bit too heavily on the "can-you-believe-they-SAID-that?" or "what-the-heck-are-they-TALKING-about?!," hands-in-the-air, "check-out-this-silly-prose" snark, particularly when he dives into Badiou and Zizek. The fact that Continental philosophy is willfully obscurantist is by now general knowledge; pointing out how goofy the prose is doesn't count as an insight anymore. He cloaks this lazy critique by referring to the Continentals' bad writing as "Newspeak," so that by pointing out how intentionally bad their prose is, he seems to be scoring a political point. But Scruton abuses the word “Newspeak,” particularly in his chapters on Lacan and Deleuze and Badiou and Zizek, Scruton conflates "Newspeak" with “nonsensical jargon” when, in Orwell, it served a very different function: language was not rendered incoherent in 1984 but was stripped of its organic redundancies. The result was a hyper-clear, hyper-efficient language that streamlined meaning and eliminated complexity. I suppose you could argue that Lacan and Deleuze were doing something like that. I think that’s a hard argument to sustain.

Scruton's entire critique of Lukács seems to boil down to a) Stalin was bad, b) Lukács supported Stalin, and c) we don't read Heidegger anymore because he was a Nazi, so why do we read Lukács? Which, yeah, a) true, b) true, and c) we still read Heidegger.

A more substantial criticism I have with Scruton's treatment of Continental philosophy: he overrelies on a key insight, namely that 20th-century Europe's obsession with Object/Subject relations descends from an influential misreading of Hegel by Kojève. Because so many influential leftists sat in Kojève's lectures, they all inherited, to one degree or another, a misunderstanding of Hegel, which serves as the golden thread that runs though Continental philosophy.

Perhaps. But Deleuze and Zizek and Badiou all seem to have actually read and absorbed the real Hegel, and although they may share some misimpressions about the great German philosopher, Scruton's narrative about the malign influence of Kojève's lectures is a tad too neat.

Elsewhere, Scruton dismisses other twentieth-century revolutionaries with a tone that implies, “They would've been alright chaps if only they’d been clever enough to be British conservatives!”

On the whole, however, Scruton is an intelligent guide to intelligent conservative objections to left-wing thought. Give this book to your QAnon-espousing, Trump-supporting, MAGA-loving kin and tell them it's by one of the century's most prominent conservative intellectuals. I'm sure they'll love it.

The question isn't whether leftist politics or the universal human subject work in practice—the question is whether they work in *theory*! I first read Badiou's St Paul in graduate school; this was my second reading. The first chapter, "Paul: Our Contemporary," is stunning. It sets up the ethical and political stakes of the argument in the clearest possible terms. This was written in the France of the 1990s but feels fresh in 2021: immigration woes; a reactionary, populist, identitarian right wing; lamentations about the end of liberalism; etc.

As the book progresses, especially when he digs into the antidialectics of Pauline thought, I start to feel pretty...lost and confused. I probably should have read a little more slowly and reread the most confusing passages a few more times, but I'm not an academic anymore so who got time for that? If you're the sort of reader who finds post-structuralism exhausting, don't read this book. By the time we get to the last couple chapters, however, the stakes and the argument begin to clear up once again.

There are moments of real beauty in this translation, particularly as the book concludes: "Differences, like instrumental tones, provide us with the recognizable univocity that makes up the melody of the True" and "Every name from which a truth proceeds is a name from before the Tower of Babel. But it has to circulate in the tower." Love that stuff.

If you regularly lie awake at night wondering about the balance between universality and particularity, and how the possibility of Truth emerges from that balance, this one is for you.

I don't understand the complaints I've read about the structure of this beautifully written biography. I think Carlisle made a very good choice when she reorganized the events of Kierkegaard's life, opting to begin with his relationship with Regina Olsen and his most important book (Either/Or) and only then backing up to offer the wider perspective: his childhood, his family, etc. I also appreciated that she dealt with the intellectual and religious scene in Cophenhagen early in the book, before getting into the finer details of Kierkegaard's biography. I really appreciated the way Carlisle engaged with Kierkegaard's milieu; her summaries of Copenhagen's intellectual life and the ideas of Bishop Mynster, Heiberg, Martensen, etc., enriched my understanding of Kierkegaard's writings a great deal.

One thing I wish Carlisle had included: a succinct summary of Hegel's thought. The intellectual world Kierkegaard inhabited was so massively shaped by Hegel, a thinker whose influence I understand but whose ideas are very difficult. A brief primer on Hegel would have been really great, and would have contextualized Kierkegaard's own ideas even better. Consequently, I wouldn't necessarily recommend this biography to someone who knows *nothing* about Kierkegaard's thought. But I would certainly recommend it to anyone with a passing familiarity with Kierkegaard and his ideas.