readers on boasts

Here is one of several reader responses I received about the Badiou/McLuhan boasts:

“I appreciate your post on Eric McLuhan, Badiou, and boasts. Neitzsche’s Ecce Homo would be a fine case to add to the ones you mention, and I’ve read the latter fruitfully as an effort to enact a subversion of what he would call Christian morality. Muhammad Ali too. ‘Why Am I so Wise’ and ‘I’m the greatest.’ Nietzsche and Ali as you would say, have a lot to lose, but I also think they played against the reigning ethoi (plural?) of their moments. Do you think Badiou and McLuhan do the same?”

Nietzsche is a great example, of course, and to some extent Giordano Bruno. In Nietzsche’s case it seems pretty obvious that a humble tone would ruin his works, and in Bruno’s case as well. But there are other cases where I would hate to see boasting– try to imagine a cocky Aquinas, for instance. (“Why I am Such a Great Theologian”; “Why I Deserve to Go to Heaven”.) That would be ridiculous.

As for Muhammad Ali, I was young enough during his heyday that I simply took him for granted and didn’t realize what a special figure he was. I suppose many readers of this blog enjoyed the film “When We Were Kings” as I did. That film made me appreciate not only Muhammad Ali, but even Howard Cosell, who was mildly obnoxious but also one of a kind. (And of course the weirdest part of the film was the sinister personality of George Foreman, since by the time the film was released we were already long familiar with Foreman as the re-invented cheerful pitchman of George Foreman grills, one of the most uproarious success stories in the history of commerce.)

I’m not normally an admirer of boasting hip-hop stars and their endless liner notes thanking 300 friends.

As for Badiou, he’s given his own justification for why modesty is not a valid philosophical attitude. And he has a point… There’s a certain inherent boastfulness in claiming to have a philosophical system that explains the whole of reality, and sometimes false modesty hides the deepest arrogance, because what it really means is that self-love is being held in reserve behind the public success or failure of any given claim. At least Badiou is coming right out and risking his self-assessment before the eyes of millions. Don’t get me wrong, I do think his statement is in mildly bad taste, just as Nietzsche’s chapter titles in Ecce Homo are in bad taste. But in Nietzsche’s case a bit of bad taste is a small price to pay for his dazzling literary-philosophical persona, and in Badiou’s case that will await the judgment of history. I tend to think he won’t win the bet, but who knows? At least I can keep a straight face while reading his claim to have written a great work of philosophy. (He used scare-quotes around “great,” and really shouldn’t have. If you’re going to make that big a boast, scare-quotes are no protection.)

As for Eric McLuhan’s statement, I think it was less self-conscious than that… He thinks, even now, that the tetrad really is the greatest intellectual discovery in several centuries, and has stated so rather matter-of-factly. Whether it’s the “greatest”… well, that’s obviously a huge claim to make for a concept that is not often discussed even among McLuhan fans (who are usually more familiar with the earlier books). But I don’t think it’s a ridiculous claim to make. You can keep a straight face while doing the thought experiment of “what if the tetrad were the greatest intellectual discovery of the past several centuries? What would be the consequences? And why do so few people currently think of it as a great discovery?” Whereas if you say, for instance, “Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche book is the greatest philosophical book of at least the past several centuries,” then of course this is clearly absurd– even Kaufmann wouldn’t say that. It’s just a secondary source on Nietzsche, though a fairly successful one.

I won’t give any invidious examples, but it’s a useful thought experiment to try out on all the recent high-profile thinkers. Ask yourself: “What if X were the greatest philosopher of the century?” Most of them are not, of course, but it’s a useful tool to sort out relative magnitudes among famous authors. Some pass the straight-face test with this method, others don’t.

Then you can up the ante a bit by asking about greatest of all time. For instance: “What if Heidegger were the greatest philosopher of all time? How would our picture of philosophy and its history need to change?” Now, I don’t think for a second that Heidegger was the greatest philosopher of all time; last time I did a list, a few months ago, I had him at #7 or #8. But you can ask “what if Heidegger were the greatest?” without bursting into uncontrollable laughter, and that’s a tribute to his true magnitude, which is surely a bit below the Plato/Aristotle level. (I can’t decide which to put first, but am pretty sure they deserve #1/#2 in some order, and pretty sure that Kant deserves #3. After that it becomes trickier in my opinion. I’ve been flipping Hegel and my serious sleeper Leibniz around #4/#5 for awhile, but other cases can be made. Leibniz is so good, it’s sometimes hard to believe, but I also happen to love Leibniz and merely deeply respect Hegel, and don’t want my biases to affect the decision too much. I’m also worried about the too heavily Greek/German top five, and want to think about that some more.)

Incidentally, this method was suggested to me by the great baseball writer Bill James. On his list of criteria for considering whether a retired baseball player deserves admission to the Hall of Fame, one of the questions to be asked is: “Did anyone ever claim that he was the best player in baseball?” Not that the answer needs to be “yes” for admission to the Hall of Fame, but the straight face test works very well here too.

Did anyone ever read Derek Pell’s hilarious Semiotext(e) book Assassination Rhapsody? My youngest brother and I had hours of fun with that book in the early 1990’s. I think of it now because, in the section where it parodies the Warren Report, it plays with some flagrant violations of the Straight Face Principle. A few examples, just from memory…

“Speculation: The Texas School Book Depository is the tallest building in the world.

Commission Finding: The Texas School Book Depository is five stories tall. A tall building, but certainly not the tallest.”

“Speculation: Lee Harvey Oswald invented the alphabet.

Commission finding: If one man invented the alphabet, he would be the greatest man in human history. However, Lee Harvey Oswald did not invent the alphabet. Rather, the alphabet evolved gradually from primitive picture-drawings.”

But I’m starting to digress, which means that it’s time to bring this post to a close.