<div>Born in Fowler, California — learned corridos and rhymes from his mother, Lucha, on the farm working roads and small towns. His father, Felipe, played harmonica telling tales&nbsp;of work in early 1900’s Wyoming. He graduated from UCLA, Stanford and the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop. His awards include the Guggenheim Poetry Fellowship,&nbsp;the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, LA Times &nbsp;Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award and recently, the International Latino Book Award. He is Emeritus Professor from Fresno State’s Chicano and Latin American Studies program and UC-Riverside’s Department of Creative Writing. In the last decade he has served as a Chancellor of the Board of the Academy of American Poets, California’s&nbsp;Poet Laureate, and the Poet Laureate of the United States. Recent book is&nbsp;Every Day We Get More Illegal.</div>

Juan Felipe Herrera

Image:&nbsp; St. Paul, Minnesota:&nbsp; RNC 2008 (detail) &copy;&nbsp;<a href="http://www.joaquinramonherrera.com" target="_blank">Joaqu&iacute;n Ram&oacute;n Herrera</a> 
Juan Felipe Herrera was recently named the Poet Laureate of California; he wrote this poem for LARB in remembrance of 1992.&nbsp; The artist and photographer Joaqu&iacute;n Ram&oacute;n Herrera is his son. 
&nbsp; 
Perched on Nothingness 
 
Broken sidewalk &mdash; bleach ragged 
The tree to the right homeless 
Man under the bush 
 
There is a tower wood &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;the hawk 
Perched on nothingness 
Fields overturned gauged reddish 
The face 
Of Rodney King his hand scarred 
 
His gaze &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; dubious television 
My son J. lost too where is he 
 
Decades now &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;the flames 
The question of race 
 
Too many faces too many killings 
Color dissipates only race remains 
race beyond race &mdash; <s>race</s> 
&nbsp; 
 
<style></style>

Perched on Nothingness

LARB Quarterly, no. 39: Air

Georg (György) Lukács (1885–1971) was a literary theorist and philosopher who is widely viewed as one of the founders of “Western Marxism” and as a forerunner of 20th-century critical theory. Lukács is best known for his Theory of the Novel (1916) and History and Class Consciousness (1923).

Georg Lukács

History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics

Mitchell Cohen is emeritus co-editor of Dissent magazine and a professor of political science at Baruch College of the City University of New York. Among his books are The Politics of Opera: A History from Monteverdi to Mozart (2017) and The Wager of Lucien Goldmann: Tragedy, Dialectics, and a Hidden God (2016), both published by Princeton University Press.

Mitchell Cohen

Georg Lukács’s Two Natures: The Centenary of “History and Class Consciousness”

Aya Labanieh is a Syrian American writer, translator, academic, and aspiring stand-up comedian. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, studying imperial conspiracies and their conspiracy-theory afterlives in literature and media. She currently serves as research associate for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Ancient Near East, and has led multiple public humanities projects, such as GATE: From Babylon to Berlin (2023), which invited migrant Middle Eastern poets and musicians to reflect on exile, belonging, and Babylonian antiquity at Berlin’s Pergamonmuseum. Her scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Arabic Literature, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, MOSF Journal of Science Fiction, and edited volumes Global Science Fiction and Approaches to Teaching Gilgamesh. Her public-facing writing has appeared in Aeon magazine, Ancient Exchanges, Culturico, and Politics/Letters.

Aya Labanieh

No Fap: A Cultural History of Anti-Masturbation

George Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, one of the college’s highest honors. He is also the University of Pennsylvania’s inaugural fellow in the Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellowship Program (2019–20 academic year). Yancy is the author, editor, and co-editor of over 20 books. His latest book is entitled Until Our Lungs Give Out: Conversations on Race, Justice, and the Future (2023). At Academic Influence, he is cited as one of the top 10 influential philosophers in the decade 2010–20, based upon the number of citations and web presence. He has also published over 200 combined scholarly articles, chapters, and interviews that have appeared in professional journals, in books, and at various news sites. He is well known for his influential essays and interviews in the New York Times philosophy column The Stone and at the progressive nonprofit news organization Truthout. He is also series editor of Philosophy of Race at Lexington Books.

George Yancy

WHEN I DISCOVERED the field of philosophy at roughly the age of 17, I was seduced by its abstraction from—or its abstraction away from, as the late philosopher Charles W. Mills would put it—the world of nonideal theory; of harmful immigration policy; of pain and suffering; of racism, anti-Blackness, sexism, femicide, classism, genocide, oppression, poverty, xenophobia, transphobia, white domination, ableist normativity. I’m sure that this is partly why I fell in love with Plato, especially his theory of Forms, which holds that ordinary physical objects are mere appearances—images, shadows—that don’t provide us with true knowledge but with opinion only. It was the immutability of the Forms that transfixed my attention, not the contingent suffering of Plato’s teacher, Socrates, condemned to death by drinking hemlock for being a gadfly. The implication was that, as a philosopher, I had to transcend the messiness of empirical reality, had to stay focused on and seek out capital-R Reality through conceptual abstraction. 
 
This assumption was indicative of mainstream philosophy as I learned it as an undergraduate philosophy major in the early 1980s. My philosophy professors, for the most part, were mainly engaged in what felt like disembodied abstraction and conceptual minutiae. I recall that there was one philosopher who made it clear to me that he didn’t believe the stuff he taught in philosophy of religion but simply liked to argue. In the classroom, I witnessed what seemed to be a fetishization of argumentation, not to mention philosophical hubris. The objective was to escape, through pure intellection, the cave of ignorance that Plato allegorized as our unfortunate human condition. 
 
So, I was struggling there to see beyond what was before me, trying to extricate myself from what were deemed mere shadows, simulacra. It was only later that I came to realize that practicing philosophy in this vein isn’t about philosophy tout court but rather about a particular understanding of philosophy, a construction that refuses to see the ugly face of human suffering and seems incapable of doing—or unwilling to do—anything to eradicate that suffering. The questions posed, and the answers given, stem from what Mills, in his 1994 essay “Non-Cartesian Sums: Philosophy and the African-American Experience,” calls a “perk of social privilege.” 
 
Critiquing a narrow understanding of theory in her provocative 1984 essay <a href="https://openspaceofdemocracy.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/adrienne-rich-notes-toward-a-politics-of-location.pdf">“Notes Toward a Politics of Location,”</a> Adrienne Rich writes that “theory can be a dew that rises from the earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn’t smell of the earth, it isn’t good for the earth.” The relevance of Rich’s point regarding how theory can lose the smell of the earth speaks to how philosophical reflection can function as a form of mere spectatorship (theōros), where there is no investment in the world other than to view it at a distance. In this context, I had become a young philosopher who lost his sense of smell, his sense of the mundane, the quotidian muck and mire of human existence. When I was a graduate student at Yale, I met philosopher Cornel West for the first time, not long after he was arrested and jailed for protesting the university’s investment in South Africa’s apartheid regime. His actions spoke to what it means to be true to Socratic parrhesia (courageous speech) and how we mustn’t avoid what he calls the <a href="https://brotherwisedispatch.blogspot.com/2017/04/prophetic-fragments-existential-blues.html">“raw funky stinky stuff of life.”</a> 
 
In this regard, it isn’t lost on me that, at this moment in history, roughly 1,200 Israeli men, women, and children were brutally killed by Hamas on October 7, and that, since that tragic day, over 10,000 Palestinians, including over 4,000 children, have been brutally killed by Israel’s bombardment and invasion of Gaza. That is the stuff that my early introduction to philosophy didn’t prepare me for. There were discussions of death but not of severed body parts, deep lamentation, the unimaginable grieving for brutalized children. When I was an undergraduate, ensconced within the pristine halls where philosophers pontificated about truth, reality, beauty, substance, justice, ethics, the good life, and the meaning of meaning, the whiteness and maleness of philosophy were hypervisible, and the anti-Blackness held by many of the West’s prominent thinkers, including Hume, Kant, and Hegel, was sidestepped or deemed irrelevant. The painful sounds of a George Floyd calling for his mama, the reality that he was knelt on for over nine minutes by the white police officer Derek Chauvin, would not have been discussed with philosophical vigor given the meta-philosophical policing of professional journals, college curricula, and academic colloquia, the places where “real” philosophy takes place. 
 
These days, these trying times, these moments of existential ruin, where we are 90 seconds to midnight, which is the closest we have ever been to global catastrophe, I find myself less and less moved by Auguste Rodin’s bronze sculpture of The Thinker. As a philosopher, I find myself immersed instead in Edvard Munch’s The Scream and, as a Black philosopher, located in the midst of what Christina Sharpe calls <a href="https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/art-books-music/a43012829/christina-sharpe-in-the-wake/">the wake,</a> the horrid afterlife of slavery. Despite my bona fides as a professionally trained philosopher, this identity in no way keeps me safe from being racially profiled or prevents me from being shot by a police officer who mistakes my cell phone for a weapon. That prospective horror—and so much more—makes up the funk, the harsh reality, that philosophy must face, must engage with, must not avoid by abstracting from the smell of the earth. 
 
The decision to curate this special series on philosophy’s importance at times like these was partly motivated by my own practice and understanding of the imperative to do philosophy as a mode of public-facing work. I wanted to demonstrate just how important and relevant specific conceptions of philosophy (implicit and explicit), and specific praxes of philosophers, can be in times of deep social, political, and existential trauma. The six philosophers gathered for this series celebrate what philosophy is capable of. Each is invested in philosophical plurality, which doesn’t mean that anything goes or that all views are equally well-thought-out or critically valid. These thinkers have no pretensions of being able to perform what Donna Haraway refers to as “the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere.” Each embodied philosophical voice is deeply situated, invested not in navel-gazing but in bearing witness to other embodied voices that have been marginalized and deemed nugatory. 
 
I have curated this special series because I see philosophy as asking of us nothing less than to face the reality of the world and of who we are with as much honesty as we can manage. It asks us to grieve that world, and to grieve our own mistakes within that world, and yet also to be moved by the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love to transform that world for the better. Asking for modes of change that involve the mutual flourishing of all human beings is, as sad as it may sound, an act of deep risk-taking; it can be dangerous. My public-facing philosophical practice has made me the target of death threats, racist projections, and vicious name-calling. I was even placed on the infamous <a href="https://www.professorwatchlist.org/search">Professor Watchlist</a> for writing <a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/dear-white-america/?_r=0">a letter of love to white people.</a> In these times of narrow ideological allegiances and goose-stepping conformity, philosophers who ask “why?” as a challenge to the status quo are asking an unsafe question. And that fact, more than anything else, shows us why we need philosophy in times like these. 
 
In this special series, I am honored to share this space with philosophers who understand, with clarity and urgency, the role that philosophy must play in transforming the world, in helping to push us closer to the not yet—the manifestation of worldwide justice and the recognition of the unquestionable humanity of all peoples. Coming out tomorrow are essays by Jay L. Garfield and Vanessa Wills. <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/an-apology-for-philosophy">Garfield draws from a panoply of philosophical voices and traditions, arguing for cross-cultural and interdisciplinary ways of seeing and doing philosophy.</a> While stressing philosophy’s ability to address pressing questions about climate change and structural racism, capitalism and colonialism, he also argues for the capacity of philosophy to generate beauty in our lives. <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/philosophy-in-times-like-these">For her part, Wills engages several issues in what increasingly feels like our inevitable march toward a dying planet: the forcible displacement of human beings, mass imprisonment, book banning, and COVID-19 denialism.</a> Both essays speak to the deep pertinence of philosophy conceived as a forceful intervention in the world, as opposed to an arcane practice performed in the confines of a stove-heated room (à la Descartes). 
 
Next Monday, December 4, essays by Kate Manne and Todd May will be published. And then, on Monday, December 11, two final essays, by Elizabeth Brake and Lori Gallegos, will appear. With clarity of thought and a refusal to think in philosophical lockstep, these six philosophers “talk back” (as bell hooks would say) to the profession of philosophy, to its hermetic proclivities, its pretensions of political neutrality, its silencing of voices that don’t reflect the interests of cishet white men, its refusal to embrace the smell of the earth. 
¤ 
Featured image: Robert Delaunay. <a href="https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/62309">Rythme/3.</a><a href="https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/62309">,</a> 1938. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Bequest of Judge Julius Isaacs, New York, 1983. <a href="https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/">tepapa.govt.nz</a>, CC0. Accessed November 3, 2023. Images has been cropped.

When Philosophy No Longer Smells of the Earth

Benjamín Labatut is a Chilean author born in the Netherlands in 1980. He was raised in The Hague before settling in Chile, where he lives and works. He is the author of Antarctica Starts Here (2009), a short story collection; After the Light (2016), a series of scientific, philosophical, and historical notes on the void; The Stone of Madness (2021), a diptych on madness, chaos, and modernity; and When We Cease to Understand the World (2021), a book that explores the ecstasy and agony of scientific breakthroughs and has been translated into over 30 languages.

Benjamín Labatut

The MANIAC

Ed Simon is the editor of Belt Magazine and an emeritus staff writer at The Millions. He is a frequent contributor at several different sites including The Atlantic, The Paris Review Daily, Aeon, Jacobin, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Killing the Buddha, Salon, The Public Domain Review, Atlas Obscura, JSTOR Daily, and Newsweek. The author of several books, he most recently wrote Heaven, Hell and Paradise Lost (2023). He holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University and an MA in literary and cultural studies from Carnegie Mellon University.

Ed Simon

ONCE, MANY CENTURIES AGO, there was supposedly a contraption of gleaming pneumatic tubes and shiny brass gears and widgets, a head constructed of polished metal with lips of copper and eyes that were smooth glass balls within corrugated sockets. The Brazen Head, as the folktale normally refers to this device, is less famous than other manufactured men, from Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel’s golem to Mary Shelley’s monster in Frankenstein (1818), even if the marvelous moving gearworks’ name endures in a handful of English and Irish pubs for whom he remains a mascot of sorts. Medieval sources claim that the machine, operated by a combination of principles both mechanical and magical, was capable of answering questions posed to it, was capable of thought. 
 
Associated with any number of figures, from Albertus Magnus to Johann Faust, this constructed man was most often remembered as a device built by the 13th-century English Franciscan philosopher Roger Bacon, a polymath to whom inventions ranging from eyeglasses to gunpowder are often attributed. Bacon was an unusual sort of wizard for, in his own estimation, he was scarcely a wizard at all. “Experimental science is the queen of sciences,” he wrote in his Opus Tertium (1267), “and the goal of all speculation.” An avowed nominalist and disdainer of the occult (despite being an alchemist), Bacon was among the first empiricists and experimentalists in the West. Yet so seemingly miraculous were his experiments that he was easily configured in the collective memory as a necromancer, a man capable of magic. A character in the Elizabethan playwright Robert Greene’s 1589 stage hit Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay enthuses how the monk’s machine is “a brazen head by art, / Which shall unfold strange doubts and aphorisms, / And read a lecture in philosophy,” an analytical engine that exists within “rich networks,” eerily prefiguring the internet. There is a newly pertinent aspect to Bacon’s mechanism, for his thinking machine is a clear prefiguration of an automaton, a robot, an android, a computer—an artificial intelligence. Before Alexa, Siri, or ChatGPT, there was the Brazen Head; humanity was haunted by the possibility of artificial intelligence before it ever existed. 
 
Bacon is only mentioned in the Chilean writer Benjamín Labatut’s first English-language novel The MANIAC (2023) by way of a deftly placed epigraph drawn from Greene’s play, but the fantastical aura of the Brazen Head permeates Labatut’s allegory about the ways in which reason, pushed to its extreme, can become its opposite, about how a certain tyranny of unfeeling logic could very well usher in an apocalypse (and soon). The title of Labatut’s novel, after all, refers to the acronym for the thousand-pound supercomputer that once occupied a few floors at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1950s. The novel is ostensibly historical fiction concerning the Hungarian Jewish physicist and father of modern computing John von Neumann, but The MANIAC is actually something far rarer and more unusual—a bona fide experimental novel of ideas that has emerged from a publishing ecosystem that all too often only rewards dry literary fiction or lowest-common-denominator genre fiction. The necessities of marketing and publicity no doubt require the book to be sold as a “novel,” and while obviously the inner thoughts of the scientist’s wife Klára Dán von Neumann or the economist Oskar Morgenstern require a certain amount of speculation on Labatut’s part (even while clearly based on voluminous research), it’s difficult to fully categorize The MANIAC as fiction, even historical fiction. Rather, The MANIAC’s genre is better understood as historical creative nonfiction, philosophical argument, or some conjunction of the two. 
 
The material on von Neumann occupies the bulk of Labatut’s attention, comprising the long middle portion of The MANIAC, wherein several different figures, ranging from the scientist’s wives and daughter to physicists Eugene Wigner and Richard Feynman, give first-person testimony in chronological order (almost as if they were being interviewed for a documentary, but no such framing conceit is offered). Meanwhile, the von Neumann narrative is bookended by a substantial prologue that sketches the biography of marginal Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest, who was simultaneously haunted by irrationality and the rise of Nazism and so murdered his Down syndrome–afflicted son and then took his own life in 1933. In keeping with narrative symmetry, The MANIAC ends decades later, in 2016, when the Korean Go savant Lee Sedol lost four of five tournament games to the computer program AlphaGO at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul. 
 
That the editors at Penguin were agreeable with Labatut’s novel ending in an 84-page (admittedly riveting) synopsis of the strategies that underlie a complex 3,000-year-old Chinese game speaks to an admirable conception of what novels can do, the way that they can be pushed and can in turn push our conceptions. Because what Labatut’s intent appears to be is nothing less than an interpretation of our nightmares of reason, this engine that powers a “reckless drive toward death and self-destruction” and embodies “an incorporeal wraith, an unholy spirit.” In that infernal trinity of nuclear weapons, climate change, and artificial intelligence, all avatars of humanity’s Thanatos, there is one figure who dwells within their nexus—Johnny von Neumann, the wizard whose supercomputer calculated the yield of the first hydrogen bombs, who advocated using those weapons as a means to control the weather in a potential Third World War, and who perhaps delivered to us the mechanism by which that conflagration will be fought in the form of the digital revolution. He is, if not in reality than certainly in The MANIAC, a demonic figure. 
 
“He was the smartest human being of the 20th century,” argues Labatut (italics his), and The MANIAC makes such a claim seem anything but histrionic. Von Neumann revolutionized several disparate fields, from quantum mechanics and nuclear physics to economics and computer science. He was the father of mathematical set theory, of proof theory, of game theory, of operator algebras, of fluid dynamics. Of the computer. He was the author of Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1932), Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), and Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata (posthumously published in 1966), among scores of other books, papers, and lectures. “So much of the high-tech world we live in today, with its conquest of space and extraordinary advances in biology and medicine, were spurred on by one man’s monomania,” writes Labatut. Von Neumann straddled the theoretical and the experimental; able to accomplish complicated mathematical proofs that had flummoxed scholars for decades while he was still just a schoolboy, his pudgy hands also groped at circuit boards and vacuum tubes. If it’s true that von Neumann was the most brilliant human of the last century, then he has ironically dwindled into popular obscurity (a lifelong fear of his), perhaps because, as a character, he lacks the doomed romanticism of a J. Robert Oppenheimer, the paranoiac madness of his friend and foil Kurt Gödel, or even the (studied) avuncular saintliness of an Albert Einstein. Far from being an otherworldly anchorite, von Neumann was a womanizer and a drinker, a gambler and a lover of luxury cars, closer to the military brass who gave him a dozen different security clearances to work at the Atomic Energy Commission, the Office of Scientific Research and Development, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, and so on, than he was to the genteel physicists of his Austro-Hungarian youth. Yet, as The MANIAC makes clear, von Neumann’s was the animating spirit of our current technological epoch, an individual whose dogged work ethic and almost supernatural intelligence made our current moment possible. 
 
His childhood was elegant and refined (the aristocratic “von” was added by the Hapsburg emperor in honor of services rendered by the scientist’s banker father during the Great War), yet, as his second wife is imagined as remembering, “Johnny loved America.” This infatuation, the transition from Neumann János Lajos who was raised in an 18-room apartment on sophisticated Báthory Street into Johnny von Neumann, American patriot, goes some way towards explaining the scientist’s Faustian proclivities. Labatut has Klára von Neumann further elaborate that America “did something to him. All that maddening, unthinking optimism, all that cheerful naïveté under which they hid their cruelty, it brought out the worst in him. A sleeping demon, a secret desire whispered by the nightmare that he confessed to no one.” 
 
It would be an error, however, to read The MANIAC as merely the Chilean novelist’s indictment of the gringo military-industrial complex, as embodied by von Neumann, because Labatut’s critique drives deeper, indicting the United States’ antinomian rationalism, its instrumental, utilitarian, positivist, rapacious, anarchic logic that so often can appear as its exact opposite. Von Neumann’s fall from grace wasn’t his becoming an American but rather the death of his faith in reason while he was still the most adept wielder of that reason. That self-exile occurs after von Neumann, whose European studies were long occupied by the search for “absolute truth, […] a mathematical basis for reality, a land free from contradictions and paradoxes,” finally encounters Gödel and his infamous incompleteness theorems, which forever laid to rest the naive belief that mathematics could be placed on an entirely consistent or coherent logical basis. The result is a reality that, at its deepest level, implies the existence of things that 
obey no measure and refuse categorization, because they exist outside the order that encompasses all phenomena. These outliers, these singularities, these monstrosities, will not be governed or compared by means of a number, because they lie at the root of what is disharmonious, chaotic, and unruly about the world. 
The conclusion is unassailable—if nothing is real, then everything is permitted (at least somewhere). Gödel reacted by going insane, while von Neumann took a less decent route—not the sanitarium but the Pentagon. 
 
Bacon built a head of brass and copper, but von Neumann’s oracle was rendered in binary and punch card, code and algorithm. In the last years of his life, eventually succumbing in 1957 to metastatic cancer most likely caused by his work at the Manhattan Project, von Neumann became obsessed with machine consciousness, with the idea that humans could create silicon minds far superior to our own. Long before there was any possibility of such a thing, when the processing power of a machine like MANIAC (short for the Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer) was equivalent to a single bit, von Neumann was already imagining “the singularity,” the coming eschaton whereby our machines finally outstrip us. As incandescent as von Neumann’s brilliance was, his mind was different from ours only in degree, not in kind. The artificial intelligence he dreamt would survive our nuclear wars (which he had made possible) would be something else entirely—they would be gods. The central preoccupation of The MANIAC isn’t von Neumann but rather von Neumann’s dying obsession, and how, now that we’re seemingly on the cusp of that epoch he yearned for, we can see the full fruit of irrationality hitherto masked as its opposite. Labatut’s novel is a sweeping condemnation of the cult of rationality, an acknowledgment that logic pushed to its extreme transforms into madness—an insanity like the nuclear deterrence method called mutually assured destruction, for which von Neumann advocated, convincing military brass that it was nothing but the clearest of clear thinking. 
 
Our supposedly rational economy drives us towards climate collapse; our apparently logical foreign policy pushes us towards nuclear war; our burgeoning artificial intelligences—paragons of miraculous technology—court apocalypse. Ours is a final age “suffused with a Faustian, boundless energy, a haste, a tragic fall,” an era of much knowledge and no wisdom, which recognizes “no laws, no method, no truth, just a blind, uncontainable surge, a rush of madness that would not stop for anyone or anything but drive us onward even to the ends of the Earth.” Our predicament is born not from a deficit of rationality but from a surfeit of it: logic dialectically pushed towards its contrary through our cowardice and idolatry. If reality has always had the demonic at its core, and if our prophets of science like von Neumann drove reason itself to insanity, then Labatut implies that we’re now witnessing the shuddering birth of a new intelligence, hence the 84-page epilogue about a Korean Go champion bested by a computer program. That program was just one of Johnny’s AI children, “a profoundly inhuman form of intelligence that was completely indifferent to mankind’s deepest needs; this deranged reason, this specter.” As exemplary as the intelligence of von Neumann was, his legacy is the crafting of intelligences far more alien than his own, the gestation of a new reason beyond reason. 
 
In legends of the Brazen Head, it is claimed that the only prediction offered by the mechanical mind was an inscrutable warning: “Time is, time was, time is past,” uttered right before it destroyed itself. Von Neumann himself was treated as a doomed oracle, his delirious brain finally so eaten by cancer that the military locked him up in Walter Reed hospital, fearing that he might start yelling out state secrets. Guarded around the clock by army personnel who hoped they could get von Neumann’s assistance, even while on his deathbed, in finding a few more solutions to their technical problems, the tortured man instead screamed out his own prophecies, which none of the officers could understand, since everything was in Hungarian, the language of the maniac’s youth. 
¤ 
<a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/ed-simon/">Ed Simon is the editor of Belt Magazine and an emeritus staff writer at The Millions.</a>

Nightmares of Reason: On Benjamín Labatut’s “The MANIAC”

Vanessa Wills is associate professor of philosophy at the George Washington University. She is a founding co-editor of Spectre, a biannual journal of Marxist theory, strategy, and analysis. Her monograph, Marx’s Ethical Vision, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Vanessa Wills

The aim of <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/when-philosophy-no-longer-smells-of-the-earth">this curated series of essays</a> is to address the question: why is philosophy important at times like these? For many, philosophy is a field of inquiry that remains so esoteric, narrow, and specialized that it has little or no relevance to the everyday world of “ordinary” people. Indeed, philosophers are often characterized as introverted, absent-minded thinkers who are obsessed with analytical minutiae, isolated in their academically cloistered spaces (offices and personal studies) in a monologue with dead white guys, and prone to encouraging dispassionate argumentation and one-upmanship. For the thinkers writing for this series, however, philosophy is a social enterprise that strives for clarity of thought and encourages the formation of multiple cultural spaces of philosophical practice that are welcoming to a diverse range of scholars and laypeople, rather than simply those who look alike and share the same hegemonic meta-philosophical assumptions about the field. 
¤ 
PHILOSOPHY DREW ME IN by offering something highly unique and valuable to a Black teenage girl from an immigrant working-class family in 1990s Philadelphia. Among the logical puzzles, the formal linguistic analysis of abstract metaphysical concepts, and the thought experiments about possible worlds, the concrete limitations of the actual world hardly seemed real. Where worldly obstacles of privilege and prejudice made themselves nonetheless felt, I could console myself with the logical certainty that these were irrational, unjustified, and perhaps, therefore, impermanent. 
 
Like science fiction, philosophy was fun, wild, and creative, rebelling against any tyranny of what is over our license to imagine what might be. The union of imagination and reason promised to reveal new truths that might remain hidden were we to restrict scholarly inquiry to the actual and not explore the conceptual terrain of the as yet merely possible. Constantly to ask, “But what if things were otherwise?” seemed to be philosophy’s main business. 
 
Contemporary academic philosophy largely self-identifies with a Socratic tradition of rigorous challenge to received wisdom and the status quo. Ask the right question, apply the right logical test, wield the right objection like a scalpel, and—if all goes well—then down tumble our ill-founded assumptions, sophistical fallacies, and logical inconsistencies. But something seems to happen on the way between the abstract notion of philosophy as the love of wisdom and actual philosophical practice. The fearlessness of asking about the counterfactuals can easily become a manner of safe and even cowardly retreat from the world, with not much to offer back to the world or to our attempts to make sense of it. 
 
The question “What if things were otherwise?” has no real content except when grounded in a rational and empirical accounting of how things now are, and of what follows logically from the fact that they are as they are. This space is too brief to attempt exhaustively to describe our current times, but I can mention briefly what I take to be some particularly salient features about them. Then, we might say more about what philosophy has to offer us who are living in them. 
 
Let us start with the implacable reality that looming before us at the end of our current path is a future on a dying planet. As of this writing, it is summer 2023 and we have recently experienced Earth’s single hottest day on record. The planet will only get hotter and hotter from here. Crops will fail, seas will rise, and resource conflicts will heighten and spread. 
 
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees <a href="https://www.unhcr.org/us/about-unhcr/who-we-are/figures-glance">estimates</a> that, at the end of 2022, 108.4 million of the world’s people had been “forcibly displaced.” This number steadily increases year by year—exponentially so over the last several years—as war and conflict drive people from their homes in places like Syria, Sudan, Palestine, and Ukraine. It does not include “voluntary” economic migrants— people who risk their lives to reach metropoles in the United States and Europe for a chance to survive, rather than remain in places where the vicissitudes of global capitalism have consigned them and their families to poverty, starvation, and death. 
 
On June 14, 2023, a boat containing about 750 people seeking better lives and economic opportunities sank into the Mediterranean Sea, killing as many as 500 of its passengers in what EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/17/world/greece-boat-worst-ever-tragedy-mediterranean-sea-intl-hnk/index.html">has called</a> possibly “the worst tragedy ever” to take place in those waters. Amid conflicting reports, what remains clear is that Greek Coast Guard ships present at the site of the tragedy did not render aid to the distressed ship as it drifted for hours before sinking. 
 
In the German town of Sonneberg this June, the notoriously far-right Alternative für Deutschland <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/26/far-right-afd-wins-local-election-watershed-moment-german-politics">won its first district council election ever,</a> having surged in popularity among voters across Germany over the past year. This marks the first time that a far-right politician has been elected in Sonneberg since the end of the Third Reich. 
 
Since national borders require a massive infrastructure of state violence to defend them, especially as conditions grow more desperate and unlivable for more and more people, it is unsurprising that far-right political parties, promoting authoritarian policies, have capitalized on the crisis to make large electoral gains throughout Europe. That the interests of the nation-state trump the interests of vulnerable human beings is the fundamental premise of restrictive and exclusionary immigration policies. Where all mainstream political parties agree on this, the Far Right distinguish themselves as the most consistent and committed adherents to that tenet. 
 
To say just a bit more about our times: the trend towards greater authoritarianism characterizes the political situation in the United States domestically as well. American cities <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/08/the-blue-budget-what-major-cities-spend-on-police/">devote about 25 to 40 percent</a> of their annual budgets to policing, on average. In the years following the Black Lives Matter protests in spring 2020, city governments mostly further <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/cities-vowed-2020-cut-police-funding-budgets-expanded-2021-rcna9864">increased police budgets</a> despite activists’ calls to defund police and fund necessary social services instead. 
 
This past year, politicians across the US have instrumentalized transphobic talking points to justify <a href="https://www.hrc.org/resources/attacks-on-gender-affirming-care-by-state-map#:~:text=As%20of%20November%202023%2C%20three,care%20ban%20had%20been%20introduced.">bans on gender-affirming care</a> for young people, with some states, such as Texas and Florida, going so far as to consider the provision of medically appropriate care to trans youth “child abuse”—paving the way for the state to seize children and prosecute their parents. The state of Texas has <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/07/11/1107741175/texas-abortion-bounty-law#:~:text=It%20allows%20private%20citizens%20to,%2410%2C000%20in%20damages%20from%20defendants.">passed a law</a> that effectively issues a $10,000 “bounty” on patients who seek abortions and anyone who assists such patients. There has been an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/21/books/book-ban-rise-libraries.html">uptick in book bans</a> in schools and libraries across the country. None of this is even to mention <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/07/05/1109444617/the-supreme-court-conservative">recent Supreme Court decisions</a> that blithely shed the appearance of judicial neutrality and reveal the court’s character as an organ of unaccountable power. 
 
Overwhelmingly, these are times of rising geopolitical tensions, of ascendant far-right extremism, of increasingly authoritarian state bureaucracies, and of looming climate disaster. This all transpires against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, which the WHO <a href="https://www.who.int/data/stories/the-true-death-toll-of-covid-19-estimating-global-excess-mortality">estimates</a> has killed three million people worldwide, providing a template for how the world’s governments will handle the further waves of mass death to come—“sacrificing lives for the economy.” 
 
I say all this not to depress the reader but to concretize the question at hand: what can philosophy offer anyone in times like these? 
 
I do not think there is just a single answer. In my philosophical work, I tackle racism, capitalism, human rights, and other similarly worldly and practical concerns. I practice and advocate socially engaged, socially aware philosophical research that grounds itself in the tradition of liberation struggle and the resistance of the oppressed, seeking not merely to “interpret” the world but also to transform it radically for the better. Yet, just as philosophy once represented for me a kind of mental retreat or escape from the world’s troubles, it would be disingenuous of me now to say that years of activism, historical study, and professional experience have taught me that philosophy is only ever wrongly or illegitimately approached in that manner. 
 
Philosophy does offer us an array of charming puzzles and opportunities for free, creative, intellectual play; this is good. Students, however challenging, eye-opening, and enriching the rest of their coursework might be, often find that philosophy classes offer them their first experiences of something like thinking done for its own sake, as an intrinsic pleasure. In a political environment where the aims of education are increasingly narrowly subordinated to the immediate staffing needs of “job creators” and every human endeavor seems to be valued just for its “usefulness” (read: profitability), this role for philosophy and philosophical education should be defended. 
 
Philosophical inquiry, however, even when apparently unmoored from some particular practical end, is always sociohistorically situated. This remains the case despite all our representations of philosophical methods and truths as somehow “eternal” and abstractly universal. Indeed, for a field that often represents its concerns as being far removed from contingent worldly matters, the ideas that overwhelmingly shape the mainstream “canon” of Western philosophy have tended to arise out of periods of great social and political upheaval. For Hobbes, it was the English Civil War that led him to wonder how the individualism of the modern age could be rationally reconciled with the order and stability of the old world. Both Kant and Hegel were heavily influenced by the tumult of the French Revolution. Even the consolidation of analytic philosophy as the dominant tradition within Anglophone philosophy departments during the mid-20th century is difficult to comprehend outside the context of the Cold War and the chilling effect of McCarthyism on the American academy. 
 
Central to many of the defining political conflicts and existential challenges facing us today is an attack on reason and rationality. Denialism about the medical dangers posed by COVID-19, for example, is a posture that has moved from the fringes of right-wing nihilism to become a mainstream response, with the needs of vulnerable populations especially relegated to the margins. COVID denialism is of a kind with climate change denialism, which is committed to delegitimizing the consensus opinion of climate scientists worldwide regarding the urgency of drastic measures to slow global warming. 
 
Not only patently unjust, policing and imprisonment in the US are also flagrantly unscientific, rooted in racism and retributivism. They are conducted in a manner practically guaranteed to produce more crime and social ills rather than less, even while politicians and law enforcement agencies insist that the most rational response to crime is to hire more police officers and build more capacity to mete out state violence. Transphobic movements—growing internationally and, not coincidentally, acting as recruitment grounds for the Far Right—claim an interest in “biology” even while promoting an anti-intellectual, anti-science agenda that dismisses decades of medical research and expert consensus as mere “woke” opinion. 
 
Bad arguments, faulty reasoning, shoddy premises—these are just the sorts of things that philosophy ought to criticize and provide an antidote for. Yet, too often, philosophers have tended to resist putting philosophy to that use, preferring not to risk the objectivity of their reflections by sullying them with matters in which they might take some personal interest—like the survival of humanity. 
 
In the 2000s, the start of my graduate education coincided with the further hardening of the US state into a permanent war bureaucracy through the Patriot Act, the formation of the Department of Homeland Security, and the initiation of the so-called “war on terror.” The philosophy seminars I attended could not have seemed more eerily removed from the reality of mayhem and death being rained down upon innocents in the name of peace, the arbitrary torture and detention spuriously cloaked with the rule of law, and the massive protests, in cities across the United States and elsewhere, fighting to uphold and extend the legacy of the anti-war movement of the 1960s. 
 
It was learning more about the importance of revolutionary ideas, and their centrality to and emergence from popular struggles, that reinvigorated my love of philosophy. The more that I came to understand that philosophy itself has a history—one that is living, dynamic, contested, and shaped in and through mass upheaval—the more I realized that its main usefulness was not in transporting me away from the world but in bringing me into closer connection with it. Philosophy can then be not mere escapism or retreat but, at least in part, the art of considering real alternatives to what now exists. 
 
Where philosophers retreat from practical, worldly concerns, they leave open a space for the kind of pseudoskeptical posturing that is now all-too-familiar from far-right discourse. The pose of “just asking questions” soon gives way to an irrationalist, anti-intellectual nihilism, attracting those who seek meaning in an increasingly grim and chaotic world while running cover for those who prefer we do nothing to prevent the mass suffering that our current sociopolitical arrangements necessarily produce. 
 
But to engage in what Karl Marx once called the “ruthless criticism of all that exists”—asking of every single thing why it is this way; what caused it to be as it is; what is its essential character; what, if anything, justifies it in persisting in its current form; and what might come to be the case if some things, or maybe all things, were otherwise than they now are—is central to philosophy and to humanity’s best attempts to make sense of the world. As authoritarianism spreads and gathers strength around the globe, philosophy’s capacity to liberate and exercise our critical imaginations becomes only more vital and necessary, with each moment bringing us closer to a future that we are creating now, consciously or not. 
¤ 
Featured image: Frank Weitzel. <a href="https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/36512">Abstract design no. 2</a>, 1931. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Gift of Rex Nan Kivell, 1953. <a href="https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/">tepapa.govt.nz</a>, CC0. Accessed November 21, 2023. Image has been cropped.

Perched on Nothingness

By Juan Felipe HerreraApril 30, 2012

LARB Staff Recommendations

Where I Used to Walk

Did you know LARB is a reader-supported nonprofit?