Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Raymond Geuss: Not Thinking Like a Liberal

Harvard University Press, 2022, pp. 208, ISBN: 978-0674270343

  • BOOK REVIEW
  • Published:
Society Aims and scope Submit manuscript

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. See in this context Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 1.

  2. Thomas Mathien and D. G. Wright, Autobiography as Philosophy. The Philosophical Uses of Self-Presentation, Routledge, London 2006.

  3. The three are included among twelve philosophers Geuss examines in is 2016 book Changing the Subject. Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno (Harvard U. P., Cambridge/Mass.) though not specifically with respect to the autobiographical aspects of their work. While Geuss takes a favorable view of Montaigne and Nietzsche, he writes unsympathetically of Augustine’s “repellent self and … the unattractive flabbiness of his written style.” (p. 95).

  4. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 377.

  5. Outside Ethics, p. 28.

  6. Raymond Geuss, “Who Needs a World View?” in Who Needs a World View?, Harvard U.P., Cambridge/Mass. 2020, p. 39.

  7. “Who Needs a World View?”, loc. cit., p. 6.

  8. “Who Needs a World View?", pp. 6 and 2.

  9. Not Thinking Like a Liberal is a book full of diverse ideas. But there is also much that it leaves out. Its autobiographical narrative, for one thing, is highly selective. The book covers no more than a dozen years of the author’s life. And even those are retold with great circumspection. We never even find out what the main protagonists of the story, Krigler and Morgenbesser, looked liked. They remain mere voices. Geuss himself appears mostly as a listener who records what others have said. One emotional outburst is recalled in the essay “Who Needs a World-View?” where Geuss tells us of his irreparable break with Morgenbesser. We have to assume that Geuss’s intellectual development did not end around 1970, as he claims. What did he learn from teaching at Princeton and Columbia? How did the move to Cambridge and England change him? At the end we may feel that Geuss has not told us enough about himself. He certainly does not seek to bare his innermost self to us. In Changing the Subject he dismisses the “Christian-inspired” probing of the depths of the self that he finds in Augustine. He prefers, instead, Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo “with the extensive discussion of his life by reference to his preferred diet, the landscapes he loves, and his favourite meteorological conditions.” (p. 191) Not that he follows Nietzsche in this respect.

  10. “Who Needs a World View?” p. 14.

  11. Ibid. p. 20

  12. Changing the Subject, pp. 299–300.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Hans Sluga

Authors
  1. Hans Sluga
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hans Sluga.

Additional information

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Sluga, H. Raymond Geuss: Not Thinking Like a Liberal. Soc 59, 775–779 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-022-00778-w

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-022-00778-w

Search

Navigation