I posted the following as a "comment" (one heck of a long comment) on Gary Lachman's website where he posted "Trickle Down Metaphysics: From Nietzche to Trump." He also posted it at Academia.edu, a website for posting academic papers. Take your pick: Word doc or HTML. Either way, it's an important read. I recommend you pick your format and read Lachman's piece first.
Gary,
Thank you for posting your excellent paper, "Trickle Down Metaphysics: From Nietzche to Trump". As usual, you've provided an excellent map of some intellectual high-country for those of us like me who've not explored it in the detail that you have. In this, your account prods me toward wanting to explore more of this terrain, although I must say that you only reinforced my standing conclusion that it's not worth the coin to attempt to summit Mt. Heidegger and some of the other terrain that you discuss. But regardless of my attitude toward some of the thinkers that you discuss, I found your paper helpful and provocative. As to the provocative (in the good sense), I'd like to share some random thoughts and observations that occurred to me as a result of reading this paper, although some of these thoughts--perhaps more in the way of hunches or suspicions--have been brewing in the back of my mind for some time.
The most prominent thought that your article arises from the implication in your article that certain trains of thought can be traced from Nietzche to Heidegger to Sartre to Derrida to Trump, although you--I'm sure accurately--point-out that Trump probably hasn't the foggiest about who most of these individuals are or what ideas they propounded. While some of the influences in this chain are unquestionable and well-documented (such as Nietzche on Heidegger and Heidegger on Sartre), the question arises for me about the extent that these highly literate, sophisticated (and sometimes obtuse) high-culture ideas exert an influence on popular culture down to the rungs at which Donald Trump, Trumpists, and his supporters reside. I fear that those of us who explore and value ideas may overestimate their importance in the wider world. And yet, all humans are full of ideas of one sort or another, many of which have no doubt filtered down from "on high." For example, the "literary elite" who wrote the Gospels and other writings in the New Testament and then Christian writers and theologians on down through history provide compelling examples of the power of ideas filtered down to the less educated public.
I don't subscribe to the Marxist contention that all ideas are ideologies that arise from the economic substructure of society, Instead, it seems to me that there is a dance undertaken between the world of ideas and the material world--economic, social, and political--in which these ideas are spread like seeds. Some sprout while others seem to wither or remain dormant for long periods. Indeed, much of your career and efforts have been spent exploring the Secret History of Consciousness," The Secret Teachers of the Western World, Caretakers of the Cosmos, and The Lost Knowledge of the Imagination. Why did these many ideas, which admittedly run from the far-out-there to the mainstream, not create a greater effect upon society and popular thought? While I don't find the concept of "causes" in history very useful (too mechanical, too certain, too direct), I do contend that we can identify tributaries that contribute to the flow of history, the rivers of historical events and realities. In this river metaphor, the terrain, the mountains, plains, forests, and so on, constitute the material and social base through which streams of ideas must flow; some flows are cut off from the mainstream, creating solitary lakes, perhaps deep and beautiful, but outside of the flow of time. Other ideas end up in backwaters that stagnate in whirlpools that go nowhere until some random event--an earthquake, a storm--releases those waters to flow back into the mainstream. Or, in some cases, the rain never comes and those isolated ideas simply dry-up into oblivion.
Thus, I think that we must be careful not to blame the train of thought that you've identified for Trump and Trumpism. That these ideas in some ways help water the trends and instincts that guide Trump and his followers (we can't really contend that he has "ideas" can we?), the stream of contribution is probably quite small. Trump has many forebearers: tyrants, dictators, demagogues, authoritarians, fascists, and grifters. He draws on them not so much for their ideas but instinctively, as a huckster-salesman, a flim-flam man models himself on the traits of others of his ilk. Indeed, I suggest that we all should give thanks daily that this man is so politically naive and ignorant. A person with a will to political power and a modicum of knowledge about politics combined with Trump's refined reptilian instincts would prove a much greater disaster. Someone with ideas--even crack-pot ideas--like white supremacy, anti-Semitism, or religious fundamentalisms--could (and have) done much, much worse to the world that Trump has (so far, anyway). Trump and his camp followers aren't especially new or unique in American history, or in the history of the wider world. So why did his "ideas" (such as they are) catch on now? Here I think that we have to look at the current environment, economic, social, and political, that allows such a deadly virus of ideas (or more accurately, attitudes, prejudices, cliches) to spread sufficiently to allow this man to gain and keep power. Here's where I think that developments such as economic inequality, fear of loss of status, wide-spread economic insecurity, and cultivated resentments all come into play (and this is just to round-up the usual suspects). Also, we should note that the themes and appeals that Trump and Trumpists play upon, such as racism, white supremacy, and resentment of elites, have existed within the U.S. for most of its history. Not all of U.S. history, not everywhere, not everyone, but nevertheless there, sometimes dormant, sometimes active. Yes, like a virus that we can't seem to irradicate but against which we must develop herd immunity.
Now for a few nit-picky items.
You identify Norman Vincent Peale, as you did in Dark Star Rising, as an influence on Trump. (And for anyone else reading this, if you haven't read this Dark Star Rising, you really should.) Peale is "the power of positive thinking" and Trump--at least at his father's behest--did attend Peale's church and no doubt heard Peale preach his blend of New Thought positive thinking and Christianity. And while New Thought, with its emphasis on the imagination and creating reality certainly could have influenced Trump's outlook, the New Thought movement on the whole, and Peale in particular (I believe), remained close to traditional Christianity and traditional values. These values would have put a brake--if he was really listening--on Donald's less seemly (i.e., greedy, lusty) aspirations. (Query: Did Trump ever have any admirable aspirations? Anyone? Anyone?) The true artist of the dark arts that effected Trump was Roy Cohn, the man who creates one degree of separation between Trump and Joe McCarthy. Cohn was a seething bag of contradictions and a man who thrived in the underside world of politics, money, and fame and who provides the template for Trump's modus operandi.
Also, referring back to Heidegger, you mentioned his student and lover, Hannah Arendt. I admit that I've held an intellectual crush on Hannah Arendt since I was introduced to her work as an undergraduate (oh, so many years ago!). Arendt was a student of Heidegger, and for a period, his lover. But they parted ways, both personally--and more importantly--in their thinking. Arendt was Jewish, and Heidegger did have a period of infatuation with the Nazi cause in the early 1930s while Arendt was forced to flee Germany after having been arrested early in the Hitler regime. Arendt went her own way in the ensuing years and had no contact with Heidegger until after the war. Even then, she remained respectful but wary. After leaving her studies (and personal relationship) with Heidegger, she studied with Karl Jaspers, another German existentialist, although much less well known than Heidegger. Arendt never missed an opportunity to praise Jaspers and his influence upon her. Although I've not explored his thought, based on her high praise, and my high estimation of her, I suspect that exploring Jasper's work might prove worth the time and effort.
But all of the above is not the most important point about Hannah Arendt. Unlike Heidegger, whose head remained in the clouds (or buried in arcane poetry), Arendt went on the become one of the most--and in my opinion--the most important political theorist of the twentieth-century. Unlike Heidegger, Arendt used her career to delve deeply into the political world and to provide a vision of politics that provides some dignity to this most human endeavor. (after having plumbed the depths of totalitarianism, a new phenomenon in politics that arose in the twentieth-century). And while Arendt doesn't make for light or easy reading--I think of reading her as reading by lightning flashes of insight--she's not the convoluted writer and obtuse thinker that Heidegger is noted for Being. And in the age of Trump, there is no single thinker that we can turn to for more insight and guidance than Arendt. If we can think of Heidegger as a Trump-precursor or enabler, we can think of Arendt as the anti-Trump, the inoculation that we so desperately need.
I also want to note that your article addresses only continental thinkers. Where are the Brits and their English-speaking off-spring? My conjecture is that such an inquiry shows that English-speaking philosophy, on the whole (and with a lot of help from the Austrians), became rather shallow with their "realism," "logical positivism," "analytic philosophy," and "ordinary language " takes upon philosophy. Not that these endeavors had no value or purpose, but these developments were aimed short and small, concerned more with the technical, the empirical, and the quotidian. Reading much of English-speaking philosophy for succor and insight during the twentieth-century would be like anticipating a high-tech weapons display and getting only firecrackers. But of course, my genealization is not universally true, and as the realist-logical positivist-analytical-linguistic analysis branch was coming into ascendency, there were others outside of this trend, such as Samuel Alexander, Alfred North Whitehead, Michael Oakshott, and my personal favorite, R.G. Collingwood. Collingwood is sometimes classed as the last of the British idealists (Green Bosanquet, Bradley), but this inaccurate, as Collingwood made quite clear to "Ryle" in an exchange of letters about an article in which Gilbert Ryle described Collingwood as an "idealist." Indeed, Collingwood is hard to classify--and the more power to him for it. He left no school of thought, but his mind ranged widely and with great insight. He's best known (and rightly so) for his work in the philosophy of history, but his work also addressed ethics, politics, metaphysics, and art (including language) in useful and imaginative ways. The final work published before his untimely death at age 53 in 1943, was The New Leviathan, a work about politics built from the ground-up modeled on (but not so pessimistic as) the Hobbes original. It was a work intended to provide an intellectual grounding for what the Allies were fighting for and against in fascism. Like Arendt, Collingwood provides guidance and insight into our time of troubles. (For an initial (and as yet uncompleted) comparison of Collingwood and Arendt, go here.
I'll conclude these reflections with a "what if?" reference, and how the flow of ideas might have taken a different course. Ray Monk, a biographer of Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and J. Robert Oppenheimer, wrote an insightful and tantalizing piece about Collingwood and what might have transpired in the world of philosophy--and the analytical versus continental divide in philosophy--had Collingwood been able to continue is work and remained in his influential position at Oxford (where he was succeeded by Gilbert Ryle.) One can't argue that had Collingwood lived long enough to complete all his projects and to continue to explore his thoughts that the world, even the world of philosophy, would have now been all hunky-dory, but . . . . what might have been is always tantalizing. But to borrow a rare coherent thought, "it is what it is." But at least we have thinkers like Collingwood, Arendt, and Lachman (and those he champions), to provide us guidance, the self-knowledge of history, with which we can light our way.
