Philosophy is dead

JONATHAN RÉE

There are two different ways of responding to this predicament. Geuss sketches one of them in a scintillating chapter on Theodor Adorno, the twentieth-century aesthete who sought to combine classical Marxism with disdain for the stupidity of the masses. Adorno, you might say, showed signs of intellectual mysophobia, or Platonistic revulsion from impurity, and Geuss – who regards Plato as an “intellectual bully” – is uneasy about Adorno’s “relentless negativism”. He finds an amiable alternative in Michel de Montaigne who, having no desire to correct the follies of humanity, was “free of all these pathologies”.