“The enemy is the unphilosophical spirit which knows nothing and wants to know nothing of truth.” – Karl Jaspers, Reason and Anti-Reason in Our Time (1952)
After World War II, Karl Jaspers offered up a rudimentary but neglected distinction, one that could help explain the rise of Nazism. Beginning with a general observation about human behavior – “There is something inside all of us that yearns not for reason but for mystery” – Jaspers linked political harms to “anti-reason.” Among other things, the German philosopher urged humankind to confront the enemies of reason not just in the “outside world,”[1] but also “inside each one of us.”
If Jaspers was correct that anti-reason first takes root in the singular individual,[2] it’s high time to seek meaningful explanations of war, terrorism and genocide beyond politics. Here, as in the case of any multi-layered intellectual quandary, verifiable truth could prove extraneous. In essence, it’s time to look “beyond the news.”
Donald Trump’s second presidency thrives on variously paradoxical juxtapositions of privilege with philistinism. For such a seemingly self-contradictory fusion, nineteenth century thinker Friedrich Nietzsche (“existentialist” forerunner of Karl Jaspers) coined a specific term, one he hoped would become universal. This new word was Bildungsphilister. Expressed in literal translation, it means “educated Philistine.”[3]
Intellectually and linguistically, these matters remain “delicate.” To wit, Nietzsche’s Bildungsphilister is a term that could shed useful light on Donald Trump’s largely-undiminished support among millions of America’s well-educated and well-to-do. During both the 2016 and 2024 presidential campaigns, Trump commented: “I love the poorly-educated.” In the end, a substantial fraction of Trump voters came from the not-so-poorly-educated.
Today, much more “penetrating clear thought” (a term of philosopher Karl Jaspers) is needed to understand a still-surging American indifference. Do most Americans object to a president who has never even glanced at the US Constitution, a document he solemnly swore “to uphold, protect and defend?”[4] Is it even reasonable to “uphold protect and defend” a document that has never even been read? Is it in any way reasonable that “We the people….” are not more deeply troubled by such a conspicuous moral and intellectual failing?
Key questions ought not be skirted any longer. To proceed, we must inquire, “How has the United States managed to arrive at such a dismal and portentous place?” What have been the accumulated failures (singular and aggregated) of American educational institutions, most notably our universities?[5] As a university professor for fifty years, this writer knows at least one thing for certain: We Americans rarely teach our students to associate critical thinking and learning with personal pleasure or satisfaction. More specifically to the point, we generally instruct students not to partake of any promising “life of the mind,” but instead to “follow the money.”[6]
Once upon a time in western philosophy, Plato revealed high leadership expectations for his “philosopher-king.” Yet, even if we should no longer plausibly expect anything like a philosophical spirit in the White House, we ought still to be entitled to a president who has heard of the Western Canon, one who can plausibly claim to have some acquaintance with the world’s most important literature and history? How can a president who identifies scholars, judges, military veterans and even his own appointees as “losers” or “fools” still be taken seriously?
It was not always this way. America’s founding fathers could not only read literature and philosophy. They could also claim authentic erudition for themselves.
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zarathustra warns prophetically: “One should never seek the `higher man’ at the marketplace.” But the generally intellect-loathing marketplace was precisely where a huge segment of American society first began to champion Donald J. Trump. What else should we have expected? In the United States, after all, we are ultimately measured by what we can buy.
There is more to understanding the core American struggle between reason and anti-reason. The incumbent American president is not “merely” marginal. He represents the diametric opposite of Plato’s philosopher-king and Nietzsche’s “higher-man.” At its moral and analytic core, Donald Trump proudly celebrates a wretched inversion of all that might once have ennobled the United States.[7] Even more worrisome, we Americans are now stumbling further and further backwards, visibly, unsteadily, not in decipherable increments but only in crudely giant leaps of self-reinforcing harms. Among other debilities, these spasmodic leaps uncover the stain of unforgivable cowardice, especially in persistently shameless sectors of the US Congress.
President Donald Trump could never understand that US intellectual history deserves a tangible pride of place. How many other Americans have paused to remember that the Founding Fathers who framed the second amendment were never expecting automatic weapons? How many citizens have ever bothered to learn that the early American Republic was a religious heir of John Calvin and a philosophical descendant of Thomas Hobbes? How many “successful” US lawyers have even heard of Calvin or Hobbes, or of William Blackstone, the English jurist whose magisterial Commentaries formed the legal underpinnings of the American nation.
. Human beings are the creators of their machines; not the other-way round. Still, in current politics, there exists an implicit and grotesque reciprocity between creator and creation, a lethal pantomime between users and the used. Nowhere is this brazen lethality more apparent than among certain loyal supporters of US President Donald Trump. If these supporters follow him faithfully, it is because they seek more intense emotional satisfactions than science or jurisprudence could possibly offer. In the final analysis, they are bedazzled by intellectually vacant simplifications and correspondingly visceral shrieks of anti-reason.
President Donald Trump’s “explanations” offer millions of Americans an ill-founded kind of reassurance. Metaphorically, they continue to provide adherents with a ubiquitous and useful “solvent,” one capable of “dissolving” almost anything of potentially clarifying consequence. At the end of the 18th century Age of Enlightenment, the philosopher Immanuel Kant urged Europeans: “Sapere Aude”: “Dare to know.” Above all else, the Trump minions’ uninterrupted fight against reason reveals a fierce struggle against wisdom, against the always-indispensable sovereignty of “mind.”
What’s ahead for the United states? Soon, even if Americans should manage to avoid nuclear war[8] and nuclear terrorism – an avoidance not to be taken for granted[9] – the swaying of the national “ship” could become insufferable. Once laden with silver and gold, previously-grand ships of state have become unrecognizable phantoms of collective failure. At some point, we must understand that the circumstances that sent compositions of Homer, Maimonides, Goethe, Milton, Shakespeare, Freud and Kafka to the bottom of the sea were neither unique nor transient. They expressed the timeless tyrannies of anti-reason.
In an 1897 essay titled “On Being Human,” Woodrow Wilson inquired about the “authenticity” of Americans. “Is it even open to us to choose to be genuine?” he asked. This American president answered “yes,” but only if the citizens would first refuse to cheer the injurious “herds” of “mass”[10] society. Otherwise, as he already understood, our entire society would be left bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of broken machinery, more hideous even than the biological decomposition of a singular person.
In every society that seeks to endure,[11] a scrupulous struggle against anti-reason is mandatory. Looking ahead, there can be a “better”American soul[12] (and thereby a more reason-based national politics), but not before the nation would first acknowledge a prior obligation. This means an overriding national responsibility to challenge “mass” culture.[13]
In a best-case scenario, the dissembling Trump presidency will end without igniting a catastrophic war. But for the United States, even that presumptively “happy ending” might still represent little more than a temporary reprieve. Unless we can finally begin to work more deliberately at changing this country’s stubborn antipathies to reason, Americans will have to face periodically perilous eras of irremediable decline.
The “trick” will be to alter this nation’s downward trajectory in time. Philosophically, to accomplish such an alteration calls for far-reaching national victories of reason over anti-reason. Once such necessary victories are achieved, the United States could seriously begin to fashion a future based on more than illiterate conspiracy theories and rancorously foolishdiatribes.
America’s primal challenge is not to wage heroic struggle against any particular species of “enemy” (whether foreign or domestic), but to resist a furiously recalcitrant body of citizens who “know nothing and want to know nothing of truth.” Until the defiling public celebration of anti-reason is confronted, millions of Americans will cling fearfully to a lethal politics of gibberish, falsification and blatant corruption.[14] Any such final embrace of anti-reason could signal no-longer stoppable prospects of war, terrorism and genocide.
By definition, this would be a fatal embrace.
[1] We were originally warned about confusing “shadows” for reality by Plato (The Republic). See, by the present author, Professor Louis René Beres, at Horasis (Zurich): https://horasis.org/looking-beyond-shadows-death-time-and-immortality/
[2] Similar emphases can be found in the writings of Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung, especially The Undiscovered Self (1957).
[3] The first language of the present author, Professor Louis René Beres, was German. Born in Zürich, this is his own translation.
[4] For the reductio ad absurdum of Trump commentaries, see: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/shocking-experts-on-trump-claiming-i-dont-know-about-upholding-constitution/ar-AA1Ed620
[5] See by this author at The Daily Princetonian: Louis René Beres, https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2018/06/a-core-challenge-of-higher-education
[6] See by this writer, Louis René Beres, at Modern Diplomacy: https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2020/09/13/american-democracy-and-the-barbarism-of-specialisation/
[7]The reader may think here of Nobel Literature laureate Hermann Hesse’s generic description of the false national leader. Observes Hesse in The Glass Bead Game (1943): “The dull-witted brute, blindly trampling around in the flower gardens of intellect and culture”
[8]In this connection, it is vital to consider an American president’s authority and capacity to initiate a nuclear strike. See by this writer: Louis René Beres, http://www.jurist.org/forum/2017/08/louis-rene-beres-trump-nuclear.php See also: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2016-05-11/possible-trump-presidency-showcases-fatal-flaw-in-nuclear-command-safeguard. Professor Beres is the author of twelve published books dealing with nuclear command decisions, including Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (The University of Chicago Press, 1980), and, in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: https://thebulletin.org/2016/08/what-if-you-dont-trust-the-judgment-of-the-president-whose-finger-is-over-the-nuclear-button/
[9] See by this writer. Louis René Beres, at JURIST: https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2024/02/lessons-from-oppenheimer-the-imperative-of-nuclear-conflict-avoidance/
[10] See especially Jose Ortega y’Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (Spain, 1930).
[11] This was the dominant message of American transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
[12] Sigmund Freud maintained a general antipathy to all things American. He most often objected, according to Bruno Bettelheim, to this country’s “shallow optimism” and its corollary commitment to crude forms of materialism. America, thought Freud, was “lacking in soul.” See: Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man’s Soul (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), especially Chapter X.
[13] The term “mass” is closely associated with the writings of Carl Jung and also Jose Ortega y’Gasset (especially The Revolt of the Masses.). It is very close in meaning to Nietzsche’s “herd,” Sigmund Freud’s “horde” and Soren Kierkegaard’s “crowd.”
[14]One may recall Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s clarifying comment in The Sickness unto Death (1849): “Devoid of imagination, as the Philistine always is, he lives in a certain trivial province of experience as to how things go, what is possible, what usually occurs…. For philistinism thinks it is in control of possibility….it carries possibility around like a prisoner in the cage of the probable, and shows it off.”
