The Life and the Mind

More and more biographies of philosophers are being written. Do they tell us anything important about philosophy?

In his late 20s, Bertrand Russell saw the wife of his friend and collaborator,

Alfred North Whitehead, in the throes of an agonizing depression, which left her all but severed from everyone around her, and from the world itself.

Something snapped in Russell. He became “overwhelmed,” he would later write, with a “sense of the solitude of each human soul.” Within five minutes of the experience, he came to believe that the loneliness of existence is “unendurable,” that the only way out is love of the “highest intensity,” that “whatever does not spring” from such love is harmful “or at best useless,” and that social relations should be ordered accordingly.

That became the ethical vision that would animate Russell’s work and thinking for the next seven decades.

Most philosophers have long held that such biographical anecdotes, while perhaps of personal interest, reveal nothing of philosophical importance. Stories of this sort are the domain of the biographer or the historian -- maybe even the intellectual historian -- but not the philosopher. As Martin Heidegger said of Aristotle, “He was born. He lived. He died.” End of story.

In recent years, though, other scholars have begun to argue that such anecdotes tell us a great deal, not only about individual philosophers but also about the relationship between ideas and life more generally -- between the way we think and the way we live. Without exploring the biographical dimension of intellectual life, these scholars argue, our philosophical understanding is, in some crucial sense, incomplete.

Their camp is growing larger. The past two decades have seen a veritable explosion in biographical studies of philosophers. Since 1982, more than 30 biographies of philosophers have appeared. Of those, 20 have been published in the past decade, a dozen just since 1999. And more are in the works.

Some see the trend as principally a reflection of currents in the publishing world, while others say it is a direct result of conceptual shifts in philosophy and in intellectual life more generally. But as the books keep coming, skeptics remain unpersuaded that this biographical “turn” is of any philosophical importance.

The Genesis of Ideas

The authors of the new studies include freelance biographers, intellectual historians, political theorists, and literary critics as well as philosophers. And while many of the recent biographies stop short of drawing an explicit connection between the subject’s life and thought, others are less reticent. In Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, Hugo Ott, a professor of history at Freiburg University, argues that the German philosopher’s attraction to Nazism was no accident, and that his political commitments should be viewed against the backdrop of the provincialism, xenophobia, and antimodernism that characterized his upbringing in the mountainous Black Forest region.

Jürgen Habermas’s thought, too, was profoundly shaped by his German upbringing, according to Martin Beck Matustik. In Jürgen Habermas: A Philosophical-Political Profile, the Purdue University philosophy professor examines his subject’s work as an elaborate response to the catastrophe of Nazism, his generation’s feelings of guilt over the Holocaust, and postwar Germany’s need for a new constitutional order.

Joachim Köhler suggests in Zarathustra’s Secret: The Interior Life of Friedrich Nietzsche, that the philosopher was a repressed homosexual, and that his deep antipathy toward Christianity and conventional morality -- central to his philosophy -- was fueled by his lifelong struggles with desire and the flesh.

James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault connects the French philosopher’s thought to his sexuality, relating Foucault’s intellectual preoccupations with discipline, punishment, deviance, and surveillance to his penchant for sadomasochistic homoeroticism and his consequent self-image as a sexual and social outsider.

In The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand, a professor of English at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, argues that the quest of the founders of American pragmatism for a philosophy free of absolutes was a collective response to the traumatic impact of the Civil War on their generation.

To be sure, the philosophical biography hardly got its start in the 1980s. The founding text of the genre dates to sometime around the third century AD, with the appearance of Diogenes Laertius’s The Lives, Opinions, and Remarkable Sayings of the Most Famous Ancient Philosophers (often referred to as The Lives of the Philosophers). In the 20th century, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers wrote a four-volume, quasibiographical study titled The Great Philosophers. Other examples published before the ‘80s include studies of Socrates, Augustine, Descartes, Hume, Di-derot, Voltaire, Kant, Jonathan Edwards, and William James.

But philosophers tended not to be terribly interested in such books. Mr. Miller, the Foucault biographer, who is director of liberal studies at New School University, points out that whereas in classical antiquity, philosophy was thought to be “a calling,” intrinsically connected to the living of life, the modern age has seen a “severing of life from thought.”

Terence Moore, publishing director for humanities at Cambridge University Press, credits Ray Monk’s 1990 book, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (Free Press), with turning the tide. The book examined Wittgenstein’s legendary philosophical intensity alongside his tortured emotional life. “It was the first time that a biography of a philosopher was genuinely respected by fellow philosophers,” says Mr. Moore. That might have had something to do with Mr. Monk’s being a professional philosopher (he teaches philosophy at the University of Southampton in Britain) with technical training in the area in question (he had written a dissertation on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics). Moreover, critics found it an extraordinarily well-crafted book about a compelling figure.

It helped inspire Mr. Moore to start a series at the Cambridge press devoted to philosophers’ biographies, beginning with Steven Nadler’s Spinoza: A Life (1999) and going on to include volumes on Hegel, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Popper. The idea behind the series was to “exploit the nonphilosophy market” for philosophy titles among scholars in other disciplines, and to “reach out to a general, nonacademically trained readership” that Cambridge, as an academic publisher, would normally not reach, Mr. Moore says. “It seemed to me that if you could capture the attention of a general reader, then you had an opportunity not just to chronicle the life, but to introduce the ideas as well.”

Cambridge has nine more books under contract for the series. A biography of John Stuart Mill will appear next year, followed by studies of Descartes, Hume, Leibniz, Locke, Montaigne, Sartre, Schopenhauer, and Voltaire.

Philosophers aren’t mere “giants standing on each other’s shoulders,” says Mr. Moore. “They exist in particular contexts, as part of particular debates. They’re reacting to figures, many of whom we’ve lost sight of,” but who have helped form “the whole intellectual nexus” of philosophy. Philosophical biographies, he says, “help give you that fuller picture.”

Location, Location, Location

Alexander Nehamas, a professor of philosophy at Princeton University and author of The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections From Plato to Foucault (University of California Press, 1998), sees the increase in biographies of philosophers as a corollary of that in biographies more generally. They are, he says, the “closest thing we have to the classical novel -- they have heroes; they have beginnings, middles, and ends; and they can tell a moral story, either implicitly or explicitly.” That tends to be no less true of biographies of philosophers, he says.

Others, however, see the increase in philosophers’ biographies as a reflection of broader changes in the discipline. Philosophers today are “taking situatedness much more seriously than they used to,” says Michael Krausz, a professor and chairman of the department of philosophy at Bryn Mawr College. Analytic philosophy, in which he was trained, has long “insisted on the separation of the person from the view,” an approach that has been giving way in recent years to historicist notions like the rootedness of the self and the social embeddedness of consciousness, he says. From there, he sees it as a “quick step to including the life story of the creator in order to understand the nature of the work.”

Richard J. Bernstein, a professor and chairman of the department of philosophy at the New School and author of Philosophical Profiles (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), believes that the growth of biographical interest in philosophers should be viewed in relation to what might be called the “narrative turn” -- a growing emphasis on the importance of storytelling to philosophical thinking.

Among the key texts of this turn are Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative (University of Chicago Press, 1984), and Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Harvard, 1989) -- books that emphasize the central role of history, narrative, and experience in the shaping of moral consciousness and individual identity.

The historicist trend has taken hold across other disciplines as well -- literary theory, cultural studies, and the humanities in general -- points out Gary A. Cook, a professor of philosophy at Beloit College and author of George Herbert Mead: The Making of a Social Pragmatist (University of Illinois Press, 1993).

He undertook a biography of his subject, he says, in order to “tell a more interesting story, to flesh it out rather than just have an abstract discussion,” and to show how Mead’s ideas developed over time.

The biographical trend is a healthy corrective to the current situation of philosophy, says Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, a psychoanalyst and author of Hannah Arendt, For Love of the World and Subject to Biography: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Writing Women’s Lives (Harvard University Press, 1998). Philosophers have become “breathtakingly irrelevant” to the wider culture, she says, but biography can “recuperate meaningful, relevant lives” for readers today. The idea that a philosopher’s experience has no bearing on his thinking is “mad,” she says, and any attempt to wall off thought into a pure realm, detached from emotions and experience, is a “schizoid” position.

Perhaps that’s not a surprising perspective from a psychoanalyst.

But many philosophers, too, have come to regard experience as integral to philosophical ideas. Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle who has taught philosophy most recently at Temple University, regularly deals with the biography/philosophy question in his course “The Philosophy of Philosophy.” He says “condescension” toward biography on the part of philosophical formalists violates their own emphasis on reason. “There are reasons why [the late Harvard philosopher of language W.V.] Quine approached philosophy in one way and Foucault in another. Some of those reasons can be extracted from biography.”

“Philosophers, like novelists, need to make critical choices -- about subject matter, about method, about style -- before they can even get started,” he adds. “And the person who chooses comes freighted with the baggage of his or her life.”

‘Intimate Scrutiny’

Others are skeptical of the ability of biography to shed light on a philosopher’s ideas. Reviewing Mr. Monk’s biography of Russell for The New Republic, Thomas Nagel, a professor of philosophy at New York University, described the book as “another one of those painful biographies” that “open up personal failings and sexual agonies to the kind of intimate scrutiny that none of us could withstand.” The work of philosophers, he wrote, “is always something finer than they are,” and can be “extracted from a flawed and messy self so that it can float free, detached from the imperfect life that produced it.”

While it’s “very important to understand the influences in the course of someone’s intellectual development,” he argues, the main interest in the biographies is personal, not philosophical. They “allow us to get close to the individual” in a way that their works do not, but they do not make “primary contributions to the understanding of philosophical works.”

Biographies may be valuable for outsiders, though. Most people “couldn’t bear to actually read Spinoza’s Ethics,” Mr. Nagel says, but “they’ll read a biography of Spinoza, and maybe they’ll pick up a little of the philosophy that way.”

“Anything that gets people to think about these things is worthwhile,” he says.

Case by Case

The New School’s Mr. Bernstein, a past president of the American Philosophical Association, shares Mr. Nagel’s caution. Biography is relevant to the ideas of some philosophers, he acknowledges. For example, Hannah Arendt’s preoccupation with questions of totalitarianism and democracy can hardly be understood without reference to her having been an exile from Nazi Germany.

“If you don’t know what she was struggling with, what she was doing in her 20s, and why she left Germany, you’re not going to understand her ideas,” Mr. Bernstein says. But does our biographical knowledge of Wittgenstein contribute to our understanding of his Tractatus or the Philosophical Investigations? “I’m very skeptical,” the professor says. Wittgenstein’s writings on logic and the structure of language are highly technical and abstract, as is most work in the Anglo-American analytic school of philosophy that he helped create. “Continental” philosophy, in contrast, tends to be more focused on questions concerning human existence, the soul, ethics, politics, and emotions.

Mr. Nehamas agrees that the relevance of a philosopher’s life depends on the nature of his thought. Kant’s biography, for example, reveals “what was bothering him at particular times and therefore what caused him to take up certain issues,” says the Princeton professor, but it “doesn’t explain the view that he held on the issue.” Because Kant’s philosophy was abstract and systematic -- dealing, for example, with questions about the horizons of human knowledge and the nature of aesthetic judgment -- his ideas are “quite independent” of his particular personality. The personalities of Nietzsche and Foucault, on the other hand -- thinkers who addressed themselves in a highly visceral style to the human condition -- are so essential to their writing that “they make it pretty impossible for you to forget that it’s their ideas.”

“One philosopher’s sexuality may be private and irrelevant to the philosophy,” Mr. Nehamas says, “whereas in other cases, one’s sexuality, like one’s teacher, may have something to do with the philosophy.” What counts as philosophically relevant in a thinker’s life, he says, is not something that can be decided in advance. “The idea that certain kinds of facts are in principle irrelevant” to understanding a philosopher is “rather self-defeating.”

Not So Fast

But to frame the debate as one between philosophical “traditionalists,” on one side, and “radicals,” on the other, or in terms of analytic versus Continental philosophy, would be to oversimplify matters. In fact, as is so often the case in philosophy, they are considerably more complicated than that.

Some of the philosophers most adamantly opposed to the idea of the biographical turn belong squarely in the Continental camp. When it was revealed in the late 1980s that Heidegger’s participation in Nazism was far more extensive than the philosopher had let on, many of his disciples rushed to his defense by claiming that the vagaries of his political attachments, whatever they may have been, should in no way sully his philosophical legacy -- that the life and the work, in other words, should be kept separate.

Richard Rorty, who has made a career out of debunking the sacred cows of analytic philosophy, is reticent on the question of biography. He has repeatedly argued against those who draw connections between Heidegger’s Nazism and his philosophy, or between Hans-Georg Gadamer’s pro-Nazi political sympathies and his ideas. Mr. Rorty, a professor of comparative literature at Stanford University, says he doesn’t “see the relevance” of one to the other.

Heidegger himself seemed to hold conflicting views on what might be called the biographical question. While he placed great emphasis on everyday life and the concrete dimensions of existence, his remark about Aristotle suggested that there was, in his view, nothing of relevance about the Greek philosopher except for the body of ideas he produced.

Like Heidegger, Foucault’s views on the place of biography in philosophy were ambiguous. He emphasized the embeddedness of ideas and discourses in social relations and “regimes” of power, and he became strongly interested in the ancient Greek notion of treating one’s life as a work of art. Yet he said precious little about his own life and discouraged others from drawing connections between it and his work. Even before Mr. Miller’s book was published (he had presented parts of it at conferences and in journals), many of the French thinker’s defenders attacked the author, accusing him of sensationalism and of undermining Foucault’s intellectual legacy by bringing salacious details of his sex life into the discussion.

Pitfalls?

There’s a palpable fear that the exposure of certain biographical facts about a philosopher might even serve to undermine the thinker’s work, reducing and trivializing ideas or even vilifying the person. In the spirit of the culture wars, for instance, might the fact that Kant viewed Africans as inferior to Europeans deter many students from studying his work -- and might the biographical turn, by calling attention to such facts, distract attention from Kant’s philosophical ideas?

Those are some of the pitfalls along the path of philosophical biography.

Mr. Miller finds “silly” the argument that biographical studies of philosophers serve to undermine the intellectual legacy of their subjects. “If the ideas have internal integrity, there’s nothing you can do to undermine them,” he declares. “They’ll hang together.”

Ben-Ami Scharfstein, a professor emeritus of philosophy at Tel-Aviv University and author of The Philosophers: Their Lives and the Nature of Their Thought (Oxford University Press, 1980), sees philosophers and their ideas as intimately interwoven, and yet believes in objective truth. Philosophical ideas are “qualified at every point” by the “personal needs and idiosyncratic emotions” of their authors, he writes. In a series of portraits in his book, he examines how philosophers have been impelled by what he calls “the desire to persuade,” shaped by the often complex “presence” of mentors (what Harold Bloom has called the “anxiety of influence”), and transformed by what he calls “axiomatic experiences” in their lives.

But, Mr. Scharfstein writes, such biographical insights should lead not to a “negation or trivialization” of philosophical ideas, but instead to a subtler understanding and therefore a greater appreciation of the ideas.

Purdue’s Mr. Matustik, the Habermas biographer, echoes that perspective. Citing Kierkegaard’s dictum that a philosopher without paradox is like a lover without passion, he writes in an e-mail message that “to understand a philosopher apart from the motivating passion of that life is like trying to behold love without passion: it is possible but not very illuminating.”

BIOGRAPHIES OF PHILOSOPHERS: KEY WORKS

The genre of philosopher’s biography has exploded over the last two decades. While some of the studies qualify as straight biographies, others are intellectual biographies; and still others focus on a particular aspect of the philosopher’s life. Here are some notable representatives of the genre:

1982

Hannah Arendt, For Love of the World by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (Yale University Press)

1986

William James, His Life and Thought by Gerald E. Myers (Yale)

1987

The Life of David Hume by Ernest G. Braham (J.M. Stafford)

Sartre: A Life by Annie Cohen-Solal (Pantheon)

George Santayana: A Biography by John McCormick (Alfred A. Knopf)

1988

Bertrand Russell: A Political Life by Alan Ryan (Hill and Wang)

Wittgenstein, a Life: Young Ludwig, 1889-1921 by Brian McGuinness (University of California Press)

1990

Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography by Deirdre Bair (Summit Books)

Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy by Rüdiger Safranski (Harvard University Press)

Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk (Free Press)

1991

John Dewey and American Democracy by Robert B. Westbrook (Cornell University Press)

Michel Foucault by Didier Eribon (Harvard)

1993

The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller (Simon & Schuster)

The Lives of Michel Foucault by David Macey (Pantheon)

Martin Heidegger: A Political Life by Hugo Ott (Basic Books)

George Herbert Mead: The Making of a Social Pragmatist by Gary A. Cook (University of Illinois Press)

Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life by Joseph Brent (Indiana University Press)

1995

John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism by Alan Ryan (W.W. Norton)

1996

Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude, 1872-1921 by Ray Monk (Free Press)

1998

Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil by Rüdiger Safranski (Harvard)

Isaiah Berlin: A Life by Michael Ignatieff (Metropolitan Books)

1999

A.J. Ayer: A Life by Ben Rogers (Grove Press)

Hobbes: A Biography by A.P. Martinich (Cambridge University Press)

Spinoza: A Life by Steven Nadler (Cambridge)

2000

Hegel: A Biography by Terry Pinkard (Cambridge)

Karl Popper, the Formative Years, 1902-1945: Politics and Philosophy in Interwar Vienna by Malachi Haim Hacohen (Cambridge)

2001

Kant: A Biography by Manfred Kuehn (Cambridge)

Kierkegaard: A Biography by Alastair Hannay (Cambridge)

Jürgen Habermas: A Philosophical-Political Profile by Martin Beck Matustik (Rowman & Littlefield)

Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness, 1921-1970 by Ray Monk (Free Press)

The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America by Louis Menand (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

2002

Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography by Rüdiger Safranski (Norton)

Zarathustra’s Secret: The Interior Life of Friedrich Nietzsche by Joachim Köhler (Yale)

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