“The last people in the humanities who are still talking about absolute truth are the postmodernists in the business of demolishing it,” said Penn State Professor of English Jeffrey Nealon with absolute certainty. But there is a receptive audience for those who stubbornly argue for the stabilization of meaning in our increasingly fragmented and dispirited consumer culture. Svend Brinkmann’s new book, Standpoints: 10 Old Ideas in a New World, sets out to accord significance to human experience by elevating key philosophical ideas or “existential standpoints” upon which one can stand firm, not only for oneself but for one’s community.
In his previous book, Standing Firm, Brinkmann poked a needle into the bubble of the personal growth industry – and in Standpoints, he persists as an advocate of Aristotle’s rule of moderation and eudaimonia, a meaningfully flourishing life. “The underlying aim of this book is to find ten basic philosophical themes that will help us formulate standpoints,” he says. “I believe these themes allow us to make out the rough contours of a philosophical anthropology that portrays humans as interconnected beings with obligations, who are reared and educated in our encounters with something other than the self.”
A Danish psychologist, Brinkmann looks to philosophy, in large part because “psychology has … transformed the religious goal of salvation into self-realization.” Valorizing self-help and self-mastery, psychology focuses individuals on being “themselves” and trusting “gut feelings,” but in Brinkmann’s perspective these goals have no intrinsic value. He proceeds explicitly from the assumption that being a good person must be recognized as an end in itself. Philosophy comes as a result of wonder. Curiosity leads to philosophizing over the nature of things and of goodness itself, but he also finds validity in Simon Critchley’s view that disappointment exists at the heart of philosophical inquiry.
In lively prose that pivots between cultural references and philosophical notions, Brinkmann favors everyday life ideas that have been deemed useless by instrumentalist thought. He says, “The self is not a resource to be optimized, or to be monetised by human resource managers.” His ten standpoints are drawn from Aristotle, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Arendt, Murdoch, and Derrida to establish “tangible places and ideas to which we are linked and from which we derive stimulation.” These “oases” of meaning stand outside of instrumentalized thinking, offering phenomena the opportunity to “manifest … in all (their) inherent value.” He assures the reader “we just need to be reminded of them.”
Fundamental to Brinkmann’s goals in the book are his maxims summarizing each of his standpoints, “relatively short sentences that you can learn off by heart and keep in mind as you go through life.” Part of the charm of Brinkmann’s writing is found in the way he uses instrumentalist tools against instrumentalist thinking. With brisk candor, he regards self-help maneuvers as merely ways of delaying the inevitable disappointments one experiences and must manage through life. People trapped in the instrumentalist way set themselves up to fail because for them because they narrow the paths extrinsic to the self and its dialectic with others.
Brinkmann may sound here like a reactionary, but I don’t mean to typecast him. In fact, as a text for writers and artists to consider, Standpoints entices one to consider our clashing impulses – on the one hand, to find in postmodernism a refreshment of language and a query of power hierarchies, and on the other hand, the self-forgetfulness that buoys the artist and supports the community that one seeks to join and address. Furthermore, he finds in certain writers plenty of substance to support his values. His chapter on “Love” focuses on Iris Murdoch’s belief that “Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” We feel the absolute nature of love because, according to Murdoch, “real love is reserved for that which cannot simply be replaced with something else.”
In the end, Standpoints is a book about freedom – but it is more invested in freedom to rather than freedom from. “There can be no real freedom without the obligation to safeguard the conditions that make freedom possible,” he insists. This sense of responsibility will resonate strongly with any writer or artist now addressing issues of social justice – even those who embrace the stylistics of postmodernism. This is the necessary tension offered by Standpoints: the opportunity to cherish our unknowability. Classical values have always been about what must be, not what just happened or the absence of happening. They address the intangibility of the moment and the artist’s desire to give it form. We discover as we make the thing in development. Perhaps Brinkmann would agree, adding and not as we self-develop. But are these things always mutually exclusive?
[Published February 15, 2019 by Polity Press, 157 pages, $49.95 hardcover/$14.95 paperback]