The first sentences of the editors’ introduction to The Philosophy of Philip Rieff (Bloomsbury, 2025) note that Rieff should be more well-known than he is. I am happy to report that this book is unlikely to change that fact, as this is a testament to its high quality. In an age where the prevailing winds prompt us to confuse interpretive acumen with performances of black-turtlenecked sophistication, I would be worried if such were not the case. From Socrates to Nietzsche, the best meditations have always been the untimely ones.
That said, I’ve thought for many years that it’s past time for Rieff to have a “moment.” I said so in print, some years ago, in an article aimed specifically at historians (See Weinacht, passim), and it is one of the merits of this book that it collects perspectives from a number of different disciplines. I count scholars of history, philosophy, politics, and biblical studies among the contributors. That the academic areas of its contributors include no scholars of literature, art, psychology, or sociology (and I apologize if I’ve overlooked someone) is likely more a testament to Rieff’s “untimely” character than it is a criticism of the breadth of the contributors’ academic areas. To put the matter more bluntly, it is hard to see a place for Rieff in contemporary psychology or sociology.
A number of these essays roughly follow the intellectual history/history of philosophy approach, seeking to place Rieff in light of other thinkers such as Nietzsche, Freud, or Heidegger. So from an academic point of view, these essays are valuable in the sense that one can see the other thinkers with whom Rieff’s work is in conversation. All grist for the academic mill, no doubt, but undoubtedly valuable beyond that, in the sense that readers can see trains of thought developing over time, closing in on answers to the all-important “how’d we get this way?” question. Rather than attempt a summary of all of these essays, what follows focuses on what I take to be some particularly important themes that emerge across this volume.
Rieff divides the history of the West into three successive eras, which he calls “Worlds.” In the pre-Christian West, in those that Rieff calls “first world” cultures, “fate” is the predominant motif; the logic of “call no man happy till he dies” inherent in Sophocles’ Antigone would be a good example. In the essay “Self-Knowledge after Rieff,” Christopher Anadale notes that in eras where transcendent faith is the predominant cultural motif, these selves are offered forgiveness through some relationship with the divine. This is Rieff’s “second world, roughly speaking, Christendom until the late nineteenth century. (Though Rieff thought Luther’s “here I stand” moment was a key transitional marker, as well). In our own “third world,” where “fiction” replaces faith as the dominating cultural motif, however, “Purely historical or contingent identities such as race are despair-prone” (Anadale, 51). This is a valuable observation. Cultural inertia these days renders such a question as “what is a person for?” nonsensical, since one fictional answer is as good as another. Thus we often find ourselves fleeing “forward,” one might say, to escape the meaninglessness that forever snaps at our heels.
Philosopher of history Eelco Runia has argued that historical discontinuity happens when we decide to “flee forward” (Runia, Ch. 6, in particular). Take WWI, for instance. Its origins are so complex and so under- and over-determined at the same time that it seems, in hindsight, a Pelosi-esque instance of fleeing-forward where we have to “pass it to find out what’s in it.” Byung-Chul Han’s Burnout Society seems likewise occupied, where we burn out on a treadmill of endless, telos-free achievement (Han, passim). From a decidedly “second world” perspective, by contrast, the 11th-century monk Nikitas Stithatos, in the Philokalia, doesn’t deny the reality of despair but distinguishes between nihilistic despair and productive sorrow (Stithatos, 119). The latter depends on a context in which transcendence has meaning: exactly what Rieff’s Third Culture has lost. Here, we know when we’ve erred in our answer to the “what is a person for?” question, where, without that transcendent context, we simply move from one despair-inducing novelty to another.
Rediscovering the felicitous limits of the transcendent proves both easier said than done and easier done than said. William Batchelder’s essay “The Peculiar God of Philip Rieff” rightly, I think, explains Rieff’s coyness about God not as “esotericism,” but as “reverent indirection” (88). Irony, as usual, proves a difficult trap to escape. How does one knowingly submit oneself to an interdictory order when the very act of intentionally doing so tends to create an infinitely moving set of goalposts, where one performance follows another? Batchelder thinks that Rieff’s only available intellectual move was to remain opaque as to his own theism or lack thereof. If God is not to be mocked, then perhaps someone in Rieff’s position should do Pascal one better and not even vocalize a belief in God, lest it become one more Performance in the late-modern Theater. I find myself thinking, here, of the final scene in Martin Scorsese’s film Silence, where the viewer is left in the dark as to whether our apostate Jesuit in sixteenth-century Japan goes to his grave really having abjured Christ. Or has he simply decided to suffer whatever consequences will follow from having appeared to renounce Christ in order to save his fellow Christians? Both Rieff and Scorsese’s Jesuit is trapped in a culture that has pulled up the ladder behind it. One can see Rieff wrestling with this problem, I think, when he observes that “when I read Hopkins, as when I hear a Bach Mass, I am an honorary Christian” (Rieff, Deathworks, 103). I have, on occasion, wondered if it would have been better for Rieff’s soul had he always kept his post-Fellow Teachers (1972) silence and committed himself instead to a naive faith in the God of his Jewish forefathers. I crossed the Tiber a few years ago; though the radical Protestant that lurks in my DNA balks now and again at the doctrine of purgatory, Rieff’s case nevertheless prompts me to hope it exists.
Is there a Rieff-ian politics? Possibly, thinks Paul Diduch, in one of this book’s more trenchant essays. Diduch does well to note what is perhaps Rieff’s central limitation: his “Jew of culture” is the eternal analyst, always observing, never naively involved. Rieff himself would never have been so gauche as to “convert”: but unless you’re a nihilist, non-trivial things are in fact at stake here. “Rieff, like Plato, sees that the facade of ‘democratic’ tolerance rests on its own kind of normativity, however inverted, blurred, or concealed. But what is ultimately enervating in dysfunctional culture is that it undermines the energy of sacred authority, the ‘charisma’ of prohibition or the interdict” (Diduch, 102). Even the invariably messy reality of democratic politics needs its interdicts. I once heard it said that if you hated the “religious right,” just wait until you meet the irreligious right. Here am I, looking back on the twentieth century and its profane authorities, awaiting with some trepidation the performative antics of the twenty-first century’s versions thereof. These will no doubt one-up their earlier counterparts, who variously cast themselves as Parties of a New Type, representatives of “The People,” the “Master Race,” or hoodied boy-genius tech-bros, and who enacted their stage productions of genocides, great leaps forward, abortion vans for “choice,” hope-and-change, telos-free “greatness,” and the ability—blessed be the day—to use our new AI god of the moment to visualize how awesome it would be if Jason Statham played Popeye the Sailor. I find myself involuntarily wondering if God could grant me a single-use time machine, so that I might pick a different—less N.I.C.E. era—in which to be martyred. In short, one doesn’t have to be a theocrat to appreciate Rieff’s emphasis on the absurdity of ersatz “authority” in a society that attempts to live in the absence of a sacred order.
In philosophy of history, Christopher Anadale’s essay also nicely lays out Rieff’s answer to what historical writing could be for, in a “third world” context in which we both suspect—and enact by so suspecting—that everything is some form of fiction. Here, historians can use Rieff’s “three worlds” framework to lay out what second world truths underly “third world facts” (Anadale, 53). We naturally want historical facts to lead to interpretations that necessarily follow from those facts. Unfortunately for that understandable desire, postmodernism in history happened, which—probably permanently—destroyed the relationship between fact and interpretation. A watershed moment here was the 1973 publication of Hayden White’s book Metahistory. White argued that it was impossible to distinguish between better and worse interpretations of the past based on the “facts” that purported to sustain those interpretations. Rather, White argued, one’s preferred narrative was bound to be beholden to the predominant organizing literary trope one prefers (White, Introduction). This led inevitably to the triumph of history cast in the Ironic mode from which, I would argue, academic historical writing has never—and probably will never—escape. If you doubt me, look up academic reviews of popular works of history, whose narratives often have a decidedly Romantic or Epic flavor. The snobbery factor will likely be intense.
Rieff defines a “deathwork” as “an all-out assault upon something vital to the established culture.” He sees his own writing as a deathwork against those of the third world (Rieff, Deathworks, 7-8). So here a Rieffian historiography could produce histories of third-world “deathworks” that do not have to end in ironic ambiguity, and the sneaking suspicion that the horrors of history, such as the holocaust, have to end up in nothing but despair. One can cast these events as Tragedies, of course, but to make such a narrative believable requires an operative and transcendent context. The “People’s Tragedy” of the Russian Revolution can be tragic only to the extent that we can see its suffering against a backdrop of some god-given humanity that was violated. Absent that, Orlando Figes’ book should be retitled A People’s Satire, where all we can say, by way of summary, is that we hoped things would turn out a certain way, and, well, they didn’t. In this case, our verdict will be inevitably and trivially tautological: “some people died and we wish that hadn’t happened, because it’s bad when people suffer like that because then people die.”
Rieff’s phrase “third world facts,” then, has a dual meaning (Anadale, 53; See also Deathworks, 211). First, in a third world context dominated by fiction, facts gain meaning only by a self-defeating self-referentiality. Thus, the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin’s “propaganda of the deed,” or philosopher Eelco Runia’s analysis of Schiller’s play “The Robbers” (1781), whose logic Runia sums up with the phrase: “In the beginning was the deed” (Runia, 116). We are now in a position to see why Rieff placed so much emphasis on the argument in Fellow Teachers (1972) that for Mussolini, “fascism was not a creed but an opportunity” (Rieff, Fellow Teachers, 50).
The second meaning of the phrase “third world facts” is, by contrast, much more uplifting, since we can see that the word “facts” deserves the ironic quotation marks. Here, we can observe that we can only make sense of the senseless, by employing second world categories; we know what is not to be done, and we have a transcendent authority that defines both transcendent and immanent consequences for violations. Without that, we’re left with Adolf Eichmann’s description of the holocaust as more or less a matter of train schedules, in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Or, in a more recent case, take Ilhan Omar’s identity-establishing performance of a beautiful line: on 9/11 “some people did something” (See minute 12:58). In sum, Rieff should be a wakeup call for historians: you can either rediscover history written in a non-Ironic key, and be willing to live with the fact that you won’t get invited to the right wine and cheese parties, or, you can continue to write as though history is really just a matter of Foucauldian “power” and your “evidence” a matter of literary preference—and then get mad that the public ignores you. Little wonder Rieff is a virtual unknown in historiography: these are unpalatable choices.
A careful reading of Rieff invariably leaves one wondering as to the possibility of a “Fourth” culture, and this is a question that a number of these authors take up, directly or indirectly. Carl Trueman’s essay wonders if “Rieff’s approach can move beyond problem to cure” (203). Likewise, Jacob Wolf’s excellent essay on Rieff and Oscar Wilde ends with the possibility that we might rediscover that a sense of authority and self-denial would help obviate the dead-end to which expressive individualism leads. The problem with lack of boundaries, after all, is that there are “fewer boundaries to transgress” (225-6). This also points us in a valuable “fourth culture” direction. Anadale similarly discusses Alan Woolfolk’s argument that a fourth culture would have to have a sense of “what is off limits, even unthinkable” (54). This is, to put it another way, a matter of rediscovering a kind of primordial naiveté, a studied ignorance. The great German novelist Thomas Mann (1875-1955), who observed a number of Rieff’s deathworks in action, notes in Doctor Faustus (1947) that no culture is possible without naive ignorance (Mann, 162). Rieff and his interpreters are clearly headed in this same direction, which is wise. C.S. Lewis knew as much, in Perelandra, where his hero, Dr. Ransom, helps to convince a latter-day Eve that to know too much too soon is deadly. Perhaps this is why so much of what passes for serious academic work these days feels sophomoric at best. This, then, is where I think we must put Rieff in his proper place. A diagnostician he is, and he may point us in positive directions. But he will not tell us the cure for what ails us, even though I’m pretty sure he knew the right answer.
This being the season of Lent, though, it is a good time to reflect on our pressing need to jettison our frivolous ironic use of what Rieff calls “God-Terms,” and to replace them with God himself. If Rieff prompts us to rediscover love of God and neighbor, and the beauty of the bounded freedom that obtains within those limits, then he will have done us a great service. For my part, I’m convinced that a key part of the way forward is embodied in a particular interpretation of Anton Barba-Kay’s suggestion that we stop paying attention. We also need to stop needing to have attention paid to us (Barba-Kay, passim). Rieff argued that you now “choose your fiction as you once chose your weapon. The war now is the effort to legitimate competing fictions” (Rieff, Deathworks, 78). The problem with trying to un-eat the apple of late modernity’s ironic fixation on performance is that we lack the necessary naivete: however, we’re just going to have to grit our teeth and watch ourselves do it; it is going to feel weird, for a while. The problem here might be encapsulated in such questions as: how to be a stay-at-home mother without being a “tradwife”? How to grow a garden and avoid the moral hazard of putting it on YouTube? Rieff has theorized the problem effectively. His interpreters in this volume have done a wonderful job of introducing his thought and developing some possible applications. Now it’s up to us to act on that basis: all the world is not a stage, and if some of its (probably digital) aspects are unavoidably thespian, then we’ll just have to return our tickets to the performance.
This is not merely an academic matter. Philosopher Meghan Sullivan recently remarked that “Now, in the era of generative AI, we find ourselves in a new and even more disorienting situation: we are back to having one option (the answer the AI gives us), but now with no authority behind it.” Nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum. If we don’t rediscover sacred authority, a more profane authority, accompanied by a faint whiff of sulfur, will be happy to step in (See Vodolazkin’s novel, A History of the Island). Rieff knew this, as he analyzed “deathworks” from Klee’s Angelus to Duchamp’s toilets. Rieff saw how these works perform their cultural murders with a sly wink, along the same lines sketched out by Mann’s narrator in Doctor Faustus, to whom I will delegate the last word. Speaking of his friend’s diabolically inspired musical composition:
But to be quite frank, this unbelieving masterpiece of orchestral coloristic brilliance already bore clandestine traits of parody, of a general attitude of intellectual irony toward art that would so often emerge like an eerie stroke of genius in Leverkühn’s work. Many found this chilling, indeed repulsive and shocking, and that was the judgment of the better sort of people, though not of the best. The very superficial sort called it merely witty and amusing. In truth, the parodistic element here was a proud flight from the sterility with which a great talent was threatened by skepticism, intellectual reticence, and an awareness of banality’s deadly and expanding realm (Mann, 162).
Works Referenced:
Barba-Kay, Anton. A Web of Our Own Making: On the Nature of Digital Formation. Cambridge
University Press, 2023.
Han, Byung-Chul. Burnout Society. Stanford, 2015; See also my review here at FPR, of the
recent volume Han.
Lewis, C.S. That Hideous Strength. Bodley Head, 1945.
Lewis, C.S. Perelandra. Bodley Head, 1943.
Mann, Thomas. Dr. Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn as Told By a
Friend. New York, Knopf, 1997.
Rieff, Philip. My Life Among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006.
Rieff, Fellow Teachers/of Culture and Its Second Death. University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Runia, Eelco. Moved by the Past. Columbia, 2014. See also what Runia calls “Red Queen
History,” in a lecture on “The Theory of the Accomplished Fact,” available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxkx_5eZUVA
Stithatos, Nikitas. “On the Inner Nature of Things,” #45. In The Philokalia vol. IV. London:
Faber & Faber, 1998.
Sullivan, Meghan. “What is the University For?” Comment. https://comment.org/what-is-the-
university-for/
Vodolazkin, Eugene. A History of the Island. Plough, 2023.
Weinacht, Aaron. “The Triumph of a Theoretic: The Uses of Philip Rieff” Anamnesis 4 (2015):
66-88
White, Hayden. Metahistory. John Hopkins, 1973.
Image Credit: Anselm Kiefer, “The Orders of the Night” (1996)
