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The Reckless Mind: When philosophy fails the soul

Dec 05, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I got to know Raphael Lindo, through my friend, Bert Wilkinson. Each time Bert is in New York, he would ask Bert what books I need and Bert would bring them.  A few months ago he emailed me about books I wanted. I requested the latest edition of a great philosophy book titled; “The Reckless Mind” by Mark Lilla. I didn’t know since September Bert had the book. It was just through a casual conversation that I knew this. I went to Bert’s home on Saturday for the stuff.
I could only assume that Bert is getting Alzheimer’s or is too bogged down with trying to improve the Chronicle on whose board he sits. THE RECKLESS MIND is a fantastic book that tells the story of how deep, brilliant and learned minds can go astray. It analyzes the wrong directions some great philosophers went into. Three of them fascinate me because these were three philosophers who were phenomenally brilliant – two French thinkers; Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida and the German master, Martin Heidegger.
This book came to me at an uncanny time – the election of Trump and the death of Castro. Lilla traces the politics of Foucault, Derrida and Heidegger and concludes that in each philosopher there is a yearning for Nietzsche’s Ubermensch, so despite their genius, philosophers get entwined with rulers because for them these rulers will bring into being the reign of truth and justice and give ontological meaning to human existence.
The book did come to me at an intriguing time and indeed graphically so. How can educated minds support the politics of Donald Trump? There are very educated people in the social sciences, and the humanities that believe Trump can make America great again and Trump can right the wrongs that have overtaken the United States. It is the story all over again of Heidegger’s quest for Nietzsche’s Ubermensch that he saw coming in the shape of Adolph Hitler.
The eulogies continue to pour in on Fidel Castro and many of the countless sentiments come from minds that have training in philosophy. How could a deeply learned mind continue to support Fidel Castro after the Cuban Revolution had settled down? How could such a mind eulogize Castro as someone who brought freedom, liberation and justice to Cuba? Castro rightfully removed a nasty Latin American oligarch who turned Cuba into a playground for the decadent classes of North America. He promised a Cuba free of poverty and full of freedom. It was not to be. He succeeded in eradicating poverty but it was a satisfaction where denial coexisted with the guaranteed housing, education and health care the Cuban were offered.
Castro gave the Cuban people a life devoid of economic desperation, but he created political and philosophical desperation. Basic human rights were brutally suppressed. People were jailed for the innocuous act of dissenting. The jails were full of them. Anyone who went to Cuba would tell you it was a society of the secret police. You had to be careful what you say and who you said it to. Anyone who went to Cuba would tell you; all foreign embassies were out of bounds to Cubans. We in Guyana, despite hard times were never prevented from applying for a visa from any country on Planet Earth.
When I read Lilla’s book over the weekend, I thought of Castro’s final realization that he was not immortal and the dark days that await the American people under Trump, and I thought also of the fragility of everything in this life.  Reading Mark Lilla’s, The Reckless Mind made me think of the existentialist nature of our lives. My mind came upon that extraordinary existentialist movie, THE LAST TANGO IN PARIS by the superb Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci. As far as existentialist movies are concerned, it will be hard to better this one. Even the theme song is one of the great existential melodies ever written. I leave you with the lyrics

“We don’t exist
We are nothing but shadow and mist
In the mirror we look as we pass
No reflections revealed in the glass

Don’t you know that the blood in your veins
Is as lifeless as yesterday’s rain
It’s a game where we come to conceal
The confusion we feel
As long as we’re nameless
Our bodies are blameless

You cried when we kissed
It was nothing but shadow and mist
Two illusions who touch in a trance
Making love not by choice, but by chance
To a theme we tore from their past
To a tango we swore was their last
We are shadows of dance”

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