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On Truth and Power
I’m grading papers for a new seminar I taught this past semester on Truth and Politics. It was one of the most exciting courses I’ve taught in a few years, with simply fantastic students who brought incredible passion and curiosity to perhaps the burning question of our moment. Structured around a close reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s short but brilliant “How The True World Became a Fable," the students came to understand what Nietzsche means when he says that “truth is a lie,” or “truth is a woman,” or “truth is a fable.” Plato invented truth because of a distrust of opinion. Confronted with the trial and death of Socrates, Plato was convinced that political opinion in a democracy was dangerous, unstable, and irrational. What was needed was training of the best, those able to see beyond the shadows and deceptions of the human world, those who could step out of the cave of human affairs and focus their attention on the supersensual truths of the ideas. These philosophers claimed to know the rational truth, and from this they claimed the right to rule as philosopher kings. The question of the course became simply: If truth is a lie, is it a lie we should cherish and protect?06-04-2023
Articles
The Stranglehold of Relevance
Roger BerkowitzRobert Boyers interviews Jed Perl about the place of freedom and authority in art.
02-05-2023
Making the Empire More Colorful
Roger BerkowitzIn Harpers last week, Christopher Beah talks to Patrick J. Deneen, Francis Fukuyama, Deirdre Nansen McClosky, and Cornell West about Liberalism and whether it is worth saving.
01-29-2023
Doubters and Skeptics
Roger BerkowitzSebastian Veg, who writes about China, has published his introduction to the Thai translation of Hannah Arendt’s “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship.”
01-29-2023
The Attack on Academic Thinking
Roger BerkowitzLen Gutkin tells of the egregious abrogation of academic freedom and intellectual integrity at Hamline University, where a art-history professor was fired for teaching about a medieval image of the prophet Muhammad.
01-08-2023
All Academic Thinking is Conservative
Roger BerkowitzJordi Graupera met Richard Bernstein when Graupera was a Ph.D. student at the New School in 2008. Last year, Graupera asked Bernstein to audit his final seminar on Hannah Arendt. Graupera’s account of that final class and his tribute to his teacher are well worth reading. So too is his retelling of Bernstein’s story of how he first met Arendt.
01-08-2023
The Twitter Files
Roger BerkowitzSince Elon Musk bought Twitter and started dismantling the company’s bureaucratic infrastructure, he has also begun a process of coming clean about Twitter’s highly idiosyncratic way of censoring posts and contributors. Instead of releasing the files at once, Musk is letting them out in parts and has tasked the journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss and others with writing about the files on Twitter itself.
12-11-2022
Is Antisemitism a Virus?
Roger BerkowitzDavid Marchese interviews Tom Stoppard about the rising virus of antisemitism.
12-04-2022
Antisemitism and White Supremacy
Michael Eric Dyson has a courageous op-ed in which he moves on from acknowledging both Jewish racism and black antisemitism to recognizing “antisemitism as a toxic species of the white supremacy that threatens Black security and democracy’s future.”12-04-2022
A Simple Tale that Undid a Totalitarian System
Roger BerkowitzRobin Ashenden writes about the seismic significance of the appearance of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which appeared Sixty years ago last week.
11-27-2022