Raymond Geuss says in the Preface that the traditional philosophical question—why do we have the natural and social orders that we have?—is the main focus of this selection of his essays. However, he also says that the traditional philosophical question of the why of order is intellectually vacuous because it is based on false assumptions. There is nothing new about the charge of intellectual vacuity. Though one may feel that the author’s disheartening self-reflection in his last and thirteenth chapter/essay, the title essay of the book, bespeaks of nihilism and reveals a self-loathing attitude in the author. Chapter/Essay 13 is about the dis-value of teaching philosophy as a game of moving symbols and as a game of pretense argument for the elite, who attend the elite university where the author teaches. Geuss says that his students attend university for the purpose of taking up positions of power among the elite in business, government and politics. The reader may feel disheartened by the author’s dismal claims about the practice and teaching of students in the upper leagues of academia. It is not just that philosophy—at least the traditional version—has no grip on reality. It is not just that traditional philosophical disciplines are being taken over and updated by other academic fields (see Chapter/Essay 1). Rather, it is terrible for the value and function of philosophy, even when updated by the current trends in philosophical understanding, that philosophy unintentionally collaborates with the oppressors of today. Even the best of contemporary philosophers—such as Bernard Williams, though he didn’t realize it (as argued in Chapter/Essay 10) with his understanding of the ambiguity of all conceptual systems, and the vagaries and context-boundedness of all thought—did not push his thinking on ethics far enough. Williams failed to realize that his tacit acceptance of current neo-liberalism implicitly entrenches the oppression of all people, including those in positions of comfort in our neo-liberal social and political world.

One might find this very negative depiction of even the top thinkers in philosophy, as unwitting collaborators of the oppressive elite of modern society, defeatist. This negative approach to the top league thinkers may be especially defeatist for Geuss’s young students. Geuss worries about his young students in his self-examination of his position of influence in a leading British academic institution. However, there is another side to Geuss’s thinking in this book that is positive for philosophy, and philosophy students. Geuss, I think, is actually asking another question: how do we make order for ourselves out of the mostly chaotic natural and social worlds into which we have been placed? We have been placed in “a world without why” or a world where whatever natural order and social order exists cannot be explained, legitimated, and cannot even be questioned nor criticized from a view outside, a transcendent and absolute point of reference. (See Chapters/Essays 3, 9 and 11.) How do we gain a foothold in this why-less world?

I think the answer lies in the deeper folds of Geuss’s text. Before I get to the answer, as I see it in the textual undercurrent, I want to propose why on Geuss’s theory of meaning that he discusses over several chapters/essays (2, 5, and 6), the meaning of text must always hide beneath the surface.

Language, particularly philosophical language and poetic language, must be obscure “If everyday language [is] … infected with conformism, repression, and distortion …” (42) Furthermore, “… much of what we take to be clear seems that way only because repressive social forces impose restrictive, determinate forms on our behaviour and on our modes of thinking and imagining.” (44) So, obscurity is to be prized according to Geuss: “That is one of the things that makes it [the best modern poetry] so unsettling for many people but also one of the reasons we should cherish it, if we can.” (44)

How do we find meaning in the obscurity of modern poetry and in the depths of the best of modern philosophy? We need to look at how “art and philosophy … articulate negatively what a meaningful life would look like.” (108) In other words, negativity or “negative dialectics” create a “surrogate meaning.” (110) My understanding of Geuss’s discussion of “The Loss of Meaning on the Left” in Chapter/Essay 5, the negativity of modern poetry and much of modern left thinking among Adorno and his school of thought, the “Frankfurt School,” uses the technique of reversal—we can find the meaning by reversing what is spoken in the words of those in positions of power and control. Negative dialectics in a way supersedes Socratic dialectics. Negative dialectics, on Geuss’s account, are free of the faulty assumption of “the initial situation of the Socratic discussion “… [which is] like that of an autonomous consumer in the ideal world of neo-liberal economic theory who is faced with a free choice among an array of options.”(164) Socratic discussion is biased with oppressive neo-liberal thinking where negative dialectics in its negativity (reverse thinking) are the only means to escape oppressive thinking. (See Geuss’s critique of Socratic dialectics in Chapter/Essay 9, pp.164 ff.).

I am soon coming to the punch-line of this review. The clue to Geuss’s answer to the question of how we can gain a foothold in a chaotic, nonsensical world, I am arguing, is in the reverse sense of what Geuss apparently clearly says because Geuss is a practitioner of negative dialectics (see Chapter/Essay 4 “Must Criticism be Constructive?” for an account of the force of Adornonian negative dialectics). Geuss apparently clearly says Arendt’s belief that all politicians must lie is simplistic. Moreover, Geuss apparently clearly says that, if Arendt had not dallied with Heidegger but instead attended to his lessons, Arendt would have understood that the truth-telling and lying dichotomy is context-bound and is variable. So, I take the reverse meaning to what Geuss is apparently clearly saying in Chapter/Essay 7 (“A Note on Lying”) and in footnote 7: “If Arendt had been paying attention to Heidegger in the right way in the 1930s, she could have learned from him.” (250) I take it that Geuss is saying in a reverse way that Arendt did learn from Heidegger’s actions about how thinkers who collude and collaborate with brutal regimes are not to be trusted.

Now I come to how I think Geuss provides a positive answer to the question of how we can gain a foothold in our chaotic natural and social worlds: we can find partial, tentative, context-bound answers to why by seeking meaning in the hard to find places, and by listening to the best of our modern poets and philosophers. Who are the best of our modern poets and philosophers? Only those who unlike Heidegger refuse to collaborate. But, to be fair to Geuss on the literal level, my previous statement is a reversal of Geuss’s apparent awe of Heidegger. However, perhaps Heidegger’s collaboration caused Heidegger, as it does Geuss in his “privileged position,” to “… suffer from recurrent bouts of nausea in the face of … densely woven tissue of ‘arguments,’ most of which are nothing but blinds for something else altogether, generally something unsavoury; and I feel an urgent need to exit from it altogether.” (232) Geuss, unlike Heidegger, has the courage and intellectual honesty to admit a self-attributed collaboration with, according to his way of thought, an oppressive social order; the courage to state openly his discomfort with a self-deemed collaboration; and to state openly his dissent with the current social order.