by Gus Mitchell
Part 1 of this interview can be found here.
Professor, writer, talk show host, part-time guitarist–Robert Pogue Harrison stands in a category of one among American intellectuals of his generation.
His first book, The Body of Beatrice (1988) a study of the Vita Nuova, lay well within his wheelhouse as a Dante scholar; since then, however, Harrison has charted an increasingly idiosyncratic course as a thinker, a writer, and an educator––in the broadest sense of the word.
Harrison joined the faculty of Stanford in 1986 and became chair of the Department of French and Italian in 2002. He turned 70 this year and announced his retirement. (Andrea Capra’s tribute, part of at a day-long celebration of Harrison’s career at Stanford held on 19th April, was recently republished by 3 Quarks Daily.)
Harrison has written books at a steady clip, each beautifully written and finely wrought, combining intensely felt thought and erudition with quietly challenging daring. His subjects–the forest, the garden, the dead, our obsession with youth–might appear dauntingly bottomless. Yet Harrison’s style, a graceful inter-flowing of literary, philosophical and (increasingly in his recent work) scientific reference-points, gives the impression that one is both ascending and descending, reaching strange giddy heights while delving deep to the essential mysteries at the core of the matter in hand.
It’s the same style that marks the conversations and monologues of his radio show-cum-podcast, Entitled Opinions. I stumbled across an episode of Entitled Opinions sometime in 2020 on the iTunes Podcast app while looking for something about W.H. Auden. But the show has been broadcasting for almost 20 years, “down in the catacombs of KZSU” (Stanford’s local radio station) where, in Harrison’s phrase, “we practice the persecuted religion of thinking.”
Past guests have included philosopher Rene Girard, filmmaker Werner Herzog (and, separately, his wife, photographer Lena Herzog), the novelists Shirley Hazzard and Colm Toibin, and many, many others. If you feel like hotwiring your brain, you would do well to listen to any episode of the show, from the latest program on “The Spirit of Rivers”, to music shows devoted to Pink Floyd or Hendrix, or the monologue on not liking Proust.
I interviewed Professor Harrison in May of 2023 in Cambridge where he was delivering the annual Clark Lectures at Trinity College. The overarching theme of the four lectures was “Thresholds”: between the living and the non-living, spaces and worlds, perceived and unperceived…and many other barriers besides. I left each one buzzing; Harrison can synthesise the literary with the philosophical, the philosophical with the scientific and the historical, taking his audience into fertile, uncharted and un-partitioned intellectual territory.
This is the concluding part of the interview. The conversation has been edited for ease of reading.
I know you’ve done a show [on Entitled Opinions] quite recently on the idea of ‘Political Realism and Apocalypse’. With or without the idea of ‘thresholds’ still in mind, do you have any thoughts on what apocalypse means now?
RPH: Apocalyptic thinking has a long history. Why? Why do so many people at so many different times in history believe the world is coming to an end? The hysteria that took over Europe in the years between 990 and 999, the mass conviction that the end time had arrived, was pervasive and contagious. Perhaps it’s exclusively a Christian thing, yet I don’t think so. Zoroastrianism had an idea of apocalypse, so did the ancient Norse religion (Ragnarök). Certainly when Jesus came on the scene, apocalyptic thinking was the order of the day in Judea. There have been any number of the prophets of doom over the ages, yet if you ask me what apocalypse means now, I would begin by suggesting that apocalypticism is intrinsically tied to mortality. We humans know our end is certain, that our sojourn on earth has an expiration date. Thus an eschatological mentality is built into our way of being. As I mentioned before, we are creatures of the threshold. Long before it becomes a biological fact, death confronts us with its finality. We have a singular psychological capacity to cross over from existential time to the historical or sacramental time of the end days. It’s because we live unto the end, projected into the imminent possibility of our own demise, that we have this readiness to believe that history itself will soon come to an end.
Do you think our desire is, in a sense, connected with mortality? We don’t want to miss the end! We want to know what will happen.
RPH: I do believe there exists a covert yet spurring desire in us for apocalypse. Hollywood movies, where everything gets blown up, this kind of desire to be done with the whole story– that connects with what you suggest about not wanting to miss the end. Maybe there’s something intolerable about the thought that the story we’re in will continue on just fine without us. There was a school of thought at Cornell when I was a graduate student there called “The Nuclear Unconscious.” Its adherents – and I was among them for a while – were enlisting Lacanian and Freudian concepts of the death drive to suggest that there was this unavowed apocalyptic desire that was fuelling the nuclear arms race – a submerged or unconscious desire on the part of the Reagan administration and the Soviet Union to bring about an ultimate annihilation. This is another version of that thirst for the absolute which I discussed earlier. In our own time, ecology and climate change have become the new correlatives of the apocalyptic imagination.
From what I understand of climate change, we would be almost better off having a clean end to it all rather than the slow, progressive, inevitable degradation of our biosphere that we seemed destined for on this Earth. At a certain point, the idea that nothing ever really comes to an end becomes a terrifying thought. History finds a way to drag on. This is Beckett’s idea of horror. Beckett believed that history had come to an end in his era, that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terminal events, and that we’re now living in a post-apocalyptic age. But nothing really comes to a definitive end. A few rats and a few humans survive. We can’t go on but we do go on. The “endgame” is precisely this endless prolongation of the end. That’s not a clean but a dirty apocalypse.
You’ve spent a long time teaching young people and you’ve written the book Juvenescence as a sort of diagnosis. Do you have any observations about how young people have changed in the time you’ve spent teaching?
RPH: To begin with, they’ve changed physically. Students look younger. Between 1985, when I arrived at Stanford, and 2023, the incoming freshmen seem at least two years more juvenile in appearance as well as in mentality. In short, in the developed world, among a certain class of people, the human maturation rate is slowing down, both physiologically and psychologically. I don’t know how much I can generalize from my experience as a teacher at an elite university like Stanford, yet I’m struck by how almost all of my younger students these days believe that they belong to the order of angels, and how easily they succumb to moral shock. I wonder how many of them have ever met the devil, in person I mean. I don’t think you can really become an adult until you confront the devil in one manner or other – until evil leers at you with a knowing, familiar gaze. The devil, after all, is not always elsewhere. He nestles comfortably, albeit covertly, in youthful complacency.
Several things conspire to infantalize the young these days. In America sensitivity editors at presses have full time jobs going over the classics and removing any words that might be perceived as offensive – taking out words like ‘ugly’, ‘fat’, and ‘idiot’, not to mention more offensive words. This leads to a prodigious paradox, fostering the illusion that the past was civil, courteous, and politically correct, that the past is not a tissue of sins and horrors. These kinds of prophylactic measures serve to infantilize those whose sensibilities are presumed to be too fragile for the darker sides of reality.
Of course as is often the case in our day and age, where one thing is true, its opposite is also, Thus at the intellectual level, my undergraduates today are in some ways more mature than 20 years ago, perhaps because history has darkened considerably in the past couple of decades, a darkening that brings with it a gloom and pessimism about the future. The young today are far more anxious and unsettled than before. The world they’re preparing to enter is so much more daunting than a generation ago. This gives the young of today an added quotient of seriousness, which I find promising.
What really worries me about contemporary juvenescence, however, is the loss of cultural and historical memory. The past is becoming increasingly remote and unreal, and where the past falls into oblivion, the prospects for maturity disappears along with it. When I published Juvenescence in 2014, a lot of people were perplexed about what I was claiming, namely that our culture was becoming ever more dangerously juvenile, that our cultural and political maturity was giving way to a new kind of childishness. And then Donald Trump got elected president in 2016, and those same people said: ‘Oh, now I understand what your book is all about’, because it became quite obvious that a full grown child had taken over the office of president. Trump of course is more a symptom than a cause. We now have a Congress in which many of our representatives no longer know how anything about the foundations of the American republic or about the how and why its governing institutions came to be. So many of our congressmen are political children. Complete children.
Robert Harrison, recording Entitled Opinions.
In American publications, we’re reading with increasing severity each year about the death of humanities and the death of the study of English, especially.
RPH: Firstly, I’m not persuaded that the death of the humanities is at hand. Certainly many of the metrics, like humanities majors and reading skills among college students, are in steep decline. Yet like many of my colleagues, I have noticed a recent resurgence of student interest in what the humanities have to offer by way of wisdom and insight into questions of meaning. They may not be becoming English majors or philosophy majors to the same extent as before, yet there’s a definite renewal of interest in the humanities across the board, especially among the students in STEM fields. It’s as if the tsunami of science and technology unleashed upon us all has created a broader general awareness that the insights of literature, philosophy, and religion have a fundamental role to play when it comes to finding our way out of the dark wood of cybernetic nihilism.
I hate to say it, but I sometimes believe that the greatest threat to the humanities comes from the humanists themselves. I mean the academic humanists of our time who, instead of being custodians of the heritage, become its relentless critics and prosecutors. Too many of us spend our time putting the past on trial and passing judgment on its moral iniquities. If you submit the humanities to the tribunal, the verdict is always going to be ‘guilty!’ Too often that verdict precedes any investigation into the matters themselves. To become the apologist for something, you risk looking naive and even ridiculous. Prosecution, by contrast, wears the mantle of righteousness. Moral probity these days is gauged by the vehemence of my reaction rather than the virtue of my action. There is nothing easier than to proclaim ‘guilty!’ I do not believe that critical thinking must always end in such a verdict. You can champion critical thinking without prosecuting and condemning. And you can be a custodian without being an apologist.
I suppose we’re partly talking about the tradition around Structuralism and Deconstruction here. You’ve criticised that here and elsewhere, but I know you don’t dismiss it out of hand.
RPH: I am not against Deconstruction, if only because I need to read Plato if I want to deconstruct him. I need to read Immanuel Kant or the Marquis de Sade to deconstruct their texts. In that sense, Deconstruction give new life to the canon. What I appreciate in Deconstruction is the practice of close, meticlous textual analysis. Even though its aim is to destabilize the order of meaning, Deconstruction is essentially a very scholastic practice. But again, you have to keep traditions alive in order to deconstruct them.
I’m much more pessimistic about the ideological warfare that has taken over the academic humanities, for this warfare essentially ignores the literary and philosophical traditions in favor of social history and social critique. I have an aversion to the social, be it social media or the socialization of the humanities. The social is what the Hannah Arendt scholar Hanna Pitkin called the “blob.” In Arendt’s political theory, the social comes between the private and public spheres. It spills over into both, it invades the political, invades the domestic, absorbs the realm of human intimacy and human action alike into its indeterminate viscous morass. The blob is the biggest threat to the humanities today. It may even be the biggest threat to the human today.
Talking about thresholds: the crucial threshold in academia is the one between the humanities and the sciences. I find it quite depressing that humanists today only rarely attempt to dialogue with scientists across that divide. There is so much in recent scientific discoveries that calls for humanistic appropriation and transfiguration. We should be at the beginning of a whole new chapter of the humanities, based on a dialogue with the sciences. Instead we opt for the mire of social critique, from which nothing genuinely new can emerge.
My argument in Juvenescence is that, in the cultural domain, the genuinely new comes forth through a creative retrieval of the old, the antecedent. If the new does not take the form of renewal, it quickly becomes yesterday’s news. Novelty for the sake of novelty succumbs immediately to the law of obsolescence. The only way to secure a lasting foundation for the genuinely new is through a creative retrieval and reprojection of legacy.
Which living writers do you follow with interest, and which influence you?
If we’re talking about philosophers, I think Peter Sloterdijk is the Nietzsche of the late 20th and early 21st century. Stendhal, who spent a lot of time in Parma, once said “il y a les fromages et le parmesan,” there are cheeses and there is Parmesan. Likewise, there are living philosophers and there is Peter Sloterdijk. I like Hartmut Rosa, another contemporary German thinker whose book Resonance I think highly of. I would mention also, Mark Taylor, a very interesting and wide-ranging American philosopher. Also, John Gray, the British philosopher, and Yuval Noah Harari, I don’t know if he counts as a philosopher, yet I find some of his ideas about technology very compelling. I am also immensely impressed by Mark Fisher, who sadly is no longer with us.
In fiction writing, I think John Banville can be very lyrical and moving when he puts his mind to it. Nicolas Mosley, who died in 2017, wrote a masterful novel called Hopeful Monsters, one of my all-time favorites. I am fond of Michelle de Kretser, an Australian writer born in Sri Lanka who wrote a short but exquisite book she wrote on the writer Shirley Hazzard, another writer whom I admire greatly. Michelle de Kretser’s The Hamilton Case is a superb novel in my view. Geof Dyer is an excellent writer whom I follow with interest. I recently reviewed his book The Last Days of Roger Federer for the New York Review of Books and was quite taken by it.
Let me mention just two more people who write about nature and the cosmos: Robert Macfarlane and Chet Raymo, the best science writer known to me. Both have been sources of inspiration for me.
To finish, I wanted finally to circle back to where we started, thinking about the canon and tradition versus modernity. The boundary between the two. I remember that Orson Welles once said he felt Shakespeare, whom we discussed earlier, was profoundly against the modern age. And he thinks that Shakespeare’s villains are ‘modern’ people, and there’s a sort of nostalgia for “Merrie England”, which (to Welles) runs through all English poetry.
We’ve talked about the canon being subversive, about the new depending on a foundation of tradition. What do you think of the idea that, to us, now, part of their very subversiveness or the novelty to be found in the great writers is that, in some sense, they’re always reactionary too?
RPH: T. S. Eliot remarked that Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them – ‘there is no third’. He was putting Dante and Shakespeare together as moderns, yet in truth they are divided by the fact that one is modern, while the other is not modern at all.
Dante is in many ways the summa of the medieval world view. God’s love and luminosity thoroughly suffuse his Divine Comedy. Dante brings to a grand culmination the whole Christian era, and century of so after him we enter what I call a post-Christian era. You can already see signs of the post-Christian era in Michelangelo’s late works – those unfinished Christ figures on the cross, the unfinished Pietàs, and the Depositions. These represent intense images of abandon. Where has God gone? Why has he forsaken us? God has withdrawn from the world, and Shakespeare’s plays take place in the wake of that withdrawal. So yes, Shakespeare belongs to a very different age than Dante.
It’s true that there is a strong conservative pull in Shakespeare. His villains are godless, subversive, and strikingly modern in their psychology. Shakespeare was writing for royalty, hence the conservative forces have to win out against the self-reliant modern rebels, who nonetheless continue to fascinate us. In Juvenescence I argue that no one with a modicum of modern blood in their veins can resist applauding Edmund’s speech at the beginning of King Lear, where he indicts the self-deception of those who blame their misfortune on the stars rather than themselves. Edmund is as Sartrean and proto-Existentialist as one can get. We must take responsibility for our own destinies. Of course, Edmund has to lose in the end, but does that make Shakespeare anti-modern? I’m not sure. With Shakespeare all one can say for certain is that he understood the perversity of the modern psyche, and that he still knows us better than we know ourselves.