By David Pan · Friday, April 5, 2024 Telos 206 (Spring 2024): The Intuitive and the Conceptual is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 We often have the experience of intuiting something without being able to precisely define what that intuition is. Sometimes this intuition leads to a more well-defined insight, and sometimes it might lead to some kind of action, even in the absence of clear conceptual definitions. Yet it is difficult to ascertain what kind of knowledge or awareness such intuitions consist of. What is an intuition as opposed to a defined concept of something? How seriously should we take such intuitions? Are they something separate and qualitatively different than concepts? Are they just fuzzy concepts? Do they really exist at all? These are crucial questions because they lead to conclusions about the status of concepts themselves. If the alternative to clear concepts is nothing at all, then the sociopolitical corollary would be that the alternative to conceptual knowledge and the holders of such knowledge would also be nothing at all. By contrast, if intuitions are separate from concepts and real, then expert knowledge might possibly have some deficiencies in comparison with intuitions. The essays in this issue of Telos explore in one way or another this question of the status of conceptual knowledge as opposed to intuitive awareness.
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By David Pan · Friday, October 13, 2023  Hamas’s horrifying attack on Israeli civilians is a continuation of terrorist methods that it has been using for years against Israel. As a technique of war, its terrorism functions primarily as a way of gaining support from current and potential allies. Such a massacre can only serve Hamas’s war aims to the extent that the use of terror as a technique of war points to an ideological similarity with its allies, Iran and Hezbollah. Hamas’s use of terror only makes sense because the allies it is trying to convince—anti-Semitic populations and terrorists in the Arab world as well as totalitarians everywhere—share their disregard for principles of human rights as well as their use of fear and hatred as the primary determiners of political life. Terrorism only works for Hamas insofar as it can appeal to similar inclinations in others in order to build a broader alliance of terrorist movements and totalitarian states.
This terrorist approach to politics defines the asymmetry in the conflict between Hamas and Israel. In contrast to Hamas, Israel and its main ally, the United States, are committed to protecting human rights, even in the face of terrorist enemies. Without such self-control, Israel could destroy Hamas by conducting the same kind of indiscriminate killing of Palestinians that Hamas has used against Israel. There is no doubt that if Hamas had the means at its disposal, it would not hesitate to kill the entire population of Israel. But in eschewing such terrorist methods, Israel ends up being attacked for its failures to live up to the human rights principles that it espouses. In its commentary on the conflict, Human Rights Watch focuses primarily on the Israeli siege of Gaza as a war crime while treating Hamas’s massacres of Israelis merely as the work of “individuals” who “should be brought to justice.”[1] Perversely, Israel loses legitimacy due to its general support for human rights, even as it struggles to balance a respect for human rights with its need to fight for its existence against the terrorists and totalitarians that surround it. Meanwhile, Hamas is not considered to be the political leadership of Gaza but as a set of bad individuals to be differentiated from the Gazan population. Clearly, Hamas’s use of Palestinians as human shields indicates how its terrorism translates into totalitarian rule within Gaza. Yet to treat the Palestinians as victims and Hamas as a few bad individuals ignores the political reality that Hamas constitutes the elected political authority of Gaza and recruits its fighters from the Gazan population that supports it.
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By Telos Press · Monday, September 12, 2022 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Brian Wolfel about his article “Thomas Carlyle’s Conception of Transcendentalism in Sartor Resartus and Its Application to Theorizing Postliberalism,” from Telos 199 (Summer 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss the problems of liberalism that transcendentalism tries to address; the basic characteristics of the transcendentalism that Thomas Carlyle describes in Sartor Resartus; how Carlyle’s transcendentalism embodies a kind of post-liberalism; how Carlyle’s transcendentalism can be understood as anti-dogmatic, or as a dogmatic anti-dogmatism; how Carlyle’s transcendentalism functions as a practical political philosophy; the relation of Carlyle’s transcendentalism to American transcendentalism and contemporary New Age philosophy; and the perilous status of liberalism in relation to current forms of authoritarianism. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 199 are available for purchase in our online store.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, August 8, 2022 The following comments refer to Mathieu Slama’s “How Brilliant Scientists Damage Democracy,” which appears here.
Among the many features of the COVID crisis, one stands out as particularly consequential: the attribution of ultimate and exclusive authority to science. Public statements abounded urging that we “follow the science,” and signs popped up on front lawns across the country advertising that the residents “believe in science”—as if science were a matter of belief rather than skepticism, observation, and experimentation. There was of course little attention to alternative scientific claims or debates within science. Instead of a scientific event, we witnessed the assertion of authority by way of the invocation of science or of what came to pass as “science.” The mandate to “follow the science” blindly has come to mean “follow the leader,” with no questions asked.
For large swaths of the public, the scientific label carries with it the implication of veracity: science, as opposed to religion (which is otherwise the proper subject matter of belief), is truth. Indeed the equation is a formula for modernity, which is why bizarre variants of modernization repeatedly cast themselves in the role of science: for Communism, the “science of Marxism-Leninism,” and for Nazis, “race science.” Nor do we have to look that far afield to those extreme cases in order to find reason to question the absolute truth claim of science. One can point to scandals like the Tuskegee experiment and to the regular reports of fraud and retractions, even in the most prestigious scientific journals. Just recently one reads that research reported in the journal Nature concerning Alzheimer’s may have been fraudulent. Following that science probably wasted millions of research dollars.
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By Mathieu Slama · Monday, August 8, 2022 These remarks on the French Science Council were published in Le Figaro on July 7, 2022 and appear here with permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman, whose comments are here.
The Science Council met for the last time this week and has issued its 75th and final opinion. It will disappear officially on July 31. In its final statement, it underscored the importance of better scientific education for the youth, who will be the public leaders of the future, and it recommended the creation of a “Council of Science,” which would consist of a “group of scientists of the highest quality” to advise the head of state. Whether these recommendations are followed or not, it is likely that some new organ will be established in the coming months. In any case, we are at the end of an institution that played a decisive role throughout the public health crisis, and it is useful to offer a preliminary evaluation of it.
Composed of brilliant individuals and our best scientists, the Science Council—despite all the talent that it has included—has been one of the principal architects of the democratic debacle of the health crisis. And if there is a lesson to be drawn from this fiasco, it is that science should never be a substitute for politics and that political decisions cannot result simply from scientific expertise—at the risk of profoundly degrading our democracy.
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By Norbert Bolz · Wednesday, December 2, 2020 When the historian Ernst Nolte formulated the thesis that Auschwitz was “the fear-induced reaction to the extermination processes of the Russian Revolution,” he was finished in the academic world. It was even of no help to him emphasizing that the copy was more irrational, more appalling and atrocious than the original. He was not forgiven the comparison since he seemed to call into question the singularity thesis, the incomparability of NS terror. That fit the taboo on totalitarianism theory. Right-wing and left-wing terror should not be mentioned in the same breath; National Socialism and International Socialism are not to be compared. And therefore all attempts to similarly work through the reign of terror by the Communists in its broad impact, as has been done with that of the Nazis, have been in vain. Of course, one would have to differentiate here. French intellectuals have undoubtedly been affected by the shocking reports by Koestler and Solzhenitsyn about the Moscow Trials and the Gulag. That was, at best, embarrassing for the German left. And so it should be no surprise that it celebrated Lenin’s 150th birthday—though under coronavirus conditions.
Lenin was the star of the Bolsheviks, who understood themselves to be the Jacobins of the twentieth century. He was undoubtedly an exceptionally gifted demagogue, but one should not imagine the Russian Revolution as resulting from a social movement; it was a project of intellectuals. The Bolshevik vanguard consisted of theorists, frequently emigrants, who had learned from Marx to use Hegel’s dialectic as a weapon. In this respect, the neo-Marxist bible History and Class Consciousness (1923) by Georg Lukács is still today unsurpassed. Here Hegel’s adroit dictum “all the worse for the facts” is taken seriously: more real than the facts is the totality as it presents itself from the standpoint of the proletarian class. In this way, dialectics becomes opium for the intellectuals.
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