If you enjoy a good philosophical ass-whupping as much as I do, you should read this review by Martha Nussbaum, philosophical ass-whupper extraordinaire, of the book "Manliness," which was apparently written in an extended fit of ignorance and self-loathing by Harvard political philosopher Harvey Mansfield. Nussbaum writes:
… it seems appalling that Mansfield has spent decades teaching great philosophical texts to undergraduates who cannot easily tell a careful reading from a careless one, or low standards from high ones — especially when the teacher keeps portraying himself as the bold defender of standards. Undergraduates typically take a while to learn to analyze the arguments in Plato logically and to care about things like validity, ambiguity, and contradiction. Many of them, then, will not notice how riddled with logical error and verbal ambiguity their teacher’s pronouncements are. That is the sort of thing that they are in class to learn. But surely other, older people know. How did someone whose every paragraph is a stake in Socrates’s heart come to be an exemplar of philosophical seriousness?
If the author of Manliness is far from being the patient philosophical type for whom we have been searching, who might he be? Plato’s dialogues knew the answer: he is a rhetorician or a sophist, one of those theatrical types so admired by the conventionally ambitious men amply on display as Socrates’s interlocutors. Far from seeking truth, the sophist seeks to put on a good show. Far from wanting premises that are correct, the sophist seeks premises that his chosen audience will find believable. Far from seeking analytical rigor, he offers a show of rigor in arguments that are riddled with ambiguity and equivocation and logical error. Far from submitting bravely to Socrates’s questioning, he slinks away when the going gets tough, or cranks up the volume in order to try to drown out the courageous voice of the truth-seeking philosopher. Audiences love him — because, says Socrates, he is like a clever cook: instead of promoting true health, he goes after what his audience will eagerly gobble up.
That is Mansfield to a T. In this book that repeatedly proclaims its own manly boldness, offering its author as a John Wayne of the intellect, he serves up a concoction that is contrived mainly to delight the conservative audience that already lionizes Mansfield as the hero of high standards, the enemy of grade inflation, and the foe of feminism. Mansfield’s daring physical prowess, he told a New York Times Magazine reporter, is displayed in his ability to move furniture around his house. His daring moral prowess is displayed in his ability to make speeches on the floor of the Harvard faculty opposing the creation of a women’s studies program, a risky feat indeed. Should average readers wonder whether this does indeed bring him into competition with John Wayne, or even with the questionable Barry Bonds, Mansfield does not care an iota, because he has his expected audience dead to rights. Readers of The Weekly Standard and National Review, they are already devouring the logic-free, ambiguity-riddled concoction he has served up and smacking their lips.
