Brown study.

The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance With Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism, by Richard Wolin (Princeton, 404 pp., $29.95)

THIS is a valuable but ungainly book. Richard Wolin, a professor of history and literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is formidably erudite about French and German 19th-century thought, and he gives the reader useful expositions of the major Romantic thinkers.

He sandwiches this history of 19th-century ideas in between discussions of the postmodernism of such figures as Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Michel Foucault, all of whom attempted to show the comprehensive failure of representation, including language, and therefore the impossibility not only of literature but even of all rational communication. Though these contemporary figures considered themselves leftists hostile to existing institutions, Wolin sees in them affinities with neo-fascist leaders today on the Continent, including Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Jorg Haider in Austria. These European neofascists are, in actuality, mainly opponents of immigration; not every Austrian whose last name begins with H and ends with R is the Fuhrer's second coming.

Wolin's title mentions Nietzsche, but his narrative starts much earlier, with Maistre, Burke, and the opponents of the French Revolution. Right there a problem becomes evident. If there is a "temptation of unreason," there is certainly a temptation of reason as well: Many, even most, of the revolutionary philosophes were rationalists, the Goddess of Reason was worshipped during the Revolution, and--as Burke said--at the end of that road lies the gallows. Not only unreason, but reason too, can serve the human appetite for power.

Another mistake Wolin makes is to understand Nietzsche as an intellectual source for political fascism. During World War I, philosopher partisans of the Allies propagandized by blaming Nietzsche for Bismarck, the Kaiser, and German militarism; later, he came to be blamed for National Socialism. But Nietzsche would have loathed Nazism; he hated anti-Semitism and other vulgarities, and often said harsh things about Germans. (Another supposed protofascist here, Oswald Spengler, is said to have been asked by Hitler, "Am I Julius Caesar?" "No," Spengler sneered, "Tiberius." If Hitler had understood him, Spengler would have had a visit from the Gestapo.)

Nietzsche's actual goal was not the powerful state, or the mighty Volk, but the heroic individual. In his journey toward this individual, he "philosophized with a hammer," expressing and admiring philosophies from Socrates and Plato through the Enlightenment and the 19th century, then smashing them and rejecting them as idols. He considered Socrates "holy," then rejected him as a corrupter; the same with Wagner, and Jesus. He called his own autobiography Ecce Homo. In the end Nietzsche reached his goal, utterly alone, stripped of illusion, on the mountain peak as Zarathustra, a poet of uncomfortable truths. Entire "aloneness" was the condition of freedom, which allowed for self-creation, not necessarily a terrifying thing, but even potentially joyful.

The case of Martin Heidegger, however, was genuinely tragic: He was too big for National Socialism, but fell into their fetid ditch and behaved like a rotter. No mere ideologue could have achieved Heidegger's explications of a few verses of Parmenides, going on for a hundred pages back, back, and further back, in search of Being in the depths of time. Hannah Arendt recalled the time when, as a young university student, she first heard of Heidegger: "There was hardly more than a name, but the name traveled all over Germany like the rumor of a hidden king.... The rumor about Heidegger put it simply: Thinking has come to life again; the cultural treasures of the past, thought dead, are being made to speak." The language there associates Heidegger with Jesus. Arendt studied with him, fell in love with him: a love that was powerful and undying. She forgave him his Nazism; she never lost the memory of those old emotions, and could not denounce him.

Wolin sticks pretty much to the Continent, and neglects the British Counter-Enlightenment--which was much more moderate, partly, no doubt, for extra-philosophical reasons. Burke found in tradition and habit modes of cognition. You tie your shoes through habit. If you tried to do it through reason, you would never get out of the house. Try playing the violin through reason. Custom and institutions embodied the collective "reason" of society, based on experience. At the very least, they foster ease. "What Burke wanted," Jacques Barzun once said, "was to get his morning newspaper on time." No simple thing.

"Ideas" are not pure, discrete pellets, but come fused with emotion and unconscious knowledge. Wordsworth wrote, "The Child is father of the Man"; he apparently even thought the "child" remembered pre-natal existence, and came into the world trailing "clouds of glory." In "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," he wrote about moments of recognition:

   ... in a season of calm weather
   Though inland far we be,
   Our souls have sight of that immortal
      sea
   Which brought us hither,
   Can in a moment travel thither,
   And see the children sport upon the
      shore
   And hear the mighty waters rolling
      evermore.

Whenever you hear waters roaring, look out. But this kind of Romanticism, far from being proto-fascist, shows Wordsworth in touch with his unconscious: that great teacher of the vital things, benevolent and not menacing. The poet was exploring the ways the mind works.

As for the postmodernists--the cafe philosophers Derrida, de Man, Foucault, and the rest--they are dangerous only to literature departments. Derrida's famous maxim, Il n'y pas de hors-texte (there is nothing outside the text), self-destructs at a snap of the fingers. That phrase can itself be discussed only within itself, and becomes just a collection of syllables, vowels and consonants. In response to this, I suppose, one might fall back on a mystical authoritarianism; but in reality, these postmodernists have had the effect of inspiring a thousand Ph.D. theses and emptying a thousand classrooms. The students, surprisingly, want to read ... poems and novels. Paul de Man, a bright charmer, persuaded Yale that all of this postmodernism was not nonsense; you can get the truth by canceling one or the other of those negatives.

The history of ideas has two classic tasks: first, as Leo Strauss said, to read a text as its author wanted it to be read; and second, to establish the responsibility of the text for what future men of action make of it. Wolin is better at the first than at the second; the postmodernists do not seem to have affected action at all.