5/25/2014 Writing About a Life of Ideas - NYTimes.com

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/writing-about-a-life-of-ideas/ 1/7

Draft

Writing About a Life of Ideas

By RICHARD V. REEVES

May 19, 2014 8:20 pm

Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.

When an intellectual dies, there are no heaps of flowers or public mournings.

The odd wistful editorial will be written in upmarket newspapers; colloquia

organized in ivy-clad colleges. Few Americans will know, for instance, that Ronald

Dworkin, a formidable figure in American liberal philosophy, died last year.

In part, this is because intellectuals occupy a small corner of the public

imagination. Nobody ever proposes a lecture from Michael Sandel for the Super Bowl

halftime show. Also, ideas outlive individuals in any case. Intellectuals stop writing

when they die, but they don’t stop publishing. Ideas are immortal. Indeed the true

measure of intellectual greatness, according to Goethe, is “posthumous productivity.”

Writing the life of a thinker seems, then, an eccentric activity. As we toil in the

archives, any biographer of an intellectual is haunted by a terrible question: “Who

cares?” Who cares whether John Stuart Mill (my own biographical subject) had sex

with Harriet Taylor or not? (I don’t know. Probably.) Who cares if John Locke

traveled from Holland to England with Queen Mary after the Glorious Revolution?

(He did not.) Who cares if Ronald Dworkin or John Rawls were nice people, or not?

(One of each, it seems.)

When the subject of a biography is a great politician or military leader, the life is

what makes the story: what they did, and said, not what they thought. A subject who

has had an important and interesting life during interesting times can, in skilled

hands, be brought to life like the character of a good novel.

5/25/2014 Writing About a Life of Ideas - NYTimes.com

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/writing-about-a-life-of-ideas/ 2/7

For intellectuals, the life is secondary to the thinking. It is the quality and utility

of ideas that count, not the qualities or heroics of their producers. “On Liberty” and

“A Theory of Justice” do not require biographical buttressing. They are self-

supporting. In which case Martin Heidegger’s succinct note about Aristotle — “the

man was born, he worked, and then died” — is more than sufficient.

And yet the ideas cannot be cleaved, in their entirety, from the life — or at least,

that’s what biographers have to tell themselves.

There is an inescapable interiority to intellectual biography, since the story is of

the mind as much as of the body. Sometimes that interior story is, in itself, gripping.

The mental illness and recovery of John Nash — brilliantly captured in Sylvia Nasar’s

biography “A Beautiful Mind” — is a case in point. But these are rare exceptions to

the rule.

Sometimes the intellectual has played a part on other stages, too: John Stuart

Mill, for instance, was a controversial Member of Parliament, and an important

polemist in Victorian political life. The contemporary scholar Amartya Sen directly

influences Indian politics, has established new divisions of the United Nations and

new universities, and advised countless governments. When the intellectual is a

public one, the biographical task is less arduous.

But more often than not, the daily lives of intellectuals are, bluntly, rather dull —

and have become more so since the professionalism of philosophy in the 20th

century. John Rawls, who died in 2002, was the towering figure of 20th-century

American philosophy, but I do not envy his biographer: quiet life, happy marriage,

great thoughts.

Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian academic-cum-politician who has written

admiringly about Isaiah Berlin — “what can I say, I loved the guy!” — suggests a

different motivation. “Our thoughts and lives are constantly interacting,” he told me.

“We think about our lives, sometimes we change our lives because of our thoughts,

and vice versa. That’s the human condition.

“Intellectuals are ordinary people, with the same tragedies and the same frailties

as the rest of us. But they are elite thinkers. So they can offer a case study of how

ideas spring from and shape the content of a life.”

5/25/2014 Writing About a Life of Ideas - NYTimes.com

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/writing-about-a-life-of-ideas/ 3/7

The life of an intellectual, Mr. Ignatieff claims, provides a petri dish for the

universal human experiment of thinking, being and doing. It’s a lovely idea. The

trouble is that intellectuals seem no better at it than anyone else. They often think

great thoughts, while being ignoble characters. Maybe Mill and Berlin and John

Dewey were noble characters. But Marx was a serial adulterer, Karl Popper was a

pompous narcissist, and Heidegger was a fascist. Elite thinkers, maybe: but as

amateurish humans as the rest of us.

Rather than attempting to turn a great thinker into a greater person, our goal is

simply to cast a different light on our subject’s ideas, in the hope of seeing them a

little more clearly. Berlin’s liberalism is expressed in breezy, almost flimsy, prose. But

once you know that as a Russian Jew, he escaped from Lenin’s Petrograd and that he

wrote against the backdrop of the Holocaust and at the height of the Cold War, you

read him differently. Knowing that Mill lost his utilitarian faith at the age of 20

explains, in part, why his “Utilitarianism” is, by his standards, such a shoddy piece of

work.

By animating the motivation of the intellectual, biographers can also help to

prevent misunderstandings, or an inappropriate retrofitting of modern concerns onto

old ideas. “On Liberty” was written as a warning against Victorian social conformity,

not against state power — which is the use to which contemporary conservatives put

the essay. Of course we can use the intellectual tools intellectuals leave us to tackle

modern problems — otherwise there is little point in reading them. But we should

know the purposes for which they were originally fashioned. We need the history of

an idea to use that idea well. And that means, very often, the history of the person too.

Weaving together the drama of the mind and the earthly events of real life is a

delicate task. There is a constant danger of turning a life event into an explanation for

an idea, thereby creating an “aha!” moment. “Aha! So that’s why Freud hated

women/Mill turned to Coleridge/Keynes feared unemployment.”

These connections are deliciously tempting to the biographer, since they validate

our entire enterprise. Sadly, it is rarely possible to connect life event A with idea B

with any degree of plausibility. The most we can usually do is point to a potential

relationship between the development of an idea and the trials of everyday life, and

leave the judgment to the reader.

5/25/2014 Writing About a Life of Ideas - NYTimes.com

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/writing-about-a-life-of-ideas/ 4/7

But on the other hand, the fear of creating inauthentic connections can lead

biographers to treat the person as entirely distinct from the intellect, and simply

narrate the events of their ordinary life. For one thing, this is often spine-crackingly

dull; no sane person cares what John Locke ate for breakfast in Holland. More

important, a “what-John-did-next” approach to intellectual biography misses the

point. We care about the ideas, and so we care about the life to the extent that it

bears upon, illuminates and revivifies them.

“Us biographers can render visible the drama of intellectual life,” says Mr.

Ignatieff. “And this can give life to what intellectuals write, and help people

understand them more deeply.”

Biographers of intellectuals are, in the end, biographers of ideas rather than of

individuals. Our hope is to bring those ideas into higher definition, by describing

their human provenance. It’s a modest enough task. But it’s enough.

Richard V. Reeves is the author of “John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand” and

a Fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Site Index

News

World

U.S.

Politics

New York

Business

Technology

Science

Health

Sports

Education

Obituaries

Today's Paper

Corrections

5/25/2014 Writing About a Life of Ideas - NYTimes.com

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/writing-about-a-life-of-ideas/ 5/7

Opinion

Today's Opinion

Op-Ed Columnists

Editorials

Contributing Writers

Op-Ed Contributors

Opinionator

Letters

Sunday Review

Taking Note

Room for Debate

Public Editor

Video: Opinion

Arts

Today's Arts

Art & Design

ArtsBeat

Books

Dance

Movies

Music

N.Y.C. Events Guide

Television

Theater

Video Games

Video: Arts

Living

Automobiles

Crosswords

Dining & Wine

Education

Fashion & Style

5/25/2014 Writing About a Life of Ideas - NYTimes.com

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/writing-about-a-life-of-ideas/ 6/7

Health

Home & Garden

Jobs

Magazine

N.Y.C. Events Guide

Real Estate

T Magazine

Travel

Weddings & Celebrations

Listings & More

Classifieds

Tools & Services

Times Topics

Public Editor

N.Y.C. Events Guide

TV Listings

Blogs

Cartoons

Multimedia

Photography

Video

NYT Store

Times Journeys

Subscribe

Manage My Account

Subscribe

Subscribe

Times Premier

Home Delivery

Digital Subscriptions

NYT Now

Email Newsletters

5/25/2014 Writing About a Life of Ideas - NYTimes.com

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/writing-about-a-life-of-ideas/ 7/7

Alerts

Crosswords

Gift Subscriptions

Corporate Subscriptions

Education Rate

Mobile Applications

Replica Edition

International New York Times

© 2014 The New York Times Company