An Apology for Apologetics

You Should Write More For Fellow Strugglers

Last post I wrote about beautiful thinkers vs. informative thinkers. Here’s another way to divide thinkers that is fruitful:

Apologetic writers vs. Outreach writers.

Apologetic writers seek to move their fellow insiders; outreach writers try to bring people into the inside.

Some writers switch hit as apologists and outreachers.

Rabbi Soloveitchick is a good example.
Halachic Man is a work of Apologetics. Lonely Man of Faith is a work of outreach.

For Abraham Joshua Heschel, Torah from Heaven is a work of Apologetics. The Sabbath is a work of outreach.

Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed is an “apology.”
His Mishna Torah is, perhaps, a work of “outreach.”

Machiavelli’s Prince is probably best read as an apology.
Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise is best read as a work of outreach.

Heidegger and Wittgenstein are apologists.
Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx are outreachers.

Sartre does outreach. Strauss is an apologist.

Outreachers want to convince.
Apologists want to accompany.

In outreach, you can’t escape the question “How do I know this?” “What are my assumptions?”

In apology, you take your assumptions for granted. Your question is “What do I want to impart to my fellows in the struggle?”

Ironically, some works of outreach are ineffective at their goal, and some works of apology are quite successful as works of outreach. Writers have little to no control over their reception.

Most poets are apologists.
The more rarified the work, the more it is a kind of inreach.

J.H. Prynne, one of the more difficult poets of the 20th century is a bestselling poet in China, where his door-stopping tomes have sold in the tens of thousands.

You would think that universalists are outreachers and particularists are apologists, but that’s not always the case.

If you’re writing esoterically you're probably doing apologetics. If you’re a popularizer you're obviously doing outreach. Most academic writing is positionally apologetics, but often self-denying.

Some of the distinction is subjective. Who does the author feel is the ideal audience?

I suppose if you’re writing to all your fellow humans qua sufferers you're probably doing both outreach and apologetics at once.

Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning is such a work.

Martha Nussbaum writes outreach, for the most part. And her criticisms of postmodern thinkers, for example, Judith Butler, tends to be that they are too apologetic (bracketing even the substantive disagreements).

Harold Bloom writes outreach.
Paul de Man writes apologetics.

One of the things that makes G.K. Chesterton and Zizek fun to read—even if you disagree with their content—is that they write apologetics.

Yehuda Halevy is a fascinating case, because the Kuzari is often read as a work of outreach—it’s literally about a sage proselytizing to a foreign king. And yet it is probably a work of apologetics, the king character being a stand-in for none other than Halevy himself.

This riff is outreach insofar as I want you to find this distinction useful and interesting.

It’s apologetics insofar as I want my fellow writers to find recognition in these archetypes and be more emboldened as a result.

Generally, I find works of inreach or apology to be more compelling than works of outreach. Apology suggests the stakes are personal.

But, too often apologists pretend they are doing outreach, and the result is something confused.

Regardless of intent, and all things being equal, reading works of thought as apologies yields better results.

Think of works of philosophy as memoirs of the mind and you’ll stop getting distracted by thoughts like “Is this a good argument?”

It’s quite beautiful, if also sad, to think of systematic works, in particular, works that aspire to massive objectify and impersonal truth, as spiritual memoirs, apologies for a life whose reality was much more complex than the section breaks make it seem.

Aristotle’s God is thought thinking itself. What if, instead of taking that literally, we imagined it as the ideal of a person who found it impossible to remain, at all times, a pure thinker?

It's a kind of admission of failing, in a way. Only God is a thinker, the rest of us are some hybrid of thought and other activities.

In short, let’s see more explicitly confessional writing.

There is a place beyond the binary opposition of Eat, Pray, Love and the Critique of Pure Reason. I’ll meet you there.