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Philosophy Shorts

Philosophers on Newspapers

by Matt Qvortrup

‘More songs about Buildings and Food’ was the title of a 1978 album by the rock band Talking Heads. It was about all the things rock stars normally don’t sing about. Pop songs are usually about variations on the theme of love; tracks like Rose Royce’s 1976 hit ‘Car Wash’ are the exception.

Philosophers, likewise, tend to have a narrow focus on epistemology, metaphysics and trifles like the meaning of life. But occasionally great minds stray from their turf and write about other matters, for example buildings (Martin Heidegger), food (Hobbes), tomato juice (Robert Nozick), and the weather (Lucretius and Aristotle). This series of Shorts is about these unfamiliar themes; about the things philosophers also write about.

Someone once said that Europe is characterized by the newspaper. It stands to reason then that this outlet of daily news was often mentioned by philosophers. Just so, “The newspaper reading of the early morning is a kind of realistic morning prayer” confided Hegel (1770-1831) to one of his notebooks (Miscellaneous Writings of G.W.F. Hegel, p.247). That famously abstract thinker knew what was he was talking about: rarely for a philosopher, he was briefly the editor of a newspaper himself – in his case, the Bamberger Zeitung. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) never held such a position, but even for him, it was as if all education pointed towards this newspaper reading ritual: “A person… has learned to read his native language. Later he reads… newspapers” Then he analyses in minute detail how this works. (Philosophical Investigations, para. 156).

All this seems to assume that the reader would be enlightened by what he or she reads. But Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) took a different view. Ever the cynic, he saw the daily papers as mouthpieces of the Prussian regime, “so with malice in their eyes and an accompanying grimace… newspaper critics too now involuntarily speak… in the language of [nationalist] superiority” (Human, All Too Human, p.368).

Nietzsche was not the first to complain that the papers were being used for propaganda. Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Irish-born British Whig politician, philosopher, and critic, feared that the French spirit of revolution is “sown almost everywhere, chiefly by newspaper circulations, infinitely more efficacious and extensive than ever they were” (Thoughts On French Affairs, p.91). And not only revolutionary ideas and the guillotine, no – even “the importation of French finery, never fails of furnishing a very popular column in a newspaper” (ibid). No wonder that he complained that views were often “bawled in newspapers” (Speech on American Taxation, p.386).

In the Twentieth Century, newspapers slightly changed their business model. Now, in order to survive, they needed advertisements. This prompted the ever-philosophical mind of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), who worked as a reporter for the New Yorker, to reflect ruefully “that the advertising columns of every newspaper show … ‘scientificality’, by which a manufacturer proves with facts and figures and the help of a ‘research’ department that his is the ‘best soap in the world’.” (The Origins of Totalitarianism, p.245).

Arendt did not say what she thought of journalists. Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), by contrast, did. According to him, the newspapers were written by “bowlegged- and crooked, club- and flat-footed, blob-fingered, half-feathered, but pig-politically rejected subjects, under the name of journalists” (Diaries, 1847, p.134).

Matt Qvortrup’s book Great Minds on Small Things is published by Duckworth.