The Philosophy of Philip Rieff: Cultural Conflict, Religion, and the Self
Edited by William G. Batchelder, IV and Michael P. Harding.
Bloomsbury Academic, 2025.
Hardcover, 324 pages, $115.
Reviewed by Albert Norton, Jr.
We should care about the philosophy of Philip Rieff because he revealed the reality of “psychological man” in thrall to a therapeutic way of seeing the world. Many are so afflicted. As its influence spreads past a tipping point, the affliction accelerates.
It’s important that we see these developments for what they are. Rieff’s work is important to this end, of course, but his writing style can be daunting for the uninitiated. Thankfully, there is a new work that serves not only as a summary of Rieff but as an updated exposition of his work, including contrasts to more recent serious thinkers on this subject. It is The Philosophy of Philip Rieff, subtitled Cultural Conflict, Religion, and the Self, a series of essays edited (and contributed to) by William G. Batchelder IV and Michael Harding.
The editors, in their introduction, commence with a word of caution:
Rieff will not help you sleep at night. But he will help you understand your sleepless nights, and why nihilism, the strangest guest, gnaws at the edge of your sleepless mind. He will help you understand what has been lost, and what that loss portends.
For someone steeped in the implications of the therapeutic worldview, like your reviewer, this volume is essential for no other reason than its completeness and bibliographies, one for each contributor. Once drawn into the seriousness of what we’re dealing with, the thinker seized with the urge to expand understanding (as he or she likely will be) can simply start here.
Several of the contributors to this collection summarize Rieff’s three-world (or three-culture) construct. Philosophers of culture are forever dividing history into epochs, and sometimes it’s not so helpful. But it is with Rieff, as is the particular vocabulary he employs. So let’s start with that foundation.
The “first world” is a pagan sensibility of “primacy of possibility.” People were internally guided by taboo and by social norms tied to expectations of the gods, in a much less individualistic environment than we in the West experience now. One might summarize the first world as governed by “fate.” This is a description of a worldview, so it is not strictly time-sequential, though one can say this worldview was more prevalent before the advent of the second culture.
The “second world” (or “second culture”) is the worldview of faith. The pagan world was upended in favor of the Jewish and then Christian conception of a hierarchy of moral principles embedded in the universe, authored by God. In Rieff’s phrasing, this is the basis for “sacred order,” meaning divine authority for the logos ordering the natural world and the human mind making sense of it. The sacred order consists of “verticals in authority,” which underwrite interdicts felt individually and socially. But the sacred order also includes a framework for remission or release of interdicts, as with sex being licit in marriage but not outside of it.
The “third world” (or “culture”) is marked by “fiction,” in Rieff’s terminology. It is the result of a collapse in society’s conception of sacred order to sponsor social and individual interdicts. It is a return to the pagan “primacy of possibility” but without its outward-directed social norms and taboos, so that individuals in society turn inward, hostile to external authority but exquisitely sensitive to the authority of self, producing a timorous inner being that must be shielded from hostile second-worlders, but which renders them unwittingly subject to ideological capture.
So many words are spilled on postmodernism and its implications, but few with real understanding. It all comes down to the rejection of the sacred order. Harding rightly takes us to Nietzsche (“You Should be Closest to Him in Heart When You Resist Him: Rieff’s Use of Nietzsche in Deathworks”) for understanding that the third culture is premised on “ressentiment,” a spirit of transgression or negation. It is the home of psychological man, the emotivist given over to the therapeutic worldview. Whatever else we might conclude from this transgressive disposition, it does not include a conception of God, except perhaps as an avatar of authoritarianism.
We tend to think one can be “religious” or “not religious” and these menu items are purely matters of personal choice, most typically thought to be the result of a disposition of personality, or influence from one’s immediate social environment. In the murky transition from second culture into third, we’re still quite conscious of Christian claims to ultimate reality, but mostly in defining what we don’t believe, rather than what we do. However, the third culture’s dominant belief system has to be more than the elision of metaphysics. Matter in motion cannot explain all of reality, and on some level, we all realize this, hence the rise of occultism and various forms of supernatural woo to replace the charism of religion.
One might suppose Rieff would go on to place authorship of “sacred order” in God, leaving the conception of God to specific theologies. But he doesn’t even go that far. As Batchelder points out in “The Peculiar God of Philip Rieff,” a thorough search of all Rieff’s writings leads only to a “maddening opacity” concerning who or what rests atop the verticals in authority. We could take Rieff to suppose this is a theological question for others to answer, but his entire thesis concerning the therapeutic rests on this undefined hinge. Perhaps Rieff believed that one’s imagined source of sacred order is immaterial to the sociological construct he produces. But that’s not entirely satisfying, because mere pragmatism cannot make “sacred order” sacred. Batchelder’s essay shows us Rieff’s deft maneuvering around this most ultimate of questions. Perhaps it’s as simple as Rieff’s recognition that he was writing within a third culture that had already arrived, so to be heard at all required him to remain deliberately vague about the source of the extant “verticals in authority.”
Carl Trueman helps us with this conundrum in his “The Sexual Revolution, Sacred Order, and Total Revolution: Philip Rieff and Augusto Del Noce on Wilhelm Reich.” He wasn’t trying to get into Rieff’s mind, like Batchelder, but instead branched out from Rieff to comment on the necessary essence of that hinge to Rieff’s thesis. Del Noce was a Catholic philosopher who explicitly identified God as the necessary authority for interdicts, else those interdicts must be seen as merely expressions of power by one group of people against another group. But there is an important overlap with Rieff’s thinking that helps us identify the pinnacle atop verticals in authority, and it has to do with sex. Sexual interdicts in particular point to something outside the social system itself for authority. Trueman writes: “[t]he essence of a thing is typically connected to its end or ends.” The essence of a human being is tied up in both natural and supernatural ends, all of which “point to a metaphysical order that gives a moral shape to life: things that enable human beings to realize those ends are goods; things that hinder or negate those things are bad or evil.” In other words, even without explicitly acknowledging God as authority, one sees that there are goods and there are negations of those goods; a moral order naturally unfolds, whether we see to the top of it or not.
It is possible to read Rieff and not get the full implications of what the therapeutic worldview means for the person fully given over to it. What is left of the person so afflicted? It has to be a hollowed-out or divided sense of self, in contrast to self-identity negotiated in the rough-and-tumble of normal social interaction. Christopher Anadale speaks to this in his “Self-Knowledge After Rieff.” After justifying self-knowing as a philosophic undertaking, Anadale turns to Rieff. In the third culture, which rejects the verticals in authority of moral realism, gaining self-knowledge is an amoral function. A psychological man’s conception of self is not framed morally, but psychologically. He is an emotivist, trusting his emotional response for evaluation of right and wrong, rather than an Author of verticals in authority, or even in a vaguely understood hierarchy of virtues and vices embedded somehow in the cosmos. Consequently, “[m]odern therapeutic selves are actors without interior sensibility, constantly retraining themselves to give the right reactions.”
There are profound implications. If psychological man is constantly retraining himself to give “right” reactions, where does he get his sense of “right?” Not from a moral structure apart from himself, but rather from what the zeitgeist tells him, because social acceptance is going to be the soothing affirmation of his psychological equanimity. This is not a recipe for solid critical thinking about politics, nor the claims of religion concerning the true scope of reality. Psychological man goes with the flow. He is primed for ideological capture; therefore, avidly seeking out the direction of flow of social narrative, so that he can conform his indignant “moral” stand to it. The flow in the third culture is to “critical theory,” the relentless deconstruction of the second culture’s structures of meaning.
Joshua Bowman gets at this in his essay “Philip Rieff and the Resistance to Totalitarian Imagination.” One must first distinguish totalitarianism from an authoritarian disposition. Authoritarianism is not a stop along the way to totalitarianism. Quite the contrary, authoritarianism means felt oppression, whereas totalitarianism means acquiescence. The form this acquiescence takes now is the ideology of the therapeutic. “Rieff would say that the therapeutic-driven world pursues an ‘impossible culture’—one without creed, direction, authority, or meaning.” Psychological man thus becomes ready grist for the totalitarian mill. Or, as Bowman puts it, “[p]ursuit of an impossible culture affords the totalitarian impulse an ideal canvas on which to impose its vision of power.”
Indeed, the therapeutic does not merely enable the totalitarian impulse. It is a direct cause:
Without authority derived from faith, a common culture, and a commitment to a particular community, society is governed by “passions,” as the classical First World might say, or by what the Second World would regard as simply “sin.” This is not a world of liberty and autonomy, but of slavery to baser desires. . . . The great joys and benefits of friendship, community, family, and congregation are rejected for their all-too-human imperfections in favor of a moral and spiritual anarchy aimed at nothing. These are the people most desperate to find expression and even consolation in a totalitarian regime or some version of “Caesar” which is merely their anthropology writ large. Plato taught that the polis reflects the individual soul; a totalitarian regime is the fruit of an anti-culture that rejects the suffering and sacrifice necessary to form a human soul at all.
Batchelder and Harding ordered the essays in this collection in two parts: the first having to do with philosophy, religion, and metaphysics; the second with cultural change. The first is more abstract, but essential to understanding the second, which is a more practical application. For example, Jacob Wolf convincingly locates the therapeutic sensibility in Oscar Wilde. Ethan Alexander-Davey considers the function of political elites in the burgeoning third culture. Batchelder and James Patterson juxtapose the dispositions and approaches of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Stokely Carmichael in the civil rights movement, through the lens of the third-world therapeutic as compared to the second-world interdictory. Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn, who wrote perceptively on Rieff and the therapeutic worldview in her 2020 Ars Vitae, closes out the volume with “Locating the Sacred: Notes Toward a Rieffian Sensibility.” This two-part division illustrates both the difficulty and necessity of first understanding Rieff, and then perceiving the implications of what he’s trying to tell us.
Once we see, we cannot unsee. We are experiencing, in the post-modern era, a slow-motion clash of visions: one which looks outward to the logos; another which finds meaning emerging from within. We need some sense of hope that psychological man does not extinguish what is best about us. To find hope, we must begin with understanding. To find understanding, we might begin with Philip Rieff and with Rieffian thought as developed in this excellent book.
Albert Norton, Jr. is the author of several books, including, most recently, The Discovered Self: Identity in the Therapeutic Age (New English Review Press, 2025).
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