Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse

roger kimball

“In the faculty of writing nonsense,” the English critic Walter Bagehot once observed, “stupidity is no match for genius.” In Lives of the Mind , Roger Kimball, one of the best of our cultural critics, offers a lively and penetrating study of genius―and pseudo-genius―at work and investigates the use and abuse of intelligence. When does a love of ideas become a dangerous infatuation? What antidotes are there for the silliness of unanchored intellect? Drawing on figures as various as Plutarch and Hegel, Kierkegaard and P. G. Wodehouse, Elias Canetti and Anthony Trollope, Bagehot and Wittgenstein and Sybille Bedford, Mr. Kimball provides a sharply observed tour of Western intellectual and artistic aspiration. He shows what happens when intellect trumps common sense, and how an affirmation of shared values and ordinary reality can rescue us from the temptations of the higher stupidity. Part cautionary tale, part literary celebration, Lives of the Mind is a witty, deeply engaging guide for the perplexed. The New York Times Book Review has called Mr. Kimball “a scathing critic but one whose tirades are usually justified....His intellectual rigor is refreshing.” And Gertrude Himmelfarb has “His essays reflect a steadiness of mind, a coherence, conviction, and passion that make him one of the most candid and perceptive critics of American culture.”

Genres philosophyessaysculturalliteraturebiography

384 pages, Paperback

First published September 6,2002

This edition

Format: 384 pages, Paperback
Published: June 17, 2003 by Ivan R. Dee
ISBN: 9781566635240
ASIN: 1566635241
Language: English

About the author

roger kimball

American art critic and social commentator. He was educated at Cheverus High School, a Jesuit institution in South Portland, Maine, and then at Bennington College, where he received his BA in philosophy and classical Greek, and at Yale University. He first gained prominence in the early 1990s with the publication of his book, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Higher Education.

Additionally, he is editor and publisher of The New Criterion magazine and the publisher of Encounter Books. He currently serves on the board of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, the board of Transaction Publishers and as a Visitor of Ralston College, a start-up liberal arts college based in Savannah, Georgia. He also served on the Board of Visitors of St. John's College (Annapolis and Santa Fe). His latest book, The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia, was published by St. Augustine's Press in June of 2012.