Philip Rieff: The Mind of a Dualist

Philip Rieff, who died on July 1, 2006, will be remembered as a most unusual and brilliant cultural critic, theorist of culture, and prophet of cultural doom. This essay is written neither to extol nor to attack him--though there will be some of each--but mainly to reflect on some larger issues raised by his works. The occasion for the essay is his death and the publication of two posthumous books, "My Life among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority" (2006), published only months after his death, and "Charisma: The Gift of Grace and How It has Been Taken From Us" (2007), mainly written in 1973 but published even more recently than "Deathworks". Though Rieff had written two lesser works, "Fellow Teachers" (1973) and "The Feeling Intellect" (1990), the later years of his life were somewhat barren of publications. By far the most influential of his writings were "Freud: The Mind of the Moralist" (1959) and "The Triumph of the Therapeutic" (1966). The two volumes published just after his death are best regarded as extension of conclusions reached in his first two works. This essay provides a few biographical details about Rieff and takes up a number of general issues that arise from his worldview and his intellectual method.