Leon Wieseltier is, among other things, the famous former literary editor of the New Republic. He is also a former wunderkind in the D.C. and New York fast set, a renowned wit, and a ferocious intellectual interlocutor. He even made a cameo appearance in TheSopranos as an outraged mensch who discovers his Mercedes is stolen. Wieseltier is now the founding editor of Liberties, a quarterly journal of opinion whose motto is “There’s nothing Artificial about our Intelligence.” Contributors include the translator and biblical scholar Robert Alter, historians Sean Wilentz and Mark Lilla, political philosopher Michael Walzer, and critic and novelist Cynthia Ozick, among others. It’s an impressive roster.
Wieseltier is also notorious for having been identified in 2017, during the height of #MeToo, as a serial sexual harasser while at the New Republic. The accusations cost him positions at the Atlantic and the Brookings Institute. At the time, Wieseltier was about to launch a much-anticipated new magazine, Idea, with backing from Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Project. That funding quickly disappeared. “I am ashamed to know that I made [anyone]…feel demeaned and disrespected. I assure them that I will not waste this reckoning,” Wieseltier said at the time. If the reach and quality of Liberties are any indication, perhaps he has put that reckoning to good use.
Wieseltier’s mistreatment of women, which included randy sexual gossip and unwanted kisses, appears to have been both teasing and calculated. “Leon’s was not a Harvey Weinstein or Roger Ailes type of predation,” wrote former New Republic staffer and current New York Times editorial writer Michelle Cottle. “No one I spoke with was ever physically afraid of him. Yes, some feared his ability to make their life miserable and ruin their future. (No one ever doubted his ability to do this.)” According to Cottle, while Wieseltier’s banter and behavior was purposefully ambiguous, his relationship with women staffers was “complicated.” As she explained the dynamic, “I wanted to stay in his good graces—not merely because I feared Bad Leon, but because Good Leon could be, yes, incomparably charming, funny, and brilliant. I rationalized that I could handle the rest and that his low-level lechery was simply the cost.”
Wieseltier had made a name for himself by writing on issues as daunting as nuclear deterrence and as personal as the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer he dutifully recited for eleven months after the death of his father. Back in the day, I was an avid reader of a one-page column he wrote for the back page of the New Republic. I didn’t always agree with him, and was especially skeptical of his strident support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But his pungent, oracular, and rigorously argued opinions impressed me. Frankly, I was envious. Even more appealing, he was the rare liberal intellectual who took religion seriously. He had been educated in a Brooklyn Yeshiva, before going on to Columbia, Oxford, and Harvard. Critics complained that his writing was pretentious and his public persona self-satisfied, but I found his erudition and philosophical passions challenging. He was eager to mix it up with just about anybody, and as the New Republic’s literary editor he was notorious for publishing harshly critical reviews of liberal as well as conservative writers. No one seemed to get a free pass—a rarity in a book-review section.
I met Wieseltier once, more than twenty-five years ago. I was invited to appear on a panel at NYU’s Remarque Institute to discuss one of David Kertzer’s books on the papacy. I don’t remember if the book was The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara or The Popes Against the Jews, but suspect it was the former. I was tasked with the thankless job of contextualizing the papacy’s otherwise questionable actions. Wieseltier would moderate the discussion, which included Kertzer and one other speaker. Given the topic and Wieseltier’s reputation of wariness toward the Catholic Church (his parents were Holocaust survivors), I was anxious about participating in what promised to be an evening of Catholic bashing. But before the program, we were all treated to dinner by the Remarque Institute’s director, the distinguished European historian Tony Judt. Judt was a frequent reviewer for Wieseltier until they had a falling out over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Over dinner that night, the two of them bantered hilariously. Wieseltier cracked joke after joke, and his timing was as polished as a professional comedian’s. Naturally, there was also a keen sense of rivalry between the two. I was just a spectator. Like Cottle, I came away seduced by Wieseltier’s charm, wit, and brilliance.
What happened at the panel discussion was even more surprising. The room was packed and the hostility of the crowd toward anything papal or Catholic was palpable and, initially, vocal. Right from the start, however, Wieseltier made it clear that heckling of any sort would not be tolerated. He more or less silenced the room. This allowed me to make the case that, while there were no excuses for Catholic antisemitism, when it came to the Church and the papacy, things are not always as straightforward or as sinister as they might appear. After the event, I thanked Wieseltier for being so “fair-minded” in moderating the discussion. He smiled and said that it hadn’t been easy, or words to that effect. “Because I am not fair-minded about these things,” he said.
Wieseltier’s essay in this winter’s issue of Liberties is a long, sinuous, and demanding piece about the need for metaphysics, in which he celebrates the work of Nicolas Malebranche, a seventeenth-century French philosopher and Catholic priest. “The only thing worse than spurious metaphysics is spurious warnings about metaphysics,” Wieseltier writes with typical assertiveness. “Metaphysics is the deepest dissent of our time, and that is only the first of its attractions. I have always been helpless before it, and famished for it; and I have an absurd tolerance for its excesses, which seem to me to err in the right direction. Nobody ever promised that the truth will not be outlandish.”
The essay’s argument is, to borrow a phrase, complicated. Wieseltier rejects the idea that metaphysics can provide us with all the answers, but he contends that it asks the right questions about God, matter, mind, the body, and morality—questions that have been exiled from much contemporary philosophical argument. Reading Malebranche, Wieseltier delights in “the feeling of being where I am most delighted to be, where I am ordained to be, in thinner but higher air, pondering ahistorical problems and savoring non-material perplexities…. The questions, moreover, themselves count as an accomplishment in a culture that no longer cares to ask them.”
Malebranche, who was born with a severely deformed spine, endured a lifetime of physical suffering. Understandably, he developed a keen interest in the mind-body dualism of Descartes, whose philosophy he admired. As Wieseltier concedes, some of Malebranche’s writing “can get hopelessly abstruse.” But if I understand Malebranche’s idealism even a little (and it’s quite possible that I don’t), he was determined to rescue God’s absolute sovereignty and our immortal destiny from the notion that ideas have no permanent reality. As Wieseltier summarizes it:
Just as the soul is entangled with the body so it is entangled with God, so that no definition of the human is possible without the inclusion of God as a kind of constituent part…. In this way the malformed philosopher brought God closer to his body. I cannot think of another idealist thinker who was so respectfully cognizant of matter. “We should not reason in order to know whether an apple or a stone is good to eat; we must taste them.”
Wieseltier goes on to discuss Malebranche’s thinking on theodicy, the possibility of miracles, Montaigne, and more. Metaphysics is “the supreme expression of the human commitment to understanding the nature of reality, which begins with the dissociation of reality from the appearances of reality,” he writes. It is an escape from the “domain of matter” to the “domain of ideas,” which offers us a hint of transcendent realities. That escape seems to be one of the liberties on offer in Wieseltier’s magazine—and a welcome reminder that the truth about our lives and the truth about the world is often outlandish.
