Why Al-Farabi Matters

Abu Nasr al-Farabi (870-950 CE), Muslim thinker, scientist, musician, occupies an important place in world intellectual history--and, yes, it is time that we shed nationalistic, cultural, or regional chauvinisms and begin to speak in terms of the world's (or the human race's) intellectual heritage. Previous generations of European and American scholars looked upon al-Farabi as the "father of Islamic Neo-Platonism" and, in that fashion, found a secure (and out of the way) place for him. Then, in 1995, Joshua Parens turned to al-Farabi's Summary of Plato's "Laws" in what appears to me to be an attempt to rescue Plato (nota bene: it was not al-Farabi who needed rescuing, but Plato) from the critical disembowling he received at the hands of Heideggerians and others in the post-modernist crowd. [The book is Joshua Parens, Metaphysics As Rhetoric, Albany: SUNY Press, 1995].

Parens felt the lure of the "rhetorical turn" among humanists that was in full-swing by the early 1990's and--not at all unreasonably, in my view--was unwilling to sit back and watch Plato being unceremoniously consigned to the trash heap of intellectual history. In addition, as a student of Ralph Lerner's at the University of Chicago, he had the advantage over many (if not most) professional classicists and philosophers working in the American academy today in that he was educated in the ways that medieval Muslim thinkers had developed the interpretive tradition of the Platonic corpus. That's right--developed the interpretive tradition: Muslim intellectuals have been significant players in the (still) continuing (human) habit of reflecting upon the lucubrations of the classical Greeks.

What Parens found in al-Farabi's reading of Plato's Laws was a studied refusal to regard Plato as the purveyor of a speculative philosophy which posited a metaphysical reality beneath or beyond the world of sensual appearances. European interpreters (pagan and Christian alike) had always read Plato in that fashion; but al-Farabi (in Parens's hands) finds not a metaphysician in Plato (or, at least, in the Plato of the Laws) but a rhetorician.

If Parens belonged to the tribe of Orientalists and had chosen to write about al-Farabi in this way, his readers could rest assured that he did so with the honorable intention (honorable among previous generations of Orientalists and among some of the present generation of neo-Orientalists) of either demonstrating that al-Farabi, an Iranian Muslim, simply failed to understand Plato (for what Iranian or Muslim possessed the mental capacity to understand the divine Plato?) or, at best, to damn him with faint praise. But Parens had a different agenda in mind. He astutely recognized that if he was to have any hope of rehabilitating Plato from the post-modernist critique of "foundationalism," he needed al-Farabi. And so he does not rest content with showing the reader the manner in which al-Farabi arrived at Plato the rhetorician--he goes further. Parens argues that al-Farabi was the first interpreter of Plato to truly understand him.

It is an interesting argument and, in some respects, I find it compelling--not necessarily as to Parens's desire to "uncover" the "real" Plato (which is, in itself, an ironically "foundationalist" project). I find it compelling because, with Kenneth Burke, I read all metaphysical speculation as a mode of rhetorical discourse. The metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle, of al-Farabi himself, of Hegel and of Marx are all, in my book, species of rhetoric. And so, if al-Farabi understood Plato in that way--whether Plato understood himself in that way or not--then al-Farabi anticipated Kenneth Burke by a thousand years.

And that is why al-Farabi matters.

Why Mao Matters

Mao Tse Tung was a perceptive reader of Marx's reading of Hegel. He understood the significance of Marx's Hegelian "head-stand": "It is man's social being that determines his thinking" (LRB, p. 206), but was careful to avoid falling into the vulgar materialism of unimaginative Marxists:

While we recognize that in the general development of history the material determines the mental and social being determines social consciousness, we also--and indeed must--recognize the reaction of mental on material things, of social consciousness on social being and of the superstructure on the economic base. This does not go against materialism; on the contrary, it avoids mechanical materialism and firmly upholds dialectical materialism (LRB, 222).

When I was in graduate school, working on my PhD in the field of Religious Studies, I was often perplexed by my colleagues's eagerness to dismiss Marx as a reductive religious critic. There was no deep encounter with the Marxian tradition, much less one with Hegel--and Mao was never even mentioned (except by me, of course). Perhaps, in the 21st century, the notion that the collapse of the Soviet Union represents a refutation of Marxist criticism appears to be self-evident to most aspirants to (and denizens of) the scribbling class.

My own study of the Marxian tradition alongside a study of the course of the political development of self-proclaimed Marxist polities suggests the opposite: Marx appreciated better than anyone before him (and possibly better than anyone since) the role of capital in the formation of human perceptions--including (and especially) the perception of socio-economic class and class interests.

Marxian materialism (like Darwinian science) reminds us that human beings are still members of the animal kingdom: we are all hard-wired to respond in a visceral way to the triggers of fear and greed. Most human beings wander through their lives bouncing like pin balls from one to the other. Capitalism is so successful because it continually appeals to these basic (and base) tendencies. Little wonder, then, that capitalist economies lurch from boom to bust.

Prophetic figures and other visionaries (like Marx and Engels) try to appeal to the "better angels" of our natures. “Have no fear! Have faith! Trust! Love! In spite of everything, love!” But such admonitions are difficult to hear over the noise and panic induced by capitalistic desire and defense.

Marxist polities struggled throughout the 20th century to address in a programmatic way the obstacles that our viscera place in the path of prophetic communalism. But vulgar (or mechanical) materialism can never yield the "beloved community." For that, dialectics in more than name only are required.

Or, as Mao put it elsewhere: "Not to have a correct political point of view is like having no soul" (LRB, 142).

"Soul-less" bureaucratic states dedicated to the mechanistic application of theory to practice are, at best, inhospitable, arid cultural deserts and, at worst (if not inevitably), laboratories of organized violence.

Dialectics in more than name only investigate the warp and woof of politics and metapolitics.

I consider such investigations to be the humanistic "science" of the religious imagination.

Marx: Another Reason That Hegel Matters

In many ways, Karl Marx understood Hegel better than Hegel understood himself.

Marx recognized Hegel's implicit (if paradoxical) materialism and brought it to the fore (thus "standing Hegel on his head").

He also opened the door to the "vulgar materialism" that insists upon a selective reading of his stated position on religion (found in his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right):

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.

Clearly religion is more to Marx than a mere "opiate": it expresses real distress and offers protest against it; it is the "heart of a heartless world."

By "standing Hegel on his head," Marx did not attempt to dismantle Hegelian metaphysics but, rather, to reverse its priorities.

Liberation theologians have been more perceptive readers of Marx (and, likewise, of Hegel) than many self-appointed keepers of the Marxian legacy.

Why Hegel Matters

Kant and Hegel stand astride the fluorescence of German Romanticism like two colossuses. Kant's significance continues today insofar as his epistemology placed the mind back into the body that Descartes had attempted to discard. Hegel is best appreciated as a Kantian (yes, a Kantian) who attempted to work out the social-psychological implications of Kant's intervention in Cartesian metaphysics. As Charles Taylor wrote in his brilliant study, Hegel: "The Hegelian notion of Geist is thus essential here. Spirit is necessarily embodied. Integrity thus cannot be achieved through an inner retreat, in which self-consciousness would cut itself off from the bodily" (Taylor, p. 149).

Hegel's explicit embodiment of "spirit" strengthened Kant's implicit turn in that direction. What Hegel intended, however, as a philosophy of history is better understood as a psychology of human relations--with the lordship/bondage dialectic at its core. That dialectic--which Hegel envisioned as a predicament peculiar to a "raw and undeveloped stage of history" (Taylor, p. 153)--is more likely a regularly occurring feature of human relationships. For all of its regularity and predictability, however, it is not a feature that must be presumed to be unavoidable.

In other words, human societies can (and, I would argue, must) be forever on the lookout for evidence of these relationships and to try to address them, wherever they are found, in a manner that will neutralize their effects. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Regrettably, Marx is not particularly helpful here--enamored as he was of Hegelian philosophy of history. Nietzsche and Freud cannot take us where we need to go with Hegel either; Nietzsche, because he found a way to privilege the lordship side of the equation, Freud (or was it really the followers of Freud?) because he (they) offered psychoanalysis as a method by which one could learn to accept as inevitable whatever side of the equation one should find oneself on and/or forget (something Marx would never allow one to do) why it mattered in the first place.

The reader of Hegel who is perhaps most helpful at this juncture is Leo Tolstoy, whose late novella Master and Man makes clear in no uncertain terms that the neutralization of the effects of the lordship/bondage relation (what I will term "liberation") must be accomplished through a two-fold or double-movement: Man must be liberated from the oppressive nature of the Master's relation to him, and Master must be liberated from the repressive nature of his relationship to himself--a relationship which precludes his ability to re-cognize the bondman as his fellow man. Unless and until that repression is interrupted, the presumption of intractability with which the lordship/bondage dialectic has been endowed (most frequently by Masters, but also by bondmen) will never be disrupted.

As Hegel pointed out, the Master is no less enslaved than the bondman. But the Master does not experience his bondage in the same way that the bondman experiences his. Norman O. Brown achieved this insight in the late 1950's and it was this achievement that prompted his turn to Freud as a means to make new sense of Marx (and vice versa). Unraveling the Master's self-repression is the key to human liberation--Brown believed that and dedicated his intellectual life to articulating (in his idiosyncratic way) how such an unraveling may be accomplished.

Tolstoy, on the other hand, suggests in Master and Man that it will take a cataclysmic event (and what may amount to divine intervention) to pry loose the Master's fingers from the Man's neck. Tolstoy was arguing from what Brown had termed the "Prophetic Tradition." For his part, late in life (and fighting despair, perhaps), Brown appears to have abandoned the Prophets and hitched his hopes to Dionysian chance...

Abrahamic Humanism

In 2007, a conference on the "New Humanism" was held at Harvard University. Among the panel discussions presented at the conference was one entitled "Toward an Abrahamic Humanism?" The discussants included Rabbi Sherwin Wine of the Society for Humanistic Judaism, the Rev. Dr. William Murray (a Unitarian Universalist) who presented a "post-Christian" perspective, and Salmon Rushdie, who spoke about secular Islam on the Indian sub-continent.

I did not attend the conference, but what I can gather from reading a published synopsis of the panel discussions, the underlying presumption of the conference participants appears to be one in which religion is "essentialized" for the purpose of distinguishing it from culture, and then ignored for the purpose of privileging culture over this essentialized construction. Robert F. Shedinger has recently given a name to this sort of rhetorical maneuver: he calls it a "discourse of domestication." Among their various uses, discourses of domestication compartmentalize religion and thereby render it "harmless" for the convenience of those who wish human religiosity would, once and for all, just go away (see Chapter Two of Shedinger's Was Jesus Muslim? Questioning Categories in the Study of Religion, Fortress Press, 2009).

Would that it were that easy!

As anyone who has spent any time thinking seriously about religion as a human phenomenon will attest, no clear cut distinctions between religion and culture ever survive the trial of counter-examples. Simply put, the behaviors that we tend to name "religious" are facets of human culture; de-contextualized as "religion," they tend to reduce to theology. But theology is a rarefied product of the interpretation of sacred texts in the light of Greek philosophical concepts. It is, in other words, an aspect of European intellectual history and, specifically, composes the dogmatics of the Christian churches.

It strikes me that a more productive approach to the articulation of a "new humanism" would be one that is informed by the historic role of religious scholarship in the invention of the "old" humanism. And if one is intrigued by the notion of an "Abrahamic Humanism," a good place to start would be George Makdisi's magisterial The Rise of Humanism in Classical Islam and the Christian West (Edinburgh University Press, 1990).

The downside of informing one's humanism with Makdisi's scholarship is that it not only makes the simplistic distinction between religion and culture untenable, it also reveals the rhetorical distancing of humanism from religiosity to be equally problematic.

Those who wish to call themselves "humanists" while turning their backs upon religiosity have not only cut themselves off from the roots of the humanistic traditions, they have cut themselves off from a characteristic aspect of historical human being. Their vaunted humanism is best described as an a-humanism, if not an anti-humanism.

I suggest that they need to re-think their entire project.

The Bridge of Criticism

Back in 1970, the historian Peter Gay wrote a brilliant little book entitled The Bridge of Criticism: Dialogues Among Lucian, Erasmus, and Voltaire on the Enlightenment. Gay chose these three figures to discuss among themselves the meaning of the Enlightenment because Gibbon had at one time mused that he might write a dialogue (trialogue?) in which these three "mutually acknowledge" the inherent risks involved in thinking critically about religion in public. Gay's book takes up this topic and many others--including the often overlooked Enlightenment roots of Romanticism. At one point in the conversation, Voltaire confesses that "...the more I read the Romantics, the more I find myself in them--certainly in the English Romantics, less so in the French, in the Germans not at all" (p. 113).

Radical Enlightenment

No honest Romantic ought ever to forget or deny that Romanticism is a child (unruly, to be sure) of the European Enlightenment; that the philosophe Rousseau "fathered" Romanticism; that Kant kept a portrait of Rousseau in his study; that Spinoza and Montaigne are well established members of the Romantic pantheon as strong precursors, alongside the Rabelais critically admired by Voltaire...