Styles of Thinking

An article from Scientific American on-line.

Santayana Weighs In

“The trouble with you philosophers is that you misunderstand your vocation. You ought to be poets, but you insist on laying down the law for the universe, physical and moral, and are vexed with one another because your inspirations are not identical.” George Santayana, The Last Puritan, 602.

The Putnam-Rorty Debate and the Pragmatist Revival

What Richard Rorty Taught Me

The Thinker

"Probably the most violent and aggressive act that any person can do to other persons is to invade their minds with ideas and twists of meaning which disturb the comforting security of things known and faith kept. Yet this is what I, as a teacher, am required to do."

R. W. Packer, "Breaking the Sound Barrier: A Dramatic Presentation" in Teaching in the Universities: No One Way, McGill-Queens University Press, 1974.

What Adolf Grunbaum Taught Me

As an undergraduate Philosophy and Classics major at the University of Pittsburgh in the late 1970's-early 1980's, I had the good fortune to take an honors seminar with Adolf Grunbaum on religion and science. Professor Grunbaum taught me many things in that seminar, not the least of which was how to read Freud both critically and appreciatively.

But the lesson that has been the most consistently useful to me in the decades since I took that class is one about the nature of scholarship: that it is a disciplined way of making sense of the world. Discipline involves asceticism--or, resistance to temptation. The scholar is one who resists the temptation to make claims about the world that lack adequate evidentiary warrant.

Of course, such an assertion requires further elaboration, for what constitutes evidentiary warrant for any given claim is subject to scholarly argument and dispute; and even where there is general agreement among scholars as to what constitutes evidence, there is still plenty of room to argue about what constitutes evidentiary adequacy. Grunbaum taught me to be sensitive to all of these vagaries of scholarship and many more besides.

In the end, scholarship involves the cultivation of habits of circumspection and reticence. Circumspection and reticence are the soul of scholarly tact.

The William James Problem

Throughout his writings, William James makes the (irrefutable) observation that faith is an ordinary part of human cognitive function. No one operates in the world on the basis of complete information. Instead, human beings rely heavily upon present sense data, past experience, reason and "common sense," in order to make judgments about how to proceed with their daily lives. Acting on the basis of this amalgam of information and interpretation involves assumptions about the reliability of all of its elements--in a word, "faith." For James, faith is very much a practical matter.

To this point, there is nothing problematic about James's thinking in this regard: he accurately describes ordinary human cognition and its attendant behaviors. An accurate description of cognitive behavior, however, is not the same thing as an epistemological justification of any given proposition. But James may be said to send mixed messages to students of religion who seek to move beyond the description of faith-in-action to a justification of that faith per se. One can always justify a particular instance of faith as an ordinary human response to a given situation--as one possible response among many. But that is a very limited notion of justification. It does not entitle one to conclude that faith as such is necessarily justified--only that it is practical. And yet this is precisely what many readers of James's writings on the psychology of religion claim that his thinking has authorized them to conclude. Is such a claim warranted? The answer may depend on what portion of James's work one reads (e.g., The Will To Believe may support this claim).

It is for this reason that I am often chary about the use of William James in the academic study of religion. I call this subtle slip from description to justification the "William James Problem" and, I am afraid, it is not a problem that we will be rid of any time soon.

Sacred Time, Sacred Space

Despite the fact that human beings often report experiencing "the sacred" or the Divine "break through" mundane time and space, such reports cannot be taken at face value. Human beings make time and space for that which they consider Divine or sacred. And there is no way to distinguish the construction of such time or space from the "event" which is said to occupy it.

The history of religions is the history of human subjectivity and its interpretation. It is through such interpretations that subjective experience is turned "inside out" as it were: made public via performances (verbal, physical). The residuum of these performances, where preserved, become artifacts--evidence of human activity, most certainly, but evidence of extra-human activity? This is something one can neither rule in or out.

The honest historian of religions cannot sing the old hymn "Glory, glory/Somebody touched me/Must have been the finger of the Lord" with any real conviction. She is denied the "first naivete," and Paul Ricoeur's "second naivete" isn't naivete at all: it is a consciously creative act, like midrash.

Religion is spilled poetry. It is a prayer-rug woven with impassioned intelligence, with "heart-sense," and put to daily use.

As the Romantics understood, "supernaturalism" is only natural.

From Spinoza Through Friedrich Schlegel To Wallace Stevens

In his "Talk On Mythology" (1799-1800), Friedrich Schlegel attempted to address the difficulty that the "modern poet" faces now that the scientific imagination has replaced the mythological one of "the ancients." This problem is analogous to that which faces the modern religious imagination: with the miraculous no longer credible, what is one to believe? It is a problem peculiar to Protestantism because of its emphasis upon belief, but all traditions are affected by this problem insofar as they depend upon the inculcated credulity of their adherents.

In response to the modern poet's dilemma, Schlegel proposed the invention of a new mythology developed from "that great phenomenon of our age," idealism. And yet, for Schlegel, it was an idealism that would give birth to "a new and infinite realism," one that "hover[ing] as it were over an idealistic ground, will emerge as poetry which indeed is to be based on the harmony of the ideal and real."

Interestingly, Schlegel considered Spinoza the great exemplar of this idealistically generated realism--most likely because, in his Tractatus, Spinoza looked to Nature as the ultimate source of the imagination, and he regarded the imagination as the stuff of prophecy.

This kind of Spinozistic/Romantic naturalism would inform the philosophy of George Santayana who would influence, in turn, the 20th century American poet, Wallace Stevens. Stevens would posit a tension between "the imagination" and "reality," and the "whole of Harmonium" that issued from it would, ultimately, fulfill Schlegel's prediction of a "new" [Modernist] mythology. Moreover, with Stevens we encounter an Alfarabian turn from metaphysics to rhetoric and from sui generis religion to spilled poetry.

[Quotations from Schlegel's Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms translated by Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, State College, Pa: The Pennsylvania State University Press (1968), pp. 81-88].

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, And Our Fathers That Begat Us (Ecclesiasticus 44:1)

"Ethically, the historian is obligated to follow historical subject matter wherever it leads and to appreciate its own inherent values, even if those values clash with the value system of the historian. Historicism means the acceptance of the relativity of human life. It is the insight that humanity lives not at the behest of static being and absolute truth, but rather forges itself in a constant process of becoming in which individuals and institutions struggle over competing truths, each vying for its place in the sun" Roy A. Harrisville and Walter Sundberg writing on the legacy to historical studies of Ernst Troeltsch in The Bible in Modern Culture, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co. (1995), 156-157.

Troeltsch was a key figure in the articulation of a modern historical consciousness. We neglect him at our peril.

A Tale of Three Cities (and Possibly Four...)

When elaborating what we might term his "eschatological" hope for a "coming contestation of religions" in chapter 6 of The Heretical Imperative, Peter L. Berger imagines that the key players in this contestation/conversation will be those committed to religious transformation as an exoteric or public and world-historical phenomenon and those committed to religious transformation as an esoteric or private and trans-historical process. He identifies the former contestants with those who adhere to the religious traditions that arose in the ancient to late ancient Near East (the so-called "Abrahamic" triad of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) and the latter are identified with those traditions that look to Mother India as their source (Hinduism and varieties of Buddhism). Why he ignored Confucianism and Daoism is not entirely clear, however, it probably had something to do with the impact of Indian religions upon the West in the 18th-20th centuries. In any event, Berger symbolized these two streams of religious thought and experience with reference to two cities:

Jerusalem

and Benares.

Now, the first thing that is to be noticed (and criticized) about this particular dichotomy is that neither of the religious tendencies represented can be adequately characterized as wholly "exoteric" on the one hand or wholly "esoteric" on the other. Berger acknowledges this unfortunate glossing of the evidence and reminds the reader that his intention in constructing these Weberian "types" is, as with all Weberian types, heuristic in nature, not exhaustively descriptive. He also contributes a shrewd historical observation: "...the conflict between the confrontational [exoteric] and the interiorized [esoteric] types of religious experience was carried on in the Islamic context with particular intensity--and also, to the benefit of later students of the matter, with particular sophistication. Indeed, if it was argued earlier in this book that Protestantism constitutes the paradigmatic case of the encounter between religion and modernity, one might argue that Islam constitutes a comparably paradigmatic case of the encounter between Jerusalem and Benares" (pp. 160-161).

It is important to notice here that Berger (quite refreshingly) managed to avoid the temptation to regurgitate the tiresome Western stereotype that pits a monolithic "Islam" against an equally monolithic "modernity." As a sophisticated student of both religion and modernity, Berger recognized that every tradition with pre-modern roots has struggled (and continues to struggle) with the implications of modernity--with Protestant Christianity having had the historical luck (or misfortune) to be positioned most squarely at the front. What Berger does not discuss in his otherwise very fine treatment of this issue is the crucial role of a third "city" in the gradual unfolding of what is, in fact, a world-historical drama:

Athens.

Ancient Athens, ironically. But it must be recalled that it was the "return" (as it were) of ancient Athens to European intellectual life (courtesy of Muslim and Jewish intellectuals) in the late Middle Ages that would spark the revival of humanism in Europe and, with it, the Renaissance as well as the Protestant and scientific revolutions. The first five chapters of The Heretical Imperative presume the critical importance of this third "city" in their treatment of the "contestation with modernity" (p. 160).

And so, it is a tale of three cities that Berger tells in a still thought-provoking book written roughly 35 years ago. Were the book to be written (or re-written) today, it would have to account--at minimum--for the criticisms that I have included in my last several blog posts. In addition, it might be useful to add a fourth city into the mix--if one were to indulge in a little prognostication:

Istanbul.

For it is from the heights of contemporary Istanbul, if anywhere on the planet, that one can take in view all three of Berger's cities. Istanbul, city of Auerbach: where Europe meets Asia, and where modernity and tradition come to dance.

The Coming Contestation of Religions

In his 1978 book The Heretical Imperative, Peter L. Berger made a startling proposal: in light of the increasing level of religious pluralism in Western societies (including popular interest in Asian religions and the resurgence of Islam), Berger argued that the time had arrived for a new kind of religious conversation to begin to take place--one that would move beyond disinterested scholarship or even "the sort of dialogue that could be described as reciprocal antidefamation...Both of these two kinds of attention are certainly valid, even praiseworthy, but they are not contestation" in the sense he intended (Berger, THI, 151-152). Nor did he intend the "missionizing" of the adherents of one sect by another--a mode that he felt was "happily on the wane" in the late 1970's. Instead, for Berger, "Contestation means an open-ended encounter with other religious possibilities on the level of their truth claims. Put differently, one seriously engages another religion if one is open, at least hypothetically, to the proposition that this other religion is true. Put differently again, to enter into interreligious contestation is to be prepared to change one's own view of reality. Anything short of this, however valuable it may be (for scholarship, say, or for joint sociopolitical concerns, or just for an enlargement of cultural horizons), is less than the contestation called for by the present situation. It is this kind of contestation that is as yet in an embryonic phase" (152).

Notice that Berger did not stipulate that those who would engage in this type of conversation would do so prepared to change their religious affiliations or practices--although, I think it reasonable to assume that he would allow for such a possibility. But any such change would be wholly within a given individual's discretion, and would not be the objective of those who participate in the conversation. One can even imagine a scenario where one party, convinced of the "truth" of another party's religious tradition, would announce her decision to leave her own tradition for the other's--only to find herself in the odd position of having the other party attempt to dissuade her from making any such change! Most peculiar, but not out of the realm of possibility.

What Berger appears to have imagined the new religious pluralism in Western societies portended was a new relationship of religious individuals towards truth claims--that, mirabile dictu, religious individuals in the West had reached a new stage of intellectual maturity: one in which they would be willing to entertain the possibility that they embrace religious dogmas uncritically and, therefore, another religious tradition might prove to be more credible with respect to particular truth claims.

It is an interesting idea and one that merits further consideration; but it is also one that ignores the fact that, in the thoughts and lives of most people, religion rarely rises above an organized or collective expression of inherited prejudice. Consequently, it is difficult to imagine that, three and a half decades on, this kind of "contestation" is anywhere near the "embryonic" phase that Berger believed it to have been in the 1970's--much less a fully developed being waiting to be born.

I will explore these propositions further in future posts.

The Experiential Turn

The hero of Peter L. Berger's The Heretical Imperative is the late 18th/early 19th century German philosopher and theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. Berger favors Schleiermacher because of his emphasis upon religious experience (a reflection of his pietistic background) and his insistence that such experience involves a "consciousness of something beyond itself--indeed, so much beyond itself that the human subject feels himself to be utterly dependent on that other reality or being at the center of the experience" (THI, 122). Reading these passages can be frustrating insofar as they often appear to contain Berger's endorsement of what is, in essence, a theological claim, dressed up as scientific "induction." This is not to say, of course, that Schleiermacher ought not to have made this particular claim or that Berger, as a social scientist, is not permitted a theology. But the book is written in such a way that one must be very careful to distinguish Berger the sociologist from Berger the theologian.

On page 128, when Berger admits that inductive reasoning cannot "prove the truth claim of an alleged revelation in the way a natural science proves or validates its hypotheses. In that final sense, religious affirmations always entail faith," the reader breathes a sigh of relief. But the added qualification of "that final sense" suggests that there are other senses, penultimate ones perhaps, in which religious affirmations based upon an "inductive model" somehow escape the criticisms leveled against it by the proponents of what Berger had earlier termed the "reductive possibility" (pp. 87-113). That latter position (represented in THI by Rudolf Bultmann), is resisted in the book because it does not allow religious experience a sui generis ontological validity--a religious sine qua non for Berger. The author's theological pre-commitments in this regard somewhat undermine his credibility--which is a shame--because the reader may become discouraged and neglect to contemplate Berger's most interesting notion: that of a "coming contestation of religions."

I will return to this notion in a future post.

The Worm In Berger's Heretical Apple

Sometime in the late 1990's--probably around 1998--I re-read (after two decades) Peter L. Berger's A Rumor of Angels, and found it as stimulating as when I had first read it as a college freshman. I was moved to write Professor Berger a brief note of appreciation. To my surprise, he wrote back: thanking me for my interest in the book and its subject (succinctly expressed by its subtitle: "Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural"). He confessed that he had always felt a personal affection for the book--despite its relative lack of success with the reading public. He added, significantly (I think), that the only book of his (on that topic) for which he had an even greater regard was The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (1979)--the book he had published in the year I first read Angels. This remark sent me out to the library in order to read and compare the two books. I found myself in agreement with the author and, of the two, it is THI to which I repeatedly return.

That said, THI is not without its problems. The deepest and most troubling from my perspective is a persistent inconsistency with Berger's earlier work with Thomas Luckmann on the sociology of knowledge. Their co-authored book, The Social Construction of Reality (1966), presents a compelling case for the proposition contained in its title: that what we take to be the true state of things is not an unmediated given but, rather, the product of tacit (and rarely conscious) agreements with the socio-cultural context in which we are embedded. In other words, "reality" is, in fact, a social construction.

Berger does not exactly abandon this position in THI, but throughout the later book he makes statements such as the following: "...truth is always its own warrant...consequently, that which has imposed itself as truth by its own force will not be voided by subsequent discoveries of truth" (Berger, 170, emphasis added). By endowing "truth" with agency in this manner, Berger implies that human beings are the passive recipients of "truth" and not its active co-authors. Given his Eliadean assertions throughout THI that sui generis religious experience is a coherent category, one can understand why Berger might have wished to distance himself from his earlier social constructivism; but if he did wish to do so, he should have come clean and admitted as much. The implication that we can genuinely experience "the sacred" as a sui generis phenomenon may lend Berger's argument greater persuasive force with some readers, but it is an argument that has very little purchase with anyone today in the academic study of religion. It is the worm in Berger's heretical apple and is probably the most compelling reason that THI is not accorded the prominence that I (for one) think it deserves within the field. I will elaborate on why I think that Berger's book deserves to be regarded as a religious studies classic with "legs" (i.e., with continuing relevance to the academic study of religion) in future posts.

The Heretical Imperative Revisited

Peter L. Berger's The Heretical Imperative, though somewhat dated, remains, for me, an important meditation upon modernity and the effect it has had upon "contemporary possibilities of religious affirmation."

Berger defines the "heretical imperative" as a response to modernity, one of the most salient features of which is the bewildering array of choices (including religious choices) that confront human beings in the post-medieval period:

"In premodern situations there is a world of religious certainty, occasionally ruptured by heretical deviations. By contrast, the modern situation is a world of religious uncertainty, occasionally staved off by more or less precarious constructions of religious affirmation. Indeed, one could put this change even more sharply: For premodern man, heresy is a possibility--usually a rather remote one; for modern man, heresy typically becomes a necessity. Or again, modernity creates a new situation in which picking and choosing becomes an imperative" (Berger, THI, 25).

I was more persuaded by this argument when I first read the book over a decade ago than I am now. I think it an accurate depiction of the state of modernity as it existed in the United States in the mid-to-late 1970's when Berger wrote the book. I sense, however, that the window of religious choice that the sociologist of religion found himself confronting has, since then, narrowed considerably.

I don't believe that this narrowing of choice is unique to human religiosity either. Instead, it strikes me that all choices--insofar as they represent genuine alternatives to the existing status quo--have become less and less prevalent. Indeed, I am beginning to think that we inhabit a stage of modernity (some may wish to name it "postmodernity") in which the freedoms enjoyed by previous generations of moderns are being relinquished by a generation that is desperate for security and, as such, desires a world that promises greater certainty. Religious certainty provides a kind of security (illusory, I would argue) that an economy founded upon war-without-end and an environment stressed by massive climactic changes simply cannot deliver. Consequently, religious fundamentalisms prosper and traditionalism (which is not the same as fundamentalism) experiences a resurgence. The big loser in this new religious environment is precisely what Berger had so confidently posited but 35 years ago: "the heretical imperative."

I will have more to say about this subject in future posts.

The Academic Study of Religion as the Fashioning of Counter-Narratives

The evolution of the academic study of religion is a fascinating one for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the manner in which religious studies has developed a genealogy of its own development as a modern intellectual project. In the process, the very notion of "religion" itself has come under intense scrutiny and historical contextualization. The result is that much of the work product of scholars of religion consists in the construction of counter-narratives: to prevailing prejudices, dogmatism (a sophisticated form of prejudice), and what is generally termed "common knowledge" (typically a witches brew of unexamined assumptions, hearsay, intuition, and speculation).

Religion is a subject concerning which most people hold opinions--often very strong opinions--to which they have arrived, however, without having engaged in the kind of thoughtful investigation that they would ordinarily apply to other important aspects of their lives: say, for example, the purchase of a new car or flat-screen T.V.

If scholars of religion can be faulted for anything, it is that we tend to "over-think" our subject--stumbling over minutia that the average, reasonably educated individual either fails to see or fails to find worthy of a moment's consideration. In that way, perhaps, we offer some compensation for the general lack of appropriate attention accorded to our subject. What would be far better, however, is the incorporation of religious studies as an integral part of a "general education"--that it would assume its rightful place among the intellectual tools available to any (and every) citizen of a functioning democracy.

Of course, the first problem in the opening decades of the 21st century has been to locate and identify functioning democracies...

From Marx to Brown to Alfarabi

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

Karl Marx's famous 11th thesis on Feuerbach never fails to stir the utopian eschatologist in me; at the same time, however, it always leaves something to be desired. I cannot help but wonder what might have happened to the Left, historically, if interpretation had not been so easily dismissed as antithetical to change in this foundational call to Leftist action.

Of course, one may argue that the New Left and its post-modern progeny fell so deeply in love with theory that, for them, a world well-theorized is itself a world turned upside down--so never mind the barricades, they are obsolete. It is one thing to know your Marx and Engels, another thing to live what you know.

Praxis was always supposed to be theoretically informed political action. When praxis fails to deliver the desired results, we ask ourselves: "What went wrong?" What we usually want to know when we ask this question is: "How did we fail to follow the theory?" Occasionally, we ask: "How has the theory failed us?" In both cases, failure prompts us to find a way to assign blame. And blame is assigned, the world turns and, yet, stays the same.

Frustrated by this repetitious state of affairs, Norman O. Brown turned to Freud. It was clear to Brown that we are all mysteries to ourselves and that Freud (perhaps following Nietzsche) knew it. Brown wanted to break out of the cycle of praxis-failure-blame-praxis and he felt that the only way to exit that merry-go-round was to crack the code of the human heart.

It was an ambitious project from the start: one that led Brown on a fascinating odyssey through heterodox varieties of Christian mysticism to Islamic studies and beyond. The tragedy of this quest was that Brown had to pursue it alone. His allies on the Left (including his old friend Herbert Marcuse, for instance) were unwilling to entertain the possibility that Brown might be on to something important.

Brown was on to something important: indeed, in his Islamic studies he had instinctively found his way to the source of an alternative praxis--one that recognizes the critical position of the "heart" (human desire) for politics. Unfortunately for Brown, when he was investigating the history of Muslim thought, Western scholarship on Alfarabi was still trapped in the euro-centric view that falsafah was nothing more than Greek "philosophy" in Arabic dress. Consequently, Brown could not see that Alfarabi, by "liberat[ing] statesmanship from the tutelage of philosophy" and making politics "an autonomous sphere, like medicine," had laid the groundwork for a sense of the political that Brown would try to imagine (roughly 1,000 years later) as "metapolitics" (see Christopher Colmo, Breaking With Athens: Alfarabi As Founder, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books (2005), 167-168).

Beginning with Love's Body, Brown attempted to make the move from politics to metapolitics. In this move, he had a potential ally in Kojeve (whom he had read). But without the mediation of Alfarabi, the necessary connections could not be made.

A Neglected Genius

The man who has not experienced the fear of death does not know that the given natural World is hostile to him, that it tends to kill him, to destroy him, and that it is essentially unsuited to satisfy him really. This man, therefore, remains fundamentally bound to the given World. At the most, he will want to "reform" it--that is, to change its details, to make particular transformations without modifying its essential characteristics. This man will act as a "skillful" reformer, or better, a conformer, but never as a true revolutionary. Now, the given World in which he lives belongs to the (human or divine) Master, and in this World he is necessarily Slave. Therefore, it is not reform, but the "dialectical," or better, revolutionary, overcoming of the World that can free him, and--consequently--satisfy him. Now, this revolutionary transformation of the World presupposes the "negation," the non-accepting of the given World in its totality. And the origin of this absolute negation can only be the absolute dread inspired by the given World, or more precisely, by that which, or by him who, dominates this World, by the Master of this World.

Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. by James H. Nichols, Jr., Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (1980), 29.

The Academic Study of Religion: Laying the Foundation for the Next Great [Political] Awakening

As God's unruly friends are painfully aware, in the thoughts and lives of most people, religion rarely rises above an organized or collective expression of inherited prejudice. Of course, the same could be said (and ought to be said) about patriotism and, frankly, any other ideological loyalty.

What distinguishes ideology from mere ideas is its supposed self-evidence. Consequently, one of the primary tasks in the non-sectarian academic study of religion is to revive students from the stupor that overtakes their minds when drinking from religion's ideological waters of Lethe--a form of "refreshment" that many of them consume quite liberally from childhood on. As this "awakening" occurs--what is really a coming to self-consciousness--the basic principle must be established: religion is not so much the problem as is operating in one's daily life on auto-pilot. That is the real enemy. For a person to be "educated," i.e., to have attained an acceptable level of active intelligence, the mind must run on all cylinders. And once the practice of awakening the mind is acquired in the study of religion, the student must learn to extend that practice to other areas of thought and life--not least of which is the political.

It is, in fact, in this way that the academic study of religion contributes to the construction of democratic selves and the aspiration towards democracy that, one hopes, will someday infect the general population of the United States as it appears to have infected populations in other parts of the world (Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Tunisia, Sudan, etc.). But we are a long way from the dawning of that happy day and there is much, much work to be done in the meantime.

The Central Question

The central question of my intellectual life, since I first began to think for myself with any credible degree of sophistication (i.e., when I began to read Kierkegaard around age 16), has been this: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem (and, by the same token, Ctesiphon with Yathrib)?

For Tertullian--who first posed the question (as a rhetorical exercise, more or less)--the presumptive response was negative: Athens has nothing to do with Jerusalem. And yet, had this been the case, biblical religion would never have evolved much beyond its origins as a priestly cult of sacrifice. The prophetic (i.e., ethical) tradition would have emerged regardless, but the intellectual hunger that eventually gave birth to the natural sciences would have gone unsatisfied. So we would have had a world in which priest-craft promised magic and redemption, moral conviction thundered, and nature was analyzed and, in part, harnessed--without reference to ethics or culture.

This is the world to which we seem to be, at present, reverting.

I find this world to be a dangerous place, because it is filled with certainties that resist all nuance and attempts at mediation and translation across the boundaries that separate priest from prophet, prophet from scientist, and scientist from priest. It is a world without poets and musicians: a world without humanists and the humanities.

Jerusalem without Athens and Yathrib without Ctesiphon are walled cities whose inhabitants are smug, self-satisfied, blind know-it-alls. Such a world is easily divided against itself; it invites conflict and fratricide.

The central question of my intellectual life has been, and remains, how do we avoid creating such a world?

My answer: we must insist on making room for the posing of this question not, as Tertullian did, as a mere exercise in rhetoric with a pre-determined answer, but as humanists have done since the beginnings of Mesopotamian civilization: as a challenge to our creativity, a spur to the imagination, and a call to lives of study and deliberation. Humanism does not provide answers to this question, it is itself an answer to this question.

Tillich's Ontology Re-Visited

In a series of lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in 1951, Paul Tillich attempted to demonstrate that "Biblical religion" is not only compatible with ontological speculation, it presumes such speculation. Tillich chose this subject in an effort to answer the charge of his critics that "theology has to restrain itself from using philosophical terms" [see Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality, vii].

Such charges are not unique to Christianity, of course, nor are they of recent vintage: Tertullian's rhetorical question, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" has been periodically posed by the Muslim and Jewish critics of their respective philosophical traditions and, in Tillich's hands, Christian theology was always deeply philosophical in method and tenor--so much so that Paul Kurtz chose to include a chapter on Tillich in his 1966 "sourcebook" American Philosophy in the Twentieth Century.

What interests me about Tillich's reply to his critics is the indirect light it sheds on certain aspects of the Islamic tradition and, in particular, upon Muslim pietism (i.e. tasawwuf). Indeed, I read Tillich's text as a superb introduction to what tasawwuf became as it moved from the "edge" of the ever-evolving tradition (a social, not geographical, location) to its "center" by the 12th century of the Common Era (for this use of the terms "edge" and "center" see Richard Bulliet's Islam: The View from the Edge).

Tillich began his lectures by defining his terms: the phrase "'biblical religion' stands for two things: divine revelation and human reception" (21). Where the latter aspect is concerned, "biblical religion belongs to the whole history of religion. Everyone who knows something about the historical settings of biblical religion knows how much they were influenced by the surrounding religions and how many analogies can be drawn between biblical and other religions" (ibid). What Tillich appears to be pointing towards here is the socio-historical and cultural contexts from which biblical literature emerged. Marshall Hodgson's notion of an Irano-Semitic civilizational complex relieves Tillich's conception of some of its inherent ambiguity, but more can be done. Biblical literature includes the Bibles that have come down to us from Jews and Christians (inclusive of canonical and extra-canonical materials as well as exegetical works on the same). As artifacts of the history of Ancient to Late Ancient Near Eastern religiosity, these texts are cousin to Mesopotamian locative epic (e.g., Gilgamesh) and Persian utopian prophecy (e.g., the teachings of Zarathustra). But they are more than that: for critical textual analysis has repeatedly demonstrated the "incestual" relations between and among these cousins. "Influence" is too weak a metaphor for the relationships that obtain.

As divine revelation, on the other hand, biblical religion purports to put human beings into an intimate relation with a non-human being and yet does so, as Tillich attests, in an indelibly personal way. The catalytic conflict of Tillich's book arises out of the apparent contradiction between Biblical "personalism" and the impersonal philosophical category of Being that Tillich derives from the Greeks--as substantially mediated (without direct acknowledgment) by Martin Heidegger's Being and Time.

For Tillich, these two aspects of biblical religion are not, in fact, contradictory but only apparently so; they stand in dialectical relationship to one another:

Wherever the divine is manifest, it is manifest in "flesh," that is, in a concrete, physical, and historical reality, as in the religious receptivity of the biblical writers. This is what biblical religion means. It is itself a highly dialectical concept. (5)

The impersonal philosophical category of Being invites "metaphysical speculation"--a phrase that Tillich dismisses as "black magic" (8). He wants to avoid metaphysical speculation and prefers to speak of "ontological analysis" which, in his usage, has the character of Husserlian phenomenology: "one has to look at things as they are given if one wants to discover the principles, the structures, and the nature of being as it is embodied in everything that is" (ibid).

This locution, however, suggests that "being" is something that is distinct from "everything that is"--a highly contestable claim.

In any event, it would seem that the distinction between "being" and "everything that is" has already been suggested by the title of this series of lectures: Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality--with "ultimate reality" as a synonym for "Being Itself."

Anyone who wishes to study this subject must first reconcile herself to the discomforting fact that it is the search itself that may be studied; "Being Itself," on the other hand, remains, paradoxically, both ready-to-hand as (Heidegger would say) and perennially elusive.

As mentioned above, it is as an unwitting introduction to tasawwuf or "Muslim pietism" that Tillich's book fascinates. I first began to read Tillich in the mid-1970's and often wondered how, or in what sense, he really functioned as a Christian theologian. His continued eccentricity in that role (his "edginess" in Bulliet's terms) is unfortunate in my view. Would that Tillich's evolving understanding of Christianity (and its place among the religions of the world) had become central to Christian thought and practice! But he was a man out of time. One can only speculate what creative course his thinking might have followed had he lived to converse with such University of Chicago luminaries of Islamic Studies as Marshall Hodgson and Fazlur Rahman.

Islam, no less than Christianity and Judaism, is biblical religion. The Qur'an and Hadith literature do not disqualify Islam from being part and parcel of biblical religion any more than the Mishnah and Talmuds disqualify Rabbinic Judaism from that distinction or the New Testament and decrees of Church councils or the writings of the Church Fathers disqualify Christianity.

Tasawwuf or Muslim pietism is the Islamic expression of the "search for Ultimate Reality" and, at the very heart of tasawwuf is tawhid: both the affirmation of the uniqueness and divinity of "Reality" or "Being Itself" and, at the same moment, the confession of one's desire to be made "whole" through some sort of "mystical" union with that unique and divine Reality. Tillich's statement that human beings belong to the power of being from which they are separated (12) sounds remarkably (or, perhaps, unremarkably) like statements one finds throughout the literature of Muslim pietism--from al-Junayd to al-Hallaj, from al-Qushayri to Jalaladdin Rumi, etc.

Indeed, a deep engagement with the literature of tasawwuf might well have enabled Tillich to resolve certain confusions in his thinking. For example, he insisted on the philosophical character of his "ontological analysis," distinguishing it from the "saint, prophet, and poet" by its thorough "cognitive function." At the same time, however, Tillich insisted that his philosophy was "existential"--a disposition he described as a "rare union of passion and rationality" (20). Had he been exposed to the work of the Egyptian philosopher A. R. Badawi (a near contemporary), he might well have reconsidered his position on the matter (see, e.g., Badawi's "Les points de recontre de la mystique musslmane et de l'Existentialisme" 27 Studia Islamica (1967), 55-76). Tillich's existential philosophical theology stands out like a white raven in Christian intellectual circles; among devotees of tasawwuf, however, it would have found both a corresponding tradition and community.

Unversed in the literature of tasawwuf, Tillich gamely attempted to "achieve a synthesis between ontology and biblical religion," i.e., to reinvent the wheel, as it were, and create a Christian version of tasawwuf from scratch (27). In order to accomplish this objective, he recognized that he had to reconcile the anthropomorphic biblical god with his own Hellenized conception of "Being as such." His Protestant pre-commitment to biblical religion, however, limited as it was to the canonical text of the Bible, put him at an immediate disadvantage: for YHWH/El is in many respects a trickster deity--one moment jealous and angry, loving and clement the next (30-31). This may be contrasted with Allah, on the other hand, who is not presented in Muslim sources with quite the same level of emotional volatility. Be that as it may, the "stumbling block" of personalism is present to all varieties of biblical religion: Tillich had his work cut out for him in any case.

The move that Tillich makes is predictable and yet fresh: for it reminds us of the organizing principle behind all theo-logizing: the marriage of the personal biblical god with the Greek notion of the Logos. The Johannine community of the primitive Jesus movement asserted the identity of theos and logos in the symbol of the Christ. Despite the problems that arise when such an assertion is applied to an historical personage (i.e., Rabbi Jesus), Tillich seized the opportunity that the Prologue to John's gospel presented him for creative thinking. The result was a Christology that bears a striking resemblance to Muslim Christologies of 'Isa ibn Maryamah, Kalamat Allahi wa Ruh Allahi wa 'l Masih (see especially the pioneering work of Mahmoud Ayoub and also Tillich, ibid., 38-39).

Indeed, I would argue that the gap between a Christology such as one finds in Paul Tillich (and possibly Hans Kung) and the Muslim Christologies articulated in tasawwuf differ not in kind but in scope. Muslims avoid speaking of "incarnation" (hulul) because of its association with a Christian dogma that, historically, divided Christians from Jews and Christians from one another. One of the goals of Muhammad's movement was to mitigate the effects of Christologically-driven sectarianism (see Fred Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, Harvard, 2010). At the same time, Muslim pietists wished to achieve a kind of "incarnationism" (call it "Divine manifestation" in the human being) through emulation of Prophetic example (the life of Muhammad) and "Christ-like" ascetic practices. Where Christian dogma elevates a single individual to Divine status (Rabbi Jesus), tasawwuf democratizes the Divine presence--though not without insisting that this "democratization" of the "franchise" be limited through a combination of meritorious effort and Divine grace.

A few years after delivering his lectures on Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality, Tillich preached a sermon in which he argued that the Christian kerygma comes down to this: an invitation to "participate" in what he called "the New Being" which is "manifest" (I think it significant that he did not say "incarnated") in "Jesus who is called the Christ" (see Paul Tillich, The New Being, New York: Scribner's (1955), 18). Reading this sermon in the light of the study of Muslim pietism, one finds it difficult to distinguish Tillich's notion of the Christian kerygma--the possibility of participating in a New Being, an "ontological event" towards which one must direct "passionate and infinite longing" (19)--and the tawhidic teleology of tasawwuf.

At the Tillichian edge of Christian theology, biblical religion can find a balm for some of its self-inflicted wounds.

Being and Nothingness

"Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being--like a worm." Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, 56.

Being "calls" to us from non-being, but only in the most attenuated sense. Apprehending what is (or appears to be) opens the door to speculation as to its negation and/or what it occludes or lacks. The perception of depth or three dimensionality creates expectations of surplus: what is inside or lies on the other side of this object? The "encounter" with absence spurs the imagination: it is the impetus of the fictional mode we call "metaphysics."

Ontological speculation involves the testing of our perceptual limitations: it is an exercise of human freedom--the freedom to interrogate our given environment and to discover (or invent for it) new interiors and new surfaces. Every exercise of human freedom is, ipso facto, an instance of human freedom--evidence that human beings are, despite all circumscription, in some genuine sense, free.

In what sense? Here, Peter Berger demonstrates himself an acute interpreter of Sartre:

"... the dramatic model of society at which we have arrived now does not deny that the actors on the stage are constrained by all the external controls set up by the impresario and the internal ones of the role itself. All the same, they have options--of playing their parts enthusiastically or sullenly, of playing with inner conviction or with 'distance,' and, sometimes, of refusing to play at all. Looking at society through the medium of this dramatic model greatly changes our general sociological perspective. Social reality now seems to be precariously perched on the cooperation of many individual actors--or perhaps a better simile would be that of acrobats engaged in perilous balancing acts, holding up between them the swaying structure of the social world" (Peter L. Berger, Invitation to Sociology, 138).

Every exercise of hermeneutics offers an opportunity to enact human freedom. Likewise, every deviation from the script of one's social role opens new possibilities in a given life.

Nothing comes from nothing. Nothing may also come from something and, from that "somethinged" nothing, may come something new.

From Kenneth Burke to Peter L. Berger

"The general perspective that is interwoven with our methodology of analysis might be summarily characterized as a theory of drama. We propose to take ritual drama as the Ur-form, the 'hub,' with all other aspects of human action treated as spokes radiating from this hub. That is, the social sphere is considered in terms of situations and acts, in contrast with the physical sphere, which is considered in mechanistic terms, idealized as a flat cause-and-effect or stimulus-and-response relationship. Ritual drama is considered as the culminating form, from this point of view, and any other form is to be considered as the 'efficient' overstressing of one or another of the ingredients found in ritual drama. An essayistic treatise of scientific cast, for instance, would be viewed as a kind of Hamletic soliloquy, its rhythm slowed down to a snail's pace, or perhaps to an irregular jog, and the dramatic situation of which it is a part usually being left unmentioned" (Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 3rd edition, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973, 103).

Kenneth Burke published the first edition of The Philosophy of Literary Form in 1941. In 1963, a young sociologist by the name of Peter L. Berger (b. 1939) published his thoroughly (but perhaps unknowingly) Burkean Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective (New York: Doubleday). Fortunately, I read Berger long before I read Burke--for Burke's labyrinthine and neologism-filled writing style can make reading him quite a struggle. Berger's books (I've read and re-read at least a half-dozen of them over the years) made the assimilation of Burke's Dramatism fairly effortless. Moreover, his work with Thomas Luckmann on the social construction of reality provided a foundation for the sociological perspective I adopted as an undergraduate and have never abandoned.

The move from Ontologism to Dramatism (accomplished by Burke and further articulated by Berger--following not Burke, I take it, but Erving Goffman) involves a Wittgensteinian asceticism that requires resolution to maintain. The call of Being buzzes incessantly in one's ears (witness Heidegger). But, as Wittgenstein taught us, the sheer mystery of Being eludes all speech. And while it is difficult to reconcile oneself to apophasis in matters that one considers to be of paramount importance, the alternative is, more often than not, sheer muddle.

Dramatism does not eliminate Ontologism: it preserves it through the description of setting or scene. Thus preserved, Being is relegated to Michael Polanyi's "tacit dimension." The effort to make the tacit explicit is a critical one; it is also, as Wittgenstein remarked, "like trying to repair a spider's web with one's fingers."

Wittgenstein felt that Tolstoy was less successful in communicating his own apprehension of the tacit dimension when he attempted to make it explicit; some things, he thought, were better left unsaid. In a letter to Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein had this to say about Tolstoy's late novel Resurrection:

"You see, when Tolstoy tells a story he impresses me infinitely more than when he addresses the reader. When he turns his back to the reader then he seems to me most impressive ... It seems to me his philosophy is most true when it's latent in the story" (Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, OUP, 1984, p. 97).

Peter Berger's Dramatism suggests that the attribution of metaphysical properties to socially constructed identities (e.g., "white," "black," "male," "female," "Jew," "Gentile") is fraught with peril: "all such appellations become exercises in [Sartrean] 'bad faith' as soon as they are charged with ontological implications" (Berger, Invitation to Sociology, 157). I could not agree more.

Nevertheless, Berger stops short of adopting Wittgenstein's Tractarian admonition "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." He does not banish the posing of metaphysical questions--for to do so results in an unwitting acceptance of the answers that our socially constructed reality provides--and this, for Berger, is to arrive at "bad faith" from a different direction. The posing of "metaphysical" questions, i.e., questions designed to interrogate the inevitability of the inherited status quo, is to exercise one's freedom. And to exercise one's freedom is, to borrow from Aristotle, to actualize a metaphysical potentiality (see Invitation chapter 6).

This view is similar in tenor to Tolstoy's death-bed assertion that "God is not love, but the more love there is, the more man reveals God, the more he truly exists."

The conversion of the potential into the actual, of fiction into fact, is the ineluctable and ethically charged "call of Being."

Despite our best intentions, we often find our way back to Heidegger. Berger's use of the German philosopher, like Sartre's, was both skillful and sparing. Would that we all had such tact!

The Dark Side of Dramatism

Kenneth Burke's Dramatistic mode of analysis will always face stiff resistance--even from those whom it might benefit--because, in the shadows of this way of thinking, lurks a (further) Shakespearean apprehension:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. Macbeth 5:5.

What the French playwright and humanist Albert Camus termed "lucidity," i.e., the ability to grasp, without flinching, the human condition as theater and, therefore, in all likelihood, as a "tale told by an idiot," is simply too much for most people to bear.

Burke was able to parry the breaking of this absurd dawn throughout his long life by means of intense intellectual work punctuated by equally intense bouts of binge drinking.

Tolstoy's well-known aversion to Shakespeare was a complicated affair, but one suspects that he sensed how full acceptance of the Bard into his consciousness would court the temptation to suicide--already fierce within him.

In the final analysis, however, Tolstoy's "solution" to the "problem" of finding meaning in meaninglessness was to harness the vocabulary of theism in a manner not unlike Camus's vocabulary of nature. There is a sobriety about the resolutions of both men that reflects a Dramatistic apprehension of the human predicament.

Ethically, speaking, both men reached the conclusion that, if this life is but a series of acts and scenes, let us learn to play our parts (conduct ourselves) with grace, decorum, courage and, above all, candor.

The "dark side" of Dramatism ensues when one is blinded by the light.

Kenneth Burke's Socio-Poetics: From Ontologism to Dramatism

When Michael Polanyi remarks that "Our believing is conditioned at its source by our belonging. And this reliance on the cultural machinery of our society continues through life" [Personal Knowledge, 322], one is entitled to ask: to what do we belong? From Polanyi's statement, it seems obvious that we belong to some sort of "cultural machinery." But what is that? The best answer that occurs to me is Shakespeare's:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages...
[As You Like It, II: VII].

The "seven ages" referred to in these lines are seven discrete stages of an individual life (from cradle to grave) outlined by the Bard in the lines which immediately follow. But that individual drama is played out in the course of a larger and more elaborate tragi-comedy--and it is the latter that Polanyi most likely had in mind when he spoke of "cultural machinery."

As an epistemologist, Polanyi's main task was to efface the Cartesian divide between mind and body. Yet he gestured repeatedly to the fact that embodied minds are also participants in social groups. This brings us full circle to Slavophile "ontologism": the assertion that there exists an "organic togetherness in cognition" that has to be accounted for [see the post of 3-18-12, below]. How best to do this? I suggest that we let the master metaphor of the drama be our guide. And if we do that, then we must find ourselves, sooner or later, confronting the genius of Kenneth Burke:

"People are neither animals nor machines (to be analyzed by the migration of metaphors from biology or mechanics), but actors and acters. They establish identity by relation to groups (with the result that, when tested by individualistic concepts of identity, they are felt to be moved by 'deceptions' or 'illusions,' the 'irrational'--for one's identification as a member of a group is a role, yet it is the only active mode of identification possible, as you will note by observing how all individualistic concepts of identity dissolve into the nothingness of mysticism and the absolute). If you would avoid the antitheses of supernaturalism and naturalism, you must develop the coordinates of socialism--which gets us to cooperation, participation, man in society, man in drama" [Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, Berkeley: University of California Press (1973), 311].

Just as the individual mind is not divorced from an individual body, so individual bodies are not divorced from the collectivities in which they are embedded. Therefore, what an individual knows, or thinks she knows, is "conditioned at its source" by her belonging to a particular society and its culture. And, like the individuals who comprise them, societies enact dramas--indeed, they are dramas in which individuals (themselves elaborate sub-plots) play evolving roles.

Burke preserved Slavophile communalism and organicism but discarded Slavophile metaphysics and mysticism. In this respect, his thinking mirrored Tolstoy's quite effectively.

Slavophile "Ontologism" Re-visited

There is what I would term a "deep structural" similarity that obtains between the Slavophile emphasis upon "that realm of interior, pre-conscious, instinctual access to truth called 'intuition' or, in religious experience, 'faith' ... not faith in the sense of belief in clearly defined dogmas or propositions, but a kind of knowledge which precedes any abstract thought or 'reason'" [See Russian Philosophy, vol. 1, edited by James M. Edie, James P. Scanlon, and Mary-Barbara Zeldin; with the collaboration of George L. Kline, Chicago: Quadrangle Books (1965), 161-162] and, say, Sherman Jackson's notion of "Black Religion" as "a spontaneous folk orientation" upon which one constructs the architecture of a religious tradition and that serves to ground and inform an individual's understanding and expression of that tradition (in Jackson's case, Sunnism--see Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican, Oxford, 2005: 31-32).

Both point to what philosopher Michael Polanyi referred to as the "tacit dimension" of human cognition [See Michael Polanyi's books Personal Knowledge, The Tacit Dimension, and Meaning (co-written with Harry Prosch), all published by the University of Chicago Press]. Frustrated by the "failure of the positivist movement in the philosophy of science," Polanyi attempted to work out a "stable alternative" to Positivism's "ideal of objectivity" [Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, Chicago (1966), 25].

For Polanyi, all knowledge is "personal," which is to say (somewhat crudely) that the element of human subjectivity cannot be eliminated from human cognition--nor should it be. For if there were no subjective element in human cognition, there would be no genuine interest in anyone obtaining new information about the world. The desire to know engenders acts of self-assertion: an exploration of experienced phenomena in an effort to account for them in some way:

The sight of a solid object indicates that it has both another side and a hidden interior, which we could explore; the sight of another person points at unlimited hidden workings of his mind and body. Perception has this inexhaustible profundity, because what we perceive is an aspect of reality, and aspects of reality are clues to boundless undisclosed, and perhaps yet unthinkable, experiences [ibid, 68].

Or so we presume. This presumption constitutes what Polanyi called "the metaphysical grounds which underlie all our knowledge of the external world" [ibid].

We must be careful here and not mistake metaphysical propositions for indicative postulates. Since Plato (or perhaps Parmenides), it seems, we have been confused about the grammar of our articulate traffic with the world. Metaphysical propositions are not indicative postulates but subordinate clauses expressed in the subjunctive mood. Metaphysical speculation is a form of inquiry into possibility or potentiality. It inspires scientific exploration but is not, itself, scientific exploration, nor may it be permitted to substitute for scientific exploration.

That said, we must be equally mindful that we do not attempt to eliminate our embodied subjectivities (i.e., our personality, our humanity) from our science. This is the nature of the Cartesian error that has impoverished our thinking for the last 500 years.

Linguistic confusion and an over-zealous ascetic reductionism are the tragic hallmarks of Western rationalism--the "fly-bottle" that Tolstoy's disciple, Ludwig Wittgenstein, aimed to help us escape from. We have yet to find our way.

Polanyi's notion of "personal knowledge" and H. Gene Blocker's article "The Truth About Fictional Entities", The Philosophical Quarterly (Vol. 24, No. 94, January 1974, pp. 27-36) suggest fruitful approaches for making our escape--on Blocker, see the post of 02-12-12 (below).

Tacit thought "forms an indispensable part of all knowledge," therefore, "the process of formalizing all knowledge to the exclusion of any tacit knowing is self-defeating" [Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 20].

But what is it that we "know" tacitly? Polanyi writes: "Our believing is conditioned at its source by our belonging. And this reliance on the cultural machinery of our society continues through life" [Personal Knowledge, 322]. Such "accidents of personal existence" may have the effect of reducing "all our convictions to the mere products of a particular location and interest." However, they may also serve as "concrete opportunities for exercising ... personal responsibility" towards the claims we take to be both justified and true [ibid].

Polanyi regards the latter approach as one's epistemological "calling." It is a calling to make tacit knowledge explicit and, in the event, achieve epistemological candor--such as the kind modeled for us by Sherman Jackson and the Slavophiles.

Ontological Investigations

The fundamental problem with ontological discourse is that it purports to be a science of "Being as such" rather than a science of beings. The former, then, is properly a metaphysical conceit; the latter, the sciences of nature.

Everyone who ventures into this area becomes mired in broad generalizations that quickly lose their cogency. A theory of "every thing," or what makes everything what it is, is bound to fail. And yet, it stands to reason that, if we can speak of things as "being," we should be able to articulate what it is about such things that warrant the predicate.

Consequently, some of the most impressive minds that humanity has ever produced have been lured into the trap of ontological discourse--only to find themselves stuck like Br'er Rabbit in the arms of the Tar Baby. Paradoxically, it seems that not everything that "stands to reason" can be rationally articulated.

In the 19th century, a group of Russian thinkers (known collectively as Slavophiles because of their distinctive theories about Russian history and culture and what they believed to be Russia's unique world-historical "destiny" as an arbiter between Europe and Asia) developed interesting approaches to the science of ontology. Unlike what was on offer in Europe at the time, Slavophile approaches to ontology were "anti-rationalistic, anti-positivistic, and anti-materialistic" Russian Philosophy, vol. 1, edited by James M. Edie, James P. Scanlon, and Mary-Barbara Zeldin; with the collaboration of George L. Kline, Chicago: Quadrangle Books (1965), 161. While he remained aloof from Slavophile circles, Lev Tolstoy's writings evidence the influence of their ideas upon him. Feodor Dostoyevsky, on the other hand, would appear to have become, over time, an unapologetically convinced Slavophile. The importance for Slavophile thought of German Romanticism and Idealism can hardly be overestimated.

"The most unifying and best known theme of this philosophy ... was explicitly formulated by [Alexis Khomyakov (1804-1860)] under the term sobornost ... [or] an organic conception of ecclesiastical consciousness ... [that] defined the Church not as a center of teaching or authority but as a 'congregation of lovers in Christ'" [ibid., 161].

This meant that Christians are united to one another "'organically' rather than 'organizationally.' The Church is not an authority which can force obedience but a free union of believers who love one another. The only source of faith (the highest and truest kind of knowledge) is the consciousness of believers in their collectivity. No Council or Church pronouncement [is binding] unless it is ratified by the community of believers" [ibid., 161-162]--a view that bears striking resemblance to the Sunni concepts of iman, umma, and 'ijma (and which may owe something to them).

While the Slavophiles clearly developed their ideas in an ecclesiocentric fashion, their conceptual apparatus has wider application. Epistemologically, "like the German Romantics, the Slavophiles do not emphasize the clear and distinct ideas of abstract thought but that realm of interior, pre-conscious, instinctual access to truth called 'intuition' or, in religious experience, 'faith.' This is not faith in the sense of belief in clearly defined dogmas or propositions, but a kind of knowledge which precedes any abstract thought or 'reason'" [ibid]. The Slavophiles were convinced that Western Christianity had "lost this kind of 'faith'" and, consequently, had "developed a 'rationalistic' and 'juridical' view of Christian truth and thus cut itself off from the living source of religion. [Therefore, they asserted that] knowledge (in the highest sense) and the possession of truth are not a function of individual consciousness but are entrusted only to the collectivity. [The historian of Russian philosophy V.V. Zenkovsky named the Slavophile] theory of knowledge ontologism. As opposed to Western rationalism, ontologism considers 'rational' cognition to be a secondary and derived form of knowledge, based on and flowing from a more fundamental, more primitive contact with reality which is pre-cognitive. [The ontological implication of this theory of knowledge resides in the notion of an] 'organic togetherness in cognition' which characterizes the solidarity of true Christian believers, particularly within Orthodoxy. As long as a man is vitally inserted in this sobornost, he is in the truth ... whenever, through pride, he attempts to discover the truth by relying on his own powers of reason, in isolation from the collectivity, he falls into error" [ibid].

Anyone familiar with the "ontological prerequisites" for Leo Tolstoy's "world outlook" will find much that is familiar here [see A History of Russian Philosophy, vol. 2, edited by Valery A. Kuvakin, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books (1994), 384-393]. Richard Gustafson's Leo Tolstoy: Resident and Stranger, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1986), details Tolstoy's numerous debts to Eastern Christian thought.

Tolstoy appropriated much that he found attractive in Slavophile and Orthodox philosophy and cut it loose from its moorings in Russian parochialism and, thereby, exploited its universal (i.e., broadly humanistic) potential and appeal. In his hands, the "science" of ontology abandons the ambition to become a "theory of everything" or a theory of what makes everything what it is. Instead, Tolstoyan ontology is not a "science" but, rather, a rhetorical mode. It is an assertion that human beings share a common life and a common destiny (i.e., death). The implications of this assertion are, for Tolstoy, not so much epistemological as they are ethical. We are all in this together, would seem to be his "ontological" conclusion; therefore, it would behoove us to begin to order our lives in such a way that both acknowledges and does honor to our common fate.

The Tolstoyan ethic moves from this rhetorical "ontology" to a "deontological" morality, i.e., one that assents to the proposition that general and specific obligations are owed to others. It is, at its base, a sense of noblesse oblige. Such nobility, however, is not a matter of privileged birth but of common birth (i.e., every human being enters this world via natality). The Tolstoyan ethic is aristocratic in this limited sense and, in the event, mirrors the Qur'anic notion that every human being is both a khalifa and an 'abd, i.e., born to lead through service. For Tolstoy (as in the Qur'an), the "best" among us must truly be the best among us (see Qur'an 49:13).

Sherman Jackson and "Black Religion"

Surely one of the most interesting figures to emerge from the American Muslim community in the latter half of the 20th century is Sherman Jackson, an African-American intellectual of considerable depth, breadth, and moral passion. Jackson's work is rife with provocative arguments and stimulating ideas and deserves to be placed front and center in any consideration of what it means to be Muslim and American in the 21st century.

As an African-American thinker, Jackson is preoccupied with questions of race, and such questions have drawn him into the penumbral area of ontology with predictably unsatisfactory results: in his book Islam and the Blackamerican (Oxford, 2005), for instance, he argues against the notion of "ontological blackness" as a biological category (p. 13) only to affirm it on the next page as a sociohistorical one (p. 14). As I have argued repeatedly in this blog, ontology is a problematic "science" at best, but I do not think that Jackson's apparent muddle in this instance is fatal to his analysis. Moreover, if by "ontology" Jackson actually intends something other than metaphysics, his thinking on this issue may not be muddled at all--but, to this reader anyway, his intention in using the term is unclear.

Jackson's identification of "Black Religion" [BR] is most intriguing. Not to be confused with "African-American religion" as a whole, he stipulates that BR is best understood as a "subset of the aggregate of black religious expression in America" (Jackson, 2005: 29). It is a distinctive "religious orientation among Blackamericans ... the central preoccupation of [which] is the desire to annihilate or at least subvert white supremacy and anti-black racism" (ibid).

He then argues that

Black Religion has no theology and no orthodoxy; it has no institutionalized ecclesiastical order and no public or private liturgy. It has no foundation documents or scriptures, like the Baghavad Ghita [sic] or the Bible, and no founding figures, like Buddha or Zoroaster (ibid, 31).

Instead, BR is closer to "deism" or the "natural religion of Blackamericans, a spontaneous folk orientation at once grounded in the belief in a supernatural power outside of human history and yet uniquely focused on that power's manifesting itself in the form of interventions into the crucible of American race relations" (ibid, 31-32).

Here, I think, Jackson has allowed himself to be seduced by a myth of primordial primitivism that unnecessarily deprives his conception of the richness that admitting its connections to the utopian impetus of Near Eastern prophecy would otherwise provide. I am unsure why he would embrace such a myth, although I suspect that he is attempting to create a space for Blackamerican Islam in a playing-field that has been dominated (historically) by the Black Church. Personally, I think the victory here, if there is one, is Pyrrhic, but I have no real stake in the outcome of such intra-communal sparring.

What I most appreciate about Jackson's delineation of BR's "constitution" is this litany: "subversion, resistance, protest, opposition" (ibid, 32). These nouns reveal BR's methodological kinship with Etienne de la Boetie's anarcho-humanism and, likewise, Leo Tolstoy's--suggesting that BR, like Tolstoyanism, represents a prophetic attitude or "attunement" that serves as a foundation for the personal appropriation (see Jackson's interesting discussion of this term and its relationship to religious conversion, ibid, 28-29) of existing religious traditions.

Harold Bloom as Speculative (Tillichian) Ontologist

On occasion, the great literary critic Harold Bloom has indulged his taste for Tillichian ontology. His reading of French Iranologist Henry Corbin on the multi-faceted religious genius Ibn 'Arabi is a case in point:

"I am not a Jungian, and so give no credence to the archetypes of a collective unconscious. But I am both a literary and a religious critic, a devoted student of Gnosis both ancient and modern, and I have enormous respect for recurrent images of human spirituality, no matter how they may be transmitted. Images have their own potency and their own persistence; they testify to human need and desire, but also to a transcendent frontier that marks either a limit to the human, or a limitlessness that may be beyond the human. I return here to ... Henry Corbin's 'suprasensible world which is neither the empirical world of the sense nor the abstract world of the intellect.' In that intermediate world, images reign, whether of the plays of Shakespeare, the scriptures of religion, our dreams, the presence of angels, or astral-body manifestations ... [I ask] who can establish or prophesy the ultimate relations between sense impressions, images, and concepts?" Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium, 11.

The question of the "ultimate" relations between sense impressions, images, and concepts is Tillichian in its flavor; it is also unanswerable, because "ultimacy" eludes clear definition. What independent criteria will allow us to decide that we have arrived at the ultimate relations among sensation, image, and concept? Indeed, what does such an expression even mean?

Bloom's reference to images as markers of a "transcendent frontier" either limiting or pointing beyond human reality is also Tillichian in tenor. But such remarks reflect a failure to consider the phenomenon of linguistic referentiality--how it "works" in ordinary usage.

In an article published in The Philosophical Quarterly, ("The Truth About Fictional Entities", Vol. 24, No. 94, January 1974, pp. 27-36), H. Gene Blocker brought much needed light upon this subject in deft, Wittgensteinian fashion.

Blocker focused his article upon fictional characters such as Tom Sawyer and asked in what sense such a character may be said to exist. He then notes that "our understanding of fictional characters is very much like our understanding of real people. We know that there are no such persons, but we understand the narrative as the revelation of a whole complex person, indicating, for example, general character-traits which nonetheless leave room for speculation as to what he is like in other respects. Through our referential use of language, the character in a work of fiction is treated as a partially disclosed entity about whom more can be learned, who therefore contains more than our description of him, and in that sense, transcends the actual descriptive sentences about him. In short, because of our referring use of language, we treat him as a whole person over and above the sum of properties actually attributed to him in the novel. This is what lies behind, and a better way of putting, the confusing idea that a fictional character is a non-existent object" (p. 32).

My only criticism of Blocker's handling of this issue is the naive realism reflected in his opening statement--that our understanding of fictional characters is "very much like our understanding of real people." I would add that our understanding of "real people" is very much like our understanding of fictional characters; elsewhere in the article, Blocker indicates an awareness of the complexity of this issue: "Many of our attitudes about love, for example, are formed more by novels, plays, and films than by real life. In this sense, nature imitates art, as Wilde noted, and this is the sense in which people live within a cultural framework which allows certain well-defined aspects of reality to be perceived more than others" (p. 35).

I hold, with historian of religions Jonathan Z. Smith, that "map is not territory, but maps are all we possess." That said, the epistemological processes involved with linguistic reference are, I think, precisely as Blocker described them. No object of enduring interest--factual or fictional--may be exhaustively known or described. Speculation and commentary continue as a consequence of the hermeneutical instability ensured by the complexity of such objects as well as by the passage of time. New historical contexts invite fresh interpretations. I thank God for that--fully aware that God him/her/it-self is likewise an "object" of enduring interest.

Paul Tillich's "Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction"

In The Courage To Be, Paul Tillich argued that the "ontological nature of reality" (a redundant phrase if ever there were one) can only be described "ontologically"--a circular argument if ever there were one. An ontological description of reality uses "some realm of experience to point to characteristics of being-itself which lie above the split between subjectivity and objectivity and which therefore cannot be expressed literally in terms taken from the subjective or the objective side" (25). He then asserts that being qua being "transcends objectivity as well as subjectivity" but, in order to approach it cognitively, "one must use both." This feat is accomplished by the use of analogy (ibid).

How analogy helps one here is, at best, unclear. What is clear is that Tillich wishes to posit a "realm" of reality that is not exhausted by either "objective" or "subjective" approaches to it. In this regard, he appears to be indicating an apprehension of reality that eludes ordinary modes of descriptive discourse and borders upon the "apophatic speech" of the mystic--what Michael Sells has termed "mystical languages of unsaying."

I would suggest, however, that such uses of language are inherently literary and fictional: they do not rise "above the split between subjectivity and objectivity" but, rather, manage to straddle the two. Their credibility (if that's the right word) is a function of the degree to which they persuade us through their mimetic qualities--and this is where "analogy" or other modes of metaphorical speech come in. Dickens's character Charles Gradgrind is "believable" to the extent to which he successfully "embodies" the sort of individual or individuals I have encountered in my life who think, talk, and behave as (simile) this character in the novel Hard Times.

The so-called science of ontology is best appreciated by the Stevensian conceit of "notes toward a supreme fiction." Religion, as Harold Bloom reminds us, is "spilled poetry." It supplies us, as Northrop Frye argued, with "myths to live by" and "metaphors to live in." Indeed, as Frye insists, "imaginative structures contain a vast amount of truth about the human condition that it is not possible to obtain in any other way" [Frye, The Double Vision, 37] but we must not understand these figures of speech "literally" in the sense that we should expect to find a birth certificate on file in some county clerk's office that would serve as proof that the Charles Gradgrind of Dickens's novel was a living, breathing, eating, defecating, love-making, laboring, and eventually dying, individual.

For all of that, however, Charles Gradgrind lives, has lived and, alas, shall live on: we have met him on many occasions and in numerous guises. And wherever we have met him he has always presented himself in a manner that is true to his novelistic form: a soul-withering adding machine for whom everything--and everyone--has a price.

With the proper adjustments--i.e., by substituting "notes toward a supreme fiction" for the various references to ontology that appear in Tillich's work--we can begin to appreciate Paul Tillich as a stimulating philosopher of culture and intellectual history.

Apocalyptic Humanism Refined

Reconciliation with one's personal mortality (i.e., one's humanity) as in the Gilgamesh epic need not be conflated with capitulation to the prevailing social order (i.e., the status quo). In the Ancient Near Eastern city-state--a social order that displayed the hierarchical pyramid structure paradigmatic for Western civilization ever since--the humanism of the Gilgamesh epic was enlisted for precisely this purpose. But, in the Axial Age, figures arose who questioned this structure on ethical grounds (e.g., the Near Eastern prophetic tradition) and in the post-Axial period of Hellenistic ascendency, this mode of cultural critique cultivated new utopian tropes of intensity which we call today "apocalypticism."

There is an implied threat of violence involved when State authority calls upon one to remember her mortality: "We are bigger and more powerful than you; don't resist us; remember that you are mortal--the State is not."

Go along to get along: or suffer the consequences.

Apocalyptic utopianism replied to this threat by denying humanism: "We may be mortal in the present round, but we shall be immortal in the next. We may be sown a natural body, but we shall be raised a spiritual one." The often inhumane humanism of the Imperial state was answered with a fearlessness founded in a new mythological structure: the hope of the resurrection. Insurrection was now possible.

One wonders if Constantine the Great, shrewd politician that he was, did not recognize in the willingness of the followers of Christos to face martyrdom rather than bow to the assertion of Roman power an untapped source of new Imperial potential--a source that he was determined to domesticate and harness. Men and women unafraid to die can change the course of history.

As it turns out, there is more than one way to accept one's mortality.

Apocalyptic humanism accepts the limitations that mortality imposes upon a given individual life, but retains enough utopian intensity to refuse victory to the prevailing State [of Affairs]. This "great refusal" is but the stubbornness of humanity to assert its worth in the face of those forces that seek to deny human dignity and worth. I think that this is what Paul Tillich may have intended when he argued that "courage is an ethical reality, but it is rooted in the whole breadth of human existence and ultimately in the structure of being itself. It must be considered ontologically in order to be understood ethically" [Tillich, The Courage To Be, 1].

Ontology is an extremely problematic science. For it to be useful at all, it must be carefully and deliberately construed. In my view, Tillich made some progress in this direction, but there is much more work to be done. There is something quite suggestive, however, in his view of human self-affirmation as an "ontological act" [Tillich, 15]. Tillich may well have been one the last great theoreticians of apocalyptic humanism in the previous century--alongside Northrop Frye and Norman O. Brown.