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.