An American Athenaeum

Averroist "Apocalyptic Humanism"

2012-01-14T19:51:00.000-08:00

From Stuart MacClintock's article "Averroes" in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ed. Paul Edwards, 1967, p. 222):

From Aristotle, Averroes [Ibn Rushd, 1126-1198 C.E.] understood that the knowing process in man comprised a passive aspect--adumbrant concepts capable of being fully activated--and an active aspect--a power of dynamically activating such concepts. This power, termed during the medieval period the "active intellect," was taken to operate against a "passive intellect" to actualize concepts and thus constituted the thinking activity; and the resulting fusion of function was termed the "acquired intellect."... God, as the First Intelligence, provides through the next subordinate level of intelligences--the celestial bodies, upon which he exercises immediate control--activating power for the active intellect controlling man's thought.

It is difficult at this point in history to understand what was at stake for medieval thinkers in these abstruse speculations. Some insight may be gleaned from
Fazlur Rahman's analysis in Prophecy in Islam (1958, re-issued 2011 by the University of Chicago Press, p. 110):

... For Averroes, the eternal existence of the Universal Intellect and of thinking humanity are co-relates, as it were. This quasi-immanentism and humanism perhaps seemed to orthodox Islam even more dangerous than the temporary identity of the prophet with the divine in the act of revelation. For, even though the involvement of the divine in the creation and especially in man is great and, indeed, crucial for man's fate, to exhaust the meaning of the divine--the transcendent eternal truth--in man's destiny is even far more intolerable than the emptying of man's being in the divine [i.e., fana'].

The argument here must be viewed against the background of Islamic "orthodoxy's" desire to defend the position that the tradition had staked out centuries before vis a vis Christian orthodoxy. Unwilling to deify a proto-Rabbinic figure from an obscure Mediterranean backwater (i.e., Jesus of Nazareth), and yet equally unwilling to deny an active Divine presence in human life, the Islamic intellectual tradition followed the Qur'anic practice of endowing the prophetic lineage with a unique intimacy with the Divine--one that falls short, however, of incarnation or literal "sonship." Once established, this fine-line was vigilantly defended. Averroes, however, took no heed of this line--not because he wished to contest it but, rather, because it would not occur to him that anything he might think or write would be construed as crossing it. He was the commentator on Aristotle par excellence; Islam's radical (i.e., unitarian as opposed to trinitarian) monotheism was never in question for him. He honored Jesus as a prophet, not a god, and left it at that. But in speculating upon the ontologized Aristotelian epistemology of his day (i.e., Aristotle as read through a Neo-Platonic lens), he brought the Divine intelligence into contact not only with the prophets, but with all men--and not just for the purposes of producing revelation, but for thinking--something all men do all the time. From such a premise, one might draw the conclusion that Divine Reality is ever-present in the functioning of the human mind. If human beings may be said to reason "through" God, what becomes of the Divine-human distinction?

I have never encountered a comparison of Averroes to Blake--probably because of the latter's vehement anti-rationalism. But the parallel between Blakean Christology and Averroist anthropology is striking. For if Blake can be considered a Christian at all, it is only as a heterodox one. Blake's God is the imagination--the "poetic genius" as he would say--and every human being possesses such a genius. Christ, for Blake, was simply the paradigm case. Consequently, if we are willing to ignore all Blakean qualms and substitute reason for poetic genius, we find in Averroes a view quite similar to what Northrop Frye called Blake's "apocalyptic humanism." Fazlur Rahman called Averroes's position "quasi-immanentism and humanism." Pragmatically, I would suggest that the Averroist view anticipated Blake's.

Gilgamesh: the Invention of Humanism, the Invention of Literature

2012-01-05T14:10:00.000-08:00

Given the manner in which I have defined humanism (see previous post), it should come as no surprise that its invention coincided with the invention of literature.

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, first committed to cuneiform writing roughly 4,000 years ago, we encounter both. It is likewise a witness to the Mesopotamian birth of human civilization, i.e., the creation of large urban settlements (circa 3,000 BCE) made possible by the Neolithic or agricultural revolution that occurred among scattered human populations in the great river valleys (Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, Indus and Yellow rivers) roughly 7,000 years before.

In the Gilgamesh epic, we encounter a king (Gilgamesh, two-thirds divine, one-third human) who tyrannizes his subjects until a "wild man" (Enkidu)--something of a throw-back to the cooperative pastoral values of an earlier age--challenges him. The result of this conflict is, remarkably enough, mutual respect and friendship. Afterwards, Gilgamesh and Enkidu hit the road together in search of adventure. In the process, Gilgamesh is forced to endure Enkidu's death and then to contemplate his own--despite his two-thirds divinity. He eventually returns home to Uruk in southern Iraq, deprived of any hope that he might escape death and, presumably, chastened by his experiences.

The narrative pattern of the Gilgamesh epic is the prototype of the epic struggle that is humanism: the struggle, as Wallace Stevens phrased it, to forgo the wishful thinking that inspires leaps into an imagined transcendence in order to discover, instead, "what will suffice."

Humanism Revisited

2012-01-04T10:09:00.000-08:00

Humanism is a practice of mental and emotional askesis, a mode of resistance to the temptation ever present to human fancy to imagine an escape from mortality and the life of this world into immortality and the life of another world. Humanism, even in its more charismatic formulations (Romantic humanism, religious humanism) is a sober insistence that, in the words of G. K. Chesterton's incredulous gum-shoe cleric Father Brown,"...it's natural to believe in the supernatural. It never feels natural to accept only natural things. But though it wanted only a touch to tip you into preternaturalism about these things, these things really were only natural things" ("The Miracle of Moon Crescent").

The American Romantic poet Wallace Stevens characterized human existence as an epic struggle in which the hero successfully negotiates the pressures exerted upon him by what he called "imagination" and "reality." For Stevens, a "successful negotiation" of these pressures is one in which the escapist tendencies of the imagination are held in check (if not chastened) by the everyday demands of ordinary life on earth (i.e., reality); and yet, at the same time, reality is enriched and enlivened by the vivid hues of the imagination's palette. His life as an insurance company executive by day and modernist (though slyly Romantic) poet by night was a demonstration--one might even say an extreme demonstration--of the practical viability of his humanistic project.

The epic struggle that is humanism runs through all of the religious traditions that locate their original mythical impetus in the people called "Israel." In "ancient Jewish philosophy," the struggle took the form of the divergent ways in which the people's God was imagined: as immanent or transcendent (see Efros, Ancient Jewish Philosophy). During the Second Temple Period, political factions arose among the Judahist inhabitants of Palestine that were expressive of this tension: the Sadducees, representing the traditional priest-caste and sacrificial cult, resisted the Pharisaic party's introduction of "transcendentalist" notions imported from Iranian religion--e.g., bodily resurrection, an afterlife, angelology, a Satan figure, apocalypse. This is not to say that the Sadducees were the true humanists and the Pharisees something else: rather, the ideologies of both groups combined elements of humanist immanentism and transcendental speculation in different proportions and with often conflicting emphases. Such were the Palestinian parties and politics that shaped not only the "Old Testament" (as Morton Smith rightly argued) but also helped to determine the shape of the "New."

With the rise of the Jesus Movement among Second Temple Judahists and the introduction into the Near Eastern religious imagination of Graeco-Roman notions of apotheosis, the struggle continued in the articulation of incarnationist Christology and, eventually, trinitarian theology. What was originally at stake in the strange, post-mortem history of the Galilean proto-Rabbinic figure (Yeshua)--who, in his all too brief public career, attempted to forge an alternative to the predominant Judahist parties of his day--was the question of where to draw the line between human reality and an imagination given to flights of super-human fancy. In Wallace Stevens's words, it was a struggle to find "what will suffice."

With the Roman Empire's adoption, in the 4th century C.E., of Christianity as its official cult, the politics implicit in this struggle became not only explicit but were writ large in public life. By the mid-5th century (the Council of Chalcedon), a specific Christological formulation became a legally enforceable ideology and test of citizenship in the Empire. The specifics of that formulation marginalized those who felt it did not adequately express their own sense of "what will suffice" and so, for them, humanism--as they conceived it--became a matter of conscience. Such individuals and, unquestionably, groups of individuals, sought refuge in the Empire's hinterlands, and constituted, for the most part, informal communities of conscience. Too "Jewish" to be "doctrinaire" Christians (i.e., to consent fully to Chalcedonian Christology) and yet too Christian to be Rabbinic Jews, these individuals and groups languished on the periphery of the Byzantine and Sasanian empires, unorganized and voiceless, until the early 7th century C.E. At that time, in oasis towns of the Red Sea basin, a new movement arose that would, within a century, reconfigure the religious and political landscape of the Afro-Eurasian ecumene: the movement that would come to be known in time as "Islam."

Despite this reconfiguration, however, the struggle between imagination and reality, i.e., the epic struggle that is humanism, continued apace. Among Muslims, it would take new forms--even as it had among the convictional communities that were now known separately as "Christianity" and "Judaism." But the struggle remained then as now, in its essentials, the same. As concisely expressed by the title of one Stevens poem, the struggle amounts to this: "How To Live, What To Do."

The Proper Study of Humankind

2011-12-28T08:29:00.000-08:00

1. From Alexander Pope, An Essay On Man:

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of Mankind is Man.

2. From Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, p.28:

For the essence of humanism is [the] belief … that nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its vitality--no language they have spoken, nor oracle by which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever been passionate or expended time and zeal.

COMMENTARY: Pater here echoes the Roman poet Terrence's declaration that Homo sum--"I am a man" (i.e., a human being)--and what follows from that fact is that "I consider nothing human alien to me" (nihil humanum alienum a me puto).

3. From Ralph Waldo Emerson,"History" in Essays: First Series:

We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.

COMMENTARY: If there is no history, only biography, we should not be surprised to learn that biography and autobiography are crucial genres for understanding the history of religions.

That does not mean that the academic study of religion becomes nothing but the memoirs of scholars; it means that the study of religion is a branch of aesthetics (as found in Walter Pater, Arthur Schopenhauer, George Santayana, and Wallace Stevens).

Humanistic Social Science

2011-12-27T16:49:00.000-08:00

In my view, humanistic social science is best understood and appreciated as the hand-maid of the humanities proper (i.e., the study of texts, broadly construed, as the proper study of humankind). The great founding figure of humanistic social science was Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406 C.E.).

It would be centuries before any European intellectual would venture to theorize in a disciplined manner about human social organization and the effect of environment (natural and social) upon the construction of personal character. If I had to nominate a European for the honor of "founding figure" of humanistic social science in the so-called "West" (Ibn Khaldun, after all, was from Western North Africa), I would be tempted to name Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), although I would prefer to regard Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) as that figure.

While it is true that Montaigne wrote about himself, he did so, as Eric Auerbach rightly noted, in an effort to describe as accurately as he could the "human condition"--indeed, the latter phrase is Montaigne's. It is also true that few readers of Montaigne would ever accuse him of doing anything in a "disciplined manner," but that judgment is due, in part, to Montaigne's own self-effacing remarks about himself. The discipline one observes in Montaigne is his relentless self-scrutiny. Of course, one may object, this is not at all unprecedented--just read St. Augustine's Confessions! I am afraid I must disagree. St. Augustine engaged in self-scrutiny for the purpose of justifying his religious conversion--and to persuade his readers that they, too, were in need of salvation. Montaigne, on the other hand, was attempting to plumb the depths of the mystery of the self. He appears to have been innocent of any desire to justify himself or his way of life to his reader. What you see in the Essais is what you get--take it or leave it. The absence of a sense of sin and contrition in Montaigne infuriated Pascal; in Rousseau's eyes, his lack of self-justification must have appeared to be a missed opportunity--a "mistake" that Rousseau himself was determined not to make in his own Confession.

Among latter-day practitioners of this hybrid form of humanistic study, I am drawn to Max Weber, William James, C. Wright Mills, and Clifford Geertz. These four intellectuals appear to me to never lose sight of the fact that, by virtue of their practice as writers, their work contributed to the construction of a history of human subjectivities. In this respect, they are all worthy successors to Ibn Khaldun and Michel de Montaigne.

The Humanist Republic of Letters

2011-12-25T14:43:00.000-08:00

"The search after the great man is the dream of youth and the most serious occupation of manhood. We travel into foreign parts to find his works,- if possible, to get a glimpse of him. But we are put off with fortune instead. You say, the English are practical; the Germans are hospitable; in Valencia the climate is delicious; and in the hills of the Sacramento there is gold for the gathering. Yes, but I do not travel to find comfortable, rich and hospitable people, or clear sky, or ingots that cost too much. But if there were any magnet that would point to the countries and houses where are the persons who are intrinsically rich and powerful, I would sell all and buy it, and put myself on the road today.

The race goes with us on their credit. The knowledge that in the city is a man who invented the railroad, raises the credit of all the citizens. But enormous populations, if they be beggars, are disgusting, like moving cheese, like hills of ants or of fleas,- the more, the worse.

Our religion is the love and cherishing of these patrons. The gods of fable are the shining moments of great men. We run all our vessels into one mould. Our colossal theologies of Judaism, Christism, Buddhism, Mahometism, are the necessary and structural action of the human mind. The student of history is like a man going into a warehouse to buy cloths or carpets. He fancies he has a new article. If he go to the factory, he shall find that his new stuff still repeats the scrolls and rosettes which are found on the interior walls of the pyramids of Thebes. Our theism is the purification of the human mind. Man can paint, or make, or think, nothing but man. He believes that the great material elements had their origin from his thought. And our philosophy finds one essence collected or distributed." --Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Uses of Great Men," from Representative Men

Why Stevens Matters

2011-12-23T05:13:00.000-08:00

Wallace Stevens matters because he picked up the fallen standard of Walt Whitman (who had picked up the fallen standard of Dante) and endeavored to write a Commedia for his time and place.

His poetry as a whole (the "whole Harmonium"), though often difficult, stands next to Leaves of Grass as American scripture. It is, perhaps, commentary on Whitman in many ways, but commentary of such aesthetic strength that it achieved canonicity. Not bad for an insurance lawyer from Reading, Pa.

Sundry Notes On Wallace Stevens

2011-12-16T22:12:00.000-08:00

As heir to Emerson and Whitman (see, e.g., Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, 214), Stevens voiced the distinctive American genius that emerged from the country's brief republican interlude between colony and empire.

In terms of political chronology, I trust Robinson Jeffers: he wrote the poem "Shine, Perishing Republic" on the eve of the First World (European) War. Stevens and Jeffers were contemporaries: Stevens the humanist, Jeffers the "inhumanist" (see Arthur B. Coffin, Robinson Jeffers: Poet of Inhumanism, U. of Wisconsin, 1971). Stevens wrote comedy, Jeffers tragedy. Both suffered intensely for their art, but in remarkably different ways. Jeffers's relative independence from the bourgeoisie left him less compromised politically. Stevens in correspondence referred to himself as a "man of the left" and in his poetry his sympathies with the common life are evident--but his position in the rising corporatocracy meant that he would always be guarded in his political expression. He was careful to cultivate an image of apolitical insouciance.

With intellectual roots that ran deep into the brief republican interlude, Stevens, who lived during the rise of American empire, was a man out of time. Subliminally, he understood this. Instinctively, he struggled to translate 19th century British, French, and American Romanticism into his 20th century reality. He was not unaware of Romanticism's revolutionary credentials. But living as he did on the wrong end of the political revolution, he set his sights on completing the Romantic project of cultural revolution: what M. H. Abrams rightly called "natural supernaturalism" or the conversion of theological vocabularies and concepts into humanistic ones.

In 2008, Leon Surette published a study of Stevens and T. S. Eliot (The Modern Dilemma) in which he argues that pre-Anglo-Catholic Eliot was more of a humanist than scholars credit and Stevens, throughout his life, was less of a humanist than scholars credit. It is a perfectly reasonable thesis, but the book as a whole suffers from an inadequate definition of humanism: for Surette limits that definition to the militantly "secular" or anti-clerical and most often atheistic version of humanism that emerged in late 19th century Europe as an alternative to traditional religion. This leads Surette to make absurdly sweeping and historically inaccurate claims such as "Humanism is not a philosophical position, but an ethical and social one [one wonders what such a statement can possibly mean--ethics are not philosophical? There is no such thing as "social philosophy"?], and is compatible with a range of philosophical positions [including ethical and social ones?]--except for theism" (p. 78).

In the case of Eliot, this definition seems plausible for, as everyone familiar with that poet's biography knows, Eliot became a traditional believer after he was already a renowned poet. That said, historically speaking, one may be a traditional believer and a humanist (witness Erasmus and More).

Stevens, on the other hand, was never a traditional believer as Surette admits--unless one accepts the rumor of his deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism and interprets that "conversion" in traditionalist terms. Surette rightly points out, however, that, even if we are persuaded by the rumor, it is irrelevant for understanding Stevens's poetry for it came too late to have had any effect on Stevens's poems. This would seem to contradict Surette's contention that Stevens was less of a humanist than scholars have credited--especially in light of Surette's own definition of humanism.

It is true that, in correspondence, Stevens expresses a dislike of humanism and it seems obvious that the version of humanism that Stevens rejected is, in fact, the atheistic sort that Surette's definition describes (see Surette, 222). But that does not mean that Stevens was not himself a humanist--of a competing variety.

Stevens was also known to protest that he was not a Romantic (see Surette, 263). Be that as it may, anyone who reads Stevens's poetry recognizes it as Romantic and, as Harold Bloom has sagely observed, "Romanticism, even in its most remorseless protagonists, is centrally a humanism..." (Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, 57). In order to make his argument stick, Surette is obligated to take many of Stevens's own statements about his work at face value--a signal critical failure on Surette's part.

On page 286, Surette comes very close to admitting that Stevens represents a genuine humanistic alternative to the version of humanism that conforms to his overly-narrow definition, but he seems to be far too invested in that definition to be able to modify it. His procedure reveals itself here to be peculiarly deductive precisely where induction is called for.

On page 318, Surette finds that Stevens "twists himself into knots" in an effort to "retain the sense of sanctity" while yet "abandoning belief in the transcendent." If anyone twists himself into knots, however, it is Surette: for he must maintain that Stevens is not a humanist in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Perhaps most damaging to Surette's case, if not his credibility as a critic, is the fact that his book relies heavily on Stevens's correspondence with Hi Simons, makes use of Simons's essay on Stevens's poem "The Comedian as the Letter C," but omits any mention of Simons's 1942 review of Parts of a World in the journal Poetry. Entitled "The Humanism of Wallace Stevens," Simons's review identifies the foundation of Stevensian humanism as a "conviction that life must be nobly lived to be worth living." According to Simons, this conviction "gives its tone to Stevens' humanism, a humanism with an aesthetic instead of a moralistic basis" (Simons, 452).

Unlike Surette, Simons recognized that humanism comes in a variety of philosophical flavors. This view is consistent with the known history of humanisms that have arisen throughout history in many parts of the globe. Surette's study is an object lesson in how to write an erudite and yet disappointing book. Let future authors take note.

Why Nietzsche Matters

2011-10-31T12:20:00.000-07:00

Nietzsche matters because, at the close of the 19th century, he saw with unflinching clarity the intellectual and, lacking a better term, spiritual exhaustion of Europe.

He matters because, in his own way, he wagered his intellectual life on offering Western civilization (so-called) a new way forward. Understanding, of course, that, ex nihilo nihil fit, Nietzsche ransacked European intellectual and religious history for sources of inspiration. He found it in Montaigne and Schopenhauer--in many ways as unlikely a pair of bedfellows as one could hope to meet; but that was yet another example of Nietzsche's genius.

Montaigne's uncommon common sense and clear-eyed acceptance of humankind with all of its faults and foibles reflects to an uncomfortable degree the 16th century gentleman's retirement to his country estate; on the cusp of the 20th century, his meditations seemed to Nietzsche to lack something--a je ne sais quoi. The missing ingredient was supplied by the acerbic punch of Schopenhauer's blindly self-assertive Wille.

One can certainly quarrel with the proportions Nietzsche chose for his recipe--Schopenhauer is a stiff drink and a little bit of him goes a long way. But the powerful mixture certainly caught the attention of the most important thinkers to follow in Nietzsche's wake--Heidegger, Sartre, and Marcel among them. Indeed, one might say that this Nietzschean cocktail determined the direction of European philosophy throughout the 20th century and remains, to this day, the narrow gate through which one must pass to productive thinking.

Marcel and Montaigne

2011-10-26T20:38:00.000-07:00

Had Montaigne not been Montaigne, Marcel would not have been Marcel. Nor Nietzsche, Nietzsche; Emerson, Emerson. And although it is a matter of dispute among Shakespeare scholars, without Montaigne, Shakespeare might have been less than the Shakespeare we know.

In his essay on "Montaigne and Francis Bacon," Harold Bloom writes: "What Montaigne gives you goes beyond wisdom, if so secular a transcendence is acceptable to you" (Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, 120).

Montaigne re-invented humanism for the Modern Age.

Why Marcel Matters

2011-10-17T12:16:00.000-07:00

In Alexandria, it has been said that the only persons incapable of a sin are those who have already committed it and repented; to be free of an error, let us add, it is well to have professed it.--Jorge Luis Borges, Averroes' Search

Marcel matters, first, because of his unflinching intellectual honesty; the sort of intellectual honesty and transparency that characterizes the very best humanistic scholarship.

Marcel referred to this intellectual honesty as "philosophy," and therefore characterized his philosophy as "neo-Socratic."

Intrinsic to intellectual candor is the "refusal, at any price, to have the free movement of our thinking blocked" (Mystery of Being, p. 15). This means that thinking must be permitted to find its own way through the dark wood of avoidable prejudice. I qualify "prejudice" in this way because, since Kant, we know that there are unavoidable prejudices: a priori forms of thinking that, for better or worse, make thinking possible. These are prejudices of the first order; we are stuck with them. If there is any consolation to be had, it is that these prejudices are universal: they do not reflect racial, ethnic, gender, or socio-economic class distinctions (although some will dispute this claim). If they reflect history at all, it is the evolutionary history of our species: again, a history universally shared by human beings.

It is second order prejudices with which we have to deal: those enumerated above and, as Marcel insisted, others--even prejudices that many presume endemic to philosophy itself:

I would not hesitate to say, for instance, that philosophical idealism, as that doctrine has long been expounded, first in Germany, then in England and France, rests very largely on prejudices of this sort...(MOB, 15-16).

Marcel then adds a personal note that I find very revealing:

I remember very well the periods of anguish through which I passed, more than thirty years ago now [he was writing around 1950], when I was waging, in utter obscurity, this sort of war against myself, in the name of something which I felt sticking in me as sharply as a needle, but upon which I could not yet see any recognizable face (Ibid).

Marcel's determination to "do" philosophy in a way that eludes the grip of the dead hand of the philosophical past is why he matters; it is also probably one reason why he is, today, so neglected.

Today, the battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of the language of philosophical idealism is not the monumental struggle it was for someone like Marcel in the middle of the 20th century. Today, we have new sets of demons to try to dispatch. Many of them, however, produce the same (or similar) effect upon the discursive intellect that philosophical idealism did. Marcel called this effect the "spirit of abstraction."

It is with his analysis of the spirit of abstraction that I always begin to read Marcel; and from there, I inevitably become distracted. In the past, it had always seemed to me that he fell victim to this spirit and, therefore, I found him to be of little help as a guide through it. But he was really very much like Wittgenstein in this regard: his understanding of the effects of the snake's venom was not second-hand. He himself had been bitten. What I failed to recognize when I tried reading him (in the 1970's, then the 1980's, then again in the first decade of the present century) was how he had managed to recover.

Here is where one has to pay very close attention to the moves he makes: he counters the "spirit of abstraction" with a kind of radical immanence: focusing his attention upon subjective responses to phenomena taken, always, in the individual case. At the same time, however--and this is where one must hold on tight or risk losing the Marcellian difference--he insists upon a notion of transcendence. With the impatience of youth, I repeatedly reached this point in Marcel's discourse and said, "Look! We have reached my stop ... Farewell!" I would then put the book down and turn to other things. For it is in Marcel's insistence upon transcendence that I saw his thought turn back upon itself and undermine his stated project. I did not stick around to see how he managed to extricate his thought from self-contradiction. This is why philosophy worthy of the name is not for the young.

Radical immanence need not be set in opposition to transcendence like matter and anti-matter. Marcel had achieved (as I had not) the Heraclitean way of thinking that was capable of perceiving a harmony of opposed tensions, as in the bow and the lyre.

For Marcel, the "true" opposite of transcendence, i.e., the opposite that interrupts harmonies, that makes them untenable, is not radical immanence, but reductive immanence. It is the latter which is best represented in Western philosophy by scientific materialism and the like; ironically, scientific materialism is a mode of the "spirit of abstraction" for it objectifies phenomena to the point where all subjectivity is banished from consideration. But "purely" objective phenomena do not exist for human beings; they are, in fact, abstractions.

Radical immanence, on the other hand, contains within itself a transcendental dimension: the sort one finds in the sober Romanticism of a William Wordsworth and, especially, Wordsworth's American heir, Wallace Stevens.

Gabriel Marcel

2011-10-16T21:29:00.000-07:00

Gabriel Marcel demonstrated that one can be an honest heir to the post-Kantian tradition of critical philosophy and still be a convinced theist.

I tried to read him without success in high school, then in college, then in graduate school. One would have thought him a natural resource for someone who cut his intellectual teeth on Kierkegaard and other so-called "Existentialists." I will confess that his conversion to Catholicism around age 40 made me uneasy; perhaps some residual Protestant distrust of Catholic intellectuals has deprived me of his stimulating companionship through the decades. This is just a guess; an attempt at humility and candor.

Nowadays I find reading him as bracing as reading Pascal and more satisfying since, in his major works at least, he appears to have avoided the apologia that often muddles the Pensees.

Marcel was a Christian humanist in the grand Erasmian manner. I am thankful to have finally found my way to his simple, cheerful, and gracious table.

Heidegger

2011-10-09T04:54:00.000-07:00

One moves easily from Herder to Heidegger (here pictured as he liked to see himself, a simple German peasant), although one may also reach Heidegger through the Neo-Kantians with which he early associated himself as well.

Part genius, part snake-oil salesman, Heidegger was, in many respects, a major figure in the Romantic project by which "inherited theological ideas and ways of thinking" were secularized (see M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 12).

Heidegger's body of work is as vast as it is confused and confusing; I have known gifted intellects to wander into the Black Forest of MH never to return. My impression is that Heidegger's greatest charm is for those who, like him, are obsessed with justifying the failures of their lives rather than accept such failures for what they are--milestones along the way--and move on.

Sartre is Heidegger's greatest disciple and the only reason to return to Heidegger is to better understand what Sartre did with him. Like Jacob wrestling the angel at Jabbock's ford, Sartre grasped Heidegger's genius early, felt his grip slipping as Heidegger oozed his trademark snake-oil, and yet managed to hang on long enough to be transformed from a minor French novelist and playwright to a major 20th century intellectual.

Had there been no Heidegger, there would be no Sartre--not as we have come to know him. When we recognize Romanticism in Sartre, it is often a residue of Heidegger's impact upon him.

From Kant To Herder

2011-10-03T17:10:00.000-07:00

Gottfried Herder was one of Kant's most perceptive students. He learned much from Kant though it is fashionable to regard Herder as a kind of anti-Kant (in the same way that Aristotle is no longer remembered as the Platonist that late ancient and medieval philosophers understood him to be). Kant's relative obtuseness to history helped to spur Herder on to his great intellectual achievements--in history and historicism.

Romanticism follows the line from Kant to Herder just a surely as it follows the line from Kant to Fichte and on to Hegel.

The Enlightenment gave birth not to a single or monolithic Romanticism but to an unruly brood of Romanticisms. Had Kant not been Kant, Herder would not have been Herder. Let us give credit where (and how) it is due.

What Is Enlightenment?

2011-09-07T14:29:00.000-07:00

It is unfortunate--beyond unfortunate, really, and bordering on the tragic--the degree to which posturing is substituted for thinking in the Academy. That Michel Foucault, for instance, and the "post-modernism" with which he is so frequently associated, would be set against Kant and the Enlightenment project with which he is associated, should cause thinking people absolutely no satisfaction; if anything, such oppositions should cause scholars embarrassment and pain. For these disputes represent nothing so much as a form of intellectual parricide. If the Enlightenment project was not constructed upon a scaffolding of rational critique (beginning, as with Kant, with a critique of reason itself), then there was no Enlightenment and, if there was no Enlightenment, then there can be no coherent assertion of a Counter-Enlightenment--the banner under which "post-modernists" mount their charge.

Every now and then a scholar, usually obscure, challenges the Received Tradition of Posturing Cant (often in the name of Kant), and attempts to set the record straight. Occidental College's Kory Schaff is one such scholar:

The Enlightenment has left us with "normative superstition," or a healthy form of skepticism about the justification of modern institutions and ideals. Along these lines, I adopt an interpretation of Foucault that diverges from the standard view. I argue that he shares with his detractors a common heritage of the "critical attitude," placing him squarely in line with Kant, Hegel and critical theory generally. If it is possible to view this critical attitude as an expression of Enlightenment-oriented views, then there are reasons to believe that his so-called postmodernism is nothing more than hyper-modernism [or what I like to call "modernism in high gear"--R.R.R.]. The general lines of this last argument have been made elsewhere, most notably in Robert Pippin's important work [Modernism As A Philosophical Problem], but there is a need to situate Foucault in the unfolding narrative of modernity, rather than label him a hostile opponent to it... [Schaff, Human Studies 25: 323-332, 2002].

In my own view, the "need" for revising the "narrative of modernity" as it unfolds in the hands of the most egregious of Posturers arises from the fact that the world is on fire; this is no time for intelligent people to be at one another's throats, settling scores that, when all is reduced to smoldering ash, amount to nothing. There is much work to be done by the intellectual fire brigades. Let us roll up our collective sleeves, each grab a bucket, and get to work.

Kant and Max Weber

2011-08-16T14:52:00.000-07:00

Yet another installment in the record of scholarly blindness:

"Weber's place in the German idealist tradition is a neglected area in Weber scholarship. It was not until the past decade that, for example, the all too apparent influence Nietzsche exerted on Weber received systematic attention ... Equally apparent, yet even less investigated, is the Kantian link. Except for the interest in the neo-Kantian epistemology of Weber's time (via such figures as Rickert and Windleband), Kant has been all but completely left out in contextualizing Weber's thought ... For a brief yet strong argument for the Kantian nature of Weber's examination of modernity, see Ernest Gellner, who claims, 'Thus the preoccupations of Kant and of Weber are really the same. One was a philosopher and the other a sociologist, but there, one might say, the difference ends. It is of course a very significant distinction. They saw the same problem, but Kant saw it as a universal one, which concerned man as such; Weber saw it as a differential problem--concerning why some men, but some men only, saw the world in a certain way and acted in a certain manner.' See his Legitimation of Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974) 184-95" Sung Ho Kim, Max Weber's Politics of Civil Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2004), fn. 80, p. 53.

Kant and the Power of Imagination

2011-08-14T17:31:00.000-07:00

"...in the mid-twentieth century rush to make Kant palatable to Anglo-American analytic philosophers, much that was central to Kant's work was initially ignored, down-played, or simply dismissed..." Jane Kneller, Kant and the Power of Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2007), p. 21,

Kant, Rousseau, and Romanticism

2011-08-01T09:25:00.000-07:00

When I was a freshman in college, a philosophy professor of mine (who was actually an historian of philosophy) warned me that academic philosophy was crippled by its steadfast refusal to examine ideas in their full-blooded historical context. I went on to major in philosophy and discovered, to my chagrin, that my professor's warning was spot on. Since then (the late 1970's-early 1980's), there have been modest advances in the field such as the hybrid discipline of the "history and philosophy of science." But rarely are ideas ever adequately embedded in their historical context by academic philosophers, and one can certainly understand why: because ideas, thoroughly historicized, tend to lose their universal validity. Or that is the fear, anyway. But how is it, one must ask, that a loss of universality as such is not compensated for by the corresponding gain in historicity? Take, for example, the case of Immanuel Kant.

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason has been called the worst written of great books. All of Kant's work is hampered by a difficult style. And this is without question one factor in the difficulty one encounters when reading him. But another factor in my view is the disservice done to Kant by the majority of his interpreters who, with few exceptions, de-contextualize Kant, making his thought even less approachable.

All of Kant's interpreters acknowledge that he was raised in a household of devout Lutheran pietists. And yet, astonishingly, most of those interpreters are unwilling to consider the possibility that Kant's philosophical output ought to be read in the light of his pietistic upbringing. This scholarly refusal appears to reflect an assumption that piety and criticism are entirely incompatible modes. Consequently, the father of "critical philosophy" could not possibly have harbored any pietistic leanings in his thinking. Instead, the regularity of his personal habits are viewed as the vestiges of his pietism and nothing else. This assumption (a prejudice, really) distorts Kant's philosophic project in general but permits him to be placed among the forefront of Enlightenment thinkers--where Enlightenment is to piety what matter is to anti-matter.

Kant's debt to Hume is always celebrated; the fact that he kept a portrait of Rousseau (another contrarian Enlightenment figure) above his desk is rarely mentioned and, when mentioned, almost never commented upon. But Kant, like Rousseau, was not only an Enlightenment figure, he was, as well, a counter-Enlightenment figure: for neither he nor Rousseau were completely at home with the radically secular wings of the European Enlightenment and both--yes, both--are crucial precursors to what would be later known as the Romantic revolution.

The Paterian Precursor: John Ruskin

2011-07-05T15:26:00.000-07:00

"Ruskin never gave up insisting that all art, literature included, was worship, but this insistence does not make him either a 'religious' or a 'moral' critic of literature. Though he moved in outward religion from Evangelical Protestantism to agnostic naturalism and on finally to a private version of primitive Catholicism, Ruskin's pragmatic religion always remained a Wordsworthian 'natural piety,' in which aesthetic and spiritual experience were not to be distinguished from one another. Ruskin's literary taste was formed by the King James Bible, more than any other reading, and therefore from the start he associated expressive and devotional values. In this also he stands with the great Romantics, whose theories of the Imagination are all displaced, radical Protestant accounts of the nakedness of the soul before God."

From Harold Bloom's essay on Ruskin in Essayists and Prophets.

Another Comrade in the Visionary Company

2011-07-04T16:04:00.000-07:00

Harold Bloom on Walter Pater:

1. Pater's "value inheres neither in his accuracy at the direct interpretation of meaning in texts nor in his judgments of relative eminence of works and authors. Rather, he gives us a vision of art through his own unique sensibility, and so his own writings obscure the supposed distinction between criticism and creation. 'Supposed,' because who can convince us of that distinction? To adapt Shelley's idea of the relation between poetry and the universe, let us say that criticism creates the poem anew, after the poem has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration."

2. Pater's key terms as a critic are 'perception' and 'sensation,' which is response to perception. 'Vision' for Pater, as for Blake, is a synonym for Coleridge's or Wordsworth's 'Imagination,' and Pater further emulated Blake by questing after the 'spiritual form' of phenomena as against 'corporeal form.' This is the 'form' that: 'Every moment...grows perfect in hand or face,' according to the almost preternaturally eloquent 'Conclusion' to The Renaissance."

3. "For this is Pater's Gospel, but it is Ruskin's manifesto: '...the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.'"

4. "What Wordsworth called 'spots of time,' periods of particular splendor or privileged moments testifying to the mind's power over the eye, Ruskin had turned from earlier, as being dubious triumphs of the pathetic fallacy. Pater, who subverted Ruskin by going back to their common ancestor, Wordsworth, may be said to have founded his criticism upon privileged moments of vision, or 'epiphanies' as Joyce's Stephen, another Paterian disciple, was to term them."

5. "Pater's strange achievement is to have assimilated Wordsworth to Lucretius, to have compounded an idealistic naturalism with a corrective materialism. By de-idealizing the epiphany, he makes it available to the coming age, when the mind will know neither itself nor the object but only the dumbfoundering abyss that comes between."

6. "An Epicurean or hedonistic askesis is only superficially a paradox, since it is central in the Lucretian vision that Pater labored to attain."

7. "His great achievement...was to empty Ruskin's aestheticism of its moral bias, and so to purify a critical stance appropriate for the apprehension of Romantic art. More than Swinburne, Morris, Rossetti, he became the father of Anglo-American Aestheticism, and subsequently the direct precursor of a Modernism that vainly attempted to be Post-Romantic. I venture the prophecy that he will prove also to be the valued precursor of a Post-Modernism still fated to be another Last Romanticism."

From H.B.'s essay on Pater reprinted in Essayists and Prophets (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005).

A Further Irony

2011-04-21T08:01:00.000-07:00

A further irony of Edward Said's criticism of Northrop Frye lies in the fact that Said's limited grasp of history (the very thing for which he chastised Frye) prevented him from recognizing the implicitly revolutionary nature of Frye's embrace of Blake.

For to adopt a Blakean stance is to open the door to radical politics: the kind of politics that Blake himself espoused and that threatened to "turn the world" of mid-seventeenth century England "upside down."

Frye's politics were a left-leaning bourgeois liberalism--fairly tepid by Blake's standards and by Said's (not to mention this author's). In Frye's defense, however, he spent most of his adult life during a portion of the 20th century that saw left-liberalism make solid gains in the implemented policies of the democracies of Europe, Scandinavia, and North America. Frye's confidence in the reformist programs of Western governments was reposed in facts on the ground and thereby warranted. The hyperbolic posturings of the "academic Left" no doubt struck him as beside the point. It was a different time than the one we inhabit now. Said's critique makes no allowance for Frye's historical context.

The political implications of Blakean humanism were succinctly expressed by one of Blake's radical precursors, Gerrard Winstanley, in a tract entitled A Watch-Word to the City of London (1649):

Freedom is the man that will turn the world upside down, therefore no wonder he hath enemies ... True freedom lies in the community in spirit and community in the earthly treasury, and this is Christ the true man-child spread abroad in the creation, restoring all things unto himself (cited by Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, London: Penguin (1991): 107).

What would become Blake's humanistic Christology, with its wealth re-distributing political implications, is set out quite clearly in Winstanley's tract for anyone with ears to hear and eyes to see. We can only speculate what Frye would make of the present political climate in North America were he still with us; based upon his close reading of Blake and his subsequent articulation of a Blakean humanism, one can only imagine that his left-Liberalism would be far less tepid than it was in the latter half of the 20th century.

Northrop Frye's Blakean Humanism

2011-04-20T16:15:00.000-07:00

As Tony Davies demonstrates throughout his slim volume Humanism in Routledge's New Critical Idiom series, the term "humanism" eludes straightforward definition. Indeed, in his glossary, the entry for "humanism" reads: "An undefinable term, possibly obsolete." His definition of a "humanist" is even better: "A teacher and writer of books. A superman. A deluded wretch, deserving pity and contempt. None of the above. All of the above" (Tony Davies, Humanism, 2nd edition, London: Routledge (2008): 150). This is perhaps a prime example of humanistic gallows humor, of the characteristically dry Anglo-Saxon variety, but it is not without merit as an honest appraisal of the state of the "-ism."

As a card-carrying humanist and Chomskian Left Libertarian, I cannot help but admire humanism's "anarchic" inability to get its story straight. If Davies had been able to nail down a clean definition of humanism in his little study, I would have taken that as a signal that the time had come to go shopping for a new ideological homeland.

The trouble with humanism, as Davies reminds us throughout his book, is human beings. Its redemption is variety. Thankfully, there are many ways of being human, and many ways of reflecting on what being human can and ought to mean.

At the end of his life, the great humanist and academic provocateur Edward Said gave a series a lectures that were later collected under the title "Humanism and Democratic Criticism" (Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, NY: Columbia U. Press, 2004). Like so much of Said's scholarship, these lectures were both learned and informed by his hair-trigger political consciousness. Also like so much of Said's scholarship, they contain a certain amount of ad hominem critique of other scholars that is not always fair, and not always accurate.

Take, for instance, his remarks on Northrop Frye. Said describes The Anatomy of Criticism (published in 1957) as Frye's "summa" (Said, p. 39). Frye himself accounted for his Anatomy as a book that he had to write so that he could go on to write (decades later) what were, for him, the books that truly constituted his "summa," i.e., The Great Code and Words With Power. But then Said goes on to say something about Frye's humanistic project that is insightful though, again, not precisely correct: his "purpose was nothing less than an attempted Blakean-Jungian synthesis of the humanistic system organized into a mini-life-world ... The core of Frye's amazing invention is what Blake called the human divine, a macrocosmic man..." (ibid).

Yes and no.

Frye's humanism was deeply and unapologetically Blakean. His thought, however, owed nothing to Jung. He remarked somewhere (either in an interview or in his notebooks) that he was unaware at the time that he chose to speak of "archetypes" that Jung owned the patent on that term in the minds of academics. Presumably, Said attributed Jungian influence to Frye on that basis. For his part, Frye rejected the notion of a "collective unconscious" and never associated his notion of literary archetypes with it. If he was indebted to anyone for his use of the term "archetype," it was Oswald Spengler.

I omitted from the above quotation Said's other criticisms of Frye on the ground that they reflect, at best, a superficial reading of the corpus of Frye's work. Suffice to say, the accusation of Eurocentrism is applied to Frye in a heavy-handed manner--a trademark move of Said's and a charge to which Frye would have pled guilty on the ground that he was, openly and unashamedly, a scholar and critic of European literature. But, then, so was Edward Said.

Said's companion criticism, that Frye's approach to literary study was a-historical and, therefore, a-political, is best answered by Hayden White's exasperation with all who have leveled similar charges at Frye: "It seems incredible that anyone who has taken the least trouble to read any of Frye's work would credit him with such a banal conception of culture, literature, and history" (Hayden White, The Fiction of Narrative, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins (2010): 264). The frustrating thing about Edward Said's criticism of other scholars is that he all too often appears to have failed to have taken the least trouble to read their work. This failure is nowhere more evident than in Said's own magnum opus (not to say "summa"), Orientalism.

It is not my intention, however, to blacken the memory of Edward Said. I have learned from and profited much from Said's critical interventions over the years and I salute his unflagging and outspoken moral courage on behalf of Palestinian humanity. I miss the articulate voice with which he gifted the dispossessed and voiceless and I believe that his death has diminished us all.

Frye's purpose throughout his long and distinguished career was "nothing less" than an "attempted" Blakean humanism, the core of which was Blake's notion of the "human divine" or "macrocosmic man." What Frye sought to do with Blake was expand the limits of the humanistic imagination at a moment when what is called "human" was being reduced to "mere" matter by a positivistic scientism, on the one hand, and even eliminated from consideration altogether by an anti-humanistic Structuralism, and then post-Structuralism, on the other.

As Frye's Anatomy amply showed, he was not at all adverse to analyzing the products of human genius in terms of "structure"--again, a clear Spenglerian debt. Architecture can be, after all, a triumph of human creativity. Even when it is mundane and pedestrian, the human urge to build habitation is a "structuralist" compulsion. But, for Frye, as for every other sensitive human being, there is a difference between a house and a home. What that difference is--how it makes a difference--is the question to which Frye would continually return.

William Blake expressed this human difference as "divinity"--for the simple reason that post-Christian talk of human difference has a tendency to lose sight of the upper reaches of the humanly possible and fixate upon the lowest common denominators of social and/or biological determinism. And mark well: Blake was no Christian in any conceivable doctrinal or dogmatic sense of that term. Nor was he a theologian. Instead, he was a humanist who averred that all we can know of God is limited by our knowledge of "man" (generically understood).

Christ was a powerful symbol for Blake because it expanded the imagination of what is humanly possible. He was not interested, however, in an evangelical "personal relationship" with God through Christ. Instead, he argued that, because Christ was human, "Christ-ship" was within the grasp of every human being. And "Christ-ship" for Blake, as for Frye's Blakean humanism, means an expansive understanding of what being human can and ought to mean.

Philosophers of Human Freedom: Sartre and Northop Frye

2011-04-06T12:08:00.000-07:00

Hayden White was right to celebrate Northrop Frye as a thinker who, like Sartre, "was nothing if not a philosopher of human freedom, of artistic creativity, and beyond that of a generally human power of species self-creation" (White, The Fiction of Narrative, p. 266).

There are several reasons why the term "literary criticism" is not synonymous with the name Northrop Frye; none of these reasons are any good. They include:

1. Frye was Canadian and therefore not to be taken seriously unless the subject is ice hockey.

2. Frye learned to think by reading Blake and the Bible; most people, even educated ones, have difficulty reading either. The notion that they might learn to think by reading them is simply beyond their capacity and, therefore, out of the question.

3. Frye's knowledge of art, literature, religion, and politics was encyclopedic and put most of his critics to shame.

If all of Western philosophy is more or less prologue to Sartre, all of Western literary criticism is more or less prologue to Frye.

Making It Explicit: Frank Lentricchia's "Versions of Existentialism"

2011-03-06T17:43:00.000-08:00

Literary critic Frank Lentricchia's After the New Criticism (U of Chicago Press, 1980) makes explicit the connection between Wallace Stevens and Sartre. FL does not accomplish this feat by means of historical reconstruction (i.e., he makes no effort to prove "influence"); rather, he recognizes the conceptual kinship between Sartre's philosophical project and Stevens's poetic one.

FL took his cue from Frank Kermode's implicitly Stevensian book The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction wherein Kermode traces "the long tradition of postromantic epistemology which begins with the reorientation of the knowing subject effected by Kant and is later radicalized in directions that Kant would never have approved" (ANC, p. 31). The figures who radicalized Kant included Nietzsche, Vaihinger, William James, Ortega y Gasset and, last but not least, Jean-Paul Sartre, whose early work, according to FL, embodies "its ultimate extension" (ibid).

Yet it is Stevens, and not Sartre, who stands out in Kermode as "the culmination and summary representative" of what FL terms "the conservative fictionalist tradition in modern poetics and philosophy" (ibid). This tradition "captured the American theoretical imagination because it appeared to offer a clean break" with the "grander aestheticism" of Northrop Frye's Anatomy and the New Critical "isolationists of the image" (ANC, pp. 31-32).

Stevens's "conservative fictionalism" resides in his view of "truth" and "reality" as "alien" beings and as "'violence' which ever pressures us." The imagination, on the other hand, "is the response of our subjective violence which presses back against an inhuman chaos. Imagination makes space between us and chaos and thereby grants momentary relief from sure engulfment, madness, and death. With ['truth' and] reality so horribly privileged, fictions may be understood as heroic evasions..." (ANC, p. 33).

FL pronounces Stevens an "existentialist" because his "dominant theme is the stubborn independence, the final freedom of being from mind and the priority of natural existence over consciousness" (ANC, p. 34). For readers of Sartre, this dichotomy should sound oddly familiar. Like Sartre's ontological distinction between being and nothingness, Stevensian "poetics is a two-term system where fiction and reality engage in endless and complex play in which one term, while open to qualification by the other, always successfully resists subsumption by its opponent" (ibid).

These intriguing parallels merit further consideration and will receive it as we continue to explore the Sartre-Stevens connection.

More Notes on Sartre and Wallace Stevens

2011-03-03T14:51:00.000-08:00

M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, Oxford: OUP (1953), p. 335:

Coleridge very carefully kept science, poetry, and religion distinct by attributing each, primarily, to its appropriate faculty of understanding, imagination, and reason. It was only in the early Victorian period, when all discourse was explicitly or tacitly thrown into the two exhaustive modes of imaginative and rational, expressive and assertive, that religion fell together with poetry in opposition to science, and that religion, as a consequence, was converted into poetry, and poetry into a kind of religion.

Sartre and Stevens were both heirs to this early Victorian shift. Sartre converted its epistemological dualism into the phenomenological ontology of being and nothingness; Stevens into the metaphysical dualism of reality and the imagination.

Notes on Sartre and Wallace Stevens

2011-03-01T14:34:00.000-08:00

From the entry "Poetry" in the Continuum Encyclopedia of American Poetry, p. 900.

Wallace Stevens was another modernist poet whose influence would be deferred for many years; he was a symbolist like Eliot rather than an imagist like Pound and Williams. Stevens was an existentialist as well. Most of his poems were expositions of the proposition that mankind ought by now to have grown out of romantic notions that there is a god who created the universe and looks after everything in it. To believe in such a creator is to blind oneself to the fact that people need to perceive life with "a mind of winter"--as Stevens wrote in his poem "The Snowman" from his first book Harmonium (1923)--and become responsible for their own actions, make their own order out of the chaos of existence.

Kant's Universalism/Heidegger's Obscurantism/Sartre's Cosmopolitanism

2011-02-16T15:37:00.000-08:00

In the fourth thesis of his Idea for a Universal History, Immanuel Kant proposes a sociology of conflict anchored in an anthropology of "unsocial sociability." According to Kant, human beings enter into social bonds which they subsequently strain to the breaking point with their desire to assert their individual proclivities.

Kant argues that, far from being a "design flaw," this built-in tendency to conflict is Nature's way of forcing human beings to realize their innate powers.

Hegel will, of course, develop a similar schema into his famous dialectic. Marx will absorb Hegel and, in the process, invent the conflict model of modern social science.

Sartre is heir to this entire Enlightenment project. At the same time, he reaches back to Parmenidean ontology: there is being and there is nothingness. Unlike Parmenides, however, Sartre will not privilege being over nothingness. For Sartre, as for Kant, it is what we lack that drives us to invent ourselves vis a vis the herd.

In the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre doubled back to re-examine the herd and find its potential (previously unremarked by him) as the mass. Following Marx, Sartre became convinced of the revolutionary potential of the mass as individuals struggle with themselves and with each other to realize that which they are not and have not.

This is why I contend that all of Western philosophy is mere prelude to Sartre. Heidegger arrogated to himself the role of Western philosophy's midwife to a new way of thinking, but Heidegger's new way of thinking proved to be little more than the old way of thinking clothed in a German peasant's smock. He abandoned the challenge posed by Kant's universalism after he soured on National Socialism. He pretended to mysticism, but delivered only mystification and "post-modern" obscurantism.

Sartre absorbed Heidegger or, rather, those parts of Heidegger he found useful, and discarded the rest (a truly judicious use of the Heideggerian corpus). Attuned always to what is lacking, Sartre saw clearly that a new way of thinking was not necessary, but new ways to act. Heidegger had begun with that premise (existence precedes essence) but became confounded somehow: he became lost in the labyrinthine lucubrations that characterized his years of post-war exile and silence.

Not so Sartre. Perhaps because he abandoned academic philosophy, perhaps because he remained active in politics, in Paris cafe society, in the world of art and literature, Sartre remained faithful to his Copernican insight that "freedom from" and "freedom for" constitute philosophy's true subject and humankind's true interest. And rather than set himself up as some sort of gnostic eminence (a la Heidegger), knowing "the way" to thinking, knowing "the way" to language, Sartre knew only the way to nothingness. He knew this because he knew that nothingness is what eludes us and that what eludes us is forever with us. The way to nothingness is, therefore, always open.

As Parmenides put it: "What is there for thinking and for being is the same." That sameness bored Sartre. Besides, thinking is a way open only to the few. Action is open to everyone: therefore, nothingness (not being) is where the action is. What we lack is what we strive for; ultimately, it is also what we achieve.

Only the joke's on us. For every achievement is something, not nothing; and every achievement is something we will want freedom from. In this manner, Kant's Nature, Hegel's Spirit, Marx's matter carry on their eternal struggle through Sartre's Cosmopolitan ontology.

Philosophy begins with Parmenides and finds its true "end" (as Heidegger punned) in Sartre--who turned Parmenides on his head. What is not there for thinking and for being is not the same: it is difference. Heidegger wished to bury philosophy but only managed to give it a new lease on life. Sartre did not wish to bury philosophy but finally managed to bring it to rest--so that our true labor could begin. Again.

A Brief Kantian Interlude

2011-02-07T14:52:00.000-08:00

Kant's theses on universal history with cosmopolitan intent.

Notes On Sartre and Benjamin

2011-02-01T16:46:00.000-08:00

Sartre's late work on existential psycho-biography and a close reading of Walter Benjamin's Theses On the Philosophy of History discloses important parallels.

When writing a particular life (Genet's, Flaubert's, even his own), Sartre sifted his data for what he called, borrowing a term from Merleau-Ponty, the "differential": that which placed his subject out of step with the prevailing spirit or presumptions of his time and, as a consequence, permitted him to undertake a life-project that reflected the peculiar stamp of his individual consciousness. For Sartre, every life is filled with opportunities to step away from the drowse of "bad faith" that encumbers every life and embark upon a career of existential authenticity.

Benjamin, theorizing a Marxist historiography, focused not on specific individuals but rather on the sweep of history itself. And yet he, too, was in search of the "differential" that impregnated historical moments with "chips of Messianic time" (Addendum A): those historical junctures which presented historical actors with opportunities for revolutionary action. In Thesis XV, Benjamin wrote:

"The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action."

Likewise, the recognition of such moments in the course of sifting one's historical data presents the critical historian with the opportunity to salvage them from the ash-heap of the victor's narration of the past and, thereby, transform her scholarship into a mode of revolutionary praxis.

I am, at present, uncertain whether or not Sartre was familiar with Benjamin's Theses. I would be surprised if he were not; but this is a matter for further research.

Notes On Sartre and Marx

2011-01-23T21:28:00.000-08:00

Douglas Collins's Sartre As Biographer (HUP, 1980), though a monograph on JPS's relationship to the genre of biography is, at the same time, a lens through which Sartre's entire intellectual project may be comprehended. Indeed, I will be so bold as to say that JPS's relationship to this particular genre is the key to understanding his decisive contribution to modern thought.

Collins observes that "Sartre has an important place in the history of ideas, not because he developed a distinctive definition but rather because he broadened and applied the earlier ideas in new and unexpected ways. Only by reading Sartre in the context of his predecessors can one discover where the originality lies" (p. 32).

This sort of achievement is not unique to Sartre. Originality never involves creation ex nihilo--except in certain systems of theology (and theology is largely composed of what Wittgenstein termed "language on holiday").

Sartre, intent upon putting language to work, was no theologian. And the longer he labored with language, the more his attention shifted towards labor itself. His turn to Marx is therefore a source of embarrassment only to those who fail to appreciate the drift of his thinking over the course of his long and productive intellectual career.

Those who fail to appreciate the drift of Sartre's thinking are, by and large, intellectuals of the Liberal class: individuals who confuse freedom with license and, consequently, experience intense episodes of dyspepsia when confronted by Sartre's demands for moral responsibility and political commitment.

Liberals fawned over Sartre when they mistook him for the Philosopher of License. The love affair ended when Sartre began to point out that "men are free as well as determined, that they make their own history, though within an environment which conditions them. The seeds of such a method have always been contained within Marxism, and it is the historical task of existentialism, with its emphasis on the concrete man as the center of knowledge, to recall Marxism to its original interest in the specific human existence" (Collins, SAB, p. 27).

In other words, Existentialism was not conceived by JPS as a "stand alone" philosophical school but an adjuvent and corrective to what was, and remains, the most penetrating school of sociological analysis produced in the modern period: the school of Karl Marx.

Sartre and the Liberal Class

2011-01-02T17:12:00.000-08:00

Writing after the "death of god," Sartre attempted to anchor personal responsibility in ontology (since theology was not an option for him as it had been for Dostoevsky).

His subsequent eclipse among Liberal Class intellectuals is due to their discovery that this ontological anchoring of responsibility placed strenuous moral and political claims upon them--not what they had initially expected from the man who had promoted a philosophy of freedom (a concept that they had interpreted to mean "license").

As Dostoevsky explained in an edition of A Writer's Diary:

In the present shape of the world people think of freedom as license, whereas genuine freedom consists only in overcoming the self and one's will so as in the end to achieve a moral state such that always, at every moment, one is the real master of oneself...

Real mastery of the self consists, for both Sartre and Dostoevsky, in negation (Sartre would say, "in nothingness"); in both cases, in the ability to say "No."

"Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre" is a form of askesis. A hard sell in the era of Neo-Liberal consumerism and capitalistic commodification.

Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre

2010-12-27T11:10:00.000-08:00

The title of Walter Kaufmann's old gem says it all. Of course, Kaufmann was careful to qualify his title: Dostoevsky was not an Existentialist in any formal sense (but then, who is?); rather, his novella Notes From Underground was the "best introduction to Existentialism" that Kaufmann had ever encountered.

And he was definitely on to something; for Dostoevsky's revolt against scientific and materialistic reductions of human beings to "rational actors" prefigures Sartre's insistence that existence (being-in-itself) does not exhaust human possibilities. "Essence" (being-for-itself) remains a wild-card--even if, for Sartre, that wild-card signifies, at the end of the day, a "useless passion."

Sartre was himself an interesting amalgam of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy: refusing, like the former, to see the human being reduced to a "rational actor," Sartre likewise refused (in Tolstoyan fashion) to underestimate the human being qua rational actor.

Reading Sartre, one wonders whether George Steiner's formula "Tolstoy or Dostoevsky" ought not to be reinstated in a more inclusive vein: as with Black Liberation theologian James Cone's insistence that to choose between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X is to make a choice that is false to the full experience of African American history, so to choose between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is to make a choice that is false to the full experience of human history more generally.

A small amendment might do the trick: Tolstoy and/or Dostoevsky. Such is the Sartrean legacy to us all.

All Roads Lead To Sartre

2010-12-20T15:34:00.000-08:00

A. N. Whitehead famously remarked that all of Western philosophy was but a footnote to Plato. I am of the opinion that, in fact, all of Western philosophy is but prologue to Sartre.

Sufism Is Sophism...

2010-11-08T08:17:00.000-08:00

in the non-pejorative sense of the term. Sufism, typically identified as "Islamic mysticism," is better described as the wisdom tradition inspired by the narrated example of the life of the "seal of prophetic authenticity," i.e., Muhammad.

It is a telling sign and symptom of the persistent juvenility of American culture that so many "spiritual seekers" wish to enroll in the "graduate studies" of Islam (i.e., the wisdom tradition) without first undertaking a thorough tuition in the legal disciplines.

Likewise, it is a telling sign and symptom of the desiccated modernity of so many born and bred in Islamicate cultures who choose to forgo the tuition of the wisdom tradition and cling, thoughtlessly, to an arid legalism: one that does no justice at all to the historic partnership that Muslim jurisprudence forged with prophetic wisdom as the Umayyad era unfolded.

It is no doubt true that Sufism is a tree luxuriant of fruit, and that the Sophism which has hung from its boughs has not always proved fresh or ripe or even nourishing. Some who have tasted have been poisoned. But this is all the more reason why the Tree of Wisdom ought to be approached with caution, and the hand that reaches to pick its fruit first be disciplined by the ideal of a life lived in accordance with Prophetic example (i.e., Shari'ah).

Amateurs beware.

The Sophistic soul-craft that is Sufism is not to be read out of a book. It is a practice--a traditional craft--like weaving, that can only be learned in conversation with a certified practitioner. It requires a serious commitment of time, attention, and energy. It is an apprenticeship--nothing less.

Anyone who suggests otherwise is either misinformed or lying.

Why al-Ghazali Matters

2010-10-14T09:35:00.001-07:00

In December of 1995, in Paris, Brussels, and Ghent, I read Montgomery Watt's translation of al-Ghazali's Munqidh. His account of the application of systematic doubt in order to arrive at an understanding of how we "know" that which we claim to "know," and his positioning of this exercise as a prerequisite to accepting or rejecting religious claims, flew straight like an arrow into my Wittgensteinian heart. "If one is to embrace a religious tradition or to 'be religious' in any cognizable sense," I thought, "this is the way to approach it."

Al-Ghazali's reasoning led him to reject the search for "first principles"-- rendering Descartes's later Meditations quaint by comparison. Quaint and superfluous.

Moreover, he anticipates Kierkegaard's position insofar as S.K. regarded any appeal to first principles as self-deception.

According to al-Ghazali, S.K., and Wittgenstein, the chain of justifications ends not on its own but through intervention: the light of the Divine enters the heart (al-Ghazali), or the Knight of Faith steps out in trust (S.K.), or one eventually grows weary of the chase and declares "This is simply what I do" (Wittgenstein).

If one desires to be religious, one decides to be religious.

Such an explanation of human religiosity dissatisfies most religious people because it does not offer marching orders to anyone but to those who are already predisposed to be "on the march." It is an unfortunate state of affairs for sectarian apologists but al-Ghazali--at least at this point in his autobiographical narrative--was disinclined to offer any aid or comfort to sectarian apologists.

Al-Ghazali did not leave the matter there, however. For once one has decided to be religious, one must determine how to be religious. Here al-Ghazali's arguments tend to be circular as circularity is all that one can reasonably expect from someone who has abandoned the search for first principles. What remains useful in his approach is his desire to be thoughtful about his decisions. Al-Ghazali is a deliberate religionist; he is unwilling to embrace a belief or engage in a practice simply because other members of his community do so.

In this respect, al-Ghazali's approach is far less novel than it might appear at first blush. As Watt points out in his full-length study of al-Ghazali (Muslim Intellectual, 1963), al-Ghazali's teacher, Abu-'l-Ma'ali al-Juwayni (d. 1085 CE), had declared in his own autobiographical reckoning: "At an early age I fled from the acceptance of others' opinions..." (Watt, p. 24).

According to Watt, al-Juwayni's position commanded considerable respect: he was "the first theologian of his time" (Watt, p. 23). Al-Ghazali's trademark scepticism was, therefore, not unique nor was it unprecedented. It was a respected and familiar trait among thinking Muslims of the Age.

The Two Bodies of Literature that Matter

2010-09-20T06:19:00.000-07:00

Departments of literature be damned. There are two bodies of literature that matter in any individual's life: (1) Birthright Literature and (2) Acquired Tastes.

Birthright Literature is literature that bears an immediate and seemingly organic relationship to any given individual's native land and culture. This relationship is, in point of fact, an accident of birth; there is nothing about this literature that renders it intrinsically valuable or inevitable. It is the literature that one reads as a matter of course as a consequence of being born in a particular time and place. Its value and inevitability are functional: these qualities arise from the fact that such literature is absorbed by an individual's psyche like mother's milk and so it supplies the constitutional vocabulary and attitudinal thought-structure that serve as a standard of seriousness--a canon if you will--by which all future experiences with literature will be judged. In my own case, my Birthright Literature is American literature and the Bible.

Acquired Tastes are those literatures one finds oneself "instinctively" drawn to over the course of a reading life. I place the word instinctively in scare quotes because one's encounters with such literature are no less accidental than one's encounters with Birthright Literature. Nevertheless, one's readerly engagement seems to have a more arbitrary quality. This is a necessarily subjective assessment. For example, I need not have been drawn to modern French literature, Classical literature in Greek and Latin, 19th century Russian literature, or Arabic and Islamic literature over the course of my reading life--but I was and continue to be drawn to these Acquired Tastes. I am at a loss to explain why I have not found Chinese poetry more compelling--despite the fact that, whenever I have encountered it in translation, I have found myself invariably charmed. Likewise, the great Sanskrit classics (in translation) have the ability to move me, but they do not hold my attention for sustained periods of time. As the old saying goes, there is no accounting for taste.

By dividing literature into these two "bodies," I do not intend to create a center and periphery dichotomy--although I do not deny that such a dichotomy may present itself in the practices of an individual reader. Indeed, the human analytical tendency to divide (and conquer) is one that every reader should struggle to become conscious of and labor to ameliorate. The evolutionarily advantageous behaviors that social psychologists have identified as "in-group/out-group" extend to our reading habits. Caveat lector.

The Return of the Stoa

2010-06-09T12:09:00.001-07:00

Anyone who regularly peruses the philosophy sections of bookstores (as I do) will undoubtedly have noticed that one particular facet of the Socratic Movement--Stoicism--has become something of a cottage industry in recent years. As a self-identifying Socratic Fifth-Columnist, I welcome the revival of interest in this Hellenistic interpretation of the Master's teachings, but I also see in it a sign or symbol of our present stage of political consciousness: for the Stoics rose to prominence first in the aftermath of Macedonian imperialism (the conquests of Alexander the Great) and then again as the Roman republic gave way to the Roman Empire. The Roman Stoics (most notably Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca) have been receiving the lion's share of publishers' attentions. And why not? The analogies to present political realities seem most apt.

Hegel insightfully noted in his Preface to Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts that as every individual is "a son of his time," so "philosophy also is its time apprehended in thoughts." Sensitive thinking people living in the U.S. in the year 2010 and reeling from the blow that the Obama Administration daily delivers to the hopes for change that Candidate Obama had raised, feel their political disempowerment (not to say disembowelment) most keenly, and seek refuge in an ancient wisdom tradition--one born of the pressing need to cope with similar sources of disillusionment. One can hardly blame them.

This, then, is the politico-cultural context in which we welcome the University of Chicago Press's announcement that it is publishing the Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, newly edited by Shadi Bartsch, Elizabeth Asmis, and Martha Nussbaum.

As the publisher notes in the advertisement which appears in the June 24, 2010 issue of the NYRB: "...this engaging collection restores Seneca to his rightful place among those classical writers most widely studied in the humanities"--and does so right in the nick of time.

This should occasion no surprise: after all, what capitalism worthy of the name would fail to capitalize upon current angst? Besides, one could do much worse...

The Socratic Fifth Column

2010-03-16T16:08:00.000-07:00

In his book on the Socratic tradition in Medieval Arabic literature, Israeli scholar Ilai Alon traces the various routes by which Socratic material found its way into the Islamic tradition. The most direct route runs as follows: Socrates > Cynics; Stoics; Gnostics > Diogenes Laertius; Plutarch > Islam. Indirect routes involve Plato, the School of Alexandria (presumably Neo-Platonism), Christian tradition, Syriac literature, as well as Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Persia.

Abu Bakr ar-Razi, Al-Kindi, Ibn Sina [Avicenna], various Sufis and anti-Sufi Sufis ("God's Unruly Friends") all bear the marks of the Socratic imamate.

Abu Bakr ar-Razi (10th century CE physician of the soul) referred to Socrates as "our Imam" and would perhaps have been most comfortable with the title "Socratic Muslim" or even "Muslim Socrates."

In this way he anticipated Kierkegaard by nearly 1000 years. In the last of his works written for publication during his lifetime, SK wrote that "the only analogy I have for what I am doing is Socrates. My task is the Socratic task of revising the definition of what it means to be a Christian. Therefore I do not call myself a Christian (keeping the ideal free), but I can make it plain that nobody else is either" (from The Moment, published September 1855).

Those Muslims who honor Socrates tend to regard him as a prophet, a wise man, an "imam," or some combination of the three.

Whatever one calls him, he is a symbol of the subversive activity of inquiry that refuses to conflate credulity with faith.

Religious institutions cultivate the former; Socratic religiosity, the latter.

Among 20th century thinkers, perhaps no one was more Socratic than Ludwig Wittgenstein when he defined philosophy as a "battle against the bewitchment of the intelligence by means of language."

The Socratic elenchus is the manhaj (Arabic term meaning something close to "methodology") by which the ideological roots of presumptions are exposed to critical examination.

Why Al-Farabi Matters

2010-01-13T14:00:00.000-08:00

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 ash 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

2010-01-05T10:06:00.001-08:00

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

2010-01-04T14:45:00.001-08:00

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

2009-11-24T11:42:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-20T15:33:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-02T14:16:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-24T09:43:00.000-07:00

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...

What Hath Karamustafa Wrought?

2009-08-25T09:21:00.000-07:00

Ahmet T. Karamustafa's God's Unruly Friends accomplishes what all scholarship in the study of religion must accomplish (to be considered competent, in my view): it exercises the religious imagination and challenges the reader to expand her notion of what constitutes a particular expression of human religiosity (in this case, "dervish piety").

What Karamustafa shows us in his study is that certain forms of "dervish piety" in the Islamic Middle Period (1200-1550) were practiced outside--and as a criticism--of institutionalized religious practices.

Once we have learned to appreciate "dervish piety" as a particular, local expression of a more general, human phenomenon, we can see how such figures as Socrates and Diogenes of Sinope represented pre-Islamic expressions of this peculiar mode (and why they came to be revered, even regarded as "prophets," by certain Muslim intellectuals).

Moreover, we can move forward in time (for the arrow of time points where we aim it) and recognize other figures such as Walt Whitman, the later Tolstoy, or many other anarchists as "practitioners" of "deviant" renunciation and, depending upon the rationale they offer for their modus vivendi, ask whether, or to what extent, their protests represent branches of the dervish family tree.

When the artificial barriers that we have constructed to separate ourselves from the Muslim "other" begin to crumble, then Islamic Studies emerges in our academic practices as the new humanism. It is then that we learn to say with the Roman poet Terence:

Homo sum, nihil humani alienum a me puto.

The Dervishes Return the Favor

2009-08-20T10:11:00.000-07:00

If Middle Period Muslim Dervishes may be viewed as enacting the Romantic temper, may not modern Romantics be viewed, in turn, as enacting a Dervish sensibility? Consider this from the "deathbed edition" of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass:

A Persian Lesson

For his o'erarching and last lesson the greybeard sufi,
In the fresh scent of the morning in the open air,
On the slope of a teeming Persian rose-garden,
Under an ancient chestnut-tree wide spreading its branches,
Spoke to the young priests and students.

"Finally my children, to envelop each word, each part of
the rest,
Allah is all, all, all - is immanent in every life and object,
May-be at many and many-a-more removes - yet Allah,
Allah, Allah is there.

"Has the estray wander'd far? Is the reason - why strangely
hidden?
Would you sound below the restless ocean of the entire
world?
Would you know the dissatisfaction? the urge and spur of
every life;
The something never still'd - never entirely gone? the invisi-
ble need of every seed?

"It is the central urge in every atom,
(Often unconscious, often evil, downfallen,)
To return to its divine source and origin, however distant,
Latent the same in subject and in object, without one
exception."

Walt Whitman: Romantic poet and great American Dervish.

God's Unruly Friends

2009-08-19T14:40:00.000-07:00

With Pater's flexible definition of Romanticism, one can ask whether it makes sense to consider Dervish groups in the Islamic Middle Period (1200-1550) as Muslim Romantics. In his book, God's Unruly Friends, Ahmet Karamustafa compares these Dervish groups to "hippies" (though I think perhaps "proto-punks" might provide a more accurate analogy). In either case, what we are dealing with is a form of social and cultural protest that emerges when certain ideals (political and religious) are compromised and/or sacrificed for the sake of institutional exigencies and expedience.

Karamustafa points to the "normalization" or "mainstreaming" (not his terms) of Sufism during the period in question. He writes that Sufism (originally a protest movement against the rise of Muslim kingship after the death of 'Ali Ibn Abu Talib, the last Caliph who had been a member of the Prophet Muhammad's inner circle) and Sunnism entered into "close if not untroubled alliance" and, consequently, "became the major constituents of the new Islamic social order that emerged after the disintegration of the universalist 'Abbasid dispensation" (Karamustafa, p. 98).

Put simply, there were those in the Islamic community who regarded this new alliance as a form of "selling out." Whereas previously, Sufi identification had been a sign of political disaffection and, consequently, a little dangerous, it was now no longer considered as such. "The entrenchment of Sufism in society in the form of ubiquitous social institutions refranchised the dormant other-worldly trends of renunciation and anarchist individualism within Sufism" with the result that "deviant renunciation ... reclaimed its place on the agenda of Islamic religiosity as the active negation of institutional Sufism" (ibid, 99).

In Pater's terms, Sufism had traded its Romantic strangeness in order to become a more or less "known quantity" in the ordinary Muslim religious imagination. Thus domesticated, it could be accepted as "classically" Islamic. This new status provoked the Dervish reactions of "deviant renunciation" and "anarchist individualism"--a re-assertion of Sufi piety in its renegade incarnation.

Karamustafa wonders "aloud" if "the same forces that generated the movements of deviant renunciation from within institutional Sufism were not also at work in other aspects of Islamic religiosity during the same period" (ibid, 100). My reading of Marshall Hodgson's Venture of Islam and L. Carl Brown's Religion and State suggest that the answer to this query is an emphatic yes. With the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in 1258 (followed by subsequent waves of nomadic conquerors), the "separation of powers" that had naturally evolved in Islamdom during the period of Muslim kingship was fatally compromised. The cultural institutions of Muslim civil society (e.g., mosques, schools, public baths, etc.) that had been privately endowed and administered independent of the palace were increasingly drawn into its orbit and oversight. This change occurred as the Mongol's imposed their own "top-down" or vertical and militarized social structure upon all of Islamdom. Developed in the conditions of nomadism, the Mongol form of social organization entailed a command structure that was very successful in terms of efficiency, and promoted continual expansionism that translated, over time, into the rise of the three great "gunpowder empires" of Ottoman Turkey, Safavid Iran, and Timurid India. What was lost in the process, however, was the independence of the scholar-class from state co-optation.

Karamustafa points to the disaffection of figures such as Ibn Taymiya (d. 1328) from the "mainstream" 'ulema as evidence for a broader social and cultural reaction than that found among Dervish groups (although it must be remembered that Ibn Taymiya himself had Sufi affiliations). I would suggest that the roots of Dervish disaffection ran deeper and broader than discontent with the increasing social acceptability of the Sufi tariqas. Their protest was that of the Romantic consciousness which bridles whenever and wherever it feels that liberties it considers innate are betrayed and curtailed by human interference with divine legislation.

Pater on the Romantic Temper

2009-08-10T14:32:00.000-07:00

In his now canonical essay “Romanticism” published in Macmillan’s Magazine 35 (1876-1877), literary critic Walter Pater argued that the human repertoire of responses to the found world tends to oscillate between “classical” and “romantic” modes, i.e., between responses which privilege, respectively, the familiar and known over the unfamiliar and unknown and those which privilege the latter over the former. The conclusion one may draw from Pater’s formulation is that the particular concentration and constellation of Romanticisms that dominated late 18th and 19th century European culture was exceptional, but not unique. Romanticisms did not begin and end then and there. Indeed, they had been present within European literature in embryonic form in such works as Homer’s Odyssey and Dante’s Divine Comedy. The cultural transformation that occurred in the late 18th century, and throughout the 19th, was one in which Romanticisms ceased from being phenomena that waxed and waned but resisted complete occlusion to phenomena that wax and wane and are impossible to completely avoid.

"To Touch Without Self-Appropriation"

2009-07-02T14:47:00.000-07:00

In Judge Holden, from Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian, we encounter the anti-thesis of this Bloomian Romantic trope:

… Toadvine sat watching him as he made his notations in the ledger, holding the book toward the fire for the light, and he asked him what was his purpose in all this.
The judge’s quill ceased its scratching. He looked at Toadvine. Then he continued to write again.
Toadvine spat into the fire.
The judge wrote on and then he folded the ledger shut and laid it to one side and pressed his hands together and passed them down over his nose and mouth and placed them palm down on his knees.
Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.
He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he’d collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men’s knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.
What’s a suzerain?
A keeper. A keeper or overlord.
Why not say keeper then?
Because he’s a special kind of keeper. A suzerain rules even when there are other rulers. His authority countermands local judgments.
Toadvine spat.
The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.
Toadvine sat with his boots crossed before the fire. No man can acquaint himself with everything on this earth, he said.
The judge tilted his great head. The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.
I don’t see what that has to do with catchin birds.
The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I’d have them all in zoos.
That would be a hell of a zoo.
The judge smiled. Yes, he said. Even so.

As I have pledged to avoid drawing political implications in this blog, I will leave it at that.

A Bloomian Definition of Romanticism

2009-06-30T15:01:00.000-07:00

Harold Bloom, an intellectual heir to Walter Pater, offered the following definition of Romanticism (from Figures of Capable Imagination, published back in the mid-1970's):

Romanticism, even in its most remorseless protagonists, is centrally a humanism, which seeks our renewal as makers, which hopes to give us the immodest hope that we--even we--coming so late in time's injustices can still sing a song of ourselves. Despite all its studying of the nostalgias, the high song that is Romanticism persists in saying: 'Nothing need be lost--nothing is lost--if we will learn to listen again, and with the ear of the mind too, to see into the life of things and to see with the eye of the mind, to touch without self-appropriation.'

In his ever-so-idiosyncratic manner, Professor Bloom here put his finger on three important aspects of Romanticism as a perennial human tendency:

(1) It is a humanism, which is to say that its central concern is the creature who occupies time while longing for the eternal (or the not-time);

(2) It is a humanism which translates creaturely desire into visionary saying and hearing;

(3) It is a visionary humanism which attempts to "touch" with the eye of the mind that which lies outside the mind: the world. The world's body: like Leonard Cohen's Suzanne who has "touched your perfect body with her mind."

The refusal of solipsism, as well as the struggle or agon with time, are distinguishing marks of the Romantic impulse; an impulse we neglect at our peril.

The (Re-)Turn to Friedrich Schlegel

2009-05-15T15:42:00.000-07:00

To my way of thinking, one of the most interesting developments in recent American intellectual life has been the rediscovery of, and a renewed appreciation for, the neglected figure of Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829). I suspect--but question whether it is worth taking the time to prove--that the Schlegel revival is in some way connected with Richard Rorty's late attempt to give academic philosophy a decent burial.

I have noticed that recent treatments of Schlegel's legacy (beginning at least as far back as Adam Carter's article in parallax, vol. 4, no. 4 (1998) "'Self-Creation and Self-Destruction': Irony, Ideology, and Politics in Richard Rorty and Friedrich Schlegel") have attempted to offer Schlegel as something of a palliative for those who recognize the significance of Rorty's call for a Pragmatic and Romantic and ultimately post-philosophical approach to life but who--for a variety of reasons--cannot bring themselves to let go of philosophy's lure.

Carter has genuine disagreements with Rorty's politics (which he finds insufficiently left-leaning-radical) and questions the consistency with which the late philosopher presented his views; others, like DePaul University's Elizabeth Millan-Zaibert, author of Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy (SUNY 2007), argue that Romantic philosophy in the wake of Schlegel is an attempt to reform the philosophical inheritance bequeathed by Kant and Fichte rather than an attempt to abandon it.

In any case, F. Schlegel emerges from these studies as a formidable intellect whose interests and literary output enrich and deepen our understanding of what Romanticism has to offer us after what Walter Pater termed the "long ennui" induced by the Kantian and post-Kantian attempts to marry philosophy to the model of the natural sciences.

I shall be returning to Pater and Schlegel (among many others) again and again as I attempt to chart New Romantic approaches to life, religion, and literature in subsequent posts.

Not Another Blog!

2009-05-11T11:24:00.000-07:00

Oh yes. Another one. Though not intended to replace its sibloglings (The Mazeppist and Ghaffar Khan Society--see below), An American Athenaeum will serve as a repository of material that reflects (in a more academic vein than my other blogs) my three inter-related intellectual projects:

(1) “Islam in the American Grain,” a study of the phenomenon of Romantic Orientalism in American literature and intellectual life since the 18th century; included in this research is my investigation into Norman O. Brown’s late-life turn to Islamic studies.

(2) “The Romantic Roots of Religious Studies,” a re-description of the modern study of religion as inquiry into the religious imagination and, hence, a specific moment in the development of a more general theory of human creativity.

(3) Further development of Modern Qur’anic Hermeneutics, an approach to Qur’anic study which emerged from the early 20th century Egyptian Literary Renaissance (itself a product of Egyptian engagement with British and French Romanticism). I continue to apply the techniques of recent allusion theory and other literary critical and rhetorical tools to unpack Qur’anic meanings.

Some of this material has found its way (and will no doubt continue to do so) into the posts of the Ghaffar Khan Society and The Mazeppist with the provocativeness (even contentiousness) of the mode of Romantic irony that I have termed "Pantagruelism."

I cannot promise that I will not wear my lacerated Swiftian heart on my blogging sleeve when posting to An American Athenaeum, but I shall attempt to tone down the indignation a bit in the interests of minimizing distractions. Commentary upon subjects that beg for satire will continue to be posted at this blog's sibloglings--and, yes, as far as I know, I have this day coined that term.