Why Hegel Matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abrahamic Humanism

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

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

Would that it were that easy!

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

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

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

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

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

The Bridge of Criticism

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

Radical Enlightenment

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

What Hath Karamustafa Wrought?

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

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

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

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"

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

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

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!

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.