Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marx: Another Reason That Hegel Matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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