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.