The Proper Study of Humankind

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

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

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

"...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

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

"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

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

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

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

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"

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

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

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

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

Kant's theses on universal history with cosmopolitan intent.

Notes On Sartre and Benjamin

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

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

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.