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.