More Faulknerian Humanism

Faulkner's Nobel Prize banquet speech.

Faulknerian Humanism

Faulkner, in The Reivers as elsewhere, conveys most powerfully his sense of astonishment at the irresistible resilience of the human spirit. He shows us again in this last novel his sense of wonder at human endurance and hope, his constantly renewed surprise at the spiritual strength of man who, like the Titans, seems to bounce back with renewed vigor at each apparent overthrow. From the godlike perspective of the writer, the sheer oppressive weight of circumstances seems overwhelming, and he writes in order to convey his astonishment at his own creations. Faulkner demonstrates conclusively in The Reivers...that his world view is neither an optimism nor a pessimism, but a humanism, a comprehensive acceptance of the human condition as a meaningful phenomenon, perhaps even a general delight at the variety and interest of life itself and a recognition that nothing but impossible and overwhelming difficulty could merit the engagement of untiring man...Perhaps the most interesting and even exciting feature of The Reivers as an expression of Faulkner's outlook is his final attempt to describe the ideal humanist. Faulkner does here arrive at something close to a definition, and he does so, not by abstract speculation, but by telling how a man must act. He falls back on the term "gentleman," and it seems as good a term as any.

A gentleman can live through anything. He faces anything. A gentleman accepts the responsibility of his actions and bears the burden of their consequences, even when he did not himself instigate them but only acquiesced to them, didn't say No though he knew he should.

Faulkner's gentleman sounds like Chaucer's knight. Faulkner believed that not only is such a model a possible reality, it is an absolute essential. Man is dependent on his own efforts to be a gentleman both for personal meaning and survival and also for racial purposes and improvement. A gentleman, too, fails, but he does not give up; he suffers, but he still hopes; he makes errors, he sins, but he is never lost. Faulkner sums it all up in a superb metaphor that might stand as a kind of subtitle to the entire body of his work: "A gentleman cries too, but he always washes his face." And the next sentence is "And this is all."

--Joseph Gold, William Faulkner: A Study in Humanism From Metaphor to Discourse, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press (1966), pp. 175; 186-187.

A Durkheimian Interlude

While every special sociological science deals with a determinate species of social phenomena, the role of general sociology might be to reconstitute the unity of all that is dissected by analysis in this way. The problems to which it should address itself with this aim in view are in no way vague or indecisive; they can be formulated in perfectly well-defined terms and are capable of being treated methodically.

From this viewpoint, one should particularly ask how a society, which is however only a composite of relatively independent parts and differentiated organs, can nevertheless form an individuality endowed with a unity which is analogous to that of individual personalities. Very possibly one of the factors which most contributes to this result is that poorly analyzed complex which is termed the civilization appropriate to each social type and even, more especially, to each society. This is because there is in every civilization a kind of tonality sui generis which is to be found in all the details of collective life...

The character of peoples is another factor of the same kind. In a society, as in an individual, the character is the central and permanent nucleus which joins together the various moments of an existence and which gives succession and continuity to life...

--Emile Durkheim, "Civilization in General and Types of Civilization" (1902).

Sufism as a Normative (or Therapeutic) Humanism

It is helpful to approach tasawwuf (Muslim pietism) as a kind of pre-modern psychology that has both normative and descriptive elements. Psyche-ology is, after all, the science of the soul. The "scientific" aspect of psychology is intended to be purely descriptive (a worthy, if unattainable, ideal). But psychology has never been "purely" descriptive; it has always included a therapeutic aspect, and therapy implies normativity.

One of the main assumptions that underlies tasawwuf is that human beings are works-in-progress. They possess conflicting urges and understandings of themselves and others. They require training in order to become fully or appropriately human beings (this is the normative/therapeutic aspect). Tasawwuf is not only Muslim pietism but also humanistic psychology.

Such an assumption does not fit well with the culture that predominates in the United States. That culture, built upon an assumption of inherent individual rights, proceeds from the proposition that the individual human being enters the world fully developed. All that is necessary for the world to work safely, fairly, and efficiently, is to remove impediments to the free exercise of those inherent rights. It is an interesting vision, but one that invites conflict as each individual struggles to assert his or her "inherent rights," frequently at the expense of those of another. Egotism all too often prevails over the common good.

A thousand years ago, the shaykhs of tasawwuf worked out the details of a different kind of culture: one that seeks to balance individual effort (self-culture) and group dynamics (learning to negotiate the exigencies posed by living in, and committing oneself to, a community).

In the 1950's, Norman O. Brown started his intellectual odyssey with Freud and eventually found his way (in the early 1980's) to explorations of tasawwuf. He was handicapped in those explorations by the relative paucity of material available to him in languages that he could read. Nevertheless, in his brief but intense period of Islamic Studies, he offered new directions to thinking about tasawwuf as a variety of humanism.