Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

Western monotheism--Judaic, Christian, Islamic--is perhaps not so much opposed as it is complemented by the reliance of Goethe, Emerson, and Freud on individual genius, or daemonic Eros. Secular wisdom tradition and monotheistic hope may not finally be reconcilable, at least not wholly, but the greatest of writers ancient and modern--Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare--contrive balances (however precarious) that allow prudential wisdom and some intimations of hope to coexist. We read and reflect because we hunger after wisdom. Truth, according to the poet William Butler Yeats, could not be known but could be embodied. Of wisdom, I personally would affirm the reverse: We cannot embody it, yet we can be taught how to know wisdom, whether or not it can be identified with the Truth that might make us free.

--Harold Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (2004), 284.

On Exactitude In Science: A Note From J. L. Borges

…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a
single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety
of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the
Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and
which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so
fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map
was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the
Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are
Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is
no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

—Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

[Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley].

The Prophet Mani

An article from the Encyclopaedia Iranica on Manichaeism: "the only world religion that has become completely extinct."

Or so they say...

Richard Shweder on Cliff Geertz

"He helped us imagine how it is possible for morally sensitive and intellectually reasonable members of divergent cultural lineages in the human family to live their lives guided by goals, values, and pictures of the world very different from our own...he suggested that

the Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against a social and natural background is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world's cultures [Geertz, "On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding" (1975, p. 48)].

...So he offered up a challenge: Can anthropologists, political philosophers, and globalization theorists develop a version of liberalism with both the courage and the capacity to engage itself with 'a differentiated world'? And can they do so with regard to, and respect for, a multicultural world in which at least some of that diversity has its source in the primordial ties of individuals to kith and kin and particular ancestral histories, and not in some original autobiographical act of free choice or expressive liberty? Cliff Geertz died before he was able to fully spell out his own affirmative response to his own questions. Nevertheless, in some ways his most significant legacy is his invitation to those of us for whom his voice was resonant to rethink the implications of political liberalism" [Richard Shweder, Clifford James Geertz, 1926-2006: A Biographical Memoir, Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences (2010), pp. 12-14].

As American political and cultural empire expands across the globe, the persistent moral question that its subjects (I'm afraid I cannot use the word "citizens" as that term ought to be reserved for use with the inhabitants of a republic) must try to answer for themselves is this: how much difference can we abide? Our track record on the North American continent (i.e., with respect to the indigenous populations and imported slave populations) ought to give us pause. The drive to (white-bread Protestant) homogeneity is troubling, to say the least.

In light of this challenge, Clifford Geertz emerges from the disciplinary field of anthropology as one of the most important intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century; in the opening decades of the 21st century, he becomes, like Richard Rorty, indispensable.

Geertzian Humanism: Again and Again

Back in the mid-1990's, after several conversations regarding Wittgenstein, law, and religion, a friend of mine picked up a copy of Clifford Geertz's Local Knowledge. After he finished reading the book, he came to me excitedly and said, "So this is where you've been getting your ideas!" I had to confess that I had not read Geertz at that point, that he had been languishing on my "to read" list for some time, but that I fully intended to read him. "Oh, you must!" my friend insisted. "He's your kind of thinker!"

In a way, I wish I had never had that conversation, because it unduly prejudiced me against Geertz. At the time, I was actively working through my own approach to law and religion and it was disconcerting to be told that I could have saved myself a lot of time and trouble by simply reading Geertz. When I did pick up Local Knowledge and, later, in graduate school, The Interpretation of Cultures, I am afraid that I was frequently predisposed to find where I disagreed with C.G. instead of celebrating the fact that he was an accomplished scholar who had thought deeply about the subjects that were integral to my own intellectual project and had reached many of the same conclusions that I would later reach (albeit independently).

Nowadays, I return to Geertz again and again, dipping into his writings for wisdom and insight. His importance to the history of humanism is, as Stephen Toulmin observed in Cosmopolis, comparable to that of Montaigne and Aristotle (see Toulmin, 43).

For someone like myself, an intellectual whose aspirational life has long been driven by a desire to come to terms with the different ways it is possible to be human, anthropology is an indispensable field of inquiry. When I first read Geertz, I was frequently disappointed by the relatively a-political nature of his writings. Not that the politics weren't there, but Geertz did not wear them on his sleeve (compared to someone like George Marcus, e.g.). Geertz's "aestheticism" made him appear less viable to me as a role model. These days, while I still value Marcus's contributions to anthropology, I turn to him less often than I do Geertz. My current view is that C.G.'s work has greater breadth and depth than Marcus's. Perhaps this is a sign of maturity on my part; perhaps it is evidence of surrender.

Some lessons we learn only the hard way.

Sign-Post

Civilized, crying: how to be human again; this will tell you how.
Turn outward, love things, not men, turn right away from humanity,
Let that doll lie. Consider if you like how the lilies grow,
Lean on the silent rock until you feel its divinity
Make your veins cold; look at the silent stars, let your eyes
Climb the great ladder out of the pit of yourself and man.
Things are so beautiful, your love will follow your eyes;
Things are the God; you will love God and not in vain,
For what we love, we grow to it, we share its nature. At length
You will look back along the star's rays and see that even
The poor doll humanity has a place under heaven.
Its qualities repair their mosaic around you, the chips of strength
And sickness; but now you are free, even to be human,
But born of the rock and the air, not of a woman.

--Robinson Jeffers

Rortian Humanism, Again

In the 1990's Rorty focused on literary criticism as the discipline best able to enlighten us about the different ways it was possible to be human, and so to expand our tolerance for diversity and our compassion for others conceived as different. The interest in literary studies was of a piece with the large role that an almost passive aestheticism had played in Rorty's outlook. For him the literary critic had replaced the philosopher in "the conversation of the west," and so explained why philosophy had almost lost out in the academy to English departments. The core area in which to look for wisdom was literature-- "plays, poems, and, especially, novels." To foster this interest, Rorty first supported pluralist efforts within the American Philosophical Association, but eventually, like Kuhn, gave up on the discipline of philosophy. His ideas had carried his fame beyond that profession. He left Princeton's department in 1982 for a position in the Humanities at Virginia, and, in 1998, for one in Comparative Literature at Stanford.

[Bruce Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America: 1720-2000, OUP (2001), 279-280].

Coincidentally, 1982 was the year that I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a B.A. in philosophy and classics. Disillusioned with both fields, I was determined to go no farther professionally in either one. Instead, I turned to a deep reading of Wittgenstein, Santayana, Robinson Jeffers, and Wallace Stevens, followed by Rorty and Tolstoy. I had left my university studies in order to think "about the different ways it is possible to be human."

My over-riding ambition in life has always and only been a modest and yet maddeningly elusive one: to be a human being.

Diogenes of Sinope

The lover of wisdom, par excellence.