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The World Is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth : The Poetry Foundation

Heroes of Humanism: Seneca (d. 65 CE)

Of all men they alone are at leisure who take time for wisdom, they alone are alive. For they are not content to be good guardians of their own lifetime only. They annex every age to their own; all the years that have gone before them are an addition to their store. Unless we are most ungrateful, all those men, glorious fashioners of holy thoughts, were born for us; for us they have prepared a way of life. By other men's labors we are led to the sight of things most beautiful that have been wrested from darkness and brought into light; from no age are we shut out, we have access to all ages, and if it is our wish, by greatness of mind, to pass beyond the narrow limits of human weakness, there is a great stretch of time through which we may roam. We may argue with Socrates, we may doubt with Carneades, find peace with Epicurus, overcome human nature with the Stoics, exceed it with the Cynics. Since nature allows us to enter into fellowship with every age, why should we not turn from this paltry and fleeting span of time and surrender ourselves with all our soul to the past, which is boundless, which is eternal, which we share with our betters?

--Seneca, "On the Shortness of Life," tr. John W. Basore (slightly altered).

Heroes of Humanism: Khosro I Anushirvan (531-579 CE)

Famous for his justice, Shah Khosro I was a strong supporter of Mazdean Zoroastrianism and cultivated the study of literature and philosophy at his court. He suppressed the followers of the apocalyptic preacher Mazdak and introduced a variety of reforms to the bureaucracy of the Sasanid state. He had literature translated from Greek, Syriac, and Sanskrit into Middle Persian, kept up with the latest astronomical observations, and entertained at his court philosophers exiled from Athens. In 561, he negotiated a fifty year peace with his rivals in Byzantium, though the treaty was broken in 571 during an Armenian revolt.

The Peculiar Case of Boethius [6th Century C.E.]

The assumptions upon which Boethius' philosophical position rests, and the detailed arguments by which his position is expressed are, for the most part, not original [but]...derived from the classic works of Greek and Roman philosophy, most notably from Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, and from the Neo-Platonists, and adapted during the Patristic period to the theology of Christian revelation. What is new in The Consolation, and the reason for its lasting influence and importance in the history of medieval philosophy, is the expert synthesis of these traditional ethical doctrines by an author who consciously limits his consideration to the powers of natural reason without direct recourse [to], or even mention of, Christian revelation.

--from R. Green's "Introduction" to his translation of the Consolatio (xv). Emphasis added.

Wilhelm Dilthey

Whoever studies history and society is everywhere confronted by abstract entities such as art, science, state, society, and religion. These are fog-banks that obstruct our view of reality, yet cannot themselves be grasped. Just as substantial forms, mystical forces, and essences once stood between the eye of the scientist and the laws governing atoms and molecules, so these entities veil the reality of socio-historical life, the interaction of psychophysical life-units as regulated by the conditions of nature and the natural genealogical articulation of human life. I would like to demonstrate how to see this reality--an art of seeing which needs to be practiced for a long time, like the art of perceiving spatial forms--and to drive away these fog-banks and phantoms.

Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, Vol. 1, ed. Makreel and Rodi, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1989), 93.

Montaigne's "Jewishness"

We live in strange times. Too often, scholarship becomes the battle ground of our "culture wars" and identity politics. Even our dear Michel de Montaigne--who managed to safely navigate the cultural conflicts and civil strife of 16th century France--is, through insinuation, not argument, retrospectively recruited to score points on behalf of Catholic identity, or atheism, or Jewish identity. It is a sad state of affairs.

The facts are well known. Montaigne's mother was descended from Spanish Jews and a convert to Protestantism; Michel himself was raised as a Roman Catholic. His "scriptures," however, if by that term we mean the texts upon which he meditated constantly and that informed his thinking about the world, were composed by pagan intellectuals from classical Greece and Rome. Montaigne was an early modern humanist. He expressed personal loyalty to the faith of his baptism (Catholicism) but regarded his Catholic identity an accident of birth. He never felt moved to change his accidental confessional affiliation because, to put it bluntly, his broadly skeptical epistemology made him, for the most part, religiously apathetic. Besides, in his own time, confessional changes were political statements. To change one's confessional identity from Catholic to Protestant was revolutionary; to convert from Catholicism to Judaism would have been reckless; to declare oneself an atheist was just as dangerous as conversion to Judaism (if not moreso); converting to Islam would have been bizarre, and possibly suicidal; conversion to Hinduism, Buddhism or even Eastern Orthodoxy, simply unthinkable. His religious choices were really quite limited and, as far as he was concerned, the differences among the choices realistically available to him (Protestant or Catholic) were not differences worth losing one's life over.

The fact that he had "Jewish blood" as it has been termed by some commentators did not make him a humanist or a skeptic. It is reasonable to infer that the persecution his mother's family had faced made him sensitive to the problem of religious persecution more generally, but he lived in an age when religious persecution was pandemic--he did not require exposure to anti-semitism to be sensitive to the depth or scale of the problem.

"Jewish blood" (which is no different than any other type of human blood) did not determine Montaigne's thinking and, frankly, those who would make such a suggestion out of sympathy or bigotry have abandoned scholarship for the low road of cultural politics, if not racism.

Auerbach In Istanbul

Finding humanism's haven in Istanbul Israel News | Haaretz

Tolstoy's Library

"In the stationmaster's house at Astapovo, Tolstoy reportedly had two books by his bedside: The Brothers Karamazov and the Essais of Montaigne. It would appear that he had chosen to die in the presence of his great antagonist and of a kindred spirit. In the latter instance he chose aptly, Montaigne being a poet of life and of the wholeness of it rather in the sense in which Tolstoy himself had understood that mystery. Had he turned to the celebrated twelfth chapter of Book II of the Essais while composing his fierce genius to tranquility, Tolstoy would have found a judgment equally appropriate to himself and to Dostoevsky: C'est un grand ouvrier de miracles que l'esprit humain..." --George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, 348.

In addition, one of Tolstoy's daughters is reported to have found a copy of Allamah Sir Abdullah al-Mamun al-Suhrawardy's The Saying of Muhammad in her father's overcoat after he died [see Hassan Suhrawardy's 1941 "Preface" in current reprints].

From Montaigne to Ghazali and Back

Reading Montaigne in 1989 confirmed my intuition that, far from destroying faith, skepsis or honest doubt purifies faith by scrubbing it clean of credulity. I wanted to read more "religious thinkers" like Montaigne but discovered that he is rarely considered a religious thinker. This is partially due to the fact that Montaignean Christianity never really caught on.




Ironically, it was in Paris, in 1995, that I first read William Montgomery Watt's translation of al-Ghazali's Munqidh Min al-Dalal ("that which delivers from error") and, there, in what was ostensibly "Montaigne country," I encountered a religious thinker who, 500 years before Montaigne, had articulated what would become a Montaignean approach to religion. To my astonishment, I discovered, as well, that (unlike Montaigne's relation to Christianity) al-Ghazali is central to the Islamic tradition: he is, in fact, comparable to a St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas in the history of Islamic thought.

Reading Montaigne prepared me to read al-Ghazali. Re-reading al-Ghazali has prompted my return to Montaigne. Placing the two in "conversation" is rich, very rich.

What We Accomplish When We Search for the Sublime in the Bottomless Self

In Search of the Sublime-Fourth Installment

Now, the view from Montaigne's tower:

I began to read the Essais of Montaigne in the late 1980's. I was in law school at the time, and hungry for anything that could re-humanize me. For although the law contains within itself great humanizing potential, it rarely lives up to it.

In his late thirties, Montaigne left his own legal practice to take refuge in his tower and, there, rediscover his own humanity. He, too, went in search of the sublime, but wanted what we might call a homely sublime--for he knew that the sublimity which unhouses us is unsustainable over the long term.

Alan Levine, one of the most perceptive readers of Montaigne in a generation, put it this way: by means of his solitary inventories of himself, Montaigne discovered that the self is "bottomless." Instead of occasioning despair, this realization prompted him to advocate self-exploration as a pleasurable end in itself. Of course, he understood the dangers that such activity entails--but they are not what one may think. Navel-gazing is not the problem. The problem is that human beings, finding no unitary "there" there, become desperate to latch on to one particular dimension of themselves to the exclusion of all others. This one particular dimension then becomes the self, but that is an illusion. Levine observes that "Montaigne is not against this on a temporary basis, for one must act on one's desires and wills in order to explore them, but one must never lose sight of the rest of oneself, to rob oneself of one's possibilities" (Levine, Sensual Philosophy, p. 7). A false "finding" of the self is, paradoxically, a flight from one's "authentic" self (the empty room of the self): something like what Sartre would later term "bad faith."

So we have here two kinds of sublimity: that which transports us out of our grooved ruts, our accustomed selves, and breaks the spell of the myth of the unitary self and that which we discover in the process--the "homely sublime" that subsists within every human psyche. It is the limitations of the false or illusory self that we must flee--limitations that we impose upon ourselves but that others also impose upon us as well (indeed, we may learn to engage in self-limitation at the prompting of others--one of the casualties of living in society and becoming attached to communities, institutions, and social networks).