Humanity's Debt To Paris

Paris is a living reminder of what can happen when a city embraces the notion that aesthetics ought not to be an afterthought.

H. L. Mencken

Saidian and Rortian Humanitas

In The World, the Text, and the Critic, the late Edward Said restates the three pillars of humanitas (cosmos, logos, and skepsis). Moreover, he extends the notion of skepsis beyond its definition (a suspension of final judgment upon matters where the available data simply does not warrant such finality) to its embodiment in critical practice: "...criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the interests of human freedom" [WT&C, 29].

It is no accident, by the way, that Saidian humanitas corresponds (nicely) with Rortian (where we find the concern for "the world" expressed as "solidarity," the concern for "the text" expressed as "contingency"--for all textual meaning is context dependent--and the concern for "the critic" expressed as "irony"--a word Said recommends that we couple with "criticism" [WT&C, 29]).

This correspondence is due to the fact that Saidian and Rortian humanitas are genuine modes of that peculiar disposition or orientation--where the genuine article is distinguished from "false friends" by reference to the confluence of its three pillars.

Heidegger's maddening Letter on Humanism aside, genuine humanitas is (and has always been) an orientation predicated upon cosmos, logos, and skepsis. The struggle with metaphysics--if it is even necessary--is but a side-show and a distraction. As Rorty reminds us in his late appreciation of Gadamer: "being that can be understood is language."

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Humanitas

The three pillars of humanitas (or humanism) are cosmos, skepsis, and logos. An individual becomes a humanist because s/he is gripped by a fascination for the mysterium or "elusive something" that seems to pervade human life. What does it mean to be a human being? That is the pervasive mystery. The fact that one might find him/herself at leisure to ponder such a question says a lot about the conditions under which humanism becomes possible.

A fascination with logos is often the entrance-way to a fascination for cosmos and a tendency towards skepsis: for the workings of language, when carefully considered, confront one with the varieties of order that human beings have produced across the globe and through time; they also raise more questions than a lifetime's worth of research can possibly answer. The enormity of the task that faces the individual who embraces humanitas (i.e., making sense of human being through that most human of faculties, language) cannot be underestimated. Skepsis (or a suspension of final judgment upon matters where the available data simply does not warrant such finality) is a natural concomitant.

The fascination for cosmos (varieties of order) combined with a tendency towards skepsis produces an interesting side effect: for this combination engenders a cosmopolitanism in the humanist. Cosmopolitanism results when exposure to the implacable fact of human difference creates not fear but wonder; in the event, an individual's acceptance of difference expands and parochialism recedes proportionately.

This is humanitas.

For most humanists, the mysterium of the three pillars of humanitas (the mysterium that forged them in its smithy) fully occupies their attentions. For others, there remains the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. The former kind of humanist is nowadays referred to as a "secular humanist"; the latter is referred to as a "religious humanist." The real difference between the two kinds of humanist is that the latter tends to hold that the mysterium tremendum et fascinans in some (mysterious) way possesses the key to answering humanitas's threshold question: what does it mean to be a human being? In addition, the religious humanist tends to suspend skepsis to some degree when it comes to considering the mysterium tremendum. Philosophers have endowed skepsis about skepsis in such matters with the technical name fideism. The humanism of Montaigne is a classic example of this type.

The Latter Day Vagabond Scholar

It is the fate of the vagabond scholar to be sacrificed on the altar of the ideal of disinterestedness. That is, in fact, our special calling. We are intellectual wanderers who demonstrate to others, by the kinds of questions that we ask, how it is possible to think the taboo--the otherwise unthinkable.

In thinking the otherwise unthinkable, we expand the universe of possible discourse. This is our service to humanity: we set ourselves the task of breaking silences where silences have been imposed in order to insure intellectual and (via the intellect) social conformity.

We are perpetual heretics, forever frustrating the peace of mind that orthodoxies promise. We are both the products of modernity and its facilitators--for modernity, as Peter Berger taught us long ago, "multiplies choices and concomitantly reduces the scope of what is experienced as destiny. In the matter of religion, as indeed in other areas of human life and thought, this means that the modern individual is faced not just with the opportunity but with the necessity to make choices as to his beliefs. This fact constitutes the heretical imperative in the contemporary situation. Thus heresy, once the occupation of marginal and eccentric types, has become a much more general condition; indeed, heresy has become universalized" [Berger, The Heretical Imperative (1979), 28].

Or so it appeared to sociologists of religion in the 1970's. We are a long way from the halcyon days of free thought and heresy has once again become the occupation of the marginal and eccentric. No matter. We follow our imam: Socrates.

American Orientalist Painting

Edwin Lord Weeks (1849-1903).

Why And How To Read The Bible

Norman Gottwald is a pioneering Marxist Biblical scholar--a distinction shared by far too few in his profession.

In my view, there are two reasons to read the Bible: the first is for aesthetics (that of the Biblical texts themselves and of the vast body of art and literature upon which they have left their impact), and the second is for its utopianism (the Bible's major contribution to the Near Eastern prophetic tradition).

While it is true that most Marxian social and economic categories belong to an industrial era and are not an exact fit for the prevailing conditions of ancient Israel, they are quite suggestive and shed light upon the problems of equality/inequality and liberation/bondage--problems that are not unique to modern societies but have plagued human communities around the globe for as long as human beings have lived in them.

Reading Gottwald, one is never very far from these issues--and that is a good thing, because too many people turn to the Bible in order to escape them.

The Sublime Summit of Literature in English...

is still shared by Shakespeare and the King James Bible.

--Harold Bloom, The Shadow of a Great Rock (2011), 1.

Even a litany of locusts such as that found in the prophecy of Joel--singing of agricultural devastation wrought by insects--possesses a beguiling sonority:

That which the palmerworm hath left hath the locust eaten; and that which the locust hath left hath the cankerworm eaten; and that which the cankerworm hath left hath the caterpiller eaten. (Joel 1:4).

"The largest aesthetic paradox of the KJB," writes Bloom, "is its gorgeous exfoliation of the Hebrew original. Evidently the KJB men knew just enough Hebrew to catch the words but not the original music. Their relative ignorance transmuted into splendor because they shared a sense of literary decorum that all subsequent translators seem to lack." SGR, 12.

Amen and amen.