The Neglected Walter Kaufmann

And an essay Kaufmann published in Harper's in 1959 and later expanded into a book (that I read and re-read during my last two years as an undergraduate).

William Blake: Preface to 'Milton' (Jerusalem)

The Neglected Knut Hamsun

Love is God's first word, the first thought that sailed through his brain. When he said, "Let there be light!" there was love. And everything that he made was very good, and no part thereof did he wish undone. And love became the world's beginning and the world's ruler; but all its ways are full of flowers and blood, flowers and blood.

Knut Hamsun, Victoria, tr. Sverre Lyngstad, Penguin (2005), 18.

The Neglected Martin Buber

Martin Buber, Anarchist.

Ibn 'Arabi's Theory of Everything (and No-Thing)

I first read William Chittick's Imaginal Worlds about 15 years ago. It is an ambitious work, insofar as it attempts to provide a succinct summation of Ibn 'Arabi's (d. 1240 C.E.) life's work: a "theory of everything (and no-thing)." Having just read the book a second time, I was surprised to discover how much I'd retained. I think this may be due, in part, to the fact that Chittick constructed this volume from a collection of essays that he had written on other occasions but re-worked into chapters. As a consequence, the book is somewhat repetitive. Given the subject matter, the repetition is helpful for, without it, the effort to comprehend the Shaykh al-Akbar's visionary system would likely issue only in bewilderment.

That said, it is difficult to say more about such a book and such a subject. Ibn 'Arabi was clearly a genius of world-class stature. If you accept his premises, it is almost impossible to avoid his conclusions. In order to accept his premises, however, you must also take on faith propositions that violate the Aristotelian law of non-contradiction--re-styling them, in Kierkegaardian fashion, as "paradoxes"--and demonstrating, yet again, that the religious imagination is the human "faculty" that never loses patience with aporia.

Frederick Douglass

What to the slave is the fourth of July?

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.