Marshall G. S. Hodgson (1922-1968)

Marshall Hodgson was the greatest Islamicist that the United States has yet to produce and a pioneer in the emerging field of World History. As far as Islamic Studies are concerned, Norman O. Brown called Hodgson "our Copernicus." On page 158 of volume one of his magisterial three volume The Venture of Islam, Hodgson included an autobiographical footnote (n. 11) that illuminates both his scholarship and the academic study of religion as he practiced it. Hodgson wrote:

I am personally a convinced Christian, of the Quaker persuasion, but neither here nor earlier do my general formulations on the nature of religion represent Christianity as such. If they represent anything, it is the sort of considerations that have been developed in the modern discipline of religion studies in the works of such scholars as Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade; not without influence from the anthropological tradition (e.g., Bronislaw Malinowski, Paul Radin), the sociological (e.g., Emile Durkheim), certain psychologists (e.g., Carl Jung), and philosophers (e.g. Ernst Cassirer, Wm. James, Albert Camus).

The Camus reference has always pleased me and, to an extent, surprised me. The French author and playwright has been important to me since I first read portions of L'Etranger in tenth grade French; I have long been thankful that Hodgson listed him among his influences in religious studies. Camus belongs there as a sympathetic religious critic of the first order.

Once Upon A Time In America

Relics of the Leftist past.

SAMUEL BARBER - Adagio for Strings, Op. 11

Walter Lippmann

Yet another book that I first read around age 16 and that had a profound effect upon the way that I continue to think is Walter Lippmann's A Preface to Morals (1929).

Like Wallace Stevens, Lippmann was a student of George Santayana. He also studied with William James. His thought displays an interesting confluence of those two Harvard colleagues.

From reading Lippmann I discovered that, while modernity is a fact, modernism is an ideal. I am not certain that Lippmann himself was very clear on the distinction, but his very lack of clarity may have made the distinction obvious to me. It is for this reason that I have long cherished Bruno Latour's observation that "We have never been modern." My riff on Latour is that all of us are modern--whether we like it or not--but few of us are modernists, i.e., are among those who have considered the advantages and disadvantages of modernity (casting a cold eye on both) and have made conscious choices about what to embrace and what to resist in the modern condition.

Reading Lippmann's Preface convinced me that modernist religion need not be rational, but it must be reasonable. Moreover, his discussion of "high religion" as a modern, humanistic mode makes the case (possibly without knowing it) that tasawwuf has all the credentials it needs to be the modernist religion par excellence.

As Lippmann himself would say: "The stone that the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner" (Luke 20:17).

That Wily Dervish, Jacques Derrida

John Caputo has labored a lifetime to interpret that wily Dervish, Jacques Derrida.

Word.

Two Books In My Personal Canon

One never knows, when picking up a book and reading it, what impact it will have over the course of a lifetime--especially a life lived, as mine has been, among books. I have long acknowledged the importance of Robert Bretall's A Kierkegaard Anthology, first read when I was sixteen, to my intellectual formation.

I still have my original copy of the book with its yellowed pages and now-faded highlighting.

A book I read subsequent to Bretall was William Barrett's Irrational Man; I may have been seventeen by the time I began to work my way through Barrett.

For some reason, I tend not to credit Barrett's book as I should. This may be because Barrett offered an interpretation of "existential philosophy," whereas Bretall's Anthology provided me with primary source material.

Yet, picking up Barrett's book again--with its red ink underlining and cracked spine--I find myself pulled back in time, into the strange thrill I felt when I first encountered the Sartrean mantra "existence precedes essence."

Why did such an assertion strike me, at the time, as so powerful, so profound? Like many American adolescents of the mid-to-late 1970's, I was ambivalently rebellious but definitely restless: frustrated and alienated by my bourgeois upbringing in the suburbs of a post-War industrial capital. But why should Sartre's simple (some might argue simplistic) summation of Heidegger's attempt to turn the history of European metaphysics on its head "speak" to my condition?

It is baffling to consider how deep was the impact of that phrase--especially baffling in light of the fact that, at the time, I knew nothing, or next to nothing, about the history of European metaphysics. I knew only Kierkegaard's almost pathological rejection of Hegelian system: but that, too, had struck me as unerringly on target.

Perhaps the appeal of these books and the ideas to which they introduced me lay in the message that I, as a restless adolescent, took from them:

Your situation here is temporary and, in any event, is an accident of birth. You are not stuck here, nor is your ultimate fate determined. If you do not yet know who you are, it is because who you are has not yet been decided. Existence precedes essence. You are not yet who you shall become...

Such a message was gospel to me; it was a source of strength and of hope (not, as many seem to read the message of Existentialism, one of despair). It taught me that my feelings of alienation were perfectly natural--and that those who did not share them were probably in for a rude awakening at some point in the future.

Of course, the irony is that, nearly four decades on, the same message continues to reverberate in my consciousness: You are not yet who you shall become...

But, at this point, "who I shall become" no longer interests me: for "I" no longer interest me--at least not in the obsessive, self-absorbed manner of the modern American adolescent.