From Marx to Brown to Alfarabi

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

Karl Marx's famous 11th thesis on Feuerbach never fails to stir the utopian eschatologist in me; at the same time, however, it always leaves something to be desired. I cannot help but wonder what might have happened to the Left, historically, if interpretation had not been so easily dismissed as antithetical to change in this foundational call to Leftist action.

Of course, one may argue that the New Left and its post-modern progeny fell so deeply in love with theory that, for them, a world well-theorized is itself a world turned upside down--so never mind the barricades, they are obsolete. It is one thing to know your Marx and Engels, another thing to live what you know.

Praxis was always supposed to be theoretically informed political action. When praxis fails to deliver the desired results, we ask ourselves: "What went wrong?" What we usually want to know when we ask this question is: "How did we fail to follow the theory?" Occasionally, we ask: "How has the theory failed us?" In both cases, failure prompts us to find a way to assign blame. And blame is assigned, the world turns and, yet, stays the same.

Frustrated by this repetitious state of affairs, Norman O. Brown turned to Freud. It was clear to Brown that we are all mysteries to ourselves and that Freud (perhaps following Nietzsche) knew it. Brown wanted to break out of the cycle of praxis-failure-blame-praxis and he felt that the only way to exit that merry-go-round was to crack the code of the human heart.

It was an ambitious project from the start: one that led Brown on a fascinating odyssey through heterodox varieties of Christian mysticism to Islamic studies and beyond. The tragedy of this quest was that Brown had to pursue it alone. His allies on the Left (including his old friend Herbert Marcuse, for instance) were unwilling to entertain the possibility that Brown might be on to something important.

Brown was on to something important: indeed, in his Islamic studies he had instinctively found his way to the source of an alternative praxis--one that recognizes the critical position of the "heart" (human desire) for politics. Unfortunately for Brown, when he was investigating the history of Muslim thought, Western scholarship on Alfarabi was still trapped in the euro-centric view that falsafah was nothing more than Greek "philosophy" in Arabic dress. Consequently, Brown could not see that Alfarabi, by "liberat[ing] statesmanship from the tutelage of philosophy" and making politics "an autonomous sphere, like medicine," had laid the groundwork for a sense of the political that Brown would try to imagine (roughly 1,000 years later) as "metapolitics" (see Christopher Colmo, Breaking With Athens: Alfarabi As Founder, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books (2005), 167-168).

Beginning with Love's Body, Brown attempted to make the move from politics to metapolitics. In this move, he had a potential ally in Kojeve (whom he had read). But without the mediation of Alfarabi, the necessary connections could not be made.

A Neglected Genius

The man who has not experienced the fear of death does not know that the given natural World is hostile to him, that it tends to kill him, to destroy him, and that it is essentially unsuited to satisfy him really. This man, therefore, remains fundamentally bound to the given World. At the most, he will want to "reform" it--that is, to change its details, to make particular transformations without modifying its essential characteristics. This man will act as a "skillful" reformer, or better, a conformer, but never as a true revolutionary. Now, the given World in which he lives belongs to the (human or divine) Master, and in this World he is necessarily Slave. Therefore, it is not reform, but the "dialectical," or better, revolutionary, overcoming of the World that can free him, and--consequently--satisfy him. Now, this revolutionary transformation of the World presupposes the "negation," the non-accepting of the given World in its totality. And the origin of this absolute negation can only be the absolute dread inspired by the given World, or more precisely, by that which, or by him who, dominates this World, by the Master of this World.

Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. by James H. Nichols, Jr., Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (1980), 29.

The Academic Study of Religion: Laying the Foundation for the Next Great [Political] Awakening

As God's unruly friends are painfully aware, in the thoughts and lives of most people, religion rarely rises above an organized or collective expression of inherited prejudice. Of course, the same could be said (and ought to be said) about patriotism and, frankly, any other ideological loyalty.

What distinguishes ideology from mere ideas is its supposed self-evidence. Consequently, one of the primary tasks in the non-sectarian academic study of religion is to revive students from the stupor that overtakes their minds when drinking from religion's ideological waters of Lethe--a form of "refreshment" that many of them consume quite liberally from childhood on. As this "awakening" occurs--what is really a coming to self-consciousness--the basic principle must be established: religion is not so much the problem as is operating in one's daily life on auto-pilot. That is the real enemy. For a person to be "educated," i.e., to have attained an acceptable level of active intelligence, the mind must run on all cylinders. And once the practice of awakening the mind is acquired in the study of religion, the student must learn to extend that practice to other areas of thought and life--not least of which is the political.

It is, in fact, in this way that the academic study of religion contributes to the construction of democratic selves and the aspiration towards democracy that, one hopes, will someday infect the general population of the United States as it appears to have infected populations in other parts of the world (Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Tunisia, Sudan, etc.). But we are a long way from the dawning of that happy day and there is much, much work to be done in the meantime.

The Central Question

The central question of my intellectual life, since I first began to think for myself with any credible degree of sophistication (i.e., when I began to read Kierkegaard around age 16), has been this: What has Athens to do with Jerusalem (and, by the same token, Ctesiphon with Yathrib)?

For Tertullian--who first posed the question (as a rhetorical exercise, more or less)--the presumptive response was negative: Athens has nothing to do with Jerusalem. And yet, had this been the case, biblical religion would never have evolved much beyond its origins as a priestly cult of sacrifice. The prophetic (i.e., ethical) tradition would have emerged regardless, but the intellectual hunger that eventually gave birth to the natural sciences would have gone unsatisfied. So we would have had a world in which priest-craft promised magic and redemption, moral conviction thundered, and nature was analyzed and, in part, harnessed--without reference to ethics or culture.

This is the world to which we seem to be, at present, reverting.

I find this world to be a dangerous place, because it is filled with certainties that resist all nuance and attempts at mediation and translation across the boundaries that separate priest from prophet, prophet from scientist, and scientist from priest. It is a world without poets and musicians: a world without humanists and the humanities.

Jerusalem without Athens and Yathrib without Ctesiphon are walled cities whose inhabitants are smug, self-satisfied, blind know-it-alls. Such a world is easily divided against itself; it invites conflict and fratricide.

The central question of my intellectual life has been, and remains, how do we avoid creating such a world?

My answer: we must insist on making room for the posing of this question not, as Tertullian did, as a mere exercise in rhetoric with a pre-determined answer, but as humanists have done since the beginnings of Mesopotamian civilization: as a challenge to our creativity, a spur to the imagination, and a call to lives of study and deliberation. Humanism does not provide answers to this question, it is itself an answer to this question.

Tillich's Ontology Re-Visited

In a series of lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in 1951, Paul Tillich attempted to demonstrate that "Biblical religion" is not only compatible with ontological speculation, it presumes such speculation. Tillich chose this subject in an effort to answer the charge of his critics that "theology has to restrain itself from using philosophical terms" [see Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality, vii].

Such charges are not unique to Christianity, of course, nor are they of recent vintage: Tertullian's rhetorical question, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" has been periodically posed by the Muslim and Jewish critics of their respective philosophical traditions and, in Tillich's hands, Christian theology was always deeply philosophical in method and tenor--so much so that Paul Kurtz chose to include a chapter on Tillich in his 1966 "sourcebook" American Philosophy in the Twentieth Century.

What interests me about Tillich's reply to his critics is the indirect light it sheds on certain aspects of the Islamic tradition and, in particular, upon Muslim pietism (i.e. tasawwuf). Indeed, I read Tillich's text as a superb introduction to what tasawwuf became as it moved from the "edge" of the ever-evolving tradition (a social, not geographical, location) to its "center" by the 12th century of the Common Era (for this use of the terms "edge" and "center" see Richard Bulliet's Islam: The View from the Edge).

Tillich began his lectures by defining his terms: the phrase "'biblical religion' stands for two things: divine revelation and human reception" (21). Where the latter aspect is concerned, "biblical religion belongs to the whole history of religion. Everyone who knows something about the historical settings of biblical religion knows how much they were influenced by the surrounding religions and how many analogies can be drawn between biblical and other religions" (ibid). What Tillich appears to be pointing towards here is the socio-historical and cultural contexts from which biblical literature emerged. Marshall Hodgson's notion of an Irano-Semitic civilizational complex relieves Tillich's conception of some of its inherent ambiguity, but more can be done. Biblical literature includes the Bibles that have come down to us from Jews and Christians (inclusive of canonical and extra-canonical materials as well as exegetical works on the same). As artifacts of the history of Ancient to Late Ancient Near Eastern religiosity, these texts are cousin to Mesopotamian locative epic (e.g., Gilgamesh) and Persian utopian prophecy (e.g., the teachings of Zarathustra). But they are more than that: for critical textual analysis has repeatedly demonstrated the "incestual" relations between and among these cousins. "Influence" is too weak a metaphor for the relationships that obtain.

As divine revelation, on the other hand, biblical religion purports to put human beings into an intimate relation with a non-human being and yet does so, as Tillich attests, in an indelibly personal way. The catalytic conflict of Tillich's book arises out of the apparent contradiction between Biblical "personalism" and the impersonal philosophical category of Being that Tillich derives from the Greeks--as substantially mediated (without direct acknowledgment) by Martin Heidegger's Being and Time.

For Tillich, these two aspects of biblical religion are not, in fact, contradictory but only apparently so; they stand in dialectical relationship to one another:

Wherever the divine is manifest, it is manifest in "flesh," that is, in a concrete, physical, and historical reality, as in the religious receptivity of the biblical writers. This is what biblical religion means. It is itself a highly dialectical concept. (5)

The impersonal philosophical category of Being invites "metaphysical speculation"--a phrase that Tillich dismisses as "black magic" (8). He wants to avoid metaphysical speculation and prefers to speak of "ontological analysis" which, in his usage, has the character of Husserlian phenomenology: "one has to look at things as they are given if one wants to discover the principles, the structures, and the nature of being as it is embodied in everything that is" (ibid).

This locution, however, suggests that "being" is something that is distinct from "everything that is"--a highly contestable claim.

In any event, it would seem that the distinction between "being" and "everything that is" has already been suggested by the title of this series of lectures: Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality--with "ultimate reality" as a synonym for "Being Itself."

Anyone who wishes to study this subject must first reconcile herself to the discomforting fact that it is the search itself that may be studied; "Being Itself," on the other hand, remains, paradoxically, both ready-to-hand as (Heidegger would say) and perennially elusive.

As mentioned above, it is as an unwitting introduction to tasawwuf or "Muslim pietism" that Tillich's book fascinates. I first began to read Tillich in the mid-1970's and often wondered how, or in what sense, he really functioned as a Christian theologian. His continued eccentricity in that role (his "edginess" in Bulliet's terms) is unfortunate in my view. Would that Tillich's evolving understanding of Christianity (and its place among the religions of the world) had become central to Christian thought and practice! But he was a man out of time. One can only speculate what creative course his thinking might have followed had he lived to converse with such University of Chicago luminaries of Islamic Studies as Marshall Hodgson and Fazlur Rahman.

Islam, no less than Christianity and Judaism, is biblical religion. The Qur'an and Hadith literature do not disqualify Islam from being part and parcel of biblical religion any more than the Mishnah and Talmuds disqualify Rabbinic Judaism from that distinction or the New Testament and decrees of Church councils or the writings of the Church Fathers disqualify Christianity.

Tasawwuf or Muslim pietism is the Islamic expression of the "search for Ultimate Reality" and, at the very heart of tasawwuf is tawhid: both the affirmation of the uniqueness and divinity of "Reality" or "Being Itself" and, at the same moment, the confession of one's desire to be made "whole" through some sort of "mystical" union with that unique and divine Reality. Tillich's statement that human beings belong to the power of being from which they are separated (12) sounds remarkably (or, perhaps, unremarkably) like statements one finds throughout the literature of Muslim pietism--from al-Junayd to al-Hallaj, from al-Qushayri to Jalaladdin Rumi, etc.

Indeed, a deep engagement with the literature of tasawwuf might well have enabled Tillich to resolve certain confusions in his thinking. For example, he insisted on the philosophical character of his "ontological analysis," distinguishing it from the "saint, prophet, and poet" by its thorough "cognitive function." At the same time, however, Tillich insisted that his philosophy was "existential"--a disposition he described as a "rare union of passion and rationality" (20). Had he been exposed to the work of the Egyptian philosopher A. R. Badawi (a near contemporary), he might well have reconsidered his position on the matter (see, e.g., Badawi's "Les points de recontre de la mystique musslmane et de l'Existentialisme" 27 Studia Islamica (1967), 55-76). Tillich's existential philosophical theology stands out like a white raven in Christian intellectual circles; among devotees of tasawwuf, however, it would have found both a corresponding tradition and community.

Unversed in the literature of tasawwuf, Tillich gamely attempted to "achieve a synthesis between ontology and biblical religion," i.e., to reinvent the wheel, as it were, and create a Christian version of tasawwuf from scratch (27). In order to accomplish this objective, he recognized that he had to reconcile the anthropomorphic biblical god with his own Hellenized conception of "Being as such." His Protestant pre-commitment to biblical religion, however, limited as it was to the canonical text of the Bible, put him at an immediate disadvantage: for YHWH/El is in many respects a trickster deity--one moment jealous and angry, loving and clement the next (30-31). This may be contrasted with Allah, on the other hand, who is not presented in Muslim sources with quite the same level of emotional volatility. Be that as it may, the "stumbling block" of personalism is present to all varieties of biblical religion: Tillich had his work cut out for him in any case.

The move that Tillich makes is predictable and yet fresh: for it reminds us of the organizing principle behind all theo-logizing: the marriage of the personal biblical god with the Greek notion of the Logos. The Johannine community of the primitive Jesus movement asserted the identity of theos and logos in the symbol of the Christ. Despite the problems that arise when such an assertion is applied to an historical personage (i.e., Rabbi Jesus), Tillich seized the opportunity that the Prologue to John's gospel presented him for creative thinking. The result was a Christology that bears a striking resemblance to Muslim Christologies of 'Isa ibn Maryamah, Kalamat Allahi wa Ruh Allahi wa 'l Masih (see especially the pioneering work of Mahmoud Ayoub and also Tillich, ibid., 38-39).

Indeed, I would argue that the gap between a Christology such as one finds in Paul Tillich (and possibly Hans Kung) and the Muslim Christologies articulated in tasawwuf differ not in kind but in scope. Muslims avoid speaking of "incarnation" (hulul) because of its association with a Christian dogma that, historically, divided Christians from Jews and Christians from one another. One of the goals of Muhammad's movement was to mitigate the effects of Christologically-driven sectarianism (see Fred Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, Harvard, 2010). At the same time, Muslim pietists wished to achieve a kind of "incarnationism" (call it "Divine manifestation" in the human being) through emulation of Prophetic example (the life of Muhammad) and "Christ-like" ascetic practices. Where Christian dogma elevates a single individual to Divine status (Rabbi Jesus), tasawwuf democratizes the Divine presence--though not without insisting that this "democratization" of the "franchise" be limited through a combination of meritorious effort and Divine grace.

A few years after delivering his lectures on Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality, Tillich preached a sermon in which he argued that the Christian kerygma comes down to this: an invitation to "participate" in what he called "the New Being" which is "manifest" (I think it significant that he did not say "incarnated") in "Jesus who is called the Christ" (see Paul Tillich, The New Being, New York: Scribner's (1955), 18). Reading this sermon in the light of the study of Muslim pietism, one finds it difficult to distinguish Tillich's notion of the Christian kerygma--the possibility of participating in a New Being, an "ontological event" towards which one must direct "passionate and infinite longing" (19)--and the tawhidic teleology of tasawwuf.

At the Tillichian edge of Christian theology, biblical religion can find a balm for some of its self-inflicted wounds.

Being and Nothingness

"Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being--like a worm." Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, 56.

Being "calls" to us from non-being, but only in the most attenuated sense. Apprehending what is (or appears to be) opens the door to speculation as to its negation and/or what it occludes or lacks. The perception of depth or three dimensionality creates expectations of surplus: what is inside or lies on the other side of this object? The "encounter" with absence spurs the imagination: it is the impetus of the fictional mode we call "metaphysics."

Ontological speculation involves the testing of our perceptual limitations: it is an exercise of human freedom--the freedom to interrogate our given environment and to discover (or invent for it) new interiors and new surfaces. Every exercise of human freedom is, ipso facto, an instance of human freedom--evidence that human beings are, despite all circumscription, in some genuine sense, free.

In what sense? Here, Peter Berger demonstrates himself an acute interpreter of Sartre:

"... the dramatic model of society at which we have arrived now does not deny that the actors on the stage are constrained by all the external controls set up by the impresario and the internal ones of the role itself. All the same, they have options--of playing their parts enthusiastically or sullenly, of playing with inner conviction or with 'distance,' and, sometimes, of refusing to play at all. Looking at society through the medium of this dramatic model greatly changes our general sociological perspective. Social reality now seems to be precariously perched on the cooperation of many individual actors--or perhaps a better simile would be that of acrobats engaged in perilous balancing acts, holding up between them the swaying structure of the social world" (Peter L. Berger, Invitation to Sociology, 138).

Every exercise of hermeneutics offers an opportunity to enact human freedom. Likewise, every deviation from the script of one's social role opens new possibilities in a given life.

Nothing comes from nothing. Nothing may also come from something and, from that "somethinged" nothing, may come something new.

From Kenneth Burke to Peter L. Berger

"The general perspective that is interwoven with our methodology of analysis might be summarily characterized as a theory of drama. We propose to take ritual drama as the Ur-form, the 'hub,' with all other aspects of human action treated as spokes radiating from this hub. That is, the social sphere is considered in terms of situations and acts, in contrast with the physical sphere, which is considered in mechanistic terms, idealized as a flat cause-and-effect or stimulus-and-response relationship. Ritual drama is considered as the culminating form, from this point of view, and any other form is to be considered as the 'efficient' overstressing of one or another of the ingredients found in ritual drama. An essayistic treatise of scientific cast, for instance, would be viewed as a kind of Hamletic soliloquy, its rhythm slowed down to a snail's pace, or perhaps to an irregular jog, and the dramatic situation of which it is a part usually being left unmentioned" (Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 3rd edition, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973, 103).

Kenneth Burke published the first edition of The Philosophy of Literary Form in 1941. In 1963, a young sociologist by the name of Peter L. Berger (b. 1939) published his thoroughly (but perhaps unknowingly) Burkean Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective (New York: Doubleday). Fortunately, I read Berger long before I read Burke--for Burke's labyrinthine and neologism-filled writing style can make reading him quite a struggle. Berger's books (I've read and re-read at least a half-dozen of them over the years) made the assimilation of Burke's Dramatism fairly effortless. Moreover, his work with Thomas Luckmann on the social construction of reality provided a foundation for the sociological perspective I adopted as an undergraduate and have never abandoned.

The move from Ontologism to Dramatism (accomplished by Burke and further articulated by Berger--following not Burke, I take it, but Erving Goffman) involves a Wittgensteinian asceticism that requires resolution to maintain. The call of Being buzzes incessantly in one's ears (witness Heidegger). But, as Wittgenstein taught us, the sheer mystery of Being eludes all speech. And while it is difficult to reconcile oneself to apophasis in matters that one considers to be of paramount importance, the alternative is, more often than not, sheer muddle.

Dramatism does not eliminate Ontologism: it preserves it through the description of setting or scene. Thus preserved, Being is relegated to Michael Polanyi's "tacit dimension." The effort to make the tacit explicit is a critical one; it is also, as Wittgenstein remarked, "like trying to repair a spider's web with one's fingers."

Wittgenstein felt that Tolstoy was less successful in communicating his own apprehension of the tacit dimension when he attempted to make it explicit; some things, he thought, were better left unsaid. In a letter to Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein had this to say about Tolstoy's late novel Resurrection:

"You see, when Tolstoy tells a story he impresses me infinitely more than when he addresses the reader. When he turns his back to the reader then he seems to me most impressive ... It seems to me his philosophy is most true when it's latent in the story" (Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, OUP, 1984, p. 97).

Peter Berger's Dramatism suggests that the attribution of metaphysical properties to socially constructed identities (e.g., "white," "black," "male," "female," "Jew," "Gentile") is fraught with peril: "all such appellations become exercises in [Sartrean] 'bad faith' as soon as they are charged with ontological implications" (Berger, Invitation to Sociology, 157). I could not agree more.

Nevertheless, Berger stops short of adopting Wittgenstein's Tractarian admonition "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." He does not banish the posing of metaphysical questions--for to do so results in an unwitting acceptance of the answers that our socially constructed reality provides--and this, for Berger, is to arrive at "bad faith" from a different direction. The posing of "metaphysical" questions, i.e., questions designed to interrogate the inevitability of the inherited status quo, is to exercise one's freedom. And to exercise one's freedom is, to borrow from Aristotle, to actualize a metaphysical potentiality (see Invitation chapter 6).

This view is similar in tenor to Tolstoy's death-bed assertion that "God is not love, but the more love there is, the more man reveals God, the more he truly exists."

The conversion of the potential into the actual, of fiction into fact, is the ineluctable and ethically charged "call of Being."

Despite our best intentions, we often find our way back to Heidegger. Berger's use of the German philosopher, like Sartre's, was both skillful and sparing. Would that we all had such tact!