Humanism and Democratic Criticism: The Changing Bases of Humanistic Study and Practice

Said's second lecture on a new American humanism takes aim at "humanism as protective or even defensive nationalism" (p. 37). He rehearses the ways in which humanists and humanism have been used as tools (sometimes knowingly and willingly, sometimes not) of nationalistic agendas (sometimes government-sponsored, sometimes not). In this respect, the uses and abuses of the humanities in the North American context have not been unique:

"All cultures have this as a latent tendency, which is one reason why I have connected the humanities directly with the critical sense of inquiry, rather than with what Julien Benda calls the mobilization of collective passions" (p. 37).

Said emphasizes the centrality of critical inquiry to his conception of humanistic study and practice:

"... it is the mark of humanistic scholarship, reading, and interpretation to be able to disentangle the usual from the unusual and the ordinary from the extraordinary in aesthetic works as well as in the statements made by philosophers, intellectuals, and public figures. Humanism is, to some extent, a resistance to idees recues, and it offers opposition to every kind of cliche and unthinking language" (pp. 42-43).

How does this work out in practice?

"More than ever before, it is true to say that the new generation of humanist scholars is more attuned than any before it to the non-European, genderized, decolonized, and decentered energies and currents of our time. But, one is entitled to ask, what does that in fact really mean? Principally it means situating critique at the very heart of humanism, critique as a form of democratic freedom and as a continuous practice of questioning and of accumulating knowledge that is open to, rather than in denial of, the constituent historical realities of the post-Cold War world, its early colonial formation, and the frighteningly global reach of the last remaining superpower of today" (p. 47).

Again, speaking of the "proper role of the American humanist today," Said wrote:

"... I cannot stress strongly enough, [it] is not to consolidate and affirm one tradition over all the others. It is rather to open them all, or as many as possible, to each other, to question each of them for what it has done with the others, to show how in this polyglot country in particular many traditions have interacted and--more importantly--can continue to interact in peaceful ways, ways never easy to find but nonetheless discoverable also in other multicultural societies like the former Yugoslavia or Ireland or the Indian subcontinent or the Middle East. In other words, American humanism, by virtue of what is available to it in the normal course of its own context and historical reality, is already in a state of civic coexistence, and, to the prevailing worldview disseminated by U.S. officialdom--especially in its dealings with the world outside America--humanism provides little short of stubborn, and secular, intellectual resistance" (p. 49).

These words stir me like passages in Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address: for they carry within them the ambition of "achieving our country"--something that Richard Rorty, towards the end of his life, hoped to do through (mistakenly) identifying Liberalism with Leftism and both with the Democratic Party. Rorty was, without realizing it, signaling his membership in the Party of Memory. Said, on the other hand, here signaled his membership in the Party of Hope.

This is not to say that memory has no role in the humanistic enterprise--far from it! But humanistic practice is not, as Said puts it so beautifully, "an ornament or an exercise in nostalgic retrospection" (p. 53). Instead, Said proposes what he calls "radical humanistic critique" which begins, for the American humanist, in a self-critique of humanism: "For one thing," Said writes,

"... too much is known about other traditions to believe that even humanism itself is exclusively a Western practice. As a particularly telling example, take two important studies by Professor George Makdisi on the rise of humanism and the Islamic contribution to it. His studies demonstrate amply and with enormous erudition that the practices of humanism, celebrated as originating in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy by authorities such as Jakob Burkhardt, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and nearly every academic historian after them, in fact began in the Muslim madaris, colleges, and universities of Sicily, Tunis, Baghdad, and Seville at least two hundred years earlier ... We now know so much about [the contributions of non-Westerners to the so-called "Western miracle"] as in effect to explode any simple, formulaic accounts of humanism ... It is little short of scandalous, for instance, that nearly every medieval studies program in our universities routinely overlooks one of the high points of medieval culture, namely, Muslim Andalusia before 1492, and that, as Martin Bernal has shown for ancient Greece, the complex intermingling of European, African, and Semitic cultures has been laundered clean of that heterogeneity so troublesome to current humanism" (pp. 53-54).

This state of affairs prompts Said to ask,

"When will we stop allowing ourselves to think of humanism as a form of smugness and not as an unsettling adventure in difference, in alternative traditions, in texts that need a new deciphering within a much wider context than has hitherto been given them?" (p. 55).

When, indeed?

Humanism and Democratic Criticism: Humanism's Sphere

In posts on Northrop Frye at this blog's "American Athenaeum" siblogling, I have mentioned both my deep admiration for the work and legacy of Edward Said and also my frustration with his lamentable penchant for ad hominem attacks upon scholars with whose work he often appeared to have had only a passing acquaintance. Consequently, I do not feel the need to repeat those remarks here.

Instead, I would like to celebrate Edward's contribution towards a contemporary articulation of American humanism as found in lectures that he gave towards the end of his life and collected in the small volume which bears the title Humanism and Democratic Criticism.

1. "Change is human history, and human history as made by human action and understood accordingly is the very ground of the humanities" (p. 10).

2. "... it is possible to be critical of humanism in the name of humanism and ... schooled in its abuses by the experience of Eurocentrism and empire, [I believe that] one could fashion a different kind of humanism that was cosmopolitan and text-and-language-bound in ways that absorbed the great lessons of the past from, say, Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer and more recently from Richard Poirier, and still remain attuned to the emergent voices and currents of the present, many of them exilic, extraterritorial, and unhoused, as well as uniquely American" (pp. 10-11).

Let me say parenthetically that readers of this blog (yes, both of you) should be able to recognize that the foregoing statement bears a distinct ideological consanguinity with what is often referred to here as "Mazeppism."

3. "For my purposes ... the core of humanism is the secular notion that the historical world is made by men and women, and not by God, and that it can be understood rationally according to the principle formulated by Vico in New Science, that we can really know only what we make or, to put it differently, we can know things according to the way they were made ... Hence Vico's notion also of sapienza poetica, historical knowledge based on the human being's capacity to make knowledge, as opposed to absorbing it passively, reactively, and dully" (p. 11).

4. "So there is always something radically incomplete, insufficient, provisional, disputable, and arguable about humanistic knowledge that Vico never loses sight of and that, as I said, gives the whole idea of humanism a tragic flaw that is constitutive to it and cannot be removed. This flaw can be remedied and mitigated by the disciplines of philological learning and philosophic understanding ... but it can never be superceded. Another way of putting this is to say that the subjective element in humanistic knowledge and practice has to be recognized and in some way reckoned with since there is no use in trying to make a neutral, mathematical science out of it. One of the main reasons that Vico wrote his book was to contest the Cartesian thesis that there could be clear and distinct ideas and that those were free not only of the actual mind that has them, but of history as well. That kind of idea, Vico contends, is simply impossible where history and the individual humanist are concerned ... But it is worth insisting, in this as well as other cases, that attacking the abuses of something is not the same thing as dismissing or entirely destroying that thing" (pp. 12-13).

5. "... the late-twentieth-century American university has been corporatized and to a certain degree annexed by defense, medical, biotechnical, and corporate interests ... the humanities ... have fallen into irrelevance and quasi-medieval fussiness, ironically enough because of the fashionability of newly relevant fields like postcolonialism, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and the like. This has effectively detoured the humanities from its rightful concern with the critical investigation of values, history, and freedom, turning it, it would seem, into a whole factory of word-spinning and insouciant specialities, many of them identity-based, that in their jargon and special pleading address only like-minded people, acolytes, and other academics" (p. 14).

6. "Humanism is the achievement of form by human will and agency; it is neither system nor impersonal force like the market or the unconscious, however much one may believe in the workings of both" (p. 15).

7. "America's is an immigrant society composed now less of Northern Europeans than of Latinos, Africans, and Asians; why should this fact not be reflected in 'our' traditional values and heritage?" (p. 20).

8. "... to understand humanism at all, for us as citizens of this particular republic, is to understand it as democratic, open to all classes and backgrounds, and as a process of unending disclosure, discovery, self-criticism, and liberation. I would go so far as to say that humanism is critique, critique that is directed at the state of affairs in, as well as out of, the university ... and that gathers its force and relevance by its democratic, secular, and open character" (pp. 21-22).

9. " ... the whole concept of national identity has to be revised ..." (p. 24).

10. "The invention of tradition has become far too thriving a business" (p. 25).

11. "... every reading and interpretation of a canonical work reanimates it in the present, furnishes an occasion for rereading, allows the modern and the new to be situated together in a broad historical field whose usefulness is that it shows us history as an agonistic process still being made, rather than finished and settled once and for all" (p. 25).

12. "Not to see that the essence of humanism is to understand human history as a continuous process of self-understanding and self-realization, not just for us, as white, male, European, and American, but for everyone, is to see nothing at all" (p. 26).

13. "... there can be no true humanism whose scope is limited to extolling patriotically the virtues of our culture, our language, our monuments. Humanism is the exertion of one's faculties in language in order to understand, reinterpret, and grapple with the products of language in history, other languages and other histories. In my understanding of its relevance today, humanism is not a way of consolidating and affirming what 'we' have always known and felt, but rather a means of questioning, upsetting, and reformulating so much of what is presented to us as commodified, packaged, uncontroversial, and uncritically codified certainties, including those contained in the masterpieces herded under the rubric of 'the classics'" (p. 28).

14. " ... language is where we start from as humanists ... and language ... supplies humanism with its basic material as well as, in literature, its richest occasion" (pp. 28-29).

Mazeppism is a humanism.

Humanism Defined

“For the essence of humanism is [the] belief … that nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its vitality--no language they have spoken, nor oracle by which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever been passionate or expended time and zeal.” — Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, p. 28.

It always strikes me as odd that some human beings ask other human beings to defend the notion of humanism or the study of the humanities, so-called.

Pater here echoes the Roman poet Terrence's declaration that Homo sum--"I am a man" (i.e., a human being)--and what follows from that fact is that "I consider nothing human alien to me" (nihil humanum alienum a me puto).

For human beings to take interest in themselves, their own thoughts and feelings, their own perceptions and experiences, is really a no-brainer. Narcissistic, perhaps, but otherwise non-controversial.

And yet, increasingly in our world, the teaching of the humanities is under attack by human beings who, apparently, have lost interest in humanity.

If anyone should feel the need to defend their position, it should not be those who teach or advocate the teaching of the humanities, but those who oppose them.

But that is not the world we inhabit in the opening decades of the 21st century.

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection by Gerard Manley Hopkins : The Poetry Foundation

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection by Gerard Manley Hopkins : The Poetry Foundation

As I've Said Many Times Before: Mazeppism Is A Humanism

My tariqa, al-Insaniyya, is world-wide and trans-sectarian. We are a beleaguered lot, nonetheless—especially my own branch of Romantic religious humanists, the Paterian. The Diaphaneite ideal is difficult to understand, much less to instantiate. But then, what ideal is not?

Tony Davies’s tongue-in-cheek definitions of “Humanism” and “Humanist” capture the difficulties involved in identifying as a Humanist quite nicely:

“Humanism: An undefinable term, possibly obsolete.
Humanist: A teacher and writer of books. A superman. A deluded wretch, deserving pity and contempt. None of the above. All of the above.”

(Tony Davies, Humanism, 2nd edition, London: Routledge, 2008, p. 150).

Add the qualifiers "Romantic," "religious," and "Paterian," and you find yourself a sect of one.

So be it.

Weber's "Gesamtpersonlichkeit" and Pater's "Diaphaneite," PART THREE.

Matthew Beaumont's "Introduction" to the Oxford World Classics edition of Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance is first rate scholarship and, at times, almost moving in the degree to which it communicates the personal struggles of this most unusual of Oxford dons. Through the close and careful attention that he pays to Pater's writings, Beaumont is able to discern the impress of his subject's otherwise repressed emotional life. In the early essay "Diaphaneite," Beaumont discovers a Paterian manifesto that will haunt all of the don's subsequent academic work:

"'Diaphaneite' posits nothing less than the proto-type of a utopian society: 'the type must be one discontented with society as it is,' Pater declares; and the mass proliferation of this man of the future, he adds, 'would be the regeneration of the world'"(Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, OUP, p. xii).

This Paterian "man of the future," like Weber's Berufsmensch or Gesamtpersonlichkeit is also a man of the past. The past of Weber's ideal type is early modern Europe and Protestant; the past of Pater's ideal type is also early modern Europe, but the Europe that juxtaposed the pagan sensibilities of a revived Hellenism to the severe Hebraisms of a Luther or Calvin. In my view, the difference in these sensibilities leads Beaumont to take a small misstep in his reading of "Diaphaneite," for he argues that Pater's "revolutionist" (Pater's term) is "no activist ... not even of an ascetic, transcendental kind" (ibid).

My own response to such a statement is an Abelardian yes and no; for it seems to me that Pater, at this particular point in his intellectual development, is of two minds about the way in which his coming man will make an impact upon the world. He signals his ambivalence in the very term he chooses to name this figure. The verbal form "diaphaneite" can be rendered both as "you will cause something to appear" and "you will allow something to shine through" and, hence, expresses activity or passivity, depending upon how one chooses to render the verb in English. As Ulrike Stamm has observed, this means that "the transparency [of the 'diaphanous character'] works in two directions. It refers on the one hand to a greater ability of reception, of taking in perceptions and ideas, and on the other hand to an ability to express the inner self to the outside world and to form one's self as a clear outline in accordance with one's own system of inner law" (see Stamm, "Walter Pater's essay 'Diaphaneite' as a bridge between romanticism and modernism," in Nineteenth-Century Prose, September 22, 1997, emphasis added).

It may well be that Stamm finds Kant in Pater before Pater found Kant, but I do not think so. For, in "Diaphaneite," Pater refers to this specific type of character as one that exemplifies "all the higher forms of inward life" by its "subtle blending and interpenetration of intellectual, moral and spiritual elements." One salient effect of this "subtle blend" is that it manages to elevate "taste" from a "mental attitude or manner" to a new level: "Its beautiful way of handling everything that appeals to the senses and the intellect is really directed by the laws of the higher intellectual life" (Pater, Renaissance, p. 137).

Pater does not make explicit to what "laws" he may be referring, but Stamm's Kantian phrase, "one's own system of inner law," does not strike me as far from the mark. As with Weber, Kant's voice seems to be a latent strand within the Paterian complex but one that becomes more pronounced as Pater's thinking matured. He will not speak of "the charm of ascesis" until he writes the Preface to his history of the Renaissance, but I would suggest that the "passivity" Beaumont detects in the character of the Paterian "Diaphaneite" is perhaps better understood as the reticence of one who knows his own mind too well to allow himself to be caught up in what Pater called "the play of circumstances" (Pater, p. 138). Such reticence is an instinctive mode of ascesis, one that expresses "the direct sense of personal worth ... that of pride of life" that Pater's ideal type possesses in spades and that makes him a different kind of "revolutionist" than those who act out of "self-pity, or indignation for the sake of others, or a sympathetic perception of the dominant undercurrent of progress in things"--but a revolutionist nonetheless (ibid). Pater writes:

"It is not the guise of Luther or Spinoza; rather it is that of Raphael, who in the midst of the Reformation and the Renaissance, himself lighted up by them, yielded himself to neither, but stood still to live upon himself, even in outward form a youth, almost an infant, yet surprising all the world ... Over and over again the world has been surprised by the heroism, the insight, the passion, of this clear crystal nature" (ibid., 139).

In "Diaphaneite," Pater offers us an ideal type that presents an alternative to that of Weber, and yet one that shares much in common with the Weberian ideal. Ascesis, it seems, produces more than one kind of character and, with it, varieties of charisma. Unlike Weber, however, Pater does not appear to have imagined that his "basement type" of character could serve as the foundation for a new social order. His "utopianism" is not expectant, it does not even appear to be particularly hopeful:

"Here there is a moral sexlessness, a kind of impotence, an ineffectual wholeness of nature, yet with a divine beauty and significance of its own" (ibid).

A rather sobering conclusion if one is looking for relief from yet another round of Weberian capitalist-Protestants.

Weber's "Gesamtpersonlichkeit" and Pater's "Diaphaneite," PART TWO.

As J. Hillis Miller has shown, Pater's theory of recurrence is tied up with his theory of form. And, for Pater, "form is everything, matter nothing" (Miller, "Walter Pater: A Partial Portrait" in Bloom's Modern Critical Views, Walter Pater, p. 86).

Therefore, when considering a particular historical personage, we must take notice of that particular person's presentation in time as a congeries of elements. Miller likes to use Plato as an example:

"No element in Plato is new, not one speculative atom. What is new is the way of putting these elements together. In Pater's doctrine of recurrence, repetition is always with a difference. The difference lies in the way old forces are brought together once more in a slightly changed way and under new conditions. Pater's term for this novel way of assembling new materials is 'form.' Plato's originality lies in his brilliant novelty of form..." (ibid).

As to how such recurrent configurations come about, Pater does not venture much in the way of explanation. In his early essay "Diaphaneite," he seems content to utter phrases such as "a happy gift of nature," and "coming as it were in the order of grace, not of nature"--neither of which is particularly "diaphanous" as a description and hardly suffice as explanations (see Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, OUP, p. 137)!

If we require explanations of such phenomena, we must look elsewhere than Pater. Finding a certain congeniality between Pater's thought and Max Weber's (as mediated by Kant), I have chosen to look there.

What I find in Weber is a similar sensitivity to "form," whereby the form of the individual personality is determined, in part, by "larger," i.e., "social" formations.

At this point I must confess a degree of skepticism about sociology in general. I can never quite escape the nagging suspicion that the analysis of social formations offers no better (or worse) an explanation of a given phenomenon than such phrases as "a happy gift of nature" and "coming as it were in the order of grace, not of nature." What do we accomplish by offering a sociological explanation? Without a doubt, we have added a layer of complexity to our descriptions of phenomena--we have "thickened" them as Geertz would say--and that, at any rate, is something. But is that our ultimate objective? I think not. Our ultimate objective is to penetrate further into the mystery of how things happen and, if possible, to thereby gain some sort of leverage over the course of our lives. In other words, in the so-called human sciences, we have not advanced beyond the stage of magical manipulation of the universe. We are still "primitives" in our efforts and our desires. I often wonder if we would not be better off simply accepting the rudimentary nature of our grasp of things and, instead of striving to achieve something more "advantageous" (whatever that means), apply ourselves towards living more comfortably within our manifest limitations. With this caveat in mind, let us return to Weber's sociological explanation of personality types--leaving aside the question as to whether what Weber provides us is truly an example of explanatory power or just another adroit deferral of facing up to human impotence and mortality.

Weber shares Pater's interest in accounting for differences in human personality. He is convinced that the form of community in which one finds oneself has a determinate bearing upon the shape which that personality takes. In other words, community acts upon human personality in a manner analogous to the way a mold acts upon jell-o. Weber pays close attention to the various forms that communities take in particular historical contexts. He often compares and contrasts the attributes of distinguishable social formations. One pair of social formations that Weber distinguishes is "church" versus "sect." His motivation for making this distinction (which appears to introduce a sort of circularity to his arguments) is to account for the appearance and persistence of certain personality types. The particular Weberian type that is most relevant to the present inquiry is that of the Berufsmensch or "person of vocation" which I take to be a sub-type of the integrated modern personality that Weber favors: the Gesamtpersonlichkeit. If I am mistaken about Weber's taxonomy of types, I don't think it will be fatal to the comparison I wish to make with Pater and such a mistake (if there is one) could be corrected with a shift in nomenclature.

The distinction that Weber makes between church and sect is this: a "church" is the kind of community that "routinizes" charisma (and therefore manages to "homogenize"--sectarians would say "neutralize"--its individual manifestations among its members because all are deemed, by virtue of their membership in the community, to participate in charisma in some fashion); a "sect" (on the other hand) is the kind of community that cultivates the individual personalities of its members in such a way as to insure periodic "outbreaks" of charisma among them. It achieves this goal in a variety of ways. One is by limiting membership to those who have demonstrated charismatic authority prior to joining the organization. As a practical matter, this means that a sect cannot rely upon heredity to sustain or grow its membership in the way that a church can--for the obvious reason that charisma is not a predictable trait among families. For example, some of the Kennedys have had it, but most have not.

As Kim points out, Weber associates the "church" form of community with the Anstalt or institution and he associates the "sect" form of community with Gemeinschaft or organic community--a Romantic concept that would also inform Gramsci. On the basis of this distinction he compares and contrasts the Catholic church with Puritan sectarianism:

"Weber alleges, for instance, that the Catholic Church is not particularly interested in the ethical qualities of its lay population, because it is vested with a power to redeem their sin periodically. Thus the church members include periodic sinners as well as religiously sincere personalities. This is why ... Weber calls it a 'salvation-dispensing foundation' ... an institution based on leveling universalism. By contrast, Puritan sects tend toward a religious elitism or spiritual aristocracy. For Puritans, as their name indicates, only the pure can be admitted to the Lord's Supper, and 'it is a sin not to purge the sacramental communion of nonbelievers.'As opposed to Anstalt or institution, a Puritan sect is not a universal organization that embraces everybody and anybody. It is in a sense an elite group of those who have passed the strict test of admission, usually decided by a ballot of members. Those belonging to sects are the new elites and aristocrats by virtue of proven quality, or in short, charisma: 'The possession of such faculties is a "charisma," which to be sure, might be awakened in some but not in all'" (Kim, Max Weber's Politics of Civil Society, p. 77).

There is much here to mull over. If Weber is correct about the real-world effects of his church-sect distinction, he has provided us with a valuable analytical tool that can assist us in forming our expectations of certain types of social formations. And insofar as our expectations of social formations relate to our political hopes and agendas, he has contributed to those as well.

Pater's favored personality type, the Diaphaneite, is a charismatic mode with political potential but, as we shall see in PART THREE of this post, he was not particularly optimistic that this type could fulfill his utopian hopes.

Weber's "Gesamtpersonlichkeit" and Pater's "Diaphaneite," PART ONE.

Perhaps the place to begin with these two "personality types" is to recognize them as just that--"types." Ideal types in both instances and, therefore, useful as heuristic devices rather than descriptive history.

After acknowledging the typological nature of these devices, one should consider the different emphases of their inventors and try to decide whether or not such differences have a decisive impact upon the way in which such types are best understood.

A superficial comparison of these two types will seize upon the fact that Weber was a founding figure of sociology and Pater a literary man and then summarily conclude that the latter's typology suffers from a failure to attend to the role of social or environmental factors.

I hope to avoid this kind of superficiality in my analysis. That said, to ignore the potential relevance of such an obvious difference would be irresponsible.

Let us begin with Pater--or, rather, with the expositor of Pater who, in my view, does the best job of "distilling" from his body of work the "configuration that underlies all his criticism," J. Hillis Miller (see, e.g., Miller's article "Walter Pater" in the 2nd edition of The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Criticism, pp. 720-722).

Miller rightly outlines the manner in which Pater embraced the notion that all of human experience reflects the Heraclitean flux. This notion saturates Pater's approach to literature and to life itself. Moreover, it lends a distinctly solipsistic flavor to Pater's world-view, for once Heraclitus has cut from beneath our feet all solid ground, each individual is left with nothing to hold on to but a rushing stream of impressions and her or his own interpretations of the same.

It is those who travel this far with Pater, and this far only, who are in the greatest danger of producing a superficial reading of his project.

For Pater does not see each individual consciousness as a self-enclosed monad bobbing about in the Heraclitean flux; instead, he posits deep commonalities among consciousnesses and, indeed, among the very elements of the flux itself: "It turns out that for Pater, the moment, though unique, is not single. Each 'impression' is 'infinitely divisible'"--for it is in the very nature of the flux to be so (Miller, 721). Each impression snatched from the primeval soup of experience is "self-divided" or, in Pater's terms, "Anders-Streben" (Other-Striving). As Miller explains, "The moment is in battle against itself in a way that recalls the Heraclitean flux, the Parmenidean or Empedoclean battle of opposites" (ibid).

It is via this appreciation of the complexity of the moment or momentary impression that Pater introduces the dimensions of diachronicity and conflict into his "system":

"The uniqueness of the momentary impression is a result not of its singleness but of its special combination of antagonistic forces flowing into it from the past and destined to divide again, each to go its separate way into the future. This means that the moment, at first seemingly so isolated, is connected by multiple strands to past and future" (ibid).

Here one observes Pater's often remarked debt to early Greek and Hegelian philosophies; but it is with respect to his rarely remarked debt to Kant that we discover his affinity to Weber. Pater's Kantian side argued that the ethically appropriate response of the individual to the Heraclitean flux was not to "go with the flow" merely, but rather, to "purge away by an effort of refinement or askesis all impurities in the moment, all irrelevant associations" in order to arrive at "the unique 'virtue' of each moment, meaning by 'virtue' the power or energy specific to the elements concentrated in that moment" (ibid). Pater spoke of this power or energy in terms of its ability to induce "pleasure" in the person savoring the moment, but it would seem that pleasure is but one possible response to this activity and, in the interests of thick description, one might wish to invoke Longinus (a la the Paterian Harold Bloom).

In any event, for Pater's Victorian contemporaries, the scandalous aspect of his "system" was that, lurking beneath his ethics, there lay an unapologetic aesthetics (cp. Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Ethics and aesthetics are one" remark 6.421 of the T L-P).

In addition to diachronicity and conflict, Pater's "system" contains an "implicit theory of repetition, so Viconian or Nietzschean in its resonances" (ibid, 722). For Pater, what distinguishes history from a record of "one damn thing after another" is the manner in which existing elements re-combine and, therefore, recur.

"The 'virtue' of a given moment does not die with that moment. It divides again into the various elemental forces that have entered into it. Those forces are always potentially able to combine again in a repetition of the earlier flame, a reincarnation that will be no less unique and no less 'wholly concrete' for being a recurrence" (ibid).

As an example, Miller suggests that "A great figure such as Plato is unique, in Pater's view, only in being a special combination of ideas and images already present long before his time" (ibid). Pace Hegel, Pater did not endow history with any specific linearity or teleological direction. The task of the historian and critic is, therefore, the "scrupulous discrimination of the particular elements that are configured in a painting, a poem, a work of philosophy, a personality" (ibid). Pater was less concerned with producing "predictions" than "explanations" and he was less concerned with producing "explanations" than "appreciations."

Weber was likewise indebted to Kant insofar as his ideal type of early modern personhood employed an ethical discipline or askesis as a means of managing his own participation in the unruly world of experience. The specifically sociological contribution of Weber was his insistence that human beings are capable of directing the flow of experience (the flow of the flux, as it were) by means of the social forms that they impose upon the found world. These social forms are, in part, the product of individual exercises of askesis cooperatively performed and, once established, they provide an artificial environment conducive to the recurrence of such acts and, therefore, their (potentially) perpetual institution (see, e.g., Kim, Weber's Politics of Civil Society, p. 74).

Reading Weber together with Pater allows one to recognize the latent aesthetics of Weber's sociology as well as the sociological possibilities of Pater's criticism. We shall return to these matters in PART TWO of this post.

Max Weber and "The Last of our Heroisms"

"The historical constitution of a certain type of self and the empowerment of its agency through a complex interplay with political, social, and economic conditions always remain close to the heart of Weber's research agenda. Throughout his vast unorganized opus, Weber appears to be occupied with a distinctive ontology and genealogy of the modern self, which he calls the 'Occidental self' in the essays on world religions, the 'charismatic individual' in the studies of economy and society, personality (Personlichkeit) in the methodological essays as in his later writings on politics and science, and the 'person of vocation' (Berufsmensch) in The Protestant Ethic. These ideal-typical individuals share such characteristics as asceticism, methodical self-discipline, a regimented way of life, and an instrumental stance toward this world (and even toward one's own self)--all culminating in a fanatic zeal for secular activism ... Weber contends with Thomas Carlyle that it is these types of individuals, 'raised in the hard school of life, simultaneously calculating and daring but above all dispassionate, steady, shrewd, devoted fully to their cause,' who have made it possible to generate 'the last of our heroisms'" (Kim, pp. 27-28).

Given Weber's later criticisms of the "iron cage" which, in his view, characterizes late modern rationality, one might suspect that he harbored deep anxieties about such a "dispassionate" type. Most liberals do. But Weber, to his credit, was not "most liberals"--in his case, anxiety proved an effective spur to constructive thought and action. Kim detects Weber's ambivalence about the role of "dispassionate rationality" even in his early work and argues that Weber, as an alternative, posited a sort of "middle way" type of character "that can bring subjective value and objective rationality together to form a systematic total personality (Gesamtpersonlichkeit) under the supremacy of will" (Kim, p. 30).

Readers of Walter Pater may recognize here a resemblance to the Paterian appropriation in "The School of Giorgione" of Matthew Arnold's "imaginative reason." In "Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment," Arnold declared that

"The poetry of later paganism lived by the senses and understanding; the poetry of medieval Christianity lived by the heart and imagination. But the main element of the modern spirit's life is neither the senses and understanding, nor the heart and imagination; it is the imaginative reason" (see Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, OUP, new edition 2010, pp. 122, 179).

Kim argues that

"This willful combination of value and rationality ... enables the modern self to gain a moral, political, and economic agency in the form of worldly activism that is to revolutionize the subsequent course of modern history. In his Protestant ethic thesis, evidently, Weber wanted to isolate this paradoxical compound, a theme that kept on informing his critical evaluation of his contemporary politics and society as a degeneration of this early modern ideal" (Kim, p. 30).

It will be instructive to compare Weber's Gesamtpersonlichkeit with Pater's "Diaphaneite."

Max Weber, Anarchist.

Sung Ho Kim, a scholar who studied the works of Max Weber at the University of Chicago, seems to me to have his finger on the pulse of our (post?) modern political predicament. His revised doctoral thesis Max Weber's Politics of Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) attempts to demonstrate that Weber was more than just a diagnostician of the political malaise that has diseased our Evening-Lands in these dark days of their accelerating decline (the notorious "iron cage" metaphor). Weber also holds relevance as a physician with a prescription for what ails us.

When I entered my Ph.D. program in 2001, the mantra of "those in the know" as to how to repair our dysfunctional politics was "civil society." As a Chomskian Left Libertarian, I was encouraged by the prospect of liberals embracing the notion that the procedural state may not be the ne plus ultra of human social organization. Unfortunately, liberals tend to invoke magical formulae (the "audacity of hope" syndrome) in lieu of direct political action and, as anyone who was paying attention understood, the mere repetition of the mantra proved empty.

With this magical chanting ringing in my ears, I read Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country and allowed him to persuade me (for the last time) to give liberals another chance to repair the mess they had made of the country when they abandoned progressive politics after the debacle of McGovern's ill-fated campaign for the Presidency in 1972. Kim, on the other hand, was immersing himself in the body of work bequeathed us by Max Weber and asking the right questions. At the center of his inquiry are these two beauties: (1) Can a liberal democratic regime sustain itself in a robust form while remaining neutral to the moral dispositions and civic virtues of its citizens? and (2) What is the role of civil society with regard to the continuing viability of a liberal democratic regime (statecraft) and the self-constitution of its citizens (soulcraft)? (Kim, p.5). In response to these questions, Kim offers a Weber who had concluded that

"The cultivation of a certain type of moral agent ... called 'the person of vocation' (Berufsmensch) is critical for the continuing vitality of the modern liberal democratic regime; that its virtues, dispositions, and characters can be fostered only in a peculiar context of civil society ... called 'sectlike society' (Sektengesellschaft); and that the decline of civil society and the concomitant degeneration of the liberal self must be restored as one of the central agendas for late modern politics. Statecraft and soulcraft are not separated in Weber's politics of civil society, nor can they or should they be separated" (Kim, pp. 6-7).

Weber contended that "not all forms of civil society are conducive to a robust liberal democratic regime; some are in fact detrimental to it. Through a genealogical reconstruction ... he [sought] to resuscitate a peculiar mode of civil society as the site where his liberal politics of voluntary associational life and the unique ontology of modern self intersect and interact" (Kim, p. 7).

The "peculiar mode of civil society" that Kim claims Weber hoped to "resuscitate" is the "sectlike associations" of early modern Europe (and, I would add, medieval Muslim societies). As Kim reads Weber, the "iron cage" is a late modern phenomenon and not characteristic of the modern period (or project) as a whole. Kim argues that,

"...in the Protestant ethic thesis Weber aimed to isolate an ontology of the self in which subjective value and objective rationality are willfully brought together to form a systematic whole, thereby enabling modern individuals to act in accordance with the principled sense of moral duty--a view that is distinguishable from both Enlightenment naturalistic anthropology and Victorian liberal characterology and rather resembles the Kantian ideal of the self-legislating self. Although this type of modern self, which Weber called Berufsmensch, is constituted in inward, subjective isolation ... it does not usher in an atomized social realm of individual rights in Weber's social imagination. On the contrary, Weber held that a novel mode of sociability results from the modern empowerment of the individual agency, which is institutionalized as a sectlike society. Weber saw that the Berufsmensch can be maintained only in a rigorous social mechanism of ethical discipline, which demands a small-scale, pluralized, and voluntary associational life in opposition to state intervention. The result is a permeation of small voluntary associations into modern political society ... The nature and mechanism of sectlike society [is to be found in] Weber's essays on Puritan sects ... [and, based upon his findings in those studies,] Weber wanted to revive a secularized form of Protestant individualism and associational pluralism..." Kim, pp. 25-26.

The advocacy of "small-scale, pluralized, and voluntary associational life in opposition to state intervention" is a fundamental tenet of Left Libertarianism. Moreover, as every history of Anarchism acknowledges, the Protestant Reformation and the English Revolution were periods rife with Anarchistic experimentation.

We shall continue to explore Kim's remarkable reading of Weber in subsequent posts.

The Madness of Marcel Proust

At the age of 19, Proust began to take notes for the work which would make him famous. At age 34, after the death of his mother, he is said to have "retired from the world" in order to devote himself to recording what his experience had been. He knew by then what it means to live; what was left to him was the creation of literature. At age 42, or thereabouts, he published Swann's Way. He was dead at 51 and the final volume of his work was published 5 years later.

The madness of Proust (like the madness of Kierkegaard, and many others) was a literary one. The power of the written word is immense; it can become tyrannical and all-consuming.

When we are told that the Word becomes flesh and dwells among us, should we be comforted by this news, or terrified?

How ought we to compose ourselves? That is the question...

It is no accident that, in the Islamic tradition, adab means both personal conduct and literature.

Swinburne on Whitman and Blake

From the 2nd edition of Swinburne's essay on Blake (1868), pp. 300-301:

The points of contact and sides of likeness between William Blake and Walt Whitman are so many and so grave, as to afford some ground of reason to those who preach the transition of souls or transfusion of spirits. The great American is not a more passionate preacher of sexual or political freedom than the English artist. To each the imperishable form of a possible and universal Republic is equally requisite and adorable as the temporal and spiritual queen of ages and of men. To each all sides and shapes of life are alike acceptable or endurable. From the fresh free ground of either workman nothing is excluded that is not exclusive. The words of either strike deep and run wide and soar high. They are both full of faith and passion, competent to love and to loathe, capable of contempt and of worship. Both are spiritual, and both democratic; both by their works recall, even to so untaught and tentative a student as I am, the fragments vouchsafed to us of the Pantheistic poetry of the East.

True Religion: A Brief Homily

All religions are true. All religions are false. The criterion of true religion is a simple one: if, when faced with the choice to love, to hate, or to be indifferent to another human being, something in the religious tradition that you profess to adhere to persuades you to choose love over the alternatives, your religion, in that moment, is true. In the next moment, should you decide to choose otherwise, your religion, in that next moment, is now false.

The truth or falsity of any religion is the responsibility of its adherents.

If you consider yourself religious, choose wisely. Choose to love.

All the rest: the dogma, the ritual, the poetry, the architecture, the painting, the statuary, the institutions, the bureaucracies--are so much opera and its staging. You are more than welcome to love the opera; but love your neighbor better, and love your neighbor first.

De Profundis

"While in reading the Gospels--particularly that of St. John himself, or whatever early Gnostic took his name and mantle--I see the continual assertion of the imagination as the basis of all spiritual and material life, I see also that to Christ imagination was simply a form of love, and that to him love was lord in the fullest meaning of that phrase."

-- Oscar Wilde