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.