Why I Write

An essay by George Orwell.

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Paideia

The intellectual principle of the Greeks is not individualism but “humanism,” to use the word in its original and classical sense. It comes from humanitas: which, since the time of Varro and Cicero at least, possessed a nobler and severer sense in addition to its earlier vulgar sense of humane behavior, here irrelevant. It meant the process of educating man into his true form, the real and genuine human nature. That is the true Greek paideia, adopted by the Roman statesman as a model. It starts from the ideal, not from the individual. Above man as a member of the horde, and man as a supposedly independent personality, stands man as an ideal; and that ideal was the pattern towards which Greek educators as well as Greek poets, artists, and philosophers always looked. But what is the ideal man? It is the universally valid model of humanity which all individuals are bound to imitate. We have pointed out that the essence of education is to make each individual in the image of the community; the Greeks started by shaping human character on that communal model, became more and more conscious of the meaning of the process, and finally, entering more deeply into the problem of education, grasped its basic principles with a surer, more philosophical comprehension … The ideal of human character which they wished to educate each individual to attain was not an empty abstract pattern, existing outside time and space. It was the living ideal which had grown up in the very soil of Greece … This was not recognized by the classicists and humanists of earlier generations … they left history out of account and construed the “humanity,” the “culture,” or the “mind” of Greece or of classical antiquity as the expression of an absolute and timeless ideal. (Werner Jaeger, Paideia, vol. 1, pp. xxiii-xxiv).

Hayden White's Historicist "Party of Hope" Humanism

In October 1959, Hayden White published a review article in the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History on Franz Rosenthal's translation of Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah. White used the occasion to articulate his own historicist humanism. He opens his essay with a key observation:

"It is a distinguishing feature of modern Western historical thought that it has striven self-consciously to free itself as an autonomous, self-explanatory and self-justifying form of thought. Croce believed this movement to be a late phase of humanism and identified it as the main ingredient in the Western intellectual tradition. In his view, the history of historiography in the West has been one long struggle to expel the category of transcendence from historical analysis, that is, a struggle of history against philosophy of history" (White, "Ibn Khaldun", p. 110).

I would respectfully amend White's final sentence to read, "... that is, a struggle of an immanentist philosophy of history against a transcendentalist one."

Secularity, so-called, is really nothing more than a preference for immanence over transcendence. Such a preference, by the way, has roots in ancient Semitic literatures (the Bible, no less), and so any facile distinction made between sacred and secular is just that--facile, all too facile.

One can read White's subsequent analysis (and critique) of Ibn Khaldun's masterpiece as an exercise in Euro-centric triumphalism--a reading, I fear, that someone like Edward Said would have been only too prone to produce. I choose to avoid such a reading while, at the same time, reserving the right to take exception to statements that reflect a youthful enthusiasm on White's part that would probably make him blush today (e.g., "Unlike modern historical thought with its value free orientation..."). Exception taken, noted, let us move on...

White's essay tends to celebrate the accomplishments of the ancient Greek historians (Herodotus, Thucydides) in a manner that credits their efforts with a kind of modernity that owes more to wishful thinking than critical analysis, and his brief precis of "Asharite theology" ironically de-historicizes the Muslim thinker's metaphysics in such a way as to miss the fact (later recognized by White's friend and colleague Norman O. Brown) that al-Ashari's "imperious" and "secluded" Deity may lead one to a version of secularity both radically immanentist and nominalist.

Nevertheless, his overall critique of Ibn Khaldun is sound:

"In Ibn Khaldun's philosophy of history there is no progress that is not temporary, no enlightenment that is not revelation, no human accomplishment which does not have at its base mechanical chance; there is only the enervating Lucretian rise and fall out of the void and back again, only brute habit making for what seems to be historical continuity" (ibid., p. 123).

In my view, what remains most admirable about White's article is the articulation of the wonderfully historicist humanistic morals that he drew from his study of the Muqaddimah:

1. "... when the historian has no genuine respect for men, he will look everywhere but to men for the cause of historical change, and, failing to center upon man as the agent responsible for human triumph and disaster, he will find it impossible to share, through his history, in the achievement of the former and the avoidance of the latter" (pp. 124-125).

2. "... the distinction between 'inner meaning' and external appearance of historical events is not in itself vicious; it only becomes so when it is used to justify escape from the burden of human freedom and its responsibilities" (p. 125).

With these lines, Hayden White announced his membership in the Party of Hope: the party of all who dare to embrace a humanism capable of sustaining the practice of democratic criticism so woefully absent from public discourse in the United States today.

Of Pseudo-Antinomies and False Dichotomies

If it weren't for the discourse of pseudo-antinomies and false dichotomies, most academics would have nothing to say at all...

"The idea of the Orient, very much like the idea of the West that is its polar opposite, has functioned as an inhibition on what I have been calling secular criticism. Orientalism is the discourse derived from and dependent on 'the Orient.' To say of such grand ideas and their discourse that they have something in common with religious discourse is to say that each serves as an agent of closure, shutting off human investigation, criticism, and effort in deference to the authority of the more-than-human, the supernatural, the other-worldly. Like culture, religion therefore furnishes us with systems of authority and with canons of order whose regular effect is either to compel subservience or to gain adherents. This in turn gives rise to organized collective passions whose social and intellectual results are often disastrous. The persistence of these and other religious-cultural effects testifies amply to what seem to be necessary features of human life, the need for certainty, group solidarity, and a sense of communal belonging. Sometimes of course these things are beneficial. Still it is also true that what a secular attitude enables--a sense of history [disentangled from theology] and of human production, along with a healthy skepticism about the various official idols venerated by culture and by system--is diminished, if not eliminated, by appeals to what cannot be thought through and explained, except by consensus and appeals to authority" --Edward Said, The World, The Text, and the Critic, p. 290.

Edward Said was very good at identifying some pseudo-antinomies and false dichotomies (the "Orient" and the "West") while relying uncritically on others (the "secular" and the "religious"). Nevertheless, I approve of his identification of the "secular attitude": his phrase "a sense of history and of human production" is an allusion to the New Science of history founded by Giambattista Vico on the principle that "what human beings can know is only what they have made, that is, the historical, the social, and [Said adds redundantly] secular" (ibid., p. 291). In the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza had introduced to humanistic reading a form of mental askesis by means of which Europeans could grant themselves permission to consider history without invoking the God-hypothesis. After Spinoza, explanations of the form "And then a miracle occurred..." need no longer be considered adequate. Indeed, they need no longer be considered explanations at all. Vico strengthened Spinoza's gift to humanistic reading by grounding this de-theologized hermeneutic in an anthropocentric epistemology: "human beings can know only what they have made." To follow Said and call Vico's position "secular" is to pretend that "secular" and "religious" are discrete and antithetical categories inscribed in the nature of things instead of human constructions--at best, heuristic devices--that have no meaning apart from one another.

The Prescription: Philology

It was not without a certain level of anxiety, even embarrassment, that Edward Said offered philology as the most effective way to re-tool American humanism for the 21st century. He admits as much in the opening sentence of his lecture, "The Return to Philology," and then offers the reader the consoling reminder that "the most radical and intellectually audacious of all Western thinkers during the past 150 years, Nietzsche, was and always considered himself first and foremost a philologist" (p. 57). From this invocation of Nietzsche, Said moves seamlessly to the fact that in Islamic traditions, "knowledge is premised upon a philological attention to language" which found its beginnings in tafsir (Qur'an interpretation) and developed, with ever greater elaboration (if not sophistication), from grammatical studies (not to mention--and Said does not--close readings of pre-Islamic Arab poetry) through "jurisprudential hermeneutics and interpretation" and culminating, for Said at least, in fiqh al-lugha or "the hermeneutics of language." He then reminds the reader that in the previous lecture he had briefly adverted to the fact that there was "a consolidation of the interpretive sciences that underlie the system of humanistic education, which was itself established by the twelfth century in the Arab universities of southern Europe and North Africa, well before its counterpart in the Christian West." Indeed, it is not until Vico in the middle of the 18th century that Europe actually made a substantial contribution to the development of humanistic knowledge to which "the science of reading," i.e., philology, "is paramount" (p. 58). It is a potted history, true enough in its general outlines, but somewhat slighting of the known development of humanism in Western Europe. That said, I think it is well established that Muslims (predominantly Arab in the beginning but less so as time passed and conversion to Islam increased) led the way to humanism in the history of Central and Western Asia, Eastern and Western Europe. What Said has to say about "philological reading" is perhaps more interesting. A "true" philological reading, he says, is "active; it involves getting inside the process of language already going on in words and making it disclose what may be hidden or incomplete or masked or distorted in any text we may have before us. In this view of language, then, words are not passive markers or signifiers standing in unassumingly for a higher reality; they are, instead, an integral formative part of reality itself" (p. 59). Though Said appears to rely upon Vico, Emerson, and Richard Poirier as his authorities for such a view, it is difficult to read it and fail to be reminded of Herder (and Herder's somewhat agonistic relation to Kant) as well. The kind of active reading that Said has in mind is foreshadowed by the phrase "making it disclose what may be hidden or incomplete or masked or distorted in any text we may have before us." And here we are introduced to philology as "secular apocalypse." The move Said wishes to make is from textual practices to "statements about vast structures of power" (p. 61). Such a move involves, however, an ambitious (and far too often reckless) leap of the critic from text to world (or vice versa) and he does what he can to minimize the likelihood that the reader will "move immediately ... from a quick, superficial reading" to such statements--though readers of Said's Orientalism and other works have reason to complain that this is a frailty to which Said himself was too often heir. The remedy for such recklessness is the philological patience that Said asserts is the "abiding basis for all humanistic practice ... a detailed, patient scrutiny of and a lifelong attentiveness to the words and rhetorics by which language is used by human beings who exist in history: hence the word 'secular,' as I use it, as well as the word 'worldliness'" (p. 61). Said continues:

"... reading involves the contemporary humanist in two very crucial motions that I shall call reception and resistance. Reception is submitting oneself knowledgeably to texts and treating them provisionally at first as discrete objects (since this is how they are initially encountered); moving then, by dint of expanding and elucidating the often obscure or invisible frameworks in which they exist, to their historical situations and the way in which certain structures of attitude, feeling, and rhetoric get entangled with some currents, some historical and social formulations of their context ... Thus a close reading of a literary text ... in effect will gradually locate the text in its time as part of a whole network of relationships whose outlines and influence play an informing role in the text" (pp. 61-62).

Consequently, it is not a rash leap from literature to politics that Said contemplates for the humanist, but a gradual one that would appear to grow organically and by means of the practice of humanistic reading itself.