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.