Montaigne

"My lawgivers are Erasmus and Montaigne, not Moses and St Paul."--E. M. Forster, from the essay, "What I Believe" (1938).

Jack Kerouac

I've read a lot about old J.K. over the years, but no one, to my mind, has ever summarized his life story with such insight and concision as John Clellon Holmes:

"The tragedy--I shouldn't even call it that--but the irony is that he worked so hard to project, to put on paper and project in the world a vision, his own particular vision ... He'd worked really very selflessly out of his genius to get it down, and then when it came back to him, when it was accepted, from his point of view, for the wrong reasons, he didn't know how to handle it ... Jack had tremendous areas of--I'm loath to call it ignorance, but they were. But that's what made him good. If he'd known how the world worked he never would have broken his heart over it." --Jack's Book, 318.

Man Against Mass Society

At roughly the mid-point of the last century, Gabriel Marcel published Man Against Mass Society, a "neo-Socratic" (Marcel rejected the label "Existentialist") social critique.

For Marcel, the indifference of the masses to the present state of endless war--recall that, in 1951, the endless war du jour was the Cold War--is made possible by what he termed a "spirit of abstraction." This spirit has been sent abroad in the land by the propaganda machines of the ruling class (the fourth estate, public education) which effectively de-humanize the enemy through rhetorical demonization and minimize the public's exposure to any accurate information that might make the consequences of its government's military actions concrete.

This same spirit of abstraction reflects the public's lack of connection to any sort of effective politics: the ballot box offers a simulacrum of democracy, not actual democracy; elected officials work to maintain the status quo, not disrupt it. The resulting sense of impotence undermines any individual sense of self-worth or collective sense of community.

Aimless, alienated, and bored, people become subject to fanaticism for they are lost in the spirit of abstraction and lack "ground."

Clearly, nothing has changed in sixty years.

It remains to be seen if the present "Occupy X" fad will effect any real change whatsoever. So far, it appears to be little more than a kind of "acting out" of genuine frustration. But no one has come forward with any concrete solutions designed to effect the radical change that is needed. It is difficult to understand how people who have been systematically indoctrinated to believe that the simulacrum of democracy is actual democracy could be capable of taking concrete steps towards the dissipation of the ruling spirit of abstraction. How could they know where to begin?

The Hearty, Forgiving Laughter of the Paterian Humanist

No one is born a humanist, but if you work at it long enough, you may become one of the Terrentian variety. For it was the Roman poet Terrence who said "I am a man, therefore I consider nothing human to be foreign to me." Then, if you keep working at it, you may pass from the sort of open curiosity that characterizes Terrentian humanism to the appreciation that characterizes Paterian humanism. You may be on your way to Walter Pater's Diaphaneite.

Terrentian curiosity brings the humanist face to face with difficulty: the difficulty of finding ways to digest the depths of human depravity along with the heights. The mental acrobatics this requires sharpens the intellect and broadens one's sensibilities. Paterian appreciation, on the other hand, shifts the focus from the head to the heart. It is interesting to recall, in this regard, that the work Pater left unfinished at his death was a study of Pascal.

One never really understands a figure such as al-Ghazali, Pascal, Heidegger, Ibn Hazm. Oh, for a while, one thinks she does; but that is probably best put down as just another instance of hubris. If one is lucky, one lives long enough to forgive these thinkers, i.e., to accept them for who they were, when and where they were, and know that, there but for the grace of God go I. It is really no different than with anyone else with whom we must learn to live.

That does not mean that they will no longer disappoint us; they shall and they must. Indeed, if they fail to disappoint, to offend, they fail us as human beings.

In Pensees 4 Pascal wrote: "To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher."

Let it be the hearty, forgiving laughter of the Paterian humanist.