Culture And/Or Anarchy

Like most Americans of my generation, I was introduced to Matthew Arnold in high school; the Arnold of "Dover Beach" and the Arnold of Culture and Anarchy. I remember finding his world-view stark, if not dark, but deeply humane. I also remember resisting it, to some degree: I wasn't ready for what appeared to me then to be a kind of doleful pessimism, but what appears to me now as sober late-Romantic realism. In any event, in graduate school I rediscovered Arnold as a religious critic whose views corresponded closely to my own: religion (as Harold Bloom puts it) is "spilled poetry." The great hidden precursor of all religious critics in the Arnoldian vein is, therefore, Alfarabi.

Lionel Trilling's intellectual biography of Arnold, first published in 1939, is a work of consummate scholarship and critical, literary intelligence. Arnold was worthy of a great biographer (no less than Samuel Johnson) and, like Johnson, he was fortunate enough to find one. Trilling truly rose to the occasion when he took on his subject and the result is a book that stands alongside Arnold's own work as a shining example of all that Arnold stood for.

Trilling does not arrive at Arnold's masterpiece, Culture and Anarchy, until the ninth chapter of his book. The first eight chapters prepare us for it--if anything could provide that service. His opening paragraph is priceless:

"Time and familiarity have faded the drama which lies in the title of Arnold's book and have obscured the tragedy it implies. Culture and Anarchy--culture or anarchy: it is a grim alternative, for Arnold's culture, as he was careful to point out, does not signify what the word commonly does, a vague, belletristic gentility; it means many things but nothing less than reason experienced as a kind of grace by each citizen, the conscious effort of each man to come to the realization of his complete humanity. And upon this urge to perfection, upon this 'possible Socrates' in each man's breast, Arnold bases the sanction which alone can prevent anarchy--the authority of the State. It is so much a counsel of perfection that it becomes a counsel of despair."

It is difficult to imagine how anyone could have summarized Arnold's book more succinctly, deftly, accurately, or hinted at the depth of pathos that drove Arnold's project--no less than Alfarabi's Principles of the Opinions of the People of the Excellent City composed a thousand years before. Utopias inevitably possess this quality because those who are moved to imagine them and record their fond imaginings find inescapable the fact that, as Wordsworth sang, "the world is too much with us; late and soon..."

And so it is. Consequently, all counsels of perfection become counsels of despair. This makes them, however, no less necessary. For without them, we too easily default to the status quo, and convince ourselves that mediocrity is the best we can hope for and that injustice is our lot.

Arnold's theory of culture, like Alfarabi's political science (falsafah), is an act of resistance: a refusal to go quietly. It is an insistence that a better world, in this life, is our due: so let us dream freely and, with resolution, work for the realization of our dreams.

Matthew Arnold On Bourgeois Religion

"The fineness and capacity of a man's spirit is shown by his enjoyments; your middle class has an enjoyment in its business, we admit, and gets on well in business, and makes money; but beyond that? Drugged with business, your middle class seems to have its sense blunted for any stimulus besides, except religion; it has a religion, narrow, unintelligent, repulsive. All sincere religion does something for the spirit, raises a man out of the bondage of his merely bestial part, and saves him; but the religion of your middle class is the very lowest form of intelligential life which one can imagine..." [quoted in Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold (1939), 230].

Matthew Arnold, Religious Critic

In his Introduction to The Portable Matthew Arnold, Lionel Trilling observed that Arnold's writings on religion were "central" to his life from 1870 to 1877 and bear "an intimate connection with his other work. They are frequently marked by verve and wit. And what they say is in a great tradition, for the theory that the Bible is essentially poetry, so to be read and understood, and that the utterances of the great poets are essentially religious, was stated first by Spinoza and subsequently by Coleridge" (TPMA, 29).

Once again, eurocentrism undermines the work of an otherwise capable critic: Spinoza's notion of the prophetic imagination as a form of "poetic" genius comes straight from Alfarabi.

Trilling continues: "In Arnold's day it was a theory of great importance to those who wished to keep religion in what they thought to be its naturalistic essentials, purging it of all that was dogmatic, supernatural, or in conflict with science. To Tolstoy, for example, Arnold meant much..." (ibid).

The line of religious criticism from Alfarabi to Tolstoy runs through Matthew Arnold.

From Petrarca to Francesco Bruni

October 25, 1362

"What am I then? I am a fellow who never quits school, and not even that, but a backwoodsman who is roaming around through the lofty beech trees all alone, humming to himself some silly little tune, and--the very peak of presumption and assurance--dipping his shaky pen into his inkstand while sitting under a bitter laurel tree. I am not so fortunate in what I achieve as passionate in my work, being much more a lover of learning than a man who has got much of it. I am not so very eager to belong to a definite school of thought; I am striving for truth. Truth is difficult to discover, and, being the most humble and feeble of all those who try to find it, I lose confidence in myself often enough. So much do I fear to become entangled in errors that I throw myself into the embrace of doubt instead of truth. Thus I have gradually become a proselyte of the Academy as one of the big crowd, as the very last of this humble flock: I do not believe in my faculties, do not affirm anything, and doubt every single thing, with the single exception of what I believe is a sacrilege to doubt."

Translation: Hans Nachod, 1948.

Alfarabi As Precursor

Isaiah Berlin's insight into the "deep structure" of Tolstoy's thought requires further development. His sense that Tolstoy's epistemology was "somewhat Aristotelian" (Berlin, Russian Thinkers, 71) is right on the money. Unfortunately, Berlin was not able to capitalize on that insight: he did not know quite what to do with it. And this is because he suffered from the blind-spot that afflicts even the best minds that a European education can produce: a kind of cultural amnesia about Europe's own past and the importance of Muslim intellectuals in the development of Hellenistic thinking.

Here is an example of European cultural amnesia combined with simple bigotry in an otherwise superb scholar of Muslim intellectual traditions, T. J. DeBoer:

The so-called "Theology of Aristotle" was still considered by Farabi to be a genuine work. In Neo-Platonic fashion, and with some attempt at adaptation to the Muslim faith, he seeks to demonstrate that Plato and Aristotle harmonize with one another. The need which he experiences is not for a discriminating criticism, but for a conclusive and comprehensive view of the world; and the satisfaction of this need,--which is rather a religious than a scientific one,--induces him to overlook philosophic differences" (DeBoer, History of Philosophy in Islam, 109).

DeBoer here characterizes the great 10th century Muslim intellectual Abu Nasr ibn Muhammad ibn Tarkhan ibn Uzlag al-Farabi's "harmonization" of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle as a function of his ignorance ("The so-called 'Theology of Aristotle' was still considered by Farabi to be a genuine work"--as if anyone in Europe at the time knew better). It would not do for DeBoer to acknowledge, instead, Alfarabi's determination to work with his Hellenistic inheritance.

Alfarabi (as he has come to be known) did not invent the attempt to see Aristotle as more of a Platonist than he was: European philosophers had already undertaken that task. Today, the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction that we forget that Aristotle was ever Plato's student or that he was, in any sense, a Platonist (in 2006, L. P. Gerson published Aristotle and Other Platonists in an effort to correct our present misunderstandings). The point is that Alfarabi was no more or less ignorant about the relationship of Platonic thought to Aristotelian than any other intellectual of his historical period; moreover, the "harmonization" of the philosophies of those two great Athenians was a project of the Hellenistic period that Alfarabi inherited from Europe and that he saw no reason to challenge. DeBoer gets right the reason Alfarabi did not challenge the harmonization of Plato and Aristotle: he wished to construct "a conclusive and comprehensive view of the world"--no less than his Hellenistic intellectual ancestors. But, again, DeBoer's bigotry causes him to poison the well of historical accuracy with the additional comment about "the need which he experiences" not being for "a discriminating criticism." These remarks are to be read in the light of DeBoer's contrast of religious "need" with scientific (code for "Oriental" irrationality contrasted with Occidental reason).

As it happens, Alfarabi's work is filled with "discriminating criticism"--so much, in fact, that Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (d. 1111 C.E.) essentially labels him an apostate in his book The Incoherence of the Philosophers. The search for truth is rarely, if ever, undertaken without some attempted exercise of the will-to-power over another human being.

In any event, the prejudice that openly deforms DeBoer's scholarship likewise occludes from view the data that could render Isaiah Berlin's judgment that Tolstoy's epistemology was "somewhat Aristotelian" more than a vague hunch. Unencumbered by European cultural amnesia, Tolstoy's genius reveals an "Asiatic" streak present--though unconsciously repressed--in European thought from the pre-Socratics on. This "Asiatic" streak or, perhaps, project is nicely summarized by DeBoer as the premise that philosophy "is the science of Being as such, in the acquisition of which science we come to resemble the Godhead" (DeBoer, 110).

This premise is far more pronounced in Plato than in Aristotle and it is what makes Tolstoy's thought only "somewhat" Aristotelian. Tolstoy's penchant for empirically driven criticism of philosophical ideas is what makes his thought Aristotelian in any sense at all. This "amalgam" (not to say "harmonization") of Plato and Aristotle was inherited by Alfarabi (and other "Asiatic" thinkers) as a result of the banishment from Europe of any philosophy deemed threatening to the Christian faith. Numerous purges of pagan philosophers were conducted by Christian emperors after the 4th century C.E. In order to escape from persecution, they (and their libraries) traveled eastward, eventually ending up in Muslim lands.

The more that one studies Tolstoy's thought in light of its Hellenistic antecedents, the more one comes to recognize Alfarabi as a strong (though hidden) precursor to Lev Nikolaevich's "somewhat Aristotelian" way of thinking.

More on Isaiah Berlin's Reading of Tolstoy

Isaiah Berlin's famous essay on Tolstoy's philosophy of history ("The Hedgehog and the Fox") is, perhaps, the best introduction to Tolstoy's thought and the Tolstoyan dilemma yet composed. In any event, it is indispensable reading for anyone who wishes to understand Tolstoy as a religious thinker. It is also remarkable for the deep sympathy that Berlin, famously liberal, was able to muster--despite his antipathies towards Tolstoy's point of view. On the whole, I find Berlin fair to Tolstoy, almost to a fault: his biases intrude only occasionally and, even then, are kept somewhat muted. He does insist upon presenting Tolstoy's agon (the inner conflict he suffered as a fox who, nevertheless, wished to be a hedgehog) as a kind of personal failing rather than the spur to his genius, and one wonders how Berlin managed to maintain the sort of Olympian equipoise towards the world that he did--but maybe that is the privilege of a liberal in a liberal's world.

In a prior post, I made a brief comparison between Tolstoy and Plotinus that I stand by (as far as it goes). I am well aware that Berlin might have placed Plotinus among the hedgehogs without a second thought. My understanding of Plotinus, however, is mediated by Hadot's nuanced study (The Simplicity of Vision) and so, even though I would agree that Plotinus was more hedgehog than fox (just as I would describe Tolstoy as more fox than hedgehog), I think we are faced, in both thinkers, with a difference of degree rather than kind.

It is to Berlin's magnificent treatment of Tolstoy's "positive doctrine" (thin though it may be) in parts VI and VII of his essay that I wish to draw the reader's attention. As Berlin argues throughout, the Russian thinker can be devastating whenever he turns his attention to the short-comings of the positive doctrines of others; but when it comes to offering a viable alternative to the doctrines he criticizes, he is frequently (and uncharacteristically) silent. Berlin is unwilling to settle for Tolstoyan silence in this regard and, to his credit, teases out of his writings (particularly War and Peace) what we might call (for lack of a better term) the "deep structure" of Tolstoy's philosophy. For Berlin, this Tolstoyan "deep structure" consists in an understanding of "the need to submit." Submit to what? To "the permanent relationships of things, and the universal texture of human life, wherein alone truth and justice are to be found by a kind of 'natural'--somewhat Aristotelian--knowledge" (Berlin, Russian Thinkers, 71). Although he neglects to expand explicitly upon his invocation of Aristotle, I presume that Berlin has in mind the Greek philosopher's notion of phronesis: the sort of wisdom that one acquires through experience--and, as I think Tolstoy would wish to add, the most educational form of experience is suffering.

But here we have a mystery: for what is meant by the phrase "universal texture of human life"? Berlin spills much ink in the attempt to elaborate this phrase and, in the process, makes an indirect argument on behalf of Tolstoy's relative silence on the matter. His attempts to express what Wittgenstein (one of Tolstoy's most astute disciples) termed "the inexpressible" come down to something like "the context in which one's life is lived." And I think Berlin is quite right. However, had he availed himself of The Death of Ivan Ilyich, I think he could have offered his reader additional insight into Tolstoy's point of view. For Tolstoy, the context in which one's life is lived is not limited to one's immediate environment (social, cultural, religious, political, etc.) but also--and especially--one's "ultimate" environment: the fact that all human beings are mortal.

Tolstoyan phronesis consists in reconciling oneself to this inescapable fact (a process Norman O. Brown characterized as overcoming one's repression of it and, in the event, choosing "life against death"). Whether or to what extent Tolstoy's thinking on the matter is consonant with Brown's is a discussion for another time. What matters here is finding the door that Berlin opened onto Tolstoy's thinking and entering it. Once "inside," as it were, we can begin to find our way about.

Hedgehog and Fox Revisited

When Isaiah Berlin assembled his roll call of hedgehogs and foxes, Plato was counted among the former, Joyce among the latter. "But when we come to Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, and ask...whether he belongs to the first category or the second, whether he is a monist or a pluralist, whether his vision is of one or of many, whether he is of a single substance or compounded of heterogeneous elements, there is no clear or immediate answer...The hypothesis I wish to offer is that Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog" (Berlin, Russian Thinkers, 22-24).

In this respect, Tolstoy's thinking would seem to approximate--intuitively, and probably never consciously--that of Plotinus. For the latter, we are all foxes who wander, bewildered by multiplicity, until we "recover" our senses or, rather, our true sense for the source of Being: the One, which is both origin and destiny.

It is a beautiful vision that Plotinus articulated, though one that is extremely difficult to achieve and, even when achieved, difficult to sustain. For many a fox, moreover, it is undesirable. And when we consider the achievements of foxes such as Joyce or Shakespeare or (reluctant fox that he was) Tolstoy himself, we cannot help but wonder if the Plotinian vision--for all of its serenity and loveliness--is, in some fundamental respect, unsound.

This would seem to be the unspoken assumption of many who criticize Tolstoy's post-Confession work--an assumption the Mazeppist does not share. At the same time, the Mazeppist can never bring himself to fully subscribe to the Plotinian vision. Like Tolstoy, he is by nature a fox but believes in being a hedgehog--and this conundrum or, if you like, contradiction, lies coiled like a worm in the heart of his being. It is the itch that he is fated to scratch without relief; the divine joke played upon him in supreme Pantagruelist fashion; the instigating dilemma of his intellectual and emotional life; his tragedy, his comedy, his daimonic blessing and curse.