Adab

The Arabic word adab has a wide variety of meanings and also has had different connotations at different times. Broadly speaking, the term refers to literature, but included in the concept "literature" is the person and character of the adib--one who is a skilled litterateur. The Muslim adib is the precursor of the Humanist as he emerged during the European Renaissance--but with a twist: for the Islamic tradition presumes that traffic in great literature refines not only the sensibilities of the Humanist, but his manners and his moral comportment as well.

According to Gabrieli, in the 9th century CE, an adib was someone who was "not only cultivated in Arabic poetry and prose, in maxims and proverbs, in the genealogy and tradition of the djahiliyya and of the Arabs at a time when they were hardly yet Islamized, but broadened his range of interests to include the Iranian world with all its epic, gnomic, and narrative tradition, the Indian world with its fables, and the Greek world with its practical philosophy" [EI(2), v. 1: 176].

There really was a time when the word "civilization" meant something.

Abu Huseyn an-Nuri (d. approx. 907 CE)

"I spent twenty years between finding and losing. Here's how: When I found my lord, I lost my heart; and when I found my heart, I lost my lord" [my translation from the Risala of al-Qushayri, Beirut (2005), 62].

Abu Huseyn an-Nuri understood the paradoxical nature of a life lived longing for the Divine--1,000 years before Kierkegaard "discovered" it. This gnomic saying expresses his appreciation of that state of confoundedness in which one wanders on "the path"--the path being nothing other than life itself.

The Promise and Predicament of Modernity

Where does this leave us? Adding another sentence to the book of daily longing.

Despite the eloquence of Marx, and that of the great Santayana, human beings desire neither freedom nor disillusionment. Such matters hold little fascination or appeal. We want magic lanterns and shadows on the wall. We want spectacle. We want lies. What's more, we want slavery (what Etienne de la Boetie called "voluntary servitude" and Tolstoy attributed to the Law of Violence and "stupification").

Even so, in every epoch there emerge a few kindred souls who aspire to sobriety and to finding, as Wallace Stevens put it, "what will suffice." Souls who resist, refuse, and renounce the ways of the crowd and embrace Tolstoy's Law of Love. It would be too much to imagine that such individuals could ever constitute a critical mass or prove to be the "hinge of history." They are more like brief sparks in an otherwise impenetrable darkness. But, by such lights, we stumble through. One might even say (optimistically, perhaps hyperbolically), "We find our way."

Sacred/Secular Is A False Dichotomy

"If religious symbols are to be understood, on the analogy with words, as vehicles for meaning, can such meanings be established independently of the form of life in which they are used? If religious symbols are to be taken as the signatures of a sacred text, can we know what they mean without regard to the social disciplines by which their 'correct reading' [scare quotes added] is secured? If religious symbols are to be thought of as the concepts by which [certain] experiences are organized, can we say much about them without considering how they come to be [so] authorized? Even if it be claimed that what is experienced 'through' [scare quotes added] religious symbols is not, in essence, the social world but the spiritual, is it possible to assert that conditions in the social world have nothing to do with making that kind of experience accessible? Is the concept of religious training entirely vacuous?" Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion, Johns Hopkins University Press (1993), 53.

The answer to Asad's final, rhetorical question is: No. The kind of religious training one has (or the kind of religious culture one inhabits) is absolutely determinative of the kind of religious experience one will report. Individual interpretations, no matter how far they may deviate from normative consensus, are always arrived at by means of the mediation of interpretive communities. The "sacred" is not "stand alone" or sui generis. It is manufactured.

But, then, so are bullets. And if one hits you, you may be changed forever.

The Reality we inhabit is sufficiently mysterious; it is not in need of deus ex machina intervention or augmentation.

Thus Spinoza mocked those who require miracles to convince them of the need for piety: as if the universe were not miracle enough.

The sacred/secular distinction is sometimes promoted by statecraft, sometimes by priestcraft, often (in the modern world) by statecraft and priestcraft in mutual collusion. In any case, it represents an exercise of the will-to-power over one's perceptions. One must always inquire: cui bono? Who benefits?

To paraphrase Wittgenstein: She who would understand the world rightly must finally recognize all such distinctions as senseless and, thus, surmount them.

Both Nietzsche and Muhammad understood that, sometimes, to philosophize requires a hammer.

The House of Words: A Poetic Interlude

The Qur'an reminds us that those who hope to find a Strong [Protective] Friend in something other than al-Haq [Reality] are like the spider: building for themselves a fortress of the flimsiest material (Q. 29:41).

Such is the House of Words. It is an elaborate fiction, yet it is the fiction we are driven to produce by none other than the Socratic god within--or, taking the liberty of another metaphor, by "the nightingale singing in the Shirazi garden of the great Sufi poet Hafiz [which] becomes the elusive bird of the heart of the Baul, trapped within the rib cage of his body, yet unknown. And it becomes again the bird of God of Rabindranath Tagore:

Even though slow and sluggish
evening comes,
and stops as with a gesture
your song;
even though you are alone
in the infinite sky,
and your body weary,
and in terror you utter
a silent mantra
to horizons hidden by the veil--
bird, O my bird,
though it is darkening,
do not fold your wings."

[Edward C. Dimock, Jr., The Place of the Hidden Moon, University of Chicago Press, 1989, 256-257].



Philology arises from the same spiderly instinct that we typically associate with human religiosity: the impulse to construct what J. Z. Smith terms "a place in which to meaningfully dwell."

Religion, Harold Bloom reminds us, is "spilled poetry."

It is a witness to our longings and, as such, to the human tragi-comedy.

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.

So we of the scribbling class, we word-scratchers, like Whitman's noiseless patient spider, spin.

How do we justify such a life? As Kierkegaard understood, there is but one justification: the Socratic one.



"Perhaps, then, someone might say, 'By being silent and keeping quiet, Socrates, won't you be able to live in exile for us?' It is hardest of all to persuade some of you about this. For if I say that this is to obey the god [to theo] and that because of this it is impossible to keep quiet, you will not be persuaded by me, on the ground that I am being ironic" [Plato's Apology, 38a, Thomas G. West translation].

In the present context, "being silent and keeping quiet" is refusing to spin.

"And on the other hand, if I say that this even happens to be a very great good for a human being--to make speeches every day about virtue and the other things about which you hear me conversing and examining both myself and others--and that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being, you will be persuaded by me still less when I say these things. This is the way it is, as I affirm, men; but to persuade you is not easy" [ibid].

What Do You Read, My Lord?

Words, words, words.

Kierkegaard's legacy is a rich and complicated one--too rich and complicated to survey in any real depth here. Nevertheless, one aspect of his teaching--perhaps the most valuable of all--was his uncompromising emphasis upon the individual qua individual. As with his entire body of work, SK's own activities as a literary artist and "local character" prove to be indispensable aids to interpreting this particular strand of the data.

As a writer, Kierkegaard's productivity was, by any standards, prodigious. To describe him as "prolix" seems, almost, banal or pedestrian. Over the course of a relatively brief writing life (he died at age 42), SK spilled enough ink to fill 25 volumes in the Princeton University Press's definitive edition. There was method to his ostensible logorrhea, however; for out of this daunting mass of verbiage, SK carved an inimitable self. With passionate intensity, he gave birth to his own incomparable personality. Over against the eternal silence that mocked him from the starry heavens, Kierkegaard left his mark by constructing his own "soul" from his native Danish. His singular desire--to be remembered as "that individual"--was his greatest and most lasting achievement.

When Polonius asks Hamlet, "What do you read, my lord?" he receives an answer that evidences the contempt with which he is held by the melancholy Dane: "Words, words, words." Yet, there is perhaps more truth in Hamlet's somewhat evasive remark than is usually noticed. Hamlet is, after all, a creature of words: as a character in a play, he is words reading words. Shakespeare endowed his character with a consciousness of his own "wordiness." Indeed, both playwright and character revel in it. The same may be said of Kierkegaard's relation to his own creations.

Contrary to Walter Benjamin's weird detour into Logos Theology (in "The Task of the Translator," see previous post), what emerges from the "linguistic flux" is not a "pure language" beyond meaning but, rather, a singularity--individual as a snowflake--that imposes itself on the void. What do we read? Why, words, of course. Why do we read? To invent/discover (two sides of the same coin) ourselves. Indeed, we "coin" ourselves. And what we call "spirit" is just that: the ephemeral windiness of words. In reading and writing (again, two sides of the same coin) we match our own gusts of windiness against the prevailing winds of others. To read, as Thoreau understood, is deep religion. And what is the "Qur'an" but "a reading"?

Map Is Not Territory

"For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well--that is, to read true books in a true spirit--is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object."



"Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read. The one is commonly transitory--a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that: if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak." --H. D. Thoreau, Walden, "Reading," Everyman's Library edition, 89-90.

I first encountered these sentences four decades ago; immediately, upon reading them, they became burned into my consciousness (with much else in Walden). When Emerson asked (rhetorically) in Nature "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us and not the history of theirs?" Thoreau and Whitman stood at the ready to provide the sacred texts.

Thoreau offered to show us not only where the gold may be found but also how to extract it in such a way as to avoid doing violence to the small plot of earth where we have staked our claim. Walden is the philologist's Scripture, guide-book, instruction manual, compass and map. If we lose it, we lose what hope we have in words--as opposed to, say, the Word. For while it is quite possibly true that the only balm and salve that could heal the immortal wound is what Walter Benjamin pointed us towards in "The Task of the Translator"--that "pure language formed in the linguistic flux...which no longer means or expresses anything but is, as expressionless and creative Word, that which is meant in all languages"--the Word (that which is meant in all languages) is, unfortunately, the ever-elusive thing-in-itself: the Holy Grail of meaning that, like Augustine's sense of time, defies all wording.

Such is the human, all-too-human, predicament: We apprehend ourselves existing in a world, but that world, in order to be fully articulated, requires a criterion of meaning that stands outside it. The tragedy of our situation lies in the fact that there is no Punctum Archimedis upon which to stand and observe that world. Furthermore, there is no way, as Kant taught us, to penetrate the world of appearances and grasp hold of the thing-in-itself. The result is that we are never able to say exactly what we mean. Language, the one tool we possess designed to express what we mean, is inadequate to the task. Even the most eloquent among us is, ultimately, as tongue-tied as Shakespeare's Cleopatra upon Mark Antony's departure:

Courteous lord, one word.
Sir, you and I must part, but that's not it;
Sir, you and I have loved, but there's not it;
That you know well. Something it is I would--
O, my oblivion is a very Antony,
And I am all forgotten. (1.3.87-91)

The task then, as Thoreau understood, is not to read in order to grasp the ungraspable "essence," the "pure language." The task is not to heal the unhealable wound. The task is "to read well--that is, to read true books in a true spirit." In order to accomplish this task, we must first cultivate that spirit. But what is that "spirit"? Nothing more and nothing less than the "truth" of ourselves--those small, yet, unrepeatable aspects of each individual that distinguish (and, therefore, constitute) him or her as an individual. In coming to terms with this task we must acknowledge as master one who suffered perhaps more than any other over it:



Kierkegaard.

The Love of Words...

...includes, by implication, a love of Music.

The "Science" of Reading

"Philology is, literally, the love of words, but as a discipline it acquires a quasi-scientific intellectual and spiritual prestige at various periods in all of the major cultural traditions that have framed my own intellectual development. Suffice it to recall briefly that in the Islamic tradition, knowledge is premised upon a philological attention to language beginning with the Koran...and continuing through the emergence of scientific grammar in Khalil ibn Ahmad and Sibawayh to the rise of jurisprudence (fiqh) and ijtihad and ta'wil, jurisprudential hermeneutics and interpretation, respectively. Later, the study of fiqh al lugha, or the hermeneutics of language, emerges in Arab-Islamic culture as possessing considerable importance as a practice for Islamic learning. All these involve a detailed scientific attention paid to language as bearing within it knowledge of a kind entirely limited to what language does and does not do. 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. Similar developments occur in the closely related Judaic tradition in Andalusia, North Africa, the Levant, and Mesopotamia. In Europe, Giambattista Vico's New Science (1744) launches an interpretive revolution based upon a kind a philological heroism whose results are to reveal, as Nietzsche was to put it a century and a half later, that the truth concerning human history is 'a mobile army of metaphors and metonyms' whose meaning is to be unceasingly decoded by acts of reading and interpretation grounded in the shapes of words as bearers of reality, a reality hidden, misleading, resistant, and difficult. The science of reading, in other words, is paramount for humanistic knowledge" (Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, New York: Columbia University Press (2004), 58).

How I Became A Philologist

"It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound--that he will never get over it. That is to say, permanence in poetry as in love is perceived instantly. It hasn't to await the test of time. The proof of a poem is not that we have never forgotten it, but that we knew at sight that we never could forget it. There was a barb to it and a toxin that we owned to at once...The most exciting movement in nature is not progress, advance, but expansion and contraction, the opening and shutting of the eye, the hand, the heart, the mind. We throw our arms wide with a gesture of religion to the universe; we close them around a person. We explore and adventure for a while and then we draw in to consolidate our gains. The breathless swing is between subject matter and form." --Robert Frost, "The Poetry of Amy Lowell," in The Christian Science Monitor, May, 16, 1925.