Augustinian Humanism

Despite my criticisms of the work of St. Augustine (and I have many), I must also confess (confession being a characteristically Augustinian mode) my lifelong indebtedness to him. In my youth, I read many of the "principle" Augustinians: Augustine himself, Luther, Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, and Kierkegaard. As an undergraduate, I adopted (more or less) the "Augustinian humanism" articulated by James Woelfel in his book of the same name. Woelfel, an erstwhile Christian, took what he called "Augustinian themes" and "transmuted" them "into a 'secularized' framework." Included in those themes are the following: "the radical creatureliness and deep bondage of our personal and social existence, and the decisive role of grace in healing and elevating that existence" (Woelfel, i). As an erstwhile Christian myself, Woelfel's work meant a great deal to me in my late teens and early twenties and, over the decades, his writings have continued to resonate with me--especially his little study of Albert Camus (Camus: A Theological Perspective), which I have read and re-read several times.

Remarkably resilient, Woelfel has taught in the Philosophy and Religious Studies departments of the University of Kansas since the 1960's.

True Victory

The one true victory vouchsafed to humankind in this life is a form of insight or wisdom that Albert Camus characterized as "lucidity." I call it "coming to terms." But, whatever one calls it, the substance is the same: we acknowledge to ourselves the nature of the human predicament and make our peace with it. We then begin to acknowledge publicly what we have realized (what I call "bearing witness"). Finally, if we have integrity (i.e., a fundamental respect for ourselves and others similarly situated--the human race), we choose to make the very best of the time allotted us by entering the lists on behalf of our beleaguered species. I call this "redeeming the time." In Camus's mythopoesis, the archetypal figures engaged in this threefold flowering of integral existence are Dr. Bernard Rieux and Jean Tarrou.

A Picture Held Us Captive

"A picture held us captive..." --Ludwig Wittgenstein.

We have labored far too long with St. Augustine's metaphor of a divided world: the city of God and the city of man. As a result, we have been unable, in the West, despite admirable prosperity and the accumulation of remarkable wealth, power, and influence over the rest of the world, to come to terms with our actual (existential) situation: we live in one city, a city closed in upon itself, a city infested with plague.

And such is our enthrallment to the Augustinian metaphor, that we continually turn away from the city in which we are suffering and imagine that we can escape the city of man and be received, as refugees, in that other city, the city of God.

But there is no escape from the city we inhabit, a city of plagues we call the human condition.

The great service that Albert Camus attempted to provide his fellow human beings was to offer us a new urban metaphor as a substitute for the one that had been obstructing our insight into our own, dire predicament: Oran.

In choosing Oran, an actual city in North Africa, a city plagued by French colonial occupation (a situation from which Camus personally benefited and suffered), Camus was calling attention to the actual (and existential) condition of modern human beings and, especially, of Europeans caught in a prison of their own devising.

But he did more than that, for he invented characters (some exemplary, others not), made them citizens of Oran, and then imagined for us how they would respond to their (our) actual life in a plague-infested world.

Placed among the exemplary citizens of Oran were Dr. Rieux and Jean Tarrou: two properly disillusioned individuals who rejected the Augustinian dualism they had inherited from their culture and chose, instead, a courageous reconciliation with the found world, the world of the plague. They dedicated their lives to ameliorating the effects of the contagion that, ultimately, they were helpless to eradicate completely.

Our inability to dislodge the Augustinian metaphor and replace it with Camus's gift is sad testimony to the inability of the human race to re-imagine its own existential predicament and, with that re-imagining, take concrete steps to re-invent the world. Thinking ourselves to be the freest people in the world we are, in fact, the most to be pitied: for we are slaves to the very poison that, day by day, is killing us.

The poison that is killing us (the plague) is, in part, the conviction that we have another city to which we can escape: the city of God. We are like Rambert, the character in The Plague who is so desperate to get out that he will take any risk and pay any amount to get his wish. The interesting thing about Rambert, however, is that he, too, becomes disillusioned (like Rieux and Tarrou) and joins the "resistance" to the plague. Perhaps Camus was something of an optimist after all...

Imagining a heavenly city is not necessarily a symptom of disease, if that imagined city is embraced as an ideal that then motivates one to work to see its attributes realized in the found world. In other words, if it serves as an inspiration to struggle with the status quo. Unfortunately, for far too many, the city of God is viewed as a kind of lifeboat or escape hatch. It is the object of wishful thinking that displaces positive action to better the world with resignation and the despair that expresses itself in conservatism and conformity.

Further Remarks On San Miguel de Unamuno

A true heir of those great Spanish saints and mystics whose lifework was devoted to the exploration of the kingdoms of faith, he is more human than they in that he has lost hold of the firm ground where they had stuck their anchor. Yet, though loose in the modern world, he refuses to be drawn away from the main business of the Christian, the saving of his soul, which, in his interpretation, means the conquest of his immortality, his own immortality.

Political individualism, when not a mere blind for the unlimited freedom of civil privateering, is but the outcome of that abstract idea of man which he so energetically condemns as pedantic--that is, inhuman...We are confronted here with that humanistic tendency of the Spanish mind which can be observed as the dominant feature of her arts and literature. All races are of course predominantly concerned with man. But they all manifest their concern with a difference. Man is in Spain a concrete being, a man of flesh and bones, and the whole man.

Unamuno's "inner deadlock": his reason can rise no higher than scepticism, and, unable to become vital, dies sterile; his faith, exacting anti-rational affirmations and unable therefore to be apprehended by the logical mind, remains incommunicable.

It is on the survival of his will to live, after all the onslaughts of his critical intellect, that he finds the basis for his belief--or rather for his effort to believe. Self-compassion leads to self-love, and this self-love, founded as it is on a universal conflict, widens into love of all that lives and therefore wants to survive. So, by an act of love, springing from our own hunger for immortality, we are led to give a conscience to the Universe--that is, to create God.

S. De Madariaga

San Miguel

Sometime in the last ten years or so, I wrote the following on the fly-leaf of my copy of Unamuno's The Tragic Sense of Life:

The only way to "understand" this book is to suffer it (as in the phrase "to suffer fools gladly"); this I have done now for decades. I begin to appreciate it the more I suffer it. But the book cannot be "understood" in any conventional sense. To try to do so will only result in misunderstanding.

One might call this a "sufi" text--aimed not at the head but the heart--indeed, at the heart of hearts which is nowhere and no-thing so that it might be everywhere and every-thing.

Unamuno was that most rare of beasts: an honest theist--an honest Christian, no less. For he did not shrink from Christianity's utter irrationality. Instead, he gloried in it. But not without second thoughts. And third thoughts. And fourth. And therein lies his true genius.

In his Afterword to my edition of the book, William Barrett expressed a similar sentiment:

To re-read Unamuno--especially when one is reading to find where one stands at last with him--is itself to be in a contest. One emerges a little shaken and winded, for here is an author that insists upon coming at you head on. Yet the man himself is so simple, direct, beguiling--a true friend, but a troubling friend. He troubles us above all when we try to follow too straight a line in trying to pin him down.

One could dedicate a life to living with this book. It would be a life of nobility: one of daily toil and suffering punctuated by occasional episodes of satisfaction and even bliss.

As such, it would be a normal life--except for the fact that the individual living it would be intensely conscious that he or she was living in the lengthy shadow of San Miguel de Unamuno. One would then be a disciple of that disillusioned saint. In other words, a dervish.

Spanish Falsafa

For Miguel de Unamuno, it was always plague time.

Peter Koestenbaum neatly summarized the central themes of his work:

1. Individuality is primary; even one's nationality (e.g., Unamuno's Spanishness) "becomes not a social ideal but the expression of [one's] individuality."

2. The emphasis upon individuality leads, naturally, to a further emphasis upon personal integrity. "Truthfulness to oneself and total honesty in ideals are the hallmarks of the philosophical man."

3. The role of the philosopher [faylasuf] is "Socratic gadfly to the community. The philosopher [sic] is needed to awaken us to our genuine nature, to our authentic problems, and to the honest attempt to resolve them."

4. The demands of faith and reason are irreconcilable. Reason is skeptical and cannot produce "any kind of fundamentally hopeful knowledge. Faith can do so, but faith exists only in the shadow of the despair that is reason; it has no independent and positive existence. Faith can never totally dispel reason, and reason always leads to despair. The logic of the heart is hopeful and gives meaning to life, but it is never strong enough fully to set aside the darkness of the logic of the head."

5. Religion is, therefore, caught within the conflict of reason and faith; moreover, it is inadequate to the task of reconciling their conflict. Nevertheless, "religion is a necessity of life. We must risk faith in the way that Pascal wagered, James willed, and Kierkegaard leaped. We must, for profoundly pragmatic reasons, live as if God does in fact exist."

6. Commitment is the key to the authentic life. "An authentic life is dedicated to and identified with an ideal, an ideal that genuinely emanates from the depths of each man. The truth of such a commitment can be vindicated and confirmed only by the heart; but since reason casts permanent doubt on that commitment, a blind, courageous leap of faith is needed for authentic human existence."

7. "Life thus becomes a vague, brittle, and tenuous cluster of experiences between two awesome, incomprehensible, and impenetrable barriers of nothingness: birth and death. Only through a foundationless but fervid commitment can man escape, at least temporarily, the despair of meaninglessness."

8. The Spanish temperament is illustrated by Cervantes' Don Quixote and Sancho Panza: part impractical dreamer, part practical (and too often unprincipled and expedient) dullard.

For Koestenbaum, these eight points summed up Unamuno's grasp of human existence in his "tragic sense of life." Additional themes in Unamuno's work include:

9. An anguished awareness of the radical contingency of human existence assuaged only by a commitment to expand both the range and self-consciousness of one's perceptions of the world.

10. An acceptance of the suffering that such expansion inevitably entails.

11. An acknowledgement that human existence is shrouded in mystery, but that love (specifically sexual love) is the underlying force of human existence.

12. Like Heidegger, Unamuno conceived of Dasein as essentially future-oriented; this future-orientation produced both hope and the agony of hope's fulfillment deferred.

13. "Language is a mode of being."

14. Truth is subjectivity. Even so, "man and world are intimately meshed."

15. Reality is "a state of permanent flux."

From The Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Unamuno (1967).

Religion in a Time of Plague

But religion in a time of plague could not be the religion of every day. While God might accept and even desire that the soul should take its ease and rejoice in happier times, in periods of extreme calamity He laid extreme demands on it. Thus today God had vouchsafed to His creatures an ordeal such that they must acquire and practice the greatest of all virtues: that of the All or Nothing.

Albert Camus, The Plague, tr. Stuart Gilbert.

American Falsafa

In his 1989 classic, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, Cornel West argued that "the evasion of epistemology-centered philosophy--from Emerson to Rorty--results in a conception of philosophy as a form of cultural criticism in which the meaning of America is put forward by intellectuals in response to distinct social and cultural crises. In this sense, American pragmatism is less a philosophical tradition putting forward solutions to perennial problems in the Western philosophical conversation initiated by Plato and more a continuous cultural commentary or set of interpretations that attempt to explain America to itself at a particular historical moment" (West, AEP, 5).

American Falsafa shares Emersonian roots with pragmatism as well as an aversion to epistemology-centered philosophy; moreover, it is being "put forward by intellectuals"--well, in all candor, by this particular intellectual--"in response to distinct social and cultural crises" related to the hysteria-driven ignorance of the vast majority of Americans when it comes to matters Islamic.

American Falsafa is at once a recovery of an older tradition of "philosophizing" (Hellenistic philosophy in conversation with Perso-Arabic traditions of thought and practice) and an attempt to introduce American intellectual culture to a cosmopolitan humanism that permeated Muslim majority societies from, roughly, the ninth to the nineteenth centuries.

American Falsafa, then, is an invitation to America to outgrow her obstinate dogma of exceptionalism and join what Raymond Williams might have termed a much broader and older "structure of feeling." Put another way, American Falsafa is an invitation to America to see her rapid globalization as an opportunity to come of age in the community of nations: to learn to play her part as a fellow world citizen as opposed to a world hegemon.

American Falsafa is a risk and a wager; a hopeful wager that today's militaristic tyrant can transform herself, over time, into tomorrow's model republic.

American Faylasuf
Happy are you poor in spirit, for you shall be heir to God's kingdom.
Matthew 5:3.


Manet, "A Philosopher (Beggar in a Cloak)."

The Crucial Century

Marx, Nietzsche and their contemporaries experienced modernity as a whole at a moment when only a small part of the world was truly modern. [Over] a century later, when the processes of modernization have cast a net that no one, not even in the remotest corner of the world, can escape, we can learn a great deal from the first modernists, not so much about their age as about our own.

We have lost our grip on the contradictions that they had to grasp with all their strength, at every moment in their everyday lives, in order to live at all. Paradoxically, these first modernists may turn out to understand us--the modernization and modernism that constitute our lives--better than we understand ourselves. If we can make their visions our own, and use their perspectives to look at our own environments with fresh eyes, we will see that there is more depth in our lives than we thought. We will feel our community with people all over the world who have been struggling with the same dilemmas as our own. And we will get back in touch with a remarkably rich and vibrant modernist culture that has grown out of these struggles: a culture that contains vast resources of strength and health, if only we come to know it as our own.

It may turn out, then, that going back can be a way to go forward: that remembering the modernisms of the nineteenth century can give us the vision and courage to create the modernisms of the twenty-first. This act of remembering can help us bring modernism back to its roots, so that it can nourish and renew itself, to confront the adventures and dangers that lie ahead. To appropriate the modernities of yesterday can be at once a critique of the modernities of today and an act of faith in the modernities--and in the modern men and women--of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.

--Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (1988), 36.

[Photos top to bottom: Karl Marx (d. 1883), Friedrich Nietzsche (d. 1900), Muhammad 'Abduh (d. 1905), Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani (d. 1897)].

L'Etranger

According to Abu Hurayrah (may God be satisfied with his service), God's Messenger (upon whom may God's peace and blessings abide) remarked: "In the beginning, al-Islam was a stranger; it will return as it was in the beginning; so let the strangers rejoice."

--Tr. from the sahih hadith collection of Muslim.

Dervish Praxis

A. "By knowing self, the servant comes to know God inasmuch as He has disclosed Himself to the soul. He knows God in His similarity, but can never know Him in His incomparability. It follows that by worshiping God, the servant is worshiping himself. He worships God as He discloses Himself to the soul, and that is determined and defined by the soul itself. It also follows that one cannot worship anything other than God, since whatever one worships is God's self-disclosure to the soul."

From William Chittick's commentary on Ibn 'Arabi's The Meccan Openings and other writings (Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, 342).

B. The Dervish enters every act of worship--indeed, every act of her existence--with an awe-full awareness that whatever-is is a process of self-disclosure; and that every process of self-disclosure is, likewise, an act of self-invention: for whatever-is is in perpetual motion. Stasis is the property of whatever-is-not.

C. The bottom line is that there is no bottom line. There is no bottom at all. All that is solid melts into air. Therefore, modernity is the Dervish's proper milieu. The collapse of the medieval world-view amounted to the surrender of a utopian nostalgia for a time before time, a time that never was. That nostalgia offered assurances of solid ground that the advent of modernity revealed as illusory. The Dervish is, therefore, profoundly disillusioned: a disillusioned "saint".

D. Those who struggle to recreate the lost medieval dream in the modern world have failed to recognize that the era in which they live, i.e., the present, is propitious. But, then, life in the present is always propitious--even as it recedes into the past for a creature (i.e., Dasein) whose temporal orientation is always toward the future. And that is Dervish praxis, the Dervish's "greater jihad": the struggle to step outside of her temporal (future-oriented) trajectory through acts of ek-stasis. For the present is not part of time: it is eternity.

E. In effect, the Dervish must attempt to grasp a handful of water and then, bewildered, learn to laugh, heartily, at the absurdity of it all.

F. Another type of modern throws himself into parodies of the past: he "needs history because it is the storage closet where all the costumes are kept. He notices that none really fits him"--not primitive, not classical, not medieval, not Oriental--"so he keeps trying on more and more," unable to accept the fact that a modern man "can never really look well-dressed," because no social role in modern times can ever be a perfect fit. Nietzsche's own stance towards the perils of modernity is to embrace them all with joy: "We moderns, we half-barbarians. We are in the midst of our bliss only when we are most in danger. The only stimulus that tickles us is the infinite, the immeasurable."

Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (1988), 22-23.

G. Chinese proverb: A small saint runs up to the mountains, but a great saint lives in the city.

Dervish Existentialism

"Existentialism" is an interesting label: few to whom it is applied are willing to accept its mantle.

And for good reason: the popularization of the term in the United States and Europe in the post-World War II era saw it twisted into a version of nihilistic "despairism."

As a corrective, we should define Existentialism responsibly: as a way of thinking about and acting in the world in which "existence precedes essence."

What does this phrase mean? Most directly, it is an assertion of human freedom, responsibility, and creativity. One enters the world (enters human existence) endowed with both the freedom and the responsibility to create a life worth living (i.e., one's essence).

Someone (a philosopher, perhaps) might counter that such an assertion identifies the essence of the human being as free, responsible, and creative; the proponents of the phrase would argue that such terms are empty until enacted existentially, i.e., in the world, in the course of one's life. Existentialism is about action, agency, and embodiment (another way of saying freedom, responsibility, and creativity). Freedom, responsibility, and creativity may be "essential" conditions for existential enactment, but what the Existentialist considers to be of the "essence" is the end product of a life-long process: an autobiograph, the self-composed life.

Philosophers since Plato have been hung up on the idea of "essence"; they wish to privilege an "essential" world of perfection beyond the lived world of imperfect existence. Existentialism denies the truth-value of the Plato to Kant canon of Western metaphysics. It turns Western philosophy on its head, so to speak.

The Dervish travels the road to Falsafa--not Western philosophy. She acknowledges her debts to Hellenism (as do all Faylasufs) which she creatively appropriates for her own purposes. Those purposes are "Existentialist," for they are concerned with self-composition in line with what the Qur'an refers to, enigmatically, as her fitra or "nature." And what is her nature? To be free, responsible, and creative. To invent herself.

Her Deity is a process of continual self-invention (which is to say that her Deity is a living God). Dervish Existentialism is Imitatio Dei as modeled in the Prophetic tradition that she has inherited from Biblical religion with its three central Testaments (Tanakh, Gospel, Qur'an) and ancillary literatures. Dervish Existentialism is the claim of a birthright: to have been born in the divine "image" and, therefore, to be called to a life of divine imagination.

Signposts along the way are, as mentioned, Prophetic example and the so-called ninety-nine most beautiful names of God (which she regularly invokes and upon which she meditates).

Such is the way of the Dervish: Existentialism avant la lettre.

The Dervish and Thais, Queen of Falsafa

The Dervish on the road to Falsafa must be prepared to pay homage to its Queen: Thais, the famed Athenian courtesan of Alexander's entourage.

His task is to serve her--not to convert her. Despite her scandalous reputation, he perceives divine beauty within her. She plays Shakh-e Nabat to his Hafiz, Layla to his Majnun. She is both temptation and consolation.

The Dervish road to falsafa always begins and ends in the ruined tavern of the world.

How To Become An American Faylasuf

The problem of [Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human] lies in its divided intentions: the intention to revise philosophy and the intention, as it were, to revise humanity as a moralist rather than an analyst of the deep nature of morality itself. But as a writer, Nietzsche was always defined through divided intentions. He did not want at any time to give up his critique of the human, all too human, as he continued all the while to build the great philosophical account of human nature that in less gifted hands would have been a treatise, an essay, an enquiry, a dissertation.

He tried to practice philosophy in the way he thought of history as being practiced when in the service of life rather than in the production of academic scholars. His divided intentions very nearly queered his philosophical reputation, inasmuch as philosophers since his time have pretty largely just been academic philosophers, trained by codes of expressions Nietzsche fails to follow, whereas we might now see in him a model for how to do philosophy when we want to be taken seriously in the academy and at the same time effective in life. Human, All Too Human is a marvelous place to begin for readers with that sort of ideal, as it was precisely the right way for the writer to begin to be who he became.

Arthur C. Danto, Beginning to be Nietzsche, 1996.

Dervish Comportment

The Soul should always stand ajar
That if the Heaven inquire
He will not be obliged to wait
Or shy of troubling Her

Depart, before the Host have slid
The Bolt unto the Door--
To search for the accomplished Guest,
Her Visitor, no more--

Emily Dickinson, 1055 (c. 1865)

Dervish Skepsis as a Mode of Faith

"Even for the believer in revelation, skepsis may be an indispensable way of faith. A man who does not 'confess' need not be a skeptic. His very faith may bar the formulated creed. Confessing a creed, as a statement of absolute truth worded in human language, seems to be a fatal act, for it divides people and opens the chasm of uncommunicativeness if accompanied by the demand that others join in it, as in the language of absolute truth. Opposition to confessing in words--rather than in actions and in the way of life--is not skepticism. It is faith itself that may keep a skeptical eye on its own statements."

--Karl Jaspers, Philosophical Faith and Revelation (tr., 1967), pp. 85-86.

Ramadan is Not Just Another Month: it is the School of Humanity

"Man is the being who can say no not only to others but to himself. This is the root from which our freedom and responsibility grow."

--John Wild, Existence and the World of Freedom (1963), 110.

Dervish Wisdom

Dervish wisdom is often the wisdom of the "holy fool." A thoroughly modern version of this type is exemplified by Isaac Bashevis Singer's classic tale, Gimpel the Fool.

Dervish and Friends

Dervish Shrines

Afghanistan:

Kashmir:

Pakistan:

Morocco:

The Deep Heart's Core:

Dervish Style

There's one in every crowd.