Peace and Mind : Civilian Scholarship from Common Knowledge 9781935790853, 9781934542163

Citation preview

PEACE AND MIND

Contemporary European Cultural Studies Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala, Series Editors This series publishes English translations of works by contemporary European intellectuals from philosophy, religion, politics, law, ethics, aesthetics, social sciences, and history. Volumes included in this series will not be included simply for their specific subject matter, but also for their ability to interpret, describe, explain, analyze, or suggest theories that recognize its historicity. Manfred Frank, The Boundaries of Agreement Antonio Livi, Reasons for Believing Jósef Niżnik, The Arbitrariness of Philosophy Paolo Crocchiolo, The Amorous Tinder William Egginton, A Wrinkle in History Rodolphe Gasché, Views and Interviews Giacomo Marramao, Kairós Andrés Ortiz-Osés, The Sense of the World José Guimón, Art and Madness Darío Antiseri, Poppers Vienna Remo Bodei, Logics of Delusion Philip Larrey, Thinking Logically Giovanni Mari, The Postmodern, Democracy, History Emanuela Fornari, Modernity Out of Joint Duncan Kennedy, Legal Reasoning Ana Messuti, Time As Punishment Franca D’Agostini, The Last Fumes: Nihilism and the nature of philosophical concepts Jeffrey M. Perl, ed., Peace and Mind: Civilian scholarship from Common Knowledge

PEACE AND MIND Civilian Scholarship from Common Knowledge Jeffrey M. Perl Editor

The Davies Group, Publishers Aurora, Colorado

Copyright 2011, Jeffrey M. Perl All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in an information retrieval system, or transcribed, in any form or by any means—electronic, digital, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the express written permission of the publisher, and the holder of copyright. Submit all inquiries and requests to the publisher: The Davies Group Publishers, PO Box 440140, Aurora, CO 80044-0140, USA.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Peace and mind : civilian scholarship from common knowledge / Jeffrey M. Perl, editor. p. cm. Compilation of articles originally published in Common knowledge. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-934542-16-3 (alk. paper) 1. Knowledge, Sociology of--Case studies. 2. Interdisciplinary approach to knowledge--Case studies. 3. Learning and scholarship-Philosophy. 4. Historiography--Philosophy. I. Perl, Jeffrey M. II. Common knowledge III. Title: Civilian scholarship from common knowledge. BD175.P43 2011 306.4’2--dc23 2011036276

Printed in the Unites States of America 0123456789

CONTENTS Preface Abstracts Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Randall Collins, On the Acrimoniousness of Intellectual Disputes

vii xxix xlvii l

1

Wayne Andersen, How Not to Take Sides: Leon Battista Alberti—Renaissance Man?

33

William Weber, Consequences of Canon: The Institutionalization of Enmity between Contemporary and Classical Music

55

Clifford Geertz, “Ethnic Conflict”: Three Alternative Terms

85

Ulrich Beck, The Truth of Others: A Cosmopolitan Approach

101

Bruno Latour, Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics?: Comments on the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck

111

Jeffrey J. Kripal, Comparative Mystics: Scholars as Gnostic Diplomats

129

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies

175

Roxanne L. Euben, A Counternarrative of Shared Ambivalence: Some Muslim and Western Perspectives on Science and Reason

205

vi

peace and mind

Gianni Vattimo, “Derealization” and Charity

247

Dale Kent, Charity and Power in Renaissance Florence: Surmounting Cynicism in Historiography

257

Israel J. Yuval, The Myth of the Jewish Exile from the Land of Israel: A Demonstration of Irenic Scholarship

283

Susan Stephens, Lessons of the Crocodile

311

Maya Jasanoff, Cosmopolitan: A Tale of Identity from Ottoman Alexandria

347

Clark Davis, “Not Like Any Form of Activity”: Waiting in Emerson, Melville, and Weil

371

PREFACE Jeffrey M. Perl

“Civilian” or irenic scholarship is a genre associated with Common Knowledge, a journal founded in 1992 and still in publication. The essays collected here are formative contributions to the genre, whose premises are of three related kinds. The first is professional: scholarship should be civil or collaborative, rather than agonistic or partisan. Writers in this genre tend to have experience of the socalled culture wars, as a result of which their tendency is to regard charity, diffidence, self-denial, self-doubt, vulnerability, readiness to compromise, ambivalence, and sometimes also quietism as basic intellectual virtues. They tend moreover to regard the contraries of these virtues as vices. A second premise motivating civilian scholarship is methodological: the “hermeneutics of suspicion” should be focused on conflict as much as on consensus. Wittgenstein’s insight that antagonists are fundamentally in agreement—that they agree in, or to, the language of their dispute—has been invaluable in dealing with intellectual and cultural (as well as social, political, and military) conflicts. Irenic scholars have come to expect that enmities, if minutely researched, disclose surprising origins and a history of unconscious or subterranean collaboration. Irenic scholarship tests the substance of conflicts by affiliating trends and milieus, groups and individuals, assumed to be at antipodes and by redescribing divisive figures charitably. The third premise of civilian scholarship is philanthropic: humanists should be humanitarian. Theorists in humanities and human science disciplines have developed sophisticated vocabularies and ways of framing problems that have an untapped potential for pro bono use. First, however, those theorists and their adherents must scale or bypass the barriers to altruism that they themselves have put in place. Leftovers from scholarly discourse of the past (reifications, fossils, bumpkin terms) impede the development of vocabularies

viii

peace and mind

useful for irenic work. Philosophers of science and anthropologists worked up “incommensurability,” for instance, to protect ways of life and thought that at the time seemed under threat; but the concept did its service and now does as much harm as good. Civilian scholars are especially concerned that the methodology of contextualism— which inhibits the comparison, translation, or assimilation of vocabularies—may inhibit irenic scholarship as well. Whatever the differences of emphasis among the practitioners of civilian scholarship today—and no one pursues equally all of its basic premises—each of us expects to find, as Clifford Geertz once said, “obscured dependencies” and very few “grand disjunctions” when studying past and present conflicts. The Professional Premise of Civilian Scholarship There should have been no “culture wars.” The skeptical theories of knowledge, meaning, and value that came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s should have inhibited, rather than inspired, intellectual conflict. To the extent that such theories worked to lower the pretensions of true, real, and other hazardous words, postmodernism was a project for which moderates and traditionalists should have been grateful. Even when arrogantly framed, poststructuralist claims gave the oldfashioned wisdom of humility a new life. It was not the argument of any sober theorist that “nothing is true” or “anything goes.” What was claimed, first, is that being right is not such a big deal—and second, that (as Susan Sontag put it) “something else is always going on.” There is too much truth for anyone or any combination of us to take in, digest, and utter. As for “anything goes”: what-goes depends on who’s going, and when. No one serious in these debates proposed that reality and validity and factuality are imaginary or even (in principle) unavailable to human understanding. The claim was, rather, that validity and facts are in such plentiful supply. It is not that we have no knowledge of facts but that we know so many and that the ones we do know do not, very much of the time, cohere. The most effective transmitters of this avant-garde wisdom have, in my experience, been lullabies, their tunes accompanied by stories

preface

ix

to help us get some rest. Once the melody of Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature is in your bedtime repertoire, the hypertension that attends on using real and true in sentences subsides. Unfortunately we have as yet no lullabye about justice and injustice, which remain nouns of exceptional shrillness. Along with truth and peace, justice is among the three principles that the Mishnah says maintain the world. Justice and truth have always had obsessive intellectual partisans. But peace? Living where I do, Jerusalem, peace seems to me an ideé fixe over which intellectuals could usefully obsess now. But even within the postmodern common room, there are voices shouting as though ontologies were in conflict. How is that possible, now that the big words have been lower-cased and scare-quoted? About what can those people be arguing? Rorty used to say that, despite all (“all” being historicism), he would like us to feel that we can fight and die for a cause we know is not transcendent, but historically situated and conditioned. I would have thought that the prime benefit of his kind of relativism should be that we would no longer feel any such needs. I used to think—it once seemed possible—that we contend over territory, even where, as in the academy, the territories are trivial (who gets the corner view? whose protégé gets tenure?). But I have come to think instead that we fight in order to evade peace, which apparently some of us fear and others despise. Heraclitus is quoted on the beauty of conflict in so many books, book reviews, and epigraphs, it is untoward. Knocking our heads together, as he recommends, is an unlikely means of enlightenment. The assumption that strife is productive is simply a prejudice. The symptoms are so widespread, we hardly notice them. What, for instance, does “celebrated quarrel” mean? It is a phrase that shows up often in scholarship and therefore ought to mean something. Many of us celebrate birthdays, national holidays; some celebrate Mass—but quarrels? More pertinent adjectives are available: “notorious quarrel” would make better sense. In assembling a bibliography of tomes with terms like “conflict,” “consensus,” and “disagreement” in their titles or subtitles, I have found relatively few in the humanities—these few are generally in the vein of Habermas or Donald Davidson in philosophy—that do

x

peace and mind

not presuppose agreement to be ominous. Jacques Rancière’s book Disagreement, for example, associates consensus with “the reign of the inhuman.” Certainly I can think of instances, many instances, in which a consensus has had dire consequences. But in theory? As a general maxim? Terror and Consensus, edited by Jean-Joseph Goux and Philip Wood, likewise “characterizes any community, political or other” in terms of “the agonistic, the dimension of conflict present in it.” Democracy, it is argued (I am summarizing a contribution to Terror and Consensus by Françoise Gaillard), requires a divided community. Democracy in an undivided community, she holds, is necessarily “a cosmetic vision.” Mark Poster, also writing in the Goux-Wood volume, describes Habermas’s theory of communicative action, which is premised on the desirability of consensus, as “a terroristic subordination of concept and meaning to instrumentality.” (Terroristic?) Not one essay in the collection disagrees about agreement: the consensus against consensus is definitively firm. To most of these books, which take stances more than they make claims, no helpful reply is possible. But Stuart Hampshire’s book Justice Is Conflict (his epigraph is the usual from Heraclitus) makes a case for agon so lucid that we can see where its blind spot is. Hampshire writes that “every soul is always the scene of conflicting tendencies and of divided aims and ambivalences, and correspondingly, our political enmities in the city or state will never come to an end while we have diverse life stories and diverse imaginations.” I am not sure what diversity has to do with ambivalence in that sentence— ordinarily we use diversity to refer to the relationships among stable, self-identical types—but I think it is interesting that Hampshire believes our ambivalence as individuals is a guarantee of strife when it could very well be the opposite. If each of us is ambivalent, if none of us represents a stable, self-identical type, then ambivalence could be an inchoate and dynamic principle of consensus. Montaigne, for example, understood ambivalence in this way: Anyone who turns his prime attention on to himself will hardly ever find himself in the same state twice. I give my soul this face or that, depending upon which side I

preface

xi

lay it down on. I speak about myself in diverse ways: that is because I look at myself in diverse ways. Every sort of contradiction can be found in me, depending upon some twist or attribute … anyone who studies himself attentively finds in himself and in his very judgement this whirring about and this discordancy. There is nothing I can say about myself as a whole simply and completely, without intermingling and admixture. I think it is fair to say that intellectuals fear ambivalence more than most people. We argue more than most not because we are more pugnacious, but because we more deeply fear self‑contradiction. However, Montaigne is writing here of multivalence rather than ambivalence and to that degree is a less threatening and more pertinent psychologist than Freud. Because it will pay to think of ourselves, each of us, as a parliament of incompatible parties in which elections must be held frequently; there must be governance, we must go on. The coalition in control today will present a prime-ministerial face reflecting none of the conflict that lurks behind it; likewise the next face tomorrow. The faces may differ widely, as Montaigne observes, and if we insist, each of us, that each new face is ours, our only face, the only face that we have ever had—that our opinions, in other words, are unconflicted and consistent—it is clear that we will come to blows with each other. But if we recognize, each, that we are internally more than externally diverse, that we are poor forked and bewildered creatures negotiating life on a planet hospitable basically to fish, then a devaluing of our external diversities is possible. Or regard the matter in this way: disagreements are complexly historical. They mostly have histories that long antedate the disputants—histories so entangled and subtle that disagreement has become, paradoxically, a kind of sharing. Their dispute, given their agreement to have one, is almost a community—and, in such a case, neither the word disagreement itself, nor the terms of whatever disagreement is in question, has any longer a genuine or stable referent. Some philosophers view this problem as an effect of untranslatability. Rorty wrote of the opposing sides in a dispute:

xii

peace and mind

“Both are right, but there is no way to make both speak a single language.” However, the most serious misunderstandings may arise when parties to a dispute speak the same words but mean different things by them or do not mean what they say at all. “There is a general law,” P. N. Furbank has written, that “what historians refer to … as ‘beliefs’ or mental ‘representations’ are better described as rhetoric.” Much of what enemies, or even friends, say is wishful thinking; enmity, like friendship, is perhaps a milieu, rather than a consequence of acts or beliefs. At all events, when it comes to history, it seems perversely wishful to describe the past, in Lawrence Stone’s manner, as “a battle-ground which has been heavily fought over … beset with mines, booby-traps and ambushes manned by ferocious scholars prepared to fight every inch of the way.” (Ferocious?) What I am trying to describe is not a position. It is a metaposition, a position about holding positions. Call it relativism and scare the neighbors; give it blessedly no name at all, and what is it? A civilian approach to living four-score years. Skepticism is nothing but sophistication, its maxims inscribed for occasional reference. In our time, thanks to the fires of hell, that sophistication is widely shared. Relativists of the kind I mean can have deep commitments, and peace is often one of them; they value peace over truth and justice—or rather, they know that truth and justice have been used as excuses for war. I would add that, in both the short and long runs, truth and justice are themselves better served by those whose preference is for peace… . Some readers, I imagine, are by this paragraph squirming with embarrassment and responding with disdain. But the intellectual community needs to get its affective house in order before it can claim any other community’s regard. Joyce wrote seventeen acidly ironic episodes of Ulysses so that no intellectual could smirk when his book said “yes I will Yes” in the eighteenth. After World War II, Beckett was able—there had been sufficient death by then—to arrange dramaticules (such as Footfalls and Not I) that are sentimentalphilanthropic and ironic-brutal-cool at once. But if scholarship is waiting for its Samuel Beckett, it could wait too long. The cultivation of pity, mercy, compassion, approbation, love of peace, and the other

preface

xiii

virtues whose invocation leaves us green and squeamish will take much time and conscious effort in a community that prefers to see itself as rough-and-tumble. Quarreling appears to be a game, much as war is said to be—a game with human casualties and cultural casualties that, once it has started, there seems no reliable way of ending until enough damage has been done. The world deserves better of those employed to think and write and educate. The Methodological Premise of Civilian Scholarship Our first and worst mistake as scholars is to define fields of inquiry with reference to controversial topics (past and present), to disagreements, to the dividing lines between what are called “schools.” I am not suggesting that we find and celebrate points of concord. While many of us want to transcend what Ian Hacking calls the “evil  … of sheer incommensurability,” not all of us are impressed that there is “an immense amount of agreement about chickens and blades of grass and what’s wet and whether a camel hair goes through the eye of a needle.” The passage that I just quoted is Hacking’s gloss on Donald Davidson’s view of consensus. This next passage is Davidson’s own summary of his own position: What is shared does not in general call for comment; it is too dull, trite, or familiar to stand notice. But without a vast common ground, there is no place for disputants to have their quarrel. Of course, we can no more agree than disagree with someone else without much mutuality; but perhaps this is obvious. I am not sure to what extent I agree with Davidson or even Hacking’s Davidson about agreement. Notice the adjectives that Davidson associates with mutuality: “familiar,” “dull,” and “trite.” Notice Hacking’s funny list of what we agree about: lawns, poultry, dampness, camels. But is it that we agree about insignificant, dull, and homely things, or that we agree to label those things about which we are agreed insignificant, dull, and homely? Agreement

xiv

peace and mind

that we agree (about many boring things) does not take us very far. It does not clarify why—does not worry the question why—we consider agreements trivial and tautological. And the point that Davidson makes does not help us either with specific disagreements among specifiable intellectuals: disagreements on disagreeable questions. At that level of discourse, it does not help us to observe that two thinkers, driving tanks, agree about dampness and camels. “Agreement” and “disagreement” lose their explanatory usefulness in complex and subtle conversation. The terms are too primitive for use by intellectuals. Alternative vocabularies are, fortunately, at hand. The authors of postmodern proverbs stipulate a view of opposites as mutually constituting, mutually deconstructing, and unendurably dependent on each other. Thus adversaries are best conceived as a unit or even system. Our most profound disputes may express accord, and protagonists may agree to fight rather than experience the ambivalence they share. We are all of us ripe for conversion to our apparent opposites. Each of us involved in a dispute is divided— divided as an individual. Our disagreements are with ourselves. “All serious thinkers in the eighteenth century accepted commerce, and all had doubts about it” is a dictum of J. G. A. Pocock’s. “To range political thinkers such as Jefferson as wholly for or wholly against commerce would be,” he adds, “to miss the reality of the debate.” And yet, he finds, historians almost universally do so. Complaining he has been made a “straw man” for even noticing this small complexity, Pocock asks the plaintive question: “Are historians incapable of counting higher than two? … I found I had blasphemed against icons of American liberalism, when all I wanted to say was that the icons were unsure of themselves.” If the serious thinkers on all (more than two) sides of a debate are ambivalent, then focusing intellectual history on debates, and focusing political history on wars, elections, and other conflicts, becomes less a valid method for historians to apply than a subject for their diligent investigation. We devise historical periods, moreover, on a winner-take-all system: “whose army won?” “whose style of painting, whose thought style, won out over whose?” are the kinds of

preface

xv

questions that we ask. But if the ambivalence of all parties continues beyond the dates of historical transition, then is the transition more or other than one between complex tissues of ambivalence? In which case, why view the transition as into anything so portentous as a new period, episteme, paradigm, or context? Taking ambivalence seriously into account could work changes equally extensive in philosophy and other theoretical disciplines. “If we have no one else with whom to argue, we must do so with ourselves,” Aristotle says in the Organon. In the presence of consensus or the absence of an adversary, the philosopher “must” turn on himself—Aristotle intends that “must” prescriptively, we assume, but I wonder if we should not take it descriptively, as meaning “we have no choice but to”? In which case, the sentence would make a splendid epigraph for a fat book on projection and related defenses. The anxiety of a life without opponents is one that philosophers, theorists, proposers of falsifiable propositions, might feel intensely, were it not that opponents are so readily found. Without an adversary, a proposer might begin to locate faults in the conclusion that he or she has proposed—in the arguments made to get there—and might feel the desirability of other conclusions and lines of argument. The dialectic, the conflict, the feelings of enmity might be realized internally. The anxiety may go yet deeper: the theory of ambivalence, if radically understood, implies that neither the community nor the individual has convictions, commitments, settled practices, or even existence. We may exist, qua us or qua me, only in relation to a vast inter- and intrapersonal mess of defenses against thinking and feeling too many contradictory things at once. In the relevant sense of the word, I learned all I know about mess in the years from 1989 to 1991, while I watched the Soviet monolith collapse. Stable systems of thought and behavior, I learned then, are transient; their most deeply convinced proponents may turn against them. Maintaining an appearance of stability and conviction requires fancy footwork psychologically. Doubts about a regime of thinking and behavior, even if the doubts are shared universally, must be situated locally so that orthodoxy—or even a coherent state of affairs—may seem to prevail. Dissidents are a convenient place

xvi

peace and mind

to deposit our inconsistencies and then confront them, as if outside ourself, with hatred, aversion, or outrage. The approach to adversarial relationships that I am sketching here augments the hermeneutics of suspicion but, at the same time, disorients it. The hermeneutics of suspicion has tended to be more cynical than skeptical—which is another way of saying that its practitioners are skeptical, but only of common sense. Speaking for common sense in the Politics, Aristotle argues that there is war and there is peace, that they are different, and that while the latter is much preferable, the former is sometimes a way of achieving it. The cynical response, from Heraclitus to Foucault, has been that peace is a disingenuous form of war. The academic field of conflict resolution is divided today, so far as I can tell, between these alternatives, labeled respectively “idealist” and “realist.” But there is logically a tertium quid. War may be a disingenuous form of peace—a way to have peace of mind but also wholeness. The anxiety of feeling too many contradictory things at once is for many of us an intolerable kind of pain. Projecting contradictory feelings, desires, and ideas onto others, we still can hold our castlings close through enmity. In a war of this description, the opponents are complicit unconsciously; and the effects of war tend to be, at one level, sanguinary while, at another level, sanguine. The conscious cooperation of enemies is a more mysterious operation. I refer the interested reader to Natalie Zemon Davis’s classic essay on the Aumône-Générale of sixteenthcentury Lyon. Davis emerged from the archives with evidence of opponents in the religious wars meeting secretly and regularly to plan for the distribution of charity. Protestants and papists on the field of battle, they were merely Christians behind closed doors— Tweedledum and Tweedledee being, it would seem indisputably, Tweedles first and foremost. Scholarship too fine and skeptical to contemplate the existence of either/or propositions seems always at hand but never predominant. The first Romantics, those in Jena, put the principle of noncontradiction in doubt, determined that there is “essentially no such thing as error,” looked for residual misunderstandings in every consensus, proposed that contradictions cancel each other out, and

preface

xvii

stressed that adversaries are (metaphysically and historically) parts of larger wholes. Expounding Friedrich Schlegel, Manfred Frank wrote in Common Knowledge that irony makes it “possible to see the systematically coherent whole, though only as a regulative idea.” The wholeness to which opposing parts belong is not “an idea about which there can be intelligent dispute.” It is because polar terms are one (or are accomplices) that they are ultimately irreconcilable. The acid test of this style of thought is Jewish history, for reasons too obvious to require mention. The most successful attempt that I know of to apply it to Jewish history is a passage, from which I will quote at length, in a Common Knowledge article ostensibly on another topic. In “The Presence of Objects: Medieval AntiSemitism in Modern Germany,” Caroline Walker Bynum considers charges made by Christians in the Middle Ages that Jews desecrated Eucharistic hosts. She examines the cult at Deggendorf in Germany, which became an important pilgrimage site after a pogrom there in 1337. The anti-Jewish violence was justified a generation later with “an elaborate legend of Jewish host desecration,” confirmed by the presence at Deggendorf of a bleeding “wonderhost  … preserved without decay.” The Nazis encouraged pilgrimage to the site because of these anti-Jewish associations; thus “anti-Semitism seemed to lurk in the miraclehost itself.” Despite which, Bynum goes on to argue, bravely, that one might see the cult at Deggendorf as eucharistic, not anti-Semitic, in origin, and interpret the projection of host legends back onto a riot against the Jews less as an excuse for killing (which in many places at the time seemed hardly to need an excuse) than as a claim to miraculous presence…. To contemporaries, it may have been more a matter of seizing on the slaughter of Jews as an opportunity for miracle than crafting the miracle as an excuse (before or after the fact) for slaughter. Horrible though it seems to say it now, the Jews may have been “useful” in the Middle Ages not only as moneylenders and merchants, not only (in theological and exegetical terms) as the chosen remnant who must be

xviii

peace and mind

preserved for a conversion that would herald the end of time, but also as creators (or, in theological terms, revealers) of holy matter. The emergence of such matter—miraculously resisting decay and destruction as if nonmaterial, yet bleeding as if alive—was often in the earlier Middle Ages a response to superstition, naïveté, or credulity, to accidents or mistakes in ritual; but increasingly in the later Middle Ages it was seen as the result of specifically Jewish doubt, malice, or abuse. It is quite possible to argue that the heart of the matter was matter—holy matter—and not an excuse for attacking Jews. Relics like the one at Deggendorf, Bynum suggests, produced “moments of special encounter with the flesh of Christ. If the bleeding was truly Christ’s blood, then objects such as tabletops, knives, or nails that touched it” were “saturated not so much with the evil of the violators as with the power of a God who revealed himself in its midst. In a distorted and hideous felix culpa, desecration produced the holy matter that led to special access to the divine.” And for this miracle—as for Eucharist itself, which required that Jesus’ blood be shed, as on an altar—medieval Christians had a “kingdom of priests,” the Jewish people, to thank. This honor paid the Jews is dubious, to say the least. Still, the perspective from which Bynum views medieval history could help scholars to redraw more than one episode of anti-Jewish violence in shades more subtle and complex than black and white, or even grey. The Philanthropic Premise of Civilian Scholarship Interventions such as Bynum’s are rare. One reason worth considering for the rarity is publicly sensitive resistance to the involvement of scholars in public affairs. Take, for example, “the war over history” in India, which William Dalrymple helped bring to attention in the West with an article in the New York Review of Books. Even nonIndian scholars overseas, publishing on presses such as Oxford, found themselves persecuted, sometimes violently, and prosecuted in Indian courts for mounting scholarly arguments offensive to Hindu

preface

xix

nationalist versions of history. Wendy Doniger was narrowly missed by an egg while lecturing in London on aspects of Indian religion— and one contributor to this book, Jeffrey Kripal, was arraigned in the upper house of the Indian parliament and pursued even in America by Hindu agitators. Protestors in India bring lawsuits and crowbars against academic historians who have shown that Indian school textbooks are stocked with myths. As Dalrymple wrote, “It is not just that the textbooks are historically invalid: in the aftermath of the state-sponsored pogroms in Gujarat in April 2002, when over two thousand Muslims were hunted down and murdered, Indian historians fear that the propagation of such divisive myths can only lead to yet more violence.” Dalrymple added that myths have replaced history even “among the members of India’s middle class,” because there is an “absence of accessible, well-written, and balanced histories of India” in English, let alone in any Indian language. In a similar vein, Neal Ascherson has written (again, in the vigilant New York Review) about the “incompatible versions of the past” maintained in Armenia and Azerbaijan. But Ascherson’s special interest is in how “mutual exclusion is not the whole story … pitiless group rejection [can] live side by side with personal affection and understanding.” He quotes Thomas de Waal on the Armenian/ Azerbaijani problem: “The lines of division run straight through the middle of people. Hateful impulses coexist with conciliatory feelings in the same person.” To which, Ascherson adds: “In Baku and Yerevan, refugees loaded de Waal with news and fond messages for beloved friends and neighbors they had been forced to leave behind. Many hundreds of Armenians owe their lives to Azerbaijanis who rescued or hid them and their families during the Baku pogroms of January 1990.” When “totally incompatible versions” of a conflict and the “hateful impulses” blamed on it coexist with feelings suggesting there was “personal affection” in the past, historians may have work to do before successful diplomacy can be contemplated. What methods of historiography are best applied to conflicts of this description? Manuel Gimeno and Francisco Espinosa, for example, have used microhistorical techniques effectively to unravel preconceptions about the Spanish Civil War. Microhistorians have

xx

peace and mind

collected large amounts of previously ignored data (including oral histories) while eschewing the usual approach of Civil War historians, which is to write an overall and thus tendentious history of the slaughter and its aftermath. Working with very circumscribed districts and time frames, the microhistorian attempts to delimit what can and cannot be said honestly about what happened more generally in Spain during the 1930s. But he or she also records what has, with insufficient warrant, been claimed (by whom, in what context, and why). Only accounts of this intricacy, perhaps, can make sense of the complexity and ambivalence of feelings that may adhere to such events for decades or even centuries to come. Still, irenic scholars are only too aware of how poor the record of intellectual intervention in public affairs was in the last century, and aware also that historical scholarship has not always been curative. As Clifford Geertz warned: the rehearsal of charge and rebuttal, accusation and denial with respect to events about which everyone involved, or even interested, has long ago taken up a position loses momentum after the fifth go-round. Introspection has its uses, but after a while it begins to look like hypochondria…the sense grows most insistent that the past really is, sometimes, past, and that after a while it runs out of lessons to teach us. Around the same time, however, and in another context, Geertz commented critically on the dearth of engaged but informed, responsible scholarship. “Certainly,” he concluded a review of books on the Islamic world, the conception of “Islam” being so desperately built up before our eyes by professors, politicians, journalists, polemicists, and others professionally concerned with making up our minds will be of great importance in determining what we do. Here, for once, the line between writing and the world is direct, explicit, substantial, and observable. And, we shall doubtless soon see, consequential.

preface

xxi

Thus even advocates of contextualism—those who hold that knowledge should be thought of as local—are coming to admit that exponents of rival worldviews had better get help in communicating with each other. There are distinguished precedents. The use of history made by principals in the Christian ecumenical movement has been perhaps the most productive of these. Ecumenical theologians recognize that reconciliation will not come to their churches through discussion of theological controversies. Such scholars recognize, in other words, that reconciliation will never occur through a synthesis of truthclaims but only, if at all, through a history of their development and conflict. An important history of this type is Henry Chadwick’s book East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church. Chadwick’s strategy is to wear down the reader’s prejudices with details, of which he musters three kinds. The first kind is deployed to make the date 1054 appear almost inconsequential. 1054 is the year when, I learned in school, Cardinal Humbert (representing the papacy) and Michael Cerularius (patriarch of Constantinople) severed communion between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches. But Chadwick runs through a series of disputes and apparently irreconcilable breaks beginning as early as the Christian church and concluding as late as the Council of Florence in 1439. He shows that any number of dates for the break between churches could be selected, or that—and I assume this is his implication—we might do better with no date at all. A second sort of detail that Chadwick assembles to exhaustion is what he calls, in his epilogue, expressions of Christian love (these often are tacit) and of a deep desire among Christians to reconcile. He hunts for what he terms “pro-unionists” and finds them in every generation and on all sides: “Patient listening,” he writes, “can uncover deep and wide agreement concealed by the polemics of the past”—and “interpretation of the past,” he adds, “defines the limits of what is possible in the present.” The third kind of detail that Chadwick accumulates is evidence of human pettiness. By the time I had finished reading his book, I was persuaded that rarely had principles been at stake in the disputes between Eastern and Western

xxii

peace and mind

churches but only personal insults, mistranslated or unhandsomely delivered messages, and various types of sloppiness, mendacity, selfaggrandizement, and ill temper—humanly contingent circumstances rather than Truth or Revelation or Justice. As a reviewer of the book, Conrad Leyser, put it: Churchmen in general and bishops in particular had long memories. This could be a blessing, but also a curse. A slight, once uttered, did not easily dissipate: the techniques of institutional memory tended rather to distort it. So effective, indeed, were these techniques that events did not need to have occurred at all. Canon lawyers became adept at retrojecting into the past the claims and accusations of the present. One would hope that a Roman Catholic or Orthodox bishop reading Chadwick’s subtle history would feel chiefly a sense of humiliation— which is the first step toward humility—and a desire to make amends for centuries of “retrojection.” A less formal ecumenical movement exists between Christians and Jews. Chadwick was involved in formally constituted negotiations between the Anglican and Roman Catholic communions. Scholars such as Robert Lerner and Daniel Boyarin are not formally involved in discussions between the rabbinate and any Christian church, though their work seems an attempt to contribute to mutual understanding between these communities. Lerner’s latest book is The Feast of Saint Abraham: Medieval Millenarians and the Jews, and in it he proceeds much as Chadwick does with respect to the unheralded peacemakers of church history. Against the widespread assumption that medieval millenarians were universally anti-Semitic, Lerner has labored in the archives (“sometimes,” he says, “like a Russian in the 1950s, reading unpublished editions in samizhdat”). And he has come up with a tradition, or as he puts it “a network,” of Joachites—followers of Joachim of Fiore, mostly Franciscans—who believed that eventually Jews would take all leadership positions in the church, including the papacy, and move the principal seat of Christianity from Rome to a

preface

xxiii

restored Jerusalem. Lerner gives as an example the French Franciscan John of Rupescissa, who was kept for years in a papal prison for his heretically irenic views and yet “was not only allowed but positively encouraged to write more prophecy” by his jailers. His writings were distributed in the fourteenth century “from his dungeon to cardinals’ palaces, and thence to the outreaches of Europe.” By 1550, a figure in this tradition or network, Guillaume Postel, “wrote that for the world to be spiritually renewed good Christians should think of themselves as ‘Christian-Jews’.” The argument was finally that “Christians themselves needed to be made better and the Jews were there to help. If this book has served any larger purpose,” Lerner concludes his last page, “it has been to counter any comfortable assumption that all medieval Christians thought alike about their Jewish neighbors. Granted that the Joachite millenialists were not tolerationists, they nonetheless stood for an alternative to the formation of a persecuting society.” Daniel Boyarin’s desire for reconciliation takes him farther than either Lerner or Chadwick is prepared to go. Chadwick implies, but never states, that no break occurred between the Eastern and Western churches; it is just that we cannot specify a date—the churches were always at odds and yet always, at least in theory and in yearning, a part of the one universal church. Boyarin in recent work argues that “there are Christians who are Jews, or perhaps better put, Jews who are Christians, even up to this very day.” A part of his point, there, depends on acceptance of the Foucauldian premise that such identities are constructed (and may rely for their continuance) on one another’s continued existence. But a more interesting aspect of Boyarin’s argument depends on Freudian thinking. Boyarin chooses to examine texts that expose the Christian’s “pervasive ambivalence” about Judaism: “It is the fact that Jews and Christians share the same scripture and, in part, the same liturgy that produces the anxiety about borders” that Boyarin finds in Christian texts. These are texts that others have defined, more simply, as either anti-Semitic, on the one hand, or philo-Semitic, on the other. Ambivalence is at the heart of such texts because it is the “redefinition [of Judaism] as an object on the same semiotic level as Christianity, not the extinction of

xxiv

peace and mind

Judaism, that guarantees Christian orthodox existence.” Ecumenical activity of the kind that Boyarin’s work represents is akin to the practice of psychoanalysis, in which the analysand is invited to own his or her ambivalences and be healed by having owned them. The precedents for civilian scholarship, however, are not restricted to the field of religion; other successful attempts have been made in the area of geopolitics. There have been, for instance, governmentappointed commissions charged with suggesting revisions to textbooks used on both sides of troubled borders. The best documented of these may be the Joint Polish-German Commission, about which Michael Müller published a retrospect and overview in 2004. Beginning in the 1970s, the commission drew the attention of Polish and German geographers and historians to one another’s postwar research. This encounter led, Müller says, to a “systematic debate over comparative history” and over “the ‘entangled histories’ of Germans and Poles.” The discussion “started from an extremely low level of cross-national communication. In the interwar period, institutional contacts had almost come to a stand-still as in Germany the field of East Central European Studies was increasingly occupied by the representatives of an openly political discourse of anti-Polonism.” Müller’s phrase “extremely low level of cross-national communication” is bracing because, in the end, direct conversation among scholars across borders led to a serious revision of both nations’ school curricula. One technique used in those conversations was to switch historical venues from areas, in the modern centuries, where no consensus appeared possible to the medieval centuries where Polish-German topics were less politicized. Medieval historians were apparently more open to the discussion of what Müller calls “methodologically complex issues.” The result apparently was a reconceptualization of unsettled problems of historiography “in a broad European context” that minimized “essentialist national interpretations hitherto so typical of the definition and perception of space that had dominated German and Polish historiography in the past.” Müller says that, in the end, the commission did not so much negotiate “a common view of the past” as thoroughly “deconstruct national narratives.”

preface

xxv

A “common language” was developed which he defines as “postnationalist”—so much so that debates among German and Polish historians are no longer divided along national lines but along those of “diverging methodological orientations” that, he contends, have “become more significant than national loyalties.” But the PolishGerman case is one in which a level of goodwill had been established between governments, and so an ad hoc commission of the kind could function, albeit deliberately and painfully. There are other border disputes and historical disputes internationally in which no such cooperation is yet possible. Individual scholars have had to take on themselves the burden that, in the Polish-German case, could be handled by groups with government support. I am thinking, for instance, of a study by John Powers, History as Propaganda: Tibetan Exiles versus the People’s Republic of China. Given the stakes and the contemporaneity of many events he has to deal with, Powers’s book could do little more than “legwork.” Among its basic contributions are charts that parallel or equate terms used by Tibetan and Chinese historians and propagandists, so that novices like me can begin to understand the documents. Powers says that where Chinese sources refer to “rebellious bandits,” Tibetan sources refer to “the Tibetan people”; and where the Chinese use the phrase “instigated by the Dalai Lama’s clique,” Tibetans use the single adjective “popular.” Where the Chinese use the words “cruel” and “savage,” Tibetans use “good” and “warm.” Powers understands that what needs to be undertaken is deep and monographic historical work leading, however slowly, toward the understanding of two mentalities that are partially in conflict and partially inextricable. But there is so much legwork to accomplish first that he can only hint at what such studies might, in the end, conclude. He is dealing with a conflict in which “all the Tibetan writers use only Tibetan or English sources, and all of the Chinese writers use only Chinese or English sources.” Thus Powers sets out to catalog the “internal contradictions and inconsistencies” in the two basic historical accounts of Tibetan/ Chinese relations; and second, to show that the biases of the two accounts are, as he says, “incommensurable.” But the opponents are in

xxvi

peace and mind

perfect agreement on one point: history is crucial in founding their political claims. Powers suggests that a history could be written with the aim of reconciling what seem to be irreconcilable viewpoints, and he comes eventually to the conclusion that both sides incorrectly perceive Tibet and China prior to the modern period in terms derived from the modern nation-state…. Unlike the modern nation-state, in the past the borders between the two countries were unclear and often shifted. Borders were far more porous than those of modern nation-states and vast areas of the frontier were unpatrolled…. The situation was one in which two governments exercised primary authority within their respective central provinces, and their power diminished as one moved toward the peripheries … the vast distances between the central areas of China and the Tibetan plateau made direct administration impossible, and so as long as Tibet remained stable and posed no threat to China, the government was content to leave it alone to manage its own affairs … the institution of the Dalai Lamas, which led to periodic times of weakness and political infighting between the death of one Dalai Lama and the maturity and investiture of his successor, coupled with the inwardlooking nature of Tibetan society, led to a situation in which Tibet needed military support from its neighbors. As long as China provided that support and refrained from directly annexing Tibet, the government was content to allow China to officially proclaim its overlordship. [In the era of the nation-state, however], such an ambiguous conclusion is unacceptable to both sets of contemporary writers, who are convinced that “history” can prove their points and defeat their enemies. Thus Powers sets down the terms in which incommensurability could be overcome between historians of goodwill; yet his conclusion, his last words on the topic, are: “It is difficult to imagine a resolution

preface

xxvii

in light of the incommensurability of their respective premises and sources of evidence.” He gives up just when he could start work on volumes two and three of a magnum opus. How would work of that kind be put to civilian use? Promising ideas have been in circulation for some years and have led to practical experiments. The Salzburg Seminar’s Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation sponsors “historical dialogues in pursuit of accountability, acknowledgement, and the resolution of historical disputes that inflame and aggravate contemporary conflict. The IHJR aims to turn historical dialogue into a fundamental tool of political reconciliation.” Their method is to establish groups of historians, partisans from “both sides of a conflict”; and these groups, together with “relevant third parties,” are asked to develop joint histories that the IHJR then will find ways to disseminate. The advisory board consists of lawyers, diplomats, and human rights professionals, so dissemination should not be a problem. The problem, from the perspective of irenic scholarship, is that the IHJR is not an organization for scholars— certainly not for scholars (“students of the symbolic”) of the variety that Lorraine Daston has argued are best prepared to unpack disputes. The historians that the IHJR locks in combat to produce “joint histories” are encouraged to picture their conflict as between “both sides”: but why are conflicts thought to occur between “sides” at all, as though they were board games or sports; and why is it so predictably two teams and an umpire that are called onto the field? I wonder also about the phrase “Historical Justice” in the IHJR’s name: is not the idea of historical justice dry kindling for an uncontained fire? Scholars with an eye to conflict resolution (and conflict avoidance) should think about how definitions of the word justice—also of fact and truth—vary across borders and through time. But if peace is the aim, it would make sense to concentrate, in writing history, on evidence of ambivalence, ambiguity, unclarity, paradox, covert agreement, and the mutual dependence of opposing claims. Justice, fact, and truth are terms adequate to the aims, and developed for the use, of disputants (“Truth being on the side of the Tibetan people, we feel the need from time to time to restate the facts plainly, as they really are, and trust that this will serve the cause of truth and justice”); but those terms are not

xxviii

peace and mind

adequate to the aims of historians committed to resolving disputes. Unfortunately, non-scholars in general and disputants in particular prefer the vocabulary and methodology of positivism, while positivist historians are untrained and unpoised to recognize the premises that enemies share. Is reconciliation the likely upshot when participants in negotiations take for granted that “sides” are nonmetaphorical, that facts are “plain,” and that truth and justice are “causes” that peacemakers are called upon to “serve”? A good text to help with reframing these and similar questions is Bruno Latour’s underread manifesto, War of the Worlds: What about Peace? His argument is that disputants and writers about disputes must begin by acknowledging “that there exists no superior referee”—no omnipotent fact or truth or standard of historical justice: “no arbiter”—“able to declare that the other party is irrational and should be disciplined.” The trouble, Latour says, with positivist or even simply rationally based proposals for resolving conflicts is that “reason recognizes no enemy.” What the peacemaker faces in disputes with long histories is “proponents of different common worlds” rather than different series of falsifiable claims. Before any negotiation can begin, disputants must be brought to see that “facts, as their etymology indicates, are fabricated, and so are fetishes, gods, values, works of art, political arenas, and nations…. Here is where negotiations could begin: with the question of the right ways to build.” What we want, Latour ends by arguing—surprisingly for so credentialed a contextualist—is universality: a single common world. But universality will have to be constructed, since it does not now exist, and can be constructed only by enemies working together. The social constructivist argument—that facts are by definition factitious—has been construed as deconstructive in intent or even nihilist. On the contrary, as Latour’s book demonstrates, social constructivism is an invitation to make things (among which could be peace on earth).

ABSTRACTS The intended readers of this volume are scholars and the students whom they train for careers in scholarship. The essays collected here are meant to show veterans of the humanities and human sciences that a war footing is unnecessary and inappropriate to their vocation. For mentors who conclude their students should learn that humanists, in research and writing, can pursue humanitarian aims, the following abstracts are offered as a guide to the academic fields and irenic methods that are treated in the varied contributions to this book. Randall Collins, “On the Acrimoniousness of Intellectual Disputes,” is a supplement to his monumental study The Sociology of Philosophies. Collins’s basic claim is that intellectuals work only in “networks,” never alone, and that their disputes are best explained in sociological terms. When scholars argue, despite appearances, it is not about the truth, except in this one restricted sense: “the notion of truth is a constitutive ideal of the intellectual community, symbolically expressing…what distinguishes them from nonintellectuals, those who put other interests first.” Collins holds that “the intellectual world is, sociologically, an attention space” and that “intellectual success consists in making the arguments that put oneself in the midst of the several dimensions of conflict that structure intellectual attention space.” Thus, “intellectual conflict” is “not only normal, but constitutive of how ideas are shaped.” The intensity of conflict is likewise best described sociologically: there are “more good ideas generated…than slots in the attention space. Those persons who are ignored and disappointed often manifest the kind of acrimony that we may call the bitterness of the supernumeraries.” With this hypothesis in mind, Collins reviews the history of intellectual cultures in Europe, Islam, and China. His conclusion is that we would be better off if we were more explicit about our dependence on a network cycling through widely if unevenly shared bodies of ideas and argumentative techniques; more

xxx

peace and mind

explicit, too, in recognizing that the few individuals who become the rallying points of intellectual movements are focal points in flows of ideas that wash in many directions around networks made up of large numbers of us. Less egotism, both individual and collective, and more awareness of how we all constitute each other: this could be a path toward lowering intellectual acrimony in the future.

Wayne Andersen, “How Not to Take Sides—Leon Battista Alberti: Renaissance Man?” is, like Collins’s essay, about avoiding petty competition and discord among scholars. Andersen’s main claim is that scholars argue too much over problems that they themselves have manufactured: the assertions and denials of intellectuals often concern only the meaning and application of neologisms and reifications. As an example, he traces the history of a dispute that began in the nineteenth century over the question, “Was Alberti a ‘Renaissance Man’?” Andersen traces as well related disputes over what the term “Renaissance” means and whether periodization is a fruitful subject for scholarly discussion. Arguing that the Renaissance, if there was such, “applies as an idea only to a miniscule sector of the Italian population” and that most artists, at any given time, “develop or reproduce styles that are enduringly conserved and available” for use, Andersen concludes that a process of “unnatural selection” at five Quattrocento courts yielded “mutants protected from prevailing conditions of general mediocrity.” These “mutants” constitute what we call “the Renaissance,” and their destiny was to add “morphological links (irreversible ones) to the progress of evolution” in the arts and sciences. Having established this context, Andersen repeats the question asked by his subtitle and responds with another question: “Who cares?” Even specialists on the period should not care, he says, because being wrong or right with respect to such a question would be inconsequential. Drawing on arguments made by the philosopher W. V. Quine, Andersen seeks to demonstrate that, in a conflict over terminology, right means “trivially true within a conceptual scheme.” If an entity (a “possible entity,” in Quine’s

abstracts

xxxi

terms) that you do not believe exists, but by the nature of things you cannot prove does not exist, is a subject of debate among colleagues, then you should grant their conceptual scheme. In other words, “‘No, Alberti was not a ‘Renaissance Man’ is one of those sentences that has meaning but—if the speaker does not believe in Renaissance Men or the Renaissance—has no reference.” The alternative to playing an academic game that you do not want to play is to reply, when cornered: “Alberti was a Renaissance Man if anyone was. We can speak of Renaissance Men (and the Renaissance) while having no commitment to either concept…. Grant the scheme—there is no way out, in any case; and to do so costs you nothing but your own endurance of a long, tedious, and trivial war.”

William Weber, “Consequences of Canon: The Institutionalization of Enmity between Contemporary and Classical Music,” is a study in the relationship of enmity and contingency. Often it is presupposed that adversarial relationships are based on disagreements and selfinterest, but Weber’s focus is on an enmity that developed out of sheer contingency. He does not dispute that there has been bad blood for a long time between classical and contemporary music; he reviews instances of severe polemic emerging from both camps. The concertgoing public is dismissive of most contemporary composers, and those composers tend to regard establishment concert programs as philistine. Musical modernism is commonly said to make demands that few listeners can meet (and even fewer can tolerate). But modernist and postmodern experiments with serialism, atonality, and aleatory composition “did not create the problem.” Weber’s point, supported by his archival research, is that “by 1910 concert life had shifted its focus so much from contemporary to classical repertory that new works now took up a problematic, often marginal place within musical life.” Until far into the nineteenth century, it was unusual for more than a few works to remain “in performance longer than a generation”—a situation “of course the opposite of that which prevails in our own day.” Taste in music, Weber continues, “was by definition a matter for the present, with links to the various

xxxii

peace and mind

styles of the past changing on a cyclical basis … early audiences went with the presumption that most of the programs they attended would be of new music, and indeed they were lured into the concert hall by such promises.” Until fairly recently, then, “being on the side of innovation meant bringing old works back into the repertory, whereas being on the side of tradition meant scheduling only or mostly new music.” From this innovation in concert programming emerged an “impatience” among concert-goers with “less-thansupreme greatness” and, accordingly, a “suspicion of new music” as well. It was “as if the clock of musical time had stopped…. The rise of musical classics established a fearsome hierarchy and a dreaded new concept: the ‘minor composer’.” Rather than talk in terms of enmity between classical and contemporary music—which lends itself to making judgements, choosing sides—Weber advises that we more fruitfully and correctly say simply that “history dealt music a tough set of cards to play.” The ultimate moral of his story, however, has considerably more bite and carries weighty implications for irenic scholarship: “the unusually dynamic and emotion-bending movements we call ‘classical’ and ‘popular’ taste … could be made to work together only by institutionalizing the enmity between them.” The scholar’s job is to find another way.

Clifford Geertz, “‘Ethnic Conflict’: Three Alternative Terms,” argues that “there are subjects of general public concern” with which scholars can be of help yet from which they tend to stay aloof. In the case at hand, Geertz maintains that “anthropological ways of thinking” are of “particular relevance” to the diverse nightmares known by the single name of “ethnic conflict.” Dubious that “any field ever will” construct “a body of data and theory remotely adequate for size-up-and-solve rational control of such matters as collective identity, racism, and social violence,” Geertz suggests that “what anthropology can do” is develop “a more useful way of discussing” them. By “useful,” he means ramified and various: the “vocabulary available [for discussing] issues of collective personality” is “too sweeping, and too insensitive to local realities.” Geertz brings his

abstracts

xxxiii

own field experience to bear on the question, assuming that scholarly prose should be more like conversation than like encyclicals, legal briefs, or scientific findings. Thus Geertz writes: My own awareness of the awkwardness of our inherited language for discussing the relationships between the passions of collective identity and those of political assertion arose in connection with my own work…in the newly independent states of Indonesia…and Morocco. I simply could not find—amid the rush of rhetoric about autonomy, selfhood, pride, and collective destiny, virtually all of it borrowed from l’entre deux guerres Europe—anything that looked like a nation-state, for which, as a matter of fact, there is no accepted expression in either Indonesian or Maghrebian Arabic. The questions of “ethnic conflict” that politicians and journalists have posed “may be mal posées.” In reformulating those questions— with more nuance and with sensitivity to local conditions—scholars can help develop a politics “based not on primordial consensus, which does not exist and is not about to, but on adversarial respect, which also does not much exist but, here or there, at this point or that, has some chance of doing so.” Geertz calls this project—the encouragement of “adversarial respect” where consensus is out of the question—“a primary task of our time” for scholars in the human sciences.

Ulrich Beck, “The Truth of Others: A Cosmopolitan Approach,” coins a term—“realistic cosmopolitanism”—to describe the negotiation he would encourage between contextualism and universalism. His program is to establish which “minimum universalist norms” of behavior are already supported, globally, by “cosmopolitan common sense.” These norms, he contends, include the proscription of “evils so great and obvious that there is virtually universal acknowledgment of the need to oppose them.” He holds that child slavery, for

xxxiv

peace and mind

example, is beyond the limits of “cosmopolitan tolerance.” Beck holds that there are intellectual obstacles to be overcome before minimal public goods can be attained. Among the obstacles is contextualism, which he equates with cultural relativism and which, he says, “tends to reject even the possibility of recognizing or developing general norms.” Thus relativism, Beck concludes, is paradoxically akin to universalism and essentialism: The instrument by which we close ourselves to others and reject any outsider’s perspective on our own culture is the incommensurability principle. If everything is relative, then everyone is simply “like this” or “like that”— no more to be said. Ironically, the relativist’s principle of incommensurability has much in common with its supposed opposite, essentialism. Both are compelled to accept things as they are. There is a will in both to be left in peace and to leave others in peace, on the grounds that the trenches between cultures can never be crossed. However polemical and wrongheaded the motives behind it, the presumption of incommensurability does lead to a nonintervention agreement between cultures—though, in a world where it is impossible not to intervene, where intervention is always underway, that agreement can easily veer around into violence. The best solution to this problem, he argues, is to modify universalism to take account of contextualist reasoning: “A more contextualist universalism could acknowledge that cultural interpenetration is historically the normal case and that nonintervention is certainly an impossibility now…. The fake joys of incommensurability are escape routes leading nowhere, certainly not away from our intercultural destiny.” Universalism and contextualism ought to become “mutually correcting, limiting, and protecting. What is new, what is realistic, about cosmopolitan realism derives from the reciprocal correction of these semantic elements, whose combination is greater than the parts.” The type of cosmopolitanism he proposes is not a variety of

abstracts

xxxv

“consensus; managing conflict is a more realistic and cosmopolitan expectation. We need not the ‘ideal speech situation’ of Jürgen Habermas, but rather a realistic theory about severe conflict among truths.”

Bruno Latour, “Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics? Comments on the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck,” evaluates Beck’s cosmopolitan realism as ethnocentric…a gentler case of European philosophical internationalism. Beck takes his key term and its definition, off the shelf, from the Stoics and Kant. Those definitions (Beck’s, Kant’s, the Stoics’) are problematic: none shows understanding that more than culture is put in jeopardy by conflicts. The cosmos too may be at stake… . It’s impossible for us now to inherit the beautiful idea of cosmopolitanism since what we lack is just what our prestigious ancestors possessed: a cosmos. According to Latour, Beck assumes that issues of war and peace involve only humans, each endowed with the same psychology, each knowing a language translatable into every other language, and each possessed of only slightly contradictory representations of what-there-is. For Beck, as for most sociologists and all political scientists, wars rage because human cultures have (and defend) differing views of the same world. If those views could be reconciled or shown to differ only superficially, peace would follow automatically. But since “the makeup of the cosmos” is actually “at stake,” nothing can be “off limits, off the table, for dispute.” Latour accordingly suggests that people

xxxvi

peace and mind

never differ about opinions, but rather always about things —about what world we inhabit. And very probably, it never happens that adversaries come to agree on opinions; they begin, rather, to inhabit a different world. A common world is not something we come to recognize, as though it had always been here (and we had not until now noticed it). A common world, if there is going to be one, is something we will have to build, tooth and nail, together. In other words, Latour proposes that each of the three options Beck explores—universalism, contextualism, and cosmopolitanism— be supplanted by a diplomat’s version of constructivism. On the other hand, coming as Latour does from philosophy of science— the field in which incommensurability has been debated most intensively—he defends the concept against its main alternatives: universalism, cosmopolitanism, imperialism, mysticism, and intellectual sloppiness. But Latour promotes constructivist rather than contextualist methods as best corresponding to the knowledge that cultures differ radically. In the absence of a common world and a common language, he argues, both will have to be constructed, even though the only builders available to do so are clueless antagonists who at present occupy incommensurable worlds.

Jeffrey J. Kripal, “Comparative Mystics: Scholars as Gnostic Diplomats,” is another response to Beck’s essay but approaching it from a different theoretical direction than Latour’s. Kripal and Latour both assume, as Beck does not, that worldviews or cultures can be incommensurable (or almost). The assumption of incommensurability goes hand in hand, for most scholars, with contextualist methodology. Latour wants to get past contextualism—which inhibits comparison and impedes understanding—by way of constructivism: he urges enemies to construct a “common world” where none presently exists. Kripal advises that we surmount incommensurability and sidestep contextualism by learning how gnostics, shamans, and mystics can transcend cultural limits.

abstracts

xxxvii

We must concede, Kripal maintains, that there are figures with a scandalous ability to think beyond borders drawn literally on a map or cognitively in the recesses of cultural, religious, and even sexual identity. Given the efforts and successes of such (admittedly rare) people, we need to rethink the ontological status of difference itself, particularly within those literatures and practices that we have come to call “mystical.” Such figures “expose all doctrinal claims as historically and culturally relative expressions of a deeper mystery or ontological ground that nevertheless requires these relative expressions for its self-revelation.” Thus “cultural differences and local knowledge are socially and politically important but not ontologically ultimate”—and “ontological ultimacy (which flourishes especially in subversive countercultures or mystical traditions) is the level at which deep communication may be realizable.” Kripal adds that he does not “presume to intuit a common essence to the world religions that can offer a stable basis for diplomacy” but only that mystics, in whatever religious context, tend to “subvert their religions’ local knowledge and practices.” Kripal’s theoretical introduction is followed by a case study of “the archetypal Hindu example of East-West encounter, Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa,” who, in nineteenth-century Bengal, pursued “a remarkable religious experiment, worshipping and identifying with in turn a broad range of deities”—including the Christian and Muslim—“and experiencing the altered states of consciousness that they brought upon him.” The essay concludes by showing how “the mystical and philosophical experiments of Ramakrishna are carried forward today, in some of their most sophisticated forms,” by the academic field of comparative religion, which Kripal claims is “a modern mystical discipline.” For comparative religion is not only comparative of disparate contexts but also “notoriously…countercultural, and even (it might be added) anticultural.” Kripal expects that the discipline of comparative religion is ultimately capable of producing what he terms “gnostic diplomats.”

xxxviii

peace and mind

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies,” may be read as a response, though it was written independently, to the articles on incommensurability by Beck, Latour, and Kripal that precede it here. Viveiros de Castro’s essay deals basically with the distance, apparently unbridgeable, between “our ‘nature/culture’ distinction” in the modern West and the widespread Amazonian belief that “animals are ex-humans (rather than humans, ex-animals).” He proposes that we speak about how to compare or commensurate these two notions in terms of “multinaturalism” rather than “multiculturalism.” For where the Western conception is founded on the implied unity of nature and multiplicity of cultures— the former guaranteed by the objective universality of body and substance, the latter generated by the subjective particularity of spirit and meaning—the Amerindian conception presumes a spiritual unity and a corporeal diversity … the notion of matter as a universal substrate seems wholly absent from Amerindian ontologies. Reflexive selfhood, not material objectivity, is the potential common ground of being. Since “what is nature to us may well be culture to another species,” translation per se leads to nothing but absurdities: “what is blood to us is manioc beer to jaguars, a muddy waterhole is seen by tapirs as a great ceremonial house.” In place of translation—the commensuration of terms—Viveiros de Castro concludes that only “ontological predation,” warfare, and the “carnivorous copulation” of cannibals will ever accomplish what is required. Kripal’s essay suggests that scholars, acting in the role of shamans, can take on this heroes’ labor; but as an anthropologist, Viveiros de Castro understands shamanism more literally and suggests a cure that seems identical to the disease. “Warriors are to the human world,” he writes, “what shamans are to the universe at large: conductors or communicators of perspectives…both involve the embodiment by the self of the enemy’s point of view.” In the “idiom of enmity,”

abstracts

xxxix

an exchange of viewpoints occurs, “though the exchange in this case is very extreme.” The extreme exchange—predation—of which Viveiros de Castro writes is not at all the adversarial-yet-constructive engagement that Latour envisions or the mystical engagement that Kripal commends. In warfare, as Viveiros de Castro describes it, one party incorporates the other and “produces a synthesis in which all distance is suppressed: the relation is created by abolishing one of its terms, which is then introjected by the other.” The alternative to incommensurability is thus “inseparability”—“a kind of fusion.” This essay concludes by assuring us that “no effort less strenuous and transformative and dangerously disorienting would make even disagreement with an animist warrior possible.”

Roxanne L. Euben, “A Counternarrative of Shared Ambivalence: Some Muslim and Western Perspectives on Science and Reason,” collects and sorts evidence that Islam and the West have been equally ambivalent about science, technology, and even rationalism. Therefore, Euben argues, it makes sense to examine Islamic thought and Western thought not as in opposition but as parallel yet distinct means of dealing with the same ambivalence. Irenic scholars often undermine the idea of “closed domains of discourse” by revealing overlap and exchange between them, whereas Euben attends to the incoherence within paradigms and especially to the relationship between the incoherence of one paradigm and the incoherence of another. Beginning from the observation that Al Qaeda recruits tend to have advanced educations in the applied sciences, Euben examines “several distinct streams of Islamic political thought” in historical sequence, and then she details how, in standard narratives, their commitment to rationality is hidden from view. Next she discusses Western ambivalence to science, taking as her case study the philosophical work of Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre, and demonstrating how objections to rationalism in the West get classed as mere anomalies. Having undertaken this “fusion of horizons” between Islamic and Western thought, Euben concludes that

xl

peace and mind

what I have juxtaposed here are not positions taken so much as ambivalences expressed; and there is surely much work to do before we understand the relationship between ambivalences in very different cultures toward the cultural products associated with one of them. Agreement in ambivalence may not be agreement in any sense of the word that we customarily intend. But certainly, ideas like disagreement, dispute, and enmity must be radically reconsidered in the face of a dispute between equally ambivalent foes.

Gianni Vattimo, “‘Derealization’ and Charity,” proposes that it is our preference for clear-cut definitions, distinctions, binaries, and moral judgments that obstructs the appreciation of lives, cultures, and eras other than our own. Vattimo shares this premise with Euben; and though his essay is the more theoretical of the two, his is also, like hers, an exigent case study. Vattimo starts from the Heideggerian concept of Verwindung, which he takes to mean “resigned acceptance,” recuperation, and charitable distortion. By applying the strategy of Verwindung to its inventor, Vattimo distorts Heidegger’s philosophy charitably and thereby makes peace with his memory. Vattimo says that we need Heidegger now, or at least we need several of the concepts he developed in order, precisely, to recuperate the past. Therefore, we should “weaken” our image of him, as we should weaken all of the insistent concepts and distinctions that we inherit. The process by which we can do so he calls “derealization,” and he asks: Is it not possible that many of the dramatic problems of our civilization depend for their drama on a neurotic effort to reaffirm a strong sense of reality in a context where emancipation resides rather in the weakening of that sense? The nostalgia for a strong reality, for clear authority, for a unique and apodictic system of values, resembles what psychology terms neurosis. It appears to me that, beyond the

abstracts

xli

simplistic opposition of pessimism and optimism, right and left, in relation to our technological and postrevolutionary world, an “active nihilism,” like that prepared by Nietzsche and Heidegger, could help decisively in healing this neurosis. Vattimo begins the healing process by weakening the connection that Heidegger insisted on between his philosophy and his politics: “Heidegger himself, when he supported Hitler, misunderstood the authentic meaning of his own philosophical premises.” Rather than reject our past, Vattimo suggests that we consciously shape it into an acceptable, usable, and ultimately therapeutic form.

Dale Kent, “Charity and Power in Renaissance Florence: Surmounting Cynicism in Historiography,” concerns the tendency of recent historians to judge as entirely self-interested the piety, charity, and devotion to social harmony of powerful figures of the past. “Power does not, in every age, come first in the lives of the powerful,” Kent argues, and she adds that to believe otherwise “is a prejudice so ingrained in our time that we simply do not recognize it as a prejudice.” In support of this view, she examines the career of Cosimo de’ Medici, who in his time “was both known and celebrated for his… many-sidedness” but is more often regarded now as a cynic whose acts of generosity were in essence “political statements.” Kent’s focus is on “Cosimo’s first major ecclesiastical commission—the rebuilding and decorating of the Dominican convent of San Marco.” After sifting the evidence of letters, iconography, and contemporary religious treatises, she concludes that “salvation was the ultimate concern of even the most worldly of Renaissance Christians.” Scholars today often dismiss this spiritual dimension, because they find the figural language through which it was expressed—“the exercise of patriarchal power through charity”—profoundly distasteful. The political patriarch or patron was as much a part of “the drama of intercession,” Kent shows, as were patron saints. Advising the reader that she has “no interest in praising Cosimo,” and that she herself, if asked to judge him, “might well condemn Cosimo as an elitist, sexist,

xlii

peace and mind

manipulative, and ruthless profiteer,” still she concludes that scholarship should never be judicial in approach. Rather scholarship should respect the complexity of the past, just as scholars should respect their face-to-face, living colleagues. For we are not, Kent explains, “merely hostile opponents of each other’s most cherished positions”; we are also “complex human beings whose apparently conflicting views deserve at least a courteous hearing.” Figures of the past, as human as ourselves, deserve the “truly charitable understanding” that we ourselves, even as we bring them to judgment, crave.

Israel J. Yuval, “The Myth of the Jewish Exile from the Land of Israel,” urges that “a dimension of self-awareness” be added to “the Zionist national narrative.” But Yuval’s claim is also general: “Historical studies must undergo a corrective transformation and serve to foster understanding among nations, rather than hatred.” An Israeli and (as he emphasizes) a Zionist, Yuval nevertheless terms the idea that the Romans exiled the Jews from Israel “a myth.” He shows, first, that “the dispersal of the Jews did not begin in 70 CE with the destruction of the Second Temple. By the time of the destruction, according to Josephus, the Jewish nation was already “widely dispersed over all the inhabitable earth.” In any case, the Romans “did not have a policy of exiling conquered nations…the Jews were left in place. They emigrated from the Land of Israel during the first centuries of the first millennium in a slow and gradual process.” Earlier Jewish (namely rabbinic) sources show that, while the Jews were expelled from Jerusalem and their numbers greatly reduced in its environs, they were by no means expelled from the entire Land of Israel. The rabbis and the Sanhedrin itself relocated to Yavneh and then Tiberias—outside Jerusalem, but still well inside the Promised Land. The myth of total exile originated in Christian sources, and the Jews’ acceptance of it reflects the adaptation of the Jewish apologetics to the Christian conception of time without agreeing to the actual content of Christian claims. The two religions regarded the

abstracts

xliii

destruction of the Temple as a formative event but disagreed about its meanings… . Perhaps it was convenient for the Jews to prefer the picture of expulsion from the land to that of abandoning it, for only an expulsion with national and catastrophic dimensions was worthy of a national, messianic, sweeping remedy in the Time to Come. Despite the internalization of Christian concepts, however, the juxtaposition of the Jewish and Christian images of exilic time placed the two on a collision course. Just as Christians claimed that the Jews had crucified Jesus and thereby deserved the punishment of exile, so Jews claimed that the Christians—whom Jews identified with mythical Edom [and thus with Rome]—had exiled the Chosen People from the Promised Land and thereby deserved their future punishment: the messianic revenge that would precede the Jews’ final redemption. In any case, “the return of the Jews to Zion” is today “grasped in Christian consciousness as a natural process in an age of growing reconciliation between the two religions…. But this return deeply affected a third party, the Muslim world as a whole and the Palestinian Arabs in particular, who do not share the Judeo-Christian Weltanschauung of time.” Thus the Middle East conflict is a matter of mentalité, and no amount of negotiating will solve it until Jewish, Muslim, and Christian scholars in the region sort through the history cooperatively. Yuval’s essay invites Palestinian historians to respond in kind by reevaluating the founding myths of their own nationality.

Susan Stephens, “Lessons of the Crocodile,” defines how best to write about the relationship of conquered and conquerors, and thus bears comparison with Kent’s essay on how to write about patronage

xliv

peace and mind

and power. The crocodiles of Stephens’s title are historical, not figural; and her interest in the animal cults of ancient Egypt has to do with their persistence no matter who was in power nominally. “The political and economic world of these crocodiles,” she writes, “was dramatically altered as Egypt fell subject to invaders from Macedon, and Greek speakers became the new ruling class. Yet the crocodiles themselves went unchanged.” The prevailing assumption, among classical historians and Egyptologists alike, has been that the “Greek ruling class” under the Ptolemies permitted the Egyptians, a “subject people,” the harmless fetish of sacred crocodiles. But Stephens shows, on the contrary, that the “mutual interdependencies” of the conquerors and the conquered—the widespread assimilation and “experiences of accommodation”—render the categories of ruler and subject inadequate to the situation. Local Greeks turned “to the cults of the indigenous gods” even in their “own” city Alexandria, and the Ptolemaic kings themselves were compelled to participate in (and pay for) the animal cults. “Priestly elites”—in the name of crocodile, Apis bull, or Horus falcon—“arrogated the powers of the throne to themselves.” In short, “the cost of native acquiescence” in Greek rule, though very high, was paid, because “failing to support native elites was to court disaster.” Meanwhile, the assimilation of Greeks and Egyptians proceeded in both directions. There was a class of “tax Greeks,” for instance, who comprised “a subset of assimilated Egyptians who spoke and wrote Greek and who functioned within the imperial bureaucracy”—and “since the category was heritable, some ‘Greeks’ might never have been Greek at all.” In this and similarly contingent ways, “the ethnic hierarchy [took] on a kind of fictional status … ethnicity was less a matter of bloodlines than of the public performance of assigned roles.” Not only, then, were there “Egyptians ‘acting Greek’” (which would “be typical of assimilation to a dominant group”) but also “Greeks ‘acting Egyptian’” (which “clearly undercuts the paradigm”). Stephens’s crocodiles, however real she makes them for us, eventually take on symbolic resonance. She stresses how it was “the traditions of a scribal class…unfamiliar in Greek culture but entrenched in the Egyptian” that allowed “a considerable amount of Greek literature” to be recovered during

abstracts

xlv

the nineteenth century. Given how much of the Greek papyri we now possess was preserved as stuffing in mummified crocodiles, Stephens prepares us to acknowledge that “the roles of conqueror and conquered” are less normative—more outlandish—than most of the scholarship on empire would have us believe.

Maya Jasanoff, “Cosmopolitan: A Tale of Identity from Ottoman Alexandria,” is focused, like Stephens’s contribution here, on Egyptian cultural history, though in its main concern Jasanoff’s essay relates more closely to that of Clark Davis which follows it. Davis and Jasanoff explore frames or habits of mind essential to peace and peacemaking. Reading their essays in tandem helps establish, moreover, a closer relation between cosmopolitanism (Jasanoff’s topic) and quietism (Davis’s) than intellectuals have wanted to grant. Edward Said is regarded widely as a cosmopolitan thinker, yet his political engagement appears to disqualify him. Jasanoff shows that, whereas Said “famously identified the French invasion of Egypt (1798–1801) as the launchpad of modern Orientalism,” what a scholar will find in “the dispatches and memoranda of French diplomats—documents rarely consulted by cultural historians”—is not “foreshadowings of Orientalist discourse” but rather “evidence of the cross-cultural relations that formed part of daily life.” Furthermore, the lines between empowered and powerless, even East and West, did not always seem clearly drawn; nor did individuals’ allegiances necessarily fit neatly within the borders between cultures or nations… . empires—while they develop hierarchies and rhetorics of difference—also contain considerable potential for crossing and cosmopolitan mixing. Jasanoff centers on the career of one Etienne Roboly, a dragoman and go-between, whose uncertain nationality was a threat to his life. For while “the French called Roboly French…the Ottomans called

xlvi

peace and mind

him Ottoman. The likely truth, which neither of these competing definitions could accommodate, was that [he] was both: claimed by an imperial identity, while laying claim to a national one.” A single nationality—indeed the idea of nationality—is not a fit for everyone. There are those who paradoxically are “at home in a cosmopolitan setting.” Such people find themselves, more often than not, pressed (against their personal history, character, and self-interest) “to take sides” between nation-states during disputes. And yet, Jasanoff bravely adds, “we have also been taught to see empires as evil things,” when in practice they “have sometimes been more accommodating of difference than many independent nations.” An empire can “provide an umbrella of common security for people from a range of cultures to coexist, and at times even intermingle.” But “the larger question” that her essay raises is not whether we should prefer empires to nationstates. She musters evidence instead that “inclusionary definitions of belonging can be made to outweigh exclusionary ones.” The nature of empire is raised to make a sharp point: no sort of political or social or cultural arrangement should be rejected out of hand if its result might be a cosmopolitan variation on “belonging.”

Clark Davis, “‘Not Like Any Form of Activity’: Waiting in Emerson, Melville, and Weil,” is an essay on quietism, dealing—like Jasanoff’s on cosmopolitanism—with a temperament or stance that contributes to peacemaking. Both the quietist and the cosmopolitan tend to be regarded negatively. As Davis writes, the quietist is believed to lack “self-regard,” to be “afraid or too lazy to take action, join a cause, take a position, keep busy—do something.” Yet an intellectual can be a quietist on principle and by choice. Davis shows that key figures of modern intellectual life (notably Emerson, Melville, Mallarmé, and Weil) became quietists for reasons similar to those motivating the activists of their time. Modern quietists have been in retreat from materialism—from every urge to accumulate resources, pleasures, prestige, or power. Quietists seek, as Davis puts it, to obtain only “a space lacking the disorders that follow from rival claims. For where there are no claimants, there are no claims.” To the quietist, activities

abstracts

xlvii

of almost every kind seem to be “ways, nearly indistinguishable… of making noise and keeping busy”—busy, mainly, to ill effect.” The proper business of a human soul, Weil argues, is to pay attention; the alternative to which is to make judgments. Modern quietists find the idea of justice itself suspect, because judging, in conversation and scholarship as much as in courts of law, is an activity that we seek and savor too much. “We have invented the distinction between justice and charity,” Davis quotes Weil as saying, then he adds: “justice, judgment, morality, ethics, and responsibility are all at odds with attentiveness. What the friend stands in need of is a displacement of will… . The proper form of generosity is waiting”—waiting to act, to judge, or to do. Hence the words of Weil’s that Davis quotes in his title: “The attitude that brings about salvation is not like any form of activity.” The waiting that Weil commends is “a gift,” as Davis says, “and thus, faithful, patient, anarchic, effortless.” Its opposite is “justice commodified…. The expectation of justice may be a form of impatience, and ‘justice done’ an excuse for inattention.” It is not the quietist, therefore, but the activist who is indolent. To be and to remain a civilian in a warrior species demands a heroic self-discipline unknown to the busy, belligerent, and judgmental.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Gianni Vattimo, Santiago Zabala, James Davies, Stanley N. Katz, G. Thomas Tanselle, Caroline Walker Bynum, Clifford Geertz, Sari Nusseibeh, Israel J. Yuval, Alick Isaacs, Robert Weisbuch, Philip Glotzbach, Robert S. Nelsen, JoAnn Corrigan, Lawrence Jones, Aden Bar-Tura, Director Stephen Cohn and the Duke University Press Journals Department, and President Moshe Kaveh and the Bar-Ilan University School of Humanities all gave encouragement and logistical support without which this book would never have happened. Material published originally in Common Knowledge appears here by permission of Duke University Press: Gianni Vattimo, “Optimistic Nihilism,” in Common Knowledge, Vol. 1, Issue 3, pp. 37–44. Copyright 1992, Oxford University Press: Reprinted by permission of the present publisher, Duke University Press. Clifford Geertz, “  ‘Ethnic Conflict’: Three Alternative Terms,” in Common Knowledge, Vol. 2, Issue 3, pp. 54–65. Copyright 1993, Oxford University Press. Reprinted by permission of the present publisher, Duke University Press. Randall Collins, “On the Acrimoniousness of Intellectual Disputes,” in Common Knowledge, Vol. 8, Issue 1, pp. 47–70. Copyright 2002. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. William Weber, “Consequences of Canon: The Institutionalization of Enmity between Contemporary and Classical Music,” in Common Knowledge, Vol. 9, Issue 1, pp. 78–99. Roxanne L. Euben, “A Counternarrative of Shared Ambivalence: Some Muslim and Western Perspectives on Science and Reason,” in Common Knowledge, Vol. 9, Issue 1, pp. 50–77. Copyright 2003. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. Dale Kent, “Charity and Power in Renaissance Florence: Surmounting Cynicism in Historiography,” in Common Knowledge, Vol. 9, Issue 2, pp. 254–272. Copyright 2003. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press.

acknowledgments

xlix

Wayne Andersen, “How Not to Take Sides: Leon Battista Alberti— Renaissance Man?,” in Common Knowledge, Vol. 10, Issue 2, pp. 198– 213. Copyright 2004. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. Ulrich Beck, excerpts from “The Truth of Others: A Cosmopolitan Approach” in Common Knowledge, Vol. 10, Issue 3, pp. 430–49. Copyright 2004. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. Bruno Latour, “Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics? Comments on the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck,” in Common Knowledge, Vol. 10, Issue 3, pp. 450–62. Copyright 2004. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies,” in Common Knowledge, Vol. 10, Issue 3, pp. 463–84. Copyright 2004. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. Susan Stephens, “Lessons of the Crocodile,” in Common Knowledge, Vol. 11, Issue 2, pp. 215–39. Copyright 2005. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. Maya Jasanoff, “Cosmopolitan: A Tale of Identity from Ottoman Alexandria,” in Common Knowledge, Vol. 11, Issue 3, pp. 393–409. Copyright 2005. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. Israel J. Yuval, “The Myth of Jewish Exile from the Land of Israel: A Demonstration of Irenic Scholarship,” in Common Knowledge, Vol. 12, Issue 1, pp. 16–33. Copyright 2006. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. Clark Davis, “ ‘Not Like Any Form of Activity’: Waiting in Emerson, Melville, and Weil,” in Common Knowledge, Vol. 15, Issue 1, pp. 39– 58. Copyright 2009. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Jeffrey M. Perl is the founder of Common Knowledge and has been its editor since 1992. Currently professor of English literature at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, he taught for many years at Columbia University in New York and at the University of Texas. His publications include Skepticism and Modern Enmity: Before and After Eliot, The Tradition of Return: The Implicit History of Modern Literature, and monographs on Friedrich Schlegel, Mallarmé, and T. S. Eliot. Randall Collins is Dorothy Swain Thomas Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and former president of the American Sociological Association, he is the author of The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change; Violence: A Microsociological Theory; Macrohistory: Essays in Sociology of the Long Run; Interaction Ritual Chains; Four Sociological Traditions; and Sociological Insight: An Introduction to Non-Obvious Sociology. Wayne Andersen, painter, corporate art consultant, and architect of the King Khaled Mosque in Riyadh, is professor emeritus of art and architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Among his many books are The Youth of Cézanne and Zola; The Loss of Art: The Legacy of Marcel Duchamp; Picasso’s Brothel; Manet: The Picnic and the Prostitute; German Artists and Hitler’s Mind; and The Ara Pacis of Augustus and Mussolini. He is a member of the Common Knowledge editorial board. William Weber is the author of The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms; Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris, and Vienna, 1830-1848; and The Rise of Musical Classics: A Study in Canon, Ritual, and Ideology. He is professor emeritus of modern European history at California State University, Long Beach. Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) was Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and founder

notes on contributors

li

of the School of Social Science there. Among his books, translated into more than twenty languages, are The Interpretation of Cultures; Local Knowledge; Works and Lives; Available Light; After the Fact; Negara: The Theater State in Nineteenth-Century Bali; The Religion of Java; Islam Observed; Meaning and Order in Moroccan Society; and The Politics of Culture: Asian Identities in a Splintered World. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences, he was a founding member of the Common Knowledge editorial board. Ulrich Beck is Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and director of the modernization research center at the University of Munich, where he is also professor of sociology. Among his books, translated into more than thirty languages, are Cosmopolitan Vision, World at Risk, Risk Society, Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk, Ecological Enlightenment, The Reinvention of Politics, Democracy without Enemies, Power in the Global Age, What Is Globalization?, and (with Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash) Reflexive Modernization. Bruno Latour, professor and dean for research at the Institut d’Études Politiques, is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His books in English translation include War of the Worlds: What About Peace?; We Have Never Been Modern; On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods; Cogitamus; Iconoclash; The Making of Law; Politics of Nature; Science in Action; The Pasteurization of France; Pandora’s Hope; Reassembling the Social; Aramis, or The Love of Techology; and (with Steve Woolgar) Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. He is a member of the Common Knowledge editorial board. Jeffrey J. Kripal is J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. He is the author of The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion; Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred; Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna; Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the

lii

peace and mind

Study of Mysticism; Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion; and Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, professor of anthropology at the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro, has also held the Simón Bolívar Chair in Latin American Studies at Cambridge University. His most recent book in English translation is From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society. His other publications include Amazônia: etnologia e história indígena; A inconstância de alma selvagem et outros ensaios de antropologia; and Métaphysiques cannibales. Roxanne L. Euben is Ralph Emerson and Alice Freeman Palmer Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College. She is the author of Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism and Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge, as well as coeditor (with M. Q. Zaman) of Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought. Gianni Vattimo, a member of the European Parliament, is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Turin. His many books in English translation include Religion (coauthored with Jacques Derrida); The Future of Religion (with Richard Rorty); Christianity, Truth, and Weak Faith (with René Girard); The Responsibility of the Philosopher; Hermeneutic Communism; The Adventure of Difference; Beyond Interpretation; Nietzsche: Philosophy as Cultural Criticism; Dialogue with Nietzsche; Nihilism and Emancipation; The End of Modernity; Art’s Claim to Truth; and The Transparent Society. He is a founding member of the Common Knowledge editorial board. Dale Kent is professor emerita of history at the University of California, Riverside, and honorary professorial fellow in historical and philosophical studies at the University of Melbourne. Her books include Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre; The Rise of the Medici: Faction in Florence, 1426-1434; and Neighbors and Neighborhoods in Renaissance Florence: The District of the Red Lion in the Fifteenth Century.

notes on contributors

liii

Israel J. Yuval is director of the Interdisciplinary Research Center in Jewish Studies, Backenroth Senior Lecturer in Medieval Jewish Studies, and professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has written extensively in Hebrew on Ashkenazic attitudes toward Christianity in the Middle Ages. His books in English translation include Scholars in Their Time and Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Susan Stephens, Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities and professor of classics at Stanford University, is the author of Seeing Double: Intercultural Poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria. As a papyrologist, she has published literary and documentary texts belonging to the Oxyrhynchus and Yale collections, and is coeditor (with Jack Winkler) of Ancient Greek Novels: The Fragments. Her most recent book, coauthored with Benjamin Acosta-Hughes, is Callimachus in Context: From Plato to the Alexandrian Poets. Maya Jasanoff is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences in the Harvard University department of history. She is the author of Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850, which received the Duff Cooper Prize for nonfiction. Her second book, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World, appeared in 2011. Clark Davis, professor of English at the University of Denver, is the author of Hawthorne’s Shyness: Ethics, Politics, and the Question of Engagement; After the Whale: Melville in the Wake of Moby-Dick; and (forthcoming) It Comes from Trouble: The Life and Work of William Goyen.

ON THE ACRIMONIOUSNESS OF INTELLECTUAL DISPUTES Randall Collins

We must never forget that genuine schools [of thought] are sociological realities. They have their structures—relations between leaders and followers—their flags, their battle cries, their moods, their all-too-human interests. Their antagonisms come within the general sociology of group antagonisms and of party warfare. Victory and conquest, defeat and loss of ground, are in themselves values for such schools and part of their very existence. —Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis

Ideally, we would like peace, harmony, and agreement. Or if that is unrealistic, and too boring, we would like disputes to be carried out in a friendly manner. Ideals aside, acrimony is ideal material for sociological comparison. Acrimoniousness of disputes, and the viciousness of conflict more generally, are just the sort of variations whose conditions become visible from sufficiently overarching sociological distance. One might question whether it is valid or desirable to pull out intellectuals for special consideration, as one trend of late-twentieth-century thought has been to expose intellectuals, to bring their motives and practices down to the mundane level of the rest of the social world; but my intent here is to sketch the wavering etiquette of intellectual conflict. My justification is simply that intellectuals are distinctive, not in every respect but certainly in the one under consideration: they have a different way of carrying out conflicts than do street gangs, ethnic movements, or states, and we need a distinctive theory to deal with that difference. To say so is certainly not motivated by a desire to idealize intellectuals; the determination that intellectual conflicts are distinctive has arisen from the research itself.

2

peace and mind

How the Intellectual World Works Let me begin by summarizing briefly a sociological theory of intellectual life, based on a comparative study of philosophers throughout Western and Asian history.1 Among the findings reached is that the number of notable positions or factions in a thriving field of intellectual activity—whether in ancient Greece or India, medieval Islam or modern America—is quite limited. Whenever there is creative activity, there are rivals; the so-called great thinkers appear, at minimum, in pairs of contemporaries, and more typically there are three or more recognizably differing positions—but rarely as many, it would appear, as six. This is so regular a state of affairs globally that I have generalized it as a “law of small numbers.” When only one position dominates the intellectual world, it is a time not of creativity but of stagnation, the reign of an orthodoxy from the past that is no longer creative. We see the same pattern in terms of intellectual networks, the chains of eminent teachers and pupils that channel the development of schools of thought across generations. Few such chains can sustain themselves from one generation to the next; but when the number of positions rises, I have found that, historically, some of the positions are squeezed out. They become superfluous, distractions in an attention space that can only accommodate a small number of positions at one time; thus they fail to recruit disciples in the following generation, and the lineage dies out. The limited field of attention is one source of intellectual acrimony. The material bases of intellectual life, of course, affect the creation and dominance of ideas, but the evidence is that they do so only indirectly. The formulation of Marx and Engels, that class ideologies dominate according to who controls the means of intellectual production, has been widely adopted; thus it is common to speak of ideas reflecting bourgeois interests, for example, or reflecting an ethos of Protestants, or of males or females. But what makes ideas important among intellectuals is not what is already widely believed in larger communities, but what is new and distinctive in their own field of argument and the way in which it engages and transforms the ongoing lineages of rival positions that make up their own

on the acrimoniousness of intellectual disputes

3

social world. Thus the material conditions that most powerfully affect intellectual life are those bases that allow specialists to devote themselves to carrying on their rival storehouses of past ideas and creating new ones. Hence another historical generalization: the episodes when new philosophies, new theories and worldviews, are created are times when the material bases shift. These are times when new educational systems appear; when new religious movements arise, or old religious institutions decline and are replaced; when new forms of support arise in the form of courtly patronage or autonomous research academies; or when careers become supported by markets for publishing. These shifts in the material bases of intellectual production open new ways that intellectuals can make a living, and thus places where their networks can form; such shifts also destroy old bases, or upstage them, and squeeze out the networks that made their careers in them. There are rising and falling material bases of intellectual life, and consequently of the lineages that are supported by them—this is not simply a matter of rising material bases making one intellectual position dominant, while others fall. The time when the modern research university was established, the so-called Humboldtian revolution in Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century, was the time of ascendency of the Idealist philosophers, who led the university reform. Their philosophies of an unfolding world made up of ideas, ideas that manifest a spirit of freedom, provided an ideological counterpart to the revolution of the professors, who were claiming academic posts on the basis of careers in innovative research. But the Idealists came in a cluster, and split along the lines of rival positions: those of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Hegel, and others, with their schools of followers. A new material base reshapes positions in the attention space, which is in turn structured by the law of small numbers. The new school of thinkers that exploits the career opportunities of an expanding material base soon splits into rival positions, because it has more slots in the attention space to fill. If strongly based positions split, the opposite also holds: weakly based positions, those that are losing material support,

4

peace and mind

cluster together for mutual support, amalgamating into a synthetic position. The last generations of a fading intellectual community often undergo one last flaring up of philosophical brilliance, as old rivalries are transcended in a synthesis gathering together the threads into a defensive position against the alien thinkers of the new intellectual base. Among many examples is medieval India when the Buddhist monastic universities lost their economic and political supports, and the centers of intellectual life shifted to the new Hindu religious orders. The last gasps of Buddhism include the synthetic sophistication of Dharmakirti—one of the peaks of world philosophy, all too little known in the West—while the victorious Hindus split and subsplit into a range of new philosophical camps. There is creativity both on the way up and on the way down, but in differing modes: strong positions split, weak positions unite—providing us another clue to the level of acrimoniousness in intellectual life. The intellectual world is, sociologically, an attention space, a locus of intellectual action. This is to put the point generically; everything that we call a field, a discipline, a specialty, is its own attention space. Thus there can be a number of different fields of rivalry in parallel—when their borders are crossed, a special kind of rivalry occurs because the local division of attention into a supportable number of contenders is upset, complicating the struggle for attention. The intellectual world is based on conflicts in a very deep sense. What gives attention, what makes someone’s work recognized as important, is that it formulates topics to argue about, or makes contributions to settling well-known puzzles. In a live field of intellectual action, the settling of some questions always gives rise to new questions, and this is how the intellectual community goes about keeping up a focus of attention. Those who simply settle questions take a back seat to those who open up ways of doing further intellectual work. Among philosophers, great eminence comes from crystallizing new standards of argument, raising the hurdles that the community must clear. Many, perhaps most, intellectuals would object to this way of describing what we do—it is the search for truth that we are dedicated to, they would say, and indeed our intuition has generally been that

on the acrimoniousness of intellectual disputes

5

truth is one, and disagreements are unsatisfactory conditions to be overcome. Nevertheless, what we see historically is this repeated pattern of division among rival positions and lineages; and it has been out of these networks of contention that the exalted concept of truth has arisen. Truth as something to which one dedicates one’s life, as something rising above material interests, even above friendship, was an ideal formulated in these contentious struggles over attention space. One need only think of Plato’s transcendent realm of truth, formulated in a contest of schools at Athens, or of Aristotle’s dictum in breaking from his teacher: “Plato is a great friend, but truth a greater one.” The notion of truth is a constitutive ideal of the intellectual community, symbolically expressing what its members aim for and what distinguishes them from nonintellectuals, those who put other interests first. Even those intellectuals who adopt a skeptical stance (including late-twentieth-century versions) wish to be taken seriously: they may not use the terminology of truth, but their practical employment of speech acts is equivalent to it. I do not deny the importance of having a concept of truth, either on epistemological or on sociological grounds. It remains the case that intellectual communities have been divided into rival positions from their very beginnings, and continue to be thus structured today. (I leave aside here the complicated question of to what extent the natural sciences in recent centuries have arrived at consensus, and what social organization of their community has been involved in producing it.) But in philosophy, the social sciences, and humanities, the law of small numbers continues to be important. The fact that we remain committed to some version of the quest for truth, even as it recedes into the future, gives a poignant quality to intellectual life. Neither intellectual contention, nor the ideal of truth, is going to go away so long as intellectual creativity occurs; both are constitutive of the intellectual world. Intellectual conflict is deeply constitutive because opposition among rival positions shapes the content of those positions. Thus when one position in a field of intellectual rivals changes, the rest of the field changes as well, as old lines of argument are superseded by new ones. We see this in repeated reorganization of the line-up of schools in the ancient

6

peace and mind

Greek world, and in many other instances on up through the present. We are still living in the shadow of the realignment of argumentative factions in the early twentieth century when the older factions of Neo-Kantians, Idealists, evolutionists, and vitalists gave way to new rivalries among phenomenologists, logical positivists, and ordinarylanguage philosophers. To stay in the forefront of intellectual action, one must be attuned to where the lines of opposition are shifting; one formulates not simply one’s own position, but one’s position as distinct from positions that too much resemble it, and also one’s position as a rallying point in opposition to those of prominent rivals. In the 1930s, the existentialist phenomenologists and the logical positivists were perfect foils, each exemplifying just the kind of philosophy that the other took to be most meaningless and most reprehensible as a mode of thinking or of living. To make a creative contribution—which is to say, to make a move that puts one at the center of developments and debates—one needs good network contacts early in one’s career. This means not merely good contacts with those eminent in the action of the previous generation (although that is the typical pattern as well) but also contact with opponents, either directly or through short network chains; one needs a rapid and sophisticated sense of where arguments are opening up. Thus it is only superficially surprising that Carnap and Heidegger emerge from the same network of teachers—they share the neoKantian Rickert—or that both the Vienna Circle militants and the phenomenological movement, which Heidegger radicalized into what came to be called existentialism, connect backward through teachers of teachers to upheavals in the foundations of mathematics at the end of the nineteenth century. The intellectual world is a moving center of arguments. The older topics become transformed and the intellectual tools of the previous generation are sharpened into techniques that the new generation can use to raise yet further lines of dispute; but this is typically accomplished as if breaking away from old mistakes, overcoming old crudities of thinking, opening up new paths to truths, claiming at last to settle long-standing questions. Often the leaders of breakaway movements are recognizable as those who organize groups and

on the acrimoniousness of intellectual disputes

7

journals with manifestos declaring what the new school of thought is creating and what or whom it is demolishing. Vertical conflict across time, breaking from the past while implicitly building it up—both by sharpening its techniques and using it as a foil—sets the stage for horizontal conflict, as new movements—rival ways of moving toward the future—arrive in clusters. Intellectual action is collective action, depending both on networks from the past and on contemporary dimensions of rivalry that ensure there are plenty of new things about which to argue. The action is collectively constituted, but only a few individuals get to be at the very center of attention: the outstanding names that become touchstones for loyalists and whose fame is further propagated by being targets for opposing camps. Out of the school of Husserl’s followers, it was Heidegger who reaped the most fame, but Nikolai Hartmann had been a contender in the early 1920s, when both had the reputation of rising young men (both had junior positions at Marburg), and Max Scheler’s star was temporarily high in the sky while his work was being criticized by the more technical phenomenologists as merely a superficial exposition of their own arguments. Selecting these names ignores the larger ranks of the phenomenological movement, people who shared in the enthusiasm but failed to capture more than local reputations or, further down, to do any significant work at all. In the intellectual world, Robert Merton noted, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer—to which I would add: but not without struggle. Success in the intellectual world is not merely a matter of coming from the camp of the previously successful generation. The students of successful teachers do not necessarily inherit the same resources, go on to do important work, and receive the same honors for it, while their rivals start in obscurity and stay in obscurity. Famous teachers have many pupils and hence much of the early struggle is among those who start with the same endowments. New intellectual positions must be forged against one another to make themselves distinctive, and these positions get attention to the extent that there are slots available in the attention space. Those who start along a successful pathway may become energized; typically they become prodigious

8

peace and mind

workers, absorbed in the available lines of thought with confidence that their ideas are important. It is because such individuals are deeply ensconced in networks with the action unfolding around them that they have a quick intuitive sense of what is important to do. Once they have acquired the momentum of success, once they have experienced the emotional resonances of finding a niche in the attention space (which dramatically focuses the lines of conflict onto their own position), they are energized to continue making the intellectual moves that lead to the center of attention. Conversely, those who fail to capture attention become demoralized and lose energy; their work becomes less important to them, and they fade from the competition. Intellectual heroes, the “geniuses” celebrated by remote admirers, are made, not born—some young potential geniuses starting from favorable spots in intellectual networks are energized while others fade, and still other new contenders are too far from the sites of action to keep up with those moves that are capturing the limited attention space. Intellectual success consists in making the arguments that put oneself in the midst of the several dimensions of conflict that structure intellectual attention space. Intellectual conflict, then, is not only normal, but constitutive of how new ideas are shaped. Given this baseline, what determines the level of acrimoniousness? When is intellectual conflict carried out coolly and neutrally, when in a friendly atmosphere, and when is it most hostile? Career Rivals One consequence of the law of small numbers is that some persons near the center of intellectual action are squeezed out of the attention space. They start with good network contacts; they may have very good ideas that they formulate from the possible combinations of ideas and lines of opposition available in the intellectual community at the time. But there are often more good ideas generated in this way than slots in the attention space. These persons who are ignored and disappointed often manifest the kind of acrimony that we may call the bitterness of the supernumeraries.

on the acrimoniousness of intellectual disputes

9

An example is Schopenhauer. At the tail end of the Idealist generation and younger than its other luminaries, Schopenhauer failed abysmally to capture attention when he lectured at the University of Berlin in 1820, at just the time when Hegel was coming to be defined as the culminating philosopher of the Idealist movement. Schopenhauer was not unrealistic in his great expectations. He had, like Hegel, been a pupil of Fichte’s and had been well sponsored in the original Idealist circle around Goethe at Weimar/Jena—while Hegel was a late bloomer, a youthful friend of the other Idealists (who were already published to acclaim in the 1790s), but whose own writings only came to be known in the late eighteen-teens. Schopenhauer was defeated by the law of small numbers; all the slots were taken up by the variety of Idealist positions, and his own distinctiveness was not visible. His philosophy of the will as thing-in-itself was taken as just another variant on Fichte. Schopenhauer’s famously acerbic personality was molded in this period of frustration—the notorious incident in which he incurred a lawsuit by throwing his landlady down the stairs happened at the moment of his bitterest attacks on Hegel, whose lectures were popular while his own were ignored. Schopenhauer was lucky insofar as he lived long enough, into a subsequent intellectual generation, to be discovered. In the 1850s and 1860s, when a reaction had set in against Hegel and against Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, new slots (as it were) had opened in the attention space and Schopenhauer got one of them, along with a lineage of prominent followers including Wagner and Nietzsche, who assured long-term interest in Schopenhauer’s work. The vituperativeness of Marx’s writing style emerged in a similar way. Marx was part of the movement of Young Hegelians of the early 1840s, participating at its center in the Berlin coffeehouse circle known as Die Freien. His scornful polemics were aimed first at his compatriots, especially in 1846 in The German Ideology, where he savages Feuerbach, Bauer, Stirner, and others who had beat him to the punch in publishing their own systematic statements. Marx, like Schopenhauer, wrote in obscurity for a long time; his fame came only after the 1871 Paris Commune. During his years of laboring in the shadows, Marx reserved his strongest condemnation for Bakunin,

10

peace and mind

Weitling, and others prominent in the revolutionary movement— precisely those who, to use my shorthand, occupied the slot in the attention space that Marx had organized his intellectual project to fill. Most thinkers who are squeezed out in this way are not so lucky: their reputations never rise above those of secondary figures, perhaps with a scattering of followers in peripheral regions; they become thinkers known to scholarly specialists but never part of those canonized in the standard reading lists. Secondary figures, I would suggest, are the most likely to be bitter. Their ideas are sophisticated and important; the field could just as well have been built upon them, in its way forward, than on someone else’s formulation. It is this realistic sense of one’s merit by the standards of one’s own field that makes for the kind of bitterness that is specific to intellectuals. But this is not the only kind of acrimony that arises from career rivalries. Secondary figures, after all, are rare enough—much more common are minor thinkers, who receive only slight amounts of long-term attention in the history books, or who enjoy only local reputations. Still larger numbers are of those who are not mentioned in the history books at all, those whose papers and books have few readers, whose serious students are relatively few and modest in achievement. And beyond these, who manage to have an intellectual career at all, are those who aspire to an intellectual life, study or work at it for a while, then drop out into something else. Intellectual communities are pyramids, with most of the attention focused at a few peaks, and with a long base whose bottom (to continue the metaphor) is lost in the darkness of the earth. There can be career-niche rivals at various levels of the pyramid. The life of each aspiring intellectual passes through a career turning point. Many of us start with dreams of glory, emulating the intellectual heroes whose books we first read or whose ideas and personalities were held out to us as exemplars when we were young. Sooner or later, one settles into a particular level of the intellectual attention space: one progresses into the heart of the networks where the action has gone on in the generation of one’s teachers and where the new lines of action are unfolding; or one finds oneself on the

on the acrimoniousness of intellectual disputes

11

periphery, where one can read and perhaps teach to others ideas that have already become central elsewhere. The individual must decide, whether consciously and explicitly or only by drift, and possibly through a considerable cloud of illusions, whether it is worth striving to contend for one of the limited number of highly visible positions. If this becomes implausible, another realistic choice, short of dropping out entirely, is to become a follower of the occupant of one of the prominent positions. There is the opportunity to become a specialist, applying some prominent theory to a subject matter honed narrowly enough that one achieves at least some aspect of uniqueness. Or one can become a commentator, an expositor; instead of striving to rival Foucault, one becomes a Foucault scholar. Often one can find considerable eminence as a commentator, especially if one is a pioneer in importing ideas from a foreign country or from one discipline into another. Intellectual acrimony is most likely in that period when one’s young career is just becoming a middle-aged career, and one has not yet quite realized that one is being squeezed by the limited attention space. This is the time for the sharpest attacks on those who are currently eminent, and on the gullibility of their followers—attacks conducted in the most objective terms: it is truth that suffers from the incoherence of my opponents, and only incidentally myself as possessor of a superior path to truth. But taking a sociological view, the attacker should not be convicted of insincerity. To be a serious participant in the intellectual world is to be committed to making a contribution to true knowledge, and the more committed one is, the more difficult it is to distinguish between the merit of the ideas one believes in and the recognition that one believes is owed to oneself. As a rule of thumb, the degree of disappointed ambition determines the level of acrimony. Those who have aimed the highest, and who hold to that aim the longest, are the most acrimonious in attacking their successful rivals. Those who hold out the longest in the face of the lack of recognition, keeping faith with their own idea of themselves, are those who are most likely to be negative about the successful. We all know the carper, the type of intellectual who disagrees with everyone, who never has anything good to say about

12

peace and mind

anyone’s newly published work. Most likely the carper is someone who once had a promising start, the object of much praise during youth, but who never could make it even at the top of some specialty and hangs doggedly on the periphery of the intellectual world. The hypothesis could be tested by biographical comparisons, although we rarely undertake biographies of the unsuccessful. Acrimony of a different sort happens when the young intellectual first begins to publish the work that is to give him or her an independent reputation. Here we find the acrimony of the young against the older generation, the attack on one’s teachers. This break occurs most sharply in those thinkers who have come from a lineage of distinguished teachers, for the danger of being unoriginal is greatest when one is under the spell of an impressive teacher. To continue someone else’s ideas is to have no chance of independent recognition. Breaks with one’s teachers are structurally most necessary at the higher levels of the intellectual world. This is not simply a psychological process, a universal Oedipal pattern of killing the father. The process varies, most notably with the degree of career ambition; and ambition is in turn structurally given, at the moments when the field is shifting and an array of new positions is opening up and superseding the old structure of rivalries. There is little Oedipal rebellion at the periphery of the field, little explicit and vehement breaking with obscure teachers; it is the important teachers who have the greatest magnetism, the greatest centrality in the attention space, and thus it is their pupils who have the most to gain in breaking away and who must carry out the greatest transfer of emotional energy from their teachers to themselves. It is a typical pattern, in intellectual networks, for the major figures of each new generation to be pupils of the major figures of the previous generation, but what such pupils get from their teachers cannot be simply their ideas. What pupils learn that enables their own future eminence is the stance of being at the center of intellectual action; they appropriate and carry on the emotional energy, the ambitiousness, of their teachers. Once the break is successfully made, later in a career, the polemic subsides. One thinks, for instance, of Engels as an elder statesman, recounting the history of Idealism and generously giving credit to the Idealists

on the acrimoniousness of intellectual disputes

13

for opening a pathway to his and Marx’s success. And many pupils of important teachers do not break away at all; there is no Oedipal break for those who recognize early that their own career pathway is to be followers, appliers of big ideas to particular specialties, or to be commentators on and propagators of the message of the schools in which they were trained. In some curious cases, there is no need for a break, because the teacher dies and the pupil can step into the curatorial role of propagating and developing the great thinker’s ideas as if they were his or her own. In the 1930s, the young sociologist Herbert Blumer was teaching assistant to George Herbert Mead in the University of Chicago philosophy department. Mead died in the midst of a course of lectures and Blumer carried on for him; thereafter Blumer took up the standard for Mead’s ideas, gave them the label of “symbolic interactionism,” and polemicized against rival theoretical schools, in the process of which Blumer made Mead’s ideas into a research program for the next generation of sociologists. Blumer became a creative force in the world of sociological theories, but he hid the fact under the cover of Mead’s intellectual identity. This sort of thing could happen because the elder thinker was not well known except in a coterie of local disciples, and his death made it possible for a devoted follower to become eminent without rivalry for their position in attention space. Physical death is sometimes the prerequisite to intellectual resurrection. A final subtype of career rivalry is accompanied by a much more limited form of acrimony, the priority dispute. These disputes over who should get credit for having first discovered and published an idea have been widely studied. Priority disputes can only occur in those fields in which there is a great deal of consensus on the criteria for a significant contribution, fields in which reputations—rather than having to wait for later generations to sort out whose ideas are worth remembering—are quickly established. Priority disputes are thus found in the natural sciences and in mathematics, at least since the time of the “scientific revolution.” These are fields that I would characterize as “rapid-discovery science”: their networks quickly settle the issue of the last round of controversy and get on to

14

peace and mind

building the next round of discoveries upon it. Priority disputes do not much occur in philosophy, the humanities, and social sciences. Such disputes are a very focused and specific form of acrimony, corresponding to the highly focused and specialized organization of some fields of intellectual work; where the fields are not so minutely focused, acrimony must be more generalized. We all have our bêtes noires, the writers whom we cannot stand, from whom we have nothing to learn: these are on the whole persons occupying the same niche in attention space, at the level of our own specialty, perhaps using a different terminology, a somewhat different mix of arguments and evidence, but aiming at a topic so close that their success diminishes our own. There is an indirect use of priority accusations that figures in this kind of generalized contentiousness. One often hears a third-person accusation, in which someone denigrates a rival by declaring that what he or she has to say is merely a repetition of what has already been said by X. This accusation is one of the techniques of the carper; an indirect result is that the carper does finally acknowledge the value of someone else’s work, if only by using it to put down the person immediately at hand. Insofar as the intellectual world is built on conflict, on struggle over a limited attention space, this roundabout agreement is more than incidental: consensus happens precisely as contenders need to call on allies to effectively attack their rivals, thus turning a potentially infinite amount of disagreement into a limited amount of division among well-known schools of thought. At times, priority claims are raised in a fashion that can sound untoward to disengaged observers. In my own field, sociology, there was, during the 1970s, a good deal of acrimony around the newly prominent movement of ethnomethodologists (followers of Harold Garfinkel). They declared that existing sociology was merely a gloss on naive conceptions of social order, and that these must be superseded by phenomenological methods that study the process of constructing our sense of taken-for-granted reality in everyday life. The bitterest conflicts took place, not between ethnomethodologists and the most positivistic schools, but between Garfinkel’s followers and their nearest predecessors, the symbolic interactionists. On the latter’s

on the acrimoniousness of intellectual disputes

15

side, one often heard, against the claims of ethnomethodologists, that their arguments about social reality were ridiculously extreme— yet strangely, furthermore, that the symbolic interactionists already owned this topic. In other words: your position is absurd; and also we said it first. Border-Crossing Acrimony Collective hostilities, like the individual hostilities we have examined so far, seem governed by the limited number of prominent positions in the intellectual attention space. One way to reduce conflict, and to open up career possibilities, is to divide, into separate attention spaces, different specialties, each of which provides its own field of competition, regulated by its own application of the law of small numbers. Thus arises the possibility of another form of conflict: the institutionalized hostility between the inhabitants of a particular field and those who intrude across its border. We see this kind of conflict in hostile reviews of books written by outsiders, as well as in referees’ reports on manuscripts submitted for publication in the journals belonging to a particular specialty, on applications for research funds, and the like. Part of the practical skill of successful academics is to label their projects with just the right markers and to steer their work toward gatekeepers who see things as they themselves do, from the viewpoint of a shared specialty.2 From the insider’s viewpoint, the outsider misses just those questions that are significant, the lines of opposition that are of concern to those active inside the local attention space; outsiders are not focused on the same puzzles, and thus their work appears at best uninteresting or out of focus. This lack of fit is often seen as a lack of scholarly skill on the part of the outsiders, a failure to have undergone the appropriate apprenticeship, to “get their hands dirty” in the archives, at the lab bench, or in field work. There actually are such failures, and plenty of blunders in amateur efforts. But insiders are generally ill positioned to distinguish such failures from work in their field that is of interest in a frame of analysis developed in another field. To name an example near to my own heart, work in

16

peace and mind

the sociology of philosophy is not the same as work done in the substantive controversies of philosophy or in the historiography of philosophy. Reviewers drawn from the native population—the philosophers and historians of philosophy—naturally enough tend to overplay the privileged status of their own viewpoint. But indeed, there is no single vantage point; we each have our own dignity to uphold. More generally, what sociologists or economists or anthropologists see as fruitful material in historiography, or in the practices of scientists or lawyers, may not be perceptible at all to those inside, and may be regarded as a hostile intrusion, an unwarranted reduction of their own ontological context to an alien one. The late-twentiethcentury movement of literary theory and its cognates, imported into the humanities from an amalgam of semiotics, phenomenological philosophy, and the social sciences, was experienced as an invasion by prior inhabitants of terrain that they took to be defined as the study of substantively valuable and therefore classic works of literature and the arts. Hostility was exacerbated by the victorious crowing of the bordercrossers and their scorn for what they proclaimed an unsophisticated and tradition-bound way of studying a reputational canon. No doubt this characterization of the established literati gave them a twinge of growing old, since what had become offensively traditional in the last third of the twentieth century had arrived as the rebellious movement of New Criticism in the middle third of the century. The extent to which intruders try to be respectful of the fields they are intruding upon, or alternatively the extent to which they arrive as arrogant imperialists, depends upon the relative success of these intellectual movements on their home grounds and upon the pecking order of disciplines. Consider some current examples. The enthusiasm for well-funded developments in genetics and biology has spilled over into a cross-disciplinary movement of evolutionary biologists. Its strongest effects have been in psychology departments, where traditional versions of psychological research have been displaced or made precarious; evolutionary biology has intruded as well upon the topics of the social sciences (crime, gender roles, intelligence testing) in ways that have brought considerable hostility.

on the acrimoniousness of intellectual disputes

17

In another part of the theater, economics has been riding high since the last decades of the twentieth century, both from the expansion of job opportunities for its graduates, as compared to those in other social science fields, and from the wave of political popularity of free-market economics. The success of economics as a field has added impetus to a movement of “rational choice” or “public choice” theories, applying neoclassical economics to standing topics in political science and elsewhere. Strands of conflict are often tangled; the atmosphere is worsened when political differences are perceived to overlay these border-crossing disputes. But one thing at a time (for now, we must defer consideration of the political dimension). We cannot decide the substantive merits of the positions of intruders and the defenders of borders before the event. By their fruits ye shall know them, and it is future practitioners and historians of our fields who alone will be in a position to observe how these movements have played themselves out. The past shows that new developments, especially in the academic world since the research university was established around 1800, have often come from border crossings. This phenomenon is especially apparent in the natural sciences, where movements of physicists brought about biochemistry, and where the combinations of laboratory techniques from different disciplines have repeatedly given rise to new substantive areas. Elsewhere, cross-border colonization has brought developments such as an experimental psychology separate from philosophy departments, and both the logicist and phenomenological movements in the early twentieth century, as physicists and mathematicians overflowed into philosophy. More abstractly, we can say that one way in which intellectuals can find new materials to work upon, and new things to say—and thus to make new careers with new centers of attention—is to recombine various strands of ideas and techniques from previous lineages of the intellectual world; and if these provoke new lines of conflict, so much the better for the excitement of intellectual action. But to say this is not to take the position that the border-crossers are always right, that they are the inevitable wave of the future. The history of philosophy shows that the construction of new lines of intellectual action does not automatically eliminate the older lines;

18

peace and mind

and intellectual “traditionalists,” conservatives in the sense that they extol the merits of older lines of thinking, have often become innovators on the rebound as they have dug more deeply into their traditional stance to fend off threats. The history of China, Japan, and India is especially rich in examples of the innovativeness of philosophical conservatives pushed to the wall. But let me note a recent example from the heart of the natural sciences: the aggressive new movement of molecular biologists led by James Watson, after its famous success in modeling DNA, loudly declared traditional field biologists outdated. But Watson’s attempt to reform the Harvard department along these lines provoked those very traditionalists to mount a countersynthesis in the form of the new subdiscipline of ecology.3 In the same way, intrusions of rational-choice economics or evolutionary psychology into the older terrains of the social sciences are not fated to carry everything before them; they also motivate explicit moves to show how established modes of social science can do the job of explanation better. One token of this phenomenon is the movement of “economic sociology” which counterattacks on economists’ terrain with the methods of network analysis. Here again, we see the general pattern of intellectual fields, generating creativity by focusing lines of opposition. Intellectual Fortresses Another important form of intellectual hostility is based, not on new movements and intrusions, but upon long-standing, institutionalized rivalries. For several centuries in Hellenistic Greece, intellectual action simplified down to four main schools: the Platonic Academy, the Aristotelians, Stoics, and Epicureans. Lineages were firmly established in organizations that owned property and kept up both a flow of funding and well-recognized slots in the attention space. These schools sustained a traditional set of disputes, which led to some refinements but not to abandonment of the basic positions. This episode in the history of philosophy supports a generalization: materially well-supported positions do not give up their basic framework of thought, and are capable of riding out any level of

on the acrimoniousness of intellectual disputes

19

criticism by their enemies. Jibes between the Hellenistic schools were part of their identities. A similar dynamic operated in the period of medieval India when the Hindu schools were institutionalized in the “six darshanas” (orthodox philosophies or viewpoints); these then kept up a stable set of alliances and splits among themselves. As long as the material bases were strong, intellectual criticisms by rivals led to responses that radicalized their differences, rather than to acceptance of the validity of what the opponent was urging. A conceptual scheme, as W. V. Quine observed, has many points at which it can be adjusted without giving up its overall framework. Hence the collapse of a position comes, not from institutionalized lines of rivalry, but from a transformation of the entire attention space, in which entire sets of oppositions are squeezed out. In late medieval Christendom, after many creative developments, scholastic philosophy became divided among Thomists, Scotists, and nominalists; each came to control its own universities as strongholds, where the opposing positions where excluded from the curriculum and the professorial chairs. Acute lines of mutual criticism were not taken to heart and did not disturb the balance of power. These lines shifted only with the rumbling upheaval in the material bases for intellectual life. Positions outside the universities for thinkers drawing upon court patronage, and the new networks for circulating intellectual news, provided the home grounds, first for the humanists and then for the movement that eventually became known as the scientific revolution—these displaced the older scholastic rivalries and gave them, individually and en masse, the reputation of being archaic. It was then that the name of Duns Scotus, the “subtle doctor” (whose merits were to be rediscovered centuries later by Heidegger), was transformed into a term of denigration: “dunce.” Such periods of institutionalized rivalry occupy a medium level on the scale of acrimony; their mutual abuse is conventional rather than heated, unlike relations among new and old movements at times when an entire material base is displaced. Observing the confrontation of intellectual fortresses is analytically useful, because

20

peace and mind

it sets up a contrast with situations in which intellectual acrimony is notably low: that is to say, periods when there is plenty of intellectual action and therefore disagreement, but name-calling and nastiness are relatively absent. Across the history of philosophy, the periods of greatest innovation have been times when several rival intellectual networks have intersected at one or a few great centers of discussion. A classic example for the West is Athens at the time of Socrates. In the generations just previous, the philosophical networks were dispersed around various parts of Ionia and the Greek colonies of Italy (Magna Graecia), but in this period they came together (driven to a considerable extent by geopolitical developments) in one city. It was this confluence of networks that made it possible for an individual to acquire the stance of sophisticated encounter with many different viewpoints, and to rise to a metalevel of abstraction about the nature of intellectual objects; in short, these were the structural conditions that made it possible for someone to become “Socrates.” The point I want to emphasize is that debate in the newly selfconscious intellectual community in Athens was carried out under emerging conceptions of politeness; this quality is the charm that many generations of readers have been struck by in the Platonic dialogues. The new politeness was not simply the Greek cultural ethos, even of that time, but a particular mode of social organization among intellectuals, for it contrasted strongly with the surrounding ethos of city-state politics, which was often quite vituperative as well as violent.4 Even the sophists, teachers of rhetoric and the art of argumentation, were not mere polemicists. For all their flaunted disagreements, the sophists become increasingly conscious of rules and standards of debate, and indeed the propensity of the sophists to show that they could argue on either side of a question was part of an increasing sophistication and cosmopolitanism, invoking the implicit ideal that true intellectuals can rise above being tied to partisan stances. The golden moments of other world traditions of philosophy have similar patterns. Ancient Chinese philosophy crystallized in the fourth century BCE, when several courts of warring states employed

on the acrimoniousness of intellectual disputes

21

scholars as ministers and diplomats, and brought together teachers from many schools to debate, notably at Wei and at the famous Chihsia Academy at Ch’i. In these centers of shifting membership, major thinkers like Chuang Tzu (the first important proto-Taoist) and Hui Shih (a pioneer of abstract conceptual logic of the “school of names”) debated, and sharpened their positions upon each other, but also associated as friends. This gentility among the Chinese intellectual elite is not a cultural trait, in the sense of a constant quality at all historical periods; there is plenty of petty hostility and indeed violent contentiousness to be found among Chinese schools in other periods, especially during that between the third and tenth centuries CE, when Taoists, Confucians, and Buddhists were organized into intellectual fortresses. When the structural pattern appears again— the intersection of rival networks at a few metropoles of lively intellectual action—the civility reappears. Another great episode of Chinese philosophy, too little known in the West, occurred in the eleventh century CE. Here the action emerged from building a large-scale examination system for government officials; at the same time, various factions of scholars contended over a succession of government ministries introducing, and sometimes (in the name of tradition) renouncing, major economic reforms. Here arose vigorous intellectual struggles among a small number of rival factions, including the Neo-Confucians (an example of the innovativeness of self-styled conservatives); the conservative Confucian poets led by Su Shih; and the radical reformers, led by Wang An-shih (a name as important in Chinese history as Richelieu, Cromwell, or Bismarck in European history). Despite strong intellectual and political differences, Wang An-shih and Su Shih were privately friends, who received each other in retirement to paint and write poetry together. In sum, the gracious, polite ways of debating, those that separate personal relations from intellectual disagreements, have tended, historically, to arise in cosmopolitan centers, where alliances are fluid and connections multiple. Entrenched loyalists, hurling traditional epithets against traditional enemies, originate in the self-enclosed networks of isolated citadels.

22

peace and mind

Material Base Shifts The seismic shifts of intellectual life, when one material base is displaced by another, are usually accompanied by a tidal wave of denigration of the products of the old system. But all is not quite what it seems. The generation of Descartes claimed to sweep the slate clean of the scholastic philosophies and start anew: for all that, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and the other new stars drew surreptitiously upon a judicious selection of techniques and concepts of their banished predecessors. In the twentieth century, when American and British universities had finally adopted as their model the German-style research university, professional thinkers touted their new analytic tools and looked down upon the thought of the previous century as mere preaching and journalism. Inhabitants of different modes of intellectual production live in different worlds; and when one life-practice struggles for dominance over the other, an impersonal acrimony tends to color all relationships. Similar generic denigration goes on when two different modes of intellectual production confront one another on roughly equal terms: in the period since World War II, “continental” thought has appeared, from the viewpoint of anglophone analytic philosophers, to be mere literary flash. In fact, continental philosophy is grounded in a distinctive organization of intellectual action—the blending of the elites of publishing, theater, and the academic world, all centered on Paris, where reputations are made before a high-culture audience of aspirants in each of these contexts.5 Moreover, the critical mass of intellectuals assembled from all these career paths is large enough to be a force capable on occasion of dramatic political action, and this fact of life adds an engagé tone of political resonance to French thought. Thus it is the envy of more institutionally isolated American academics but also the butt of accusations about the faddishness and dogmatism characteristic of social movements. After one mode of production displaces another, all is not sweetness and light within the victorious camp; they have a full attention space to divide up. The leaders of an intellectual movement associated with the new material base may have started out as a close-

on the acrimoniousness of intellectual disputes

23

knit group of comrades at arms. I have mentioned the generation of German Idealists, whose success in seizing the attention space was followed immediately by splits: the old revolutionary Schelling ended upholding a conservative religious idealism against the dominance of his schoolmate Hegel. The Sartre circle of existentialists, which swept into the center of French intellectual life at the end of World War II, soon broke into acrimonious conflicts among Sartre, MerleauPonty, and Camus; ostensibly these were conducted on political grounds but their structural basis was the opportunity, and need, to differentiate themselves if they were to have independent reputations and to produce new things to say. This is not a distinctively Western kind of intellectual contentiousness: we find comparable splits in the successive victorious camps of Buddhist and Hindu India, as well as among the Neo-Confucian philosophers in Sung dynasty China, even though the originating group consisted of two brothers, their uncle, and a family neighbor. The solidarity of the battle line is generally followed by an upsurge of contentiousness among allies, and this makes for some retrospective romanticization of the days when the allies were united in the face of a common enemy—the war is portrayed as a honeymoon when compared to the peace. On the losing side, the contrary is surprisingly the case. The old situation of material supports upheld an array of rival positions, with their long-standing arguments and institutionalized scorn for each other’s weaknesses. The effect of being pushed onto the defensive by a new kind of intellectual movement is typically to bring about one last efflorescence of ideas in the form of a grand synthesis. Buddhist syntheses of previously rival schools were achieved, as I have mentioned, at the time when their monastic universities were undercut by the renewed organization of Hindu schools. In late Greco-Roman antiquity, when the Christian church was acquiring substantial political support in imperial politics and building its own network of educational institutions, the long-standing rival pagan schools came together in a grand synthesis, notably in the system of Plotinus. In Europe in the early seventeenth century, when the scholastics were being shown the door by Bacon, Descartes, Gassendi, and the rest of the new thinkers,

24

peace and mind

the last great scholastic system was produced by Francisco Suarez. Though Thomists and Scotists had been bitter rivals for centuries, Suarez incorporated both into an ontology that set new standards for sophistication. Nor did this work languish in a backwater of Spanish conservatism; Descartes himself carried Suarez’s Disputationes metaphysicae on his travels, and Leibniz drew upon it for various refinements of ontology. I see two morals in such stories. The factional conflicts of intellectual life are not permanent: driven into opposition by favorable opportunities for dividing an attention space, intellectual camps may be brought into friendship during a period when there is a premium on alliance against an alien mode of intellectual life. And even then, there are deeper currents of continuity beneath the stormy weather fronts—the changes of intellectual bases—and a good deal of clandestine borrowing from one’s enemies. Political and Religious Entanglements The most severe intellectual acrimony occurs where the arguments on intellectual terrain are entangled with positions in larger political and especially political/religious struggles. It is fashionable to say that the cultural world is political. But saying so does not capture the difference between, on the one hand, politics as a struggle to gain control of the coercive apparatus of the state and, on the other hand, the distinctive kind of politics practiced by those struggling for an attention space among networks that build up their own abstract and rarefied topics and techniques of argument. The difference is felt in the dimension of cultural production where producers look to each other for their standards and judgments of success, vis-à-vis the dimension where producers appeal to the taste of lay audiences— Pierre Bourdieu refers to this distinction as one of “autonomy” vs. “heteronomy.”6 Internal vs. lay orientation is no sharp dichotomy but, rather, a continuum along which intellectual life has varied historically. At one extreme, however, where cultural production is dictated entirely according to lay standards, the intellectual community per se is dead; these are stagnant times in abstract disciplines

on the acrimoniousness of intellectual disputes

25

like philosophy and in all the more theoretical sciences and theoretical fields of scholarship. But self-reflexive intellectual networks spring up whenever there is opportunity for cultural specialists to argue among themselves—and there are periods when lines of struggle are between those extolling the right of intellectuals to go their own way (often under some banner such as philosophy’s independence from theology) and those (often the leaders of church politics or of the state) who regard such innovativeness as frivolity or heresy. Max Weber regarded this line as a perennial location of dispute inside religions. It is part of the tradition of intellectuals in the West to point to the martyr-heroes who sacrificed themselves for “truth,” our rallying cry: Socrates forced to take hemlock, Galileo placed under arrest, Bruno burned by the Inquisition. We reduce these cases to a conflict between insiders and outsiders, between the intellectual world and the politicians of church or state. But in fact, many such instances are better understood as conflicts among rival groups of intellectuals, some of whom have exclusive alliances in a religious/ political camp—that is, they use these camps as their material bases. Such instances are not necessarily symmetrical, and some may be closer to being “pure intellectuals” while others are closer to the heteronomous end of the continuum. Important French intellectual factions in the era of Descartes and Pascal, for example, built upon the schools and sanctuaries of Jesuits and Jansenists, rival Catholic movements that did not hesitate to call on state power to exclude each the other from university posts or even to deny entry into a country. Cardinal Bellarmine, who led in the condemnation of Galileo, was no know-nothing, but rather a Jesuit thinker not many links removed in the network from both Suarez and Descartes; as a church politician, his policy was maneuvering alliances inside and outside the intellectual camps, and keeping the most controversial aspects of Galileo’s position from causing trouble. The danger of those times was part of the structural conditions for creative upheaval: where intellectual bases were entwined with religious organization, and the struggle of churches was a part of violent campaigns that rearranged state power, the conditions were present both for massive intellectual

26

peace and mind

realignments—a pattern of creativity already discussed—and for shifting intellectual/religious entanglements that could get one burned at the stake. The entanglement of intellectual life with religious politics appears to bring the acrimoniousness of disputes to a peak. Politics has force as its ultimate weapon, and its coalitions, however democratic, are formed to gain control of that means of organized compulsion, the state. The intellectual world operates on a different terrain, where an argument carried only by force is not considered an argument at all. In this light, it seems strange to cluster religion with politics, since religions have on their own no coercive means of generating the moral solidarity and symbolic commitment that they pursue. But religious organizations differ from intellectual communities in that argument and ongoing formulation of new positions is not the aim, but rather the preservation and propagation of doctrines and practices expressive of ultimate commitments. Intellectuals are intrinsically divided by their factions, whereas religions generally attempt and claim to express communal inclusiveness. Most importantly for our purposes, the symbolic and emotional techniques of religions can be intensely mobilizing for large groups of people; thus religions make ready allies of political factions, and the strongest religions have commanded and legitimated organized force. The worst atrocities are all too often carried out under religious auspices.7 Yet religions are not always at each other’s throats: sometimes religiously based intellectuals discuss and argue rather harmoniously across religious lines. What makes the difference? Compare briefly two sets of cases. In medieval China, there were periods when Taoists, Confucians, and Buddhists met for debates sponsored by the imperial or regional courts. Losers of these debates (as declared by the ruler) were defrocked, and their temple properties confiscated; the winners were given state patronage and made the officially established religion. Yet in later dynasties there were friendly relations, as between Zen monks and Neo-Confucian scholars, and syncretist movements sometimes extolled the “unity of the three doctrines,” the notion that the three were saying the same thing in different terms.

on the acrimoniousness of intellectual disputes

27

In the Islamic world, there have been periods both of intellectual civility and of violent conflicts. Among the latter was the episode of the so-called Inquisition during the years 827–847 at Baghdad, when the caliph attempted to elevate the philosophical theology of the Mu’tazilites—a sect of rationalistic thinkers—into official doctrine, and tried to enforce it on the teachers of hadith (traditions about Mohammed transmitted from his companions through lineages of specialists). The leader of one of the Baghdad hadith schools, Ibn Hanbal, courageously stood up to imprisonment, ill-treatment, and threats of death, until the caliphate finally gave in. This concession ushered in a period of reversal of fortunes, as the practitioners of rationalistic theology (kalam) were increasingly vilified by the schools of hadith, as well as by theological/philosophical movements that took their stance against Mu’tazilite doctrines. By the eleventh century, even moderate practitioners of kalam like Al-Qushayri and Ibn ‘Aqil were being attacked by mobs and driven from teaching in Baghdad. But contrast the situation in Spain during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. A lively creativity embraced a variety of intellectual factions, including both religious rationalists, who were constructing versions of Neo-Platonic and Aristotelian systems, and traditionalist mystics. Similar factions were found among both Muslims and Jews: Jewish philosophers often wrote in Arabic, and indeed the networks crossed religious lines. The great cosmopolitan thinkers Moses Maimonides and Averroes (Ibn Rushd) came from the same network of thinkers at Cordoba. The situation of intersectarian interchange was not to last: sharp divisions among Jewish and Muslim thinkers developed in following centuries, and their networks as well as the contents of their ideas moved far apart. These episodes of religious tolerance, and of interreligious participation in a common intellectual field, gave way to forced conversion and persecution. What makes the difference? The high-hostility cases are ones in which the intellectual factions have their own self-sufficient material bases; plus the alliance with political factions raises the stakes by the application of force. We see this combination in the hostile instances in China and in Islam (and others from elsewhere could be cited). Taoists, Buddhists, and Confucians all had their own temples and

28

peace and mind

their own sources of membership and economic support; each could live without the others. In ninth-century Baghdad, hadith schools, with their control over careers in jurisprudence, were relatively impervious to threats from the Mu‘tazilite intellectuals relying on court patronage. These were, then, fortresses of the kind that underpin long-standing intellectual camps; the more secure and isolated the fortress, the more a fortress mentality develops against outsiders. What escalated these intellectual rivalries into violence was the intrusion of politics. Here was a lethal mix of intellectual and political animosities. For to settle intellectual disputes by coercion is to intrude nonintellectual means into the heart of the intellectual community: the constitutive goal and activity of this community of debaters—to become the center of action purely by moves made within the space of intellectual attention—is thus undermined. The intrusion of politics as a means of determining intellectual victors and losers is dangerous to intellectuals themselves, and not only on the side of those who get coerced. Political intrusion draws down the hostility not only of rival political forces but also of the core intellectual networks. Thus the Hanbalities, the followers of the stalwart conservative Ibn Hanbal, emerged from the “Inquisition” with not only religious but also intellectual prestige. Coercion is a bad intellectual tactic, whether it favors the side of self-professed rationalists and progressives or the side of self-conscious conservatives. In view of their aftermaths, Ibn Hanbal is the structural equivalent of Galileo. We may reach the same conclusion from the other end of the comparison. Relative harmony and tolerance among intellectuals across religious and other factions occur where no faction has a strong, autonomous material base; instead, they rely on the same base and thus are thrown together into a common community— political coercion is not a weapon in their arsenals. Islamic Spain presented a situation in which intellectual life was based upon a network of small courts, where both Muslim and Jewish scholars served as court officials (a particularly cosmopolitan group were the medical doctors: the profession of Maimonides and Averroes, among other leading thinkers). These small states were often at war, but the complexities of geopolitics made for frequent shifting of alliances,

on the acrimoniousness of intellectual disputes

29

which indeed sometimes even cut across to the Christian kingdoms; scholars were sent as diplomats, and their careers typically shifted from one court to another. Thus, although the courts comprised the material base, they were the opposite of factional fortresses, for it was the network of scholars as a whole, circulating among the various courts, that was the focus of the community. And over time, the sense of intellectual excitement must have been building up as new initiatives in theology, philosophy, and science were launched— in literature too, even across linguistic lines (these were the times when courtly love poetry passed over from Muslim poets to the troubadours).8 The sense of intellectual action yielded a magnetism, and we can envision the members of this network, for some golden years at least, feeling that it was more their home than any particular religion or political party could be. Intellectuals were involved in politics, but in a practical way rather than with ideological fervor. Politics was not calling the shots. A comparable situation existed in those periods in China when the religious camps were not rivals for political favor—the center of political action was elsewhere. In part, the intellectual harmony came about because of the enforced depoliticization of Buddhism and Taoism in the later dynasties. Confiscation of the wealth of the big monasteries in the late T’ang dynasty (ninth century), the shift toward small monasteries and shrines serving the lower classes, and the concomitant shift of intellectual base to the government examination system and the schools that prepared candidates for it: all these, by the Sung dynasty and thereafter, settled intellectual life, for the first time in a thousand years, firmly under Confucian dominance. Confucian philosophers were free to borrow surreptitiously from Buddhist positions of the past; and fringe Confucians, out of government favor, carried on quasi-Buddhist meditation techniques and maintained relations with monks of the declining Zen sect. The harmony of the three doctrines was an alliance of the weak and the depoliticized. Is there a contemporary application? In those parts of the world where religious politics is a matter of open warfare, conditions for a pessimistic prognosis are obvious. Independent resource bases for

30

peace and mind

Muslim and Jewish intellectuals in the Middle East allow conflicts among intellectuals to go on vociferously without the mitigating influence of participating in a common sphere of intellectual life. Yet the same factions, meeting at universities in America or Britain, are brought into the normal civility of academic life, with its networks of committees, conferences, department business, and professional associations: the shrillness of discourse descends to the normal and for the most part restricted levels of acrimony whose sources I have been outlining here. This situation illustrates, if nothing else, that the conditions for intellectual acrimony are found in mutable structures, and not in deep-rooted cultural differences. Envoi As intellectuals, we make our careers in networks. What we produce is shaped by our predecessors who provide the topics and techniques of thinking, and—if we are lucky—by webs of successors who continue and transform our ideas. We are shaped too by maneuvering around rivals with whom we divide up a limited field of attention. Usually this process goes on tacitly. We would be better off if we were more explicit about our dependence on a network cycling through widely if unevenly shared bodies of ideas and argumentative techniques; more explicit, too, in recognizing that the few individuals who become the rallying points of intellectual movements are focal points in flows of ideas that wash in many directions around networks made up of large numbers of us. Less egotism, both individual and collective, and more awareness of how we all constitute each other: this could be a path toward lowering intellectual acrimony in the future.

on the acrimoniousness of intellectual disputes

31

Notes 1. Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 2. Another source of hostile reviews, especially of books, is reviewers who are too close, i.e. rivals over the same niche in attention space. Between one kind of danger and another, the scholar has many pitfalls to negotiate in making a prominent career, and these account for much of the strain and emotional bitterness of intellectual life. 3. Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist (New York: Warner, 1994). For a general statement and a case study of the innovations that occur by means of “role purification” when a discipline unites to throw intruders out, see Martin Kusch, Psychologism: A Case Study in the Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1995). Kusch presents a brilliant analysis of the social bases of disputes among schools of psychology during the field’s early generations in Germany in Psychological Knowledge: A Social History and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1999). 4. In this respect, the position of G. E. R. Lloyd seems overstated, i.e., that Greek standards of intellectual argument arose from democratic debate in the city-states. See Lloyd, Demystifying Mentalities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 5. On the structure of this intellectual world in the mid-to-late twentieth century, see Pierre Bourdieu, Homo Academicus (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988). On its shaping at the end of the nineteenth century, see Jean-Louis Fabiani, Les Philosophes de la République (Paris: Minuit, 1988). 6. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 7. Jack Goody, “Bitter Icons,” New Left Review 7 (January–February 2001): 5–15. 8. Goody, “Bitter Icons.”

32

peace and mind

HOW NOT TO TAKE SIDES Leon Battista Alberti—Renaissance Man? Wayne Andersen

My subject here is assertion or assertiveness—or rather, which assertions might be worth disputing and how to treat the others philosophically. Disputes become seminal because, once begun, no one knows how to stop the conception of progeny. Pursuing peace, I will take up the case of Leon Battista Alberti (c. 1404–72), the Florentine Renaissance Man. That Alberti was the predecessor of Leonardo da Vinci as Universal Man is not a subject of interesting dispute. The dispute that counts is over whether that truism means something more or other than that Alberti and Leonardo were dilettantes. The founding opponents in this dispute are Jacob Burckhardt (whose Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien of 1860 established Alberti as the prototype of the Renaissance Man) and Julius von Schlosser (whose Die Kunstliteratur of 1924 expresses discontent with Burckhardt’s assessments on several counts).1 These preeminent art historians, by virtue of their contrasting opinions, opened a vast space for further scholarly intrusions, and even the most recent erudition on Alberti mediates in the space between Burckhardt and Schlosser. As for Alberti himself: born in Genoa, he was the illegitimate son of an exiled Florentine businessman with a far-flung empire of banking and trading branches from England to remote Greek islands. As a youth, he received a classical Latin education at Padua, with advanced study of canon law at Bologna. At the age of twenty, he wrote a comedy in Latin in the manner of Lucian titled Philodoxeos that passed, it is said, as an authentic ancient theatrical piece (by Lepidus).2 From that point on, Alberti’s engagement with arts and letters multiplied in literary genres and as well in painting, architecture, and building—mostly in Florence, which he was allowed to enter in 1428 when the ban on the Alberti family was lifted. By then he was an adviser experienced in the company of nobles, having secured a secretarial post as writer of briefs in the papal court. After

34

peace and mind

a short stay in Bologna, he arrived in Florence as a member of the cortege of Pope Eugenius IV, who, following public demonstrations, had been expelled from Rome.3 In other words, it was from the first Alberti’s aim to be a man of all talents: poet and playwright, craftsman (painter, sculptor, architect), geometer, orator, political adviser, augur, and global theoretician— the self-fulfillment of his oft-quoted maxim: “man can do all things if he will.”4 His ambitions exceeded the tendency—the tendency since Brunelleschi refused to pay dues to the stone mason’s guild, claiming architects were not mere craftsmen—for builders to be men of letters, skilled in geometry, versed in poetry, appreciative of music, and conversant in philosophy. Vitruvius in the first century BC had already underscored the need for architects to depend on many disciplines, and recommended apprenticeships in the other arts: “While the primary knowledge is of craftsmanship and technology, architects without culture cannot gain a prestige befitting their labors, while those who neglect craft and technology and put their faith in theory and literature follow a shadow, not reality. But those who have mastered all the requirements, like men equipped in full armor, soon acquire influence and success in purpose.”5 On arriving in Florence, Alberti made the acquaintance of the most prominent painters and architects, and was soon sufficiently knowledgeable about studio practice to write his treatise on painting, published in 1436 and dedicated to Brunelleschi (with Donatello, Ghiberti, Luca della Robbia, and Masaccio cited in the preface). Alberti’s bow to the masters was perhaps as much to gain their support as to do them honor. His booklet on sculpture appeared many years later, in 1464. His treatise on architecture and town planning, in which he deals with architecture as a civic art and offers a theory of beauty (based on ancient Greek aesthetics as interpreted by Vitruvius), was still in progress at his death in 1472.6 Alberti’s career as a practicing architect and consultant on building and town planning got underway when he was in his forties. In 1446 he provided the design and construction oversight for Cardinal Rucellai’s palazzo in Florence, the first Renaissance building in which a system of classical pilasters articulate the façade.

how not to take sides

35

His first ecclesiastical commission was to design a modern façade for an old Gothic church, San Francesco at Rimini, for which Alberti drew upon the imposing example of the ancient Roman triumphal arch, the triumph here not military but over death: the church was to be a memorial to his patron Sigismondo Malatesta, his family, the leading members of his court, and it was to contain on either side of the central arch chapels for the sarcophagi of Sigismondo and his wife. It was completed by 1450, after which Alberti undertook for Rucellai the task of creating a marble façade for the extant medieval church, Santa Maria Novella. With this latter project, finished in 1477, Alberti made his major contribution to modern architecture and justified his decorative tendency. The finely detailed marble distributed in flat patterns across the façade contrasted with the three-dimensional massing of imposing buildings nearby and was the first example, perhaps, of what nowadays is called “urban tissue.” In 1460, Alberti undertook the church of San Sebastiano in Mantua, for which he combined a temple front and triumphal arch; his plan was for a Latin cross with side chapels (instead of the usual aisles) and a classical barrel vault over the nave.7 His architecture was criticized in his time—architects in a competitive market typically denigrate each other—but no one to my knowledge has even yet determined the degree to which studio assistants, collaborators, master masons, and clients had a hand (or eye) in the ultimate form and appearance of his structures. In any case, to Alberti credit must be given for the conceptual designs. Because of these accomplishments in their exceptional variety, Burckhardt named Alberti the first Renaissance Man. Burckhardt’s appraisal involved a quantity of feedback from Leonardo lore implanted in Italian history by Giorgio Vasari, the sixteenth-century painter and biographer of artists. Yet the extent to which Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci were ideologically allied as temporally displaced Florentine twins was not an issue in Vasari’s time and today remains a subject of guesswork. The forty-eight-years younger Leonardo began his apprenticeship with Verrocchio about 1472, the year Alberti died. And it is unlikely that Leonardo pored over Alberti’s writings or

36

peace and mind

drew directly on his architectural principles; in the few cases when he mentions Alberti in his notebooks, Leonardo disagrees with him. Paolo Giovio, who wrote biographical sketches of illustrious men in the late 1520s (including a posthumously published life of Leonardo), does not mention Alberti in his Eulogies, and Vasari had to struggle against historical decorum to write much good about Alberti’s art. In Vasari’s Le vite de’ più eccellenti Architetti, Pittori, et Scultori Italiana (“Vasari’s Lives,” as it is known to everyone in English), Alberti is valued primarily as a theoretician. Alberti’s books were still read and his architectural accomplishments for the most part intact when the 1555 edition of Vasari’s Lives was republished with enhancements in 1568, almost one hundred years after Alberti’s death.8 Although born in Arezzo, Vasari had matured as a person and painter in Florence, where Alberti’s reputation had by no means been forgotten. So it is difficult to discern which aspects of Vasari’s assessment were his own and which were recitals of local sentiment. It was left to Burckhardt to make the mold in which serious scholarship on Alberti would be cast. Burckhardt promoted Alberti as a giant towering over all, facile in every literary genre in Latin and Italian, who learned music without a master and acquired in the arts every sort of accomplishment and dexterity. He extolled Alberti’s gift for socializing with every segment of society and applauded his gymnastic feats: from a standing start with feet together, Alberti could spring over the head of a man standing next to him (one is reminded of Vasari’s claim that Leonardo’s physical strength was such that he could bend a horseshoe). In the cathedral, Alberti could flip a coin in the air with such force that it could be heard ringing against the ceiling; the wildest horses trembled under him.9 At the extreme of adulation, Burckhardt repeated tales about Alberti as augur. Alberti had foretold a bloody catastrophe in the Este family and had predicted events in the life of Florence and of various popes years beforehand with apparent accuracy. Burckhardt’s assessment of Alberti’s universal genius set conditions for the dialectically essential pole at the other extreme. Was not this Universal Man, so-called, no more than a dilettante, a jack of all trades and master of none? By no means a cohesive genius with multiple

how not to take sides

37

talents, he was rather an emulsified aggregate—unified by style rather than substance, like an edifice made entirely of decorations. Burckhardt himself had intimated that Alberti was something of a dilettante, but only when compared to Leonardo “who was to Alberti as the finisher to the beginner.” Among the first to doubt Alberti’s universal genius— and, not incidentally, Burckhardt’s approach to art history in general— was Aby Warburg who, by 1903, was promoting a kind of art history that verged on cultural archaeology (not so different from Freud’s efforts at the time to reach the subsurface of the ego).10 Warburg’s now famous term Nachleben, referring to the metamorphosing afterlife of images, would soon open more space for scholarly debate.11 Warburg held that examining the surface imagery of an artwork, as Burckhardt did, was like knowing a person only by his or her looks. Little value accrues to passive observation of an artist’s style, Warburg thought, if the observer is ignorant of historical influences, of ancient symbols that infuse art over successive generations. He did not dare publicly offer his sour judgment of Burckhardt’s approach. Warburg’s prenatal sociology of art was not settling well with colleagues, and he concluded that a passionate critique of Burckhardt, to whom scholars of the Italian Renaissance were then at heel, could only worsen his own professional reputation. Thus Warburg’s Bildniskunst und Florentinisches Bürgertum, published in Leipzig in 1902, opened with a glowing tribute to Burckhardt as the pioneer of Renaissance scholarship. Ernst Gombrich has, however, disclosed in his biography of Warburg several drafts of that tribute, and these betray a contrasting assessment of Burckhardt’s Alberti. In the privacy of those preparatory notes and drafts, Warburg scoffs at Burckhardt’s effort to isolate Alberti, other artists, and individual works of art from historical influences that might diminish a valiant artist or dilute the originality of a great artwork. Commenting on Burckhardt’s 1855 Der Cicerone, Warburg accuses him of oratorical indulgence in hero worship and of providing little more than a hedonistic travel guide.12 And indeed Burckhardt’s book, subtitled “A Guide to the Enjoyment of Works of Art in Italy,” is a comprehensive study of the art treasures of Italy arranged like a guidebook for tourists. It is tourists who want only to admire

38

peace and mind

genius—genius independent and timeless—and to hear of nothing else. In an unpublished note in his Festwesen, Warburg described the bedazzled aesthete who admires without having to think: “At the moment they feel danger threatening the individualism of the Renaissance artist, a motley guard hurries to mobilize, headed by those capitani spaventoni [captains of fear], the disciples of Gobineau, harmless folks, but incompetents … the quattrocento must remain for them their isles of bliss for Easter holidays.”13 Warburg was himself investigating impersonal forces that, he argued, had shaped Renaissance art and culture: the influence of retained memory from the remote past, classical and medieval, as well as the influence of prevailing social conditions in Florence and greater Italy. Gombrich tells of Warburg’s struggle to map those external forces as they fashioned the mold of Alberti and his contemporaries. But Warburg soon became, in Gombrich’s words, “like a man lost in a maze,” suffering the usual dilemma of the cultural historian who tries bringing the whole of history and society to bear on a singular individual or artifact. Gombrich summarizes the questions that Warburg found difficult to answer: Was the Gothic taste an ally furthering the final triumph of the Renaissance? And if it helped to precipitate the Renaissance, did it do so by provoking a reaction or by helping it along? Or, are we wrong in seeing a clash of incompatibles where the Renaissance man saw no irreconcilable contradiction? Or, finally, was it true that the victory of the classical ideal was an unmixed blessing? Did it not also threaten values needed psychologically to keep art in the equilibrium that Warburg had found in the greatest works of Leonardo?14 Unaware of Warburg’s antipathy toward Burckhardt’s portrayal of Alberti—Warburg had published nothing but praise for Burckhardt—Julius von Schlosser took an independent hard look at Burckhardt’s assessment.15 Schlosser reexamined Alberti’s intellectual achievements, practical mastery of the several arts, and formulations of creative principles; and, if Warburg had

how not to take sides

39

become lost in a maze of influences and social criteria, Schlosser was soon lost in a maze of Alberti’s making. Alberti had been his own biographer and public relations officer, one among many men in the quattrocento who realized that the art of creating one’s self in readers’ minds could prove as efficacious as the production of material art. Vasari, not an exceptional artist by the standards of his time, may have been thinking of himself—surviving as a biographer rather than a painter—when admitting on Alberti’s behalf: “As far as fame and fortune go, the written word has the most enduring impact.”16 The consensus view that Alberti worked with equal ease in the fields of philosophy, science, classical learning, and the arts; that he eliminated the last traces of the Gothic; that his design for San Sebastiano at Mantua was the most mature centralized church plan of the time; that his San Andrea was the last word in the spacing of the Latin cross church, such that both dominated church design for centuries to come—these were all judgments that Alberti himself had encouraged.17 Schlosser did try—but failed—to find a unifying principle in Alberti’s diffuse work, a principle that could justify Burckhardt’s definition of him as a kind of universal genius. While holding in reserve that Alberti’s treatises on architecture, painting, and sculpture were historically important, Schlosser could not avoid saying that as an artist and scientist Alberti was a dilettante, an overreaching scholar with a sprawling lack of creative talent. The temple of San Francesco that Alberti designed for Sigismondo Malatesta in Rimini was for Schlosser a “masquerade”; Alberti’s Church of San Andrea in Mantua, commissioned by the Marquis Ludovico, amounted to “a purely decorative structure, almost like a stage set.”18 To dispel any thought that Schlosser’s judgments were hindsighted and thus irrelevant for Alberti’s time, one might look to Vasari’s critiques of Alberti’s art and architecture, which may (250 years later) have primed Schlosser’s eyes. Of the church of San Andrea in Mantua, Vasari says that Alberti made only a model—that his designs were carried out by other Florentine architects. Of San Francesco in Rimini, Vasari praises the decorative effects but says nothing about the structure. Of the rebuilt apse of the Annunziata,

40

peace and mind

the church of the Servites in Florence, Vasari says it is a bizarre and difficult form—a round temple edged by nine chapels, each the shape of a niche surmounted by a round arch: Since the arches of the chapels rest on the pilasters [that follow the curve of the circular apse], the arches, inclining towards the walls, tend to draw ever backwards in order to meet a wall, which turns in the opposite direction according to the shape and the tribune; wherefore, when the arches are looked at from the side, it appears that they are falling backwards, and that they are clumsy. Truly, it would have been better had Alberti avoided this method altogether.19 Regarding the Loggia dei Rucelli in Florence, Vasari points out a serious fault in the arching that, he says, resulted from poor judgment: the arches of the interior vaulting could not spring from the columns without appearing clumsy—and Vasari attributes the mistake to Alberti’s reliance on theory, to his lack of practical experience. As for Alberti the painter (nothing by his hand exists today),20 Vasari wrote only a few words: “In painting, Alberti did not do great or very beautiful works. The few by his hand do not show much perfection; nor is this to be wondered at, seeing that he devoted himself more to his studies than to draftsmanship.”21 Vasari excuses Alberti’s lack of design talent, and lack of construction expertise, with reference to the standard practice of studio masters depending on talented assistants: “It was no small good fortune for Alberti to have friends who understood him and were able and willing to serve him, because architects cannot always be standing over their work; it is the greatest use to them to have a faithful and loving assistant. If any man ever knew it, I know it very well from long experience.”22 Vasari thus identifies himself (as an artist-scholar) with Alberti— and Vasari’s pursuit of enduring fame was, likewise, through his writing. It is Vasari’s books that have garnered the renown by which he is treasured today. Vasari was by no means alone in considering Alberti a theoretician more than an artist. Cristoforo Landino, in the preface

how not to take sides

41

to his book on Dante’s Commedia, wrote a number of paragraphs lauding the distinguished men of Florence—and of his multitalented friend, Landino asked: “Where shall I put Alberti, in what class of learned men shall I set him?” To his own question, Landino replied, Among the natural scientists, I think. Certainly he was born to investigate the secrets of nature. What branch of mathematics did he not know? He was geometrician, arithmetician, astronomer, musician, and more admirable in perspective than any man for many centuries. His brilliance in all these kinds of learning is shown in the nine books on architecture expertly written by him, which are full of every kind of learning and illuminated by the utmost eloquence. He wrote on painting; he also wrote on sculpture. He not only wrote on all these arts but he practiced them with his own hand.23 Alberti’s practice of the arts was, for Landino, chiefly fieldwork for proving his grasp of ancient principles and theorizing about them. And Alberti’s reputation as an artist was a “moreover”—merely over and above his reputation as scholar and theoretician. Alberti’s painting and sculpture are passed over in silence. In another contemporary brief assessing Alberti, Angelo Poliziano wrote to Lorenzo de’ Medici (the note accompanied a gift of Alberti’s books on architecture): Surely there was no field of knowledge however remote, no discipline however arcane, to have escaped his attention; you might have asked yourself whether he was more an orator or a poet, whether his style was more majestic or graceful. So thorough had been his examination of the remains of antiquity that he was able to grasp every principle of ancient architecture, and renew it by example; his invention was not limited to machinery, lifts, and automata, but also included the wonderful form of buildings. He had moreover the highest reputation as both painter and sculptor, and since

42

peace and mind

he achieved a greater mastery in all these different arts than only a few can manage in a single one, it would be more telling, as Sallust said about Carthage, to be silent than to say little about him.24 About the time that Warburg and Schlosser were pulling up short on Burckhardt’s evaluation of Alberti, Leonardo too was being reassessed in the vast space between Renaissance Man and dilettante. Over the nineteenth century, adulations had intensified, decade by decade, to the point where Leonardo was assigned the status of universal genius. He understood gravity before Newton, the twinkling of stars before Kepler, and had anticipated the ideas of Bacon, Galileo, Pascal, and Huygens. By the turn of the century, a few specialists in the relevant fields had heard enough of Leonardo’s greatness (which reduced those who followed him to dwarfs). In 1902 the French chemist Marcellin Berthelot, fed up with his colleagues at the Academy of Sciences over their exaggerations of Leonardo’s gifts as a scientist and engineer, claimed that the inventions and discoveries attributed to him were in fact readily available in his time—that Leonardo had been little more than a skilled dilettante, an accomplished bricoleur.25 As for Leonardo the artist, Bernard Berenson’s 1896 essay, The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, finds him “the one artist of whom it may be said that nothing he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty.”26 But by 1916, in his Study and Criticism of Italian Art, Berenson vaults to the opposite pole: Leonardo’s Last Supper is now described as an object of repulsion reminiscent of a Neapolitan marketplace; his Mona Lisa said to exude hostile superiority; his St. John treated as a fleshy whore at the window of a darkened lair.27 Leonardo has been reinvented time and again since Vasari published his Lives. Berenson’s flip at the extremes of judgment delineates the space in which every opinion about Leonardo now stands.28 More immense than between any here and there, that space lies between is and is not—which is the domain of scholastics, of course, but also (“is not! is too!”) the domain of schoolchildren. Art history may not be the discipline that offers the tools with which best to understand Alberti. There are disciplines—cultural

how not to take sides

43

history, social history—in which it would simply not be appropriate to ask whether Alberti was a Renaissance Man or a dilettante. Cultural histories are or can be, like autopsies, nonjudicial—no one need evaluate greatness and award prizes—and perhaps in cases where the vocabulary of one discipline leads us to either/or choices and in-fighting, we should look for another discipline that leads away from contention and contentiousness. Alberti’s ambitious undertaking to stage a contest for contemporary poets to write verses in Tuscan, but in the manner of Catullus, Virgil, Ovid, Propertius, or Tibullus, failed when the judges refused to award a single prize, their having determined that not one of the competitors measured up to the ancients. That failure is as important to a cultural historian as any success, however measured, would have been to a belletrist or canonizer. The analysis of overreaching and failure can yield as much cultural information as the evaluation of triumph. In the context of any nonjudicial history (as opposed to art history), the concept “Renaissance Man” loses much of its interest because the concept “Renaissance” loses interest as well. “Renaissance” and “Renaissance Man” signal commitment to the greatness of greatness. The Renaissance in that sense applies as an idea only to a miniscule sector of the Italian population. Farmers, vintners, olive growers, herders, artisans, shopkeepers, clerks, notaries, even lawyers and doctors, were not Renaissance Men or even denizens of the Renaissance. They were, for that matter, not denizens of any historical era but were rather embedded in cultural strata ranging from Neolithic to Gothic, history leaving nothing behind. Nor were most artists of the period “Renaissance artists.” Few artists, at any time, are innovators. Most develop or reproduce styles that are enduringly conserved and available. Even if neoclassical styles of portraiture are no longer current in oil painting, neoclassical portrayals of queens and presidents are still conventional for Western coinage. The style has not become historical; it remains in circulation but has shifted venue from a higher to a lower genre where it is no longer taken cognizance of by art history. Likewise the pottery in tourist shops in Tuscany is still painted in certain styles of Renaissance high art, while amusement parks, churches, and schools continue to be built

44

peace and mind

in variations on Gothic style. None of these stylistic paradigms has disappeared (or even shifted). From this perspective—a viewpoint avoided by art historical connoisseurship—all that innovative artists do is add styles to an open archive. The innovators of Alberti’s time lived as if on islands in an ocean—with its variable currents, swells, and waves—across which an entire population was spread. The Renaissance—its special populace—was confined to the courts, in particular those of Florence, Padua, Rimini, Mantua, and Rome. Alberti would serve the court of Federigo Montefeltro, the highly cultured, God-fearing father of his people, whose personal motto was essere umano (be human). Alberti also served Sigismondo Malatesta, “the wolf of Rimini,” whose haughty incivility visited misery on his people. Neighboring states could be culturally miles apart, though not quite so far apart as the Renaissance of the courtiers was from the amorphous, variegated cultures of everyone else. Thus the history of the Renaissance differs radically from the history of fifteenth-century Italian culture, the former being a history of popes, cardinals, princes, and dukes whose wealth funded commissions for architects to design churches, palaces, plazas, and memorials, and for painters and sculptors to create exceptional works that articulate art history as cities do a nation and landmarks a city. This process— call it unnatural selection—yielded Darwinian mutants protected from prevailing conditions of general mediocrity; it provided innovative artists with favorable conditions for survival and gave them the destiny, like Galapagos species, of adding morphological links (irreversible ones) to the progress of evolution. The most vital of these mutants, by finding ways to make their designs awesome, asserted their own power over patrons. Brunelleschi, jailed, as I have mentioned, for refusing to pay guild dues, was released and exempted from guild membership by wiser minds who got the point: work on Florence’s cathedral dome would stop until Brunelleschi got his way (silence the bird and you silence the song.) Michelangelo destroyed the architectural integrity of the Sistine Chapel while holding it hostage for the four and a half years it took him in his mid-thirties to bring the Early Renaissance to the High Renaissance—his accomplishment dependent on Julius

how not to take sides

45

II’s fear that a quarrel (such as they had had in 1506, resulting in Michelangelo’s disappearance from Rome) would doom the work entirely. What is meant, from the cultural historian’s point of view, by the question “Was X a Renaissance Man, a universal genius?” is something like “Was X able to rival his political master Q as the center of his court?” The relevant skills were as much rhetorical as they were artistic, scientific, and poetic. The person or people who held the power of life and death had to be persuaded of an artist’s greatness—to accept the artist’s own criteria for greatness and believe that he fulfilled and embodied them. Of Alberti’s statement that a man can be anything he wants to be, Kenneth Clark once said: “How naive Alberti’s statement seems when one thinks of that great bundle of fears that every [creative] individual carries with him; to say nothing of the external forces that are totally beyond his control.”29 Given the power of his patrons and the competitive edge of other artists harbored in the same courts, there was very little that Alberti could control except through oratorical skill underwritten by believable talents.30 In Anthony Grafton’s Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance, there is no echo of Warburg’s critique of Burckhardt’s Alberti, nor of Vasari’s take on Alberti’s shortcomings. Still, Grafton does not hesitate to point out that Alberti, like any Renaissance architect, worked at his best when not alone. Architects then, as now, work within and yield to a community of critics. That community would include professional builders able to translate a conceptual plan into working drawings, and other architects and engineers competent to evaluate the design and its structural requirements.31 Alberti’s architectural projects were for the most part renovations, stylistic upgradings of medieval structures that, it might be argued, reduce the rinascita to a practical task of recycling existing structures to represent modernity. Aside from his promotion of the circle as the ideal plan for a church, Alberti’s principles of architectural design and construction were in local use before his books on architecture were published posthumously. As for painting, Alberti’s De Pittura offers the earliest intellectual rationale and description of perspective

46

peace and mind

and proportions as means of unifying pictorial space on a flat surface. But Florentine painters were for the most part already deploying those principles. Alberti’s practical advice to painters, such as letting locks, horse manes, and tree leaves flutter in the wind, or letting the folds of garments reveal the shape of the human body, was the sort of workshop exchange of ideas that gave stylistic unity to Florentine painting, as distinct from the Sienese, Venetian, or Neapolitan. Nor was Alberti ahead of the pack, “ahead of his time,” with respect to sculpture. His De Statua was published about 1464 and so had no significance for Donatello, whose inventive sculptures date to the first quarter of the quattrocento and gave Vasari cause to write of the rinascita as the rival of antiquity. The theory of rinascita was always willful, a rhetorical flourish. The innovators in painting, Masaccio for example, had no visual access to ancient paintings. The Roman murals from upper-class houses and seaside villas, uncovered too late (in the late fifteenth century), would have had no meaning for painters of the quattrocento except as traditions that amplified the value of one’s present as descended from a notable ancestry. And it makes little sense to cite the ancient Greek painters Apelles and Zeuxis, known only from Pliny’s accounts, as influencing Florentine artists to follow nature in the search for perfect form. Achievement of perfect form must repress fidelity to nature, which is organized by processes explored in geology, botany, and zoology rather than principles known to aesthetics. In any case, nothing in Italy’s nature was any longer natural, considering the centuries of forestry, grazing, farming, swamp draining, mining, and roadwork that, by the fifteenth century, had altered every square meter of the peninsula’s surface. Like the Renaissance itself, perfect form and nature are ideals to help organize art-history textbooks. Human proportions, by Alberti’s day, had become reduced to an ideal divorced from real human bodies but imbued with the conviction of its own realism. The Renaissance did not exist at the time it existed: the abstraction, as we know from reading famous books and articles, was made up retrospectively, though with rhetorical aid from the likes of Alberti and Vasari. The question is, what kind of rhetorical aid?

how not to take sides

47

Alberti’s De re aedificatoria was a recasting for his time of Vitruvius’s ten books on architecture, presented as a transcendent complement to a great ancient’s efforts. One might conclude, then, that Alberti was a classicist in the mode that made rinascita and Renaissance applicable terms. But the title of Alberti’s treatise on architecture may allude to Lucretius’s De rerum natura as well and thus bear another kind of meaning. Lucretius’s poem had lain fallow over the eon between its composition in the first century BC and its retrieval by Florentine humanists in the early fifteenth century, so this liaison too might be evidence of a classic revival. On the other hand, content should count for something: Lucretius’s poem daringly proposes that interventions of gods in the real world and punishment of the soul after death are groundless notions left over from mythical times, and that the world and everything in it, including souls, which die with the body, are material—governed by mechanical laws of nature that creative men can work to alter by the application of their will. The point of classical learning in the modern context is its encouragement of secular thinking. Much of the classical wisdom retrieved by Renaissance humanists is godless (and the remainder is pagan). The tendency of the humanist syllabus, like that of Cato’s principles of agriculture, is to press the gods aside and allow humanity to manage and work the farm. “Christian humanism” developed as a sort of brake on that revolution. There is not much to choose in the great debate between proponents of the Renaissance as a classical revival and those who see the fifteenth century, like the modern age it inaugurates, as a transitional period from “medieval” ways of seeing and doing things to more “enlightened” ways. The latter is correct insofar as the former is correct—though neither has much to say to tailors and nuns, to pirates and field laborers. If what is meant by the honorific “Renaissance Man” is that Alberti comes down to us as a representative figure of the early modern transformation of theological values into human-centered ones, then the title is apt enough. His hostility to medieval values, as he understood them, took constructive, detailed, and influential forms. His ideas for town planning, in De re aedificatoria, are for example

48

peace and mind

set in marked contrast to medieval tendencies. In a medieval Italian town, each family of means built a palazzo and a tower without consideration for its neighbors, incurring while defying their envy. Alberti proposed instead that the construction of squares, towers, bridges, government buildings, churches, and theaters be carried out according to a central plan and with the publicly shared splendor that befits human communal dignity. The houses of leading citizens were to avoid the ostentation that would arouse petty hostilities, while still being splendid and dignified. Houses for poorer citizens were to be built on the same scheme but on a smaller, more modest scale, so that the difference between the social positions of richer and poorer citizens would not be strongly marked.32 Likewise a church was to be definitively planned rather than Gothically accreted. Onepoint (or centralized) perspective, about which Alberti wrote a great deal, positions the individual’s eye relative to the world such that the world is forced to accommodate the beholder (rather than vice versa, as in a Latin-cross plan), with one piece of the world unified along one line of human sight, the point of reference now pointedly inside the frame in which the beholder stands. In other words, if we want Alberti to be a quintessential Renaissance Man, we can arrange to have him be such. If the ideal of historiography, or in any case art history, is to be a centralized (as opposed to decentered) story, then the question will always be where best to locate the high altar. And to be frank, decentered historiography of the kind I have gently advocated here is not history proper; it is history improper. Decentered history is like a baseball field with no base plates or pitcher. But more to the point: the decentering of outstanding individuals and events ends up centering the scholar. Nietzsche’s method of telling history from the perspective of the teller’s life—Nietzsche’s method, anyway, as described by Hayden White—will produce not a history of literature (or of art or anything else) but a literary historiography, and these two are not similar or equivalent accomplishments.33 In literary historiography, the scholar is at the center of the world—as the viewer is from a viewpoint aligned with a vanishing point such that, whichever way the viewer pivots, the horizon viewed appears marginal.

how not to take sides

49

Alberti wrote that Narcissus was the inventor of painting. Having been turned into a flower, Narcissus came to represent painting as the flower of the arts. And what is painting, Alberti asked, “but the act of embracing, by means of art, the surface of the pool”?34 (Narcissus’s image of course reflected his likeness upon a flat surface—a canvas made of water.) A lovely image; but today there is an Academy of Narcissus, staffed by art historians (and other scholars) who respond to cultural artifacts as reflections of themselves, finding it intellectually liberating to believe that nothing exists in the world independent of the observer. I have myself no doubt that Burckhardt, Warburg, Schlosser, Edgar Wind, Irwin Panofsky, Ernst Gombrich, and Rudolf Wittkower conceptualized strategies for dealing with Renaissance Man that would glorify or denigrate their own, much later times (and for reasons as personal as scholarly). Their motives coincided, by no means incidentally, with those of Alberti in his attempt to persuade the empowered of his time that classical form, as the rational supplanting the mystical Gothic, should structure modern times and link fifteenth-century Italy with its glorious past. That motive will come around again in the 1930s with Mussolini’s fascism glorifying the reign of Augustus.35 As for me, I am tempted to conclude by quoting Leonardo in one of his crankiest moments: “The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.” I am tempted, in other words, to offer no opinion of my own as to whether Alberti was a dilettante.36 Still, there is no quick way off this game board. I suppose, looking back on them, my arguments here, my evidence, support a judgment that Alberti was a less major figure than some would have him, but (and here is my main point) who cares? It is a wise principle of living to agree with your neighbor, about the weather at least, then wander off mumbling not Leonardo’s words but Quine’s: How many possible men are there in that doorway? Are there more possible thin ones than fat ones? How many of them are alike? Or would their being alike make them one? . . . We may impose the adverb “possibly” upon a statement as a whole, and we may well worry about the semantical analysis

50

peace and mind

of such usage; but little real advance in such analysis is to be hoped for in expanding our universe to include so-called possible entities.37 By “possible entities,” Quine says he means things like Pegasus, but he would not, I hope, object to my dealing with Renaissance and Renaissance Man along the lines he sets out. I gather, from this passage, that there is no point in saying “possibly, maybe so” when an entity you do not believe in is posited or referred to. But what about flat-out contradiction? “There can be,” Quine argues, “no generally applicable test of contradictoriness,” and it is surely unclear how to formulate a contradiction in the case at hand (5). “No, Alberti was not a Renaissance Man” is one of those sentences that has meaning but—if the speaker does not believe in Renaissance Men or the Renaissance—has no reference. “Being a name of something,” as Quine writes, “is a much more special feature than being meaningful” (11). Even in “a play of insignificant notations,” the “play of notations can still be of utility” (though “utility need not imply significance”) (15). In other words, play the game with subtlety, and cross your fingers. And so, let me say what can be said in this context in a rhetorical form useful, I hope, in other contexts as well: Alberti was a Renaissance Man if anyone was. We can speak of Renaissance Men (and the Renaissance) while having no commitment to either concept. Wrong, when the game is subtly played, means “trivially true” within a “conceptual scheme” (10). Grant the scheme—there is no way out, in any case; and to do so costs you nothing but your own endurance of a long, tedious, and trivial war.

how not to take sides

51

Notes 1. Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch, ed. Ludwig Geiger, 2 vols, 11th ed. (Leipzig: A. Kröner, 1913), 1:154–56. Burckhardt’s book was translated and published in English in 1878 as The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. The latest reissue is the translation by S. G. C. Middlemore, intro. Peter Gay (New York: Modern Library, 2002). Julius von Schlosser, Die Kunstliteratur, ed. O. Kurz (Vienna: A. Schroll, 1924). See also, Schlosser, “Ein Kunstlerproblem der Renaissance: L. B. Alberti,” Akademie der Wissenschaft in Wien, Sitzungsberichte no. 210 (1929): 2. 2. Leon Battista Alberti, Philodoxeos fibula (1424), ed. Lucia Cesarini Martinelli, Rinascimento, 2d ser., 17 (1997): 111–234. 3. The standard biography of Alberti is Girolamo Mancini, Vita di Leon Battista Alberti, 2d ed. (Florence: G. Carnesecchi, 1911). See as well Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) and Anthony R. Tavernor, On Alberti and the Art of Building (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 4. As quoted by Burckhardt in Civilization of the Renaissance, 99. 5. Vitruvius Pollio, On Architecture, trans. Frank Granger, 2 vols. (London: W. Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–34). I have altered a bit of Granger’s translation. The most recent, and excellent, translation of Alberti’s On the Art of Building is On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). 6. Compare Vitruvius, On Architecture, chap. 2, 1:1–5. “Now architecture consists of Order, which in Greek is called taxis, and of Arrangement, which the Greeks name diathesis, and of Proportion and Symmetry and Design and Distribution, which in Greek is called oeconomia….” 7. The standard history and analysis of Alberti’s buildings in the context of Italian Renaissance architecture is Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London: Warburg Institute, 1949; London: Alec Tiranti, 1952).

52

peace and mind

8. Giorgio Vasari’s book was first published in 1550 as Le Vite de’ più eccellenti Architetti, Pittori, et Scultori Italiana, with a more complete edition published in 1568. The first English translation of the 1568 augmented version is by Gaston du C. de Vere (London: Macmillan; Medici Society, 1912–15). The edition I use here is the unabridged Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. de Vere, 2 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). The short section on Alberti spans pages 414–19. 9. Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, 98. 10. The most rewarding book on Warburg is E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1970; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 11. An excellent essay on Warburg’s Nachleben, highly detailed with analyses, is Georges Didi-Huberman, “Artistic Survival: Panofsky vs. Warburg and the Exorcism of Impure Time,” trans. Vivian Rehberg and Boris Belay, Common Knowledge 9.2 (spring 2003): 273–85. 12. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 144–45. Burckhardt’s Der Ciceroni was translated into English as The Cicerone in 1873. 13. Aby Warburg, Festwesen, cited in Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 346. Festwesen is the title of a folder containing miscellaneous drafts and notes written by Warburg between 1903 and 1906, together with a typed copy. 14. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 144. 15. See note 1 above. 16. Vasari, Lives, 104. 17. The complete consort of consensual judgments can be found in Anthony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy: 1450–1600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940). Blunt became aware of the gross generalizations he had fashioned in the first edition. In the preface to the second impression, he wrote, “[Today] I should not dare to write such a book at all. The capacity to make broad generalizations, to concentrate a number of ideas into a small compass in the hope that they will convey more truth than falsehood, is the result either of the rashness of youth or the wisdom of age. In the intervening period caution takes control, and if I were now to attempt a revision of the

how not to take sides

53

book, I would want to qualify every sentence with so many dependent clauses and parentheses that the book would lose whatever utility it has, which is to provide an introduction to the subject that may stimulate the reader to pursue it further” (6–7). 18. See in Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti, 343. 19. Vasari, Lives, 417–18. 20. For a recent attempt at attributing a painting to Alberti, see James Beck, “Leon Battista Alberti and the Night Sky at San Lorenzo,” Artibus et Historiae 10.19 (1989): 9–36. I am not qualified to offer an opinion on this attribution. 21. Vasari, Lives, 418–19. 22. Vasari, Lives, 418. 23. I am quoting Michael Baxendall’s translation in his Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 114–17, where one finds as well an excellent comparison of Pliny’s writing style with Landino’s. 24. Quoted from Alberti, front matter of On the Art of Building. Alberti had probably intended to dedicate the entire set of books to Federico da Montefeltro, who died in 1482. Alberti’s executor, perhaps encouraged to do so by Poliziano, who was very close to Lorenzo, elected to have the books dedicated to Lorenzo, who had not only great power but was vitally interested in antiquity. 25. Cf. Wayne Andersen, Freud, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Vulture’s Tail (London: Karnac Books; New York: Other Press, 2001). 26. This essay (1952) was incorporated into Bernard Berenson, Italian Painters of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1954), 66. 27. Berenson, The Study and Criticism of Italian Art, 3d ser. (London, 1916). For a larger context, see Andersen, Freud, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Vulture’s Tail, 93. 28. On this subject, see Richard A. Turner, Inventing Leonardo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 29. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation: A Personal View (New York: Harper and Row, 1969). 30. Here I offer a statement from a superbly argued paper by Dale Kent, “Charity and Power in Renaissance Florence: Surmounting Cynicism in Historiography,” Common Knowledge 9.2 (spring 2003):

54

peace and mind

254–72: “In order to understand the role played by patronage in the creation of art, we need to reassemble each individual patron as the integrated subject of his or her own life, rather than as an object fragmented for the convenience of academics in the disciplines of politics, religion, social history, and art. We also need to abandon artificial and anachronistic oppositions between public and private, secular and spiritual, individual and corporate. Patrons should be allowed to define themselves in their own words, images, and actions….” (255). For more, see Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). 31. Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti, 142–43. 32. I am paraphrasing Anthony Blunt’s condensation of Alberti’s text. Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy, 9. 33. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). 34. Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson, intro. Martin Kemp (1435–36; London: Penguin, 1991), 61. 35. Cf. Wayne Andersen, The Ara Pacis of Augustus and Mussolini (Geneva: Editions Fabriart, 2003). 36. My thanks to Paul Barolsky for his critical reading and helpful comments on this essay. 37. Willard Van Orman Quine, From a Logical Point of View: 9 Logico-Philosophical Essays, 2d ed. rev. (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), 4.

CONSEQUENCES OF CANON The Institutionalization of Enmity between Contemporary and Classical Music William Weber

When concerts of “classical music”—only recently so named—arose in the nineteenth century, they brought with them a culture of intense enmity between new and old music. Ask any composer in the avantgarde today what symphony orchestras have done for him or her, and you will unleash a barrage of resentment against such institutions. Then ask a subscriber to orchestra concerts how much new music should be performed, and you will get the contrary reaction: an accusation that composers do not care about the public, that they write only for each other. We take these expressions of enmity for granted now; they seem natural, inherent to the musical landscape. The dense polemical meanings of the term “modern music” define an area of high art where proponents and opponents have little common ground and where conflict has become institutionalized. When agreement periodically occurs—there is a popular taste for various works by Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, Henryk Gorecki, and John Adams—the agreement is quickly disclaimed by an avantgarde anxious to recategorize modern pieces in concert repertory as “merely popular.” Myself, I love much music by avant-garde composers but despair of their polemics; I therefore wish to help make possible a language, built on historical foundations, by which to understand the stalemate between the contemporary and the classical. To comprehend how the stalemate happened, we must investigate the process through which classics replaced contemporary music, first in concert programs and then in opera, and next investigate how that change spawned a separate world of new music largely isolated from public life. This cultural framework, in both its polemical and institutional aspects, was in place by around 1910. By that time, classical-music repertories dominated the great majority of the

56

peace and mind

most important concert series, from those of symphony orchestras and chamber-music groups to those of solo recitals. The public had become instinctively skeptical of anything new, and living composers had begun to build their own concert world. Composers’ anger at their limited access to key concert repertories led them to define new music as a moral cause for high art; the composers developed concerts dedicated to the performance of serious contemporary music—concerts run by themselves, by musicians, by their patrons and friends, and usually attended by few others. Musical modernism, in other words, did not create the problem. It was not that composers alienated the public by writing music beyond what most people would like or could understand. Rather, by 1910 concert life had shifted its focus so much from contemporary to classical repertory that new works now took up a problematic, often marginal place within musical life. Still, in the long term, the very rhetoric that divided classical from contemporary music has served as a means of negotiation between the two. While the two sides have deprecated one another intensely from the beginning of the twentieth century, they in the process have worked out practices by which new music has maintained at least a limited standing in the life of the average concertgoer. However much the stalemate between new and old music has become institutionalized, new musical and social pressures have brought both sides to adapt to change and devise new ways, if usually small ones, by which contemporary music can relate to the larger musical world. The language of deprecation has proved politically malleable, despite its harshness. Thus did the British Broadcasting Company fund extensive performances of avant-garde works beginning in the late 1920s, and four decades later the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States began requiring ensembles given grants to offer some new music on their programs. Whether those moves helped or hurt public appreciation of contemporary music is of course an open question.1 The epitomes of twentieth-century musical enmity are books published in the 1950s by the British critic Henry Pleasants and the Russo-American encyclopedist Nicolas Slonimsky. In their

consequences of canon

57

books, we can see how two generations of attack on and defense of contemporary music culminated in the establishment of dogmatic creeds for each side. Pleasants opened The Agony of Modern Music (1955) by declaring that “serious music is a dead art. The vein which for three hundred years offered a seemingly inexhaustible yield of beautiful music has run out. What we know as modern music is the noise made by deluded speculators picking through the slagpile” (3). Pleasants invoked the public as the source of authority for his judgment: “In former times contemporary music survived despite opposition from critics and professional musicians because the public liked it. Today it languishes despite critical and professional support because the public will have none of it. That it survives at all, or at least continues to be played, is due simply to the fact that the public no longer has anything to say about it” (8). Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers since Beethoven’s Time predated Pleasants’s book by two years, and Slonimsky’s Music since 1900, published in 1937, indeed prefigured it. Essential to Slonimsky’s dogmatic construct is the erection of a modernist countercanon, founded upon the principle that great works will eventually be recognized. The opening chapter, “Non-Acceptance of the Unfamiliar,” uses vocabulary just as blunt as Pleasants’s “slagheap,” and it blames the antimodernists’ “fossilized senses” for their failure to appreciate new music: “To listeners steeped in traditional music, modern works are meaningless, as alien languages are to a poor linguist. No wonder that music critics often borrow linguistic similes to express their recoiling horror of the modernists” (4). Slonimsky adapts the principle of canon to favor new works: “A fairly accurate time-table could be drawn for the assimilation of unfamiliar music by the public and the critics. It takes approximately twenty years to make an artistic curiosity out of a modernistic monstrosity; and another twenty to elevate it to a masterpiece” (19). Slonimsky’s credo has since become dogma for defenders of new music, as can be seen in Richard Kostelanetz’s adoring compendium of excerpts, published in 1994.2 Pleasants’s work, five decades on, seems more carefully argued, perhaps more open to negotiation, than Slonimsky’s simplistic

58

peace and mind

listing of antimodernist horrors. Pleasants was not entirely typical of the critics of new music in that he made a strong commitment to jazz and areas of popular music, arguing that public taste for the new had taken a creative path in a novel direction. Slominsky did, however, accurately predict, indeed significantly influence, the rise of a modernist countercanon. Musical Enmity: Quarrels in the 1750s and 1840s To understand the recent framework of musical enmity, we have to look back to earlier forms of conflict over new and old music, prior to the establishment of a canon in musical culture. A massive change (yet one little remarked on) took place in this regard between around 1750 and 1910. We all take the existence of a canon of music for granted; it is easy to forget that in 1800, except in Britain, relatively few works remained in performance longer than a generation, and this situation is of course the opposite of that which prevails in our own day in opera and classical-music concerts. Until the beginning of the eighteenth century, it was unusual, though by no means unknown, for a work more than a generation old to be performed publicly. Students and admirers of master composers kept their music alive for several decades, sometimes a bit longer; and names like Josquin Desprez, Giovanni Palestrina, Thomas Tallis, and William Byrd remained in memory even though few people had heard or read any of their music. Musical taste was by definition a matter for the present, with links to the various styles of the past changing on a cyclical basis. Most works were composed to celebrate current events, and an old work seemed entirely inappropriate to such occasions. Some works did remain in performance over long spans of time, chiefly in the church, but did so quietly, without being defined as components of a canon. The idea of “ancient music” arose in England and France in the early eighteenth century, but it was not until around 1850 that canonical repertories began to emerge in Europe as a whole.3 The attitude toward old and new music was in the eighteenth century not so different from the now current attitude toward

consequences of canon

59

rock music. Some readers will protest any such parallel and indeed the nature of public enthusiasm for leading musicians differs fundamentally between, say, the progressive-rock scene of our own time and the concert world of 1780. The contemporary example has a commercial purpose of large-scale profit quite unlike that of the earlier period. Still, early audiences went with the presumption that most of the programs they attended would be of new music, and indeed they were lured into the concert hall by such promises. An interesting parallel exists also in the roles of public and private musical experience. Listeners in the late eighteenth century were acquainted with older styles from their private lessons—they were taught to play the concertos of Arcangelo Corelli. Likewise, today, rock concertgoers know the music of the sixties from which the latest groups have grown, because those audiences also listen to records and CDs at home.4 Rock has yet to establish its own institutions of pedagogy based upon canonical examples, and for that reason most such musicians still learn within the classical-music tradition. Disputes between defenders of new and old music have occurred regularly at points when style has changed rapidly and fundamentally. These episodes are best seen as quarrels: that is, as brief disputes whose manners have followed patterns of literary custom that allow strong disagreements to occur without disturbing the social equilibrium. These usually have involved a congeries of interrelated musical, personal, political, and social issues; they have usually been linked to politics, in some fashion, but ultimately have served to entertain the reading and gossiping public. One finds such disputes prominently between supporters of new and old styles around 1350, 1520, 1600, 1750, and 1830. The dispute in the 1750s was the Querelle des Bouffons in Paris between supporters of Jean-Baptiste Lully, the composer to Louis XIV whose works remained unusually long on stage, and the new Italian opera buffa that had been changing musical style from top to bottom across Europe for thirty years.5 The episode did not concern the preferability of new music to old so much as it concerned aesthetic and political questions about what kind of musical experience should define the state theater. Though the Bourbon regime had prevented

60

peace and mind

Italian companies from playing in its midst, the constitutional crisis of absolutism in the 1750s forced the admission of a troupe in 1752, setting off an epochal querelle in which authors of the Encylopédie found it in their interests to support the new Italian against the old French opera. Friedrich Grimm, a member of the Encyclopedist camp, came down firmly on the side of Italian opera in Le petit prophète de Boehmischbroda: echoing what foreign diplomats were saying about the amazingly out-of-date music they heard at the Opéra, Grimm wrote: “in your obduracy you have made yourself into an opera house which has bored me for twenty-four years, and which is the laughing-stock of Europe to this day.”6 Thus did enmity in musical culture serve the needs of political conflict—the most serious political crisis, indeed, that the regime had experienced since the Opéra was established in 1661. We get a concise picture of what Parisians heard at that time in the concert hall—basically new music, with a smattering of what they called la musique ancienne—by looking at a program performed at the Concert Spirituel on September 8, 1752. The concerts were held on holy days when the theaters were closed, and this privilege was justified by offering a few sacred works. Only two works out of seven on this program were by dead composers (Madin and Delalande): Angelo Vio of Venice, Symphony with Horns Henri Madin (1698–1748), Diligam te, motet Concerto for unnamed instrument, no composer cited Aria in Italian style, no composer cited Felippe Palma, Concerto for Flute Pierre Gaviniès, Solo for Violin Abbé Mongeot, Cantata for the convalescence of the dauphin Michel Delalande (1657–1726), Te Deum.7 A program performed at the same series in 1782 shows a pattern closer to the norm in Europe as a whole—all works by living composers: F. J. Haydn (1732–1807), Symphony, première Giuseppe Sarti (1729–1802), Aria in the Italian style

consequences of canon

61

Prosper Deshayes (c. 1750–1815), Concerto for unnamed instrument François-Joseph Gossec (1734–1829), O Salutaris, motet Concerto for Oboe, première, composer not cited Chartain (1740–93), Ode sacrée, words by Jean-Baptiste Rousseau Chartain, Concerto for Violin, première Nicolo Piccini (1728–1800), Aria in Italian style Johann Sterkel (1750–1817), Symphony.8 A paradox faced music lovers during this period (call it the Enlightenment, if you will): being on the side of innovation meant bringing old works back into the repertory, whereas being on the side of tradition meant scheduling only or mostly new music at public concerts. Strange bedfellows were consequent on this paradox. The Encyclopedists, for example, who were almost always seen on the side of innovation, took the side of tradition in bringing contemporary music back as the standard of taste. The performance of Jean Baptiste Lully’s out-of-date operas was a dramatic novelty in music history, and the philosophes served as a conservative force in helping to stop it. The traditional public got its way in the end: Paris had to wait until the cult of Beethoven emerged in the 1820s for canonical repertories in public concerts. Still, in the 1780s musical commentators began to speak of Lully, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and the Frenchified Christoph Willibald Gluck as a national heritage, thereby attributing to past styles a high authority that was to become central to musical culture. By the same token and with the same irony, aristocrats and political conservatives were particularly prominent in the innovative—the progressive— movement on behalf of classical music during the 1830s and 1840s.9 By the 1840s (a second period of dispute), concert programming had changed significantly. A substantial classical repertory had developed, though it did not yet wholly dominate musical taste. The following German program is typical of the period: William Sterndale Bennett (1816–75), Overture to The Wood Nymphs (1838)

62

peace and mind

Mozart, “Al desio di chi t’adora” from Le nozze di Figaro (1789 substitute aria) Ferdinand David (1810–73), Violin Concerto, played by composer Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864), Cavatina from Robert le Diable (1831) Henri Vieuxtemps (1820–81), Lieder ohne Worte for Violin (1845) J. B. Bach, Solo for Violin Beethoven, Symphony no. 3, Eroica (1804).10 Here, in a program of the Leipzig Gewandhaus (November 12, 1846), we can see a fixity beginning to develop in the choice of repertory—a tendency, that is, to stay with certain works rather than to refresh the program with new ones. The placing of the Eroica as the only work after intermission reinforced the attribution of authority to the music of a dead composer. This practice departs drastically from the eighteenth-century convention of four or five pieces in each half. The first such departure at the Gewandhaus occurred when the Eroica was first played there in 1807 (though with a well-known recent opera scene at the very end), and the practice was continued as a way in which to honor works by composers who were now being recognized as canonical. By the 1840s, one might occasionally hear a program including a work each by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven— in effect, a canon (which also included, at that time, Carl Maria von Weber, Luigi Cherubini, Giovanni Viotti, Domenico Cimarosa, and Giovanni Paesiello, among others). Still, we need to underscore that the first half of this Gewandhaus program featured new music: an aria by Meyerbeer, the biggest name in musical life at the time; a new overture by William Sterndale Bennett, who visited Leipzig regularly; and a concerto by the twentysix-year-old Henri Vieuxtemps, soon to be recognized as a star virtuoso. Thus were contemporary and classical repertory closely linked, indeed balanced; one senses no canonical hierarchy of the sort to which we are accustomed. Vieuxtemps certainly revered the Mozart aria sung just before his piece, but he could take center stage

consequences of canon

63

after its performance with complete confidence. The integration of old and new works did, however, prove to be a transitional stage in musical taste—a stage that was to end within about fifty years. We can identify a formal negotiation between composers and orchestral concerts under way even at this early date. It became the practice to hold “trials” at which an orchestra’s directing board would invite several composers to bring performing parts of a new work they wished to have considered for inclusion in the orchestra’s program. Trials are known to have been scheduled by the Philharmonic Society of London as early as the 1820s, then by the Society of Concerts in Paris and the Philharmonic Orchestra of Vienna. It would seem that the composer, his friends or students, and members of the musical intelligentsia were invited to these sessions.11 By this practice did the rising orchestras claim a hegemonic role with regard to new music and to composers’ careers. In this context, an instructive and highly ideological dispute surrounded the Gewandhaus concert (1846) in which the Eroica was performed after intermission. The dispute began as a quarrel between two music magazines, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (NZM), edited by Robert Schumann, and the aging Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (AMZ), which the NZM arose to challenge. The AMZ, founded in 1798, had been the foremost music periodical in Germany, reaching both more and less learned readers, but by the 1830s it had lost touch with a younger generation of idealistic musicians and intellectuals. Schumann attacked the AMZ for a philistine taste governed by the growing commercialism of opera, virtuosic music, and the publishing business; he came close, in fact, to using the term “commodification.” The episode resembled the eighteenth-century quarrel in many respects, since Leipzig was the Paris of Central Europe—the leading city of the German music world. Just as the querelle des bouffons broke out during a major political crisis, so this later dispute drew much of its vitality and its ideological themes from political unrest: from a situation referred to as the Vormärz.12 While this dispute did not originate in a conflict between taste for classical and contemporary music, it ended up deepening the enmity between them significantly. The music business was at

64

peace and mind

that time expanding rapidly, due to the invention of cheaper and more colorful ways to print sheet music for amateurs. Publishers were turning out medleys of the most popular opera tunes for amateurs to perform, and these opened up a vast new market. In effect, what we call “popular music” began at this time, at least to the extent that observers such as Robert Schumann began drawing a fundamental distinction between music written for commercial and noncommercial ends. Schumann accosted virtuoso performers and opera composers for designing their music for profit rather than craft, and for thereby contributing to what we now call the commodification of music. His pithy aphorisms, later published in a book titled On Music and Musicians, attacked such musicians on moral grounds: Rossini, Bellini, and Auber, he wrote, each wanted simply to be fashionable, to be recognized as a “genius à la mode.”13 Schumann ridiculed the “variation”—the main genre by which virtuosi adapted opera tunes to the piano—in especially harsh language: “No musical form,” he wrote, “has produced more insipid results than these…one has little conception how much shameless vulgarity…. We consider ourselves and our readers far too good to be burdened with such trash.”14 Schumann accordingly defined great classical works as a higher authority by which to deprecate the aesthetic and moral standing of the music he found inferior. As he put it: “The quartets of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven! Who does not know them and who dare cast a stone at them?…after the lapse of half a century they still delight all hearts…in so long a period of time nothing comparable has been created.”15 I have argued elsewhere that a sort of “musical idealism” emerged from Schumann’s writing: a moral code, in other words, for taste in music.16 In Britain, Henry Chorley, critic for the Athanaeum, offered similar ideas—as also, in France, did François Fétis, editor of the Revue et Gazette Musicale. The quarrel between the two Leipzig magazines (NZM and AMZ) ended at the opening of the Revolution of 1848, indeed with the collapse of the AMZ in that year; but a movement grew out of the episode that gave a new direction to the composing profession. While Schumann promoted a musical idealism in defense, ultimately, of new music, the movement

consequences of canon

65

he spawned gave so central a place to canonical compositions that it worked against the interest of living composers. Franz Brendel, Schumann’s successor as editor of the NZM, made that journal an organ for supporters of Wagner who proclaimed a broader movement on behalf of progressive music. Brendel adapted the moral rhetoric of Schumann to help composers of the self-titled New German School to get their works performed. During the 1850s, orchestras such as the Gewandhaus performed more classics and fewer new works, especially works by composers identified with Wagner and his ideological colleague Franz Liszt. The enmity that Schumann had felt toward “commercial” music was shaped by Brendel in the service of progressive composers. Brendel and Liszt turned their conflict with the Gewandhaus into an institution—the Allgemeine Deutsche Musikverein, founded at Weimar in 1861 to help bring new works to performance. The organization held a national festival of new music annually and many of its chapters did the same in local communities.17 By the 1890s, it had become a kind of composers’ guild and pressure group. The enmity against musical commercialism in Germany had turned into a political and professional ideology. In France, the Société Nationale de la Musique Française, though not Wagnerian, had a similar history and worked for much the same purposes as the Allgemeine Deutsche Musikverein.18 The Dissociation of Old and New in Concert Programs, 1900–1910 By 1910, the concert repertory had become fundamentally canonical, and within it new composers had begun to negotiate a limited status for their work. The contemporary and the classical were no longer balanced: canon had come to rule. New works were still performed, a good deal more than we are used to today, but the most important concerts in the leading musical cities offered far less new music than had been the case in 1850. The main symphony orchestras around 1910 did not tend to play more than one work by a living composer on any program. The presence of that single work was, in effect, the product of negotiation with the ensembles by composers as an interest group. One element in the shift between the typical

66

peace and mind

eighteenth-century and twentieth-century concert was the reduction in the number and length of works performed. It became usual, by the first decade of the twentieth century, to offer four or five works per concert, as compared with eight in the eighteenth-century Gewandhaus, ten at the Philharmonic Society of London, and as many as thirty-five at some concerts. Short genres common in the 1840s, opera selections or virtuoso fantasies on opera melodies, had migrated from those events to pops concerts of an informal nature. Since fewer slots existed for an increasing number of composers, any work played had to be a major composition, almost by implication a candidate for canonization. By 1900, all countries in Europe made a sharp distinction between classical and popular music, and all offered events of the sort called music halls in Britain and variété in France—concerts focused upon female singers but often also including jugglers, comedians, animal acts, and orchestral performance of works that used to be included in formal concerts. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the great majority of composers wrote lighter music for performance at home or in promenade concerts; pieces by Carl Maria von Weber, Felix Mendelssohn, and even Schumann himself remained in use as late as 1914 in concerts thought to be popular rather than serious. But from around that time on, composers have had to choose between the two worlds in their careers or else to keep the music they wrote for each entirely separate. The serious musical world now frowned upon anyone writing ballads or band numbers. Those who wanted recognition in the serious musical world took Brendel’s ideology very much to heart; it offered them intellectual salvation. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a concert for both vocal and instrumental music was often called a “miscellaneous” concert—one with a repertory various enough to satisfy the contrasting tastes of different publics or of any one person. At such a concert, one might hear not only a symphony, but also an opera number, a flashy virtuoso number, and a sentimental song from a comic opera. Eliminating such numbers spurned a time-honored tradition of performing the serious and the comic together. The new principle of homogeneity (uniformity of cultural level) conveyed a

consequences of canon

67

sense of purity and, some might say, cultural pretense.19 The program offered at the Gewandhaus on February 12, 1910, is an extreme, but not unusual, example of the new practice. Only four works were performed—all pieces by dead composers of the first canonical rank: J. S. Bach, Brandenburg Concerto no. 4 in G (1713) J. Brahms, variations on a theme by Haydn (1873) Mozart, Serenade for Horns (1781 or 1782) Intermission Beethoven, Fifth Symphony (1808).20 One would never have encountered a program such as that one in the 1840s. Let us remember, however, that names unfamiliar to us now, though famous then, are often to be found in programs of the time—for example, in this Gewandhaus program of 1911: Beethoven, Third Symphony (1806) Handel, Arias from several oratorios (1730s-40s) Intermission Friedrich Gernsheim (1839–1916), Zu einem Drama, tone poem Robert Franz (1815–92), Lieder.21 Franz’s lieder were in 1911 regarded as classics; Gernsheim, little known today, was then a prominent member of the faculty at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. Similar practices were followed in England. The London Symphony Orchestra, from its founding in 1904 and quick rise to eminence, offered in its programs only one relatively new work by a living British composer; the new work was scheduled for the middle of the concert, as is the usual practice today. The program for February 14, 1910, offered one recent work, a piece for a capella chorus by Edward Elgar: Mozart, Symphony in B flat, K. 319 (1779) Bach, Sing Ye to the Lord, motet for double chorus (1727) Edward Elgar (1857–1934), Go Song of Mine, op. 57, unaccompanied chorus (1909)

68

peace and mind

Intermission Beethoven, Mass in D, op. 123 (1823).22 Numbers can help us to see how massive a change occurred in the course of a hundred years. All told, the works performed by the Gewandhaus in the season 1786–87 included 11 percent works by dead composers; in 1845–46, the proportion had risen to 39 percent; and in 1911–12, there was a steep increase to 81 percent. Likewise, during the season 1910–11, the London Symphony Orchestra performed 18 percent by living and 82 percent by dead composers. Meanwhile, there emerged what we now call the “new music” concert—an event devoted almost entirely to contemporary music that does not command a broad public. Such concerts were fundamentally different from those given around 1800, say, where almost all works were recent, and the general public attended. Concerts of new music, from around 1870 on, have usually been oriented toward narrow audiences. One could indeed argue that the audience for new music was by the end of the nineteenth century not so much a public as it was an interest group, given how high a proportion were either members of the fast-growing music profession (including students at conservatories recently established) or else patrons of the concerts. When Mozart wanted to connect with his colleagues, he did so privately, at one of the frequent gatherings of musicians that he wrote of in letters from Mannheim and Vienna. In the late nineteenth century, composers met up at public concerts, but it is doubtful that many outside their own world attended; indeed, it was well-known at the time that many, if not most, people at such events had free tickets. The music was largely comprised of songs and chamber ensembles, but the programs were quite different from those at classical recitals and chamber-music concerts. Take, for instance, this 1910 program of the Société des compositeurs de musique (forty-eighth season, third concert), held in Paris at the Salle Pleyel, a leading recital hall since the 1830s: Edouard Mignan (1884–1969), Sonata Stanley Golestan (1875–1926), Chansons populaires roumanes

consequences of canon

69

Théodore Dubois (1837–1924), Dixtuor, Double Quintet for Strings and Winds Gabrielle Dauly, Deux Mélodies Florent Schmitt (1870–1958), Trois Rhapsodies for Two Pianos.23 Not one work by a then-canonical composer was performed (and not one of the composers listed has become canonical since). Concerts put on by composers’ leagues (such as the German and French societies already mentioned) were to become the most important venue for new music in the twentieth century. Examples include the Viennese concert society of Arnold Schoenberg, the International Society for Contemporary Music begun in 1922, the League of Composers in New York, and the 1939 Evenings on the Roof in Los Angeles.24 In some cases, wealthy patrons have financed concerts where new works have been premièred. Thomas Beecham was the leading such patron around 1910, providing Frederick Delius with a remarkable number of opportunities to have his music played by Beecham’s orchestra. Delius himself was in 1896 among the first to give a concert entirely of his own compositions, and Beecham made possible a full concert of Delius’s orchestral music in 1911. More commonly, however, programs that focused on recent works also included well-known classical numbers. The Thomas Beecham Orchestral Concert at Queen’s Hall, London, on April 19, 1909, is a good example—it offered work by Britain’s best-known woman composer, Ethel Smyth: Bedrich Smetana (1824–88), Overture to The Bartered Bride Ethel Smyth (1858–1944), Ballad and Romance “Amour, amour!” from the opera The Wreckers Arnold Bax (1883–1953), Into the Twilight, tone poem Mozart, Concerto for Four Violins Brahms (1833–97), Lieder Smyth, Prelude to Act II of The Wreckers Intermission Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908), Antar Symphony.25

70

peace and mind

Polemics on Modern Music after 1900 The controversy over new music between roughly 1900 and 1910 put contemporary works in a situation entirely distinct from that of new music in the earlier pair of quarrels we have discussed. The new quarrel grew out of massive changes in European cities and elites, changes that had a profound impact upon culture. Major cities had grown too large and diversified for quarrels of the sort found in the eighteenth century to take place: earlier disputes had involved a small, self-conscious group, often called the beau monde or, simply, world. The proponents and detractors of modern music around 1910 spoke to a variety of separate cultural worlds rather than to a community. Composers fought for their cause as an interest group; critics antagonistic to them responded with the pretension of speaking for an estranged public. It is vital to recognize that, while new works had often been attacked in their own time, now the idea of what a new work constituted became entirely different from what it had been in 1800. Any new work was treated, on the one hand, with reference to hallowed canonical standards and, on the other hand, was defended by the composing profession as a moral good to which the public had to pay allegiance. Neither proposition had existed before. Listeners’ expectations had changed fundamentally. In the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century, the period when concert programs balanced and blended new and old works, listeners did not assume that the new music they heard was by definition great or even a candidate for greatness. For his reputation to spread, a composer had only to be considered a master musician by his colleagues. But by the 1890s, music critics had become impatient to find composers worthy of comparison with the then-ultimate figure of the canon, Beethoven. In Britain, H. Heathcote Statham argued that neither Mendelssohn nor Schubert could be considered as of this status, and George Bernard Shaw’s musical canon consisted of just a few genres of works by a very few composers.26 Positivism was a strong influence upon writers like Statham and Shaw, perhaps via Auguste Comte’s Calendar of Great Men, which included a scant thirteen musicians and was widely translated. (Comte’s Calendar

consequences of canon

71

appeared in its final form, prepared by Frederick Harrison, in 1892.)27 From this point forward, critics commenced to up the ante on what they expected from composers before considering them great. Beyond this impatience with less-than-supreme greatness, a general suspicion of new music emerged after 1900 that had not appeared in concert reviews or public discussion even thirty years before. From the start of formal concert criticism at the end of the eighteenth century, reviewers were often harsh about new works, as Slonimsky shows in detail, but they did not exhibit a distrust of new music per se. By 1910, a recurrent theme of concert reviews and reports on public taste was that the new was to be regarded as a burden to the critic or listener. It did not matter whether the new music in question was stylistically traditional or avant-garde; its being simply “unfamiliar”—Slonimsky’s apt adjective—set people against it. Proponents of contemporary music fought this tendency by defining its role in moral terms. In 1820, scheduling new works was taken for granted, though some classics were long-term and beginning to seem permanent in the repertory. By 1900, performing new pieces became, to an important subculture, a musical virtue, a step beyond the normal etiquette—and virtuous behavior of this kind brought (as it still brings) the blessings of those who approved. The narrowness of the emergent canon was, for such musicians and critics, unethical. “What is going to happen to young composers?” became the key moral question of the new-music subculture. Here, for example, is an extract from the leading article in a 1910 issue of the Musikalisches Wochenblatt, the descendant of Schumann’s magazine: Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, R. Strauss. Anything else is regarded as a nuisance. It is so difficult to get anything new and good in front of the public. After all, look how many singers do nothing but trudge through Schubert’s songs piece by piece. And so what is going to happen to young composers? Singers say they’ve done all they need to do in that department by offering pieces by Wolf and Strauss.28

72

peace and mind

If the polemical terms used by proponents of new music were ethical, those used by its opponents were apocalyptic. The former held that performing new music was virtuous; the latter, that doing so was suicidal. For a closer look at the enmity between classical and contemporary music, it is best to begin with Britain because its composers at the turn of the century—Charles Villiers Stanford and Hubert Parry, most prominently—cannot be regarded as modernist, and thus we can rule out a reaction against musical radicalism as a cause of the dislike in Britain of new music. Of course, by long tradition composers had limited prestige in Britain; a great deal of British music, however, was heard in both homes and public concerts—just not in the most prestigious genres (opera, symphony, concerto). In other contexts, there was a rich world of British music.29 Stanford and Parry aimed their sights at the higher genres, and the British public did not respond warmly to the change. The movement that Stanford and Parry stimulated and that was being called a “renaissance” by around 1890, became a major force in British musical life at that time, but the challenge to public expectations resulted in a nervous relationship between composers and concertgoers. A relatively small but highly articulate public developed that favored the new composers, but the general public remained alienated. New works were performed regularly, beginning in the early eighteenth century, at the annual music festivals held throughout Britain. Concertgoers treated these three- or four-day events in the cathedral towns as holidays, and enjoyed the several important premières that occurred alongside the offerings of standard works. By around 1910, however, the number of new works performed was declining, and critics began to observe that the public regarded even these as a burden. Fewer people attended the festivals, causing directors to look for more consistently popular repertory. Concerning the Three Choirs Festival (Gloucester, 1910), one reviewer wrote: “The fatal mistake made by the committee was in the choice of new works for performance….All the festivals that I have named are on the down grade: they do not attract the public in sufficiently large numbers. It is noticeable, however, that

consequences of canon

73

The Messiah, The Hymn of Praise, and Elijah are still great ‘draws’, proving that the public likes that with which it is familiar.”30 The word “fatal” in this review is typical of the new diction of disparagement. The disparaging rhetoric became typical, indeed, of both sides. A reviewer named Herbert Antcliffe assessed the concert public of 1910 in these condescending terms: “Ask ten people who go to a festival, and nine will evade it (the question)—because they mean ‘amusement or recreation only.’” This distinction between amusement and serious listening had begun to arise in the writing of Robert Schumann and (in England) the reviews of Henry Chorley of the Athenaeum and J. W. Davison of The Times; now it became basic to musical culture as a whole. A few years before, Antcliffe observed, the concert committee at Sheffield had “expressed the view that they did not exist to  .  .  . afford openings for untried compositions by budding composers.” On the other hand, Antcliffe agreed with the festival organizers that “few, if any, masterpieces have resulted” from such premières: “The majority of commissioned works pass into the oblivion that their respectability demands and do little good to the world in general or either to their composers or their publishers.”31 These views were widespread. In a piece entitled “Weird Opinions by a First and a Second Cathedral Organist,” the reader is bluntly informed that “serious modern composers and their works never appeal to our people; and their music is always so difficult and costs much more money.”32 Terms like “amusement” and “recreation” had not before been applied to (for example) the sentimental songs that were mixed with overtures by Mozart and songs by Mendelssohn in music halls and ballad concerts. By the 1880s, it was common to refer to such concerts as “popular”; but in 1910 the term “popular music” had come to mean “entertainment,” and “classical music” was the term used to imply serious listening. At a “popular concert in the provinces,” a journalist wrote in 1913: The singers are often quite well known to the audience and can be relied upon to sing something the audience knows; or at any rate, something where the sentiment is so obvious

74

peace and mind

and the music so “tuny” that the listeners know what is coming… . The concert is for recreation, not for brain work. So the audience will not studiously listen to new works and try to find the beauties in them: hence the new things do not have a chance of becoming well known, although they might easily be better than those which have been hackneyed on street pianos for twenty years, but which are still accepted at “popular” concerts.33 It was as if the clock of musical time had stopped. The repertory that was seen to open with Johann Sebastian Bach was now seen to end with Wagner, and a new one had begun with Edward Elgar and Antonin Dvorak. Listeners seemed fundamentally uneasy about what the standards should be for accepting new works as canonical. Worries grew that some works were accepted too quickly and superficially. The well-known critic John Runciman asked, after hearing Elgar’s Cockaigne overture, “Is Elgar still a classic, I wonder, or has he outlived the burst of cheap immediate fame that followed [The Dream of] Gerontius? He was hailed as a classic before the last chord of that semi-failure had been struck for the first time; he was called a classic just as Gounod and Dvorak—not to mention Mascagni, Leoncavallo and Puccini—had been called classics.” Runciman argued that a classic had once meant a composer whose work had stood the test of time. But around the period when Gounod’s operas arrived in England, “musical writers got tired of such slow methods.” They began to “immortalize composers and new works after a single hearing, with results that soon became amusing to the idle looker on and embarrassing (if not, as in Dvorak’s case, positively disastrous) to the composer.”34 Clearly, famous new composers on the continent garnered no more interest in Britain than did new British composers. Ignaz Paderewski, for example, came out of a long tradition in which a performer—in his case, a great pianist—played his own compositions along with those of contemporaries (and, more recently, with those of canonical musicians). Paderewski’s works were treated with a polite lack of interest around 1910. After the première of a new Paderewski

consequences of canon

75

symphony, a reviewer for the Star wrote that he thought “it would be of interest to learn how many people came to hear the concerto and how many the symphony?—a most unpleasant inquiry.” The reviewer found the new work dull, too close to the styles of Wagner and Strauss, and burdened with weird new instruments such as the “sarrusophone” and the “thunder machine.” Besides, he concluded, “why any modern composer should write an instrumental work an hour long is quite beyond the present writer.”35 As for German composers, the country that had given birth to the greatest classics was thought to lack inspiring new talent. One British critic suggested that “Germany is living on its past: a great and glorious past it is true, but one that from the very nature of things cannot prolong itself far into the future.  .  .  . Nor are the other great European schools of music in much better case. A kind of dry rot in matters musical seems to be spreading all over the continent; a lethargy succeeding the overexertion and the strenuous energy of the past.”36 The situation of new music was not all that different in Germanspeaking countries. True, a nationalistic movement in German music had existed since the turn of the nineteenth century, while the equivalent had only just started in Britain after two centuries in which British music was largely neglected in the prestigious concert programs. But while the Austrians and Germans were conceded to possess the ultimate national canon, that perception only meant that a new German-speaking composer would be judged by tougher standards. The Austro-German canon closed with the deaths of Wagner in 1883 and Brahms in 1897, and even then the jury was still out on the reputation of Brahms’s abstract symphonic style. What could a German composer do to enter a canon with Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven? New German composers did have a more sympathetic press than the British. As we have seen, the Wagnerian movement had begun an intense ideological campaign for the cause of progressive composers in the 1860s, a campaign that developed into a kind of trade lobby. More critics in the major Germanlanguage periodicals favored performance of a large number of contemporary pieces than British critics did. Yet new music faced an enmity in Germany from the public—and that public faced the scorn

76

peace and mind

of new-music supporters—just as much as in Britain. Few composers other than Strauss and Johann Reger had become respected or even fashionable in the eyes of the general public, and composers had begun wondering where on earth they stood professionally. The institutionalization of musical enmity was in fact more pronounced in Germany than in Britain. Even so formidable a musical figure as Richard Strauss had a hard time making room for new music when he conducted. In 1909, one of the two main German music magazines applauded Strauss for performing somewhat more new music as conductor of the Berlin Court Orchestra than had his predecessor. Yet the magazine warned him to exercise caution: “It is dangerous to break with tradition suddenly, since the public sticks to its ways.”37 Following some advice or instinct of the kind, Strauss continued the practice of giving all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies every season, and even while including Mahler’s Fourth, he selected almost nothing by composers under age fifty. The reviewer mentioned that, among all of Berlin’s orchestras, only a single piece by Claude Debussy had been performed in the winter of 1909. The rise of musical classics established a fearsome hierarchy and a dreaded new concept: the “minor composer.” In the late eighteenth century, a lesser musician was ignored but not derided. A choice example of the ridicule to which a minor composer might be subject appeared in 1914 in a Leipziger Volkszeitung review; its victim was a piece played by the Munich New String Quartet. “The four gentlemen attended us with an entirely modern program,” the critic took his aim: “So little can one follow this composer [Jan Ingehoven], so little can be grasped about what is going on the piece, that it’s clear he fritters away what musical talent he does possess by going too far in the contemporary direction. He gives us an unattractive mirror image of our hideously nervous age, rather than seeking out new artistic ideals that can be comprehended.”38 A commentator in the Deutsche Sängerbundeszeitung put the same point in more sweeping terms. Writing for a readership of amateur choral societies, he felt no compunctions about denouncing new music per se: “So you want even more modern music? Haven’t we had enough already? Isn’t it clear that as soon as a conductor brings

consequences of canon

77

on a new piece, the hall empties out immediately, and that is the best way to scare people off?”39 Felix Weingartner, the composer and conductor, transmitted a subtler and less conscious version of this message in 1913. He related that, fifteen years earlier, he had been introduced to a woman over ninety years old in Brussels, a woman who was said to have known Beethoven and sung under him in the première of the Ninth Symphony. After the woman finished reminiscing about the great icon, her daughter closed the conversation: “Modern music does nothing for her—but when the Classics begin . . . she becomes young again.”40 Weingartner did not question the daughter’s assertion. It might, though, have been in his interest to observe, as a serious but unappreciated composer himself, that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was not a classic at the time when his elderly interlocutor sang in its première. Weingarten and the woman’s daughter took it for granted that an old person would dislike contemporary works—a distaste that would have been unusual in Beethoven’s lifetime—and that new music had always been unpopular in Germany. It is important, at this juncture, to remind ourselves that neither Igor Stravinsky nor Arnold Schoenberg had come to the fore of European musical life by 1910. Martin Thrun, the historian of the German new-music movement, proposed Schoenberg’s first tour in 1911 as the moment at which an avant-garde began to form.41 The controversies we are discussing were motivated by the kinds of novelty heard in the operas of Strauss and the orchestral scores of Debussy, music that we may find tame in retrospect but that contemporaneous taste found unassimilable to the existing repertory. The far harsher and more categorical rejection of Schoenberg grew out of a suspicion of new music already established firmly by 1910. And yet, a good deal more new music was performed in 1910 than is performed typically today: elements of tradition remained in early modernist music by which composers such as Stravinsky could claim the public’s attention. In 1910, a commentator returned from a Promenade Concert in London, noting,

78

peace and mind

Crowds listen with delight to the music of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven who would at best only pay formal respect to the works of Milton and even Shakespeare or to the pictures of Titian and Rembrandt or to the sculpture of Michelangelo. Further these crowds are interested in the most modern music as they are not interested in the most modern literature and art. Composers like Strauss and Debussy are familiar to a public that has scarcely heard the names of their chief contemporaries among writers and painters.”42 As this observation suggests, thanks to skillful institutional and ideological negotiation, enmity between new and old music did not keep audiences from hearing works by the two leading composers of the decade, composers then only in their forties. But the statement proved only half true in the long run. As early as the 1920s, abstract painting and sculpture went far beyond music in achieving a place in museums and other public venues. By the 1950s, members of the bourgeoisie began to flood into exhibits of modern art, far more than went or now go to new-music concerts—and the public came to tolerate reprints of Jackson Pollack even in dentists’ offices. Not only are museums of modern art places of general resort as few newmusic concerts tend to be, but also art galleries as a whole balance older and newer exhibits much more closely than orchestras or most chamber groups. While disputes do break out over abstract sculpture in public places, or sexual content in exhibitions, those disputes may do as much to rally support to the cause of modern art as to harm it. Modern poetry, too, eventually acquired a broadly based public, stimulating a relatively modest amount of criticism of experimental styles. One could argue that people have enjoyed attacking modern music and that the rhetoric of enmity has thus enlivened musical life. For myself, I must admit that I yearn for conditions like those of the middle period of this history—of the epoch between the early and late decades of the nineteenth century, when new and old music mingled in a balanced and creative way. The line between canonical and recent music was extremely fine—audiences enjoyed Handel,

consequences of canon

79

Mozart, Schumann, Gounod, Wagner, and Brahms on a virtually equal plane—and every commentator fought battles on both sides of the line. It may be that musical culture simply could not support such a framework of taste for very long. Canon had come relatively late to music, awkwardly close to the time when massification transformed all the arts to some degree. Musical culture ended up with a much more severe alienation between the canonical and creative areas of high art than was the case in painting or sculpture. The pictorial arts were not as radically changed by massification as music was, and indeed visual art and architecture have experienced a much more balanced, temperate interaction between canon and creativity since the sixteenth century. History dealt music a tough set of cards to play, involving it in unusually dynamic and emotion-bending movements we call “classical” and “popular” taste that could be made to work together only by institutionalizing the enmity between them.

80

peace and mind

Notes 1. Jennifer R. Doctor, The BBC and Ultra-Modern Music, 1922–36: Shaping a Nation’s Tastes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 2. Richard Kostelanetz, ed., Nicolas Slonimsky: The First Hundred Years (New York: Schirmer, 1994). 3. William Weber, The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual and Ideology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Weber, “The History of Musical Canons,” in Rethinking Music, ed. Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 336–55; Weber, “From Miscellany to Homogeneity in Concert Programming,” Poetics 29 (2001): 125–34; and Weber, “La Musique Ancienne in the Waning of the Ancien Regime,” Journal of Modern History 56 (1984): 58–88. The original piece on this subject was: Joseph Kerman, “A Few Canonic Variations,” Critical Inquiry 10 (1983): 107–26. 4. See Antoine Hennion, Sophie Maisonneuve, and Emilie Gomart, Figures de l’amateur: Formes, objets, pratiques de l’amour de la musique aujourd’hui (Paris: Documentation Française, 2000). 5. Weber, “La Musique Ancienne,” 58–61, and Denise Launay, ed., La querelle des bouffons: Texte des pamphlets, 3 vols. (Geneva: Minkoff Reprint, 1973). 6. Launay, La querelle des bouffons,1:168. See also Louisette Eugénie Reichenburg, Contribution à l’histoire de la “querelle des bouffons”: Guerre de brochures suscitées par le “Petit prophète” de Grimm et par la “Lettre sur la musique française” de Rousseau (New York: AMS, 1988). 7. Pierre Constant, Histoire du concert spirituel: 1725–1790 (Paris: Societé française de musicologie, 1975), 210. At the end of the concert, several motets were also sung, some of which might have been from the earlier period. 8. Constant, Histoire du concert spirituel, 232. 9. Jane F. Fulcher, French Cultural Politics and Music–From the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Jann Pasler, “Countess Greffulhe, the ‘Queen of Music,’

consequences of canon

81

and Concerts as a Form of Diplomacy” (paper presented at the conference on “The Musician as Entrepreneur and Opportunist,” William Andrews Clark Library, University of California, Los Angeles, June 2, 2001). 10. Collection of Gewandhaus Programs, Stadtgeschichtliches Museum, Leipzig. 11. The “trials” are cited in the Minutes of Directors’ Meetings, Papers of the Royal Philharmonic Society, on permanent loan to the British Library (see, for example, January 20, 1815; December 28, 1817; January 19, 1819; January 20, 1837; January 2, 1840); “Procèsverbaux du comité,” Société des Concerts du Conservatoire de Paris, Fonds Conservatoire, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; and Minutes of Directing Committee, Papers of the Vienna Philharmonic, Archive of the Philharmonic, Vienna. 12. Much of Schumann’s style of writing was seemingly influenced by the main early journal critical of the Leipzig and Saxon regimes, Unser Planet: Blaetter für Unterhaltung, Zeitgeschichte, Literatur, Kunst und Theater. Unterhaltungsblatt (Leipzig, 1833–34). 13. Robert Schumann, On Music and Musicians, trans. Paul Rosenfeld, ed. Konrad Wolff (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 70–71. 14. Schumann, On Music and Musicians, 66. 15. Schumann, On Music and Musicians, 68. 16. Weber, “Wagner, Wagnerism, and Musical Idealism,” in Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, ed. David C. Large and William Weber (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 91–145. 17. James Deaville is doing important research on the history of the organization and its concerts. See Deaville, “Programming in the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein: The Life (and Death) of a New-Music Performance Organization” (paper presented at American Musicological Society Annual Meeting, Lexington, KY, November 1999). 18. Michael C. Strasser, “Ars Gallica the Société Nationale de Musique and its Role in French Musical Life, 1871–1891” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1998). 19. Weber, “From Miscellany to Homogeneity,” 125–34.

82

peace and mind

20. Collection of Gewandhaus Programs, Stadtgeschichtliches Museum, Leipzig. 21. Collection of Gewandhaus Programs, Stadtgeschichtliches Museum, Leipzig. 22. Department of Portraits, Royal College of Music, London. 23. Program Collection, Bibliothèque de l’Opéra, Paris. 24. See Weber, “Wagner, Wagnerism and Musical Idealism,” 91–145. 25. Included in the programs of Concerts of Thomas Beecham: 1909– 45, British Library J.X. 0431/534. 26. Henry Heathcote Statham, My Thoughts on Music and Musicians (London: Chapman and Hill, 1892); Jeffrey Hay, “Wagner, Schopenhauer, and Shaw” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 1994). 27. Frederic Harrison, The New Calendar of Great Men: Biographies of the 558 Worthies of All Ages and Nations in the Positivist Calendar of Auguste Comte (London: Macmillan, 1892). Comte included thirteen musicians, including Antonio Sacchini (1734–86), excerpts from whose operas reappeared periodically through the 1840s, but not Johann Sebastian Bach. 28. “Musikalische Chronik: Leipzig,” Musikalisches Wochenblatt (September 29, 1910): 1. 29. See the massive collection of concert programs in the Department of Portraits in the Royal College of Music, London. 30. Gerald Cumberland, “Musical Problems: IV Musical Festivals,” Musical Opinion and Music Trade Review, no. 398 (November 1, 1910): 90–91. See also Robert Demaine, “Individual and Institution in the Musical Life of Leeds, 1900–1914” (Ph.D. diss., University of York, 1999). 31. Herbert Antcliffe, “Musical Festivals and Modern Works,” Musical Opinion and Music Trade Review, no. 391 (April 1, 1910): 483. 32. “Weird Opinions: First and Second Cathedral Organist,” Musical Opinion and Music Trade Review, no. 396 (September 1, 1910): 842. 33. “Songs, Singers and Audiences,” Musical Opinion and Music Trade Review, no. 392 (May 1, 1910): 551. 34. John F. Runciman, “National Composers at Queen’s Hall,”

consequences of canon

83

Musical Opinion and Music Trade Review, no. 389 (February 1, 1910): 337. This article was originally published in the Saturday Review. 35. Walter Bernhard, “Out and About: Symphony of Paderewski,” Musical Opinion and Music Trade Review, no. 387 (December 1, 1909): 185. 36. C. Elvey Cope, “The Future of Music, and the Final Aim of Art,” Musical Opinion and Music Trade Review, no. 393 (June 1, 1910): 621. 37. August Spanuth, “Symphoniekonzert-Programme,” Signale für die Musikalische Welt 67 (April 28, 1909): 617. 38. “Musik,” Leipziger Volkszeitung (February 3, 1914). 39. Richard Oehmichen, “Mehr moderne Musik fürs moderne tägliche Leben,” Deutsche Sängerbundeszeitung 53 (June 7, 1913): 374. 40. Felix Weingartner, “Eine Begegnung mit einer Zeitgenossin Beethovens” Deutsche Musikdirektoren-Zeitung, Amtliches verbandsorgan des Deutschen Musikdirektoren-verbandes, Sitz in Leipzig (March 26, 1913): 100–101. 41. Martin Thrun, Neue Musik im deutschen Musikleben bis 1933 (Bonn: Orpheus-Verlag, 1995). 42. “Notes on News,” Musical Opinion and Music Trade Review, no. 398 (November 1, 1910): 100.

84

peace and mind

“ETHNIC CONFLICT” Three Alternative Terms Clifford Geertz

The anthropological essay designed for an extra-anthropological audience is a difficult genre. Sometimes, it simply relates more than anyone wants to know and would never think to ask about some distant place or other, some distant people or other. Sometimes, it consists of a string of supposedly colorful anecdotes involving various sorts of exotica, and casting the writer in a romantic light. Sometimes, most profitless of all, it is a heartfelt, more or less uncircumstantial, plea for increased tolerance, understanding, and respect for difference—a standard sermon, complacently given and complacently received. But there are subjects of general public concern to which anthropological knowledge and anthropological ways of thinking have seemed, over the years, to be of particular relevance. Race and racism is one, at least since Franz Boas sorted out the cultural from the biological dimensions of the question. The Third World—insofar as one wants still to call it that, now that the Second has disappeared and the Third has differentiated into Koreas, Kuwaits, Myanmars, and Zaires—is another. And the formation and maintenance of collective self-images (the inclusions and exclusions of the social “we”) is a third. These are matters that engage attention, and I want to treat an intensely current phenomenon that touches, in oblique and complex ways, on all three of them: “ethnic conflict.” The immediate occasion of the intense general interest in such conflict is, of course, the explosions of violence and of the promise of violence around issues of collective identity and its claims—to recognition, to autonomy, and to various sorts of dominance and material advantage—that have arisen since World War II and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. There seems to be hardly anywhere anymore that reminds one of the Enlightenment idea of a universal republic populated with generalized citizens.

86

peace and mind

I cannot, of course, promise much in the way of explanation, and even less of remedy. Neither my field, nor any other, has developed a body of data and theory remotely adequate for size-up-and-solve rational control of such matters, settled science capable of giving exact direction to determinate policy; and I, at least, rather doubt that any field ever will. What anthropology can do, perhaps, is provide a more useful way of discussing “ethnic conflict,” a way of talking about it that is both less obscuring of what is going on (in this instance or that) and less given to the sort of distortion the deep emotionality of these issues seems inevitably to produce. What I propose to do, much too briefly to be genuinely persuasive, is suggest ways of looking at “ethnic conflict” (again in scare quotes) that might improve our capacity to comprehend it and, comprehending it, to react to it in ways marginally less likely to make it worse. I The vocabulary available for talking about the sort of tension we see now between religiously differentiated Indians or South Slavs, linguistically differentiated Canadians or Belgians, genealogically differentiated Somalis or Afghans, racially differentiated Malaysians or Fijians, and culturally differentiated Algerians or Guatemalans, has a long history stretching back through the French Revolution and the Renaissance to the Middle Ages and the ancient world. But the modern form of that vocabulary, the form in which we today employ it, was mainly constructed during the period of so-called liberal nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe and the United States—Cavour, Pilsudski, Masaryk, Parnell, Bismarck (though here the “liberal” needs modification), Herzen, and Woodrow Wilson are among its makers. “Nation,” “nationality,” and “nation-state,” “self-determination,” “minorities,” “irredentism,” and—the American contribution, growing out of its massive immigration—”ethnicity” have provided and continue to provide the terms in which conflicts centering around issues of collective personality (who is what and why it matters) are discussed. When so much has changed between, say, the Risorgimento and the Iraq War

“ethnic conflict”

87

without the language by which that is described changing too, it is worth wondering whether something is amiss. What, to my mind, is amiss is that all of these terms are global: too sweeping, and too insensitive to local realities to capture the enormous heterogeneity of instances I have just recited or the extraordinary variety of circumstances within which those instances have emerged. These terms operate at the world-history, macrosociological level, a level with which few anthropologists (as opposed to economists and political scientists) are comfortable. As such, terms like “nation” and “nationality” make the present look too much like the past, reducing conflicts centered on collective identity to atavism, an eternal return of a permanent disposition rooted somewhere in an equally unchanging human nature, predisposed to hate what is different. Such terms blur the deep specificity of particular cases, pressing them into a unitary process usually referred to (in a hand-waving sort of way) as “nation-building.” Even when, in desperation, a greater precision of reference and meaning is attempted—adjectivally—so that “ethnic nationalism” is discriminated from “civic nationalism,” “official nationalism” from “popular,” “collectivistic nationalism” from “individualistic,” or even “hungry nationalism” from “sated” (these are all real instances from recent discussions), one still feels that one is not coming to grips with etched-in selves. II My own awareness of the awkwardness of our inherited language for discussing the relationships between the passions of collective identity and those of political assertion arose in connection with my own work, concrete and long-term, in the newly independent states of Indonesia (decolonized in 1950, after two hundred and fifty years of Dutch imperium) and Morocco (decolonized after fifty years of French, in 1956). I simply could not find—amid the rush of rhetoric about autonomy, selfhood, pride, and collective destiny, virtually all of it borrowed from l’entre deux guerres Europe—anything that looked like a nation-state, for which, as a matter of fact, there is no

88

peace and mind

accepted expression in either Indonesian or Maghrebian Arabic. There are words for “country,” for “people,” for “homeland,” and for “state,” but there is no word, or even any ready circumlocution, that collapses these into the diffuse unity of personhood and politics that the vocabulary of European nationalism does. I do not want to make much of these “there is a word, there isn’t a word” matters; for one can contrive to say virtually anything in virtually any language, and it is not vocabulary that drives the world. The point is simply that as one comes close up to the realities of life in such countries as these (and, in my view, most others, including those that imagine themselves compact nations—China, say, or Iran, or Italy), the relations between the sorts of loyalty that flow from consciousness of kind and the sorts that flow from common inclusion in a political entity seem, for all the forces working feverishly to identify them, surprisingly distinct. The “ties of belonging” simply do not run in a single direction, nor do they gather, except sporadically, into a uniform struggle toward an agreed-upon end. As one disconsolate observer of the Bosnian situation remarked, you have almost to go at the thing valley by valley, politician by politician. I shall come back to my own cases in point, but before doing so I want to develop some alternative conceptions, alternative again to monodic nationalism, that might make the prospect of dealing, both intellectually and practically, with so much particularism seem less hopeless. These are the alternative terms promised by my subtitle: “primordial loyalties,” “standing entities,” “the politics of identity.” They will not dissolve particularity; but, simply by refusing to dissolve it, indeed by underlining it, they may render it more susceptible to the established strategy of anthropological study, comparative analysis: seeing one thing in the light of another and the other in the light of the one. III First, “primordial loyalties.” This term and concept has, in fact, been around for a while, if rather at the margins of scholarly discussion. I myself used it thirty years ago in an early attempt to get a handle

“ethnic conflict”

89

on some of the less pragmatical, more expressivist dimensions of new state politics. (Those were the simpler days when Ceylonese Tamils, not yet Sri Lankans, were only refusing to use license plates with Sinhala characters on them, and pre-Black September Lebanon, still a “nice piece of confessional mosaic” and wanting to stay that way, was adroitly avoiding a national census.) And I was, in turn, dependent on an earlier, and rather neglected, theoretical paper by Edward Shils in which he distinguished “primordial,” “personal,” “sacred,” and “civil” ties as the elemental bonds of social life. But the idea of primordial loyalty has been quite often misunderstood by social scientists aversive to anything that suggests the rooting of human behavior in something other than individual preference, rational calculation, and utilitarian payoff. Designed to expose the artifactual, or as we would say now “constructed” (and, indeed, often quite recently constructed), nature of social identities, and to disaggregate them into the disparate components out of which they are built, the idea of primordial loyalty was often seen to be doing just the opposite—reifying them, archaizing them, and removing them to the realm of the darkly irrational. In any case, by primordial loyalties is meant (by me, anyway) an attachment that stems from the subject’s, not the observer’s, sense of the “givens” of social existence—speaking a particular language, following a particular religion, being born into a particular family, emerging out of a particular history, living in a particular place: the basic facts (again, viewed from the actor’s perspective) of blood, speech, custom, faith, residence, history, physical appearance, and so on. Such attachments vary in the strength of their hold from society to society, situation to situation, person to person, and time to time; and their mixture comes out not quite the same from case to case. But when these ties hold, as they do to some degree, with some intensity, and in some combination, for everyone at some time or another, they are seen to have an ineffable, even overpowering coerciveness in and of themselves, an unaccountable import. Primordial loyalties, to those for whom they are primordial, seem to arise from an affinity (which is of course at the same time a disaffinity from selected others) rather than from the occasions and accidents of social intercourse—

90

peace and mind

personal affection, practical necessity, common interest, moral agreement, or incurred obligation. Like Mount Everest, and as massively, they present themselves as there. The advantage of the concept of primordial ties over the various derivatives of nation/nationality/nation-state discourse is that the former not only permits, it virtually requires, the disaggregation and discrimination, down to whatever detail is useful, of the factors making up the who’s-in, who’s-out politics of identity in one place and period as opposed to the next. Situations like that of the Ukraine, where (at present) language unites and religion divides, Algeria where religion unites and culture divides, China where race unites and region divides, or Switzerland where history unites and language divides, can be dealt with more precisely within such a frame. So also can the wild cross-cuttings of religion, language, and custom harassing India; language, kinship, and region threatening Nigeria; or race, religion, and culture haunting Malaysia. (So also, translocal identities like “Arab,” “Slav,” “Kurd,” and “Tamil,” which run over political borders, or discontinuous ones like “Black,” “Hispanic,” “Muslim,” and “Turk,” which are distributed over multiple locales.) Pluralizing countries like the United States, homogenizing ones like Singapore, differentiating ones like Canada, separated ones like Czechoslovakia, disintegrating ones like Zaire, hybridizing ones like Mexico, or consolidated ones like Germany are more readily describable, less awkwardly contrasted. There is another advantage to the separative primordialties conception over the agglomerative nationalities idea—the former protects against the most common reductive move in the discussion of identity struggles: their radical biologization. This move is particularly prominent in the United States because of the centrality of the black-white division in our history of bondage and discrimination. This unhappy history has led not only to a radically dichotomous notion of race—something neither Brazil nor Morocco, Thailand nor Tanzania, has—but also to the modeling of all other sorts of identity contrasts upon it: the invention of a “blood and bone”-based notion of “ethnicity” that collapses an enormous range of group differences into a diffuse and totalizing biological idiom.

“ethnic conflict”

91

When one looks elsewhere, strongly biologized contrasts— though hardly absent from the discourse on difference (in Suriname, for example, or Fiji, to say nothing of, just yesterday, the German variety of fascism)—are not central, and often enough they are nonexistent. Whatever sets off “Arabs” from “Berbers” in Algeria, “Javanese” from “Achenese” in Indonesia, “Castilians” from “Catalans” in Spain, “Burmese” from “Karens” in Myanmar, or even “Czechs” from “Slovaks,” “Florentines” from “Sicilians,” “Visayans” from “Moros,” it is not—it is not normally locally described as being— biological. The projection to the world of culture-bound notions of “ethnicity,” “ethnic group,” and “ethnic conflict,” notions that do not always work even in New York (are Lubavitchers an ethnic group?), has been not altogether fortunate. IV My second proposed addition to the received vocabulary for discussion of the politics of identity, namely, “standing entities,” has not been around for long: it has not, so far as I know, been around at all. I borrow it from an imaginative Saudi envoy to Great Britain, who was reported in the New York Times as saying that Western countries ought to commit themselves in his part of the world to preserving “standing entities”—the Saudi monarchy, say, or the Jordanian, neither with much claim to historical depth or popular ratification—in the face of the forces directed against them, within and without, by impassioned sectarians. Like many of the objects it refers to, the term “standing entities” may prove not to have a long half-life. I advance the term less in hope of its catching on (it is perhaps too candid: who would die for “a standing entity”?) than with the intention to point up the same difficulties in the “state” part of the “nation-state” idea that I have pointed up for the “nation” part: agglomeration, homogenization, and essentialization—the turning of a human construction into a natural fact. For all of us these days, a few people in highland New Guinea or the Amazon forest possibly excepted, possibly not, the world

92

peace and mind

divides into countries conceived to be states. Aside from the poles and the oceans, a few islands in the Pacific, Caribbean, and south Atlantic, the Vatican, Gibraltar, for the moment the West Bank, there is virtually no spot on the globe not included in a bounded, continuous stretch of space called the Republic of this, the Peoples Republic of that, the Union, Kingdom, Emirate, Confederation, State, or Principality of something or other. These stretches are disjunct (no spot can belong to two), categorical (a spot either belongs or it does not), exhaustive (no spot goes un-belonged), and (now that Pakistan and Bangladesh are two) uninterrupted. Whatever the disputes, primordial or other, that take place within its trim definings, we have by now an absolute map. Absolute, not in the sense that it never changes—Rand McNally is kept busy these days—but in the sense that, however it changes, it is made up of “countries” populated by “peoples” and identified as “states,” indeed as “nation-states.” It was not always thus, and for much of the world it has become so only recently. The scattered empires, culture regions, commercial leagues, city-states, condominiums, dependencies, protectorates, free ports, unexplored territories, unbordered dynasties, mandates, and semisovereign colonies that dot any historical atlas (Transylvania, East India, Turkestan, The Congo, Tangiers) are but yesterday disappeared, and the politic British archaeologist who titled a book on Indus antiquities Five Thousand Years of Pakistan was looking not backwards but sideways. One cannot, to return for a moment to my own cases, write a history of “Morocco” or “Indonesia” that goes back much beyond the 1930s, not because the places did not exist before then, or the names either, or even because Morocco and Indonesia were not independent, but because they were not countries. Morocco was dynasties, tribes, cities, and sects, and later on colons. Indonesia was palaces, peasants, harbors, and hierarchies, and later on indische heren. They did not sum to colored polygons, and they may not do so, or at least not so neatly, in the near-term future; indeed a great many countries do not do so now. The absolute map is in itself an aspect, or a version, of the unitizing nationality/nationalism/nationstate discourse (even the volcanoes seem Indonesian, even the sheep

“ethnic conflict”

93

Moroccan), and is equally as obscuring of contemporary political and economic conditions. Perhaps the simplest, most immediate, and most startling indication of the increasing awkwardness of the absolute-map conception of how the world is politically put together, is the extraordinarily rapid increase in the number of territorialized units pictured as peoples and officialized as states. In 1950 there were fiftyeight members of the United Nations, most of them Western; in 1980 there were 158, most of them not. Today there are 192, ranging from St. Kitts and Nevis at 260 square kilometers to the Russian Federation at 17 million (or if you prefer your comparisons demographic, from St. Kitts at 47,000 inhabitants to China at a billion plus). Secretary of State Warren Christopher was heard to worry at his confirmation hearings about the prospect of 5,000 separate countries, if things kept on in their ethnical ways. This was, perhaps, a bit excited; but the specter, the Balkanization of the world, is not without basis in the way things were moving then and continue to move. But beyond the multiplication of places called nations and their enormous variety (can a single term cover Singapore, Israel, Australia, Ethiopia, Paraguay, India, Kazakhstan?), many of these “standing entities” are, as the Saudi ambassador suggested, standing on rather less than it might appear. It is not only in his part of the world that a sense of arbitrariness clings to many of the world’s accepted sovereignties. The perpetuation of the whims and accidents of imperial division in successor-state boundaries (Nigeria or Laos, Jordan or Brunei), the weight of diasporas (Palestinian in Kuwait, Chinese in Indonesia, Japanese in Brazil), and the extraordinary incongruencies some of these units have for reasons inherited from a checkered past (South Africa, Guyana, Lebanon, Malaysia) make the conception of countries as all-of-a-piece nation-states, repeating elements tiling the world, very near to comic. In any case, nation-states are not the only sorts of “standing entities” standing. From the Security Council, the European Community, ASEAN, and the OAS to OPEC, NATO, the IMF, and the Muslim Brotherhood, collective actors of another sort, claiming and exercising authority over places and peoples, are entering not

94

peace and mind

simply the politico-economic relations between countries, but within them. So also are NGOs, from Amnesty International and Asia Watch to Oxfam and Greenpeace—and the development of an economy careless of borders and globally focused has produced, in the form of multinational corporations, networked banks, and intercontinental drug cartels, many other agglomerations of power unrecorded, indeed unrecordable, on the absolute map. The attention to particulars, to variation, and to the intricacies of instances is as necessary in sorting out the “politics” side of “the politics of identity” (cluttered with forms and formulas) as it is in sorting out the “identity” side. There is nothing for it, really, but cases. V Indonesia is among the most pluralistic countries in the world. There are upwards of three hundred languages. There are three or four thousand inhabited islands. There is significant representation, in a predominantly Muslim country (the largest, in numerical terms, in the world), of virtually all the major world religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity of all kinds and states of sophistication, as well as a vast variety of tribal religions still believed in. There is a wide range of racial difference from Malayo-Polynesian through Sinic, Papuan, and Melanesian, ingeniously mixed. And, looked at historically, the place is an anthology of the world’s best imperialisms: everyone from the Arabs, Indians, and Chinese, to the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and latterly the Americans and the Japanese, seeking everything from cloves to oil and bringing everything from tantrism to Roman law, has left a mark on it. It is a carnival of distinctions, a labyrinth of fault lines. Or, as one of its politicians once called it, an elephant with beriberi. Morocco is by no means the inverse, a homogeneous population placidly set in a uniform environment. But the range of its internal variation is both less vast and less dramatic than Indonesia’s, and it is organized in quite different terms—not culturally, or linguistically, or racially, or religiously. (Virtually everyone in Morocco, especially now that most of the Jews have left, is Muslim; virtually everyone,

“ethnic conflict”

95

even the Berbers, is Arabic-speaking; and virtually everyone, even the darker-skinned people of the south, is Afro-Mediterranean in physical aspect.) Morocco is not really organized in group terms at all; it is organized in terms of personal connections between individuals located at, or identified with, one or another point on the landscape, a landscape rather exactly politicized from the time of the Arab incursions a millennium ago. The country is held together, to the degree that it is held together (for no more than Indonesia is it a compact and solidified entity), by stretched-out webs of private loyalty and private rivalry: an irregular field of micropolities arising out of the microenvironments—mountains, steppes, plateaus, littoral, deserts, oases, piedmonts, and alluvial plains—of the broken countryside and reaching into its most intimate social corners— families, neighborhoods, markets, tribes. Divided into terrains rather than into islands, and certainly not into peoples, Morocco’s labyrinth of fault lines is built up out of a tremendous variety of immediate, one-on-one relationships, which, though deeply rooted and set into powerful institutions—Islam, the monarchy, and polarized gender— do not sort out into ethnographical blocks. The “politics of identity” has, as a result, developed rather differently in these two countries. In Indonesia, the politics of identity centers on problems of cultural integration: “What, beyond propinquity and the tracings of imperialism, connects us?” In Morocco, it centers on problems of collective personality: “Where, amidst the jockeying and the networking, does our specialness lie?” Each question—“What do we have in common?” “What is it that makes us distinctive?”—asks for a particular sort of primordial answer and takes place within a particular sort of standing entity. The sorts of disturbances they inspire and the sorts of responses they call out to dampen the disturbances are, in turn, equally particular. Of the two countries, Indonesia’s primordial commotions have been the more spectacular: the “Abode of Islam” revolts of the early fifties, the regional civil wars of 1958, the enormous massacres (the estimates run toward a half-million dead) on Java and Bali in 1965, the localist upheavals at the northern tip of Sumatra, the separatist movements in west New Guinea, and the struggle over the formerly

96

peace and mind

Portuguese eastern Timor (in which a seventh of the population—a proportion comparable, the New York Times figures, to the Khmer Rouge toll in Cambodia—may have perished). There has scarcely been a year since independence when serious, primordially framed violence has not erupted somewhere in the archipelago. The immediate conflagrations of Indonesia are met, as they are met most places, with force—and, given the military’s prominence, met by the army. But shoring up the republic involves a good deal more: the army cannot, by itself, make such a variously challenged entity stand. There needs to be, and there has been evolved over the past more than fifty years, a developed ideology of general identity— an explicit, systematic, and intensely diffused story designated to convince Javanese and Dyaks, Muslims and Christians, Malays and Chinese, ex-East Indians and annexed peoples, that they belong, by fate and nature, politically together. An account of that ideology would include the government’s invocation of a heroic past (the revolution against the Dutch), its inculcation of a civil religion carefully designed to both blur and balance elements of the cultural complex (the “five-points” Pancasila, first laid out by the populist Sukarno and given institutional force by the managerial Suharto), and its fine-tune adjustment of state symbology to shifts in primordial saliencies. (Suharto, not previously noted for his Islamist piety, eventually went on the hajj and moved to construct an organizational base among Muslim intellectuals.) From the birth of the republic to the present, the government’s response to diversity has been to enfold it in an eclectic master-narrative, conciliative and synthesizing, that might, at least most of the time, in most places, more or less contain diversity’s explosive force. Morocco has a much weaker need to justify its reasonableness as a single country. There have been no genuinely separatist movements there at all, just plots and jacqueries—and its people are generally unideological: even “Islam” is more custom than doctrine in Morocco, and “Arab” an idea with fuzzy edges and fuzzier content. Hence the development of a general definition of cultural commonality, a civil religion of the Indonesian kind, has not occurred. Not groups and commitment to groups, but persons and loyalties to persons, is the

“ethnic conflict”

97

idiom of identity. Both for those who love him and those who hate him, and for the large proportion who do both at once (I imagine them the majority), the specialness of Morocco, the quality that distinguishes it from what surrounds it, is summarized in its king. It is not that the king is an unfettered autocrat or that the country’s identity would not survive the monarchy’s absence; it is that the center of a vast field of shifting personal ties, the king, or more exactly the reach of the king across the field, defines the country’s domain. The long-term conflict in the western Sahara—the major issue of primordial identity that has troubled the independent state—is a clear example of what I mean. The formation of the Polisario, in the first instance by southern Moroccan personalities with Saharan connections, when post-Franco Spain precipitously abandoned the area, was met by the king’s “Green March” into the region of unarmed volunteers assembled from all over Morocco to symbolize his (and thus, his country’s) personal ties to it. The conflict has not been, as it has usually been represented, one between nationalities, ethnic groups, or even historical communities—Moroccans, Sharawis, Algerians, and Mauritanians—but between loose agglomerations of private loyalty arising in different sorts of localities and centering on different sorts of figures. Whatever the outcome, it will have to do with the shape of immediate allegiances, not with cultural, racial, linguistic, or even religious differentiations. There is, if less explicitly articulated here than in Indonesia, also something of a masternarrative, but it tells less of diversity, separatism, balance, and synthesis than it does of dispersion, rivalry, trust, and connection. VI It is true, as someone inevitably rises at this juncture to point out, as though anyone anywhere has ever thought to deny it, that economic, demographic, and other so-called real factors have a great deal to do with the appearance of primordial, or primordialized, conflict and with the effectiveness of efforts made to resolve it. Exploding populations and stumbling economies (Nigeria, Bangladesh), factional demagoguery and governmental corruption (India, Zaire),

98

peace and mind

or even simple class selfishness (Haiti, the United States) have much to do with the shape and severity of identity politics in any standing, or tottering, entity. Rainfall and grain harvests matter in Morocco, migrations and oil prices matter in Indonesia; the distribution of wealth and the administration of justice matter in both. But another day, another essay: my concern here is not with causes, which are as multiple and intractable to general summary as are their effects, but with something else—for a stressed-out liberal, rather more pressing, and, for a chastened one, rather more fateful: the viability of democracy in a difference-ridden world. The oppressiveness of this question just now, the fear that the answer to it may be that popular government is helpless in the face of popular division, is brought on by the wide range of primordial horror before us. It is also brought on by the sense that such things were held in check, at whatever costs, by authoritarian governments recently disappeared and are not being reduced, as developmentalist utopians promise, by the global expansion of a wealth-creating capitalism. We seem to be faced with a Hobson’s choice: forcing consensus by suppressing dissent, or else an unsupported faith that material improvement will of itself bring on consensus. The British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd, of whom one expected a better grip on the world, once assured the Indonesians that “economic welfare and democratic progress will never run counter to each other.” (The response of the audience was not reported.) Still, the question may be mal posée. The assumption that high levels of consensus on matters of identity are prerequisite to democratic government may be wrong. The assumption that “agonistic democracy” is a contradiction in terms may be wrong.1 The politics of identity flow, as William Connolly says, beneath, through, William Connolly, from whom I borrow this concept, defines “agonistic democracy” as a regime that “opens political spaces for agonistic relations of adversarial respect…between interlocking and contending constituencies”: Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), x. 1

“ethnic conflict”

99

and over the boundaries of the state, the nation, the country, the standing entity; they operate in a realm specifically their own. The development of such politics—based not on primordial consensus, which does not exist and is not about to, but on adversarial respect, which also does not much exist but, here or there, at this point or that, has some chance of doing so—seems to me a primary task of our time. In relation to that task, anthropology, with its sense of particularity, its attention to detail, and its suspicion of homogenizing languages of social description, can, for all its lack of proven remedies and bankable findings, play a significant role.

100

peace and mind

THE TRUTH OF OTHERS A Cosmopolitan Approach Ulrich Beck Translated by Patrick Camiller

The “cosmopolitanization of reality” is, contrary to conspiracy theories of various sorts, an unforeseen social consequence of actions directed at other results in a context of global interdependence and its attendant risks. These cosmopolitan side effects, often undesired and mostly unintended, frustrate the equation of the nation-state with national society and create new transnational forms of living and communicating, new ascriptions and responsibilities, new ways in which groups and individuals see themselves and others. The result, at the level of opinion, is or could be a realistic cosmopolitanism or cosmopolitan realism—as distinct from cosmopolitan idealism (and distinct also from universalism, relativism, and multiculturalism). Realistic cosmopolitanism, considered apart from any philosophical prehistory, responds to a fundamental question about what I have called “second modernity.”1 How ought societies to handle “otherness” and “boundaries” during the present crisis of global interdependency? To answer that question, it is necessary, first, to distinguish the various ways in which societies handle otherness now— universalism, relativism, ethnicism, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and so on—and then relate each of these alternatives to the social formations of premodern, modern, and postmodern times. What we will learn in the process is that each alternative is guided by a set of contradictory impulses. Universalism, for example, obligates respect for others as a matter of principle, but, for that very reason, arouses no curiosity about, or respect for, the otherness of others. On the contrary, universalism sacrifices the specificity of others to a global equality that denies the historical context of its own emergence and interests. Relativism and contextualism are likewise self-contradictory: stress on the context and relativity of particular

102

peace and mind

standpoints has its source in an impulse to recognize the otherness of others. But, conceived and practiced in absolute terms, that recognition is transformed into a claim that perspectives cannot be compared—a claim that amounts to irremediable mutual ignorance. From these observations it follows that realistic cosmopolitanism should be understood, fleshed out, and practiced in conscious relation to universalism, contextualism, nationalism, transnationalism, and other current approaches to otherness. The cosmopolitan vision shares with these a combination of semantic elements that, at the same time, serves to differentiate it from all other approaches. Realistic cosmopolitanism presupposes a universalist minimum that includes a number of inviolable substantive norms. The principle that women or children should not be sold or enslaved, the principle that everyone should be free to speak about God or one’s government without being tortured or threatened with death, are so self-evident that no violation should meet with cosmopolitan tolerance. There can be talk of “cosmopolitan common sense” when there are good reasons to assume that large majorities would accept such minimum universalist norms.2 Cosmopolitanism, if it is realistic, also will accept a number of universalist procedural norms of the kind that make it possible to deal with otherness across frontiers. Realistic cosmopolitanism must thus confront the painful question of its own limits: should recognition of the other’s freedom apply equally to despots and democrats, predators and their prey? Realistic cosmopolitans, in other words, must come to terms with the idea that, in making respect for the other the heart of their program, cosmopolitanism produces enemies who can be checked only by force. The contradiction must be embraced that, in order to protect one’s basic principles (the defense of civil rights and difference), it may in some circumstances be necessary to violate them. As for nationalism, a realistic cosmopolitan will takes its continuing existence as a given but will work to develop cosmopolitan variations on the nation-state, national society, and patriotism. Without the stability that comes with national organization and feeling, cosmopolitanism can lose itself in an idealist neverland.

the truth of others

103

The Two Faces of Universalism How the Western world should handle the otherness of others is not a new question. There are striking resemblances between the terms of discussion today—exemplified by such books as Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) and Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History (1989)—and the terms of debate at the legendary conference of 1550 in Valladolid, Spain. Comparing the questions under dispute—in 1550, the extent to which Amerindians differed from Europeans was at issue—should help clarify what we ourselves are arguing at the turn of the twentyfirst century. Huntington’s influential argument is that, whereas the main lines of conflict during the Cold War were openly political and derived their explosive nature from considerations of national and international security, the lines of conflict today correspond to major cultural antagonisms involving a clash of values between civilizations. The culture, identity, and religious faith that used to be subordinate to political and military strategy now define priorities on the international political agenda. We are witnessing the invasion of politics by culture. Divisions between civilizations are becoming threats to international stability and world order. The democratic values of the West and the premodern values of the Islamic world stand opposed to each other in ever more menacing and hostile ways, both within individual countries and between different regions of the world. As to The End of History, its simplistic view is that, since the collapse of the Soviet communist system, there is no longer an alternative to the Western model of liberal democracy and the American-style market economy. “Democratic capitalism” is the genuine core of modernity, which by its own inner logic must spread through and refashion the world. Thus, a universal civilization will arise that brings history to an end. Variations on these ways of handling otherness confronted each other at the Valladolid conference nearly five centuries ago. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, an Aristotelian philosopher, and the Dominican priest Bartolomé de Las Casas represented, respectively, a universalism of

104

peace and mind

difference and a universalism of sameness. Sepúlveda argued, in a way that we associate with Huntington, that human groups are defined hierarchically, while Las Casas, more like Fukuyama, maintained that civilizations are fundamentally similar. Sepúlveda emphasized the differences between Europeans and Amerindians: the latter went around naked, sacrificed human victims, made no use of horses or asses, were ignorant of money and the Christian religion. He accordingly structured the human species into peoples that, while living at the same time, were at different cultural stages. In his eyes, different meant inferior; and it followed, viewing barbaric America from civilized Spain, that man was the god of man—some men the gods of other men—and that subjugation could be a pedagogic responsibility. Similarly, Huntington conceives the relationship of the Western world to its cultural other, the Islamic world, as one of vertical difference. “Others” are denied sameness and equality, counting in the hierarchy as subordinate and inferior. From that point it is a short step to treating others as barbarians, which means that they must be converted to the superior values of Christianity or democratic capitalism, or else must be resisted with military force. The basic distinction between Huntington and Sepúlveda is that, while the latter’s sense of superiority is easy and assured, the most striking thing about Huntington’s diagnosis is its apocalyptic tone: a new “decline of the West” is inevitable unless we join hands to battle against the “Islamic threat” on behalf of Western values. Las Casas eloquently defended the rights of the Amerindians and saw them as remarkably similar to Europeans. They fulfilled the ideals of the Christian religion, which recognizes no difference in terms of skin color and racial origin: they were friendly and modest, respected interpersonal norms, family values, and their own traditions, and were thus better prepared than many other nations on earth to embrace God’s word. In the name of Christian universalism, this Dominican vehemently opposed hierarchical differentiation. Against the principle that held others to be axiologically subordinate, he argued for the dissolution of differences—either as a present fact of anthropology (all humans are human) or as an inevitable development of human progress (modernization).

the truth of others

105

Universalism, then, sponsors more than one way of handling the otherness of others. For Las Casas, a Christian universalist, it is not otherness but sameness that defines the relationship between the other and ourselves. In any form of universalism, all forms of human life are located within a single order of civilization, with the result that cultural differences are either transcended or excluded. In this sense, the project is hegemonic: the other’s voice is permitted entry only as the voice of sameness, as a confirmation of oneself, contemplation of oneself, dialogue with oneself. An African universalism, for instance, would hold that the good white has a black soul. Even the United States, which is home to all ethnicities, peoples, and religions, has its own variety of universalism and an ambivalent relation to difference. To be an American means to live in the immediate proximity of difference, which often further means living in Huntingtonian fear that a stress on difference will spell the decline of the West—a fear that ethnic differences can never be bridged and that, without assimilation to an American identity in which differences are transcended, the chaos raging beneath the surface will emerge. This fear demands and promotes a compulsion toward sameness and conformism. The greater the diversity and the more unbridgeable the differences that appear and are staged, the louder are the calls for conformity and national ethos (in the American academy, this development is known as communitarianism).3 From Paul of Tarsus, through Kant and Popper, to Lyotard and Rorty, variants of the same dialectic serve to limit the danger of ethnic difference by stressing a common humanity—by recourse, in other words, to Western universalism. From this perspective, ethnic diversity does exist but has no intrinsic value such as universalism claims for itself. Take the case of Christian universalism and the opposition between Christian and heathen. This sort of universalism releases all from their attachment to skin color, ethnic origin, gender, age, nationality, and class, and addresses them as equal before God in the existential community of Christendom. The duality thus belies the asymmetry that it posits. As Reinhart Koselleck puts it: “The opposition between all men and all the baptized is no longer quantifiable as the previous tokens were, but involves a reduplication

106

peace and mind

of the reference group itself. Everyman must become a Christian, if he is not to sink into eternal damnation.”4 Imperial Christian universalism accordingly released emancipatory impulses that can be traced down to the modern movement for the abolition of slavery. Feminist movements have also made reference to Paul. But in these contexts as well, the dual face of universalism is visible: the blackness of blacks, the womanhood of women, the Jewishness of Jews, are stigmatized as “particularisms” inferior to the humanity of humans. Anyone who rejects universalism supposedly fails to recognize the higher morality that distinguishes it and becomes liable to a verdict of amoral or immoral particularism. In such an atmosphere, particularities tend to seek transfiguration and displacement in the direction of universality: the majority raise their own ethnicity to absurd heights and proclaim their own norms as universal. In societies where whites are dominant, being white is the privilege of not noticing one is white. The postulate of abstract identity puts pressure on the ethnic other to yield to the dominant identity and give up the insistence on difference. If blacks, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, and women then call themselves black, Jewish, Chinese, Japanese, or female, they in this context lack theoretical and philosophical authority—they are not up-to-date, they are imprisoned in an antiquated self-image. To put the point as a mainstream sociologist of modernization might: the otherness of others is a relic that modernization reduces to eventual insignificance. Las Casas and Fukuyama represent the disappearance of diversity as a civilizing process—in the one case, through baptism and, in the other, through the infectious superiority of Western values (the market economy, democracy). Then as now, no alternative route is acknowledged. The way forward is Christian/Western universalism. Clearly, the “end of history” began some five hundred years ago. But Western universalism, again, has two faces: it also promotes the principles of liberty and equality throughout the world. It is not possible to proclaim global human rights, on the one hand, and to have a Muslim, African, Jewish, Christian, or Asian charter of human rights, on the other hand. To respect the otherness and the history of others, one must consider them as members of the same

the truth of others

107

humanity, not of another, second-class humanity. Human rights infringe the local right to wall off cultures from external pressure or assault. Respect for traditions that violate human rights is taken by Western universalism as tantamount to disrespect for their victims. The dilemmas that stem from this attitude are not easily resolved. Raising questions of global responsibility leads to accusations (and to the temptation) of colonialism. Colonialism is now called humanitarian intervention. Still, with all of us faced with the risks of global interdependency, can the affairs of others be regarded purely as their own responsibility? Is there no option other than interference? Liberians—who for two decades had to endure war, banditry, and a succession of criminal regimes—took to the streets to ask the United States to restore order by force. In such instances, it is universalism, cosmopolitan sympathy, by no means greed or ambition or selfaggrandizement, that lead to the engagement of foreign armies. “Human rights colonialism,” that hybrid, may well be practiced more and more widely in the form of “UN protectorates”—beginning with Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia, moving through Afghanistan and Iraq, on to Liberia and elsewhere they may yet be needed and desired. The Two Faces of Relativism To oppose universalism is to support relativism—or so matters appear to those who think in terms of either/or alternatives. Whereas universalism removes the protective boundaries around the cultural other, relativism permits, constructs, and imposes new ones. Where and how the boundaries run or are drawn depends on whether the relativism in question is associated with nationalism, localism, or culturalism. Since relativism aims to underscore all the distinctions that universalism wants to transcend, relativism of whatever kind tends to reject even the possibility of recognizing or developing general norms. Such norms have to be imposed and so, from the relativist’s perspective, universalism and hegemony are merely two aspects of the same phenomenon. Relativism, like universalism, is dual. Universalists impose their standpoint on others yet take the fate of others as seriously as

108

peace and mind

if it were their own. The duality of relativism is complementary. On the one hand, a dose of relativism may serve as an antidote to the universalists’ hubris. Relativism and contextual thinking sharpen our respect for difference and can make it both attractive and necessary to change perspectives with one’s cultural other. But if relativism and contextualism are made absolute, this attentiveness to others turns into its opposite: any change of perspective is rejected as impossible. The instrument by which we close ourselves to others and reject any outsider’s perspective on our own culture is the incommensurability principle. If everything is relative, then everyone is simply “like this” or “like that”—no more to be said. Ironically, the relativist’s principle of incommensurability has much in common with its supposed opposite, essentialism. Both are compelled to accept things as they are. There is a will in both to be left in peace and to leave others in peace, on the grounds that the trenches between cultures can never be crossed. However polemical and wrongheaded the motives behind it, the presumption of incommensurability does lead to a nonintervention agreement between cultures—though, in a world where it is impossible not to intervene, where intervention is always underway, that agreement can easily veer around into violence. What is more, a strict relativism, however coherent (or not) philosophically, is historically and empirically indefensible. It fails to recognize, or it distorts the facts concerning, the interpenetrating histories of supposedly incommensurable cultures. Moreover, the cultural boundaries that relativism reifies are the project of a particular time (the nineteenth century) and place (Europe).5 Those boundaries are oddly out-of-date and provincial. But there is no reason that universalism cannot modify to take account of such realizations. A more contextualist universalism could acknowledge that cultural interpenetration is historically the normal case and that nonintervention is certainly an impossibility now. The effort to escape from the crisis of global interdependency into a fantasy of separate worlds is comical and quaint. Let me ensure there will be no complaints about false counterpositions: the opposite of the incommensurability thesis is not an assertion that dialogue takes place easily, meaningfully, and constructively. The

the truth of others

109

true counterposition to incommensurability is: there are no separate worlds (our misunderstandings take place within a single world). The global context is varied, mixed, and jumbled—in it, mutual interference and dialogue (however problematic, incongruous, and risky) are inevitable and ongoing. The fake joys of incommensurability are escape routes leading nowhere, certainly not away from our intercultural destiny. The object of debate should be not whether but the how of mutual interference, of further mixing and confrontation. We cannot stand back from Africa’s parlous state, because there is no Africa beyond the West’s sphere of security and responsibility. That truth is not absolute does not mean that there is no truth; it means that truth continually requires an updated contextual definition.

110

peace and mind

Notes 1. “Second modernity” (rather than “postmodernity”) is my preferred term for our present historical phase, in which modernity has become reflexive and is now modernizing its own foundations. See Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992), and Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition, and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Cambridge: Polity, 1994). 2. See, in Common Knowledge 1.3 (Winter 1992): 12–29: Sissela Bok, “The Search for a Shared Ethics”; Amartya Sen, “Three Questions”; Bok, “Three Answers.” 3. There is therefore a close connection between the popularity and political effectiveness of communitarian currents and Huntington’s catch-phrase, which maintains that the intention of destroying civilization can be found only in non-Western societies and nonChristian organized religions. This typically excludes in advance two alternative accounts: it is nowhere considered possible that barbarism could break out again in the West itself; and no systematic attention is given to the fact that the potential for conflict feeds off the effects of global interdependence. 4. Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), 231. 5. See Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Bernard McGrane, Beyond Anthropology: Society and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); William H. McNeill, Polyethnicity and National Unity in World History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985); and Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

WHOSE COSMOS, WHICH COSMOPOLITICS? Comments on the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck Bruno Latour

Blessed are the peacemakers. It is always nicer to read a peace proposal (like Ulrich Beck’s) than a call for jihad (like Samuel Huntington’s). Beck’s robust and realist form of cosmopolitanism is to be welcomed. On the other hand, peace proposals make sense only if the real extent of the conflicts they are supposed to settle is understood. A detached and, let us say, inexpensive way of understanding enmity, a Wilsonian indifference to its complexity, may further infuriate the parties to a violent dispute. The problem with Beck’s solution is that, if world wars were about issues of universality and particularity, as he makes them out to be, then world peace would have ensued long ago. The limitation of Beck’s approach is that his “cosmopolitics” entails no cosmos and hence no politics either. I am a great admirer of Beck’s sociology—the only far-reaching one Europe has to offer— and have said so in print on several occasions. What we have here is an argument among friends working together on a puzzle that has defeated, so far, everyone everywhere. Let me make clear from the beginning that I am not debating the usefulness of a cosmopolitan social science that, beyond the boundaries of nation-states, would try to look at global phenomena using new types of statistics and inquiries. I accept this point all the more readily since for me, society has never been the equivalent of nation-state. For two reasons: the first is that the scientific networks that I have spent some time describing have never been limited to national boundaries anyway: global is largely, like the globe itself, an invention of science. The second reason is that, as disciples of Gabriel Tarde know very well, society has always meant association and has never been limited to humans. So I have always been perfectly happy to speak, like Alphonse de Candolle, of “plant sociology” or, like Alfred North Whitehead, of “stellar societies.”1 It should also be clear that I don’t take the expression “peace proposal” ironically.

112

peace and mind

On the contrary, it’s for me crucial to imagine another role for social science than that of a distant observer watching disinterestedly. Beck is struggling for a mixture of research and normative intervention, and this is exactly what I mean by the new diplomatic role of the social scientist. What is in question between us is the extent to which we are ready to absorb dissents not only about the identity of humans but also about the cosmos they live in. A historical anecdote, retold in a major paper by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, may illustrate why Beck’s suggested approach to peacemaking is not completely up to the task.2 The main example that Beck gives is the “Valladolid controversy,” the famous disputatio that Spaniards held to decide whether or not Indians had souls susceptible of being saved. But while that debate was underway, the Indians were engaged in a no less important one, though conducted with very different theories in mind and very different experimental tools.3 Their task, as Viveiros de Castro describes it, was not to decide if Spaniards had souls—that much seemed obvious—but rather if the conquistadors had bodies. The theory under which Amerindians were operating was that all entities share by default the same fundamental organization, which is basically that of humans. A licuri palm, a peccary, a piranha, a macaw: each has a soul, a language, and a family life modeled on the pattern of a human (Amerindian) village. Entities all have souls and their souls are all the same. What makes them differ is that their bodies differ, and it is bodies that give souls their contradictory perspectives: the perspective of the licuri palm, the peccary, the piranha, the macaw. Entities all have the same culture but do not acknowledge, do not perceive, do not live in, the same nature. For the controversialists at Valladolid, the opposite was the case but they remained blissfully unaware that there was an opposite side. Indians obviously had bodies like those of Europeans, but did they have the same spirit? Each side conducted an experiment, based on its own premises and procedures: on the one side to determine whether Indians have souls, and on the other side to determine whether Europeans have bodies. The Amerindians’ experiment was as scientific as the Europeans’. Conquistador prisoners were taken as guinea pigs and immersed in water to see, first, if they drowned

whose cosmos, which cosmopolitics?

113

and, second, if their flesh would eventually rot. This experiment was as crucial for the Amerindians as the Valladolid dispute was for the Iberians. If the conquerors drowned and rotted, then the question was settled; they had bodies. But if they did not drown and rot, then the conquerors had to be purely spiritual entities, perhaps similar to shamans. As Claude Lévi-Strauss summarized, somewhat ironically, the two experiments, the Spaniards’ versus the Amerindians’: “the whites were invoking the social sciences while the Indians had more confidence in the natural ones.” The relevance of this anecdote should be apparent: at no point in the Valladolid controversy did the protagonists consider, even in passing, that the confrontation of European Christians and Amerindian animists might be framed differently from the way in which Christian clerics understood it in the sixteenth century. At no point were the Amerindians asked what issue they took to be in dispute, nor is Beck asking now. But asking that question is only the first step en route to adequate complexity. Was every European in agreement with every other? Were there not two (at least) solutions to the problem raised at Valladolid? Indians had souls like Christians or else Indians did not— each position had its partisans. Beck supposes there were only two solutions to the problem posed at Valladolid about Indian souls (they have souls, they do not have souls) and he ignores the other problem raised in South America about conquistador bodies (they have bodies, they do not have bodies). A negotiation between Europeans and Amerindians would thus be, at a minimum, four-sided. Bartolomé de Las Casas, the Dominican priest, held that Europeans and Amerindians were basically the same, and he complained of the unChristian cruelty of Christians against their “Indian brothers.” But how would he have responded, how might his views have modified, had he witnessed the systematic drowning of his fellow Spaniards in a scientific experiment designed to assay their exact degree of bodily presence? Which “side” would Las Casas, after the experience, be on? As Viveiros de Castro has persuasively shown, the question of “the other,” so central to recent theory and scholarship, has been framed with inadequate sophistication. There are more ways to be other, and vastly more others, than the most tolerant soul alive can conceive.

114

peace and mind

How cosmopolitan is a negotiator who mediates on behalf of one or two of the four (or more) sides to a dispute? It is hazardous, and perhaps ethnocentric as well, to assume that enemies agree on baseline principles (the principle, for instance, that all humans have bodies).4 I say that Beck’s stance may be ethnocentric because his cosmopolitanism is a gentler case of European philosophical internationalism. Beck takes his key term and its definition, off the shelf, from the Stoics and Kant. Those definitions (Beck’s, Kant’s, the Stoics’) are problematic: none shows understanding that more than culture is put in jeopardy by conflicts. The cosmos too may be at stake. Like most sociologists, Beck suffers from anthropology blindness. For the sociologist, nature, the world, the cosmos, is simply there; and since humans share basic characteristics, our view of the world is, at baseline, the same everywhere. Perversity, acquisitiveness, undisciplined instincts, account for the fact that we do not—we rarely have—peace. When Beck writes that Las Casas was in a state of denial over the extent of the struggle he wished devoutly to end, Beck without realizing it is speaking of himself as well. Beck and Las Casas are good guys, but good intentions do not resolve or prevent strife. I am not saying of course that Beck’s cosmopolitanism is simply a larger version of Jürgen Habermas’s humanism. The entrance to the debating room is not limited, for Beck, to rational agents able to pursue a reasonable conversation. Beck is ready to deal with much wider conflicts. What he does not realize, however, is that whenever cosmopolitanism has been tried out, from Alexandria to the United Nations, it has been during the great periods of complete confidence in the ability of reason and, later, science to know the one cosmos whose existence and solid certainty could then prop up all efforts to build the world metropolis of which we are all too happy to be citizens. The problem we face now is that it’s precisely this “one cosmos,” what I call mononaturalism, that has disappeared. It’s impossible for us now to inherit the beautiful idea of cosmopolitanism since what we lack is just what our prestigious ancestors possessed: a cosmos. Hence we have to choose, in my view, between cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitics. One way to present this argument is to contrast Beck’s use of the term “cosmopolitan” with that of Isabelle Stengers in her

whose cosmos, which cosmopolitics?

115

multivolume masterpiece Cosmopolitique.5 A Stoic or a Kantian will call cosmopolitan anyone who is a “citizen of the cosmos” rather than (or before he or she is) a citizen of a particular state, an adherent of a particular religion, a member of a particular guild, profession, or family. Stengers intends her use of cosmopolitics to alter what it means “to belong” or “to pertain.” She has reinvented the word by representing it as a composite of the strongest meaning of cosmos and the strongest meaning of politics precisely because the usual meaning of the word cosmopolite supposed a certain theory of science that is now disputed.6 For her, the strength of one element checks any dulling in the strength of the other. The presence of cosmos in cosmopolitics resists the tendency of politics to mean the give-and-take in an exclusive human club. The presence of politics in cosmopolitics resists the tendency of cosmos to mean a finite list of entities that must be taken into account. Cosmos protects against the premature closure of politics, and politics against the premature closure of cosmos. For the Stoics, cosmopolitanism was a proof of tolerance; cosmopolitics, in Stengers’s definition, is a cure for what she calls “the malady of tolerance.”7 The contrast between Stengers’s understanding of cosmos and Beck’s could not be more stark. For Beck, the word means culture, worldview, any horizon wider than that of a nation-state. He assumes that issues of war and peace involve only humans, each endowed with the same psychology, each knowing a language translatable into every other language, and each possessed of only slightly contradictory representations of what-there-is. For Beck, as for most sociologists and all political scientists, wars rage because human cultures have (and defend) differing views of the same world. If those views could be reconciled or shown to differ only superficially, peace would follow automatically. This way of understanding cosmos and cosmopolitics is limited in that it puts a limit to the number of entities on the negotiating table. But if cosmos is to mean anything, it must embrace, literally, everything—including all the vast numbers of nonhuman entities making humans act. William James’s synonym for cosmos was pluriverse, a coinage that makes its awesome multiplicity clear. In the face of which, Beck’s calm, untaxed coherence would be

116

peace and mind

unjustifiable except that he presumes that almost all the complexities of the pluriverse are out of bounds for politics, or, at any rate, that they make no difference in the way we agree or disagree with one another. Peace, for Beck’s kind of mononaturalism, is possible because our disputes (to borrow the Scholastic terms) bear upon secondary, rather than primary, qualities. If this be peace, I must say I prefer war. By war I mean a conflict for which there is no agreed-upon arbiter, a conflict in which what is at stake is precisely what is common in the common world to be built. As is well known from Carl Schmitt’s definition, any conflict, no matter how bitter, that is waged under a common arbiter is not a war but what he calls a “police operation.” If there exists one cosmos, already unified, one nature that is used as the arbiter for all our disputes, then there are, by definition, no wars but only police operations. To use Schmitt again: Westerners have not understood themselves as facing on the battlefield an enemy whose victory is possible, just irrational people who have to be corrected. As I have argued elsewhere, Westerners have until now been engaged in pedagogical wars.8 But things have changed of late and our wars are now wars of the worlds, because it’s now the makeup of the cosmos that is at stake. Nothing is off limits, off the table, for dispute. The Amerindians, it is worth recalling, did not rejoice when their side— those Europeans who thought them fully human—triumphed at Valladolid. Yet those ungrateful Indians received the gift of a soul that permitted their baptism and thus salvation. Why did the European offer of both peace and eternal life not please them? The Europeans took European cosmopolitics for granted as natural, and nature is a means to shortcut politics before peace is authentically attainable.9 The settlements that nature offers are reached without due process—they put 99 percent of what is up for grabs off limits, and the result is always another round of conflict. Politics is moot if it is not about (what John Tresch calls) “cosmograms.”10 We perhaps never differ about opinions, but rather always about things—about what world we inhabit. And very probably, it never happens that adversaries come to agree on opinions: they begin, rather, to inhabit a different world.

whose cosmos, which cosmopolitics?

117

A common world is not something we come to recognize, as though it had always been here (and we had not until now noticed it). A common world, if there is going to be one, is something we will have to build, tooth and nail, together. The ethnocentrism of sociologists is never clearer than when they paper over the threat of multiple worlds with their weak notion of cosmopolitanism.11 In Beck’s article here, the telltale symptom is his offhand remarks about religion. There have been good historical reasons—as Olivier Christin has shown, with respect to sixteenth-century warfare in Europe—to sequester religion when peace proposals are advanced.12 But it is not clear that what was right four and a half centuries ago is a diplomatic and respectful way to handle our newly generated wars of religion. When men of good will assemble with their cigars in the Habermas Club to discuss an armistice for this or that conflict and they leave their gods on hooks in the cloakroom, I suspect that what is underway is not a peace conference at all. There are Versailles that beget Munichs that beget Apocalypse. How is it that Beck believes religion is ignorable? Again, there is no cosmos in his cosmopolitanism: he seems to have no inkling that humans have always counted less than the vast population of divinities and lesser transcendental entities that give us life. For most people, in most places, during most eons, humans have “owners,” to use Tobie Nathan’s term; and those proprietors take precedence over humans at whatever cost. Beck appears to believe in a UNESCO koine, a sociological Esperanto, that lies hidden behind stubborn defects, whether social or psychological, in our representations. Men of good will, he would say, must agree that gods are no more than representations. It would be pretty to think so; but it is gods, not humans, who are at war. Or, at least, we should entertain the possibility that enemies can be separated by disagreements that wide. Peace settlements are not, as Stengers emphasizes, between men of good will who have left their gods (their narrow attachments) behind but between men of ill will possessed by super- and subhumans of ill will. A settlement reached too soon is, realistically, a grave danger. Stengers might even add that the longer it takes to reach agreement, the better (hence her daring to utter the phrase “malady of tolerance”). Even Cromwell, after all,

118

peace and mind

while promoting the most horrendous acts of iconoclasm, had the scruple to exclaim (in a sentence Stengers never tires of quoting): “I beseech ye, my brethren, in the bowels of Christ, think that ye may be mistaken!” Where, in Beck’s view, is the place for such a tragic warning? His cosmopolitics is much too cosmopolite to handle the horrors of our time. But perhaps the problem is simply that Beck explores only one dimension of peacemaking—the traditional gradient that leads from particular to universal and back again. Approaching peace in this way is a venerable Stoic tradition; and, as its latest expositor, Beck develops a nice compromise between the cheap universalisms available now and some even cheaper varieties of relativism and muticulturalism. Still, the traditional gradient and the Stoic view of it are not all there is to achieving peace: attachments are not defined solely by their expansion and shrinkage along a line between universalism and particularism. We should perhaps explore another dimension, perpendicular to the first—a gradient running from “naturalism” to “constructivism.” If it’s true that the traditional meaning of cosmopolitanism was based on a certain definition of science, it makes sense to see how it has been modified when another definition of science is called for. Cosmopolitans may dream of the time when citizens of the world come to recognize that they all inhabit the same world, but cosmopolitics are up against a somewhat more daunting task: to see how this “same world” can be slowly composed. Confronted by a given cosmogram, the Stoic wants to know whether it is expressive more of attachment or of detachment (whether it is local or universal in character). But a more urgent and polemical question to ask enemies might be: “How do you differentiate between good and bad attachments?” For the Stoic, detachment is emancipation (and attachment is slavery). By definition a citizen of the cosmos is free; an Egyptian, Greek, or Jew is attached (enslaved) to his or her locale and local knowledge. To be Egyptian, Greek, or Jewish is—in the Stoic tradition—a stigma. “Humanity” was a great and welcome discovery and has been a great and welcome rediscovery each time that (after World War II, notably) it has come to prominence. And yet, if all the United Nations members were

whose cosmos, which cosmopolitics?

119

satisfied to be “just humans,” if the UNESCO lingua franca was enough to define all inhabitants of the planet, peace would already reign. Since there is no peace, there must be something wrong with this humanistic definition of an emancipated human as the only acceptable member of the Club. We face a situation in which, on the one hand, real peace is unattainable if negotiators leave their gods, attachments, and incompatible cosmos outside the conference room. On the other hand, a freight of gods, attachments, and unruly cosmos make it hard to get through the door into any common space. Moreover, humans with owners, attachments, and a cosmos (crammed with entities ignored or ridiculed by other humans) tend not to seek new memberships in clubs. They have reason to believe that they themselves belong to the best clubs already and cannot fathom why others—when invited—have refused to join.13 Hence the need for a second dimension to peacemaking, one that does not require detachment from the beings (for instance, divinities) that make us exist. This second dimension requires another protocol, another investigation, to answer another question: Through what sort of test do you render possible the distinction between good and bad attachments? Making those distinctions necessitates, first, the abandonment of naturalism, which is the faith in a single natural world, comprehensible through Science—or rather, through a mistaken definition of (Western) natural science whose purpose has been to eliminate entities from the pluriverse. The universal embrace of naturalism has been, for moderns, the royal road to peace. And yet naturalism has also been the grounds on which the West has waged its pedagogical wars. The modern West scolds the remainder of mankind: We all live under the same biological and physical laws and have the same fundamental biological, social, and psychological makeup. This, you have not understood because you are prisoners of your superficial worldviews, which are but representations of the reality to which we, through science, have privileged access. But science is not our property; it belongs to mankind universally! Here, partake—and with us you will be one. The problem with this opening gambit into diplomacy is not, I rush to add, that the argument

120

peace and mind

is wrong.14 The argument is right, but it puts the cart before the horse; it begins where it should, eventually (very eventually), end. It is possible—and from a Western (from my Burgundian) point of view, desirable—that, in the distant future, we come to live within a common world defined as naturalism defines it. But to behave as if the settlement were already in place and as though it requires no negotiation to achieve it is a sure trigger to further warfare. The assumptions of naturalism have been shown—most recently and thoroughly by Philippe Descola—to be unshared by vast numbers of humans.15 But constructivism, despite its reputation as a radical postmodern ideology, might be more universalizable since the distinction between what is well and badly made is more than widespread. Constructivism is a tricky word, no doubt.16 But we can likely agree that constructivists tend to share these principles: • the realities to which humans are attached are dependent on series of mediations; • those realities and their mediations are composed of heterogeneous ingredients and have histories; • the amount of heterogeneous ingredients and the number of mediations necessary to sustain realities are a credit to their reality (the more mediated, the more real); • our realities are open to differing interpretations that must be considered with caution; • if a reality has extension (in space and time), its complex life-support systems must have been extended also; • realities can fail and thus require careful maintenance and constant repair. The paramount example of constructivism, on this definition, is the work of the sciences, as I have shown numerous times.17 In the sciences, the degree of objectivity and certainty is directly proportional to the extent of artificiality, layering, heterogeneity, multiplicity, and complexity of mediations. The assertion sounds radical but is merely obvious: in a laboratory, no naked access to truth is thinkable. Is a microbe visible without the mediation of

whose cosmos, which cosmopolitics?

121

a microscope? Are microscopes found in nature or are they human fabrications? When one scientist questions another, it is not to ask whether new data (new facts) have been fabricated or not. The question is, “How have you proven that x is so?”—and the emphasis is on how, by what means or mediation. The difference that counts, when scientists meet in confidence, is not the one between fact and construction but the one between good and bad facts. Things are different when scientists meet the vulgum pecus: then (and only then) do they borrow arguments from the epistemologists and join with philosophers in playing pedagogical war games, where the Red relativists have to fight the White Knights of realism. The example of the sciences should make clear that constructed and real are not opposed terms and that the operative question is how to distinguish between good constructions and bad. If these two generalizations apply to the sciences, to which epistemologists have assigned so unique and transcendent a role, then surely my generalizations apply to the harsh realities of cosmopolitics. And it appears, indeed, that there is no extant or extinct way of life that has not been passionately involved in making distinctions between good and bad fabrications. This observation has its uses in pursuit of peace. A constructivist landing at the mouth of the Amazon (where Amerindians, recall, were drowning Spaniards to test if they had bodies) could have entered into conversations unimaginable to the clerics at Valladolid. “Ah,” a Spanish constructivist could have said to an Amazonian researcher, “this is how you decide matters? How horrifying. Let me suggest another way to formulate and test the question at issue.” Of course, this peaceful encounter is fantastic but not for the reason that a naturalist would presume. The encounter would not happen as I have described it only because of the fundamentalism of the parties involved. Fundamentalism is at the far end of our options from constructivism. A fundamentalist—in science, politics, or religion— would review the list I gave above and indignantly invert every assertion on it:

122

peace and mind

• the realities to which humans are attached are, quite simply, unmediated; • those realities are unitary (not composed of heterogeneous ingredients) and have no history per se; • the amount of heterogeneous ingredients and the number of mediations necessary to sustain a state of affairs must be debited from its degree of reality (the less mediation, the more real); • realities are not open to interpretation; • realities of course have extension (in space and time)— they are by nature universal and it is absurd to say that they require “life support”; • realities are not susceptible to failure and thus do not require maintenance or repair of any kind. Realities of this description are invoked in the pages of the Wall Street Journal as much as in the dark caves of Pakistan and they can even come from human-rights activists: anyone who holds that fabricated means untrue, and made means fake, tends toward fundamentalism. Common experience in science, art, love, and religion should prompt us to say, “the more carefully fabricated, the more real and long-lasting.” Why we do not tend to reach that more sensible conclusion is perhaps our old and continuing fear of idolatry, of worshipping what human hands have made; a genuine acceptance of constructivism requires a reassessment of the whole history of iconoclasm and critique.18 The delightful irony of the matter is that, while fundamentalism was homemade, made in the West—the former West—it has by now become la chose du monde la mieux distribuée. As Peter Sloterdijk has remarked, Westerners loved globalization until les autres could reach us as easily as we could reach them. Naturalizers, those in the West who appeal to a Nature Out There, unconstructed and nonnegotiable, are now confronted by people saying the same of the Koran and Shari’a. And when one fundamentalism butts heads with another, no peace talks are possible because there is nothing to discuss: pedagogical wars are waged to the bitter end. However, it

whose cosmos, which cosmopolitics?

123

is not the case (pace George W. Bush) that the present world war is between a modern culture and an archaic one. The supposed enemies of modernization are themselves modernizers in the extreme, using conceptual tools provided them by Western fundamentalism.19 My main objection, then, to the peace terms of Ulrich Beck is that he has not put the West’s own native fundamentalism up for discussion. Our naturalism has failed: it was a war plan disguised as a peace plan, and those against whom we directed it are no longer fooled. Naturalism, like any fundamentalist ideology, amounts to a prejudice against fabrication. Constructivism is not, cannot possibly be, deconstructive—quite the contrary—though the former has been regularly said to be a subset of the latter. Constructivism is the attitude of those who make things and are capable of telling good from bad fabrications, who want to compare their goods with those of others so that the standards of their own products improve. But for this diplomatic task to begin, a state of war has first to be declared. And once war is declared, we can seek peace on firmer grounds: where naturalism has failed, why not try constructivism? The misunderstanding between Beck and myself may stem, in the end, from differing interpretations of the present historical situation. The “first modernization,” to use his favorite expression, came with a certain definition of cosmopolitanism, which corresponded to the great idea that the whole earth could actually fit snugly inside what Sloterdijk has called the “metaphysical Globe” (as imagined by Mercator, Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, and of course Hegel).20 The problem is that when this version of the global was invented the world was just beginning to be “globalized.” The Globe on which Hegel could rely to house every event “in it” was a purely conceptual one; it was for this reason perfect, with neither shadow nor gap. Now the planet is indeed being slowly and mercilessly globalized, but there is no “global” anymore, no metaphysical Globe to offer advance welcome to inhabitants and give them their rightful and predetermined places. So the two meanings of cosmopolitanism are, so to speak, out of sync: just when we need the Global, it has sunk deep down in the Atlantic, beyond repair. Therefore, in my view, another definition of cosmopolitics is called for, one that does not rely on the

124

peace and mind

“first modernity” dream of an already existing common Sphere. It would be a tragic mistake to pursue peace by dragging in the defunct Globe as a locus for the common world of cosmopolitanism. Since Ulrich Beck does not wish to be Munich’s Hegel, he knows fairly well that the parliament in which a common world could be assembled has got to be constructed from scratch.

whose cosmos, which cosmopolitics?

125

Notes 1. The first book that tried to describe scientific networks quantitatively was written by a plant sociologist and took the point of view of cosmopolitan methodology. See Alphonse de Candolle, Histoire des sciences et des savants depuis deux siècles d’après l’opinion des principales académies ou sociétés scientifiques (1873; Paris: Fayard, 1987). 2. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Les pronoms cosmologiques et le perspectivisme amérindien,” in Gille Deleuze: Une vie philosophique, ed. Eric Alliez (Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 1998), 429–62 (see also his paper in this volume). 3. It is not clear whether the two main characters of the controversy, as retold by Beck, ever met. See Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). There is a fairly bad book where the two protagonists meet (and the film is even worse): Jean-Claude Carrière, La Controverse de Valladolid (Paris: Le Pré aux clercs, 1992). The dispute over whether Spaniards have bodies is documented by Claude Lévi-Strauss who retells an episode from Oviedo’s Historia (supposed to have taken place earlier in Puerto Rico). The famous passage from Tristes tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955), 82–83, is as follows: “Au même moment d’ailleurs, et dans une île voisine (Porto Rico, selon le témoignage d’Ovideo) les Indiens s’employaient à capturer les blancs et à les faire périr par immersion, puis montaient pendant des semaines la garde autour des noyés afin de savoir s’ils étaient ou non soumis à la putréfaction. De cette comparaison entre les enquêtes se dégagent deux conclusions: les blancs invoquaient les sciences sociales alors que les Indiens avaient plutôt confiance dans les sciences naturelles; et, tandis que les blancs proclamaient que les Indiens étaient des bêtes, les seconds se contentaient de soupçonner les premiers d’être des dieux. A ignorance égale, le dernier procédé était certes plus digne d’hommes.” But, as Viveiros de Castro has shown, making a decisive improvement on Lévi-Strauss’s interpretation, the point was not to check whether the conquerors were gods but simply whether they had bodies.

126

peace and mind

4. There is of course a great difference between the “cosmopolitan” project of an international civil society and what I am discussing here. The difference, as was made clear in a meeting organized by Ulrich Beck at the London School of Economics in February 2004, is the weight given to the word cosmos. “Citizens of the world” are cosmopolitan, to be sure, but that does not mean that they have even begun to fathom the difficulties of a politics of the cosmos. See, for instance, Étienne Tassin, Un monde commun: Pour une cosmopolitique des conflits (Paris: Seuil, 2003), and Daniele Archibugi, ed., Debating Cosmopolitics, New Left Review Debates (London: Verso, 2003). I thank the participants at the meeting for useful insights into these rather incommensurable political philosophies. 5. Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitiques, vol. 1, La guerre des sciences (Paris: La Découverte; Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 1996). 6. For Stengers as well as for me, the ability to imagine a political order is always directly predicated on a certain definition of science. The link was made forcefully by science studies. See the now classic work of Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the AirPump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). The main weakness of legal and humanitarian forms of cosmopolitanism is to forget entirely the theory of science that has been surreptitiously used to assemble the cosmos in a peaceful manner but without due process. 7. Stengers, Cosmopolitiques, vol. 7, Pour en finir avec la tolérance (Paris: La Découverte; Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 1997). 8. This point is developed at some length in Bruno Latour, War of the Worlds: What about Peace?, trans. Charlotte Bigg (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2002). Beck’s position in the paper I am discussing is all the more strange since he has never tired, in his other books, of showing why science and technology can no longer deliver the sort of mastery on which a quiet and sane political reason could then be propped up. For some strange reason, he seems to have forgotten his own lessons. 9. Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

whose cosmos, which cosmopolitics?

127

10. John Tresch, “Mechanical Romanticism: Engineers of the Artificial Paradise” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2001). 11. To counter that ethnocentrism is why Viveiros de Castro (see n. 2 above) launched his monster term “multinaturalism.” The difference between multinaturalism and multiculturalism is that truth and reality are engaged in the former and never in the latter. 12. Olivier Christin, La Paix de religion: L’autonomisation de la raison politique au XVIe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 1997). 13. This attitude pertains, according to Philippe Descola and Viveiros de Castro, to all animists—as opposed to totemists, naturalists, and analogists. (I am using here the vocabulary developed by Descola in his essay, “Constructing Natures: Symbolic Ecology and Social Practice,” in Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Descola and Gísli Pálsson [London: Routledge, 1996], 82–102.) According to Viveiros de Castro (in comments on this essay), Amazonian Indians are already globalized in the sense that they have no difficulty in integrating “us” into “their” cosmologies. It is simply that in their cosmic politics we do not have the place that “we” think we deserve; it is not the case that “we” are global and “they” are local. 14. There is a large difference between “the sciences” understood as the proliferation of entities with which to build the collective and “Science” as a way to eliminate secondary qualities because of the postulation of primary ones. Each requires a politics of its own. On this distinction, see my Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Contrary to what naturalists believe, there is little in the sciences that authorizes scientists to be eliminativists. This point is made especially well by Stengers in her brilliant book Penser avec Whitehead: Une libre et sauvage création de concepts (Paris: Seuil, 2002). 15. See, e.g., Philippe Descola, La Nature domestique: Symbolisme et praxis dans l’écologie des Achuar (Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1986), trans. by Nora Scott as In the Society of Nature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

128

peace and mind

16. See more on this subject in Latour, “The Promises of Constructivism,” in Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality, ed. Don Ihde and Evan Selinger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 27–46. 17. In Common Knowledge alone, I have defended variations on this argument in four articles and two dialogues: “On Technical Mediation—Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy,” Common Knowledge 3.2 (Fall 1994): 29–64; “The ‘Pédofil’ of Boa Vista: A Photo-Philosophical Montage,” Common Knowledge 4.1 (Spring 1995): 144–87; “Do Scientific Objects Have a History?: Pasteur and Whitehead in a Bath of Lactic Acid,” Common Knowledge 5.1 (Spring 1996): 76–91; “Trains of Thought: Piaget, Formalism, and the Fifth Dimension,” Common Knowledge 6.3 (Winter 1997): 170–91; “Two Writers Face One Turing Test: A Dialogue in Honor of HAL” (with Richard Powers), Common Knowledge 7.1 (Spring 1998): 177–91; and “The Science Wars—A Dialogue,” Common Knowledge 8.1 (Winter 2002): 71–79. 18. For a systematic exposition, see Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art (Karlsruhe, Germany: ZKM; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 19. Compare my assumption here that Islamic fundamentalism is a form of modernization with, e.g., Khaled Abou El Fadl, Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority, and Women (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2001), and Emmanuel Todd, Après l’Empire: Essai sur la décomposition du système américain (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). 20. There is a direct connection between Beck’s cosmopolitan interest and those of the great German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. The difference is that, in the latter’s “spherology,” the questions are raised in terms of “air conditioning” and “life support.” In his threevolume inquiry into the shape of spheres, he shows how and why the Global has existed in the past but is no longer a structure in which we can freely breathe. For an excellent overview of his philosophy, see Peter Sloterdijk, Ni le soleil ni la mort: Jeu de piste sous forme de dialogues avec Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs (Paris: Pauvert, 2003).

COMPARATIVE MYSTICS

Scholars as Gnostic Diplomats Jeffrey J. Kripal

It is not difficult to see why Ulrich Beck’s cosmopolitan viewpoint would inspire dissent. In a time of religious violence, fundamentalist politics, and attempts to erase historical memory on behalf of ethnic self-interest, it is easy to forget that, not so long ago, intelligent and pragmatic people could hope for a global worldview and even a global spirituality to emerge. It is worth remembering. It is worthwhile resisting the cynicism that comes from knowing that cosmopolitan hopes were at their highest during the colonial era. But however unwelcome the contact (unwelcome, often, on both sides), colonialism brought divergent cultures into intimate relationships whose results were not wholly or finally negative.1 One result was that brave souls around the planet came to believe that the conflicts among cultures, religions, and “final vocabularies” could eventually be transcended.2 The positive results tended to be scholarly and to center on religion. In 1950, the postcolonial turning point, Raymond Schwab argued that the human venture had been ennobled and transformed during an “Oriental Renaissance” (1680–1880) when scholars labored diligently, if imperfectly, at the project of translation and religious interpretation. “Few people today,” Schwab wrote, seem to have heard of Anquetil-Duperron or Sir William Jones or what they set out to accomplish in India in the eighteenth century, but they have drastically altered our ways of thinking nonetheless. Why, then, is the fact generally unknown? The truth is that, in seizing upon the treasures of the poor Orient, critics have grasped only superficial influences that conceal the real issues, which concern the destinies of the intellect and the soul.3

130

peace and mind

Schwab was most likely thinking of the effects that Asian and Middle Eastern cultures had had on the European mind, but, as we well know, the effects of Orientalism were no less profound in Asia and the Middle East. Indeed, Asian and Middle Eastern actors often did more than anyone to advance the cultural exchange. As participants in cultures that had neither created nor fully participated in the astonishing scientific, political, and cultural achievements of the Enlightenment, these individuals were keenly aware of what might be gained from cross-cultural encounter, even if they usually described their activity in terms of redressing imbalances and injustices. Many, on all sides, saw cross-cultural transformation as the secret to a better, more balanced world, and they often turned to religion as the place to signify or effect these new “destinies of the intellect and the soul.” Schwab locates the beginnings of this “conversion” in the mideighteenth century and observes how its rise and development coincided not just with colonialism but also Romanticism: The ability to decipher unknown alphabets, acquired in Europe after 1750, had one incalculable effect: the discovery that there had been other Europes. Thus, in that progressive era, the West perceived that it was not the sole possessor of an admirable intellectual past. This singular event occurred during a period when everything else was likewise new, unprecedented, extraordinary. The advent of oriental studies during a Romantic period abounding in geniuses and accomplishments, in great appetites and abundant nourishment, is one of history’s most astonishing coincidences.4 Schwab, moreover, saw, in the synergies of European Romanticism and the cultural riches of the Orient, a hopeful answer to the violence, bigotry, and mass death of World War II: “So many prophets of doom cry out to our age of a world near its end that it feels itself susceptible to what has never moved it before. Now is the time to present to our age…the birth of an integral humanism, a crucial, unprecedented chapter in the history of civilizations.”5

comparative mystics

131

I begin with Schwab’s postwar “integral humanism” because, first, I recognize myself to be an heir, and a grateful one, of Schwab’s Oriental Renaissance.6 But my reasons for beginning with Schwab go far beyond the personal. The global meeting of Eastern and Western religions has dramatically changed the theologies of Western Christianity, in particular that of the Roman Catholic Church.7 The Oriental Renaissance has been definitive as well for modern Hinduism—definitive in its pluralistic expressions (Aurobindo’s evolutionary metaphysics, for example, or Gandhi’s theology of nonviolence) but also in the violent fundamentalism or essentialist politics of Hindutva (“Hinduness”), which, in resisting cross-cultural exchange, models itself on Western fascism and Muslim exclusivism.8 It is by now a truism among Indologists that the colonial encounter between East and West crystallized the present semiotic field: Hinduism is a modern idea—indeed a word that did not exist until fairly recently (the abstract noun did not appear in Webster’s Dictionary until 1849).9 To invoke the Oriental Renaissance, then, is not simply to recall a distant memory; it is also to observe how, in the modern context, the development of a world religion began. Some readers will take “world religion” as a threat. I take it as a hope, though also a warning: we must finally assume responsibility for our social constructions and ask hard practical questions about their ability to produce a world at relative peace. “Solidarity is not,” as Richard Rorty puts it, “discovered by reflection but created.”10 Or in Bruno Latour’s words: “The common world  .  .  . must be progressively composed  .  .  . an immense task which we will need to accomplish one step at a time.”11 Comparative Mystics The construction that Latour and Rorty and, I dare say, Beck as well have in mind will not become possible until we are ready—as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro appears to suggest here—to take the risk of mutual contamination and transformation across worldviews. Here I want to make explicit what Viveiros de Castro seems to intimate: the value of the outsider in bringing seemingly incompatible cultural forms

132

peace and mind

together. There are those—in Viveiros de Castro’s ethnography, they are shamans—with a scandalous ability to think beyond borders drawn literally on a map or cognitively in the recesses of cultural, religious, and even sexual identity. Given the efforts and successes of such (admittedly rare) people, we need to rethink the ontological status of difference itself, particularly within those literatures and practices that we have come to call “mystical.” My adjectival noun is chosen carefully here as a term of art possessing long lineages in (but irreducible to) Christian spirituality, American psychology, the modern study of religion, and French poststructuralism, all of which I will get to in due course. For now, it is necessary only to explicate my title, “Comparative Mystics,” as an intentional double entendre rooted in French psychoanalytic and poststructuralist studies of mystical literature. I am indebted in particular to the historian Michel de Certeau, whose unique use of the adjectival noun la mystique appears in my own work as “the mystical.” Michael B. Smith, de Certeau’s translator, explicates his use of the French term this way: The theme of Michel de Certeau’s Mystic Fable is la mystique. This term cannot be rendered accurately by the English word “mysticism,” which would correspond rather to the French le mysticisme, and be far too generic and essentialist a term to convey the historical specificity of the subject of this study. There is no need here to retrace the steps by which la mystique, the noun, emerged from the prior adjective, mystique…. But it may be of some interest to note that this grammatical promotion has its parallel in English, in the development of such terms as “mathematics” or “physics,” fields of inquiry of increasing autonomy, also taking their names from an adjectival forerunner. I have, therefore, in extremis, adopted the bold solution of introducing a madeup English term, mystics … to render la mystique, a field that might have won (but never did, in English) a name alongside metaphysics, say, or optics.12

comparative mystics

133

For our present context, I have added to Smith’s neologism “mystics” the qualifier “comparative” to indicate a discourse that undermines the doctrinal claims of individual religions by setting them beside the claims of other religions. The purpose of such a comparative mystics is to expose all doctrinal claims as historically and culturally relative expressions of a deeper mystery or ontological ground that nevertheless requires these relative expressions for its self-revelation. Through comparative mystics (as a disciplinary field or practice) and its comparative mystics (as historical exemplars), I want to question whether it is the case that, as Latour asserts, constructivism has no opposite.13 My thesis, baldly stated (but developed in some detail below), will be that cultural differences and local knowledge are socially and politically important but not ontologically ultimate, and that ontological ultimacy—which flourishes especially in subversive countercultures or mystical traditions—is the level at which deep communication may be realizable. Before starting on this argument, however, I need to list a variety of reservations, lest I be misunderstood and dismissed out of hand. I am not suggesting, for example, that this potential role of the mystical in our own day would repeat or return to some past revelation or some complete religious truth, or that the mystical traditions are without their own serious ethical liabilities and intellectual failures. On the contrary, I would say that modern social and intellectual forms (democracy, science, individualism, human rights, capitalism, globalism) themselves represent a fundamentally new revelation of human spirit with which the religions and their mystical countercultures must come positively to terms. Nor do I want to suggest that a turn to the mystical should be equated, as it so often is in popular literature, with vacuous thinking about “experience,” “unity,” and “purity” (this last term usually a stand-in for prudery, sexual ignorance, and misogyny). Searing self-criticism, fury, eros, and the hard intellectual labor of repudiation are more what I have in mind. In this same apophatic spirit, I will not presume to intuit a common essence to the world religions that can offer a stable basis for diplomacy. I do think that mystical traditions bear uncanny resemblances to each other, but I locate these similarities in

134

peace and mind

the methods employed by these traditions to subvert their religions’ local knowledge and practices. In short, I do not want to lose sight of the historical fact, so often forgotten, that many of these mystical traditions are countercultures that have been persecuted, sometimes quite violently, by their own orthodox religious authorities. I recognize, of course, that mystical traditions have served conservative, even violent ends; one thinks, for example, of St. Bernard of Clairvaux preaching the Crusades.14 And I am aware too that, as Mark Sedgwick reminds us, the idea of a universal mysticism or “perennial philosophy” has buttressed an antimodern traditionalism that has had fascist and terrorist expressions.15 In other words, mysticism can become simply another religious nightmare, another fundamentalist pathology. Hence it is countercultural manifestations of the mystical that I highlight here: what I am offering, then, is heresy. More precisely, I offer an academic gnosticism that can stand up against the petty and violent demiurge-gods that rule so much of our religious worlds. I have few illusions about how such words might go over with orthodox religious believers: my own writing has been the object of Internet hate campaigns, media attacks, and two organized ban movements in India (the last of which ended in the Rajyasabha or upper house of parliament).16 I would only insist that countercultures are inconceivable without cultures, and that every orthodoxy must produce its own balancing heresies. Even in my “transgressions” and “subversions,” then, I deny that there can be any such thing. My point, indeed, is to deny the logical and ontological status of dualism and of difference itself. Toward this end (it is really more of a beginning), I will proceed in three related movements: the first two treat two very different historical periods and their defining contexts (British colonialism in nineteenth-century India and the twentieth-century American counterculture). The third turns to more theoretical discourse in an attempt to link them. I will begin in nineteenth-century Bengal with the archetypal Hindu example of East-West encounter, Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836–86), examining in some textual detail his comparative, deconstructive, and dialectical experiments with religious difference—that is, his own comparative mystics.

comparative mystics

135

Next, I will return to the present and the historical genesis of those unique places in Western culture where the mystical and philosophical experiments of Ramakrishna are carried forward in some of their most sophisticated forms: the American Academy of Religion, academic publishing, and the standard college course on “comparative religion.” In effect, I want to use the Indian archetype of Ramakrishna in order to explore the analogous mystical acts of contemporary Western intellectuals, students, and practitioners. In the process, I will suggest that whereas it was British colonialism that generated and made necessary the religious experiments and mystical subversions of Ramakrishna, it was the American counterculture that generated the personalities, research foci, and general spirit of the modern comparative study of religion, at least as it is presently practiced in the United States. Finally, I will explore the theoretical categories of counterculture, gnosticism, and apophaticism as fruitful places to look for ways to better understand our own comparative mystics. The same categories, it is a part of my argument, could serve us well in our tasks of unpacking our dysfunctional religious pasts (and they all are dysfunctional within our present social circumstances). We need to construct new histories and to join our countercultural projects across cultural and religious boundaries. Indeed, it is this comparative project across time and clime that is structurally “mystical” in the sense that it recognizes the importance of cultural particularity but denies the ontological ultimacy of difference itself. To compare, after all, is to refuse both the fetishization of difference and the dangerous hegemonies of identification and conflation. Ramakrishna: Colonialism, Universalism, Mysticism My prime example of deep cross-cultural communication and crossreligious transgression is that of the nineteenth-century Bengali Shakta mystic and Hindu saint, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa. I could turn to other remarkable Indian figures for similar reminders of the fluidity of culture and the mystical denial of religious difference. The fifteenth-century devotional poet Kabir, for example, sang of a God

136

peace and mind

beyond all Muslim, Hindu, ritual, and caste differences. Guru Nanak (1469–1539) envisioned a God who united Muslim and Hindu in a monotheistic mystical theology that would recognize neither caste nor race and would soon develop into a new religion called Sikhism. Perhaps most spectacularly, we could also turn to the Mughal emperor Akbar, whose Sufi sensibility inspired him to create a small college of comparative religion at his court and to establish in 1582 a new universal religion later dubbed (by his critics) the Divine Faith (Din-i-Ilahi). To this same end, Akbar commissioned translations of classical Hindu scriptural texts, and invited Sufi shaiks, Sunni ulama, Hindu pandits, Zoroastrian and Parsi scholars, Jains, and even Catholic priests from Goa to argue their points together in his presence. Akbar’s Sufi experiment with religious difference would die with his great-grandson, Dara Shikoh (1514–59), who was accused of heresy by orthodox Muslims and executed for, among other political reasons, his embrace of mystical doctrines. Indian history would have to wait another century and a half before this vision was picked up again and developed into a distinctly modern or comparative way of looking at religion. That place and time was nineteenthcentury Bengal. The religious context of this new experiment was again a distinctly mystical and unorthodox one, carried on in a social environment imbued with debate and reform inspired by the dominating presence of Western religious and social thought. Ramakrishna was born in 1836 to a poor family in a rural district and grew up in a very traditional, very orthodox Brahmin household.17 His father died when the boy was six or seven. Soon Ramakrishna began falling into strange trances, which others interpreted as a sign of precocious religious abilities, and he began as well to entertain fantasies of being reborn as a girl. When his eldest brother, Ramkumar, moved to Calcutta, the British colonial capital, in an attempt to rescue the family from destitution, Ramakrishna joined him. They found work in the new Dakshineshwar temple, dedicated to the Tantric goddess Kali, north of the city. Ramkumar, however, soon died. Ramakrishna responded to this second major loss in the same way he had responded to his father’s death—with trance and vision. A period of intense emotional suffering followed. Desperately

comparative mystics

137

seeking a vision of Kali as Ma (or “Mom”) and frustrated with his visionary failures, Ramakrishna reached for a sword to cut his throat (the ritual sword used to decapitate goats offered to the goddess). But Kali intervened and submerged the young priest in an ocean of radiance and bliss: this was to be the first of hundreds of ecstatic unions that would become a defining feature of Ramakrishna’s sanctity and fame. Even as an adult, he experienced himself (and was perceived by others) as a child of the goddess. Over the next few years, Ramakrishna would pursue a remarkable religious experiment, worshipping and identifying with in turn a broad range of deities and experiencing the altered states of consciousness that they brought upon him. Within the broad and generous Hindu fold, for example, he engaged in Vaishnava, Shakta, and Advaita Vedantic sadhanas (spiritual disciplines). Or as he put it himself, he practiced and thought “according to the Puranas,” “according to the Tantras,” and “according to the Vedas,” three classes of Hindu scripture that represent the ways of theistic devotion, erotic transgression, and philosophical deconstruction, respectively (and very roughly). A series of gurus filed through the temple in these years, guiding, prodding, encouraging, sometimes forcing Ramakrishna through various rituals and meditative practices. The young priest, for example, “became” Hanuman, the monkey god and paradigmatic devotee of Rama, and ecstatically sang to the beautiful blue god Krishna, often as the latter’s female lover, Radha, “according to the Puranas.” He cross-dressed as a handmaid of Kali’s for a full year, in effect becoming a woman in order to conquer kama or sexual desire.18 He would also practice versions of the Five M’s, the five forbidden substances and antinomian acts that are ritually engaged in Shakta Tantric practice, and he learned of other mystico-erotic techniques with his female Tantric guru and the many local Tantric sects “according to the Tantras.” Then he denied the existence of these same gods and goddesses in order to meditate on the formless brahman “according to the Vedas,” under the tutelage of Tota Puri, a naked wandering alchemist and ascetic whose departure (or presence—it is not clear which) sent the young priest into a dangerous six-month trance that

138

peace and mind

is celebrated as exemplifying the pinnacle of yoga (“enstatic absorption without trace” or nirvikalpa samadhi). Ramakrishna also came to experiment with Islam and Christianity before settling into life, within the temple precincts, as a teaching guru and local saint. With a Hindu convert to Sufism named Gobinda Ray, who expressed his faith in secret and may not have been a practicing Muslim, Ramakrishna took up Islam.19 He repeated the name of Allah, wore Muslim clothes, prayed the daily Muslim prayers, and even refused to visit the Hindu deities. After three days of this discipline, it is said that he underwent a vision of a brilliant human figure with a long beard (that is, a male) and then merged into “the Fourth” state of the unconditioned brahman. Perhaps because the presence of Christianity was more salient than Islam and much more problematic in colonial Bengal, biographers generally concentrate on Ramakrishna’s Christian practices. They tell us, for example, that he often visited a friend who would read him passages from the Bible and that on the friend’s wall hung an image of the Infant Jesus with the Virgin Mary (that is, another child/mother goddess icon). One day, we are told, the picture came alive and a ray of light issued from it and entered Ramakrishna’s body. Another transformation had begun, this one centered on what a biographer terms the “Jesus state” (jisu-bhava). In a different version of the story, a foreign man of fair complexion approached Ramakrishna and identified himself as Jesus, “he who gave his heart’s blood in order to save humanity from suffering and pain and who endured death at the hands of men, he is one with the Lord, the greatest yogi, the loving Jesus Christ!” (LP 2.21.3). Jesus then embraced Ramakrishna and disappeared into his body. Partly as a result of these comparative experiments and the ecumenical teachings that would soon flow from them, admiring visitors and students began arriving at the Kali temple. From the mid-1870s through the mid-1880s, an impressive community of disciples formed around Ramakrishna, and the expression “Hindu saint” came to be applied.20 Disciples learned from him about the many paths of various religions (or mental conditionings) leading to the same goal and debated whether Ramakrishna was an avatar or

comparative mystics

139

“incarnation of God.” In 1886 he died of throat cancer after a long battle with the disease and passed into what the tradition calls “the great union” (mahasamadhi) beyond and beneath all local colors— into that level of being, consciousness, and bliss about which nothing can be said (KA 5:151). Doctrinal Analysis After his practices according to the Puranas, according to the Tantras, according to the Vedas, and according to Islam and Christianity, Ramakrishna eventually settled down into the more stable role of guru and began to develop the implications of his previous experiments through a series of memorable metaphors. In fascinating appendices that dialectically alternate between Ramakrishna’s Bengali teachings and Swami Vivekananda’s English lectures, Gupta nicely summarizes this “comparative mystics” and links it to the guru’s primary disciple and the latter’s famous missionary efforts in America and Europe, where he helped found numerous Vedanta Centers and prepared the cultural ground for the hundreds of Hindu and Buddhist missionaries that would soon follow his successful example. “We have drawn from our diary these conversations on the harmony of all religions [sarva-dharma-samanvaya],” Gupta writes (KA 5:161). As a way of focusing our discussion, I will in turn draw on Gupta’s appendices. To my knowledge, a long technical expression like “the harmony of all religions” never appears in Ramakrishna’s mouth, at least not in Gupta’s central text. The saint’s katha or “talk” as recorded there was pithy and catchy: his famous mata-patha was a kind of sound-bite, meaning something like “perspective-path,” or “as one’s view, so one’s religious practice.” This same mata-patha doctrine is usually taken as the essence of Ramakrishna’s teaching, and many metaphors of his do point to this basic conviction. In a teaching adapted from the Upanisads, he would liken the religions of the world to different rivers of the land, which flow finally into the same ocean. Or he would compare the social reality of religious difference to a pond to which Hindus, Muslims, and Christians all go to obtain

140

peace and mind

water. Whereas Hindus call what they draw out jal and Muslims call it pani, British Christians call it “water,” but it is all the same fluid. Ramakrishna thus insisted on the relativity of the terms, practices, and beliefs that constitute religions and customs (dharma): these were means toward a common end—culturally relative descriptions of a universal ground (or better here: liquid). The means should not be confused with that end, ocean, or pond. Ramakrishna’s teaching is, however, not as simple as is generally assumed. While he taught that “all religions are true” (KA 1:161), he did not confuse truth with God. “Religion itself is not God,” he said, though “it is possible to get to God through various religions” (KA 1:161). By “true,” then, he did not mean “without error”; on the contrary, he was clear that all religions err, just as no one’s watch perfectly reflects the sun’s movement (KA 1:162). By “true,” he most likely meant “effective” or “conducive to the experience of God.” Moreover, despite his own experimentation, he consistently taught that it is best to stay with one path or religion; people can reach the same roof by different means (stairs, ladder, rope), but no person can use two means at the same time (KA 5:161). Still, one must never imagine that the necessity (whether cultural or psychological) of following a single path renders that path singular. One must never make the mistake of thinking that one’s own path is the only possible or effective way to the common roof and its grand vista. Ramakrishna thus stood solidly against what the Bengali text calls matuyar buddhi, which Gupta (and it is probably his term rather than Ramakrishna’s) glosses in English as “Dogmatism” (KA 5:162). It is also important to realize that Ramakrishna’s tendency to compare religions did not prevent him from criticizing positions that he found dubious or dysfunctional in one religion or another. He was particularly hard on the orthodox Vaishnavas and the Christians,21 whose respective doctrines of sin struck him as useless and ultimately destructive.22 He would thus quote approvingly his Tantric friend, Vaishnavacharan: “Why do you only talk about ‘sin’ and more ‘sin’? Be blissful” (KA 5:41). Atheists, Tantrikas and Brahmos also received their share of Ramakrishna’s disdain. His attacks on atheists are particularly interesting, for those he refers to

comparative mystics

141

were in fact Brahmos (JU 102) and Vedantins (JU 62). In one scene, for example, an “atheist” has left, and Ramakrishna tells disciples to throw the bed the man sat on in the river and sprinkle the room with Ganges water. Both Saradananda and Datta, moreover, record scenes in which Ramakrishna describes a group of meditating Brahmos, those famous social and religious reformers of nineteenth-century Bengal, as “a troop of monkeys” (LP 5.1.1.6; JV 5, 72), acting out a religious practice for which they have no ability or promise. His treatment of Tantrikas was not always much better, even if it was generally less expensive in terms of beds. He seems in these passages content simply to ridicule (KA 2:142) or make fun (KA 2:141) of those “branded thieves” (KA 3:52). Obviously, then, Ramakrishna’s comparative mystics cannot be accurately represented as the simple ecumenism or universalism that it is usually understood to be. Combining a remarkable appreciation of diverse religious systems and a critical edge derived from his own Hindu sensibilities, he developed a sophisticated dialectical ontology that allowed for both appreciation and critique. The ontology is fundamental. What is the ocean into which all rivers empty, the water about which all languages speak, the roof up to which all passageways lead, or the sun that all time pieces erringly follow? Ramakrishna is maddeningly complex on these questions; and commentators, myself included, have argued for over a century about his answers. In my own understanding, Ramakrishna generally rejected the mayavada or “doctrine of illusion” of Advaita Vedanta, preferring instead to see the phenomenal world as a physical embodiment of the divine. Tinii sab hoechen (She herself [or He himself] has become everything), he often taught. Hence the world could be called a “matting of illusion” only in the middle stage of spiritual practice; further down the path, one would learn to see the phenomenal world as a “mansion of fun” in which to take delight in the omnipresence and essential bliss of the divine. This was the “dialectical gnosis” (vijnana) of the Hindu Tantra that embraced both transcendent Consciousness (the god Shiva) and immanent Energy (the goddess Sakti) as ontologically bound or—more traditionally, in iconography and meditation— sexually united.

142

peace and mind

Still within this same erotic, bipolar, or dialectical gnosis, Ramakrishna was enamored of the tradition of Ramprasad, an eighteenth-century Shakta poet whose lyrics were constantly on Ramakrishna’s lips and who famously sang that he had no desire to become sugar but would rather taste its sweetness. So too, Ramakrishna much preferred the sweet states of divinehuman encounter—devotion (bhakti) and love (prema)—over the metaphysical absolutes of nirvana and brahman, though he recognized these latter as fundamental dimensions of the divine pleroma.23 He would sometimes make this case in terms of the traditional categories of form (sakara) and formlessness (nirakara): the formless waters of consciousness take on distinct forms through the freezing force of devotion and are melted by the hot “sun of gnosis of brahman” (KA 5:170–71). He did not, then, simply recognize devotional differences. He preferred them, even as he recognized that only brahman is absolute. Still another approach to this point—the approach taken in Vivekananda’s English lectures as quoted in these same appendices— is by way of the modern category of experience.24 Here, the argument is that differences in doctrine flow at least partly from psychological differences and the stunningly various subjective experiences that individuals have had of the divine. The bottom line is personal religious experience, to which Ramakrishna referred in Bengali as anubhava (experience or experiential replication), bhava (state, mood, mode of being, ecstasy, or spiritual orientation), isvaradarsana (vision of God), or isvaralabha (attainment of God). Vivekananda and the English commentators tend to translate these terms as “spirituality” (KA 5:156), the “realization of God” (KA 5:157), or simply “these experiences” (KA 5:159). When Ramakrishna or Vivekananda, then, claims that “all religions are true,” he is asserting that all religions provide effective means to experience subjectively and directly the divine ground of all religions. As Vivekananda writes: “Religion does not consist in doctrines or dogmas… . The end of all religions is the realization of God in the soul. Ideals and methods may differ but that is the central point” (KA 5:156). With this logic, one religion has no grounds on which to accuse another of malpractice—of “idolatry”: .

comparative mystics

143

“If a man can realize his divine nature most easily with the help of an image, would it be right to call it a sin?” (KA 5:172). Furthermore, “if one creed alone were to be true and all the others untrue, you would have again to say that religion is diseased. If one religion is true, all the others must be true. Thus the Hindu religion is your property as well as mine” (KA 5:153). In the end, it is experience, and not creed, that matters. A More Historical and Critical View It is necessary now to step back from hagiography and the canonical tradition in order to better understand Ramakrishna’s experiments with Hindu, Muslim, and Christian devotion and to isolate aspects that may be applicable in other times and contexts. The canonical reading of his comparative experiments grounds them in a form of Advaita Vedanta or, perhaps, neo-Vedanta that Vivekananda privileged in his lectures as the orthodox hermeneutic for reading his guru’s life and as the basis for his own social reforms. However, there is little, if any, historical precedent in India for grounding either a universal ecumenism like Ramakrishna’s or a social consciousness like Vivekananda’s in classical Advaita Vedanta; quite the contrary, this particular philosophical tradition has historically been quite polemical toward competing religious visions and has been fundamentally ascetic in its attitude toward the social world, which it generally seeks to renounce along Indian lines rather than reform along Western lines.25 We need to look elsewhere for the immediate sources of Ramakrishna’s comparative practices. Those immediate (Bengali) sources are Hindu and Tantric. Ramakrishna’s teachings were part of a long Shakta tradition that drew on ancient tendencies in Indian thought to relativize opposing beliefs and traditions by including them in a more encompassing hierarchical framework. Ramakrishna was fully aware of this legacy when he paraphrased the Rg Veda to support his own position: “The Lord is one, though his names are many” (KA 5:14). But while this legacy was ancient, the manner in which Ramakrishna appropriated it owed much to more contemporary influences, especially

144

peace and mind

the Bengali Shakta tradition and its poet-singers. Thus, his Shakta reworking of the ancient Vedic ideal: “The Power [sakti] is one, its names are many” (JV 91). For example, Ramprasad in the eighteenth century sang to his unkempt Kali as the essence of all the gods and goddesses: “Kali, Krishna, Shiva, and Rama—they are all my WildHaired One.”26 He sang as well of the “madhouse” of the world where “Jesus, Moses, and Caitanya were unconscious in the ecstasy of love.”27 That Shakta poets such as Ramprasad saw Kali as the actress behind the world’s religious masks suggests that, even in his universalism, Ramakrishna was a Shakta, a child of the goddess. The same lesson could be learned by considering this version of his mata-patha doctrine: “There are as many paths as there are opinions. All religions are true, just as the Kali Temple can be reached by different paths” (KA 5:161).28 Where the paths lead, it seems, is as important as their obvious number. They are all “true,” after all, because they all lead to the same place—to the goddess. Again: “That which the Vedas call Parabrahman, he calls Kali. He whom the Muslims call Allah and the Christians call God, he calls Kali” (KA 1:236). This is she “who makes love to Shiva,” the latter being the formless brahman (KA 5:170). Even Ramakrishna’s canonical biographer, Swami Saradananda, acknowledges the Shakta roots of Ramakrishna’s universalism by asserting that it was Kali who “produced in his mind the liberal faith, ‘as many faiths so many paths’.”29 There is, then, something profoundly Tantric—and thus context-specific—about Ramakrishna’s universalism. It is hardly the blissful but abstract brahman of Vivekananda, his most famous expositor. The universal ground of Ramakrishna is closer to the midnight darkness where “black forms blend with one another” and “all jackals howl in the same way” (LP 4.4.30).30 The Shakta nature of this spirituality is “deeper,” more “inward,” than its common Shaiva or Vaishnava expressions. As a popular Bengali proverb puts it, “inside a Shakta, outside a Shaiva, on the mouth Hari, Hari,” which might be paraphrased: “Speak as a devotee of Krishna and act like a devotee of Shiva in public, but in your heart worship the goddess as a Shakta.”31 The Shakta nature of Ramakrishna’s experiments also becomes evident when

comparative mystics

145

we notice that he consistently prays to Kali before taking up any foreign path; he asks for her permission and also prays to her while engaged in foreign practices. Early (and largely ignored) biographers such as Satyacharan Mitra are clear about Ramakrishna’s Shakta orientation: “Ramakrishna Paramahamsa practiced according to many teachings, but the view of the Tantras was his primary view. He was really in the tradition of the Tantras! He obtain[ed] the supernormal powers [siddhi]. This sadhana was the marrow of his sadhana’s body” (JU 72).32 Mitra also tells us that Ramakrishna saw and understood the “Kali-state [Kali-bhava], not the Krishna-, Rama- or Shiva-states” (JU 61). According to such early observers, Ramakrishna’s universalism was an expression of his Shaktism; the neo-Vedantic reading of Vivekananda and the canonical tradition come later.33 Ramakrishna’s own visions often follow the same pattern. He was reported as seeing Kali in the form of a disciple’s mother, a woman whom he described as an orthodox and closed-minded Vaishnava.34 The woman’s Vaishnavism and bigotry are superficial. “Inside” she is a Shakta, indeed the goddess incarnate, despite her outward or surface Vaishnava self-understanding. The same logic is at work in another scene, this one recorded in Mitra’s Jivana o Upadesa (JU 145–46). “At this time,” Mitra tells us, “the big [Christian] preachers of Calcutta were going with Keshab Chandra Sen to see Ramakrishna.” The scene is thus set in a context of confrontation. Mitra opens the story by relating how a guileless Englishman named William told Ramakrishna that “Jesus showed us many miraculous things.” Then William asked: “Can you show us any?” In the Kathamrita scenes, Ramakrishna is quite clear about his inability to perform such feats, but here Mitra has him obliging his Christian inquirer in spectacular fashion. Ramakrishna asks William to “come and see my Kali-Ma from a distance just once.” When William obliges his host, he is amazed to see that the image of Jesus appeared in the place of the Kali image. After this display, Ramakrishna asks the astounded Christian, “How is that? Did you not see that my Kali is who your Jesus Christ is?” The scene ends with William grabbing Ramakrishna’s feet—an act of humble devotion—

146

peace and mind

and taking up the Hindu “dharma of renunciation” somewhere in the mountains. William’s taking refuge at Ramakrishna’s feet is the ritual expression of what amounts to a conversion story: the story of a conversion from Christianity to Hinduism. Once again, the Shakta goddess is the focus of confrontation and symbolic resolution. She dissolves religious forms into their deeper (Tantric) energies. Alongside these Tantric visionary resolutions of religious difference we can also easily detect a set of indigenous “deconstructive” techniques that function to melt down the stiff boundaries between all the gods and goddesses into a deeper and more fluid unity, and here the debt to Advaita Vedanta is a real one. Ramakrishna may have found these apophatic techniques too dry or boring for his own personal devotional tastes, but this does not mean that he dismissed them as unimportant. Quite the contrary, in numerous places in the Bengali texts, Ramakrishna’s metaphors and teachings employ a kind of deconstruction, suggesting in effect that all religious beliefs or attitudes are products of the environment and the mind’s ability to take on the “color” or “dye” of its immediate surroundings: “The mind takes on the color of whatever color it is dyed in. The mind is the cloth of the dyer’s room” (KA 5:119). Hence if one meditates on God, the mind takes on the colors, as it were, of God, and if one engages in worldly activities, the mind changes accordingly. What we have here, in other words, is a metaphorical understanding of what we would today call “constructionism.” What separates Ramakrishna’s constructionism, however, from most contemporary forms is that he saw a deeper “mind” or “heart” (mana) beneath all of these “colorful” constructions, a mind-heart that was in turn ultimately rooted in the nature of a universal consciousness (cit or brahman) that transcends and undergirds all forms of human culture and religion. The Western Catalyst In accounting for Ramakrishna’s religious universalism, we must add to the Tantric and Advaita Vedantic influences on him a distinctively Western catalyst, effective for some decades in Bengal. Stimulated by strands of Western social and religious thought, and

comparative mystics

147

also by Islam, Rammohun Roy, a Bengali reformer (often called “the father of modern India”), argued that Hinduism had in the time of the Upanishads experienced a golden age of monotheism that had since been corrupted by polytheist practices. In 1828 Roy instituted a Society of Brahman that would function as a monotheistic religion for middle-class, English-educated Indians and serve as their reply to Christian condescension. Roy’s brand of Brahmoism displays real similarities (and some later historical connections) to Christianity, and especially to Unitarianism, which was developing in Boston at roughly this same time. Satyacharan Mitra, for example, writing in 1896, suggested that the “state” or “mood” (bhava) of the Brahmos was the “Christ-bhava” (JU 87). Though Roy’s advent as a Hindu reformer is said to have put fear in the hearts of Christians (JU 107), it is clear that Western Transcendentalists and Unitarians found in Roy’s religion an exemplar of their own faith, one of the most impressive before Ramakrishna. Mitra, for example, insisted that the influence of Roy and other Brahmo monotheists on Ramakrisha was immense and that the Brahmo teachings had in fact inspired Ramakrishna’s own “practice of all the religions” (JU 108).35 This seemingly obvious connection between Brahmo universalism and Ramakrishna’s religious experiments gave rise to a very long controversy between the Brahmos and Ramakrishna’s followers over who influenced whom. Keshab Sen (a leader in the Society of Brahman, who broke away to found his own group) so identified Christianity with religious authority that he claimed Ramakrishna was a reincarnation of John the Baptist (a claim that implicitly identified himself as the new messiah) (KA 2:102). The textual evidence, however, is far more humble, even as it affirms Mitra’s observation that Ramakrishna was affected by Roy and Christianity, although Ramakrishna was, as I have already observed, resistant as well as open to non-Hindu religious forms. Keshab, it turns out, was sometimes more open to the religious “other” than Ramakrishna was. Ramakrishna, for example, actually pressed Keshab to return, late in life, to “the names of Hari and Ma” (KA 4:239).36 As for himself, Keshab had set up an impressive academic program in which he assigned disciples to prolonged

148

peace and mind

textual study of various religious traditions in original languages, a much more extensive version of Ramakrishna’s simpler, if more famous, comparative experiments.37 While the Brahmos and the Calcutta culture they did so much to form provided the context for Ramakrishna’s experimental universalism, he himself led the Brahmos from their “Christ-bhava” and its social gospel back to the “Mother-bhava” and worship of the goddess (JU 87). This implicit rejection of Brahmo universalism for a more traditional Hindu identity appears again in a story about the Brahmo whom Ramakrishna converted: “He left the Brahmo Society and practiced sadhana according to the Hindu way” (JU 94). It was later canonical interpreters who identified Ramakrishna’s inclusivism and religious tolerance as the primary reason he had “descended” into the world as the modern incarnation of God (avatara). He came to combine the Hindu, Christian, and Muslim into a single harmonious community in the very center of all the world’s religions, even if that center was already an unstable one. Ramakrishna and the Comparativist The modern comparative study of religion cannot be reduced to a ritual repetition of Ramakrishna’s visionary explorations. Historically, his Indian experiments were products of the same broad global forces that resulted in the earlier Indian experiments of Rammohun Roy, Keshab Sen, and the Brahmo Society, and of the earlier and simultaneous Western phenomena of European and English Romanticism, American Transcendentalism, the Theosophical Society (founded in 1875 in New York), the grand comparative theorizing and cross-cultural editing of Max Müller and his Sacred Books of the East translation series, and the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. (Significantly, it was this last event that more or less created the fame and public persona of Swami Vivekananda, Ramakrishna’s missionary to the West.) As for the sense that all religions share a common core, that was a very old idea, first clearly articulated in Europe in 1540 by Agostino Steuco in line with the neo-Platonism of Marsilio Ficino. Ficino held, Steuco

comparative mystics

149

believed (but the words here are Sedgwick’s), that “all religions shared a common origin in a single perennial (or primeval or primordial) religion that had subsequently taken a variety of forms, including the Zoroastrian, Pharaonic, Platonic, and Christian.”38 Thus modernity and what I am calling “comparative mystics” were born together in the West, interestingly at the same time that they were being similarly explored in north India at the court of Akbar. The European project would crash on the rocks of historical criticism: in 1614 Isaac Casaubon showed persuasively that the Corpus Hermeticum, which perennialists read as a Mosaic text prophetic of their own Christian-Platonic synthesis, had been written centuries after Platonism and Christianity became established worldviews.39 For the next century and a half, perennialism would linger, surviving in French Masonic lodges, before its renewal in an explicit linkage with Hindu inclusivism. This move was announced first in 1799 when Reuben Burrow connected Hinduism, Hermes, and Moses in a deeply eccentric essay in Asiatick Researches, the journal of the Asiatick Society of Bengal, which had done much to introduce India to the West.40 That Indo-Hermetic-Mosaic synthesis (Sedgwick terms it a “Vedanta Perennialism”) is still with us. For our present purposes, perhaps what matters is that this stream is the one into which Mircea Eliade waded (he wrote his M.A. thesis on Ficino and his Ph.D. dissertation on the “mysticism” of yoga) in order to create space for a modern study of religion that is neither answerable to Christian (or any other) theology nor quite reducible to the social sciences. Eliade, in other words, did more than any other comparativist to transform perennialism into scholarship and a new way of thinking about religion.41 Obviously, we are not dealing here with a cause-and-effect relationship or a debate over what culture created which; rather, we are dealing with a shared global history and a set of verisimilar responses. Still, it is also the case that the legacy of Ramakrishna in the history of religious studies is both originary and intimate. Max Müller, the founding father, or perhaps grandfather, of comparative religion corresponded with Vivekananda, for example, and wrote the first English biography of Ramakrishna, though it would take

150

peace and mind

nearly a hundred years for Müller’s historical-critical questions and doubts about the hagiographical tradition to be taken seriously.42 The second major Western biography was written by Romain Rolland, the Nobel laureate in literature who initiated the psychoanalytic theory of mysticism by sending his dual biographies of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda to Sigmund Freud.43 A bit later, a young Joseph Campbell would help Swami Nikhilananda edit his 1942 English translation of the Kathamrta, the now-classic Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna; and Campbell would moreover make Ramakrishna’s Shakta Tantra the teleological summation of Indian philosophy in his ghostwriting of Heinrich Zimmer’s influential Philosophies of India. Little wonder, then, that to this day Ramakrishna’s presence is invoked as exemplary of a type of spiritual pluralism championed by a wide range of popular writers and practitioners. He has been a presence in American religious history for well over a century. Perhaps, then, I can be forgiven for taking Ramakrishna’s experiments as an archetype of the kind of comparative mystics that denies the ultimacy of cultural and ethnic differences while celebrating their psychological necessity. (It is more usual to take his comparative experiments as an ambiguous textual complexity to unravel using historical-critical and psychological methods, or else as the last word on the relationship of world religions.) Ramakrishna’s variety of comparative mystics, moreover, grounds both denial and celebration in an ontology of human being (however defined). Every one of Ramakrishna’s archetypal experiments (with the various theistic traditions of Hinduism, with Advaita Vedanta, with Tantra, with Christianity, and with Islam) possesses fantastically rich and elaborate histories in Western scholarship. His Shiva, Krishna, and Kali, for example, have each enjoyed a long history of engagement and hermeneutical encounter with Indology, and even a sort of intellectual devotion. Moreover, scholarly work on Hindu-Christian and Hindu-Muslim relations has deepened in insight as volume after volume has appeared on the violent injustices of British colonialism in India, on various Christian and Hindu experiments in dialogue and global theology, on the rich history of Sufism in India as a mediating force between Islam and Hinduism, and on the historical,

comparative mystics

151

structural, and psychological animosity that has defined relations between Hindus and Muslims and, to a lesser extent, Hindus and Christians in historical and contemporary India. Modern historicalcritical scholarship has arrived at some new answers to all of these questions and cannot finally agree with Ramakrishna’s belief that “all paths lead to the same goal.” Yet scholars have nevertheless chosen to engage all of the religious forms represented in Ramakrishna’s archetypal experiments. The saint may not always convince us with his particular metaphysical solutions, but he knew where the problems lay (and still lie), and he was not afraid to confront them head on as specifically problems of religion. The Critical Study of Religion as a Modern Mystical Tradition The origins of the discipline of religious studies in nineteenthcentury Europe are not primarily mystical or even religious. A highly developed secular sense is a sine qua non of the discipline and its social sustainability anywhere on the planet (hence its virtual absence outside the Western academy). I would like, though, to make a restricted and heterodox case that regarding the discipline as a modern mystical tradition could be useful in approaching the constructive tasks under discussion in this symposium. I am not suggesting that the discipline must or even should be read in this way. Rather, I wish to make the more restricted, but no less unorthodox, case that some of the discipline’s practices and practitioners—those capable of forging a mystical-critical practice out of the discipline’s dual Romantic/Enlightenment heritage—can be read in this way. Moreover, a mystical-critical rereading of the discipline might be useful for the constructive tasks under discussion here: namely, the cross-cultural influence of religious systems in pursuit of a safer, more humane, and more religiously satisfying world. Scholars of religion, it turns out, often have profound religious experiences reading and interpreting the texts they critically study, and these events have consequences for the methods and models they develop, the conclusions they come to, and even the traditions they study.44 Given what is often personally, professionally, and religiously

152

peace and mind

at stake in these events, it perhaps should not surprise us that such writers commonly hide these secret (mustikos) experiences from their peers and readers through a variety of rhetorical and esoteric strategies. Historians of religions, in other words, are often closet mystics, if we allow ourselves to redefine mystic in an untraditional— that is, modern—way. Steven Wasserstrom has recently substantiated a thesis of this kind with respect to Eliade, Henri Corbin, and Gershom Scholem, three giants in the field.45 Eliade hinted that he had stepped “out of space and time” while studying yoga as a young Indologist and had later camouflaged his mystical experiences in a supernatural novella about the siddhi or superpower of invisibility.46 Scholem too “longed for mystical experience”47 and spoke of his own “genius” as an “inner compass,” like Socrates’ daimonion, that guided his spiritual quest.48 Scholem saw his massive scholarly output in mystical terms, as the expression of a desire to penetrate “through the wall of history” and “into the essence of things.”49 But the atemporal mystical truth, “whose existence disappears particularly when it is projected into historical time,” became visible for Scholem solely in “the legitimate discipline of commentary and in the singular mirror of philological criticism.”50 As for Corbin, he followed the example of his mentor Louis Massignon, who during a suicide attempt in the desert of Iraq converted back to Catholicism in the ghostly presence of his dissertation subject, the tenth-century Sufi al-Hallaj. Corbin similarly claimed that an eleventh-century Sufi master, Suhrawardi, had personally initiated and transmitted teachings to him while he was absorbed in Suhrawardi’s writings.51 In a similar spirit again, Daniel Gold has recently studied for us some of the aesthetic dimensions of writing and reading in the modern study of religion and in what he calls the “religiohistorical sublime”—that is, that experience of the abyss or the transcendentas-limit often evoked by the writings of historians of religion and commonly experienced by their sensitive readers. Invoking Kant’s notion of the sublime, Gold argues that the ambivalent experience of beauty and fear readers often encounter in works of scholarship arises from their (correct) sense that something profound is being

comparative mystics

153

communicated, and that this something, if taken seriously, will effectively dissolve the assumed certainties of the reader’s own lifeworld. The result in the individual is often transport—followed by fear. This same ambivalence is doubled, moreover, by the ambivalence of the scholars themselves, who, more often than not, are both attracted to the beauty and depth of religious language and profoundly uncomfortable with its unjustified claims to absolute truth. As heirs of both Enlightenment reason and Romantic imagination, such scholars are being true to their deepest cultural legacies and intellectual conclusions.52 On “Mysticism” as a Modern Term of Art Another way of observing this pattern is through a genealogy of the category of mysticism itself. This eminently modern category— or rather, construction—amounts to a celebration of premodern forms of consciousness and writing as reviewed (to quote Wouter Hanegraaff) “in the mirror of secular thought.”53 Although the category of mysticism has precedents reaching back as far as the eighteenth century in England (where, in its first appearance, it already signaled a sublimated feminine eroticism),54 the seventeenth century in France,55 and—at least in adjectival form—the ancient Mediterranean world,56 the noun as used today was more or less born in June, 1902, when William James published The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature.57 Significantly, James wrote this text in part out of his own experiments with nitrous oxide and parapsychological phenomena, which he approached with great philosophical seriousness and a quite radical empiricism. Put more baldly, mysticism, rather than being an ancient category easily found in all religions in all times, derives its modern salience from a mystically inclined Harvard professor and parapsychologist speaking in Scotland whose published lectures have since been read by countless other scholars of religion (and practitioners) and subsequently developed into a coherent, often quite popular idea that we know by the name James gave it. It should hardly surprise us, then, that the modern study of religion displays numerous qualities

154

peace and mind

or dimensions that can be classified as a modern or postmodern mysticism: the discipline, after all, created that term, partly no doubt to capture its own implicit interests, goals, and forms of consciousness. Put most simply, mysticism and the modern study of religion are inseparable because they are largely about the same set of modernist and now postmodernist convictions, forms of self-reflexivity, and theoretical approaches to religious plurality. Mysticism is our response to the same global forces and epistemological problems that produced Ramakrishna’s experiments. It is our chosen sadhana, our own comparative mystics. But I do not myself want to define the term “mystical” as replicating bhava, brahman, or samadhi, as Ramakrishna used those words.58 Sometimes explained as a particular state of consciousness or a collection of psychological experiences reserved for extraordinary individuals, mysticism is better defined (so the theologian Don Cupitt has shown) as a discipline of writing. It is a necessarily subversive hermeneutical practice that works in the here and now to “melt down” the dualisms of orthodoxy established (so mystics hold) to delay salvation, liberation, or enlightenment interminably. So defined, the mystical is fundamentally opposed to all forms of institutional mediation. The religious and implicitly political critiques advanced by mystics tend to be compromised as their writings are appropriated by the orthodox authorities of their traditions. Censorship, including self-censorship, is a part of any writing practice that describes itself as secret, esoteric, or mustikos. But the radicalism remains, as the censorship is usually incomplete or half-hearted, and the secret is often more or less public. We have, then, a pair of explanations for the esoteric nature of mystical discourse: The reason why mystics use language in the strange ways they do is twofold: on the one hand, they are trying to play games with language in such a way as to destabilize structures of religious oppression that are firmly built into language… . But, on the other hand, they are acutely conscious of being surrounded by enemies who will seize

comparative mystics

155

upon a careless word and use it to destroy them…. If a mystic’s writing sometimes appears far-fetched or fanciful, the reason is not that he or she is a soulful eccentric with idiosyncratic ideas about heavenly matters, but rather that religious utterance is surrounded by very severe pressures and threats of a political kind.59 Among the most striking examples of this phenomenon is the writing of William Blake, that “witness against the Beast” whose weird poetic-political visions literary critics have read as a radical’s coded critique of imperialism and monarchy.60 At the end of his long history of religious studies, Walter Capps turns to consider “what turmoil William Blake’s insights would create for the methodological conceptualization of standard religious studies. How could any of them be fitted to any coherent scheme, or, if they were, would they remain what they were originally? Why is the mentality of the technician sanctioned in religious studies while the attitude of the artist is treated with suspicion?”61 In light of my previous remarks about mystical writing as a form of art and esoteric politics, we should perhaps be asking a different question: In what ways and modes is the modern study of religion already Blakean in character? A standard way of resisting the visionary tendencies of scholarship in this field is to pose still another question as the basis of wholesome training and methodology: What is the proper relationship between the study of religions and the religions studied? Historically, this question has been asked (and unfortunately answered) with reference to the categories of the “insider” and the “outsider.” Who makes the better scholar? The insider has been acculturated into the ritual, doctrinal, and mythical intimacies of a religious tradition and so can better describe its feel and meanings; and yet because of that intimacy, the insider can lack the critical edge or emotional distance necessary for reductive analysis and for asking embarrassing questions. The outsider, on the other hand, may lack a natural feel for the tradition studied and so miss much of the detail and subtleties, but distance provides resources for asking questions and for arriving at independent answers.

156

peace and mind

Back and forth the discussion has gone for nearly a century, with no resolution in sight.62 I do not want to enter, at least not directly, into this debate here, as I think its very terms preclude its resolution: “insider” and “outsider,” after all, are binary categories that imply opposition and thus tension. Dialectical tension may be basic to intellectual or ethical progress (“without Contraries [there] is no progression,” Blake writes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell), but I would suggest that we understand the tension as emblematic of a deeper relationship—as a marriage, to use Blake’s metaphor again. Ironically, the metaphors of the “inside” and “outside” themselves already imply a resolution, as they imply a single container that may be experienced differently from different viewpoints. The study of religion occupies a liminal and problematic place in the modern university because, as a hermeneutic discipline suited to understanding and appreciating religious experience, it often looks (and sometimes really is) religious. But as a social-scientific practice suited to observing the political, social, economic, psychological, and sexual aspects of religious phenomena, the academic study of religion will appear irreligious to pious believers. Remove either pole of this paradox and the discipline collapses. For the sake of simplification, I would put the point in counterstructural terms: I see the relationship of the critical study of religion to religion as very roughly analogous with that of the apophatic mystical traditions to the religions from which they developed and in which they historically flourished. In other words, the critical study of religion is to religion as mystical deconstruction is to orthodox creed, ritual, or law. Early Christian antinomianism (in relation to first-century Jewish purity codes), the psychologized biblical hermeneutics of early Jewish and Christian gnostics (in relation to the more literal readings of the Jewish and Christian orthodox communities), the transgressive erotics of the Hindu Tantra (in relation to the Brahmanical dharma, caste, and purity codes), some forms of radical Sufism (in relation to the Islam of the ulama), medieval kabbalah (in relation to rabbinic Judaism), and the academic study of religion today (in relation to the religions studied) appear to share a set of practices. Each mystical

comparative mystics

157

mode evidences a type of intellectualism bordering upon a type of nihilism, and each prescribes transgressive acts designed to reveal the socially constructed nature of presumed religious reality. Each mode, moreover, sponsors an erotic hermeneutics (gnostic, Tantric, Sufi, Taoist, and kabbalistic erotics make Freud’s insights into the connection between sexuality and religion appear prosaic)—and each mode mounts a philosophical critique of dogma, the result of which is often censorship or actual persecution by the orthodox authorities of its own counterculture. Scholars of comparative religion have grouped these countercultures under the heading “mysticism” because they intuit in all of them a not-yet-fully articulated or understood form of consciousness that they themselves to an extent share. The structural resonances between mystical and critical hermeneutic practices explain why the study of mysticism has been central to the modern study of religion. In effect, modern scholars have privileged what they have identified with themselves and thus understood. But the comparativist’s unacknowledged normative aim—a kind of esoteric universal humanism—is also at work in this context. The differences among and between the orthodox forms of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are very great, and their mystical subcultures are inextricably involved in the traditions from which they emerged. But those subcultures can seem to be uncannily similar to each other, at least in structure. Each routinely transgresses the binary categories of its own orthodox culture. The mysticisms are thus viewed by modern scholarship as similar in hermeneutic practice, if not in metaphysical substance. This perception on the part of religious comparativists may help explain why nineteenthcentury Western intellectuals were so attracted to the “mystic East”: not always to colonize it, as is often assumed (although that was happening too), but more often to draw inspiration and strength for their own subversions of normative Western culture. And indeed, what in the end could be more subversive of Christian exclusivism and the cultural arrogance of Christendom than the realization that there are other great world religions—”other Europes,” as Schwab put it—with dramatically different deities, forms of salvation, and

158

peace and mind

coherent ethical systems? The plurality of high cultures and great religions was established as a fact of social science, and as a result ideas like “saved,” “chosen,” and “damned” became suspect within even insular varieties of Western religion. Here too we can better understand why the comparative study of religion grew markedly in the countercultural 1960s (the American Academy of Religion, by far the largest organization of its kind in the world, was founded in 1964), and why so many Asianists who grew up in this climate ultimately turned to Hindu and Buddhist forms of Tantra—to Asian countercultures—as their chosen specialization: echoes of counterculture answer one another and then harmonize across space and time. Perhaps not accidentally, this period also signaled the high point of Freud’s popularity in American intellectual life and the definitive entrance of feminism into popular consciousness; sex was an order of the day. The same decade (it was 1965) saw the lifting of the Asian Exclusion Act (of 1924), transforming the shape of American religious pluralism.63 Most established scholars of religion, I would hazard, were first introduced to Hinduism and Buddhism in this countercultural, existential, and eroticized context. Little wonder, then, that so many contemporary Buddhist practitioners found their first taste of enlightenment in psychedelic states.64 In the end, it is American counterculture, not British colonialism, that best explains the origins, dynamics, and enduring interests of the academic field of comparative religion— our own “comparative mystics.” The Scandal of Comparison There is one sense at least in which the modern study of religion is more radical than its mystical precursors. The academic field of comparative religion recognizes no specific orthodoxy for subversion: it cannot recognize the authority of any particular religion. A Christian who is offended by the Jesus Seminar and its historicalcritical methods (“Jesus probably said almost none of this”) would scarcely blink at scholarship of the kind applied to the Qur’an or to a Hindu scripture. Similarly, the Muslim or Hindu who rejects

comparative mystics

159

psychological or sociological methods applied to Islamic or Indic materials as “neocolonialist” or “Orientalist” is either unaware that the same methods have been applied very extensively to Christianity and Judaism for nearly two centuries, or else, if aware, could not care less. In either case, the believer himself may selectively use criticalhistorical methods to debunk religious worldviews other than his or her own. The true scandal of religious studies lies not in what any particular work of scholarship has to say about any particular religious belief, practice, or community, but rather in the discipline’s implied insistence that all religious phenomena, without exception, are fruitfully approached as human products and studied with the same literary and social-scientific methods. The egalitarianism of religious studies, as currently pursued (especially in the United States), denies the ultimacy and authority of any local truth or practice and the primacy of any religious community; and academic religious scholarship finds all claims to primacy or authority interesting subjects of historical, anthropological, and psychological investigation. While each religious orthodoxy denies the claims of other orthodoxies, and while mystical countercultures subvert many claims of the religions from which they derive, academics in religious studies today subvert the claims of all religions, first and foremost the Western monotheisms of Judaism and Christianity from which the critical study of religion historically arose. Framing the modern study of religion as a counterculture with nothing in particular to counter is not unproblematic, of course. Steven Wasserstrom has expressed suspicion of the paradoxical phenomenon he calls “religion after religion” and has criticized what he describes as the discipline’s “mystocentrism.” Academic religious studies, in other words, are in his view fixated inappropriately on mysticism and mythology while showing inadequate interest in orthodox creeds, as well as ethics, ritual, and the mundane workings of religion in society.65 Still, how does one go back to believing the unbelievable? The virgin birth of Jesus, the childhood exploits of Krishna, the night journey of Muhammad, and the burning bush of Moses may be central truths of Christianity, Hinduism, Islam,

160

peace and mind

and Judaism, but they are rather obviously myths to those who stand outside those traditions. How is a scholar of comparative religion to forget this simple and obvious point? On the other hand, I do want to support Wasserstrom’s other key argument about the ethical liabilities of mysticism and the troubling political affiliations of many who have made it their life’s study: the absolute collapse of difference within mystical monism does not lend itself to an adequate ethics or to vibrant social critique.66 Wasserstrom has rightly reminded us that mysticism, gnosticism, and fascism are by no means incompatible.67 But these dangers should be remote so long as we keep the premodern elements of mysticism tied to the critical and reductionist methods of the social sciences (something that Eliade, Corbin, and, above all, René Guenon failed to do).68 Where Wasserstrom and other like-minded colleagues want to move the discipline more fully toward pure reason—to make it more academic in every sense—my interest is more in moving it beyond the faith/reason distinction into a new kind of gnosis and into less predictable forms of argument and expression. What I have in mind is the kind of work done by Abdelwahab Meddeb in his recent book The Malady of Islam. Here the author consistently turns to the Sufism of the Indian Akbarian tradition,69 particularly as it was elaborated in the framework of the esoteric sciences of Ibn ‘Arabi (1164–1240)—“the Andalusian master who recommended being ‘hyle so that all beliefs can take form within you…[and who had] the capacity to internalize all forms of beliefs and to progress with their truth without trying to reduce them or make them disappear.”70 Meddeb’s aim is to subject the archaisms, criminal monstrosities, and gross contradictions of Islamic fundamentalism to criteria fully established in the Islamic tradition—a move that supports my claim that one of our best hopes for cross-cultural influence lies in the mystical traditions of our religions with their radical hermeneutic practices and pluralistic sensibilities. The same, moreover, could be said about Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Tikkun magazine and community, which have worked to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by invoking mystical themes linked to hard-nosed political criticism. Lerner is explicit about his debts to Jewish mysticism.71

comparative mystics

161

Such moves are not in themselves sufficient, and we should not neglect the labor of analyzing and correcting the grossly obvious injustices and imbalances of international relations or even take off the table the card of military intervention. Meddeb, for example, is highly critical of American foreign policy in the Middle East, but he does not exclude the possibility, even necessity, of military action in some cases. Nor does he make the mistake of laying all blame on America and Europe for what he calls “the malady of Islam,” a “sickness” that has done much to lay waste to a once gorgeous, sensual, pluralistic, and sophisticated civilization, now resentful and “inconsolable in its destitution.” Meddeb understands and embraces the broader historical context—the rise of modernity and the Enlightenment, and the internal failures of Islam to answer or fully participate in them—and then goes on to develop a richly dialectical model of Islam as an intimate partner of the West and its history. In other words, he enacts another mystical denial of difference. Perhaps, then, what I am offering here, to continue with the political or diplomatic context, is a kind of “track-two diplomacy,” a term coined by the diplomat Joseph Montville to evoke all those cultural, scientific, and personal exchanges between nations that seldom make the news but nevertheless have real effects. In an important essay that Montville coauthored in 1982 with William Davidson, they defined track-two diplomacy as “unofficial, non-structured interaction. It is always open minded, often altruistic, and…strategically optimistic, based on best case analysis. Its underlying assumption is that actual or potential conflict can be resolved or eased by appealing to common human capabilities to respond to good will and reasonableness.”72 Although no substitute for traditional track-one diplomacy with its “carrots and sticks,” track-two diplomacy has its own genius and role to play in international relations. I am not offering a cureall solution, nor even a primary response to religious violence and enmity. But a gnostic track-two diplomacy that explores the hermeneutical and countercultural resources of opposed traditions may have irenic consequences.

162

peace and mind

The Gnostic Study of Religion Aspects of the Asian traditions (particularly some nationalist or communal dimensions of contemporary Hinduism) may presently be suffering historical amnesia with respect to their own subversive and erotic dimensions—no doubt brought on by the historical sickness of colonialism against which they still feel a need to be immunized. But all of these Asian traditions are rich in the sorts of mystical resources I have been discussing. If this generalization is even approximately true, then for any cross-cultural bridge we construct, the most difficult foundational work will need to be done on the Western side. We will have to struggle with Western exclusivism in all its modes: theological, cultural, and political, and in particular against the monotheistic tendency to “smash the idols” and deny the truths of others. Such a task, however, will require better informed cultural memories and less belligerent intellectual and imaginative practices. Christians, Muslims, and Jews need to approach the problem together with cultural resources that, happily, they share in the interrelated mystical traditions of the Bible, gnosticism, and Neoplatonism. The potential of a modern critical gnosticism seems especially worth exploring. Gilles Quispel has suggested that Western culture possesses three ways of understanding—faith, reason, and gnosis—and that the third (knowledge that comes from intuitive, visionary, or mystical experience of the divine, rather than from either faith or reason) has been the least developed.73 The study of religion shares in a dual heritage deriving from the Enlightenment, with its suspicious and rational approach to religion, and from the Romantic movement, with its apotheosis of the imagination; and there are many forms of study that privilege one or the other of these modes. But there is a third epistemology, largely untapped even in religious studies, and following Quispel I suggest that we think of it as fundamentally gnostic. The gnostic does not believe tenets or discover truths, like an orthodox religionist, on the one hand, or like a rationalist, on the other. The gnostic knows, and among the things he or she knows is that the knowledge he or she possesses cannot be reconciled

comparative mystics

163

with the claims of any past, present, or future religion. To borrow an expression from Elaine Pagels, gnostic epistemology is “beyond belief.”74 Historically speaking, gnostics tend toward esotericism so as to avoid persecution. What sets apart the modern academic gnostic from premodern precursors is the academic’s secure home in a central institution of Western liberal society: the college or university. This relatively new fact of sociology, combined with the historical implausibility, social dysfunction, and increasing violence of traditional religious systems, has rendered unnecessary the usual strategies of dissimulation and concealment. Thus, the gnostic critique of orthodoxies is now available in thousands of classrooms and on innumerable library shelves in Western vernacular languages. I do not mean only that the Zohar and the Gnostic Gospels have been translated and are popular on undergraduate reading lists. I mean also that the masters of suspicion (to use Paul Ricoeur’s term) in modern philosophy and social science are invoked within religious studies as heroic figures whose ideas are as necessary to mature religious faith as the disillusionments of childhood are to growing up. The reductionistic methods of religious studies often function as apophatic techniques to expose a fraudulent demiurge posing as “God.” They thus free us for more genuine, more mature, and less dangerous forms of spirituality. They tell us what “God” is not and how human, all too human, many of our religious ideas are. Perhaps this is why the great Protestant theologian Paul Tillich insisted on the radical rationality of mystical writers, saw mysticism as an important component of the world’s religions, and chose to define the category of mysticism as “God fighting religion within religion.”75 Professional Heresy: Gnosticism vs. Contextualism I am aware that humanities disciplines, apart from comparative religion, are now basically contextualist in orientation. Knowing (gnosis) disappears where contexts are said to be incommensurable and cultures are not subject to criticism by criteria other than their own. Gnosticism is therefore, among the milieus that dismiss

164

peace and mind

epistemological doubt, perhaps the most mistrusted. Not only does the kind of academic gnosticism I am proposing here question the infallibility of modern epistemology, it refuses—adamantly—to ground itself in any one tradition, context, or regime of truth. It is notoriously comparative, countercultural, and even (it might be added) anticultural. Still, contextualists should not reject the gnostic stance automatically. Our present historical context, after all, indicates that contextualism operates politically to Balkanize the human species and hinder efforts to establish standards for a much-needed global morality. Moreover, contextualists—who tend to be trained in history and historical method—know that there have long been people who, on the basis of claims to gnosis wider and deeper than local knowledge, have risked their lives to expose cultural, national, and religious myths as such. If there is hope for our religious worlds—and there may not be—it may well reside in this attitude of openness, dissent, and (finally) heresy. While reflecting on the literal etymology of heresy (as haeresia or “choice”: the choosing of personal conviction over the authority of tradition or group), Elaine Pagels quotes to good effect the early Church Father Irenaeus against himself. Irenaeus, she writes, “mocked his Gnostic opponent for encouraging his fellow Christians to seek experiential confirmation of their beliefs and ever-new visions: ‘every one of them generates something new every day, according to his ability; for no one is considered “mature” [or “initiated”] among them who does not develop some enormous lies’.”76 In an implicitly humorous aside, Pagels goes on to point out that Irenaeus’s description of gnostic Christians describes the kind of free thinking that we nourish and model in higher education today. Our entire system—from undergraduate Socratic discussion (Socrates, recall, was condemned by Athens for corrupting its youth), to the mandatorily original Ph.D. dissertation, to the ever-new lists of our university presses—is designed explicitly to “generate something new every day, according to [our] ability.” And the newer, the more provocative, the more “controversial,” the better. In effect, we are professional heretics, paid to choose and propagate our own truths and visions in the free marketplace of ideas.

comparative mystics

165

This stance may not always bode well, of course, for our relationships with the religions some of us love and study, but at least a gnostic model offers one possible way through the culturally creative but ultimately unbelievable dualisms with which we struggle. In this light, it is possible to be both an “insider” and an “outsider,” to draw on the symbolic and ritual resources of a tradition without being slavishly bound to it, to love a religion and be publicly critical of its lies, to choose a form of consciousness that participates in both “faith” and “reason” but moves beyond both into a kind of gnosis, even to internalize and imaginatively unite other religious traditions with one’s own. Ibn ‘Arabi made such claims in fourteenth-century Andalusia, as did Kabir, Guru Nanak, and Akbar in late medieval India, and Ramakrishna in nineteenth-century colonial Bengal. We are trying such experiments again, now, in our own historical context. It is a depressing historical fact that all of these previous experiments largely failed because the orthodox cultures in which they were embedded were ultimately successful in domesticating, taming, even suppressing the countercultural forces of their mystical thinkers and writers. It remains to be seen what will happen to our own mystical denial of difference in our more secular and global context. As I write, many of us in Indology are under rather severe political pressures from both a nationalist-controlled central government in India and some wealthy, ultraconservative segments of the Hindu diaspora to censor our future writings and publicly recant and apologize for our published expressions of modern gnosticism. Ban movements are organized against our books, lawsuits and imprisonment in India for us are entertained in the Indian media, and some of our Indian colleagues must now live with bodyguards to protect them. Sadly, similar assaults on the intellectual and civil liberties of scholars of religion could be easily repeated within other subdisciplines of the field, from biblical studies to Buddhology. In short, many of us work under conditions similar to those that have always created esoteric forms of counterculture. Hence many of us have found some measure of inspiration and even hope in the mystical-critical texts of Ibn ‘Arabi, Meister Eckhart, William Blake, and Ramakrishna. Their

166

peace and mind

remarkable texts, if not always their traditions, stand to this day and for us as powerful witnesses to the not-impossible.77

comparative mystics

167

Notes 1. For the colonialists’ own traumas, see Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850 (New York: Anchor, 2004). 2. “Final vocabulary” is a useful term of Richard Rorty’s: see Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 3. Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880, trans. Gene Patterson and Victor Reinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), xxiii. 4. Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, xxiii. 5. Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, xxiii. 6. All of my own work has been motivated by what I have called a “mystical humanism,” in effect a version of Schwab’s integral humanism that brings together the worlds of Western critical theory and Asian mystical thought, on the one hand, and those of the Asian philosophical traditions and Western mystical thought, on the other hand. 7. The Vatican II document Nostra Aetate is among the most dramatic examples of this shift from the doctrine of nulla salus extra ecclesiam (“there is no salvation outside the church”) to a more humble inclusivism. The Roman Catholic Church now acknowledges, for example, that “in Hinduism men explore the divine mystery and express it both in the limitless riches of myth and the accurately defined insights of philosophy” and that Buddhism proposes a way of life in which “men can, with confidence and trust, attain a state of perfect liberation and reach supreme illumination either through their own efforts or by the aid of divine help” (October 28, 1965, Nosta Aetate or Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, in Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, ed. Austin Flannery [Collegeville, IN: Liturgical Press, 1992]). For a summary and analysis of this extraordinary development within Catholic theology, see Jacques Dupuis, Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997). 8. Peter van der Veer, Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Lise McKean,

168

peace and mind

Divine Enterprise: Gurus and the Hindu Nationalist Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Arundhati Roy, “Fascism’s Firm Footprint in India,” Nation, September 30, 2002. 9. There is a great deal of critical discussion around both the terms “Hindu” and “Hinduism.” Generally speaking, this literature suggests that “Hindu” probably first occurred as a Persian geographical term for those who live beyond (that is, east of) the Indus river. As a term designating a religion, still inclusive of what were later to be differentiated as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, it may have been first deployed by the Muslim invaders of the early part of the second millennium (Brian K. Smith, Reflection on Resemblance, Ritual and Religion [New York: Oxford University Press, 1989], 6). As an indigenous self-description, “Hindu” was used in Sanskrit and Bengali texts as a counterterm to Yavana (Muslim) as early as the sixteenth century. The English term “Hindu” (or “Hindoo”) was first used by British colonialists to describe the people of Hindustan, that is, the area of northwest India, and hence it did not yet carry any specific religious or sectarian meanings. The -ism was added around 1830 to denote the culture and religion of high-caste Brahmins and was then soon appropriated by Indian reformers to establish a national, cultural, and religious identity around ancient scriptural texts, ritual practices, and religious forms of identity. Gavin Flood is thus certainly not far off the mark when he states that “Hinduism” cannot be understood as a pure product of Western Orientalists: it also represents a development of Hindu self-understanding and so “a transformation in the modern world of themes already present” (Gavin Flood, An Introduction to Hinduism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], 8). 10. Rorty, Contingency, xvi. 11. Bruno Latour, War of the Worlds: What about Peace?, trans. Charlotte Bigg (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2002), 29. 12. Michael B. Smith, translator’s note to The Mystic Fable, vol. 1, The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, by Michel de Certeau (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), ix–x. 13. Latour, War of the Worlds, 40. 14. Steven T. Katz, ed., Mysticism and Religious Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).

comparative mystics

169

15. Mark J. Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 16. Jeffrey J. Kripal, Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (1995; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). The critical literature around this text is extensive. For my responses, see www.rice.edu/kalischild. 17. Technically speaking, Ramakrishna was not his birth name, but it is the name by which he was known in his own adult life and has been known by subsequent generations. 18. Mahendranath Gupta, Srisriramakrsnakathamrta, 31st ed. (Calcutta: Kathamrita Bhavana, 1987), 5:140. This five-volume text, known to Bengalis simply as the Kathamrita or Nectar Talk, is based on diary notes that Gupta kept between 1882 and 1886. Its thirteen-hundred pages constitute our best historical source for Ramakrishna’s mature teachings. I will cite it henceforth as KA, followed by the volume and page number, in the body of the text. 19. “Gobinda” (Skt. Govinda) is a name for Krishna. See Ram Chandra Datta, Srisriramakrsna Paramahamsadever Jivanavrttanta, 5th ed. (Calcutta: Jogodyan, Kakurgachi, 1935), 54; henceforth cited as JV. In Datta’s account, the man’s name is Gobinda Das. As for his conversion to Islam: “We cannot say how far he used to follow its social rules and customs” (Swami Saradananda, Sri-sriramakrsnalilaprasanga [Calcutta: Udbodhan Karjalay, 1986], 2.16.9 [bk. 2, chap. 16, sec. 9]); henceforth cited as LP. 20. The first appearance of the expression in print was in a local English newspaper: “A Hindu Saint,” Indian Mirror, March 28, 1875. 21. KA 2:22; 2:94–95; 3:40; 4:170; 5:82; 5:86; 5:92; 5:124. Shaktas can also be bigoted (KA 5:73). This attitude was shared by Ramakrishna’s disciples. Saradananda, for example, describes the Vaishnavas as “fault-finders” (LP 4.3.39) and “of low-caste” (LP 4.3.32). 22. For Ramakrishna’s criticism of Christianity’s excessive concern with sin, see KA 1:45–46; 1:153; 5:11; 5:111; 5:173. For his criticism of the Vaishnava fixation on sin, see KA 4:166; 5:22; 5:43. 23. For a detailed study of Ramakrishna’s embrace of this Tantric ontology, see Jeffrey J. Kripal, “Kali on Top of Siva: Tantra and

170

peace and mind

Vedanta in Ramakrishna’s Teachings and Mystical Experiences,” in Kali’s Child, chap. 3. 24. It is common these days to read in poststructuralist scholarship that the categories of “experience” or “mystical experience” are modern psychological constructions and as such reflect primarily modern anxieties about the self, about the collapse of traditional authority, and about the need for an alternative locus of truth. There is some validity to this argument, but if we want to see, as I do, the relationship of Sri Ramakrishna and Swami Vivekananda as representing roughly the Hindu tradition’s passage from a premodern worldview to a modern one, we must also admit that there is more than a little of the premodern in the modern, and that “experience” is a perfectly fine term to describe the centerpiece of Ramakrishna’s traditional teachings. The constructionist case, in other words, although otherwise valuable, is also overstated and itself needs to be deconstructed as flowing from a modern relativist epistemology that is simply not shared by much of mystical literature, the Bengali Kathamrita included. 25. For a summary of the critical literature on the relationship between traditional Advaita Vedanta and Vivekananda’s social ethics, see Kripal, “Seeing Inside and Outside the Goddess: The Mystical and the Ethical in the Teachings of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda,” in Crossing Boundaries: Essays on the Ethical Status of Mysticism, ed. George William Barnard and Kripal (New York: Seven Bridges, 2002), 230–264. 26. Quoted in Shashibhushan Dasgupta, Bharater Sakti-sadhana o Sakti Sahitya (Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, 1985), 264. 27. Jadunath Sinha, The Cult of Shakti: Rama Prasada’s Devotional Songs (Calcutta: Jadunath Sinha Foundation, 1981), no. 139. 28. The expression is usually quoted in its more complete form yata-mata-tata-patha (as one’s perspective, so one’s path). In the Kathamrita, however, Ramakrishna usually uses his shorter version, mata-patha (KA 2:143; 3:41; 3:144; 4:135; 5:21; 5:39; 5:161; 5:211). 29. LP 4.4.47; 4.4.50; 4.4.54. 30. “Black forms blend”: Sinha, Cult of Shakti, no. 170. 31. Satyacharan Mitra, Sri Ramakrisna Paramahamsa—Jivana o Upadesa (Calcutta: Great Indian Press, 1897), 169; henceforth cited as JU.

comparative mystics

171

32. Mitra’s clear preference for a Tantric reading of Ramakrishna is most likely due, among other things, to his primary oral source for the biography: a certain Damaru Mahimcandra Nakulabadhut, a “special friend of Ramakrishna” whom Mitra describes as a Tantrika. “Half this book I wrote listening to him” (JU ii). 33. The canonical biographers and even most of the later scholarship have thus more or less ignored Shakta texts like Mitra’s, which will focus much of my discussion here. A recent happy exception is Rajagopal Chattapadhyaya, Sriramakrsna: Harano Katha [Sri Ramakrishna: Lost Conversations] (Calcutta: Sribalaram Prakashani, 2003). 34. This woman, for example, was deeply offended when Ramakrishna ate Kali’s ritual offering, and she quit coming to see him (KA 5:92). 35. “If Raja Ram Mohun Roy would not have come, we wouldn’t have such a sweet Ramakrishna-bhava” (JU 82). 36. See also JU 88–89. For Keshab’s experiments with non-Hindu religious traditions, see David Kopf, The Brahmo Samaj and the Shaping of the Modern Indian Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), chap. 9. 37. Kopf, Brahmo Samaj, 267, 281–86. 38. Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 24. Sedgwick describes Steuco as “a Vatican librarian and Christian Platonist, author of De perenni philosophia [Concerning the perennial philosophy], 1540, dedicated to Pope Paul III” (Against the Modern World, 274 n. 11). 39. Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 41. 40. Sedgwick, Against the Modern World, 41–42. 41. I am indebted to Sedgwick for this line of thought. 42. Friedrich Max Müller, Ramakrishna: His Life and Sayings (London: Longmans, 1898). 43. For this remarkable story and an in-depth analysis, see William B. Parsons, The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 44. See Kripal, Roads of Excess. 45. Steven M. Wasserstrom, Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

172

peace and mind

46. Mircea Eliade, “The Secret of Dr. Honigberger,” in Two Strange Tales (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970; reprint, Boston: Shambhala, 1986). For a fuller exposition of Eliade’s Tantric mysticism, see Jeffrey J. Kripal, “‘The Visitation of the Stranger’: On Some Mystical Dimensions of the History of Religions,” CrossCurrents 49.3 (fall 1999): 367–86. 47. Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 12. See also Joseph Dan, “Gershom Scholem—Mystiker oder Geschichtsschreiber des Mystischen?” in Gershom Scholem Zwischen den Disziplinen, ed. Peter Schäfer and Gary Smith (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989). 48. See Scholem’s speech “My Way to Kabbalah” (1974), in On the Possibility of Jewish Mysticism in Our Time & Other Essays, ed. Avraham Shapira, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society, 1997), 20–24. 49. Quoted in David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and CounterHistory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 32. 50. Biale, Gershom Scholem, 32. 51. Discussed in Wasserstrom, Religion after Religion, 146. 52. See Daniel Gold, Aesthetics and Analysis in Writing on Religion: Modern Fascinations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 53. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). 54. Leigh Eric Schmidt, “The Making of Modern ‘Mysticism’,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71.2 (2003): 273–302. 55. Michel de Certeau, “Mysticism,” trans. Marsanne Brammer, Diacritics 22.2 (summer 1992): 11–25. 56. Louis Bouyer, “Mysticism: An Essay on the History of the Word,” in Understanding Mysticism, ed. Richard Woods (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1980), 42–55. 57. I am indebted to Don Cupitt for this striking thesis. See his Mysticism after Modernity (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998). 58. Although many scholarly and popular uses of the word mysticism come very close indeed: Robert K. C. Forman’s notions of a “pure consciousness event” underlying all cultural expressions of the mys-

comparative mystics

173

tical, for example, is near to Ramakrishna’s understanding of brahman as saccidananda or “being-consciousness-bliss.” See Forman, The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 59. Cupitt, Mysticism after Modernity, 120. 60. See, for instance, David V. Erdman, Blake: Prophet Against Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954); Edward Palmer Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (New York: New Press, 1993). 61. Walter H. Capps, Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1995), 342. 62. For an eloquent editorial mapping of this debate, see Russell McCutcheon, ed., The Insider-Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion: A Reader (London: Cassell, 1999). 63. For a collection of primary sources from this American story and a series of insightful introductory essays, see Thomas A. Tweed and Stephen Prothero, Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 64. Allan Hunt Badiner, ed., Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 2002). For an eloquent discussion of this cultural pattern and another story of religious hypocrisy and institutional denial, see Rick Strassman, DMT: The Spirit Molecule (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2001), esp. chap. 20, “Stepping on Holy Toes.” 65. An analogous expression—“the religion of no religion”—was employed by the German comparativist of religion, Frederic Spiegelberg, to describe and celebrate a similar mystical denial of difference and local custom. See his The Religion of No-Religion (Stanford, CA: Delkin, 1948). 66. I have written at length about this same issue and its twentiethcentury history in “Debating the Mystical as the Ethical: An Indological Map,” in Barnard and Kripal, Crossing Boundaries. 67. For a more recent study that serves to confirm this same point, see Sedgwick, Against the Modern World. 68. I am in agreement with Wasserstrom and others who have criticized the Eliadean tradition (scholars such as Timothy Fitzgerald,

174

peace and mind

Bruce Lincoln, Russell McCutcheon, Hans Penner, J. Z. Smith, Ivan Strenski, and Donald Wieb) for failure to be suspicious of their subjects of study. 69. Abdelwahab Meddeb, The Malady of Islam, trans. Pierre Joris and Ann Reid (New York: Basic Books, 2003). The consistency of Meddeb’s historical invocation of the mystical within Islam as an answer to the present ignorance and violence of Islamic fundamentalism is truly remarkable. See esp. 13, 23, 27, 39–40, 44–45, 51, 55, 59–60, 129–130. He is also perfectly aware of the intimate organic, even physiological, link between sensuality and cultural creativity (see esp. chap. 23). 70. Meddeb, Malady of Islam, 129, 130. Ibn ‘Arabi, in other words, advanced perhaps a form of the same mystical worldview that Ramakrishna would participate in six hundred years later. 71. See Michael Lerner, Spirit Matters (Charlottesville, VA: Hamptom Roads, 2000). 72. William D. Davidson and Joseph V. Montville, “Foreign Policy According to Freud,” Foreign Policy 45 (Winter 1981–82): 145–57. 73. Gilles Quispel, ed., Gnosis: De derde component van de Europese cultuurtraditie (Utrecht: HES, 1988), 9. Wouter Hanegraaff proposed both this idea and the reference. 74. Elaine H. Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (New York: Random House, 2003). 75. Paul Tillich, The Future of Religions, ed. Jerald C. Brauer (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). 76. Pagels, Beyond Belief, 96. 77. I would like to thank Karen Harris, Jeffrey Perl, Joseph Prabhu, and Mark Sedgwick for their critical readings, moral support, and substantive suggestions regarding this essay.

EXCHANGING PERSPECTIVES The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies Eduardo Viveiros de Castro My subject is the cosmological setting of an indigenous Amazonian model of the self.1 I will examine two major contexts, shamanism and warfare, in which “self” and “other” develop especially complex relations. Shamanism deals with the relation between humans and nonhumans; and in warfare, a human other, an “enemy,” is used to bring a “self” into existence. I will deliberately use a set of traditional dichotomies (I mean, in the tradition of modernity) as both heuristic instruments and foils: nature/culture, subject/object, production/ exchange, and so forth. This very crude technique for setting off the distinctive features of Amazonian cosmologies carries the obvious risk of distortion, since it is unlikely that any nonmodern cosmology can be adequately described either by means of such conceptual polarities or as a simple negation of them (as if the only point of a nonmodern cosmology were to stand in opposition to our oppositions). But the technique does have the advantage of showing how unstable and problematic those polarities can be made to appear, once they have been forced to bear “unnatural” interpretations and unexpected rearrangements. Perspectival Multinaturalism If there is one virtually universal Amerindian notion, it is that of an original state of nondifferentiation between humans and animals, as described in mythology. Myths are filled with beings whose form, name, and behavior inextricably mix human and animal attributes in a common context of intercommunicability, identical to that which defines the present-day intrahuman world. Amerindian myths speak of a state of being where self and other interpenetrate, submerged in the same immanent, presubjective and preobjective milieu, the end

176

peace and mind

of which is precisely what the mythology sets out to tell. This end is, of course, the well-known separation of “culture” and “nature”—of human and nonhuman—that Claude Lévi-Strauss has shown to be the central theme of Amerindian mythology and which he deems to be a cultural universal.2 In some respects, the Amerindian separation between humans and animals may be seen as an analogue of our “nature/culture” distinction; there is, however, at least one crucial difference between the Amerindian and modern, popular Western versions. In the former case, the separation was not brought about by a process of differentiating the human from the animal, as in our own evolutionist “scientific” mythology. For Amazonian peoples, the original common condition of both humans and animals is not animality but, rather, humanity. The great separation reveals not so much culture distinguishing itself from nature as nature distancing itself from culture: the myths tell how animals lost the qualities inherited or retained by humans. Humans are those who continue as they have always been. Animals are ex-humans (rather than humans, ex-animals). In some cases, humankind is the substance of the primordial plenum or the original form of virtually everything, not just animals. As Gerald Weiss puts it: Campa mythology is largely the story of how, one by one, the primal Campa became irreversibly transformed into the first representatives of various species of animals and plants, as well as astronomical bodies or features of the terrain…. The development of the universe, then, has been primarily a process of diversification, with mankind as the primal substance out of which many if not all of the categories of beings and things in the universe arose, the Campa of today being the descendants of those ancestral Campa who escaped being transformed.3 The fact that many “natural” species or entities were originally human has important consequences for the present-day state of the world. While our folk anthropology holds that humans have an

exchanging perspectives

177

original animal nature that must be coped with by culture—having been wholly animals, we remain animals “at bottom”—Amerindian thought holds that, having been human, animals must still be human, albeit in an unapparent way. Thus, many animal species, as well as sundry other types of nonhuman beings, are supposed to have a spiritual component that qualifies them as “people.” Such a notion is often associated with the idea that the manifest bodily form of each species is an envelope (a “clothing”) that conceals an internal humanoid form, usually visible to the eyes of only the particular species and of “transspecific” beings such as shamans. This internal form is the soul or spirit of the animal: an intentionality or subjectivity formally identical to human consciousness. If we conceive of humans as somehow composed of a cultural clothing that hides and controls an essentially animal nature, Amazonians have it the other way around: animals have a human, sociocultural inner aspect that is “disguised” by an ostensibly bestial bodily form. Another important consequence of having animals and other types of nonhumans conceived as people—as kinds of humans—is that the relations between the human species and most of what we would call “nature” take on the quality of what we would term “social relations.” Thus, categories of relationship and modes of interaction prevailing in the intrahuman world are also in force in most contexts in which humans and nonhumans confront each other. Cultivated plants may be conceived as blood relatives of the women who tend them, game animals may be approached by hunters as affines, shamans may relate to animal and plant spirits as associates or enemies. Having been people, animals and other species continue to be people behind their everyday appearance. This idea is part of an indigenous theory according to which the different sorts of persons—human and nonhuman (animals, spirits, the dead, denizens of other cosmic layers, plants, occasionally even objects and artifacts)—apprehend reality from distinct points of view. The way that humans perceive animals and other subjectivities that inhabit the world differs profoundly from the way in which these beings see humans (and see themselves). Under normal conditions, humans see

178

peace and mind

humans as humans; they see animals as animals, plants as plants. As for spirits, to see these usually invisible beings is a sure sign that conditions are not normal. On the other hand, animals (predators) and spirits see humans as animals (as game or prey) to the same extent that game animals see humans as spirits or as predator animals. By the same token, animals and spirits see themselves as humans: they perceive themselves as (or they become) anthropomorphic beings when they are in their own houses or villages; and, most importantly, they experience their own habits and characteristics in the form of culture. Animals see their food as human food (jaguars see blood as manioc beer, vultures see the maggots in rotting meat as grilled fish); they see their bodily attributes (fur, feathers, claws, beaks) as body decorations or cultural instruments; they see their social system as organized in the same way as human institutions are (with chiefs, shamans, ceremonies, exogamous moieties, and what not). The contrast with our conceptions in the modern West is, again, only too clear. Such divergence invites us to imagine an ontology I have called “multinaturalist” so as to set it off from modern “multiculturalist” ontologies.4 Where the latter are founded on the mutually implied unity of nature and multiplicity of cultures—the former guaranteed by the objective universality of body and substance, the latter generated by the subjective particularity of spirit and meaning—the Amerindian conception presumes a spiritual unity and a corporeal diversity. For them, culture or the subject is the form of the universal, while nature or the object is the form of the particular. To say that humanity is the original common condition of humans and nonhumans alike is tantamount to saying that the soul or spirit— the subjective aspect of being—is the universal, unconditioned given (since the souls of all nonhumans are humanlike), while objective bodily nature takes on an a posteriori, particular, and conditioned quality. In this connection, it is also worth noticing that the notion of matter as a universal substrate seems wholly absent from Amazonian ontologies.5 Reflexive selfhood, not material objectivity, is the potential common ground of being. To say, then, that animals and spirits are people is to say that they are persons; and to personify them is to attribute to nonhumans

exchanging perspectives

179

the capacities of conscious intentionality and social agency that define the position of the subject.6 Such capacities are reified in the soul or spirit with which these nonhumans are endowed. Whatever possesses a soul is capable of having a point of view, and every being to whom a point of view is attributed is a subject; or better, wherever there is a point of view, there is a “subject position.” Our constructionist epistemology can be summed up in the Saussurean (and very Kantian) formula, “the point of view creates the object.”7 The subject, in other words, is the original, fixed condition whence the point of view emanates (the subject creates the point of view). Whereas Amerindian perspectival ontology proceeds as though the point of view creates the subject: whatever is activated or “agented” by the point of view will be a subject. The attribution of humanlike consciousness and intentionality (to say nothing of human bodily form and cultural habits) to nonhuman beings has been indiscriminately termed “anthropocentrism” or “anthropomorphism.” However, these two labels can be taken to denote radically opposed cosmological perspectives. Western popular evolutionism, for instance, is thoroughly anthropocentric but not particularly anthropomorphic. On the other hand, animism may be characterized as anthropomorphic but definitely not as anthropocentric: if sundry other beings besides humans are “human,” then we humans are not a special lot (so much for “primitive narcissism”). Karl Marx wrote of man, meaning Homo sapiens: In creating an objective world by his practical activity, in working-up inorganic nature, man proves himself a conscious species being. . . . Admittedly animals also produce…. But an animal only produces what it immediately needs for itself or its young. It produces one-sidedly, while man produces universally…. An animal produces only itself, whilst man reproduces the whole of nature…. An animal forms things in accordance with the standard and the need of the species to which it belongs, whilst man knows how to produce in accordance to the standards of other species.8 Talk about primitive narcissism… .Whatever Marx meant by the

180

peace and mind

proposition that man “produces universally,” I fancy he was saying something to the effect that man is the universal animal: an intriguing idea. (If man is the universal animal, then perhaps each animal species would be a particular kind of humanity?) While apparently converging with the Amerindian notion that humanity is the universal form of the subject, Marx’s is in fact an absolute inversion of the notion. Marx is saying that humans can be any animal (we have more “being” than any other species), while Amerindians say that any animal can be human (there is more “being” to an animal than meets the eye). Man is the universal animal in two entirely different senses, then: the universality is anthropocentric for Marx; anthropomorphic, for Amerindians. The Subjectification of Objects Much of the Amerindians’ practical engagement with the world presupposes that present-day nonhuman beings have a spiritual, invisible, prosopomorphic side. That supposition is foregrounded in the context of shamanism. By shamanism, I mean the capacity evinced by some individuals to cross ontological boundaries deliberately and adopt the perspective of nonhuman subjectivities in order to administer the relations between humans and nonhumans. Being able to see nonhumans as they see themselves (they see themselves as humans), shamans are able to take on the role of active interlocutors in transspecific dialogues and are capable (unlike lay persons) of returning to tell the tale. If a human who is not a shaman happens to see a nonhuman (an animal, a dead human soul, a spirit) in human form, he/she runs the risk of being overpowered by the nonhuman subjectivity, of passing over to its side and being transformed into an animal, a dead human, a spirit. A meeting or exchange of perspectives is, in brief, a dangerous business. Shamanism is a form of acting that presupposes a mode of knowing, a particular ideal of knowledge. That ideal is, in many respects, the exact opposite of the objectivist folk epistemology of our tradition. In the latter, the category of the object supplies the telos: to know is to objectify—that is, to be able to distinguish what is

exchanging perspectives

181

inherent to the object from what belongs to the knowing subject and has been unduly (or inevitably) projected into the object. To know, then, is to desubjectify, to make explicit the subject’s partial presence in the object so as to reduce it to an ideal minimum. In objectivist epistemology, subjects as much as objects are seen as the result of a process of objectification. The subject constitutes/recognizes itself in the objects it produces, and the subject knows itself objectively when it comes to see itself from the outside as an “it.” Objectification is the name of our game; what is not objectified remains unreal and abstract. The form of the other is the thing. Amerindian shamanism is guided by the opposite ideal. To know is to personify, to take on the point of view of that which must be known. Shamanic knowledge aims at something that is a someone—another subject. The form of the other is the person. What I am defining here is what anthropologists of yore used to call animism, an attitude that is far more than an idle metaphysical tenet, for the attribution of souls to animals and other so-called natural beings entails a specific way of dealing with them. Being conscious subjects able to communicate with humans, these natural beings are able fully to reciprocate the intentional stance that humans adopt with respect to them. Recently, there has been a new surge of interest in animism.9 Cognitive anthropologists and psychologists have been arguing that animism is an “innate” cognitive attitude that has been naturally selected for its attention-grabbing potential and its practical predictive value.10 I have no quarrel with these hypotheses. Whatever the grounds of its naturalness, however, animism can also be very much cultural—that is, animism can be put to systematic and deliberate use. We must observe that Amerindians do not spontaneously see animals and other nonhumans as persons; the personhood or subjectivity of the latter is considered a nonevident aspect of them. It is necessary to know how to personify nonhumans, and it is necessary to personify them in order to know.11 Personification or subjectification implies that the “intentional stance” adopted with respect to the world has been in some way universalized. Instead of reducing intentionality to obtain a

182

peace and mind

perfectly objective picture of the world, animism makes the inverse epistemological bet. True (shamanic) knowledge aims to reveal a maximum of intentionality or abduct a maximum of agency (here I am using Alfred Gell’s vocabulary).12 A good interpretation, then, would be one able to understand every event as in truth an action, an expression of intentional states or predicates of some subject. Interpretive success is directly proportional to the ordinal magnitude of intentionality that the knower is able to attribute to the known.13 A thing or a state of affairs that is not amenable to subjectification—to determination of its social relation to the knower—is shamanistically uninteresting. Our objectivist epistemology follows the opposite course: it considers our commonsense intentional stance as just a shorthand that we use when the behavior of a target-object is too complicated to be broken down into elementary physical processes. An exhaustive scientific interpretation of the world would for us be able ideally to reduce every action to a chain of causal events and to reduce these events to materially dense interactions (with no “action at a distance”).14 If in the naturalist view a subject is an insufficiently analyzed object, in the Amerindian animist cosmology the converse holds: an object is an incompletely interpreted subject. The object must either be “expanded” to a full-fledged subject—a spirit; an animal in its human, reflexive form—or else understood as related to a subject (as existing, in Gell’s terms, “in the neighbourhood” of an agent). But an important qualification must now be made: Amerindian cosmologies do not as a rule attribute personhood (or the same degree of personhood) to each type of entity in the world. In the case of animals, for instance, the emphasis seems to be on those species that perform key symbolic and practical roles, such as the great predators and the principal species of prey for humans. Personhood and “perspectivity”—the capacity to occupy a point of view—is a question of degree and context rather than an absolute, diacritical property of particular species. Still, despite this qualification, what cannot be conceived as a primary agent or subject in its own right must be traced up to one: “Social agents” can be drawn from categories which are as

exchanging perspectives

183

different as chalk and cheese … because “social agency” is not defined in terms of “basic” biological attributes (such as inanimate thing vs. incarnate person) but is relational— it does not matter, in ascribing “social agent” status, what a thing (or a person) “is” in itself; what matters is where it stands in a network of social relations. All that may be necessary for stocks and stones to become “social agents” … is that there should be actual human persons/agents “in the neighbourhood” of these inert objects.15 Though there are Amazonian cosmologies that deny to postmythical nonhuman species any spiritual dimension, the notion (widespread, as is well known, throughout the continent) of animal or plant “spirit masters” supplies the missing agency. These spirit masters, equipped with an intentionality fully equivalent to that of humans, function as hypostases of the species with which they are associated, thereby creating an intersubjective field for human/ nonhuman relations even where empirical nonhuman species are not spiritualized. Moreover, the idea that nonhuman agents experience themselves and their behavior in the forms of (human) culture plays a crucial role: translating culture into the terms of alien subjectivities transforms many natural objects and events into indices from which social agency is derivable. The commonest case is that of defining what to humans is a brute fact or object as an artifact or cultured behavior: what is blood to us is manioc beer to jaguars, a muddy waterhole is seen by tapirs as a great ceremonial house. Artifacts have this interestingly ambiguous ontology. They are objects that necessarily point to a subject; as congealed actions, they are material embodiments of nonmaterial intentionality. What is nature to us may well be culture to another species. Perspectivism Is Not Relativism The idea of a world comprising a multiplicity of subject positions looks very much like a form of relativism. Or rather, relativism under its various definitions is often implied in the ethnographic

184

peace and mind

characterization of Amerindian cosmologies. Take, for instance, the work of Kaj Århem, the ethnographer of the Makuna. Having described the elaborate perspectival universe of this Tukanoan people of northwestern Amazonia, Århem observes that the notion of multiple viewpoints on reality implies that, as far as the Makuna are concerned, “every perspective is equally valid and true” and that “a correct and true representation of the world does not exist.”16 Århem is right, of course; but only in a sense. For one can reasonably surmise that as far as humans are concerned, the Makuna would say that there is indeed only one correct and true representation of the world. If you start seeing, for instance, the maggots in rotten meat as grilled fish, you may be sure that you are in deep trouble, but grilled fish they are from the vultures’ point of view. Perspectives should be kept separate. Only shamans, who are so to speak speciesandrogynous, can make perspectives communicate, and then only under special, controlled conditions. My real point, however, is best put as a question: does the Amerindian perspectivist theory posit, as Århem maintains that it does, a multiplicity of representations of the same world? It is sufficient to consider ethnographic evidence to see that the opposite is the case: all beings perceive (“represent”) the world in the same way. What varies is the world that they see. Animals impose the same categories and values on reality as humans do—their worlds, like ours, revolve around hunting and fishing, cooking and fermented drinks, cross-cousins and war, initiation rituals, shamans, chiefs, spirits, and so forth. Being people in their own sphere, nonhumans see things just as people do. But the things that they see are different. Again, what to us is blood is maize beer to the jaguar; what to us is soaking manioc is, to the souls of the dead, a rotting corpse; what is a muddy waterhole to us is for the tapirs a great ceremonial house. Another good discussion of Amazonian “relativism” can be found in a study of the Matsiguenga by France-Marie RenardCasevitz. Commenting on a myth in which the human protagonists travel to villages inhabited by strange people who call the snakes, bats, and balls of fire that they eat by the names of foods (“fish,” “agouti,” “macaws”) appropriate for human consumption, she realizes that

exchanging perspectives

185

indigenous perspectivism is quite different from relativism. Yet she sees no special problem: This setting in perspective [mise en perspective] is just the application and transposition of universal social practices, such as the fact that a mother and a father of X are the parents-in-law of Y… . This variability of the denomination as a function of the place occupied explains how A can be both fish for X and snake for Y.17 But applying the positional relativity that obtains in social and cultural terms to the difference between species has a paradoxical consequence: Matsiguenga preferences are universalized and made absolute. A human culture is thus rendered natural—everybody eats fish and nobody eats snake. Be that as it may, Casevitz’s analogy between kinship positions and what counts as fish or snake for different species remains intriguing. Kinship terms are relational pointers; they belong to the class of nouns that define something in terms of its relations to something else (linguists have special names for such nouns—“twoplace predicates” and such like). Concepts like fish or tree, on the other hand, are proper, self-contained substantives: they are applied to an object by virtue of its intrinsic properties. Now, what seems to be happening in Amerindian perspectivism is that substances named by substantives like “fish,” “snake,” “hammock,” or “beer” are somehow used as if they were relational pointers, something halfway between a noun and a pronoun, a substantive and a deictic. (There is supposedly a difference between “natural kind” terms such as fish and “artifact” terms such as hammock: a subject worth more discussion later.) You are a father only because there is another person whose father you are. Fatherhood is a relation, while fishiness is an intrinsic property of fish. In Amerindian perspectivism, however, something is a fish only by virtue of someone else whose fish it is. But if saying that crickets are the fish of the dead or that mud is the hammock of tapirs is like saying that my sister Isabel’s son, Miguel, is my nephew, then there is no relativism involved. Isabel

186

peace and mind

is not a mother “for” Miguel, from Miguel’s “point of view,” in the usual, relativist-subjectivist sense of the expression. Isabel is the mother “of” Miguel; she is really and objectively Miguel’s mother, just as I am really Miguel’s uncle. This is a genitive, internal relation (my sister is the mother of someone, our cricket the fish of someone) and not a representational, external connection of the type “X is fish for someone,” which implies that X is “represented” as fish, whatever X is “in itself.” It would be absurd to say that, since Miguel is the son of Isabel but not mine, then Miguel is not a son “for me”—for indeed he is. He is my sister’s son, precisely. Now imagine that all Amerindian substances were of this sort. Suppose that, as siblings are those who have the same parents, conspecifics are those that have the same fish, the same snake, the same hammock, and so forth. No wonder, then, that animals are so often conceived, in Amazonia, as affinely related to humans. Blood is to humans as manioc beer is to jaguars in exactly the way that my sister is the wife of my brother-in-law. The many Amerindian myths featuring interspecific marriages and discussing the difficult relationships between the human (or animal) in-marrying affine and his/her animal (or human) parents-in-law, simply compound the two analogies into a single complex one. We begin to see how perspectivism may have a deep connection with exchange—not only how it may be a type of exchange, but how any exchange is by definition an exchange of perspectives.18 We would thus have a universe that is 100 percent relational—a universe in which there would be no distinctions between primary and secondary qualities of substances or between “brute facts” and “institutional facts.” This distinction, championed by John Searle, opposes brute facts or objects, the reality of which is independent of human consciousness (gravity, mountains, trees, animals, and all “natural kinds”), to institutional facts or objects (marriage, money, axes, and cars) that derive their existence, identity, and efficacy from the culturally specific meanings given them by humans.19 In this overhauled version of the nature/culture dualism, the terms of cultural relativism apply only to cultural objects and are balanced by the terms of natural universalism, which apply to natural objects.

exchanging perspectives

187

Searle would argue, I suppose, that what I am saying is that for Amerindians all facts are of the institutional, mental variety, and that all objects, even trees and fish, are like money or hammocks, in that their only reality (as money and hammocks, not as pieces of paper or of string) derives from the meanings and uses that subjects attribute to them. This would be nothing but relativism, Searle would observe—and an absolute form of relativism at that. An implication of Amerindian perspectivist animism is, indeed, that there are no autonomous, natural facts, for what we see as nature is seen by other species as culture (as institutional facts). What humans see as blood, a natural substance, is seen by jaguars as manioc beer, an artifact. But such institutional facts are taken to be universal, culturally invariable (an impossibility according to Searle). Constructionist relativism defines all facts as institutional and thus culturally variable. We have here a case not of relativism but universalism—cultural universalism—that has as its complement what has been called “natural relativism.”20 And it is this inversion of our usual pairing of nature with the universal, and culture with the particular, that I have been terming “perspectivism.” Cultural (multicultural) relativism supposes a diversity of subjective and partial representations, each striving to grasp an external and unified nature, which remains perfectly indifferent to those representations. Amerindian thought proposes the opposite: a representational or phenomenological unity that is purely pronominal or deictic, indifferently applied to a radically objective diversity. One culture, multiple natures—one epistemology, multiple ontologies. Perspectivism implies multinaturalism, for a perspective is not a representation. A perspective is not a representation because representations are a property of the mind or spirit, whereas the point of view is located in the body. The ability to adopt a point of view is undoubtedly a power of the soul, and nonhumans are subjects in so far as they have (or are) spirit; but the differences between viewpoints (and a viewpoint is nothing if not a difference) lies not in the soul. Since the soul is formally identical in all species, it can only perceive the same things everywhere. The difference is given in the specificity of bodies. This formulation permits me to provide answers to a couple

188

peace and mind

of questions that may have already occurred to my readers. If nonhumans are persons and have souls, then what distinguishes them from humans? And why, being people, do they not regard us as people? Animals see in the same way as we do different things because their bodies differ from ours. I am not referring to physiological differences—Amerindians recognize a basic uniformity of bodies— but rather to affects, in the old sense of dispositions or capacities that render the body of each species unique: what it eats, how it moves, how it communicates, where it lives, whether it is gregarious or solitary. The visible shape of the body is a powerful sign of these affectual differences, although the shape can be deceptive, since a human appearance could, for example, be concealing a jaguar affect. Thus, what I call “body” is not a synonym for distinctive substance or fixed shape; body is in this sense an assemblage of affects or ways of being that constitute a habitus. Between the formal subjectivity of souls and the substantial materiality of organisms, there is thus an intermediate plane occupied by the body as a bundle of affects and capacities. And the body is the origin of perspectives. Solipsism or Cannibalism The status of humans in modern thought is essentially ambiguous. On the one hand, humankind is an animal species among other such, and animality is a domain that includes humans; on the other hand, humanity is a moral condition that excludes animals.21 These two statuses coexist in the problematic and disjunctive notion of “human nature.” In other words, our cosmology postulates a physical continuity and a metaphysical discontinuity between humans and animals, the continuity making of humankind an object for the natural sciences and the discontinuity making of humanity an object for the humanities. Spirit or mind is the great differentiator: it raises us above animals and matter in general, it distinguishes cultures, it makes each person unique before his/her fellow beings. The body, in contrast, is the major integrator: it connects us to the rest of the living, united by a universal substrate (DNA, carbon

exchanging perspectives

189

chemistry) that, in turn, links up with the ultimate nature of all material bodies. Conversely, Amerindians postulate metaphysical continuity and physical discontinuity. The metaphysical continuity results in animism; the physical discontinuity (between the beings of the cosmos), in perspectivism. The spirit or soul (here, a reflexive form, not an immaterial inner substance) integrates. Whereas the body (here, a system of intensive affects, not an extended material organism) differentiates.22 This cosmological picture, which understands bodies as the great differentiators, at the same time posits their inherent transformability: interspecific metamorphosis is a fact of nature. Not only is metamorphosis the standard etiological process in myth, but it is still very much possible in present-day life (being either desirable or undesirable, inevitable or evitable, according to circumstances). Spirits, the dead, and shamans can assume animal form, beasts turn into other beasts, humans inadvertently turn into animals. No surprises here: our own cosmology presumes a singular distinctiveness of minds but not even for this reason does it hold communication to be impossible (albeit solipsism is a constant problem). Nor does our cosmology discredit the mental/ spiritual transformations induced by such processes as education and religious conversion. Indeed, it is because the spiritual is the locus of difference that conversion becomes a necessary idea. Bodily metamorphosis is the Amerindian counterpart to the European theme of spiritual conversion. Shamans are transformers (and likewise, the mythical demiurges who transformed primal humans into animals are themselves shamans). Shamans can see animals in their inner human form because they don animal “clothing” and thus transform themselves into animals. Solipsism and metamorphosis are related in the same way. Solipsism is the phantom that threatens our cosmology, raising the fear that we will not recognize ourselves in our “own kind” because, given the potentially absolute singularity of minds, our “own kind” are actually not like us. The possibility of metamorphosis expresses the fear—the opposite fear—of no longer being able to differentiate between human and animal, and above all the fear of seeing the

190

peace and mind

human who lurks within the body of the animal that one eats. Our traditional problem in the West is how to connect and universalize: individual substances are given, while relations have to be made. The Amerindian problem is how to separate and particularize: relations are given, while substances must be defined. Hence the importance, in Amazonia, of dietary rules linked to the spiritual potency of animals. The past humanity of animals is added to their present-day spirituality, and both are hidden by their visible form. The result is an extended set of food restrictions or precautions that declare inedible animals that were, in myth, originally consubstantial with humans—though some animals can be desubjectified by shamanic means and then consumed.23 Violation of food restrictions exposes the violator to illness, conceived of as a cannibal counterpredation undertaken by the spirit of the prey (turned predator) in a lethal inversion of perspectives that transforms human into animal. Thus cannibalism is the Amerindian parallel to our own phantom—solipsism. The solipsist is uncertain whether the natural similarity of bodies guarantees a real community of spirit. Whereas the cannibal suspects that the similarity of souls prevails over real differences of body and thus that all animals eaten, despite efforts to desubjectivize them, remain human. To say that these uncertainties or suspicions are phantoms haunting their respective cultures does not mean, of course, that there are not solipsists among us (the more radical relativists, for instance), nor that there are not Amerindian societies that are purposefully and more or less literally cannibalistic. Exchange as Transformation The idea of creation ex nihilo is virtually absent from indigenous cosmogonies. Things and beings normally originate as a transformation of something else: animals, as I have noted, are transformations of a primordial, universal humanity. Where we find notions of creation at all—the fashioning of some prior substance into a new type of being—what is stressed is the imperfection of the end product. Amerindian demiurges always fail to deliver the goods. And just

exchanging perspectives

191

as nature is not the result of creation but of transformation, so culture is not a product of invention but of transference (and thus transmission, tradition). In Amerindian mythology, the origin of cultural implements or institutions is canonically explained as a borrowing— a transfer (violent or friendly, by stealing or by learning, as a trophy or as a gift) of prototypes already possessed by animals, spirits, or enemies. The origin and essence of culture is acculturation. The idea of creation/invention belongs to the paradigm of production: production is a weak version of creation but, at the same time, is its model. Both are actions in—or rather, upon and against—the world. Production is the imposition of mental design on inert, formless matter. The idea of transformation/transfer belongs to the paradigm of exchange: an exchange event is always the transformation of a prior exchange event. There is no absolute beginning, no absolutely initial act of exchange. Every act is a response: that is, a transformation of an anterior token of the same type. Poiesis, creation/production/invention, is our archetypal model for action; praxis, which originally meant something like transformation/exchange/transfer, suits the Amerindian and other nonmodern worlds better.24 The exchange model of action supposes that the subject’s “other” is another subject (not an object); and subjectification is, of course, what perspectivism is all about.25 In the creation paradigm, production is causally primary; and exchange, its encompassed consequence. Exchange is a “moment” of production (it “realizes” value) and the means of reproduction. In the transformation paradigm, exchange is the condition for production since, without the proper social relations with nonhumans, no production is possible. Production is a type or mode of exchange, and the means of “reexchange” (a word we certainly do not need, for exchange is by definition reexchange). Production creates; exchange changes. I would venture a further remark on this contrast: the idiom of material production, if applied outside the original domain of poiesis, is necessarily metaphorical. When we speak of the production of persons (social reproduction) or the production of “symbolic capital” as if we meant the production of subjects rather

192

peace and mind

than simply of human organisms, we are being no less metaphorical than when we apply the idiom of praxis to engagements between humans and nonhumans. To speak of the production of social life makes as much, or as little, sense as to speak of an exchange between humans and animals. Metaphorical Marx is not necessarily better than metaphorical Mauss. I would speculate, further, that the emphasis on transformation/ exchange (over creation/production) is organically connected to the predominance of affinal relations (created by marriage alliance) over consanguineal ones (created by parenthood) in Amerindian mythology. The protagonists of the major Amerinidan myths are related agonistically as siblings-in-law, parents-in-law, childrenin-law. Our own Old World mythology (Greek, Near Eastern, or Freudian) seems haunted, on the other hand, by parenthood and especially fatherhood. Not to put too fine a point on it: we had to steal fire from a divine father; Amerindians had to steal it from an animal father-in-law. Mythology is a discourse on the given, the innate. Myths address what must be taken for granted, the initial conditions with which humanity must cope and against which humanity must define itself by means of its power of “convention.”26 If such is the case, then in the Amerindian world, affinity and alliance (exchange) rather than parenthood (creation/production) comprise the given— the unconditioned condition. The Cannibal Cogito The analogy between shamans and warriors in Amerindian ethnographies has often been observed. Warriors are to the human world what shamans are to the universe at large: conductors or commutators of perspectives. That shamanism is warfare writ large has nothing to do with violence (though shamans often act as warriors in the literal sense). But indigenous warfare belongs to the same cosmological complex as shamanism, insofar as both involve the embodiment by the self of the enemy’s point of view.27 Accordingly, in Amazonia, what is intended in ritual exocannibalism is incorporation of the subjecthood of a hypersubjectified enemy.

exchanging perspectives

193

The intent is not (as it is in hunting game animals) desubjectification. The subjectification of human enemies is a complex ritual process. Suffice it to say, for our purposes here, that the process supposes a thorough identification of the killer with its victim, just as shamans become the animals whose bodies they procure for the rest of their group. Killers derive crucial aspects of their social and metaphysical identities from their victims—names, surplus souls, songs, trophies, ritual perogatives; but in order to do so, a killer must first become his enemy. A telling example is the Araweté war song in which a killer repeats words taught him by the spirit of the victim during the ritual seclusion that follows the deed: the killer speaks from the enemy’s standpoint, saying “I” to refer to the enemy and “him” to refer to himself.28 In order to become a full subject—for the killing of an enemy is often a precondition to adult male status— the killer must apprehend the enemy “from the inside” (as a subject). The analogy with the animist perspectival theory already discussed is clear: nonhuman subjectivities see humans as nonhumans (and vice versa). Here, the killer must be able to see himself as the enemy sees him—as, precisely, an enemy—in order to become “himself” or, rather, a “myself.” It is relevant in this connection to recall that the archetypal idiom of enmity, in Amazonia, is affinity. Enemies are conceptualized as “ideal” brothers-in-law, uncontaminated by the exchange of sisters (which would “consanguinize” them—make them cognates of one’s children—and thus less than pure affines). In this idiom of enmity, then, neither party is an object. Enmity of this sort is a reciprocal subjectification: an exchange, a transfer, of points of view. It is a ritual transformation of the self (to use Simon Harrison’s term) that belongs entirely to the “exchange” (not the “production”) paradigm of action—though the exchange in this case is very extreme. Harrison describes the situation in a Melanesian context that closely resembles the Amazonian: “Just as a gift embodies the identity of its donor, so in Lowland warfare the killer acquires through homicide an aspect of his victim’s identity. The killing is represented as either creating or expressing a social relationship, or else as the collapse of a social relation by the merging of two social alters into one.”29 The synthesis of the gift relates subjects

194

peace and mind

who remain objectively separated—they are divided by the relation.30 The killing of an enemy and its symbolic incorporation by the killer, on the other hand, produces a synthesis in which all distance is suppressed: the relation is created by abolishing one of its terms, which is then introjected by the other. The reciprocal dependence of exchange partners becomes inseparability here, a kind of fusion. “Ontological predation” appears to be the crucial idiom of subjectification in Amazonia. The relative and relational status of predator and prey is fundamental to the inversions in perspective that obtain between humans and nonhumans. Again, the Melanesian context, as Harrison describes it, presents striking parallels to that of Amazonia: “Aggression is conceived as very much a communicative act directed against the subjectivity of others, and making war required the reduction of the enemy, not to the status of a non-person or thing but, quite the opposite, to an extreme state of subjectivity.”31 Which means, Harrison concludes, that enmity in these societies “is conceptualised not as a mere objective absence of a social relationship but as a definite social relationship like any other” (128). This remark brings to mind a well-known passage from Lévi-Strauss: Les observateurs ont été souvent frappés par l’impossibilité, pour les indigènes, de concevoir une relation neutre, ou plus exactement une absence de relation … l’absence de relation familiale ne définit pas rien, elle définit l’hostilité … il n’est pas davantage possible de se tenir en deçà, ou au delà, du monde des relations.32 “Pour les indigènes,” no difference is indifferent and must immediately be invested with positivity. Enmity is a full-blown social relationship. Not, however, a relationship like any other: I would go a bit farther than Harrison and say that the overall schema of difference in Amazonia is cannibalistic predation. At the risk of falling into allegorical excess, I would even venture to say that, in Amazonian cosmologies, the generic attributive proposition is a cannibal proposition. The copula of all synthetic a priori judgments, in a universe articulated by a “logic of sensory qualities,” is carnivorous

exchanging perspectives

195

copulation. Let me insist: these predatory relations are fully and immediately social relations. We are dealing here with a mode of subjectification, internal to the monde des relations to which LéviStrauss refers. That world has nothing to do with production and objectification, modes of action that suppose a neutral relationship in which an active and exclusively human subject confronts an inert and naturalized object. In the monde de relations, the self is the gift of the other. Some Conclusions Our current notions of the social are inevitably polarized by the oppositions I have been evoking: representation/reality, culture/ nature, human/nonhuman, mind/body, and the rest. In particular, the social presupposes the nonsocial (the natural). It is impossible to rethink the social without rethinking the natural, for in our cosmological vulgate, nature (always in the singular) is the encompassing term, and society (often used in the plural) is the term encompassed. The contrast between our basic naturalism and Amerindian cosmologies can be phrased in the terms of our own polarities. Animism could be defined as an ontology that postulates a social character to relations between humans and nonhumans: the space between nature and society is itself social. Naturalism is founded on the inverse axiom: relations between society and nature are themselves natural. Indeed, if in the animic mode the distinction “nature/culture” is internal to the social world, humans and animals being immersed in the same sociocosmic medium (and in this sense, nature is a part of an encompassing sociality), then in naturalist ontology, the distinction “nature/culture” is internal to nature (and in this sense, human society is one natural phenomenon among others). Animism has society, and naturalism has nature, as its unmarked pole: these poles function, respectively and contrastingly, as the universal dimension of each mode. This phrasing of the contrast between animism and naturalism is not only reminiscent of, or analogous to, the famous (some would say notorious) contrast

196

peace and mind

between gift and commodity—I take it to be the same contrast, expressed in more general, noneconomic terms.33 Likewise the distinction that I have made here between production/creation (naturalism) and exchange/transformation (animism). In our naturalist ontology, the nature/society interface is natural: humans are organisms like all the rest—we are body-objects in ecological interaction with other bodies and forces, all of them ruled by the necessary laws of biology and physics. Productive forces harness, and thereby express, natural forces. Social relations—that is, contractual or instituted relations between subjects—can only exist internal to human society (there is no such thing as “relations of production” linking humans to animals or plants, let alone political relations). But how alien to nature—this is the problem of naturalism—are these social relations? Given the universality of nature, the status of the human and social world is unstable. Thus, Western thought oscillates, historically, between a naturalistic monism (sociobiology and evolutionary psychology being two of its current avatars) and an ontological dualism of nature and culture (“culturalism” and symbolic anthropology being two of its recent expressions). Still, for all its being the polar opposite of naturalistic monism, the dualism “nature/culture” discloses the ultimate referential character of the notion of nature by revealing itself to be directly descended from the theological opposition between nature and the supernatural. Culture is the modern name for Spirit—I am thinking of the distinction between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften; or at least culture names the compromise between nature and grace. Of animism, I am tempted to say that the instability is of an opposite kind: there, the problem is how to administer the mixture of humanity and animality that constitutes animals, rather than, as is the case among ourselves, how to administer the combination of culture and nature that characterizes humans. Amerindian perspectivism might be viewed as a radical polytheism (or rather, henotheism) applied to a universe that supports no dualism between created matter and Creator Spirit. I am

exchanging perspectives

197

led to ask whether our own naturalistic monism is not the last avatar of our monotheistic cosmology.34 Our ontological dualisms derive ultimately from the fundamental difference between Creator and creature. Killing off the Creator, as some say we have done, has left us with a creature whose unity depends on the now-absent God. For God prepared science, and the transcendence of transcendence has created immanence.35 This birthmark is visible on all modern efforts to dispose of dualisms. Our monistic ontologies are always derived from some prior duality—they consist essentially in the erasure of one of the terms or in the absorption (sometimes “dialectical”) of the erased term by the remaining one. A genuine monism, anterior and exterior to the great divide between Creator and creature, seems beyond our reach. A lesson we can usefully draw from Amerindian perspectivism is that the relevant conceptual pair may be monism and pluralism: multiplicity, not mere duality, is the complement of the monism I am contemplating. Virtually all attacks on Cartesian and other dualisms consider that two is already too much—we need just one (one principle, one substance, one reality). As far as Amerindian cosmologies are concerned, it would appear that two is not enough. My problem with the notion of relativism, or with the opposition between relativism and universalism, pertains to the concept that underwrites such categories and oppositions: the concept of representation. And my problem with representation is the ontological poverty it implies—a poverty characteristic of modern thought. The Cartesian break with medieval scholasticism produced a radical simplification of European ontology by positing only two principles or substances: unextended thought and extended matter. Modern thought began with that simplification; and its massive conversion of ontological into epistemological questions (questions of representation) is still with us. Every mode of being not assimilable to obdurate matter has had to be swallowed up by mind. The simplification of ontology has led to the enormous complication of epistemology. Once objects or things have been pacified—retreating to the exterior, silent, and uniform world of nature—subjects begin to proliferate and chatter: transcendental

198

peace and mind

egos, legislative understandings, philosophies of language, theories of mind, social representations, the logic of the signifier, webs of signification, discursive practices, politics of knowledge, and, yes, anthropology of course. Anthropology is a discipline plagued since its inception by epistemological angst. The most Kantian of disciplines, anthropology is practiced as if its paramount task were to explain how it comes to know (to represent) its object—an object also defined as knowledge (or representation). Is it possible to know it? Is it decent to know it? Do we really know it, or do we see it (and ourselves) through a glass, darkly? There is no way out of this maze of mirrors, mire of guilt. Reification or fetishism is our major care and scare: we began by accusing savages of confusing representations with reality, now we accuse ourselves (or rather, our colleagues).36 While philosophy has been obsessed with epistemology, ontology has been annexed by physics. We have left to quantum mechanics the task of making our most boring dualism, “representation/reality,” ontologically dubious. (Though physics has questioned that dualism only in the confines of a quantum world inaccessible to intuition and representation.) Supernature has thus given way to subnature as our transcendent realm. On the macroscopic side, cognitive psychology has been striving to establish a purely representational ontology, a natural ontology of the human species inscribed in cognition, in our mode of representing things. The representational function is ontologized in the mind but in terms set by a simpleminded ontology of mind versus matter. The tug of war goes endlessly on: one side reduces reality to representation (culturalism, relativism, textualism), the other reduces representation to reality (cognitivism, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology). Even phenomenology, new or old—and especially the phenomenology invoked these days by anthropologists—may be a surrender to epistemology. Is not “lived world” a euphemism for “known world,” “represented world,” “world real for a subject”? Real reality is the (still virtual) province of cosmologists, the theorists of quantum gravity and superstring theory. But listen to these custodians of real reality and it becomes obvious—it has been obvious, I might

exchanging perspectives

199

add, for more than seventy-five years—that at the heart of the matter, there is no stuff; only form, only relation.37 There are “materialist ontologies” on offer as cures for epistemological hypochondria, but I do not know what to do with them. All I know is that we need richer ontologies and that it is high time to put epistemological questions to rest. No effort less strenuous and transformative and dangerously disorienting would make even disagreement with an animist warrior possible.

Notes

200

peace and mind

1. Hypotheses that I have offered previously (“Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s., 4.3 [1998]: 469–88) are rehearsed here since they ground the argument of this article. I gave an early version of the present paper, in English, at the Chicago meeting of the American Anthropological Association in November, 1999, and that version was subsequently published in Italian as “La transformazione degli ogetti in sogetti nelle ontology amerindiane,” Etnosistemi 7.7 (2000): 47–58. The title of that paper (which is the subtitle of the present one) pays homage to Nancy Munn, “The Transformation of Subjects into Objects in Walbiri and Pitjantjara Myth,” in Australian Aboriginal Anthropology, ed. Ronald M. Berndt (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1970). 2. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mythologiques, 4 vols. (Paris: Plon, 1964–71). 3. Gerald Weiss, “Campa Cosmology,” Ethnology 11.2 (April 1972): 169–70. 4. See Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis.” For a generalization of the notion of “multinaturalism,” see Bruno Latour, Politiques de la nature (Paris: La Découverte, 1999) and, of course, his contribution the present volume. 5. But see Anne Osborn, “Comer y ser comido: Los animales en la tradicion oral U’wa (tunebo),” Boletin del Museo del Oro 26 (1990): 13–41. 6. Animals and other nonhumans are subjects not because they are human (humans in disguise); rather, they are human because they are subjects (potential subjects). 7. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (1916; Paris: Payot, 1981), 23. 8. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), 75–76. 9. See especially Philippe Descola, “Constructing Natures: Symbolic Ecology and Social Practice,” in Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Descola and G. Pálsson (London: Routledge, 1996), 82–102; and Nurit Bird-David, “‘Animism’ Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology,” Current Anthropology

exchanging perspectives

201

40, supplement (February 1999): 67–91. 10. See Pascal Boyer, “What Makes Anthropomorphism Natural: Intuitive Ontology and Cultural Representations,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s., 2.1 (March 1996): 83–97; and Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 11. “The same convention requires that the objects of interpretation— human or not—become understood as other persons; indeed, the very act of interpretation presupposes the personhood of what is being interpreted…. What one thus encounters in making interpretations are always counter-interpretations.” Marilyn Strathern, Property, Substance, and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things (London: Athlone, 1999), 239. 12. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998). 13. I am referring here to Daniel Dennett’s idea of n-order intentional systems: a second-order intentional system is one to which the observer must ascribe not only beliefs, desires, and other intentions, but beliefs (etc.) about other beliefs (etc.). The standard cognitive thesis holds that only humans exhibit second- or higher-order intentionality. My shamanistic “principle of abduction of a maximum of agency” runs foul of the creed of physicalist psychology: “Psychologists have often appealed to a principle known as Lloyd Morgan’s Canon of Parsimony, which can be viewed as a special case of Occam’s Razor: it is the principle that one should attribute to an organism as little intelligence or consciousness or rationality or mind as will suffice to account for its behaviour.” Daniel Dennett, Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1978), 274. 14. Cf. Lévi-Strauss, La pensée sauvage (Paris: Plon), 355: “La pensée sauvage est logique, dans le même sens et de la même façon que la nôtre, mais comme l’est seulement la nôtre quand elle s’applique à la connaissance d’un univers auquel elle reconnaît simultanément des propriétés physiques et des propriétés sémantiques.” 15. Gell, Art and Agency, 123. 16. Kaj Århem, “Ecosofía Makuna,” in La selva humanizada:

202

peace and mind

Ecología alternativa en el trópico húmedo colombiano, ed. François Correa (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología; Fondo FEN Colombia; Fondo Editorial CEREC, 1993), 124. 17. France-Marie Renard-Casevitz, Le banquet masqué: Une mythologie de l’étranger chez les indiens Matsiguenga (Paris: Lierre and Coudrier, 1991), 29. 18. See Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), and “Writing Societies, Writing Persons,” History of the Human Sciences 5.1 (February 1992): 5–16. 19. John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (London: Allen Lane, 1995). 20. See Bruno Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes (Paris: La Découverte, 1991), 144. 21. See Tim Ingold, “Becoming Persons: Consciousness and Sociality in Human Evolution,” Cultural Dynamics 4.3 (1991): 355–78; and Ingold, ed., Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology: Humanity, Culture, and Social Life, s.v. “Humanity and Animality.” 22. The counterproof of the singularity of the spirit in modern cosmologies lies in the fact that when we try to universalize it, we are obliged—now that supernature is out of bounds—to identify it with the structure and function of the brain. The spirit can only be universal (natural) if it is (in) the body. It is no accident, I believe, that this movement of inscription of the spirit in the brain-body or in matter in general—AI, Churchland’s “eliminative materialism,” Dennettstyle “functionalism,” Sperberian cognitivism, etc.—has been synchronically countered by its opposite, the neophenomenological appeal to the body as the site of subjective singularity. Thus, we have been witnessing two seemingly contradictory projects of “embodying” the spirit: one actually reducing it to the body as traditionally (i.e., biophysically) understood, the other upgrading the body to the traditional (i.e., cultural-theological) status of “spirit.” 23. Desubjectification is accomplished by neutralizing the spirit, transubstantiating the meat into plant food, or semantically reducing the animal subject to a species less proximate to humans. 24. From the point of view of a hypothetical Amerindian philosopher,

exchanging perspectives

203

I would say that the Western obsession with production reveals it as the last avatar of the biblico-theological category of creation. Humans were not only created in the likeness of God, they create after his own image: they “produce.” Ever since God “died,” humans produce themselves after their own image (and that is what culture is about, I suppose). 25. See Strathern, “Writing Societies,” 9–10. 26. See Roy Wagner, The Invention of Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 27. See Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 28. See Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Le meurtrier et son double chez les Araweté: Un exemple de fusion rituelle,” Systèmes de Pensée en Afrique Noire 14 (1996): 77–104. 29. Simon Harrison, The Mask of War: Violence, Ritual and the Self in Melanesia (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1993), 130. 30. See Strathern, Gender of the Gift. 31. Harrison, Mask of War, 121. 32. Lévi-Strauss, Les structures élémentaires de la parenté, 2d ed. (1949; La Haye: Mouton, 1967), 552–53. 33. “If in a commodity economy things and persons assume the social form of things, then in a gift economy they assume the social form of persons.” Chris A. Gregory, Gifts and Commodities (London: Academic Press, 1982), 41, as cited in Strathern, Gender of the Gift, 134. 34. The question is also posed in Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes, and in Marshall Sahlins, “The Sadness of Sweetness: The Native Anthropology of Western Cosmology,” Current Anthropology 37.3 (June 1996): 395–428—to mention only two recent works of anthropology. 35. Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 36. Polarities and other “othering” devices have had bad press

204

peace and mind

lately. The place of the other, however, can never remain vacant for long. As far as contemporary anthropology is concerned, the most popular candidate for the position appears to be anthropology itself. In its formative phase (never completely outgrown), anthropology’s main task was to explain how and why the primitive or traditional other was wrong: savages mistook ideal connections for real ones and animistically projected social relations onto nature. In the discipline’s classical phase (which lingers on), the other is Western society/culture. Somewhere along the line—with the Greeks? Christianity? capitalism?—the West got everything wrong, positing substances, individuals, separations, and oppositions wherever all other societies/cultures rightly see relations, totalities, connections, and embeddings. Because it is both anthropologically anomalous and ontologically mistaken, it is the West, rather than “primitive” cultures that requires explanation. In the post-positivist phase of anthropology, first Orientalism, then Occidentalism, is shunned: the West and the Rest are no longer seen as so different from each other. On the one hand, we have never been modern and, on the other, no society has ever been primitive. Then who is wrong, what needs explanation? (Someone must be wrong, something has to be explained.) Our anthropological forebears, who made us believe in tradition and modernity, were wrong—and so the great polarity now is between anthropology and the real practical/embodied life of everyone, Western or otherwise. In brief: formerly, savages mistook (their) representations for (our) reality; now, we mistake (our) representations for (other peoples’) reality. Rumor has it we have even be mistaking (our) representations for (our) reality when we “Occidentalize.” 37. See Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925; New York: Macmillan, 1948).

A COUNTERNARRATIVE OF SHARED AMBIVALENCE Some Muslim and Western Perspectives on Science and Reason Roxanne L. Euben

The opposition of science to religion—like the correlative binaries of reason and revelation, rationality and irrationality—is central to the way in which the West has organized its intellectual history.1 Such oppositions instantiate the claim that the advance of science and scientific method at once presupposes and demonstrates the illegitimacy of metaphysical sources of knowledge about the natural and social worlds. Implicit in these developments is the promise of mastery—of control, not just over recalcitrant facts and things, but also over human suffering—through the application of scientific and technical solutions. The progress of science and the evolution of Western history toward an ever better quality of life are by this means rendered mutually constitutive. The culmination of this process is a modernity defined by what Bruno Latour terms a “double asymmetry”: “It designates,” he writes, “a break in the regular passage of time, and designates a combat in which there are victors and vanquished.”2 The contours of modernity, in other words, congeal specifically in contrast to both the distant past of the ancients and the more immediate past of the Middle Ages in which a “great chain of being” issuing from God was said to hold sway. This ordering of past and present is rooted in the worlds of the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, and most recently the nineteenth-century heyday of philosophical materialism—yet its presuppositions retain a powerful purchase in contemporary scholarship. Its assumptions and polarities—and the standards of knowledge and methods of explanation they establish—are sharpened in what is called scientism: the presumption, of more recent provenance, that the natural or hard sciences provide a model appropriate for the acquisition of all knowledge.3 Bringing to bear

206

civilian scholarship

the precision, systematic quality, and abstractions of science on the understanding of human behavior represents a conscious rejection of the Aristotelian belief in the “impossibility of scientizing praxis”; and thus, the application of scientistic standards and methods to human action is a dimension of the modern victory over the past.4 Under the impact of rational-choice theory, the most recent extension of that victory into social studies, political science departments in particular have been roiled by the attempt to transform the study of politics from a variety of soft qualitative work into an exact science comparable to the study of markets or protons.5 The polarities on which the idea of modernity has depended are increasingly challenged in our day by religiopolitical movements whose membership and practices suggest that, far from eroding the purchase of religion, the deepening knowledge of science may quicken a sense of the divine hand in the world. After the events of September 11, 2001, this challenge is nowhere clearer than in the make up of Al-Qaeda, the network of Islamic fundamentalists (or Islamists) linked to Osama bin Laden, and tied, not only to the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001, but also to the 1992 bombing of a Yemen hotel containing American soldiers, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, and the destruction of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen in 2000.6 Unlike the often impoverished and uneducated Afghan fighters of the Taliban, a significant part of AlQaeda is comprised of middle-class, somewhat cosmopolitan young men with advanced education, often in the hard or applied sciences. Several Al-Qaeda lieutenants pursued studies in, for example, psychology, medicine, and engineering;7 Mohammed Saddiq Odeh, convicted in connection with the bombing of the American Embassy in Nairobi, studied architecture and engineering in the Philippines;8 Mohamed Atta, the alleged ringleader of the September 11 attack, had been a student at the Technical University of Hamburg, and his confederates included Ziad Jarrahi, who studied at Hamburg’s University of Applied Sciences.9 The apparent affinity of Muslim fundamentalists to advanced education in the sciences is, however, not a new phenomenon. Sociological studies have long noted, for

a counternarrative of shared ambivalence

207

example, that Egyptian fundamentalist groups, from the 1970s onward, have drawn much of their membership from universities and that the backgrounds of university-educated members are predominantly in engineering, medicine, agricultural science, technical military science, and pharmacy.10 Of course, one need not turn to Islamic radicalism to complicate a model of knowledge and a method of inquiry built upon the opposition between science and religion. Some of the strongest challenges to the claim of value-free scientific truth have come from scientists’ own accounts of their endeavor. Many agree with paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s avowal that “[we] are passionate human beings, enmeshed in a web of personal and social circumstances. . . . unless scientists understand their hopes and engage in a vigorous selfscrutiny, they will not be able to sort unacknowledged preference from nature’s weak and imperfect message.”11 Moreover, there is a growing literature by scientists on the interrelationships between, and even compatibility of, science and religion. The physicist Fritjof Capra, to cite only one example, contends that the “principal theories and models of modern physics lead to a view of the world which is internally consistent and in perfect harmony with the views of Eastern mysticism.”12 Similar claims have been made about modern cosmology and Judeo-Christian religion. These arguments form part of what has been termed a “second history” of science and religion in the West—a long-standing if subterranean tradition of accommodation, which ranges from early scientists’ attempts to fashion a mode of inquiry deliberately neutral on religious and normative claims, to Francis Bacon’s insistence that the Bible and the natural world are but two divinely created “Books,” to Isaac Newton’s biblical criticism and anti-Trinitarian polemics, to Albert Einstein’s famous remark about God and dice.13 Such complexities suggest that the tendency to read the development of the West through binaries such as science and religion may have the effect of flattening history. Hidden from view are the substantial ambivalences of Western scholars to rationalism, modernity, and the purported certainty made possible by scientific method. Such binaries distort our understanding of the “rest” of the world, for they

208

civilian scholarship

often serve as an unacknowledged grid through which cultural and religious others are defined by way of gradations of distance from the “modern, rational, developed west.”14 This distance obscures the extent to which supposedly alien cultures share Western ambivalences toward and criticisms of the binaries that authorize science or rationalism as the sole source of genuine knowledge. In the following pages, I sketch a counternarrative—one that foregrounds the shared ambivalence, on the part of various Western and Islamic thinkers, toward what they regard as the drive of modern scientific rationalism to undermine whatever is not intelligible through reason.15 These persistent doubts and criticisms may be read, not as a series of grim footnotes to the unfolding of scientific knowledge, but as partly constitutive of its meaning—and so serve as a necessary antidote to those binaries that perhaps say more about a desire to organize the world than to understand it. Fraught, conflicted perspectives on science are not the monopoly of any particular cultural constellation or historical era; highly reasoned skepticism has accompanied claims to scientific knowledge at almost every turn, although the political, cultural, and linguistic contexts in which they emerge vary widely and often reflect inequalities of power both between and within cultural constellations. To substantiate these arguments, I must first analyze several distinct streams of Islamic political thought, from modernism to Islamism to the more recent Islamization of Knowledge Project. The narrative that emerges is not reducible to irrationalist resurgence, for these are perspectives in which the exercise of reason is considered essential. Attending to substantive arguments about the necessary connection between religion and science, revelation and reason, may open a window onto a set of traditions often dismissed as fanatical, irrelevant, or insufficiently rigorous. The discussion of these Islamic thinkers requires more context and detail than the discussion of Western thinkers that follows, because the former are less familiar to the likely readership of this volume. But by the same token, the figures I have chosen must not be taken to somehow represent Islam, despite their own repetitive claims to have identified the “real Islam” once and for all. Their own disagreements illustrate the limits of any

a counternarrative of shared ambivalence

209

single argument about Islamic authenticity and are, even then, only a small part of a rich history of debate and interpretation. These arguments, I believe, will profit by being juxtaposed to one particular line of the remarkably wide-ranging Western concern about rationalism as an erosive force. That line includes the recent neo-Aristotelian critique of the Enlightenment—the critique of its “hubristic faith in reason and its consequent inability to endorse or establish an overarching ethical and communal order.”16 More particularly, this line of thinking emphasizes the moral and political fragmentation yielded by the rationalist rejection of theology and teleology; and as illustrations, I will draw especially upon arguments advanced by Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Robert Bellah. The work of each of these theorists is extensive and complex. Consequently, my discussion of them is meant to be illustrative rather than definitive or revelatory—a broad-brush sketch that, as I will suggest, discloses a grammar common to Muslim and Western thinkers, where only conflict might be expected. My emphasis here does not, of course, negate the persistent appeal of scientism—of its promise of rational control over the world and its ills—to thinkers and peoples across culture and history. From the “positivism” of Shibli Shumayyil and Zaki Nagib Mahmud, to the “liberalism” of ‘Abbas al-’Aqqad and Tariq al-Bishri, to the “Marxism” of Sadiq al-Azm and Abdallah Laroui, Arab and Muslim intellectuals from a variety of political perspectives have embraced the presumptions and implications of unfettered rational inquiry, often deploying them powerfully against those who insist that rationalism and Western civilization are coextensive.17 Still, my main concern is to illustrate, in a necessarily constrained fashion, the lineaments and persistence of a counternarrative to scientism and rationalism within and beyond the West. Attending to this counternarrative not only facilitates greater self-understanding but also entails recognizing in supposedly alien others a common language of ambivalence, one too often obscured by investments in the opposition between science and religion, on the one hand and, on the other, increasingly popular arguments that Islam and the West are incommensurable and antagonistic. Locating such overlaps and

210

civilian scholarship

intersections is no longer a matter of leisurely academic interest. No less than the propaganda about Western infidels who deserve to die, the rhetoric of a “crusade” against “evil madmen” presses messy, multiple, and cross-pollinating histories and identities into the service of binaries that distort the political landscape. Those who see in this Manicheanism confirmation of Samuel Huntington’s prediction that, in the world after the Cold War, the clash of ideologies will give way to a clash of civilizations are mistaking an effect for a cause.18 There is an unwitting collusion among the Huntingtonian, nationalist, and Islamist varieties of Manichean politics—a connection that helps to make my basic point. Hidden histories that disclose formerly unrecognized connections and commonalities between Islamic and Western traditions may become the firmest basis on which to challenge the political purchase of reductionist claims about the world order now unfolding. Ambivalence to Science in Islamic Political Thought The divide between those who celebrate a spirit of rational inquiry and those who distrust it in the name of religious commitment has been described as a “geological fault, sundering the whole of Islam.”19 However, the meaning of these terms and their relation to one another in the formative centuries of Islamic thought do not map easily onto current connotations. Qur’anic exegesis, the hadith (the collected sayings and practices of Muhammad), Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), and “all the propadeutic disciplines” are referred to under the rubric of “religious sciences.”20 These sciences often presuppose the exercise of the faculty of reason, although under clearly specified constraints.21 The rubric of “rational sciences,” by contrast, subsumes methods of inquiry derived from Greek philosophy—and the infusion of Platonic and Aristotelian thought, in particular—made possible by the extensive translations of Greek texts into Arabic beginning in the eighth century.22 Thus, the very meaning of “Islamic philosophy” (falsafa) is associated with the synthesis of Greek and Islamic thought exemplified in the works of, among others, al-Farabi (d. 950), Ibn Sina (Avicenna, d. 1037), and Ibn Rushd (Averroes, d. 1198).23 In this

a counternarrative of shared ambivalence

211

context, the term “natural sciences” refers to the established Greek sciences, including astrology, anatomy, and medicine; and texts in these fields were among the first translated into Arabic from Greek and Syriac.24 Dislike of the foreign provenance of Greek rationalism and/or of its impious implications has come from many quarters. Refutations of Islamic philosophy in particular range from the mystically inflected defense of the religious sciences by al-Ghazzali (d. 1111) to the scriptural conservatism of the Hanbali jurist Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 1328).25 These debates have always been multisided, however, and the positions have often shifted and overlapped in complex ways that cannot be adequately treated here. The complexity has derived in part from a mutual engagement of opponents that could not but alter the terms of debate: the insistence on what is traditional or authentic is born, after all, out of contest, and often those highly critical of a given kind of reasoning have found themselves using it for their own ends. But complications also have arisen because many disagreements have turned less on the illegitimacy of reason per se than on the identity of its proper object. The battles between faylasuf and proponents of theology (kalam)—proponents like the Mu’tazilis, for example—do not easily fit into a stark opposition between independent reason and blind faith.26 The Mu’tazila developed a rationalist epistemology as a tool in the defense of religious faith yet saw themselves not as philosophers, but as theologians who “represent the true orthodoxy.”27 And following their Greek exemplars, even the most rationalist of the medieval Islamic philosophers tended to regard the end of rational inquiry as the apprehension of “uniform logical, rational principles behind the apparent diversity of manifestations,” rather than as a radical skepticism toward the possibility of metaphysical order.28 The disagreements thus involved a “choice of the sort of evidence one is to reason about—a choice on the basis of what it is one puts one’s faith in…each party was using reason about something taken on faith.”29 So rather than disclosing a systemic antirationalist perspective in Muslim thought, these early debates delineated many of the terms and concerns that would pervade later discussions about the appropriate scope of human reason in the apprehension of truth.

212

civilian scholarship

Reason, Religion, and Islamic Modernism By the nineteenth century, arguments about the relationships among reason, faith, and knowledge naturally bore marks of Western colonialism and its apparently warranted claim to scientific, technological, and military superiority. This response is evident in the project of Islamic “modernism,”30 a primarily nineteenth-century stream of thought whose proponents tended to posit a golden age in the earliest generations in Islamic history and to seek its revival and reform as a bulwark against encroachments upon a decaying Ottoman Empire.31 Modernists such as the Egyptian Muhammad ‘Abduh (d. 1905) and his sometime mentor and collaborator Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (al-Asabadi, d. 1897) shared a conviction that modern rationalist methods and the scientific discoveries they produce would be essential to the strength and survival of the Islamic community. Yet they witnessed first hand the ways in which rationalism could serve as the handmaiden of Western arguments about Muslim backwardness and thus justify European hegemony. The challenge was to sever the association of science and Western power, and to draw upon Islamic history to demonstrate that, in AlAfghani’s words, science is a “noble thing that has no connection with any nation … everything that is known is known by science, and every nation that becomes renowned becomes renowned through science. Men must be related to science, not science to men.”32 In other words, Al-Afghani and ‘Abduh view the survival of the Muslim community (umma) and the truths upon which it is founded as dependent on the compatibility—or, more accurately, identity— of Islam and reason. They thus reject the division between Islamic science and European science, a classification endorsed, for different reasons, by both Muslim traditionalists and European rationalists.33 For Al-Afghani and ‘Abduh, this bifurcation essentially entails the claim that Islam is incompatible with self-evident knowledge. They contend that those who infer an essential enmity between Islam and the exercise of critical reason from the history of Islamic practice are mistaking a debased Islam for the true faith: both the Qur’an and the example of the Prophet, they argue, encourage the pursuit of

a counternarrative of shared ambivalence

213

knowledge of the material world as necessary for survival and wellbeing, and both contain or prefigure truths about the world that are now associated with modern science.34 Islam properly understood is thus “the rational religion,” the “first religion to address human reason, prompting it to examine the entire universe, and giving it free rein to delve into its innermost secrets as far as it is able. It did not impose any conditions upon reason other than that of maintaining the faith.”35 Since revelation and reason are both divine creations, contradiction between the laws of God expressed in the Qur’an and in the Traditions, and the laws of God embodied in the natural world, is an impossibility.36 The contention that Islam, properly understood, is rational depends not only on recovering the “real Islam” beneath corrupting accretions, but also on one’s conception of the substance and scope of reason. As scholars have pointed out, Al-Afghani and subsequently ‘Abduh in many ways embrace the faylasuf as the exemplars of rational argumentation, and some detect in these two the meliorative synthesis characteristic of the early Mu’tazila.37 In one sense, then, what they mean by rationalism incorporates the Greek emphasis on demonstration and proof, and its assumption that reason is the means by which to discover and appreciate the metaphysical order underlying all things.38 Yet central to their project is the reclamation of the epistemology and techniques of mastery associated with European culture and power; in short, the appropriation of modern rationalism. As opposed to ancient Greek science—which was, in Hannah Arendt’s words, “based on a philosophy of thaumadzein, or wonder at that which is as it is”—modern rationalism is associated with the epistemological and methodological claims that, first, human reason is the means by which we come to know and master the world, and, second, that facts about the world are valid because they are rationally ascertainable.39 Like modernity itself, modern rationalism takes shape by way of a double asymmetry: it presupposes its own victory over both a distant and a recent past. Victory over the distant past means rejection of Greek teleology, on the one hand, and, on the other, the retreat of theological authority from the public realm and the eclipse of the certainties that that

214

civilian scholarship

authority was thought to sustain. In this triumph, “God becomes the crossed-out God of metaphysics, as different from the premodern God of the Christians as the Nature constructed in the laboratory is from the ancient phusis.”40 ‘Abduh and Al-Afghani explicitly reject the opposition of science to religion, yet their arguments repeatedly run up against this radical skepticism of the possibility of metaphysical truths. In their various writings, this problem issues in a marked ambivalence to the rationalism that they otherwise espouse. Al-Afghani’s ambivalence is expressed in an apparent contradiction: at one moment, he embraces the most radical form of rationalism and, at another, claims that “every Muslim is sick, and his only remedy is in the Qur’an.”41 Consider, for example, Al-Afghani’s response to Ernest Renan’s article of 1883, “Science and Islam,” in which Renan argues that Arab “backwardness” is a direct product of Islam.42 Al-Afghani’s reply acquits Islam only to the extent that all religions are equally and fundamentally incompatible with philosophy, which he regards as the guiding spirit of all science and synonymous with wisdom in general.43 “Religion imposes on man its faith and its belief,” AlAfghani writes, “whereas philosophy frees him of it totally or in part. . . . It will always be thus. Whenever religion will have the upper hand, it will eliminate philosophy; and the contrary happens when it is philosophy that reigns as sovereign mistress.”44 Al-Afghani goes so far in his agreement with Renan as to acknowledge that Islam, historically, has tried to “stifle science and stop its progress”—has tried indeed to halt all “philosophical or intellectual movement . . . [turning] minds from the search for scientific truth.”45 But again, Islam is not the sole culprit: all religions have at some time similarly impeded the pursuit of truth. Yet Al-Afghani, in his Refutation of the Materialists, written three years earlier, attacks Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898) and his growing group of disciples in India (the neicheris, “followers of nature”) for arguing that Muslims must use reason to render the Qur’an in accord with the laws of nature. Critical foremost of the neicheris’s willingness to cooperate with British colonialists, AlAfghani here turns his attention to a defense of religion in general,

a counternarrative of shared ambivalence

215

though of Islam in particular, as the key to the transformation of human beings from ignorance and savagery to knowledge and civilization. Religion properly understood is “the first teacher of philosophy to the Muslims” because it both enjoins and makes possible the free exercise of human reason.46 The mistake of Muslim scholars, he contends, is not that they bow to divine authority, but that they misinterpret it and the truths it teaches as antithetical to the philosophical reasoning necessary for scientific, political, and moral progress. The Enlightenment, Al-Afghani contends, made exactly the reverse mistake: the philosophes posited an opposition between reason and revelation only in order to resolve the contradiction in favor of reason. Reason is thus linked to the repudiation of divinity, religion, and custom. But both Muslim orthodoxy and Enlightenment philosophy are, in this context, misguided, because the opposition between rationalism and religion that underlies them both is artificial and unwarranted. Scholars have accounted for the apparent discrepancy between these two texts in various ways; some have argued that Al-Afghani’s real views are those in the “Response,” while others have claimed that the views of the “Refutation” are more genuine.47 Leaving aside the question of how to determine authorial intent, these texts, taken together, suggest an ambivalence about the connection between the truths of science and the hold of religious faith.48 ‘Abduh appears to be ambivalent as well: for him as for Al-Afghani, the “true Islam” permits the exercise of reason in understanding “that which is as it is,” but also enjoins imagination without evidence, suspension of intellectual reflection, blind faith in inherited truths, adherence to unexamined dogma (taqlid, or imitation), and credulous superstition (26–32, 143–45). ‘Abduh begins from this position: Islam reproaches leaders of religions for simply following in the footsteps of their forebears, and for their adherence to the plans of their ancestors…. Thus it liberates the power of reason from its fetters, releasing it from enslavement to blind imitation of tradition. Islam has restored reason to its kingdom, a kingdom in which it reigns with judiciousness

216

civilian scholarship

and wisdom, deferring to God alone and conforming to his sacred law. There are no limits to the possible pursuits within its domain, and no end to the extent of the explorations possible under its banner. (147) But what is for Al-Afghani a primarily political matter is for ‘Abduh a theological and epistemological one. Thus, despite ‘Abduh’s apparent confidence in the convergence of rational and revealed truth, in every passage where he celebrates the rationalism of Islam he concludes with a crucial, if vague, qualification: the imperatives of reason must be in conformity with Islamic law, its exercise guided by the aim of maintaining rather than undermining faith. And while ‘Abduh exhorts believers to exercise their critical faculties in accordance with Qur’anic injunctions, he also admonishes rationalists to attend to the limits of scientific inquiry, cautioning repeatedly that reason cannot penetrate to God’s essence or to the essences of nature and human nature, which are, by definition, beyond human comprehension. The issue is not just the fruitlessness of such efforts, but also their inherently transgressive objective: As for speculation about the essence of the creator, on the one hand, it is an attempt to probe that which is forbidden to human reason; on the other hand, the pursuit of His essence is beyond the grasp of human faculties. These pursuits are foolish and dangerous, foolish because they are a search for that which is unattainable, dangerous because it amounts to a strike against faith in that it is an attempt to define that which cannot be defined, and an attempt to limit that which has no limits. (55) These repeated qualifications suggest that ‘Abduh is intent on granting to religion the ultimate authority in matters unclear or in dispute. Yet they also betray his sense of constant danger that a reason animated by doubt toward all inherited certainties will overreach itself, and in so doing, transgress the principles of faith and destroy the purchase of Islamic truth.

a counternarrative of shared ambivalence

217

Islamic Fundamentalism and Rationalist Epistemology In his history of modern Arab political thought, Albert Hourani argues that ‘Abduh’s efforts to “build a wall against secularism” instead “provided an easy bridge by which it could capture one position after another.”49 Contemporary Islamic fundamentalists have for this reason largely repudiated the project of Islamic modernism, seeing in ‘Abduh50 in particular an apologist for Islam whose meliorative efforts effected a capitulation to Westernization by letting rationalism in the back door.51 ‘Abduh and Al-Afghani were convinced that the survival of Islam in their time required the recognition that there is no distinction between so-called Islamic and modern-rationalist epistemologies. However, for Islamists such as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (d. 1989) and the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966), the challenge of modernity is to recognize the ways in which rationalist epistemology erodes divine authority, expresses and accelerates Western power, and inhibits the establishment of a legitimate Islamic social system. Thus, Qutb explicitly rejects Islamic modernism, arguing that it is an essentially defensive attempt to justify the rationality and modernity of Islam both against the obscurantism of Islamic scholars and against attacks from Western and Eastern secularists.52 Implicit in such apologetics, Qutb argues, is that Islam is on trial—is somehow guilty and in need of justification. In this way, Qutb suggests that modernists have inadvertently acquiesced in the given terms of debate, thereby deepening and exacerbating the subservience of Islam to Western power. Khomeini and Qutb insist that the Qur’an encourages the exercise of reason and simultaneously permits and anticipates the emergence of such modern developments as technology and modern science.53 Both men deploy highly rational arguments to show that “the real Islam” entails the use of reason to see the substantial limits of human insight into the most important secrets of the universe. As Shahrough Akhavi points out, Khomeini in particular “uses reason above all other classical Islamic methods in his formal arguments on behalf of clerical rule,” but he nevertheless concludes that “ultimately reason betrays man  … rationality obscures the search for God.”54

218

civilian scholarship

According to Khomeini, the truths of revealed law can only be grasped—and even then, incompletely—by intuition and faith.55 The sciences may serve as a means to approach real knowledge, but mystical gnosis and direct vision are “cognitive instruments that by far surpass all rational sciences, which are only able to provide an approximate and inexact picture of Reality.”56 The limits of human reason are perhaps clearest when confronting questions of moral judgment, human purpose, and the divine plan. The modern condition is a pathological hubris: in transforming reason from a limited tool into a validation of the completeness of human knowledge, human beings have ceased to acknowledge the unseen world and metaphysical truths, recognizing only the knowledge of worldly phenomena as worthwhile. As Khomeini warns: It has been said that “knowledge is the thickest of veils,” for pursuit of knowledge causes man to be preoccupied with rational and general concepts and hinders him from embarking on the path. The more knowledge increases, the thicker the veil becomes, and the scholar may come to imagine that the knowledge he has achieved rationally represents everything. For man is arrogant….57 Qutb similarly describes reason as a “great and valuable tool” but adds that its purpose is to help us think systematically and logically about the parts of the world we can apprehend while recognizing the finitude of our capacity to understand.58 This argument underlies his distinction between permissible and impermissible inquiry, between what he terms the “natural” and “philosophical” sciences. Just as English Puritans had linked the study of nature and the mastery of it to promoting the glory of God, so Qutb regards reason as invaluable in mastering the natural and applied sciences which, in turn, make possible the material prosperity required for divinely sanctioned social justice.59 Such mastery is further necessary because “managing the affairs of the earth” is a condition of man’s status as God’s deputy on earth (the term used is khalifa, vice-regency).60 Given that Qutb argues that much of what is taken to be Western science originated in

a counternarrative of shared ambivalence

219

Islamic universities prior to European ascendance, such knowledge does not entail a challenge to Muslim belief. The physical sciences “lead towards Allah,” he says, provided that they are confined to the study and mastery of the material world.61 By contrast, the philosophical sciences—Greek, Islamic, or modern European—are intrinsically corrosive to Islam, because they presume that the meaning of human existence is a legitimate field of human inquiry rather than a mystery known only to God. According to Qutb, the emergence of an autonomous subject called philosophy, and its insistence on opening to human inquiry the whys as well as hows of the universe, already betray the corrosion of Islam by foreign influence. The danger is particularly acute in the modern world, for the modern form of rationalism defines what is worth knowing as that which is knowable to human beings. This definition is transgressive: it subjects what are mysterious and selfevident truths to interpretation by fallible beings. Yet more than transgression is at stake: the rise of philosophy represents a profound loss. Rationalist philosophy reduces nature and all existence to matters of causality, competition and chance, whereas—Qutb and Khomeini argue—religious truths, and Islamic truths in particular, contain the meanings for which human beings by nature yearn, and answers to such basic questions as why we are born, for what purpose we live, why we die. Without a moral unity in terms of which to organize human life, they suggest, humanity is cut adrift, doomed to a knowledge that is by definition incomplete, fragmentary, purely positivistic and instrumental. As Khomeini argues: For the solution of social problems and the relief of human misery require foundations in faith and morals; merely acquiring material power and wealth, conquering nature and space, have no effect in this regard. They must be supplemented by, and balanced with, the faith, the conviction, and the morality of Islam in order to truly serve humanity instead of endangering it. This conviction, this morality, these laws that are needed, we already possess. So as soon as someone goes somewhere or invents something,

220

civilian scholarship

we should not hurry to abandon our religion and its laws, which regulate the life of man and provide for his well-being in this world and the hereafter.62 The Islamization of Knowledge Project While Islamic modernism and fundamentalism are two of the most important and influential traditions of Islamic thought in the modern period, what is called the Islamization of Knowledge is a nascent school of thought advanced by a loose collection of scholars whose import is contested and influence as yet unclear.63 Like Khomeini and Qutb, the proponents of the Islamization of Knowledge Project find in the contemporary world a crisis and trace it to what they call epistemological imperialism: the “exporting of a secular epistemological and ethical paradigm from the western world, where it first emerged, to the rest of the world.”64 Yet proponents of the Project eschew, not only modernist willingness to adapt to Western categories of knowledge, but also Islamist claims that the integrity of religious truth depends upon cultural purity. Supporters of the Project seek, rather, to negotiate a “third way” between these positions, using the language and tools of Western political and social theory to challenge the “hegemony” of positivism and the “crisis of thought” it produces.65 The Project endeavors, first, to unmask the epistemological agenda behind secularist justifications for the separation of religion and state. This epistemology is held to be no more than a “universalism grounded in ethnocentrism” and is characterized as a “fundamentalist” devotion to abstracting knowledge from the metaphysical and ethical values that must inform it.66 This epistemology, moreover, divides the pursuit of knowledge into the equally inadequate approaches of positivism and mysticism. According to Taha Jabir al ‘Alwānī (president of the International Institute of Islamic Thought), relying solely upon revelation to the exclusion of science transforms “religion into something mystical that accords no value to humanity or nature, rejects cause and effect, and ignores the usages of society, history, psychology, and economics,”

a counternarrative of shared ambivalence

221

whereas ignoring the Creator produces a purely “positivistic understanding of knowledge…. All notions of anything being sacred have been stripped away, and everything has been deconstructed and reduced to its minimum.”67 Positivism, he continues, is preoccupied with ends—“the end of history, of civilization, of progress, of modernity, or of humanity itself.”68 The question neglected by those so preoccupied is (in the words of Mona Abul-Fadl, director of the Western Thought Project at the International Institute of Islamic Thought) “the end for whom, whose history? And the beginning for whom? For which peoples in an outgoing history?”69 According to al ‘Alwānī, Muslims are now “full partners in the worldwide crisis” because neocolonial globalization assures the dominance of Western epistemology.70 As no field of “inquiry can be value-free, nor should it,” Abul-Fadl contends that the Muslim social scientist is at once outside of and “as much a part of the globally dominant culture as any third world social scientist might be.”71 The overall purpose of the Islamization of knowledge, then, is to overcome the opposition between fact and value universalized through Western influence and to recognize the supremacy of an approach to knowledge that regards the entire universe as a unity (tawhīd) whose harmony derives from its origin as the creation of an omniscient God. The pursuit of knowledge in this way requires a commitment to reading and balancing the Creator’s two “Books,” the Qur’an and the physical universe.72 This balance should not be confused with earlier attempts, for example that of Islamic modernists, to plumb religious sources only to say “we already knew about that.” Nor can a responsible social scientist “reject summarily such ideas as disbelief (kufr),” which Islamists such as Khomeini and Qutb do.73 Instead, the task for Muslim social scientists is to construct a methodology that can take both the Islamic and the non-Islamic world beyond the “present post-positivist phase” in the social sciences and then reunite the pursuit of knowledge with the “higher purposes for which creation was intended by the Creator.”74 In so doing, social scientists can recapture a “Kingdom of Ends” in which reason is actively exercised in the understanding that “the holy

222

civilian scholarship

Qur’an is the complete and final revelation…and there is no other knowledge…except based upon it and pointing to it…that can guide and save man.”75 The Islamization of knowledge is thus necessary to save not only Muslims, but humanity in general. The only remedy for the condition of anemia and “oscillation” that plagues modern cultures would be a “Median Culture” organized by the tawhīdī [unified] episteme—“encapsulated in the shahādah…the absolute and exclusive Oneness of God”—where metaphysical knowledge is both premise and guide.76 The development of that episteme requires, first, a rereading of Islamic teachings, not just as a source of private conviction, but also as the foundation of an epistemological and methodological paradigm that can redeem social science from positivism. Second, the Islamic philosophical, juridical, and theological heritage must be revisited in order to determine the extent to which the modes and methods of knowledge embedded in the Islamic past inhibit or enhance the realization of the tawhīdī epistemology. Last but by no means least, the Project involves an explicit and close analysis of the Western intellectual tradition. Analysis is necessary, Abul-Fadl argues, not only because that tradition is now inescapable, but also because a redefinition of self requires redefining the other with care.77 She goes so far as to suggest that there are insights into the Western tradition available only to Muslim social scientists, because they are in, but only in part of, the West’s “Oscillating Culture.” 78 Here Abul-Fadl would have Muslims read the West against the grain of its own explicit selfnarrations. Much like Foucault, she seeks to “expose the sinews of the dominant paradigm, to invest in its deconstruction in a manner that can pave the grounds for its rectification, or for us as Muslims, for its transcendence”—and, in so doing, she seeks to foreground the contradictions, complexities, discontinuities, and missed opportunities obscured by the language of progress, modernization, and rationalization.79 Whereas most of poststructuralism and deconstruction yields a suspicion of claims to authenticity, origins, and foundations, Abul-Fadl and others in the Islamization of Knowledge Project deploy deconstruction in the service of

a counternarrative of shared ambivalence

223

resurrecting the authority of religious knowledge that has been forced into the shadows by the ascent of modern rationalism.80 Thus, the recovery of Islamic intellectual authenticity must involve, according to Abul-Fadl, both a reassessment of the Islamic past and recovery of facets of the Western heritage obscured by logical positivism, the reduction of all sciences to physics, and the concomitant purging of all the nonrationalist elements of knowledge.81 She does not suggest “‘going back’ to a primeval simplicity,” whether Western or Islamic; globalization, the spread of technology, and cultural interpenetration have rendered that option inconceivable.82 Even modern Western rationalism is itself a hybrid, woven from the fabrics of Islamic and Greek philosophy. Still, recovery of an earlier Western heritage is necessary because, Abul-Fadl argues, the divisions made by Western epistemology between public and private morality, fact and value, the material and spiritual, the sacred and profane, reason and revelation, have permeated non-Western conceptions of what constitutes knowledge, thereby ensuring that the products of intellect and culture are everywhere distorted, partial, fragmented, and inadequate.83 The myopia is by now far-reaching: no less than Western positivism itself, the Islamic modernists’ capitulation to Western schema and the Islamists’ insistence on cultural purity both obstruct recuperation of the unified epistemology necessary for an adequate moral and political life.84 Western Ambivalence to Science The ambivalence to science and modern rationalism in strands of Muslim political thought is often taken as evidence of a unified and irrational Islamic worldview that is incommensurable with— and constitutively antagonistic toward—the West. Such claims obscure the extent to which this ambivalence is shared by, almost endemic to, Western political thought in virtually every phase of its historical development. Obviously, before the advent of modern rationalism, Christian and even aspects of ancient Greek thought disclosed uncertainty about the reach of human reason, though in terms that, like those of early Islamic debates, map uneasily onto

224

civilian scholarship

current definitions.85 But even when it became standard to represent Western history as the maturation of the scientific worldview (and nothing but), worries abounded that every advance had been also a foreclosure, that increased self-awareness, sophistication, and scientific knowledge had also effected an alienation from oneself, from others, from the things that really matter. A classic passage of Rousseau captures this anxiety precisely: It is reason that engenders vanity, and reflection that reinforces it; it is what turns man back upon himself; it is what separates him from everything that troubles and afflicts him. It is Philosophy that isolates him; it is by means of Philosophy that he secretly says at the sight of a suffering man, perish if you wish, I am safe  … nothing is as gentle as [man] in his primitive state when placed by Nature at equal distance from the stupidity of the brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man…. The example of the Savages … [confirms]  that all subsequent progress has been so many steps in appearance toward the perfection of the individual, and in effect toward the decrepitude of the species… .86 Freedom and domination, progress and decay, enlightenment and alienation, are for quite a number of Western thinkers the sides of a single Janus-face and derive inexorably (to use the language of Horkheimer and Adorno) “from the nature of the dominant ratio itself.”87 The crisis in the West did not originate in colonization from outside; but writers from Rousseau to Nietzsche to Horkheimer and Adorno have redescribed Western intellectual history as though it had been colonized by an imperial power called Philosophy or Reason or Science. Richard Bernstein draws out one thread from this fabric— he names it the “Rage against Reason”—in which the important figures (Nietzsche, Weber, Adorno, Heidegger, Foucault) find the specter of domination in the promise of emancipation itself. In this tradition, tropes of the “iron cage” and “carceral society” are central. But the battle is joined by those with radically different

a counternarrative of shared ambivalence

225

political commitments. Perhaps most obviously, there are Christian fundamentalists who, though having little otherwise in common with a New Leftist like Paul Feyerabend, argue, as Feyerabend did, that the Enlightenment’s hostility to religion has culminated in a morally impoverished cosmology that underlies and ultimately unites both the socialist and individualist ways of understanding and organizing the world.88 On the philosophical “right,” there is also Leo Strauss’s contention that modern rationalism issues ineluctably in nihilism (the “fundamental dilemma, in whose grip we are, is caused by the victory of modern natural science”).89 Much earlier and even further right is the incipiently fascist Joseph de Maistre, who craves the triumph of a deep and violent mystery at the center of the world. For de Maistre (these are Isaiah Berlin’s words), “everything in the universe that is strong, permanent and effective is beyond and, in a sense, against reason…. Irrationality carries its own guarantee of survival in a way reason could never hope to do.”90 There is no sense my attempting to be comprehensive here: the string of significant names that could be included among Western thinkers ambivalent about rationalism and science is immensely various and long. What I want to do is foreground the strain of Western thought that, it seems to me, most shares the emphasis on moral loss and political chaos of the Muslim thinkers whom I have been discussing. Among the most influential analysts of moral loss is Alasdair MacIntyre, who argues in After Virtue that the contemporary world is characterized by “emotivism.” Emotivism rests upon the claim that, since all rational justifications for objective morality have failed, right and wrong can no longer refer to criteria beyond the individual, and all evaluative judgments are therefore nothing but expressions of preference, attitude, or feeling.91 We live, MacIntyre contends, in the world as Max Weber described it. Without appeal to impersonal and unassailable criteria, rationality has become a matter of selecting the most efficacious means rather than adjudicating among rival values. “Rules become the primary concept of the moral life” in the public sphere, MacIntyre says, and morality per se becomes the purview of the private sphere; ends are a matter of individual conscience alone (119). This state of affairs

226

civilian scholarship

signals, not the exchange of one set of moral rules for another, but rather the unraveling of morality itself: the prevalence of emotivism, MacIntyre writes, indicates that “morality is not what it once was, but also and more importantly that what once was morality has to some large degree disappeared—and that this marks a degeneration, a grave cultural loss” (22). This moral impoverishment has its counterpart in an atomistic vision of social life, one where fellow citizens stand in relation to one another as strangers, as though shipwrecked together on an uninhabited island (250). In the absence of shared ends, social interaction is mediated by rules and procedures, constructed to adjudicate the demands of strangers. The public culmination of this travesty, MacIntyre concludes, is bureaucratic authority, which is justified by reference to efficacy and expertise, rather than to ultimate ends. Just as what passes for contemporary moral discourse is but a hollow shell, such authority is built on quicksand, for in MacIntyre’s view, bureaucratic efficiency is belied by the vicissitudes of life, and the lawlike predictions that constitute expertise are themselves a myth masking a hunger for power. MacIntyre traces this set of predicaments to the Enlightenment’s rejection of theological and teleological foundations: he argues that the rationalist rejection of such foundations entails a separation of fact from value that dooms any attempt to ground morality rationally. Within the older theological and teleological frameworks, the project of ethics was defined by an attempt to move from “is” to “ought,” from “man-as-he-happens-to-be” to “man-as-he-could-beif-he-realized-his-essential-nature” (52). But in the attempt to ground morality in the imperatives of reason, Enlightenment theorists could no longer address the ends of moral action. Here Kant is both the main culprit and grand theorist: The explanation of action is increasingly held to be a matter of laying bare the physiological and physical mechanisms which underlie action; and, when Kant recognizes that there is a deep incompatibility between any account of action which recognizes the role of moral imperatives in governing action and any such mechanical type of explanation, he

a counternarrative of shared ambivalence

227

is compelled to the conclusion that actions obeying and embodying moral imperatives must be from the standpoint of science inexplicable and unintelligible. (82) Paradoxically perhaps, the rules that today travel under the name of morality are intertwined with a “set of fragmented survivals” from these earlier traditions. Their continuing, if merely residual, power in moral discourse is demonstrated by the inconsistency of maintaining modern individualist notions of rights and utility along with classical notions of virtue: “the deontological character of moral judgments is the ghost of conceptions of divine law which are quite alien to the metaphysics of modernity and … the teleological character is similarly the ghost of conceptions of human nature and activity which are equally not at home in the modern world” (111). For MacIntyre, the fundamental misstep was the Enlightenment’s repudiation of the moral tradition of which “Aristotle’s thought was the intellectual core…no doctrine vindicated itself in so wide a variety of contexts as did Aristotelianism…when modernity made its assaults on an older world its most perceptive exponents understood that it was Aristotelianism that had to be overthrown” (117–18). If the problem at hand is a moral impoverishment stemming from this move, then all post-Enlightenment political theories in the Western tradition are implicated, conservative as well as liberal and Marxist. In other words, if the rejection of the transcendent—theological and teleological—in human affairs is the ultimate culprit in the process of moral decay, the entire moral tradition of the West must be “exhausted.” Central to its renewal is a recuperation of what has been lost or denied: an Aristotelian perspective that grounds the authority of laws and virtues in a conception of the good, which is itself meaningful only within the context of specifiable practices and traditions.92 Nothing short of this return can restore “intelligibility and rationality to our moral and social attitudes and commitments” and thus sustain us through the “new dark ages which are already upon us.”93 The interlocking phenomena that MacIntyre calls emotivism are assessed by Charles Taylor under the rubric of authenticity. Taylor

228

civilian scholarship

defines authenticity as a debased form of individualism that centers fulfillment on the self, without regard for any demand or end that transcends it.94 Like MacIntyre, he traces this debasement to mistakes of the Enlightenment: its rejection both of the established social hierarchy and of transcendent moral criteria eclipsed a universally recognizable hierarchy of ends and thus enabled the emergence and eventual dominance of moral subjectivism and an atomistic pursuit of self-realization. The absence of “impersonal criteria of validity” renders social relations manipulative, mere attempts to use others to pursue one’s own ends.95 Discussions of morality in this situation necessarily slide into what Taylor calls soft relativism—a relativism that, while actuated by an unquestioned moral ideal (authenticity), assumes that the “vigorous defence of any moral ideal is somehow off limits.”96 Thomas Spragens characterizes this paradox as “the irony of liberal reason”: the modern rationalist’s purge of value from fact erodes the commitments to liberty, justice, and equality that motivated the Enlightenment project in the first place.97 The culmination of this “dark side of individualism,” Taylor contends, is a “centering on the self, which both flattens and narrows our lives, makes them poorer in meaning, and less concerned with others or society” (4). Unlike MacIntyre, Taylor argues that the ethics of authenticity commenced with a laudable concern for increased individual responsibility and with an insistence (against utilitarian theory) that morality has a voice “within”: that “human beings are endowed with a moral sense, an intuitive feeling for what is right and wrong” (26). The “massive subjective turn” currently in evidence came, Taylor believes, when heeding the inner voice ceased to be a way of determining right action and became in itself significant—when the pursuit of self-realization, in other words, became the modern project par excellence. According to Taylor, this tendency is both exemplified and reinforced by those in the Nietzschean tradition who posit a linkage of self-discovery and artistic creation against the constraints of morality, thereby exalting the notion of an agent with radical freedom and untrammeled power to create value. The atomism and radical anthropomorphism that characterize modern

a counternarrative of shared ambivalence

229

culture find their roots in this linkage of self-creation, self-fulfillment, and the good life. While material and structural processes, such as industrialization and bureaucratization, have contributed to the entrenchment of contemporary atomism and subjectivism, the slide toward self-centered modes of being, Taylor contends, derive from tendencies within the ethic of authenticity. But again, unlike MacIntyre, Taylor argues that modern subjectivism is neither irreversible nor without moral content. His recuperative project is thus to “identify and articulate the higher ideal behind the more or less debased practices, and then criticize these practices from the standpoint of their own motivating ideal” (72). Taylor explains that ideals are set in, and nourished by, particular historical and cultural situations, that human life is thus inescapably dialogical, not monological.98 What we value— and individualism is a case in point—takes shape only against what Taylor calls a background of intelligibility, a shared horizon that make the conditions of significance possible and in terms of which we interpret and transform ourselves. Therefore, while selffulfillment may be expressed subjectively, its achievement requires investments in things that have “significance independent of us or our desires.”99 Despite the loss of a publicly acknowledged social and moral order, the identity of the autonomous individual is sustained by social practices, such as deliberation about public action; and selffulfillment both presupposes and requires noninstrumental ties to other human beings.100 MacIntyre poses our dilemma as a choice between Aristotle and Nietzsche. For Taylor also, the Nietzschean tradition is a kind of dead end—a sad and dangerous conclusion to the rationalist evisceration of all that is unintelligible through reason. The stakes of the choice for or against Nietzsche are nowhere clearer than in the fate of individualism, a value held dear by both liberals and conservatives. In Habits of the Heart, for example, Robert Bellah and his coathors attempt to show by argument and example that the cosmology of individualism has grown “cancerous,” a threat not only to the ties that bind society together, but to freedom as well.101 Despite a rich diversity of traditions latent in contemporary American culture, it is

230

civilian scholarship

anemic forms of individualism, so Bellah contends, that have come to define both private and public life.102 The private sphere is defined by pursuit of self-fulfillment (Taylor’s ethics of authenticity), while the economic calculus of utilitarian individualism prevails in the public realm. Participatory democratic communities have been fractured into atomistic “lifestyle enclaves”—groups that cohere around similar patterns of consumption, appearance, and leisure activity, rather than around shared histories and traditions (335). According to Bellah, our “permissive therapeutic culture”—which he also terms our “culture of manager and therapist,” “culture of separation,” and “culture of radical individualism”—fulfills Tocqueville’s prophetic warning against individualism sliding into administrative despotism and thereby diminishing democratic freedom (50, 51, 81, 277). In this condition, Bellah says, “our poverty is as absolute as that of the poorest of nations” (296). We have achieved tremendous material prosperity and technological mastery, “yet we seem to be hovering on the very brink of disaster, not only from international conflict but from the internal incoherence of our own society” (284). Echoing Taylor, Bellah argues that the pursuit of self-fulfillment has been abstracted from the tradition that produced it, a tradition in which individual autonomy was “placed in a context of moral and religious obligation that in some contexts justified obedience as well as freedom” (143). But as with MacIntyre, the task for Bellah is the recuperation of lost traditions. If modernity is a “culture of separation”—if its failure is primarily a function of placing individual goods ahead of the common good—then reintegration requires reviving biblical and republican traditions that posit communities guided by shared moral ends, both divine and civic. The revitalization, not only of civic virtue, but of meaning itself requires acknowledgment of common purposes broader than the minimalist consensus required for tolerance and procedural justice. For Bellah, that move would not entail a return to traditions that depend on gross social and political inequalities, but would rather demand an eclectic revival of communitarian principles and participatory democratic ideals. In genuine communities—“communities of memory,” he calls them—individuals do not use one another in

a counternarrative of shared ambivalence

231

pursuit of private ends; on the contrary, the private good becomes contingent on the public good to which it contributes. The vitality of such communities militates against the slide into administrative despotism and offers rich resources for meaning. Only by restoring and nourishing communities of this sort, Bellah concludes, can we “reverse the slide toward the abyss” (284). Hidden Histories, Common Currencies The juxtaposition here of Western and Islamic arguments about science and modern rationalism is not meant to establish an equivalence, but rather to put in relief what might be called a common background grammar and to assess its cross-cultural relevance. Intersecting references and partially overlapping understandings render arguments made about the same objects—or ambivalences to what seem to be the same objects—mutually intelligible. Mutual intelligibility is not agreement, of course: there is, for example, a political gulf between, on one side, attempts to shore up the Islamic umma and the absolute truths thought to sustain it, and the democratic and historicist bent of the other side. What these narratives share are stock characters, plot lines, and a common linguistic currency. A sharp contrast is made between the necessary and the destructive exercise of reason. There is the lure of human mastery—the hubris it expresses and the damage it has wrought. There is the perception of disastrous disconnections between means and ends, fact and value, science and morality, reason and religion; and there is the concomitant claim that such artificial distinctions reduce reality to “that which is tangible, discrete, external, quantifiable, and capable of being precisely conveyed to others. Everything that is left over—and some might think that this is half of life—becomes curiously unreal or epiphenomenal.”103 There is the worry about the ascendence of an epistemology that at once purports to be value-free yet organizes the rest of the world in its own image. There is the aim to protect or retrieve ends that transcend the immediately ascertainable and, in so doing, to recuperate what our ancestors—whether Western or Muslim—took to be in no need of justification. And there is, finally,

232

civilian scholarship

the shared belief that, to paraphrase Robert Bellah, social science worth the name is morally serious social science, a practical science in the Aristotelian sense of being a reflection not only on what is, but also on what must be done.104 This cross-cultural juxtaposition of arguments illustrates, in some sense, a Gadamerian “fusion of horizons,” yet this possibility arises primarily because of the Western exercise of power, whether colonialist or, more recently, through globalization.105 Language is the medium of this and all social interactions, but as Jürgen Habermas pointed out in his exchanges with Hans-Georg Gadamer, it is also a medium of power and thus domination.106 In the case at hand, economic and political inequalities have shaped the conditions and terms of encounter between Western rationalism and Islam, authorizing some experiences and arguments, while disqualifying others. Despite a history of cultural interpenetration dating back many centuries, it is the successful universalization of European definitions of reason and science with which Islamic thinkers must contend now (though in the medieval period, the reverse was perhaps true). To recognize this dimension of cultural power is not, however, to reduce science and rationalism to a mere expression of Western hegemony. For while it is now commonplace to note ways in which the cultural “center” has constituted the world of its “subjects” on the periphery, the production of cultural others simultaneously establishes the contours and content of the center and its privilege. As Nicholas Dirks, the anthropologist, observes: colonialism was “not some historical process that simply took place in colonial locales, but rather was fundamental to the construction of modern selves and societies in the metropole as well as the colony.”107 What I am terming a common language of ambivalence may evince, not a smooth blending or even similarity of worldviews, but a hybridity constituted in part by inequalities of power.108 The fusion of horizons in evidence here thus signals an unfinished process, whereby the universalization of particular Western categories and experiences interacts with, and is itself transformed by, those of cultural others, engendering meanings and concerns that are syncretic, indeterminate, and relational—negotiated rather than given. But there is another

a counternarrative of shared ambivalence

233

implication. For what I have juxtaposed here are not positions taken so much as ambivalences expressed; and there is surely much work to do before we understand the relationship between ambivalences in very different cultures toward the cultural products associated with one of them. Agreement in ambivalence may not be agreement in any sense of the word that we customarily intend. But certainly, ideas like disagreement, dispute, and enmity must be radically reconsidered in the face of a dispute between equally ambivalent foes.

234

civilian scholarship

Notes 1. Categories such as “the West” and “Islam” are at once useful and problematic. They provide a way to grasp and order unwieldy terrain but do so either by attaching a single label to what are often highly contested and variable traditions or by attempting to fix what are often porous boundaries among cultures, thereby obscuring long histories of cultural interpenetration. All subsequent references of this kind should be read as problematic, though I will omit the scare quotes. 2. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 10. 3. A recent analysis of fundamentalism and the sciences was thus premature when it declared that “science as privileged knowledge is clearly a thing of the past as the continuing activities of science and scientists come under the same scrutiny as all other forms of social action.” Everett Mendelsohn, “Religious Fundamentalism and the Sciences,” in Fundamentalisms and Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family, and Education, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 34. 4. Nicholas Lobkowicz, “On the History of Theory and Praxis,” trans. Jere Paul Surber, in Political Theory and Praxis: New Perspectives, ed. Terence Ball (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 23. 5. Rational choice proponents’ battles with their opponents in many academic departments increasingly turn on the very political questions of tolerance, pluralism, control of resources, and the power to define what “counts” as research—as a spate of recent articles in magazines and newspapers makes clear. See, for example, Jonathan Cohn, “When Did Political Science Forget about Politics? Irrational Exuberance,” New Republic, October 25, 1999, 25–31; Michael M. Winstein, “Students Seek Some Reality amid the Math Economics,” New York Times, September 18, 1999; Rick Perlstein, “Getting Real: Homo Economicus Goes to the Lab,” Lingua Franca 7 (April/May 1997); D. W. Miller, “Storming the Palace in Political Science,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 21, 2001; Ian Blecher, “How Cult Internet Character Mr. Perestroika Divided N.Y.U.’s Political Science Department,” New York Observer, January 7, 2002.

a counternarrative of shared ambivalence

235

6. As “fundamentalism” was coined to describe a turn-of-thecentury Christian movement in America, “Islamism” is a slightly less controversial way of referring to Islamic fundamentalism. For a discussion of the heated debates over such terminology, and about the usefulness and drawbacks of both terms, see chap. 1 of Roxanne Euben, Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 7. See, for example, Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc. (New York: Free Press, 2001), 27–28. 8. See Benjamin Weiser and Tim Golden, “Al Qaeda: Sprawling, Hard-to-Spot Web of Terrorists-in-Waiting,” New York Times, September 30, 2001. 9. Tim Golden, Michael Moss, and Jim Yardley, “Unpolished Secret Agents Were Able to Hide in Plain Sight,” New York Times, September 23, 2001. 10. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, “Anatomy of Egypt’s Militant Islamic Groups,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 12 (1980): 440. 11. Stephen Jay Gould, review of Not in Our Genes by R. C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin, New York Review of Books, August 16, 1984, 30. 12. Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics (London: Fontana, 1984), 16, 335. 13. Mendelsohn, “Religious Fundamentalism,” 29–31; Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (London: Henrie Tomes, 1605); Robert Merton, Science, Technology, and Society in 17th-Century England (1938; reprint, New York: Howard Fertig, 1970). Merton also discusses yet another strain of thought with regard to science, one in which science was seen, particularly among some medieval Europeans, as a kind of black magic allied with Satan. Merton, Science, Technology, 74. For Newton, see especially B. J. T. Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 14. The phrase the “West and the rest” is Kishore Mahbubani’s. Mahbubani, “The West and the Rest,” National Interest (Summer 1992): 3–13. 15. The distinction between “modern rationalism” and the use of reason generally—and the distinction between modern rationalism

236

civilian scholarship

and various other kinds of rationalism—should become clear in the following pages. 16. John R. Wallach, “Contemporary Aristotelianism,” Political Theory 20.4 (1992): 614. “Neo-Aristotelianism” has become a catchall for many different interpretations and selective contemporary applications of Aristotle’s thought; of the perspectives surveyed here, only Alasdair MacIntyre is explicitly engaged in this project. 17. The scare quotes here, again, indicate the complexity of applying such labels in this context. ‘Aqqad’s liberalism, for example, was not a mere copy of Western liberalism but rather a hybrid of Western and Islamic traditions: for instance, he argued for women’s equality not on the basis of equal rights for all, but rather by way of his own interpretation of the behavior of Zaynab, the Prophet’s wife. Similarly, Leonard Binder characterizes al-Bishri’s liberalism as an attempt to “synthesize fundamentalism, liberalism, socialism and even aspects of Islamic scripturalism by means of a revisionist interpretation of Egyptian history.” Binder, Islamic Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 23. 18. Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs 72.3 (Summer 1993): 22–49. 19. Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), xix. 20. Peter Malcom Holt, Ann K. S. Lambton, and Bernard Lewis, eds., “Science” in The Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 743. 21. The legitimacy accorded various kinds of reasoning varied, moreover, among the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence. What Fakhry terms the more liberal schools, such as the Hanafi and Shafi’i, permitted reasoning by analogy or independent judgment, whereas the Hanbali and Maliki schools opposed any type of deductive method. Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy, xvii. 22. The earliest deployments of logical arguments in defense of Islam were against the materialists and Manicheans. Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy, xix, xviii. 23. For the complexity of the term “philosophy” during the course of Islamic history, see Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “The Meaning and Concept

a counternarrative of shared ambivalence

237

of Philosophy in Islam,” in History of Islamic Philosophy, Routledge History of World Philosophies, vol. 1, ed. Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Oliver Leaman (London: Routledge, 1996), 21–25. 24. Many of the Islamic philosophers (faylasuf) made their profession the “applied sciences” of the time: medicine and astrology. Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 1:418–22. 25. See, for example, Al-Ghazzali, Ihya ‘ulum al-din (“The Revival of the Religious Sciences”) and Tahafat al-Falsafa (“Collapse of the Philosophers”), and Ibn Taymiyyah, al-Radd ‘ala al-Mantiqiyyin (“Refutation of the Logicians”). Islamic mysticism is often understood to be opposed to rational and philosophical approaches to knowledge, yet as Fakhry points out, the “history of Muslim mysticism is more closely bound up with that of philosophy than other forms of mysticism have been.” Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy, xx. 26. Mu’tazilah refers to the rationalist epistemology of a school of speculative theology founded in the first half of the eighth century. It was made the official theology of the umma in the caliphate of al-Ma’mum (827–49) but was marginalized over the course of the centuries. However, as Shahrough Akhavi points out, mu’tazili doctrines continue to be important for Shi’i thought—including that of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, as will become clear. Akhavi, personal communication with author, May 11, 1998, and E. J. van Donzel, “Mu’tazila,” in Encyclopedia of Islam: New Edition, ed. C. E. Bosworth, E. J. van Donzel, W. P. Heinrichs, and Ch. Pellat, vol. 7 (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 783–93. 27. Van Donzel, “Mu’tazila.” 28. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 1:418. 29. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 2:321–322. As Hodgson points out, for example, when the Ash’ari school (associated with the Shafi’i legal tradition) discussed aql (reasoning) and naql (transmission), they were “contrasting, properly speaking, not natural evidence to supernatural authority, but subjective conjecture (‘reasoning’) to (one kind of) objective evidence (transmitted reports)”—the latter of which “referred to any evidence of past events or usages, including

238

civilian scholarship

reports or revelatory events.” As opposed, then, to the division of religion from philosophy that came later, the Ash’aris illustrate the argument that reason and faith together sustain the Islamic system. 30. Again, I place “modernism” in scare quotes here to signal the ways in which what is called “Islamic modernism” is, not an uncomplicated embrace of the ideas and processes constitutive of Western modernism, but rather a hybrid. I will omit the scare quotes in future references, but all references should be taken to suppose this kind of hybridity. For a fuller discussion of both Islamic modernism and fundamentalism, see Euben, Enemy in the Mirror. 31. The modernist school has also included, among others, the more conservative political thought of ‘Abduh’s student Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865–1935). Yet while al-Afghani, ‘Abduh, and Rida all strove for a revitalization of Islam, only Rida interpreted it as a “puritanical revival of strict Islamic practices and religious fervor; it was for this reason that he was a Hanbalite, following the strictest of the four schools of Islamic law, and that he later cast his lot with the Saudi and the Wahabi revival.” Sylvia G. Haim, Arab Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 21. 32. Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, “Lecture on Teaching and Learning,” in Nikki R. Keddie, An Islamic Response to Imperialism: Political and Religious Writings of Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 107. 33. Voltaire is an obvious example but another is Ernest Renan: see Renan, “Science and Islam,” Journal des Débats (May 19, 1883): 1-24. 34. The crucial role of Islam in the development of what has since been termed modern science was emphasized even earlier by those, such as Rifa’a Badawi Rafi’ al-Tahtawi (1801–73) and Khayr al-Din Pasha (1820s–89), who argued that the adoption of Western scientific knowledge constituted, not imitation, but reclamation. For a more recent argument on this theme, see Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Science and Civilization in Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968) and Ahmad Y. Al-Hassan and Donald R. Hill, Islamic Technology: An Illustrated History (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 35. Muhammad ‘Abduh, Risalat al-Tawhid (“The Theology of Unity”) (1897; Cairo: Dar Al-Ma’arif, 1966), 176, hereafter referred to by its

a counternarrative of shared ambivalence

239

English title. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Arabic original are my own. 36. ‘Abduh, The Theology of Unity, 83. Similar to Francis Bacon, ‘Abduh argues that “God has sent down two books: one created, which is nature, and one revealed, which is the Qur’an. The latter leads us to investigate the former by means of the intelligence which was given us. He who obeys, will become blessed; he who turns away, goes towards destruction.” ‘Abduh, Al-Manar, 7:292, cited in Charles C. Adams, Islam and Modernism in Egypt (New York: Russell & Russell, 1968), 136. 37. See Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy, xx; Keddie, An Islamic Response to Imperialism, 45–53; and Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 8. Al-Afghani was not, however, uncritical of Islamic philosophy. 38. Given my immediate purposes, this discussion must leave aside important differences between Aristotelian and Platonic rationalism and also the ways in which Islamic philosophers reinterpreted Greek influences on their thinking in light of Islamic concerns. 39. Hannah Arendt, “Religion and Politics,” in Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 370. 40. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 33. 41. Muhammad al-Makhzumi, Khatirat Jamal al-Din al-Afghani alHusayni (Thoughts of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani al-Husayni) (Beirut: al-Matbaah al-Ilmiyyah li-Yusuf Sadir, 1931), 88, cited by Hisham Sharabi, Arab Intellectuals and the West: The Formative Years, 1875– 1914 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 26. 42. Some even date the origins of more recent debates about the relationship between Islam and science to this critical exchange between al-Afghani and Renan. See, for example, Leif Stenberg, The Islamization of Science (Lund: Religionshistoriska Avdelningen, Lund University, 1996), 32–33. 43. Al-Afghani, “Lecture on Teaching and Learning,” in Keddie, Islamic Response to Imperialism, 104. 44. Al-Afghani, “Answer of Jamal ad-Din to Renan,” in Keddie, Islamic Response to Imperialism, 187. 45. Al-Afghani, “Answer of Jamal ad-Din to Renan,” in Keddie, Islamic Response to Imperialism, 183.

240

civilian scholarship

46. Al-Afghani, “The Benefits of Philosophy,” in Keddie, Islamic Response to Imperialism, 114; Al-Afghani, “The Truth About the Neicheri Sect,” in Keddie, Islamic Response to Imperialism, 172. 47. See, for example, Elie Kedourie, Afghani and ‘Abduh: An Essay on Religious Unbelief and Political Activism in Modern Islam (London: Frank Cass, 1966); Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1798–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Keddie, Islamic Response to Imperialism. Keddie, for instance, resolves the issue by arguing that al-Afghani adopted from Islamic philosophy a tendency to vary his words and arguments when speaking to elites— including both the Western and Westernized intelligentsia—and when addressing “the masses.” In this view, then, the “Response” reflects his real commitments while his more religious “Refutation” must have been aimed at Muslims in general. 48. It may be that al-Afghani’s equivocation here is driven more by the imperatives of anti-imperialist politics than by religious commitment, yet in either case his writings disclose an ambivalence toward the uses and abuses of the unfettered exercise of reason. 49. Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 144. 50. It is one of the paradoxes of the contemporary Islamist movement that while ‘Abduh is explicitly rejected as an apologist, al-Afghani is celebrated as a great anti-imperialist defender of Islam—despite his “Response” to Renan. 51. Islamic fundamentalists are not unique in this regard: as Aviezer Ravitzky argues, Habad Hasidim condemn “any trace of modern epistemological skepticism.” Ravitzky, “The Contemporary Lubavitch Hasidic Movement: Between Conservatism and Messianism,” in Accounting for Fundamentalisms, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 305. 52. Sayyid Qutb, Al-Khasa’is al-Tasawwur al-Islami wa Muqawwamatihi (“The Islamic Conception and Its Characteristics”) (Cairo: Dar Ihya al-Kutub al-’Arabiyya, 1962), 17–20, hereafter referred to by its English title. All translations of the original Arabic are my own. 53. Indeed, tape cassettes were often the means by which religious sermons critical of the Shah reached the Iranian populace prior to the 1979 revolution; and, as Farhang Rajaee shows, the Islamic

a counternarrative of shared ambivalence

241

government has selectively embraced modern technologies and scientific innovations ever since, ranging from computers and television to military technology to the distribution of birthcontrol devices to curtail a population explosion. Rajaee, “Islam and Modernity: The Reconstruction of an Alternative Shi’ite Islamic Worldview in Iran,” in Marty and Appleby, Fundamentalisms and Society, 117–21. 54. Shahrough Akhavi, “Islam, Politics and Society in the Thought of Ayatullah Khomeini, Ayatullah Taliqani and Ali Shariati,” Middle Eastern Studies 24.4 (1988): 428, 406. 55. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, “He is the Outward and the Inward,” in Islam and Revolution: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini, trans. Hamid Algar (Berkeley, CA: Mizan Press, 1981), 410. 56. Alexander Knysh, “Irfan Revisited: Khomeini and the Legacy of Islamic Mystical Philosophy,” Middle East Journal 46 (autumn 1992): 632, 651. Khomeini’s arguments about knowledge are influenced by his exposure to both neo-Platonism and irfan, a type of Islamic thought in Iran characterized by a synthesis of philosophy, speculative theology, and mysticism. 57. Khomeini, “Veils of Darkness, Veils of Light,” in Islam and Revolution, 394 58. Qutb, The Islamic Conception and Its Characteristics, 20, 52. 59. Merton, Science, Technology and Society, 71–73. For a fuller discussion of the matter, see chap. 3 of Euben, Enemy in the Mirror, and Ahmed Bouzid, “Science and Technology in the Discourse of Sayyid Qutb,” Social Epistemology 10.3–4 (1996): 289–304. 60. Qutb, The Islamic Conception and Its Characteristics, 152–53. 61. Qutb, Ma’alim fil Tariq (“Signposts along the Road”) (Beirut: Dar al-Shuruq, 1991), 134, hereafter referred to by its English title. 62. Khomeini, “Islamic Government,” in Islam and Revolution, 36. 63. Here I am focusing primarily on the Islamization of Knowledge Project based at the International Institute of Islamic Thought in Virginia; but this intellectual project, in a more general sense, is advanced at a variety of conferences and institutes, and brings together a variety of Muslim thinkers from the United States, Europe, Africa,

242

civilian scholarship

Asia, and the Middle East who are engaged in the task of linking the imperatives of Islam with those of social science (though there are, of course, disagreements among them; see, for example, Christopher Furlow, “The Islamization of Knowledge: Philosophy, Legitimation and Politics,” Social Epistemology 10.3–4 [1996]: 259–71). The project has been criticized for, among other things, advancing tautological arguments, operating with an outdated version of 1950s social science, and “offering Islamic ethnocentrism disguised as universalist relativism” (Richard Tapper, “Islamic Anthropology and the Anthropology of Islam,” Anthropological Quarterly 68.3 [1995]: 190). Yet the project should be taken seriously because, as Tapper points out, it “addresses a wide audience, avows its ideological base [rather than claiming neutrality], and invites critical discussion” (191). For a useful overview, see Leif Stenberg, The Islamization of Science. Critiques of the project include: Bassam Tibi, “The Worldview of Sunni Arab Fundamentalists: Attitudes toward Modern Science and Technology,” in Marty and Appleby, Fundamentalisms and Society, 88–93, and Toby Huff, “Can Scientific Knowledge Be Islamized?” Social Epistemology 10.3–4 (1996): 305–16. For an opposing account of the relationship between Islam and science, see Ideals and Realities: Selected Essays of Abdus Salam, ed. C. H. Lai (Singapore: World Scientific, 1987), and Pervez Hoodboy, Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality (London: Zed Books, 1991). 64. Ziuddin Sardar, Islamic Futures: The Shape of Ideas to Come (London: Mansell, 1985), 85; Abdulwahab al Masseri, “The Imperialist Epistemological Vision,” American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 11.3 (1994): 403. 65. Islamization of Knowledge: General Principles and Work Plan (Herndon, VA: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1989), xiii. Importantly, Pervez Hoodboy points out that such attempts are by no means unique, among religious thinkers, to Muslims. Hoodboy, Islam and Science, 65–66. 66. Al Masseri, “The Imperialist Epistemological Vision,” 403; Mona M. Abul-Fadl, “The End of History: The West and the Rest?” in Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists, ed. Mona M. Abul-Fadl (Herndon, VA:

a counternarrative of shared ambivalence

243

International Institute of Islamic Thought and Association of Muslim Social Scientists, 1993); Ziauddin Sardar, The Revenge of Athena: Science, Exploitation and the Third World (London: Mansell, 1988), 1. 67. Taha Jabir al ‘Alwānī, “The Islamization of Knowledge,” American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 12.1 (1995): 88. 68. Al ‘Alwānī, “The Islamization of Knowledge,” 88. 69. Abul-Fadl, “The End of History,” in Proceedings, 31. 70. Al ‘Alwānī, “The Islamization of Knowledge,” 87. 71. Abul-Fadl, “Contemporary Social Theory: Tawhīdī Projections,” American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 11.3 (1994): 340; AbulFadl, “Contrasting Epistemics: Tawhīd, the Vocationist and Social Theory,” American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 7.1 (1990): 26–27. 72. Al ‘Alwānī, “The Islamization of Knowledge,” 84, 85. 73. Al ‘Alwānī, “The Islamization of Knowledge,” 96. 74. Abul-Fadl, “Contrasting Epistemics,” 27; Al ‘Alwānī, “The Islamization of Knowledge,” 93. 75. International Institute of Islamic Thought, Islamization of Knowledge, 37; Seyd Muhammad Naguib Al-Attas, Islam, Secularism and the Philosophy of the Future (London: Mansell, 1985), 127, 138. 76. Abul-Fadl, “Contrasting Epistemics,” and see also Sardar, The Revenge of Athena, 1–3; Abul-Fadl, “The Vision from the West: Recovering the Center,” in Proceedings, 113. 77. Abul-Fadl, “The Enlightenment Revisited: A Review Essay, ”American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 7.3 (1990): 430. 78. The feminist theorist Patricia Hill Collins similarly argues that a position of marginality makes possible a creative kind of critique of the institutions of which one is a part. Collins, “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” in Beyond Methodology: Feminist Scholarship as Lived Research, ed. Mary Margaret Fonow and Judith A. Cook (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 79. Abul-Fadl, “The Vision from the West: Recovering the Center,” in Proceedings, 111. 80. Cf. arguments made in Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick, eds., Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion (New York: Routledge, 1992). Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault, among others,

244

civilian scholarship

are deployed to develop this argument. See also Merryl Wyn Davies, Knowing One Another: Shaping an Islamic Anthropology (London: Mansell, 1988), 15–21. 81. Abul-Fadl, “The Enlightenment Revisited,” 435. See also Ilyas BaYunus and Farid Ahmad, Islamic Sociology (Cambridge, U.K.: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985). Ba-Yunus and Farid even invoke Einstein’s caution about God and dice (without naming its source) for support (36). 82. Abul-Fadl, “Contemporary Social Theory: Tawhīdī Projections,” 346. 83. Abul-Fadl, “The Enlightenment Revisited,” 435. 84. As Mendelsohn shows, the attempt to Islamicize knowledge has its counterpart in the ways in which Christian fundamentalists in North America have sought to Christianize science and technology. Mendelsohn, “Religious Fundamentalism and Science,” 28. 85. The noun “advent” perhaps suggests greater historical precision than is warranted. While tempting, the positing of originary moments is, as Foucault warned, dangerous in that it tends to erase contingency, contradiction, and ambiguity. 86. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men,” in The First and Second Discourses, trans. Victor Gourevitch (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 162, 176, 177. 87. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), xi, xvii. 88. See, for example, Pat Robertson, The New Millennium in The Collected Works of Pat Robertson (New York: Inspirational Press, 1994), esp. 50, 67. 89. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 8. 90. Isaiah Berlin, “Joseph de Maistre and the Origins of Fascism,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (London: John Murray, 1990), 130. 91. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 11, 19. “Emotivism” was in this sense first expressed by Hobbes, who argued that the judgments we make refer, not to the thing judged, but to our own prejudices; this position was

a counternarrative of shared ambivalence

245

rearticulated by exponents of logical positivism (see, for example, the work of C. L. Sevenson). 92. This version of Aristotle is but one among many advanced by today’s neo-Aristotelians. For a classification of current versions, see Wallach, “Contemporary Aristotelianism.” 93. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 259. 94. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 95. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 23–24 96. Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, 17. 97. Thomas Spragens, The Irony of Liberal Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). 98. Taylor, “Atomism” in Powers Possessions and Freedom, ed. Alkis Kontos (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), 57. 99. Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, 82. 100. Taylor, “Atomism,” 60. 101. Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), vii. 102. Of course, this contention primarily applies to middle-class white America, the primary subject of Bellah’s study. Vincent Harding analyzes the implications of excluding, for example, members of the nonwhite middle class from the book. Harding, “Toward a Darkly Radiant Vision of America’s Truth: A Letter of Concern, An Invitation to Re-creation,” in Community in America: The Challenge of Habits of the Heart, ed. Charles H. Reynolds and Ralph V. Norman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988). 103. John H. Schaar, Legitimacy in the Modern State (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1981), 36. 104. Bellah, “The Ethical Aims of Social Inquiry,” in Social Science as Moral Inquiry, ed. Normann Haan, Robert Bellah, Paul Rabinow, and William M. Sullivan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 371, 379. 105. See, for example, Roland Robertson “Mapping the Global Condition: Globalization as the Central Concept,” in Global Culture:

246

civilian scholarship

Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity, ed. Mike Featherstone (London: Sage Publications, 1990), and Pheng Cheah, “Introduction Part II: The Cosmopolitical-Today,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 106. Jürgen Habermas, “A Review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method,” in Understanding and Social Inquiry, ed. Fred R. Dallmayr and Thomas A. McCarthy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977). 107. Nicholas Dirks, Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 22–23. 108. On hybridity, see James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), and Homi Bhabha, Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Clifford and Bhabha see the concept of hybrid culture as a challenge to, on the one hand, the notion of universal culture—a culture toward which all peoples must march by way of rational reflection and development—and, on the other hand, to the ethnographer’s search for an essentialized, authentic cultural other. Cultural hybridity, Clifford and Bhabha contend, can also serve as a site of resistance to both colonial authority and nativist tendencies in anticolonial and postcolonial liberation movements. Fred Dallmayr is one among many who worry about the characterization of cross-cultural encounters as a “smooth blending or merger of perspectives.” Dallmayr, Alternative Visions: Paths in the Global Village (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).

“DEREALIZATION” AND CHARITY Gianni Vattimo

Heidegger’s thought is generally taken to be an expression of the apocalyptic Kulturkritik of the first part of the twentieth century, a critique that was very negative about the modern epoch and especially about its science and technology. But the importance of Heidegger in the philosophy of our epoch consists precisely in that he summarizes the capital themes of philosophical pessimism and antimodernism yet transforms them into a different attitude, an attitude whose name is Verwindung. Verwindung is difficult to translate. Heidegger makes use of the term especially in the essay on the “Überwindung der Metaphysik” included in Vorträge und Aufsätze (1954). There he concludes that a complete overcoming of metaphysics—an overcoming of the objectifying philosophies that dominate Western culture from Parmenides until Nietzsche, and that are “responsible” for the “alienating” aspects of contemporary civilization—is impossible. Overcoming metaphysics would require a capacity for leaping out of the tradition into which our very existence is “thrown.” But if Überwindung, an overcoming, is impossible, what we can have instead is Verwindung: a resigned acceptance that continues the metaphysical tradition in a distorted form. In the term Verwindung resound not only the meanings of “resignation” and “acceptance,” but also of “convalescence.” (Verwinden is the act of carrying the traces of an illness that has been overcome but not totally cancelled from the body.) The term Verwindung also means “distortion” (note the prefix ver), a meaning that Heidegger does not emphasize but which in my interpretation of the term is crucial. That my emphasis differs from Heidegger’s is, in its turn, a Verwindung, a distorted acceptance, of Heidegger’s doctrine. However, my interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophy is not arbitrary, insofar as it strives and claims to be faithful to the genuine inspiration of that philosophy even against (some of) the interpretive claims of Heidegger himself.

248

peace and mind

There seem to be two main ways of reading Heidegger’s philosophy, a right-wing and a left-wing interpretation. The former develops Heidegger in the direction of negative theology: ontological difference, on this reading, means that being is never identifiable with beings and so has to be looked for beyond the realm of finitude. The culmination and dissolution of metaphysics in modern science and technology place humanity face to face with the certainty that being is transcendent; thus humanity is prepared for a kind of religious conversion, more than analogous to the dark night of the mystics. Left-wing Heideggerianism, on the other hand, posits that, in order to be faithful to the purpose of overcoming metaphysics, one has to avoid the attitude of negative theology. For mysticism and negative theology assume that being is “given,” though in a distinct and transcendent realm, and that, moreover, the whole history of metaphysics is a pedagogical device that being uses in order to prepare humanity for a postmetaphysical revelation. What I propose to call the Heideggerian Left assumes (to the contrary) that ontological difference means that being is not simply concealed and waiting for the moment of its revelation. Metaphysics is the history of being exactly because it is the history of the forgetfulness of being: being ereignet, being, as an event, gives itself fully, not provisionally or pedagogically, in its suspension, in its weakening and dissolution. This left-wing interpretation of Heidegger is preferable to the right-wing interpretation, because it takes more seriously the basic purpose of Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics, namely the purpose of overcoming the identification of being with beings, things, objects, be it even the supreme “Object” of the ipsum esse subsistens, God. The only step that this left-wing reading takes beyond the explicit theses of Heidegger is its argument that the way to remain faithful to his purpose is to recognize that ontological difference involves a nihilistic destiny for being. Yet this argument is implicit in the late lecture “Zeit und Sein,” in which Heidegger says that, in order to avoid the metaphysical identification of being with beings, one has “to leave aside being as the foundation of beings” (“das Sein als den Grund des Seienden fahren lassen”; and also, “Denken wir dem Sein eigens nach, dann führt uns die Sache selbst in gewisser Weise

“derealization” and charity

249

vom Sein weg” [“If we reflect on being expressly, then the matter of thinking itself leads us, in a certain sense, away from being”]). From the left-wing point of view, metaphysics is the history of being not only in the subjective sense of the genitive—it belongs to being—but also and above all in the objective sense: being is nothing but the being of the history of metaphysics; its “ending” in this history is its very essence, not an accident that can be overcome and left behind. Nihilism, then, belongs to the destiny of being in a more general sense than Heidegger admitted. Yet Heidegger’s ontology is, I think, itself a form of nihilism—precisely of the sort that Nietzsche had in mind when he spoke of “active nihilism.” To justify, from another point of view, this “distortion” of Heidegger’s doctrine, let me add that such distortion seems to be required also by the right-wing interpretation and by the involvement of Heidegger with the Nazis. At a certain point in his career, Heidegger interpreted his own thought as a philosophical justification of Hitler’s totalitarian politics. But many of the leftist thinkers of the last decades, and even many left-wing Heideggerians (I mention only the Italian translator of Sein und Zeit, Pietro Chiodi, who was a member of the Italian resistance and was imprisoned in Nazi camps), have read Heidegger’s doctrine as separable from these implications. We cannot accept the simplistic version of Farias, that these non-Nazi readings of Heidegger are based upon a rough mistake or upon ignorance of the philosopher’s biography. Nor can we be satisfied with the strong separation of Heidegger’s “scientific” results from his personal, moral, and political attitudes: Richard Rorty, in suggesting that one may discover important truths in science or philosophy, and nevertheless be, morally, a “son of a bitch,” makes a very un-Heideggerian move toward positing philosophy as a science. We must affirm, then, the necessity of explaining why Heidegger’s thought can appear so important even from a point of view utterly unsympathetic to Nazism. The Verwindung I propose is a way—the sole one, as far as I can see—of solving the problem: Heidegger himself, when he supported Hitler, misunderstood the authentic meaning of his own philosophical premises. Such a reading of Heidegger authorizes the effort to

250

peace and mind

interpret him beyond the letter of his own self-understanding. (Taking a further step, one could show that the misunderstanding that led Heidegger to Nazism is the same one that inspired his own, and his disciples’, right-wing interpretation.) The philosophical legitimation of Verwindung (Heidegger interprets Verwindung specifically as the relation of postmetaphysical thought to traditional metaphysics) is dependent upon Heidegger’s view that the modern rationalization of society through science and technology is the end result of metaphysics. It is therefore legitimate to speak of a Verwindung of modernity in the same sense in which Heidegger speaks of the Verwindung of metaphysics. Heidegger is no more pessimistic about technology than most thinkers of our century. Most assume that modernity—the overrationalization of social and individual life through science—must be overcome. The objectifying thought that gave rise to modern science and technology threatens, Heidegger concludes, the very “essence” of humanity by reducing us to the condition of manipulable objects. But if so, why settle for a Verwindung (which Heidegger treats as a sort of ersatz Überwindung)? If we remain strictly within the theoretical horizon of Heidegger, it is obvious that, given the connection between metaphysics and modernity, the reasons why metaphysics can only be verwunden also explain the Verwindung of modernity. On this reading, modernity and metaphysics are the (sole) history of being, and we have no possible foundation outside that history. To assume the possibility of alternative, external foundations would repeat the original error of metaphysics—its notion that being is an entity out there, an entity that can be given to us objectively and that can serve as a new and more valid foundation for a philosophy that would be beyond the errors of metaphysics and for an epoch that would be beyond the errors of modernity. All of this holds, as I say, if we remain within the horizons of Heidegger’s philosophy. But my thesis is that there are good reasons as well to adopt the concept of Verwindung even if we start from a viewpoint that merely shares with Heidegger the desire to get beyond the more dangerous aspects of modernity and beyond the philosophical pessimism they have inspired.

“derealization” and charity

251

The most impressive experience that gives rise to the last ambivalence about modernity is probably the failure of the idea of revolution, a failure that indeed characterizes the last decades of our century. It is not by chance that the popularity of “postmodernism” as a term has coincided, in Western culture, with the progressive dissolution of the revolutionary projects that followed the explosion of the late sixties. From 1968 on, the revolutionary mythologies— those of Mao, Castro, and most recently Lenin—have progressively lost their power to attract the imagination of (at least) Western societies. On the other hand, this loss has not brought with it a complete acceptance of the existing order. Western culture is still profoundly marked by mistrust of the capitalist structure of society, and the increasing ecological problems created by technology contribute ever-new reasons for mistrust. Still, if many of us are agreed that we must get beyond modernity, we are agreed as well that modernity cannot be overcome by modern means—by means such as revolution and technological development. It is a complex attitude that we share, one that cannot be reduced to the simple polarities of pessimism and optimism; the notion of Verwindung can help us to give that attitude a name and thereby also a sense and direction. Revolution and technological progress are, both of them, modern mythologies, and the causes of the crisis in revolutionary ideals are the same, basically, as those inspiring mistrust in techno-scientific rationalization. The characteristic modern “error,” according to Heidegger, is the claim to absolute legitimacy: the reappropriation of true human nature (the ideal of revolution) or the development of pure, positivist objectivity (the ideal of techno-scientific progress). These two forms of metaphysical legitimation have lost their persuasiveness for philosophers, and the fact that neither faith in revolution nor in rationalization is any longer widespread may correspond to this transformation in the discipline of philosophy. Revolution promised to overcome modernity by eliminating authority and the state, but resulted instead in a totalitarianism that belied faith in the refoundation of history and society on an authentic, human basis. (Recall the Marxian notion of Gattungswesen [“species-being”].) What substitutes today for the demythologized revolutionary ideal

252

peace and mind

is not belief in progress, technology, the free market, and liberal society, but rather a kind of popular skepticism—an attitude, in its mistrust of “overcoming” and “refoundation,” parallel to that of our metaphilosophers (Wittgenstein, Rorty, Kuhn) and not far from the attitude of Verwindung. Add to this an awareness that the causes of collapse in the East European regimes were less “rational” (the need for civil liberties and democracy, etc.) than prosaic (the need for merchandise, etc.), and we have yet another reason to speak of Verwindung: to speak of progress, yes, but the progress of a chess game in which all the pieces are knights and all the moves “horse moves”—sideways motions, indescribable in linear terms. But let us return to Heidegger. His terminology is useful in describing our present situation. He offers us, furthermore, a reading of our situation that may “distort” its negative aspects toward more desirable results. Verwindung, at least from the left-wing point of view, leads to a postmetaphysical condition, a condition (roughly speaking) without objectification and hence without alienation. The way to arrive at this desirable condition is by reinterpreting the Ge-Stell (a term, like Verwindung, that is central to Heidegger’s late philosophy). Ge-Stell means, literally, “framework”; in Italian it can be best translated as imposizione, or “in-position.” As the essence of the late-modern world of technology, Ge-Stell signified to Heidegger something similar to what Adorno meant by the term totale Verwaltung, “total organization.” Ge-Stell is the world in which metaphysics (defined as the thought of the total objectification of being) has reached its highest development. Thus Ge-Stell is also the situation of highest risk for the Wesen of humanity. But, as Hölderlin says, “wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch.” In nondialectical terms (dialectical terms would entail Überwindung…), Heidegger argues that the Ge-Stell involves not only the highest risk for the human essence of humanity, but also a possible first step toward a new, postmetaphysical relation of humanity to being. In a famous passage of the first section of Identität und Differenz, Heidegger writes that “ein erstes, bedrängendes Aufblitzen des Ereignisses erblicken wir im Ge-Stell” (“we see in the Ge-Stell the first troubled flash of the event of being”).

“derealization” and charity

253

This is not only to say that the techno-scientific organization of the modern world is for Heidegger an event of being or belongs to being. Rather, in the “first flash of the Ereignis,” the possibility opens that the “domination of the Ge-Stell deepens and transforms itself (verwindet sich) into an anfänglicher event.” Neither Identität und Differenz nor any other of Heidegger’s texts tells us what this anfänglicher (initial, original, radical) experience of being is supposed to be. But this means that Heidegger’s attitude—and later Heideggerians’ attitudes toward modernity—and technology cannot be identified with the apocalyptic pessimism of the Frankfurt School. A more appropriate, a hermeneutical, approach would try to articulate in explicit terms from Heidegger’s perspective—and even against the letter of some of his earlier texts—what opportunities are offered to humanity in Identität und Differenz. There, Heidegger maintains that the Ge-Stell is “the oscillating horizon (der in sich schwingende Bereich) in which man and being reach each other in their essence, and reach what is essential to them, insofar as they lose those determinations which had been attributed to them by metaphysics.” Of course, the characteristics of subject and object are the main metaphysical determinations and qualifications assigned to humanity and being by metaphysics. The possibility of experiencing the Ge-Stell as a chance of “salvation,” and not merely as the highest risk for our essence, would be the complete consummation of the subject-object relation of humanity to being. And what I have called the right-wing interpretation of Heidegger misses this point entirely. Negative theology or ontology—whether in the form of the unknowable divine being, or in the form of the Volk and Heimat of the Nazi Heidegger—remains within the context of the “objectification” of being. A more detailed reconstruction of Heidegger’s thought could show, as elsewhere I have tried to show, that the way of grasping the verwindende chances of the Ge-Stell is to emphasize its nihilistic traits. It is precisely because in the GeStell (in the “in-position”) being tends to “evaporate” (as Heidegger says in Was heisst Denken?) that the Ge-Stell offers to humanity the promise of a new relation with being. And therefore Verwindung, when radically seen, consists precisely in reversing our attitude

254

peace and mind

toward the negative attributes of modernity, toward the nihilistic implications of the process of scientific rationalization. Heidegger indicates, in Holzwege, that one can recover from metaphysics by making its traits more extreme. The objectivity of the object (and, therefore, the objectification of being) can be dissolved by the expansion of objectivity into realms where a unified, objective world is no longer even conceivable. For it is not only the multiplication of scientific images that has rendered impossible a unified image of the world; it is also the proliferation of interpretations of reality given in mass culture that has weakened our sense of reality. As Nietzsche taught, there is no longer an “interpretation agency” that establishes what is to be taken as real and what is not. In this circumstance, being, in the sense of objectivity, tends indeed to evaporate. Its disappearance, though, should not be taken as yet another excuse for the exercise of will to power, and should be regarded not as a loss but as an opportunity: the chance to develop a no-longer-metaphysical relation with being. Moreover, the subjectivity of the subject, in this circumstance, tends to weaken: for example, the distinction between use value and exchange value disappears, and the subject itself and its “needs” are displaced by what Adorno calls the “fantasmagory of merchandise.” This weakening of the sense of reality can be observed in all regions of our experience, even in the apparently resistant area of economics. Could the term real be applied to the problem of external debt in “third world” countries? If all the banks to which these nations are indebted required their money back instantly, the world economy would collapse; this debt is, then, in a very practical sense, unreal. In still another area, historiography, methodological self-reflection in recent decades seems to have shown that History is a rhetorical scheme, applied, as are all other rhetorical schemes, in relation to specific practical (and often ideological) needs and purposes. Today history, as it is practiced, is tending to dissolve into a multitude of (hi)stories that cannot be unified. It is this process—this characteristically late-modern process— of “derealization” to which the Verwindung of Heidegger applies. It is not a matter of persuading oneself that nihilism is good as it is;

“derealization” and charity

255

resignation must be accompanied by distortion. Verwindung begins with acceptance, with a change in the valence of nihilism; but it must be reinterpreted so that we postmoderns grasp the chance offered by our weakening sense of reality. Indeed, the process of derealization itself must be reinterpreted as an opportunity to be grasped. Is it not possible that many of the dramatic problems of our civilization depend for their drama on a neurotic effort to reaffirm a strong sense of reality in a context where emancipation resides rather in the weakening of that sense? The nostalgia for strong reality, for clear authority, for a unique and apodictic system of values, resembles what psychology terms “neurosis.” It appears to me that, beyond the simplistic opposition of pessimism and optimism, Right and Left, in relation to our technological and postrevolutionary world, an “active nihilism,” like that prepared by Nietzsche and Heidegger (and perhaps not so far from the philosophy of Wittgenstein and even Levinas), could help decisively in healing this neurosis.

256

peace and mind

Notes 1. See, e.g., Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 171–80. 2. Cf. Bernard Williams’s distorting acceptance of Wittgenstein (“Left-Wing Wittgenstein”) and Jeffrey Goldfarb’s of Marx (“RightWing Marx”) in the first two issues of Common Knowledge (spring and fall, 1992). 3. Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1969), 6, 10. 4. See Gianni Vattimo, Le avventure della differenza (Milan: Garzanti, 1979), chaps. 5, 7. 5. Martin Heidegger, Identität und Differenz (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), 27. 6. Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, 25. 7. Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, 26. 8. See Gianni Vattimo, “Metafisica, violenze, secolarizzazione,” in Filosofia ’86 (Rome: Laterza, 1987).

CHARITY AND POWER IN RENAISSANCE FLORENCE Surmounting Cynicism in Historiography Dale Kent

Neri di Gino once said to Cosimo: “I wish you would say things clearly so that I could understand you.” He replied: “Learn my language.”1 A remarkable proportion of recent scholarship concerning Florence in the fifteenth century has been devoted to demonstrating that most commissions of this culture’s famed works of art by members of the city’s ruling elite were inspired by impulses more self-interested than a desire to celebrate the honor of God and the city. Historians now view these commissions as primarily, if not exclusively, ingenious representations of political power, especially if they were made by the Medici family, who in the early Renaissance came to exercise an unprecedented authority within the Florentine republic. Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464) was Florence’s most influential statesman and personal patron, and therefore anything he did was in a sense political. There are numerous examples of the favorable, and probably calculated, effects of Cosimo’s personal and artistic patronage on his popular image, resulting in the enhancement of his influence and reputation in the city. Medici images are stamped with the impress of Medici identity—of their wealth, power, and pride in lineage. But if they are to be interpreted as political statements, expressions of secular power, or aspirations, the concepts of politics and power need to be understood in much more complex terms than they have been to date. A requisite step in this direction is to study the whole corpus of works commissioned in fifteenth-century Florence from the patrons’ own perspectives, and I have myself have written such a study of Cosimo de’ Medici’s commissions.2 This work involved setting his commissions in the contexts, not only of his own life, education, and interests—and those of the artists he employed—

258

peace and mind

but also of the civic, devotional, and popular culture that artists and patrons shared with their Florentine audience (by far the most literate in Europe at the time). Tracing the pattern of the themes that Cosimo’s commissions expressed in visual form, I believe that I have been able to shed fresh light on familiar objects, restoring to them more of the meaning they bore in their own time—and able also to delineate a more accurate portrait of their patron. This approach alters or adds in essential ways to the picture that emerges from Cosimo’s more commonly studied activities as banker and politician. The resulting image of Cosimo is, I hope, more intricate, more nuanced, more human. In order to understand the role played by patronage in the creation of art, we need to reassemble each individual patron as the integrated subject of his or her own life, rather than as an object fragmented for the convenience of academics in the disciplines of politics, religion, social history, and art. We also need to abandon artificial and anachronistic oppositions between public and private, secular and spiritual, individual and corporate. Patrons should be allowed to define themselves in their own words, images, and actions: to present themselves and their worlds on their own terms. Otherwise, the historian’s appropriate exercise of the critical faculty in relation to the self-representations of people in the past may harden into a general cynicism, and an impulse to moralize, too often based on present values and standards of progress, of right and just behavior. There seems to me no point in this sort of history, since much of the pleasure and profit of the discipline lies in discovering in the past unfamiliar ways of being human that help to expand our understanding of humanity. It may be instructive that despite his modern reputation as the ultimate cynic, Machiavelli, one of the great historians of the Western tradition, regarded classical literature and history as a repository of experience waiting to be accurately understood, and he was eager to enter into the past world of antiquity on its own terms. His has always seemed to me a most eloquent and compelling argument for the study of history:

charity and power in renaissance florence

259

When I leave the wood, I go to a spring  … I have a book with me, either Dante or Petrarch or one of the lesser poets like Tibullus, Ovid, or someone similar. I read about their amorous passions and their loves, I remember my own, and enjoy these thoughts for a while. I then move on up the road to the inn, I speak with those who pass…. I learn various things and take note of the diverse tastes and different visions of men…. When evening comes, I return home, and go into my study; and at the threshold I take off my ordinary clothes, covered in mud and dirt, and I put on regal and courtly garments; and reclothed appropriately, I enter into the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them kindly, I feed on that food, which is mine only, and for which I was born; where I am not ashamed to speak to them, and to ask them the reasons for their actions; and they, in their humanity, answer me; and for four hours I feel no annoyance, I forget all my troubles, I do not fear poverty, nor am I dismayed by death; I give myself over to them entirely.3 The Piety of Cosimo de’ Medici In my earlier work on the Medici rise to power, I addressed the question of how and why Cosimo de’ Medici and his family came to exercise so much authority in a polity that was passionately committed to classical republicanism.4 In search of an answer, I considered the evidence of Cosimo’s performances in the political arena of communal councils, and the private communications in which he directed the activities of his partisans. The Cosimo who emerged from these records was certainly a political animal in the narrowest sense of being preoccupied with procuring offices and directing political opinion. When I turned, in the preparation of the more recent book, to Cosimo’s artistic patronage and to the general culture on which he drew in commissioning works of art, I was led to a much more challenging and fascinating enterprise: an attempt to understand Medici political authority and image in its social and cultural context, as a product, as well as a determinant,

260

peace and mind

of the nature of Florentine civic life. My conclusion here was more radical—that the religious and civic impulses of Cosimo de’ Medici and the society he represented were probably more important than political ones in shaping the patronage of art and its reception. I found the Medici patrons to be a part of Florentine culture rather than creators or manipulators of it. The major themes of most of Cosimo’s commissions were not explicitly and simply political (as they are often seen to be), but instead represent the civic and religious ideals with which he and his Florentine audience were preoccupied. My focus here is on a single example: Cosimo’s first major ecclesiastical commission—the rebuilding and decorating of the Dominican convent of San Marco, and particularly the altarpiece he commissioned Fra Angelico to paint for the main chapel of the church.5 The panel represents, in its images of a hierarchy of authority, an association between Florentine conceptions of the right ordering of this world and that of the world hereafter, between earth and heaven. Earthly patrons, whom Cosimo embodied par excellence, acted as patriarchal protectors and intercessors for their clients in this world, in return for loyalty and support. Through acts of charity—by supporting the church and its poor with direct gifts of food or money, and by the commissioning of churches, chapels, and devotional images—these patron-protectors earned for themselves and their clients the further protection of patron saints bound to intercede for them in heaven before the ultimate Father and Judge. Modern historians speculating on Cosimo de’ Medici’s motives for patronage have tended to be skeptical about the role of religious feeling, and much concerned to distinguish and quantify pious and political impulses, civic and dynastic interests. To Renaissance patrons, these were not alternatives. Their patronage simultaneously served, as Giovanni Rucellai (another major Florentine patron) explained, “the honor of God, and the honor of the city, and the commemoration of me.”6 Cosimo’s patronage of churches expressed a complex amalgam of inherited family obligations, increasing civic prominence, profound involvement with the institutional church (especially the papacy), and personal devotion.

charity and power in renaissance florence

261

Scholars have stressed how effectively Medici donations to churches commemorated the family and enhanced the city’s honor, and these themes are prominent in Cosimo’s oeuvre. But we need to grasp more fully the importance to the patron of honoring God. Until very recently, the role of ecclesiastical patronage in expiating the patron’s sinful acts and securing his salvation has not been taken seriously, particularly in the case of the Medici, whose undeniably powerful political instincts are generally presumed to have been always paramount. The dictum sometimes attributed to Cosimo that “a state is not governed by paternosters” is inevitably read out of the context of his having spent a lifetime saying them. In dismissing Cosimo’s piety as “conventional in the extreme,” historians have failed to realize how far the conventions of late medieval piety (and the realities that they represented) permeated the everyday life of the men whose secular fame and political power have attracted scholarly attention.7 Salvation was the ultimate concern of even the most worldly of Renaissance Christians. There is a letter of 1463 from Cosimo de’ Medici to Marsilio Ficino (a familiar of the Medici household since childhood), in which Cosimo asks the Neoplatonist philosopher to show his aging patron the way to happiness through the understanding of God: this request has been adduced as rare evidence of Cosimo’s late conversion to an interest in spiritual matters. But what the letter expresses is a strong and abiding concern for his soul that is clearly apparent in the earliest records illuminating Cosimo’s personal life. By 1418, when he was not yet thirty, his library was stocked with religious literature, his house filled with devotional images.8 His ecclesiastical patronage began no later than the mid-1420s, when he served as agent in commissioning the tomb of Pope John XXIII in the Florentine Baptistery. Cosimo assumed his father’s commitments at the family’s parish church of San Lorenzo after Giovanni di Bicci’s death in 1429. The chapels and altarpieces that Cosimo commissioned for the glory of God and the honor of the city also provided him and his family with marvelous opportunities for their own devotion, and unusual access to sacred spaces. Cosimo used the privileges of his secular power and wealth not merely for atonement, but also to lay up spiritual treasure in heaven.

262

peace and mind

Figure 1. Giotto di Bondone (c. 1266–1336). Enrico Scrovegni Offers a Chapel to the Virgin. Arena Chapel, Padua, Italy. Photo credit: Antonio Quattrone.

charity and power in renaissance florence

263

Florentines conceived spiritual debts on the model of their worldly obligations. Paying these was a means of restoring the natural and divine order that making money disturbed. Merchants’ accounts with God were not just conscience money; they served to maintain the proper equilibrium between wealthy and poor, success and salvation. The ingrained imperative of balancing credits with debts shaped devout Florentine merchants’ views of the economy of salvation. The building and decorating of churches—patronage to effect the work of God—was a part of charity, the liberality by which sin was expiated. This conception of the charity that Cosimo hoped would balance (at his own final accounting) the sinful weight of his bank’s usurious gains was perfectly imaged in a fresco painted a century earlier by Giotto in the Arena Chapel for a Paduan merchant, Enrico Scrovegni (fig.1). Cosimo, who was often in Padua, would have seen in it a visual model of the reciprocal relation between patronage and salvation. This otherworldly transaction is represented in a scene of the Last Judgment, where heaven extends welcoming hands to Scrovegni as he offers his chapel—supported by a friar—to a bevy of saints; by contrast, the sinners below in hell are hanged by their money bags. The image of this final accounting was very sharp in Florentines’ minds. Dante had placed Scrovegni’s father among several Florentine usurers, a money purse around the neck of each, “on whom the dolorous fire falls” in the seventh circle of hell.9 A poem attributed to Cosimo himself, imagining the inversion of all natural and familiar phenomena, includes a graphically conceived heaven and hell turned upside down: “and hell will be full of joy and glory, / and tempests and tears and loud cries / will fill the eternal paradise. . . .”10 From the beginning of their lives in this world, Florentines had before them, in the mosaics of the Last Judgment in the Baptistery, a quotidian opportunity for the contemplation of their fate in the next world. Fra Angelico painted a particularly vivid version of the same subject around 1431 for the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, where Cosimo went frequently to visit his friend, the prior of the convent. Florentines by the thousands, from soapmakers to bankers, compiled personal chapbooks and inserted here and there, especially

264

peace and mind

as the books came to a close, reminders to themselves and others of their inevitable end. As one popular poet observed, “Delight and pleasure in the desires of the flesh / soon pass away. But sin for ever / Remains.”11 An anthology possibly compiled for the Medici began with the Florentine hermit Giovanni dalle Celle’s account of how the world fattens its lovers, like pigs for the slaughter, and how only charity can extinguish and expiate the sins committed in the course of a life laid waste in getting and spending.12 These examples show that Florentine piety was not passive, as many historians assume. Wealth was believed to imperil the rich (“it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven”). Conversely, the wealthy could more easily undertake good works that enhanced their standing before God and man: as Cosimo wrote in a letter to his cousin Averardo, citing a common proverb, “the poor man is never able to do good works.”13 Charity was an important component of Cosimo’s reputation, his fama as a patron, and it was also his key to the kingdom of heaven. Churchgoers and members of pious lay confraternities, such as Cosimo, were constantly reminded of these Christian truths. Feo Belcari, a clerical writer of sacred poems and plays (and spiritual adviser to Cosimo’s daughter-in-law, Lucrezia de’ Medici, as well as to tailors and scissormakers), contrasted in a pair of widely circulated sonnets the fate of the “rich miser” with that of the “wealthy charitable man.” Of the former, he wrote: “When he dies and his funeral has taken place, / Mammon drags him down into the flames / and feeds them with his corpse, clad in the purple.” The charitable patron, however, could take comfort in the knowledge that “whatever his vice or sin or crime, / alms extinguish it, and endow him with the grace / to go to God without too great a handicap.”14 As San Bernardino put it, “the rich are necessary to the commune, and the poor to the rich.”15 The actual mechanism of the expiation of sin through charity turned on a reciprocal obligation to merciful intercession that, in the patronage relationship, was assumed by both donors and recipients. As Archbishop Antoninus explained in his well-known Summa Theologica, in a passage evoking the Medici style of life:

charity and power in renaissance florence

265

The Divine Providence, which disposes of everything appropriately, permits some to be lacking in temporal goods, so that in the patient suffering of their poverty they may acquire eternal life. To others he gives an abundance, not in order that they may dissipate it on dogs, falcons and horses, extravagant clothing, games, banquets, etc. . . . but so that of this property, given to them by God, they should take what they need for themselves, and give the rest to His poor, and by the virtue of charity be received into the eternal tabernacles through the prayers of the poor.16 A group of Dominican nuns in Friuli who wanted their convent rebuilt called upon Cosimo—“Mercy, oh our Lord, have mercy upon us”—in view of the fame of his “amazing goodness and most extensive charity, for which not only in Italy, but even with the barbarians beyond, you have acquired an immortal name.” In return for his patronage, the nuns promised “to pray ceaselessly to the eternal God for your salvation and for the conservation of your house.”17 While historians debate whether Cosimo’s conspicuous patronage of churches was motivated by politics or piety, his contemporaries assumed that he could have it both ways. An acquaintance supposedly observed to Cosimo that he must feel quite confident of salvation in view of his vast charity to the church. Cosimo is said to have responded with characteristic ambiguity: “God knows why I did it; if I did it for glory and the pomp of the world, I will be rewarded according to what I have done.”18 Metaphors ordered the Florentine world—and of all metaphors, the patriarchal was the most powerful, providing a means of reconciling the often conflicting claims of family, city, and heaven, by associating the authority of fathers, patrons, and the Almighty. Charity was an integral part of this scheme. Coluccio Salutati, the leader and mentor of the intellectual circles in which Cosimo moved in his youth, declared that charity, which “diminished God to the smallness of man through the mystery of the incarnation, elevates man almost to the sublimity of deity through its fruition. … [Charity] alone fosters the family, expands the city, guards the

266

peace and mind

kingdom, and  … preserves by its power this very creation of the entire world.”19 The exercise of patriarchal power through charity at the intersection of earth and heaven was dramatized on the occasion of the consecration of Florence cathedral after the completion of Brunelleschi’s cupola in 1436. The ceremonies offered several variations on the theme of mercy and intercession. First, the city’s governing magistracy made it known that they had liberated a number of prisoners, a concession that paralleled the pope’s charity in granting indulgences to hasten the liberation of souls from purgatory; ultimately both gestures evoked Christ’s liberation of souls from hell. At the conclusion of the mass, a cardinal announced the number of indulgences for attending the ceremony as six; then, as the clerical chronicler recorded, “encouraged by the pleas of the noble citizen Cosimo de’ Medici, he altered that to seven.” Cosimo continued to plead for an increase in the treasury of merit upon which Florentines might draw for their salvation, and the bargaining ended with the cardinal’s agreeing to ten, “having already refused this to all the other cardinals and lords of Florence.”20 This public and undoubtedly staged demonstration of Cosimo’s power as an intercessor for the Florentine people figured prominently in popular descriptions of the event. Cosimo’s intervention was seen to link him to a chain of intercessors culminating in the Virgin herself. According to the shoemaker poet Giovanni di Cino, it was his “marvellous charity,” the spiritual face of his secular patronage, that made Cosimo truly “worthy of immortality” and of the title “father of his country.” 21 The analogy between God the Father and Cosimo the father of the Florentine people was spelled out by Branca Brancacci, a former client, in a letter that is a virtuoso variation on the Beatitudes and the words spoken by Christ in the garden of Gethsemane. His letter exhorted Cosimo to reverse the sentences imposed by the Medicean government upon its enemies: “Oh Lord have mercy upon us … blessed are the merciful, for they themselves shall have mercy … through your piety and singular grace, my father, I pray that this cup may pass from me: nevertheless, not my will but yours be done.”22

charity and power in renaissance florence

267

The potency of the patriarchal metaphor as a means of relating Christian, civic, and familial tradition helped to legitimate analogies between authority in this world and the next. The elements of obligation and intercession common to friends, patrons, and saints served to fuse their roles in Florentine minds as they had done for Christians generally since late antiquity. And the concepts, images, and structures of patronage that shaped Florentine society further informed the understanding of religio amicitiae. As Peter Brown has observed, the patron saint was “the very special friend.”23 In Renaissance Florence, where patronage relationships served explicitly as the model on which perceptions of heaven were based, one writer used his experience of the role of patrons on earth to inform his image of a celestial court peopled by patron saints whom he described, in the language of personal patronage, as avvocati: advocates or intermediaries with God, defending the interests of the pious, their clients and friends or raccomandati.24 The mechanism of charity and the cult of patron saints threw a solid bridge across the terrifying abyss that yawned between the protective power of worldly patronage and an analogous but invisible network of protectors and intercessors for souls beyond the grave. Like the nuns who, seeking help to rebuild their convent, promised to pray for the preservation both of Cosimo’s soul and the power of his family, the rector of the church of San Cosimo in Pisa wrote to Cosimo de’ Medici asking for alms to provide for the celebration of a forthcoming feast of Cosmas and Damian—“in return for which those saints will stand before God as intercessors for you, and I continually will pray to him for the preservation and exaltation of your regime as you desire.”25 This chain of intercession is imaged in the altarpiece Cosimo commissioned for San Marco. His own patron saints or very special friends in heaven were Cosmas and Damian, early Christian brothers and physicians who were the namesakes of Cosimo and his twin Damiano, who died in infancy. The association of these doctors with the Medici (whose name means “doctors”) constituted a memorable pun in the quintessential Florentine style with which Medici friends, as well as poets and eulogists, played happily throughout Cosimo’s

268

peace and mind

lifetime. Cosimo’s father Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici was following a prevailing fifteenth-century trend when he named his children after saints who could serve as their protectors, but the adoption of these distinctive and unusual saints may well have been part of a strategy to consolidate the identity of the Medici family; Florentines might naturally look to the namesakes of the medici Cosmas and Damian for remedies for the ills of the body social. By mid-century, the Medici patron saints had a well-elaborated identity in images and in popular literature. Their identification with living human beings, not really fostered by the iconic representations of saints made for patrons of previous centuries, was facilitated by the Renaissance artist’s aim to make visible the real world in lifelike figures. Although most patrons sought to personalize images for private devotion by inclusion of their onomastic saints, the San Marco altarpiece and cell frescoes were apparently among the earliest of a number of images made between the late 1430s and early 1450s foregrounding the Medici saints in a manner unprecedented in commissions for other Florentine laymen. In relation to the Holy Family, the Medici saints in these images were larger in scale than before, more central to the composition, and played a more important and more active role in the drama of intercession. If the Medici adoption of Saints Cosmas and Damian, and their appearance in Medici images, was a conscious strategy, it was one that expressed a variety of common Florentine values and served a number of ends—spiritual, dynastic, and self-advertising—that cannot easily be distinguished. It is often assumed that the prominence of the Medici saints constitutes a dynastic display similar to that expressed by the inclusion in pictures of Medici arms and devices. This assumption leads easily to the reading of such images as partly or even predominantly affirmations of the increasing political authority and prestige of Cosimo, his family, and friends in Florence. However, images of saints are not, like coats of arms, mere markers of a dynastic presence. The image, as Aquinas taught, recalls the entity. The saints’ primary role was to act—to intercede on behalf of namesakes and protégés at the heavenly court, drawing upon the treasury of merit that the saints themselves had laid up in heaven through their deeds. In response

charity and power in renaissance florence

269

to some doubts expressed in a letter from a mattressmaker, the cleric and poet Feo Belcari produced this useful summary of the role of the saints in human salvation: Christ had conceded, Belcari wrote, “the heights of heaven to our souls, / by virtue of the credit amassed by the great saints.”26 Cosimo and his family furnished themselves at home, as well as in public places, with a plethora of images of their name saints in the company of the Virgin and Child or Christ crucified, for contemplation while practicing their devotions. Along with the many missals and books of offices among the volumes in Cosimo’s library (and his copy of the Lives of Saints Cosmas and Damian), most objects in the Medici house had a devotional purpose. A large veiled altarpiece of Saints Cosmas and Damian dominated the main sala of Giovanni di Bicci’s house. In direct response to Medici patronage and charity, the convent of San Marco was rededicated in 1443 to Cosmas and Damian (as well as to its original patron, Saint Mark). Unlike works incorporating the Medici saints that Cosimo commissioned for other ecclesiastical foundations, the images of Cosmas and Damian at San Marco were made for places not usually accessible to the general public. The fact that these Medicean images were intended mainly for the contemplation of the professional religious, rather than a public more attuned to political innuendo, strongly suggests that, rather than any political purpose, the primary function of these pictures was to stimulate commemorative prayer. They served, indeed, to keep the identity of the convent’s patrons constantly before the eyes of its mendicant brothers, the voluntary poor whose vocation was to pray continuously for the salvation of souls. Such considerations of the patron’s interest and point of view should complement William Hood’s characterization of the San Marco images, in the context of Dominican devotional and especially liturgical practice, as “painted prayer.” However, unaware of Cosimo’s interest in such matters, and in accord with a tradition of describing frescoes and altarpiece in terms of their presumed dynastic and political significance to the Medici family, Hood suggests that, for Cosimo, expressions of political ambitions so predominated in his commissions that the “grandest messages,” particularly of the main

270

peace and mind

altarpiece, “may have escaped him almost entirely.”27 It is impossible on the evidence of the image alone to say what any viewer saw in it. But given Cosimo’s expectation that his patron saints would exercise on his behalf intercessory powers in heaven analogous to those that he himself exercised as a patron on earth—and given the view of the clergy to whom he gave charitable support that there was no conflict between praying for his promotion on earth and praying for his salvation in heaven—it seems that a concern to secure divine blessing here and hereafter for himself and his family was the major impulse animating the commission of these images. Angelico’s articulation in the altarpiece of the role of the Virgin and other saints in the process of salvation was very likely as important to the patron as it was to the picture’s Dominican artist and audience. At the center of the altarpiece is the Virgin enthroned, the Child on her knee, surrounded by angels and saints (fig. 2). Distinguished from the crowd of attendants by their scale and position, nearest to the viewer and almost at the lower edge of the frame, kneel Saints Cosmas and Damian, chief intercessors before the Queen of this heavenly court. Not long before Angelico began this work, Leon Battista Alberti had suggested in his treatise on painting that the artist include someone “who tells the spectators what is going on, . . . beckons them with his hand to look. . . .”28 Here it is Saint Cosmas who mediates between the convocation of saints in heaven and the viewer, outside the picture plane, whom he addresses with his gaze as he gestures toward the Virgin and Child. Cosmas’s features are not idealized, like those of the other saints: they could be seen to resemble Cosimo’s. Whether a resemblance was intended or not, Cosmas—as Cosimo’s patron saint—represented him. Patron and mediator in heaven as Cosimo was on earth, Saint Cosmas was his direct link to the supreme intercessors, the Virgin and Christ. Right in the Virgin’s line of vision, Damian, name saint of Cosimo’s dead brother, balances Cosmas in the foreground: Damian looks directly at the Virgin, his back to the viewer. Florentines, attuned to the weight of geometric shapes in calibrating meaning by images like Masaccio’s Trinity, in the church of Santa Maria Novella, and an older Trinity or “double intercession” of Christ and the Virgin in Florence’s cathedral,

charity and power in renaissance florence

271

would have noticed that the figures of Cosmas and Damian literally support the composition—as their devotees supported the convent. These two figures form the base of a triangle whose apex is a classical triumphal arch, similar to the one in Masaccio’s Trinity, that crowns the Virgin’s throne.

Figure 2. Fra Angelico (c. 1387–1455). Altarpiece of San Marco. Florence, Italy. Photo credit: Niccolò Orsi Battaglini. The drama of intercession is focused on the figures along the strong vertical axis of the picture. The Virgin and Child represent at once the triumph in heaven of Christ and his mother, and the Incarnation through which God the Father sent his only Son to redeem the sins of mankind. Angels at their side hold the instruments of his future Passion, represented in the crucifix at the foot of the throne. These themes—Christ’s Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection, the mercy

272

peace and mind

of his mother Mary, the treasury of merit accumulated by the saints on which sinners might draw—were staples of popular devotional literature, and viewers of images identified strongly with the experience of Christ’s incarnate life, particularly through the mediation of the more accessible Virgin. This passage from an Ave Regina of the period is typical: “For the tears that you shed, / beneath the cross of death / when you looked upon Jesus, / O Virgin, give me comfort….”29 In the San Marco altarpiece, the artist integrates religious and political elements that are diverse but not incompatible. Texts, symbols, and spatial relationships constitute an armory of signs decipherable by both clerical and lay audiences. The picture sends a special message about the Medici, but the message goes both ways: to their fellow citizens down on earth, and up to heaven with the aid of the friars and through the intercession of the saints. The Medici were praised as “protectors of churches and holy places” for their charity to various religious foundations, and contemporaries presumed that the political authority and wealth that made that patronage possible were the fruit of divine approbation. Fra Angelico represents the power of the Medici as the power to dispense charity and liberality to the convent of San Marco and the community it served. His altarpiece depicts a chain of interceding patrons linking heaven and earth, associating the Medici with their patron saints Cosmas and Damian, who solicit the liberality of the Virgin for the salvation and prosperity, not only of their Medici devotees, but of all Florence. Whigs and Cynics In my book on Cosimo de’ Medici’s patronage, I freely acknowledge that some scholars see in the same evidence patterns different from those that I discern. I assume that, as continuing research uncovers further evidence, and as scholars’ questions change in accordance with their own and the field’s evolving experience, still other patterns will appear. I did hope, though, in writing the book, to offer a corrective to some prevailing orthodoxies. I wanted to counterbalance the assumption, among historians, that works of art are merely illustrative of more fundamental social, political, and

charity and power in renaissance florence

273

economic phenomena.30 I also hoped to offset the habit, among art historians, of claiming for outstanding artists the sole creative credit for the genesis of a work of art, and, on the other hand, the habit of attributing agency to the patron while denying him genuine aesthetic, religious, or cultural (as opposed to political or dynastic) concerns. I have found it interesting, therefore, to observe extreme differences in the reception of my study by general historians and art historians. The latter, primarily focused on understanding major and “timeless” works of art, have almost universally been prepared to embrace a more charitable (and I think, richer) reading of Cosimo’s charitable commissions. The College Art Association, in the citation for their award to the volume, noted that art patronage is “a multivalent phenomenon,” a process “by which wealthy and prominent men, in expressing their own identities, enriched the cultures that shaped them.” The citation acknowledged the usefulness of “rejecting methodological narrowness and simplistic interpretations of [such] complex issues.”31 Several social, cultural, and political historians, however, have greeted as an astonishing volte-face my choosing to explore in Medici patronage some impulses alternative to the partisan political aims with which my earlier work was concerned. The newer approach has been described as a “puzzling and problematic”32 betrayal of the duty to probe Cosimo’s motives with “cynicism”—a cynicism “embraced by so many scholars.” It is said that, as a result, my study paints a “tooconsistent” picture of Cosimo as “slightly saintly.”33 One reviewer went so far as to suggest that, in “abdicating” the moral judgment that history requires us to make on those who failed to embrace modern democracy or the insights of Marxism avant la lettre, I had produced “the most tenacious and polemical defence ever likely to be mounted of the man who set republican Florence on its way to a Renaissance tyranny. If the ghost of the great banker and politician, Cosimo de’ Medici, had gone in search of a scholar to do a serious but flattering portrait of himself, it could have done no better than to recruit”…me.34 In fact, I have no interest in praising Cosimo. When visiting Florence, Mark Twain, as a nineteenth-century American liberal,

274

peace and mind

predictably despised the city because, as he wrote, the Florentines had in earlier centuries acquiesced in the “tyranny” of the Medici family.35 Were I to judge the Medici, I would have to do so in terms of my own twenty-first-century values and principles, and might well condemn Cosimo as an elitist, sexist, manipulative, and ruthless profiteer who ground the faces of the poor and hypocritically sought to redress his crimes with a self-serving “charity.” But what was the point of Twain’s condemnation, and what would be the point of mine? Cosimo’s actions were in accord with the norms, and often the ideals, of his own time; now dead five hundred years, he has passed far beyond my judgment or that of the passing present. Herbert Butterfield’s critique of “Whig interpretation,” elaborated by later historians, has been a point of departure for three generations of students of the historian’s craft. It comes as rather a surprise, then, that modern professional historians should be surprised by an application of this argument against studying the past with reference to the present—against working “to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of that present” and in which “historical personages can easily and irresistibly be classed into the men who furthered progress and the men who tried to hinder it.”36 Moreover, it is ironic that those who denounce the elite of Renaissance Florence for exploiting the masses, economically and socially—a judgment rendered from a firmly present-centered point of view— are still governed by an impulse to regard the past as a repository of moral lessons for a more enlightened present, an impulse that was characteristic of Christian historians of the Renaissance, and also of their classical predecessors.37 Arguments like Butterfield’s have had considerable impact on the work of committed Marxist historians. Understanding that modern ideologies may be quite foreign, even inimical, to premodern worldviews, Marxists have generated a vast and sophisticated revisionist literature that, while absolutely assuming the primacy of class and economic factors in determining human experience, past or present, also recognizes the need for alternative, or at least more carefully crafted, tools for the analysis of preindustrial societies. (This process of nuancing began, of course, with Marx and Engels

charity and power in renaissance florence

275

themselves.) Nevertheless, some historians of Florence have recently accused many of their fellows of purposely “suppress[ing] the role of class conflict and ideology” and “summarily discounting the findings of ‘social’ or ‘materialist’ history” in an attempt to “naturalize their own idealizing approach…as ‘truth,’ or by…terming it…‘archival’… [when it is really] a mask for political conservatism.”38 Such historians “promot[e] an admired high culture,” it is conjectured, “in order to ennoble the idea of power and neutralize politics.”39 Accompanying these accusations is a related delineation of opposing schools of historiography—another conflict of classes. There is said to be a Renaissance “made in the U.S.A.,” committed to exposing “the vital nexus between the Renaissance and modernity” and entailing a preoccupation with ideals of republicanism, liberty, and stability. The focus of the American school on the ruling elite of Florence is considered to be opposed to a “new” emphasis, not on “social and intellectual symmetries,” but on “tensions, oppression and exploitation.”40 The effort taken to define this supposed polarization might well be seen as an example of “the manufacture of disagreement” or “evasion of consensus” about which Jeffrey Perl has writen.41 Happily, most historians regard alterations in historiographical focus as part of a natural evolution of interests in any field. One reason for an appeal for “cynicism” may be that even historians committed to a religious faith of their own find it hard to believe that power does not, in every age, come first in the lives of the powerful. It is a prejudice so ingrained in our time that we simply do not recognize it as a prejudice. Thus, many historians refuse to take at all seriously the commitment of the powerful in fifteenthcentury Florence to piety, charity, and a type of social harmony modeled on the heavenly hierarchy of authority. Many premodern societies subscribed to such models, and the ideas in support of them were articulated, not only in potentially self-serving political debates or idealizing civic propaganda, but in the most private of sources: letters and diaries (which were the popular genres most characteristic of hyperliterate and self-conscious Florence).42 A second key problem, I think, is an uneasiness among professional

276

peace and mind

scholars about admitting into their arguments the possibility of multivalence or even contradiction. Especially in biography, which is often constructed on shaky evidential foundations, readings that turn on a single key—although they tend to be seen as either “all right” or “all wrong,” embraced today and overturned tomorrow— are commonly considered the more convincing. Complexity (a manysided Cosimo, for example) opens the door to doubt.43 Florentines, however, saw things rather differently. While Montaigne may have been the first to set forth a sustained reflection on the “inconstancy of his own actions,” a century or two earlier Florentines were quite at home with ambivalence and often simultaneously entertained apparently contradictory positions and interests. Cosimo de’ Medici was both known and celebrated for his ambiguity, an unwillingness to align himself with a simple unitary position. When a friend and partisan once complained, “I wish you would say things clearly so that I could understand you,” Cosimo is reputed to have replied: “Learn my language.”44

charity and power in renaissance florence

277

Notes 1. The language of Florentine culture is replete with juxtaposed elements that modern historians perceive as incompatible and uncomfortable. In most chapbooks, selections ranging in tone and content from the sublime to the ridiculous rub shoulders. One of Boccaccio’s most popular and frequently cited tales—long studiously avoided by scholars, as Leo Steinberg finally noticed and pointed out—concerns a priest who, while hearing the confession of a beautiful young woman, “experienced the resurrection of the flesh.”45 While many historians emulate social scientists in seeking to categorize and make distinctions, those occupied with premodern societies might do better to follow the literary injunction: “only connect.”46 I believe that there is hope for charity, and for the recognition of charity, at least among scholars of early modern Europe. By contrast with the military metaphors so beloved of Lawrence Stone and the sharply conflictual traditions of British scholarship that shaped him, the intellectual style of Natalie Zemon Davis, with her genius for discovering the single diamond in the dung heap of the feeblest academic presentation, seems more suited to the study of societies in which Aesop’s fable about that ancient feat was treasured as a moral exemplum. Despite the wealth of Florentine archives and manuscript libraries, most scholars who work in them—trained essentially as medievalists—are so grateful for every scrap of evidence they uncover that they are willing to sift through mountains of apparent dross for gems that might be reframed in fresh contexts and regain their luster in the light of new questions. The metaphor of scholarship as a wall to which each scholar contributes a brick, and upon which each new generation must build, is naturally more congenial to such historians than any metaphor involving swordplay. Moreover, Florence was, in the Renaissance—and it still is—a pretty small town: a “face-to-face society.” While its citizens were famous for their factiousness, they also knew the necessity of cooperation among those confined together in a restricted space. Modern scholars, sifting through the remains of the Renaissance,

278

peace and mind

come face-to-face with one another every year in Florence, especially in the crowded summertime. They watch each other mature, marry, have children, grow old, sicken, and die. Naturally, they are inclined to regard one another, not merely as hostile opponents of each other’s most cherished positions, but as real and complex human beings whose apparently conflicting views deserve at least a courteous hearing. There are those who bemoan the absence of “great debates” in this field. But others take satisfaction in the knowledge that what begins as mere civility may blossom, over the years, into a truly charitable understanding. Angelo Poliziano, Detti piacevoli, ed. Mariano Fresta (Siena: Editori del Grifo, 1985), 57, no. 174. 2. See Dale Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). 3. Niccolò Machiavelli, Lettere, vol. 6 of Opere, ed. Franco Gaeta (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961), 303. The translation is my own. 4. See particularly Dale Kent, Rise of the Medici: Faction in Florence, 1426–1434 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). 5. The following account draws heavily on Dale Kent, “Expiation, Charity and Intercession,” in Cosimo de’ Medici, chap. 9. 6. Giovanni Rucellai, Giovanni Rucellai ed il suo Zibaldone, ed. Alessandro Perosa (London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1960-68), 121. 7. See, for example, James Hankins, “Cosimo de’ Medici and the Platonic Academy,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 53 (1990): 147. 8. See Marco Spallanzani, ed., Inventari Medicei (Florence: Amici del Bargello, 1996). 9. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles Singleton, 6 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970–75), 1:xi, xvii, esp. lines 46–75. 10. See Antonio Lanza, Lirici toscani del quattrocento, 2 vols. (Rome: Bulzoni, 1973–75), 2:55–56. 11. Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, II:II:64, folio 27r. 12. Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, Magliabechiana 650, folio 1r–v. 13. Florence, Archivio di stato, Medici avanti il Principato, IV, 221. 14. Lanza, Lirici toscani, 1:212.

charity and power in renaissance florence

279

15. San Bernardino is cited in Richard Trexler, “Charity and the Defence of the Urban Elites in the Italian Communes,” in The Rich, the Well Born and the Powerful: Elites and Upper Classes in History, ed. Frederic C. Jaher (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 68. 16. Amleto Spicciani, “The ‘Poversi Vergognosi’ in Fifteenth-Century Florence: The First Thirty Years’ Activity of the Buonomini di S. Martino,” in Aspects of Poverty in Early Modern Europe, ed. Thomas Riis (Alphen aan den Rijn: Sijthoff, 1981), 123. 17. Florence, Archivio di stato, Medici avanti il Principato, XII, 168. 18. Vespasiano da Bisticci, Le vite, ed. Aulo Greco, 2 vols. (Florence: Istituto nazionale di studi sul Rinascimento, 1970–76), 2:191. 19. Salutati was the chancellor of Florence from 1375 to 1406. Of the volumes in Cosimo’s library in 1418, several had belonged to Salutati and contained his comments in the margins. Salutati is cited in Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (London: Constable, 1970), 1:75–76. See also Albinia Catherine De La Mare, “Cosimo and His Books,” in Cosimo “il Vecchio” de’ Medici, 1389–1464, ed. Francis Ames-Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 115–56. 20. See Feo Belcari’s chronicle of the chapter of San Lorenzo in Howard Saalman, Filippo Brunelleschi: The Cupola of Santa Maria del Fiore (London: Zwemmer, 1980), no. 286. On this event, see Kent, Cosimo de’ Medici, 122–28. 21. His is the major popular account of the event, publicly recited and frequently transcribed in chapbooks. See Lanza, Lirici toscani, 1:683–87. 22. Florence, Archivio di stato, Medici avanti il Principato, XII, 183. 23. Peter R. L. Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), esp. 59. 24. Paolo da Certaldo, Libro di buoni costumi, ed. Alfredo Schiaffini (Florence: F. Le Monnier), 1945. 25. Florence, Archivio di stato, Medici avanti il Principato, XII, 168. 26. Lanza, Lirici toscani, 1:214–15. The inquiring mattressmaker was Franceso del Maestro Andrea. 27. William Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).

280

peace and mind

28. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson (London: Penguin, 1991), 77. 29. Lanza, Lirici toscani, 1:189–90. 30. See the symposium “Art or Society: Must We Choose?” Representations 12 (1985): 1–43, particularly the contributions of Natalie Zemon Davis and Michael Baxandall. 31. Booklet for Convocation (presented at Annual Conference of the College Art Association, Philadelphia, 2001). 32. Sharon Strocchia, review of Cosimo de’ Medici, by Dale Kent, Renaissance Quarterly 54.4 (2001): 1593–95. 33. Theodore Rabb, review of Cosimo de’ Medici, by Dale Kent, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32.3 (2002): 471–73. 34. Lauro Martines, review of Cosimo de’ Medici, by Dale Kent, Times Literary Supplement, January 12, 2001. 35. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (New York: Viking Press, 1984), chap. 24. 36. Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (1931; London: G. Bell; reprint New York: Norton, 1965), v, 11. 37. On the distribution of wealth among the populations of Florence and its territories, and the economic and social consequences of inequalities, see David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans et leurs familles: Une étude du catasto florentin de 1427 (Paris: Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 1978; English trans., Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985]). The English translation is an abridged version. 38. Marvin Trachtenberg, “History and Theory: Florence Brought to Historical Account,” in Dominion of the Eye: Urbanism, Art and Power in Early Modern Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chap. 1. 39. John M. Najemy, “The Dialogue of Power in Florentine Politics,” in City-States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy, ed. Anthony Molho, Kurt Raaflaub, and Julia Emlen (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1991), 269–88. 40. Anthony Molho, “The Italian Renaissance: Made in the U.S.A,” in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed.

charity and power in renaissance florence

281

Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 41. Jeffrey M. Perl, “The Manufacture of Disagreement,” Common Knowledge 2.2 (Fall 1993): 122–34. Cf. Jean-Joseph Goux and Philip R. Wood, eds., Terror and Consensus: Vicissitudes of French Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998)—a book about which Perl writes in his column “Civilian Scholarship,” Common Knowledge 8.1 (Winter 2002): 3. 42. Obviously, self-presentation of the sort described by Erving Goffmann, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1959), or Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), is a feature to some extent of all social utterances. 43. Particularly eloquent on these issues of historical explanation and the spurious authority of the authorial voice is Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). On the logical and practical falsity of the binary oppositions so favored by historians—and on the profession’s need “to renounce the illusion of a narrative account which could claim to be fully authentic, let alone complete: one which offers confident explanations and deals in the closure of causes and effects,” see Lloyd S. Kramer, “Literature, Criticism and Historical Imagination,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 29. Kramer is drawing out the implications of the work of Dominick LaCapra, especially Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), and History and Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). 44. Poliziano, Detti piacevoli, ed. Mariano Fresta (Siena: Editori del Grifo, 1985), 57, no. 174. 45. Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 199–203. 46. E. M. Forster, epigraph to Howard’s End (London: Edward Arnold, 1910).

282

peace and mind

THE MYTH OF THE JEWISH EXILE FROM THE LAND OF ISRAEL A Demonstration of Irenic Scholarship Israel J. Yuval More than that of any other nation, Jewish identity is based on the imaginaire of a collective memory rather than on a common territory. I intend to examine here the sources of one myth that has had critical influence on the establishment of Jewish collective memory and modern Israeli identity. In doing so, I find myself treading a thin line. On the one hand, I am a Zionist loyal to awareness of the need for the existence of the State of Israel. On the other hand, I am deeply troubled by the price paid by the Palestinians for the fulfillment of this dream. Like many others, I, too, desperately seek a fair solution that will minimize the pain and suffering for both sides. I am presenting these remarks out of recognition that the historian—especially a historian who deals with his own culture— cannot evade the responsibility of clarifying the political, moral, and social significance of his research. I belong to the generation of Israeli historians who turned their back on Zionist historiography, which was characterized by the dominance of grand national narratives. My generation has preferred to cover itself in the warm, protective blanket of “professional history,” of scholarship free of ideological bias; and rather than grand national narrative, we have preferred to deal with a multitude of smaller narratives. However, this newer approach does not mean that the professional study of history has ceased to serve political goals. Even as a “profession,” history is still a tool that advances national and particularistic agendas, and these do not provide the cultural and mental tools needed for the establishment of an era of reconciliation and peace. For that reason, I prefer to assign another task to historical studies: to construct histories that educate toward self-criticism and the tolerance of conflicting national narratives.

284

peace and mind

The position that I would like to propose here is not post-Zionist. I do not wish to undermine the Zionist national narrative or to weaken it. However, I do wish to add a dimension of self-awareness to it, so that it will be more critical, more nuanced, more balanced. In this way, historiography can take an important step forward. In the past 200 years, historical studies mainly have helped to shape national consciousness and national particularism—one may add national egotism. Historical studies must undergo a corrective transformation and serve to foster understanding among nations, rather than hatred. Thus, after shifting from monophonic national history to professional history, we should continue now into a new phase of polyphonic history. The study of history should cease to serve those who foment conflicts and become instead an instrument of reconciliation, understanding, and tolerance. In order to achieve that aim, the change I am describing must take place in every rival camp. But I have come to the conclusion that the duty of self-criticism is incumbent on the conqueror more than on the conquered. I hope that these remarks will foster parallel responses. It would be very disappointing if the only result of this internal Jewish criticism were the reinforcement of criticism from outside.

I The myth I will examine is that of the exile of the Jews from their land as a result of the destruction of the Second Temple, and I will trace its vicissitudes and history. This myth is very common not only in Israel but also in the West. The national anthem of the State of Israel declares that the hope to live as a free nation in the Land of Israel is 2,000 years old. Belief that the establishment of the State of Israel put an end to a two-millennium exile is so widely shared that, in the first generation after the establishment of the state, Israelis liked to tag new events with the cliché, “for the first time in two thousand years.” Most Jewish tourists who go to Rome today visit the Arch of Titus, and they innocently believe that the figures bearing the Temple vessels are the Jews of Jerusalem, exiles in Rome, whereas in fact they are soldiers of the Roman legion marching in a triumphal parade.

the myth of the jewish exile

285

The Arch of Titus expresses a complex of images touching upon the beginning of the exile and the circumstances of its occurrence, the most important of these being the myth that the exile from the land dates from the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. The common assumption is that the Jews were uprooted from their homeland because of an intentional policy of victorious Rome. Thus the two events—destruction and exile—entered historical imagination and imagery as a pair. Just as Nebuchadnezzar had destroyed the First Temple and exiled the inhabitants of Judaea to Babylonia, so also Titus is thought of as destroying Jerusalem and exiling the Jews from their land. It is impossible to ignore the parallel between the myth of Jews driven from their historical homeland and the opposing myth: the abandonment of the land by the Palestinians. The common Zionist view presents the flight of the Palestinians from their settlements in the years 1947–48 as “leaving.” That word has moral and political consequences. In an article published in Haaretz (“On a Sin that We Did Not Commit,” September 17, 1998), the journalist Dan Margalit wrote: “If the Arabs left their homes—mainly on the initiative of their leaders, sometimes also urged by Israeli soldiers—the responsibility for the refugee problem lies first of all upon the Arab world and the Palestinian leadership.” Leaving is a voluntary act, indirectly implying that the land was forfeited; whereas exile is coercion and apparently does not infringe upon the exiles’ connection with the land or on their rights of ownership to it. The description of the flight of the Palestinians as “leaving” is meant to deprive them of the status of victim, to place the responsibility for their fate upon them or upon their leadership, and to justify refusal to allow them a right of return. In contrast, the description of the Jews’ departure as “exile” retains the image of victim, frees Jews of the responsibility for leaving the land for so long a time, and justifies their right to return to it today. The difference between leaving and being exiled is the difference between denying the Palestinian right to return and granting the law of return to Jews.

286

peace and mind

II What is the source of the myth of exile from the land? What is the origin of the view that the emptying of the Land of Israel of its Jews after the destruction of the Second Temple was the result of intentional expulsion?1 First, we need to clarify the manifest particulars. The dispersal of the Jews did not begin with the destruction of the Second Temple. The Book of Esther (3:8) describes the Jews as “a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the people in all the provinces of thy [the Persian emperor’s] kingdom.” At the end of the Second Temple period, Josephus Flavius flatly stated: “The Jewish nation is widely dispersed over all the habitable earth among its inhabitants.”2 Philo even regarded the dispersal of the Jewish people among the nations of the earth as a blessing, and he compared the Jews’ dispersal to the Greeks’ establishment of colonies.3 The destruction of the Second Temple did not empty the land of its Jewish inhabitants— many had already been abroad for a very long time—and in any case there is no real historical basis for belief in a wholesale exile at the hands of Rome. The Romans, like any victorious army, customarily took prisoners but they did not have a policy of exiling conquered nations from their lands. According to Josephus’s probably inflated figures, 1,100,000 people were killed in Jerusalem, including many pilgrims who had been trapped in the city since Passover. About 97,000 were captured. Many of these met their deaths in battle with animals and in circus entertainments. Others died of hunger. Still other prisoners were brought to Rome; some were sold in Libya for forced labor in mines. But otherwise, the Jews were left in place. They emigrated from the Land of Israel during the first centuries of the first millennium in a slow and gradual process, and not as the result of an intentional policy on the part of the Roman and Byzantine authorities. “The exile from the land” after the destruction of the Second Temple is not a clear and evident historical fact. It is a story that reflects a world of images. Although the myth of expulsion serves the Zionist claim of renewed Jewish ownership of the land, Zionism did not initiate the claim. Rather, it is deeply rooted in ancient soil,

the myth of the jewish exile

287

and these ancient roots comprise a complex and twisted tangle. Since I cannot pretend to discuss all of the vicissitudes of the myth, I will limit myself to a modest and hesitant effort to explore its origin. The antiquity of the myth is indicated by the well-known critical remarks attributed to the Amora (Talmudic sage) Rabbi Yoḥanan, who lived in the third century CE—remarks preserved in the Babylonian Talmud: “Our House has been destroyed, our Temple burnt and we ourselves exiled from our land.”4 This sentence postulates a strong connection between the destruction and exile. As the discussion continues in the Talmud, the phrase is repeated anonymously in order to establish the guilt of Rome for exiling the Jewish people from its land: “‘The hands are the hands of Esau’: this is the Government of Rome which has destroyed our House and burnt our Temple and driven us out of our land.”5 This tripartite expression—the destruction of the House, the burning of the Temple, the exile of the people—appears three more times in the Babylonian Talmud, but in all four instances the words are attributed to the sages of the Land of Israel.6 Naturally the question arises as to how sages who were living in the Land of Israel could have expressed a complaint that the people had been exiled from its land. For were they not living in their land? Was the Galilee, their dwelling place, not regarded by them as a part of the land of the Jews? When we examine what sources in the Land of Israel had to say directly, we discover a different picture. The combination of the destruction of the House, the burning of the Temple, and the exile of the people from its land is also found in midrashim from the Land of Israel. However, there they refer specifically to the First Temple.7 In general, in many sources, including Babylonian sources, we find that the connection between the destruction of the Temple and exile is associated specifically with the First Temple.8 The early sources from the Land of Israel are faithful to the tendency to relate the biblical prophecies of destruction to the First Temple, especially those that speak of abandoning the land and its becoming a wasteland.9 In other words, it seems that the triple expression—destruction of the House, burning of the Temple, exile from the land—originally (in the sources from the Land of Israel) referred to the First Temple

288

peace and mind

and were applied to the Second Temple only in Babylonia.10 In the Tannaitic and early Amoraic sources, Rome is accused only of destroying the Temple, not of exiling the people from their land.11 A broad historical and national outlook, one that viewed the “Exile of Edom” (Rome being identified with the biblical Edom) as a political result of forced expulsion, did not survive from this period. Nor would such a view have been appropriate to the political reality and the conditions of Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel, which were certainly very well known to the members of that generation. III In Christian sources the situation is completely different. There, the exile of the Jewish people from their land occupies a central place. The exile has had four key meanings in Christianity. First, the status of the exile is for Christians identical to that of the destruction of the Temple: both were regarded as punishment for the crucifixion of Jesus.12 Second, the exile reduced the Jews to the level of servants subordinated to the church, and their earlier legal status as citizens according to Roman law was abrogated. Third, the exile marked the end of the era of the Torah of Moses—the era of the Old Testament, which was connected to the Temple—and the beginning of the era of the New Testament, which no longer needed the Temple.13 Fourth, the exile confirmed the Jewish nation’s loss of right to the Holy Land and established a new, alternative Christian claim to ownership.14 This image was born of the Christian view of the results of the Bar-Kokhba rebellion: the Romans prohibited Jewish settlement in and around Jerusalem, and there was a marked decline in the Jewish population of Judaea as a whole.15 The very mention of the Roman decree in Christian sources shows a polemical bias: the decree permitted depiction of the Jews not only as a defeated nation from the political and military point of view but also as a nation driven out of its domain. The crushing of the Bar-Kokhba rebellion was regarded by the Church Fathers as the final blow in the destruction of the Second Temple system, establishing a direct connection between the Jews’ sin (the crucifixion of Jesus) and their punishment (the

the myth of the jewish exile

289

destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of the nation from its land). In the context of Christian polemics, Justin Martyr was apparently the first, in the mid-second century, to attribute religious significance to the removal of the Jews from Jerusalem.16 He saw that step as part of a divine plan to end the regime of Ancient Israel and repopulate the Holy City with the New Israel, the Christians. With the second coming of Jesus, Jerusalem would become finally Christian, and Jesus would rule there with the faithful. According to Justin, the admonition of Leviticus 26:41 had been fulfilled: “I will bring them into the land of their enemies.” Similarly, the prophecy of Isaiah 1:7 had come true: “Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers.” These prophecies had come to pass not only because of the crucifixion but also because of the continued rejection of Jesus’ message by the Jews, who cursed those who believed in him. The historical event to which the words of Justin refer is not the destruction of the Temple but rather the Bar-Kokhba rebellion, which he witnessed, and he alludes to the prohibition imposed by the Romans upon Jews dwelling in Jerusalem.17 Tertullian also found particular significance in Bethlehem, along with Jerusalem, being emptied of Jews by the Roman decree, since Bethlehem was the city where the redeemer was supposed to be born. This too was a fulfillment of the prophecy, “Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire.”18 Tertullian’s argument that the Jews’ continuing dispersion—the emptying of the land—was punishment for the crucifixion is also found in the writings of Eusebius and Jerome.19 In his commentary, the latter interprets the prophecy of Zephaniah 1:15–16, “That day is a day of wrath,” as referring to the destruction in his own day of “the fortified cities of Judea and the high corners of Judea, which were destroyed unto the dust.” IV Was an opposing Jewish position formulated? A simple and forceful Jewish answer should have been available: “Here we dwell, we, our

290

peace and mind

elders, our wives, and our children, in Caesaria and in Sepphoris, in Tiberias and in Usha, and even in Lydda and in Eshtamoa. We did not leave our land, and our heritage has not been given to strangers.” Such an answer was not made, but understanding the neglected possibility can help explain a change in the name of the country in the Tannaitic literature of the second century. Whereas earlier the country had usually been called “Judaea,” the appellation “Eretz-Yisrael” (the Land of Israel) now became common in rabbinical literature. In the Bible, the “Land of Israel” refers to the Kingdom of Israel, as distinct from the “Land of Judaea” which refers to the Kingdom of Judaea. Calling the two kingdoms by the same name, Eretz-Yisrael, brought with it a change in territorial extent, for the country now comprised not only Judaea but also the coastal plane, the central mountains, the Galilee, and perhaps even part of Transjordan. In this way, the refugees from Judaea made the Galilee their country—a part of Eretz-Yisrael—and thus sought to overcome the feeling that they were refugees in their own land. This move may also have been a Jewish answer to a parallel move in the opposite direction by the Romans, who used the name “Syria Palestina” after the Bar-Kokhba rebellion with the intention of obscuring the Jewish character of the country. For its part, Christian propaganda continued to use the old name of the country, Judaea, so as to represent the removal of the Jews from Jerusalem and its environs as a general expulsion of the Jews from their land.20 The vast majority of references on the part of the sages of the Mishnah to the Land of Israel date from after the Bar-Kokhba rebellion, which is also when most of the halakhot (Jewish laws) relating to love of the land and the religious duty of settling it were also born. Isaiah Gafni has pointed out that the custom of bringing dead people for burial in the Land of Israel emerged around the time of Rabbi Judah HaNasi.21 “Eretz-Yisrael” is therefore an apologetic term expressing Jewish struggle not only against the new name “Palestina” but also, at least after the fact, against the claim, made in Christian propaganda, that the Jews had been exiled from their land. These struggles form an instructive context in which to consider the saying of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai: “When a person is exiled from

the myth of the jewish exile

291

Judaea to the Galilee or from the Galilee to Judah, this is not called exile.”22 If Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai found it appropriate to say such a thing, then surely claims had been made that the Galilee and Judaea were separate lands. V Still, the tendency of Jews to leave the country increased during the following centuries, and perception that the destruction of the Temple and the suppression of the Bar-Kokhba rebellion had created an irreversible process of renewed exile became progressively deeper. When we consult later collections of midrashim—dating after the composition of the Talmud (around 500 BCE)—we find that for the first time in Jewish sources the claim is made that Rome not only destroyed the Temple but also expelled the Jews from their land: “The assembly of Israel said to the Holy One Blessed be He, Master of the universe, You saw that wicked Esau was going to come and destroy the Temple and exile Israel from their land.”23 This statement clearly regards Esau (that is to say, Rome) as responsible for the exile of Israel at the time of the Second Temple’s destruction. The following legend should be included among the group of late midrashim that make Rome responsible for the exile of the people from their land: Adrianos [Hadrian], the King of Edom, since he had conquered the entire world, went to Rome. He said to the people in his palace: I want you to make me a god, since I have conquered the entire world. They said to him: You have not yet ruled over His city and His house. He went, and he was successful, and he destroyed the Temple and exiled Israel and returned to Rome. He said to them: I have already destroyed His house, and I burned His Temple, and I have exiled His people. Make me a god.24 This midrash, it would appear, has internalized the late Christian image of the pagan Roman Emperors Vespasian, Titus, and Hadrian, who underwent “Christianization” and rehabilitation in the fourth

292

peace and mind

century because they punished the Jewish crucifiers of Jesus. The Jewish author of the midrash attributes to Hadrian (or Titus) not only the destruction of the Temple and the exiling of the Jews; he also regards the emperor’s deification as the result of these acts.25 In this example and many like it, one may see evidence of a great change that took place in the fourth and fifth centuries in Jewish consciousness of the exile. For the first time, we witness a Jewish assertion that the people had been exiled from its land, and the reference is no longer to the distant Babylonian exile. Jewish authors are now dealing directly with contemporary Christian claims and are defending, in a newly Christian context, the idea of Jews continuing to be the Chosen People. The historical question that we must ask in light of this change is whether it reflects only an internal or “natural” Jewish tendency to adopt the biblical conception that ties destruction to exile, or whether a dialogical process—one that reflects absorption of an external time framework—is observable. I wish to advance the claim that the change involves Jewish acceptance of Christian historical time, which, in the fourth and fifth centuries, was already accepted by the majority in the Roman world. The Christianization of the Land of Israel by Constantine in the fourth century brought Jews to consider that Christians were correct in claiming that the Holy Land was progressively slipping from Jewish hands and that a new exile, the “Exile of Edom,” had begun. In Jewish consciousness, the Christianization of the Roman Empire came to be seen as the emergence of Edom as a single political and religious entity, and this identification helped create an equation between the destruction of the Jewish state by Rome and the exiling of the Jews from their land. Here, as in many other matters, Jewish polemics in the first centuries CE do not explicitly deny the “facts” affirmed by Christians, though different interpretations, more suitable to Jewish needs, are of course suggested. In the fourth and fifth centuries, the distinction between the revolt that led to the destruction of the Temple and the later Bar-Kokhba rebellion came to be blurred in the historical memory of Jews and Christians alike. Augustine distinguishes between two

the myth of the jewish exile

293

stages in the divine plan to deprive the Jews of their chosen status.26 First, they were to be subject to Rome, even before Jesus was born: thus Augustine understands the verse, “The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come” (Gen. 49:10). That is to say, first Judah will lose the political scepter, and then Shiloh—Jesus—will come. Indeed, Jesus was born after the last Hasmonaean king was deposed and Herod was made king of the Jews. That date, 37 BCE, was, in Augustine’s view, the beginning of the subjection of the Jews. What, then, was the punishment of the Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus, if they had already lost their political liberty? Augustine’s answer is: exile from the land. Exile, not loss of political sovereignty, was the punishment for the crucifixion. VI From this time on, Jews no longer challenged the myth of exile from the land or 70 CE, the date of the destruction of the Second Temple, as the exile’s commencement. This acceptance reflects the adaptation of Jewish apologetics to the Christian conception of time without agreeing to the actual content of Christian claims. The two religions regarded the destruction of the Temple as a formative event but disagreed about its meaning. The discussion is about meanings, not about facts. Perhaps it was convenient for the Jews to prefer the picture of expulsion from the land to that of abandoning it, for only an expulsion with national and catastrophic dimensions was worthy of a national, messianic, sweeping remedy. The messianic image of the return to Zion could promote the adoption and internalization of the Christian conception of time, for the Jewish messianic narrative, like the narrative of the destruction, was precisely parallel to the Christian narrative, although it reversed the signs. In other words, conceiving of the destruction of the Second Temple as the beginning of a new exile made it possible for the Jews to turn their historical time into messianic time. In the mythic understandings of cyclical and typological time that were prevalent in early Christianity and in Judaism, the establishment of a historical starting point for exile made it possible to posit a mythical-messianic

294

peace and mind

point of return toward which all of history strove. Christians expected that the Parousia of Jesus would return them, as it were, to their point of departure in time and place—to Jerusalem in the first century CE. But equally, medieval Jews looked forward to the advent of a messiah who would restore them to conditions of that same point in time and place, Jerusalem in the first century. This conception also inspired one of the most famous medieval Jewish calculators of the end of days. In the thirteenth century, Rabbi Moses Ben Nahman (Nachmanides) determined that the duration of the exile had to be exactly identical to the length of time that the people had dwelt in their land: “I calculated the years of Israel’s dwelling in the Land, and I saw that they are equal to the number of years that Israel will be exiled from it, for this is as they said: ‘measure for measure’.”27 The historical event that, in his view, determined the transition from dwelling in the Holy Land into living in exile was the destruction of the Second Temple. According to his reckoning, in 1358 the duration of the exile would be equal to the time of dwelling in the land, and the messiah would come then. Regarding the degree to which Jews internalized Christian concepts in understanding the exile, it is possible to present much evidence from liturgical poetry, historiography, foundation narratives, and religious thought. One example that seems to me particularly fraught with meaning is found in the work of Solomon Ibn Verga, Shevet Yehuda (The Scepter of Judah). Ibn Verga was among the Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492, and he wrote his work in the 1520s. At the beginning of his book, by means of an imaginary discussion between King Alfonso and a Christian scholar called Tomas, Ibn Verga dedicates an extensive discussion to the destruction of the Jewish state and to the exile. The Jewish author places the following explanation in the Christian’s mouth: And the reason why the Temple was destroyed—I will tell my Lord, because what happened to it is what happened to our Savior, because Jesus came to atone for the sin of Adam and he accepted death, and the Temple also was meant to atone for the sin of Israel, and it was burned upon them.28

the myth of the jewish exile

295

For his part, the king proposes another explanation. According to him, God’s intention in any event was to exile the Jews from their land, and since he did not want the Temple to fall into the hands of foreigners, he destroyed it. Of course, both of these arguments serve Jewish apologetics. Tomas’s argument places the Temple on a level equal to that of Jesus. Just as Jesus was crucified to atone by his death for the sins of mankind, so too the Temple was burned down to atone for the sins of the Jews. Ibn Verga’s idea that the Temple had a function similar to that of the crucified Jesus recalls the Epistle to the Hebrews, in which the sacrifice of Jesus is compared to the sacrifices on the altar. Jesus is the high priest who sacrifices himself, and in his sacrifice he atones for all eternity, in contrast to the animal sacrifices in the Temple, where the atonement was temporary. Ibn Verga places the burned Temple on a level equal to that of the crucified Jesus and by so doing gives the atonement of the destroyed Temple eternal validity. Ibn Verga thus became an authentic spokesman for many Jews in the Middle Ages, who regarded the expulsion from their land as an event establishing their identity in this world and promising their messianic goal. The consciousness of Jewish suffering in exile tallied well with the consciousness of suffering in the Christian passion. However, in Christianity, the sharp transition from the passion to the resurrection took place in three days, human days; whereas in the Jewish consciousness of time, the transition from exile to redemption is measured in terms of the divine day, a thousand years or more. Moreover, in Jewish literature of the Middle Ages, the juxtaposition of the Jewish and the Christian images of exilic time placed the two on a collision course. Their unification of the conception of mythic time allowed Jews to level an accusation against Christians entirely parallel to the accusation leveled by Christians against Jews. Just as Christians claimed that the Jews had crucified Jesus and thereby deserved the punishment of exile, so Jews claimed that the Christians—whom Jews identified with mythical Edom—had exiled the Chosen People from the Promised Land and thereby deserved their future punishment: the messianic revenge that would precede the Jews’ final redemption. Fixing the

296

peace and mind

destruction of the Temple as the beginning of the exile thus created a reverse symmetry between Jewish and Christian time, making the historical reality of the period between crucifixion/destruction and Parousia/redemption merely temporary. In this way, in the Middle Ages, Jewish memory of the destruction of Jerusalem changed from elegy to complaint and harsh resentment— no longer against Rome, which had disappeared from the world and been uprooted from their hearts, but against her heir and new representative: the church. The reception of the myth of exile from the land played yet another role in the Middle Ages: it explained and justified the status and existence of the Jews in European Christian society. For both Christians and Jews, it was convenient to anchor the Jewish presence in Christian Europe with the argument that the Jews there were direct descendants of the exiles from Jerusalem, as if the diaspora had been created by a single explosion in 70 CE that led to the establishment of communities in various places in the world. Thus, for example, in the fourth century Orosius, reviewing the data found in Josephus regarding 90,000 Jews taken captive in Jerusalem, concluded that these prisoners—who, according to him, were scattered all over the world—were the founders of the Jewish diaspora in general.29 The German chronicler and bishop, Otto von Freising, continued this process in the twelfth century by adding a zero to the statistic given in Josephus: according to von Freising, the total number of Jews in the world at his time was 900,000.30 The exiling of the Jews from Jerusalem determined not only the boundaries of the Jewish diaspora but also its dimensions. A traditional belief of the Jews of Spain attributes the establishment of the Jewish communities in the Iberian peninsula to the exiles driven from Jerusalem by Titus.31 Similarly, in The Book of Josiphon it is told that the exiles of Titus settled in Italy.32 In the Scroll of Ahima’atz as well, which was written in Italy during the eleventh century, the author describes his ancestors as the founders of the Italian Jewish community in the following words: “My ancestors were exiled, they came with the exiles, who were exiled from Jerusalem… with the exile, which Titus commanded, from the city crowned in beauty, and they settled in Oria, and there they gathered, they grew in Torah, and they excelled in [good] deeds.”33

the myth of the jewish exile

297

This tradition was also known in Germany. In an Ashkenazi service of penitential prayers (slihot), a tradition is presented regarding Rabbi Amitai, Rabbi Shefatya, and Rabbi Yosefya “whom the evil Titus exiled with the rest of the exile which was expelled from Jerusalem.” They instituted the prayer “Vehu rahum” (“and he is merciful”) and ordered that it be recited throughout the diaspora.34 In this prayer, the connection between sin and destruction, the humiliation of exile and the expectation of redemption, is expressed powerfully: Because of our sins and the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem and your people, a shame to all around them…. Open your eyes and see the desolation of the city, upon which your name is called…. Show a propitious sign and gather in our dispersed people from the four corners of the earth, let all the nations acknowledge and know that you are the Lord our God…. Look upon our affairs, for our pains are great, and the sorrows of our hearts. Have mercy, O Lord, upon us in the land of our imprisonment, and do not pour your wrath upon us…. O Lord, look upon the meagerness of our honor among the nations.35 According to a French version of the legend of the expulsion, Vespasian had three ships loaded with exiles from Jerusalem and launched them into the sea with no oars. One of the ships reached Bordeaux, the second came to Arles, and the third to Lyons.36 A third version—another German one—states that the three sages reached Spain, Italy, and Africa respectively.37 The myth of the expulsion from the land therefore helped in the establishment of local consciousness in the new Jewish communities of Europe. The myth was a vital component in explaining the translation of Jewish life from the ancient center of the Land of Israel to new centers in Europe, and in this respect it followed parallel Christian traditions concerning the transfer of the relics of saints from the Holy Land in the East to the new Christian centers in the West. However, the Christian legends were content with the transfer of relics to the West, whereas the Jews

298

peace and mind

presented themselves as living relics, authentic representatives of the old Jerusalem. The Jewish “holy community” (quehila quedosha) regarded itself as the local embodiment of the Jerusalem of the Land of Israel, whereas the Christian civitas sancta regarded itself as the earthly embodiment of the heavenly Jerusalem.38 Medieval Jewish apologetics, willingly and thus paradoxically, adopted an ancient Christian myth as a kind of foundation myth for their own local communities.39 The myth that the Jews were exiled from their land after the Second Temple’s destruction allowed the Jewish communities of Europe to see themselves as miniature Jerusalems and to weave messianic hopes for the future, when the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the Temple would be accompanied by the people’s return to their land. The nature of the ancient calamity was endowed with outlines for the desired future restoration: since the redemption would include the wholesale return to Zion, the calamity also included wholesale exile from the Holy Land. The great surprise that Jewish apologetics enshrines a memory whose source is Christian and anti-Jewish is explained by the function of that memory in forming the self-consciousness of the Jews in Christian Europe. The argument made by Ibn Verga was that all the Jews of Spain were descendants of the royal tribe of Judah: “In the destruction of the Second Temple, there was a Roman emperor who ruled over the entire world, and from Jerusalem and the towns he took forty thousand households from the tribe of Judah, and ten thousand from the tribe of Benjamin and from the priests, and he sent them to Spain, which was under his rule in those days.” (By contrast, most of the Jews who came to France were from the tribe of Benjamin; in other words, France received second-rate merchandise.)40 Recall the title of Ibn Verga’s work, The Scepter of Judah. His claim was that the Jews of Spain were all descended from kings, the crème de la crème of Jerusalem. The tendency to regard the Jews of Europe as descendants of the exiles from Jerusalem also had a positive judicial consequence, from the Jewish point of view, for it permitted legislators and those who drafted royal privileges to anchor the judicial status of the Jews in ancient rights that, supposedly, had been granted to the besieged

the myth of the jewish exile

299

Jews of Jerusalem by Titus or Vespasian. Yohanan (Hans) Levi, in an article on Josephus the Physician, asserted that “all the rights given to the Jews by the Christians [in the Middle Ages] originated in ab excidio Hierosolymae,” which is the title of a book by PseudoHegesippus.41 This attitude persists down to the present day, though with adaptations. I began this paper by pointing out the centrality of the myth of expulsion to the Zionist self-image. I want to conclude by suggesting the centrality of the myth in the formation of WesternChristian consciousness and also in the shaping of its stance toward the Zionist enterprise today. The success of Zionism in attaining sympathy and even considerable support in the West is based to no small degree on the Western view that there is an immanent connection between the exile of the Jews and the birth of Christianity. The return of the Jews to Zion is grasped in Christian consciousness as a natural historical process in an age of growing reconciliation between the two religions. Thus, an old concept of historical time, shared by Christians and Jews throughout the last two thousand years, helped to create a justification for—an understanding of the necessity of—the Jewish return to Zion. But this return deeply affected a third party, the Muslim world as a whole and the Palestinian Arabs in particular, who do not share the Judeo-Christian Weltanschauung of time. Beyond the conflicting territorial interests, there is also a deep gap between Muslims and Judeo-Christians in their perception of mythical time. But that is another story.

300

peace and mind

Notes 1. To my knowledge, this question has not been discussed previously in these terms in Jewish historical research, and that silence is puzzling. The Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua has called for recognizing the political and moral consequences that derive, in his opinion, from the abandonment of the land by its Jewish inhabitants 1,500 years ago or more: Yehoshua, “The Diaspora—the Neurotic Solution,” in In Praise of Normalcy [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Shocken, 1980), 31–46. The only study known to me that deals with the meaning of the term exile in connection with the supposed expulsion of the Jews from the Land of Israel after the destruction of the Second Temple is that of Chaim Milikowsky, “Notions of Exile, Subjugation, and Return in Rabbinic Literature,” in Exile: Old Testament, Jewish, and Christian Conceptions, ed. James M. Scott (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 265–96. Milikowsky argues— and his remarks are consistent with the central claim of the present paper—that in Tannaitic sources of the second and third centuries CE, the term “exile” had the meaning of political subjugation and not a connotation of being driven from one’s land. For more about exile and its meaning in Jewish historical consciousness, see Yitzhak F. Baer, Exile, trans. Robert Warshaw (1936; New York: Schocken, 1947). See also Baer, “The Land of Israel and Exile in the Eyes of the Generations of the Middle Ages” [in Hebrew], Measef Zion 6 (1934): 149–61, and Amnon Raz-Krakotskin, “Exile within Sovereignty: Toward a Critique of ‘the Condemnation of the Diaspora’ in Israeli Culture” [in Hebrew], Teoria Uviqoret 4 (Autumn 1993): 23–55. 2. Josephus, Wars, 7:3:3. 3. Philo, Life of Moses, II:232. 4. Gittin 56a. Most translations of Talmud here have been taken from the Soncino edition. 5. Gittin 57a. For additional information, see: Hans Joachim Schoeps, “Die Tempelzerstörung des Jahres 70 in der jüdischen Religionsgeschichte,” in Aus frühchristlicher Zeit (Tübingen: Mohr, 1950), 144–83. 6. Brakhot 3a, spoken by a Tanna, Rabbi Yose Hagalili, and an Amora, Rav—that is to say, at the end of the second century, beginning of the

the myth of the jewish exile

301

third century: “R. Isaac b. Samuel says in the name of Rab: The night has three watches, and at each watch the Holy One, blessed be He, sits and roars like a lion and says: Woe to the children, on account of whose sins I destroyed My house and burnt My temple and exiled them among the nations of the world.” Immediately afterward, a saying by Rabbi Yosei is presented, in which he tells about walking along the road and entering a ruin in Jerusalem, where he heard a divine voice “cooing like a dove, and saying: Woe to the children, on account of whose sins I destroyed My house and burnt My temple and exiled them among the nations of the world!” Here we have reuse of the expression attributed to the sages of the second and third centuries. However, one should note the differences between the anonymous saying in the Talmud and the three sayings attributed to Rabbi Yose, to Rabbi Yoḥanan, and to Rav. In the three attributed sayings, the active factor in exiling the people is the Holy One, blessed be he, himself, or the “the scrupulousness of R. Zechariah b. Abkulas.” In contrast, in the anonymous source, which is later, Rome explicitly bears the blame for the expulsion. In any event, the expression is repeated four times in the Babylonian Talmud and binds the destruction of the Temple with expulsion from the land. 7. Shir Hashirim Raba 7:8; Kohelet Raba 12:8; Tanḥuma, Reeh, 15; Tanḥuma, ed. Solomon Buber, Ki Tetse, 3. On one exception, see Tanḥuma, Breshit, 7 and below. 8. Sifra, Beḥuqotai 6:5: “‘and I laid the land waste.’ This is a good deed, so that the Jews would not say, since we have been exiled from our land, now the enemies come and find contentment on it, as it is said, ‘and your enemies who dwell on it will be desolate.’ Even the enemies who come afterward will not find contentment on it.” Sifre Numbers, ed. H. S. Horowitz, 47, no. 42: “Until they were exiled from their land, ‘is there a number to his legions’, when they were exiled from their land, ‘a thousand thousands will lay it waste’.” Megillah 12a: “they said [to Ahasuerus]: from the day that the Temple was destroyed and we were exiled from our land, wisdom has been taken from us, and we do not know how to judge capital crimes.” 9. Thus, for example, in the Tannaitic midrash, Sifra, we find the following interpretation of the rebuke in Lev. 26:32–33 (“And I

302

peace and mind

will bring the land into desolation: and your enemies which dwell therein shall be astonished at it. And I will scatter you among the heathen … and your land shall be desolate, and your cities waste”) as applying to the First Temple: “This is a very harsh decree for Israel, for when a person is exiled from his vineyard and from his house, in the end he will return, as though his vineyard and his house were not destroyed. You, you are not that way, but rather ‘and your land shall be desolate, and your cities waste.’ Why is this? Because you will not return in the end.” These words cannot be applied to the time of the author of the midrash, for it cannot be imagined that a Jewish commentator would believe in the second or third century that the exiles from the land would not return in the end. His words can easily refer to the first exile and to the Ten Lost Tribes, according to the approach maintaining that the Ten Tribes would not return (Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:3). 10. This impression is strengthened by seeing the expression attributed to three different speakers in the Babylonian Talmud: to the Tanna, Rabbi Yose Hagelili, and to the Amoraim, Rav and Rabbi Yoḥanan. The logical conclusion seems to be that one should not regard these “quotations” in the Babylonian Talmud as an authentic and faithful report of the attitudes of the sages of the Land of Israel in the second and third centuries. 11. In most of the ancient sources, forced exile is not described. In Mekhilta de R. Yishma’el, Masekhta de-pisha, ed. H. S. Horowitz, 51–52, we read: “You find in every place where the Jews were exiled that, as it were, the divine presence was exiled with them. They were exiled to Egypt, and the divine presence was with them…. They were exiled to Babylonia, and the divine presence was with them … they were exiled to Edom, and the divine presence was with them, as it is said, ‘Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah?’ (Isaiah 63:1). And when they return in the future, as it were, the divine presence will return with them, as it is said, ‘That then the Lord thy God will turn thy captivity’ (Deut. 30:3). It does not say, ‘return,’ but ‘will turn.’ And it says, ‘Come with me from Lebanon, my spouse’ (Song of Songs 4:8). Does she really come from Lebanon? Rather she goes up to Lebanon, and what do

the myth of the jewish exile

303

we learn from ‘Come with me from Lebanon, my spouse’? As it were, I and you were exiled from Lebanon, and I and you go up to Lebanon.” The author of this midrash takes no pains to distinguish between the exile of Egypt, which was voluntary, and the exile of Babylonia, which was forced, nor does he make the exile dependent on the destruction. Perhaps, too, the Jewish move to identify the destruction of the Second Temple with that of the First Temple leaves an opening for hope that, just as the Babylonian exile lasted a short time and was terminated with a return to Zion, the same will happen after the destruction of the Second Temple. In this respect, the Jews were different from the Christians. The latter viewed the destruction as final. The view that the destruction and the exile were bound together and that both were perpetrated by Rome gradually became ensconced in Jewish sources as well. As time passed, the distinction between the first and second rebellions was blurred, and we find more and more references to the exile of the Jews from their land. In Bamidbar Raba 4:10, the following teaching is attributed to the Tanna Rabbi Natan: “The Jews are beloved, because everywhere they are exiled, the divine presence is exiled with them. They were exiled to Egypt, the divine presence was exiled with them… they were exiled to Babylonia, the divine presence was exiled with them…they were exiled to Eilam, the divine presence was with them…they were exiled to Edom, the divine presence was with them.” On these teachings, see Efraim E. Urbach, The Sages, Their Concepts and Beliefs (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1979), 54–57. On the parallel Christian view of the reason for dispersion of the Jews—in order to disseminate the Old Testament among the gentiles—see St. Augustine, Adversus Iudaeos (Tract Against the Jews), 7:9. 12. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 3:5; Robert L. Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews: Rhetoric and Reality in the Late 4th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 135–38. 13. Origen, Contra Celsum, 4:22; 7:26; 8:69. Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica, 1:6. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho the Jew [in Hebrew], trans. David Rokeah (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2004), 40, 127, and n. 600. In the Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 116a-b, this argument is placed in the mouth of a Christian “philosopher”: “From the day

304

peace and mind

that you were exiled from your land, the Torah of Moses was taken away and a different Torah was given.” A similar opinion, according to which the commandments of the Torah were given only for those living in the Land of Israel is found in Sifre to Deuteronomy 43, ed. Louis Finkelstein, 102: “Even though I exile you from the land to outside of the land, be excellent in the commandments, so that when you return, they will not be new to you.” 14. Robert L. Wilken, The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); Stefan Heid, Chiliasmus und Antichrist-Mythos. Eine frühchristliche Kontroverse um das Heilige Land (Bonn: Borengasser, 1993), 41– 47; Peter  W.  L. Walker, Holy City, Holy Places? Christian Attitudes to Jerusalem and the Holy Land in the Fourth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990). In the first centuries CE, two schools arose among the Church Fathers regarding the Land of Israel and its rebuilding in the future. One approach regarded the biblical prophecy about the rebuilding of Jerusalem as a promise that would be fulfilled after the return of Jesus, his Parousia. At that time Jesus would establish an earthly Christian kingdom, the center of which would be Jerusalem, and it would last for a thousand years (hence the term chiliasm, from the prefix for “one thousand” in Greek). After that thousand-year reign, the kingdom of heaven would commence. Another approach regarded the messianic prophecies in the Bible as a promise for a heavenly Jerusalem and the kingdom of heaven, without promise of an actual return to the earthly Jerusalem. The Christian claim to ownership of the Holy Land was of course stronger among the proponents of the former approach, but members of both schools regarded the exile of the Jews from their land as a decided proof that they had been deposed as the beloved children of God. 15. Rivka Fishman-Ducker, “The Bar-Kokhba Rebellion in Christian Sources,” in The Bar-Kokhba Rebellion: Recent Studies [in Hebrew], ed. Aharon Oppenheimer and Uriel Rappaport (Jerusalem: Yad Yitshak Ben-Tsevi, 1988), 233–42. On Christian sources describing the prohibition against Jewish settlement in Jerusalem and its surroundings and on the theological meaning of that prohibition, see Oded Irshai, “Constantine and the Jews: The Prohibition against

the myth of the jewish exile

305

Entering Jerusalem—History and Hagiography” [in Hebrew], Zion 60.2 (1995): 129–35. 16. Martyr, Dialogue, 79, 127; Heid, Chiliasmus, 46–47. 17. Martyr, Dialogue, 100. The citation from Sifra presented above, n. 8, “Even the enemies who come afterward will not find contentment on it,” appears to be directed against the making of Jerusalem into a Roman city, but it could also be directed against these Christian hopes. 18. Tertullian, Adversos Judaeos, chap. 13. See also Wilken, Land Called Holy, 74. 19. Eusebius, Theophania, 4:20; St. Jerome, Commentary on Zephaniah, 1:15. 20. On the meaning of the concept “the Land of Israel” in biblical literature, see Sara Japhet, Beliefs and Opinions in the Book of Chronicles [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Mossad Biyalik, 1977), 307–33. 21. Isaiah Gafni, “The Bringing Up of the Dead for Burial in the Land—Outlines of the Origin of a Custom and its Development” [in Hebrew], Cathedra 4 (1977): 113–30; and Gafni, Land, Center, and Diaspora: Jewish Constructs in Late Antiquity (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997). 22. Midrash Shmuel 8:35, as cited in Efrayim Elimelech Urbach, “From Judea to the Galilee,” in From the World of the Sages [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2002), 330–46. 23. Esther Raba 3:5 and a parallel text in Midrash Tehilim 10:6: “The Assembly of Israel said to the Holy One, blessed be He, Master of the Universe, You saw that the evil Esau has come and that he will destroy the Temple in the future and exile the Jews from their land and chain them in yokes… . He [Esau] will come and take orphans and widows and incarcerate them in prison.” 24. Tanḥuma, Bereshit, 7. 25. The change that took place after the fourth century in the attitude of the Jews toward the question of exile can be seen in the reuse of the saying originally attributed to Rabban Yoḥanan Ben Zakai. In Tosefta Baba Qama 7:3, the following opinion is presented in his name: “Why were the Jews exiled to Babylonia more than all the other lands? Because the House of Abraham the Patriarch is from

306

peace and mind

there. Here is a parable, to what is this similar? To a woman who was bad to her husband. Where does he send her? To her father’s house.” These words of Rabban Yoḥanan Ben Zakai have no connection to the destruction of the Second Temple and exile from the land, and their whole intention is to explain why the major part of the Jewish diaspora in his day was specifically in Babylonia. However, in the Babylonian Talmud, Pesaḥim 87b, this idea is presented in a different manner. Within a group of sayings attributed to Amoraim of the third century (Rabbi Osha’ya, Rabbi Ḥiyya, Rabbi El’azar)—sayings that praise the existence of the Jewish center in Babylonia as an alternative to that in the Land of Israel (“the Holy One blessed be He did a favor to the Jews when He scattered them among the nations . . . the Holy One blessed be He knows that the Jews cannot bear the cruel decrees of Edom, and therefore he exiled them to Babylonia”)— we also find the following saying: “Rabbi Yoḥanan said, “[the Holy One blessed be he did not exile the Jews to Babylonia except] because he sent them to their mother’s house. As when a man is angry at his wife, where does he send her? To her mother’s house.” Here the Tanna Rabban Yoḥanan Ben Zakai, of the first century, becomes an Amora, Rabbi Yoḥanan, of the third century, and the woman is sent to her mother’s house rather than her father’s house. The similarity between the two sayings remains but the context has changed. In the Talmud, the words are said in order to show that Babylonia was the preferred refuge for the Jews of the Land of Israel, who suffered from the subjection of Rome, and they are very appropriate to the situation in the third century. In this whole group of sayings, there is no mention of a new exile. All the speakers refer to the longstanding situation of the Jewish diaspora and to the centrality of Babylonia within it. Rabbi Yoḥanan’s saying is “recycled” once again in Shir Hashirim Raba 8:9 on the verse, “If she be a wall, we will build upon her a palace of silver.” Here a great change is evident: “Israel said to the Holy One blessed be He: Master of the Universe, we are a ‘wall’ and we will erect commandments and good deeds like a wall … ‘then I was in his eyes as one who found peace’ (Song of Songs, 8:10). Why? Because all the nations of the world turn to Israel and say to them: If so, why did He exile you from his land and why did He destroy the

the myth of the jewish exile

307

Temple? And Israel would answer them: we are like the daughter of kings who went away from her father’s house to celebrate a holiday. In the end she returns home in peace.” Here we find the first effort to respond to the Christian argument that exile from the land indicates the withdrawal of God’s love from the Jews. The Jewish answer makes new use of Rabbi Yoḥanan’s saying: this time it is not a rebellious woman, but a woman beloved of her husband. The unusual Hebrew expression, “‫לעשות רגל רדופים‬,” which appears here implies that she is driven to return to her parents and tell them of her happiness upon celebrating the holiday. The second change introduced in the original saying of Rabbi Yoḥanan Ben Zakai is, “In the end she returns home in peace.” This phrase alludes to the messianic hope for the future, which here plays an apologetic role in the Jewish answer to Christian criticism. 26. St. Augustine, City of God, 18:45–46. 27. Nachmanides, Sefer Hageula, in Kitvei Rabeinu Moshe Ben Nahman, 1:294–95. 28. Shlomo Ibn Verga, Sefer Shevet Yehudah, ed. Yitzḥaq Baer (Jerusalem: Mossad Biyalik, 1947), 45. 29. Orosius, Historia adversum Paganos, VII, 9.7. A Jewish version speaks of 900 ships (in another version, 3,000), upon which the exiles sailed away from the land. See Yehuda David Aizenshtain, Otsar Midrashim (New York: Y. D. Aizenshtain, 1915), 436. 30. Yoḥanan Levi, “Josephus the Physician,” in Worlds Meet [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Mossad Biyalik, 1969), 229. 31. Abraham Ibn Daud, Sefer Haqabala, ed. Gerson D. Cohen (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1967), 58, 71. In Seder ‘Olam Zuta (found in Adolf Neubauer, Seder Hahakhamim veqorot hayamim [Oxford: Clarendon, 1888], 71), we find: “Vespasian came and destroyed the House and exiled Israel and many households of the House of David and Judah to Aspamia, which is Spain.” In Joseph Cohen of Avignon, ‘Emeq habakha, ed. Meir Letteris (Krakow: Faust’s Buchhandlung, 1895), 13–14, this tradition is applied to Hadrian and the Bar-Kokhba rebellion: “Those remaining [in Jerusalem after the destruction of the Second Temple] were exiled by Hadrian to the land of Spain, and they are those

308

peace and mind

‘exiled of Jerusalem’ who dwell in Spain until this day….” However, when Cohen fixes the date of the composition of the Mishnah by Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi, he puts it at the Hebrew calendar date of 3949, which is 199 CE. “This is the one-hundred-twentieth year after the exile of Judea from its land.” That is to say, he sets the beginning of the exile at the time of the destruction of the Temple. Similarly, he writes about the date of the composition of the Jerusalem Talmud: “About two-hundred years after the exile of Judea from its land” (15). 32. David Flusser, ed., The Book of Josiphon [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Mossad Biyalik, 1981), 1:432. 33. Megilat Ahima’ats [in Hebrew], ed. Benyamin Klar (Jerusalem: Sifre Tarshish, 1974), 12. 34. Sefer Hamanhig, ed. Yitzhak Raphael, I, 102 (with additional bibliographical data). Also cited in Megilat Ahima’ats, 45–46. And see Henri Gross, Gallia Judaica (Amsterdam: Philo, 1969), 74–75. Gross mentions there a parallel Christian story, on which see Hans Lewy, “Imaginary Journeys from Palestine to France,” Journal of the Warburg Institute 1.3 (January 1938): 251–53. 35. Yom-Tov Lippmann Mülhausen, Sefer Hanizzahon (1644; Jerusalem: Center of Jewish Research, 1983), sig. 281, offers the verse, “But he, being full of compassion, forgave their iniquity” (Ps. 78:38), as a refutation of the Christians’ claim that the Jews were in exile as punishment for their sin. 36. Avraham Berliner, Selected Writings [in Hebrew], 2 vols. (Jerusalem: Mossad ha-Rav Kook, 1969), 1:66. 37. Moshe Hershler, ed., Siddur R. Shlomo miGarmaiza (Jerusalem: Hemed, 1971), 127–28. 38. Alfred Haverkamp, “‘Heilige Städte’ im hohen Mittelalter,” Mentalitäten im Mittelalter: Methodische und inhaltliche Probleme, ed. Frantisek Graus, Vorträge und Forschungen, 35 (Sigmaringen, Germany: J. Thorbecke, 1987), 119–56. 39. Avraham Grossman, “The Myth of the Founders in the Jewish Diaspora in the Middle Ages and Its Historical meaning,” in Myth in Judaism: History, Thought, Literature [in Hebrew], ed. Moshe Idel and Ithamar Gruenwald (Jerusalem: Mercaz Zalman Shazar letoldot Yisrael, 2003), 123–43, esp. 135–37. Grossman presents sources

the myth of the jewish exile

309

that even indicate a tendency to attribute the antiquity of the Jewish settlement in Ashkenaz to exiles from the First Temple. 40. Ibn Verga, Shevet Yehudah, 34. 41. Yohanan Levi, “Josephus the Physician,” 282. Levi’s article was first published in English in 1937–38. Close to the time of its appearance, a remarkably similar article was published by Guido Kisch: “A Talmudic Legend as the Source for the Josephus Passage in the Sachsenspiegel,” Historia Judaica 1 (1938/39): 105–18.

310

peace and mind

LESSONS OF THE CROCODILE Susan Stephens

From the perspective of Herodotus, the so-called father of Western history, Greece and Egypt typified cultural extremes: whatever the one did, the other did in exactly the opposite way.1 So alien are the Egyptians that the second book of Herodotus, in which he sketches their history and ecology, can be formally detached from the main narrative. Falling outside his subject (the historical trajectory of the Persian Wars), Egypt is constructed as an exotic byway, filled with unique creatures and bizarre practices like animal worship. For example, we learn that the crocodile is sacred for some Egyptians…. Those who live near Thebes and Lake Moeris regard them as especially sacred. Each group rears one crocodile chosen from the rest, taming and adorning it with glass and gold pendants in its ears, and bracelets on its front feet, providing food and offerings and giving it the best possible life. When the animals die, they mummify them and bury them in sacred coffins. (2.69) For centuries, these sacred crocodiles were objects of fascination for Greeks and Romans; their temples, sites for tourists. “Make sure you have tidbits on hand for him to feed the crocodiles” was an instruction from an official in Alexandria to local functionaries who were wining and dining a Roman senator. Between Herodotus’s initial description (c. 440 BCE) and the senator’s visit (in 112), the political and economic world of these crocodiles was dramatically altered as Egypt fell subject to invaders from Macedon, and Greek speakers became the new ruling class. Yet the crocodiles themselves went unchanged. When the Macedonians (the Ptolemies) had been replaced by Rome, the imperial geographer Strabo, accompanying the first Roman governor of Egypt in 25–24 BCE, was equally entranced by the sacred animals:

312

peace and mind

Our host, one of the officials  … went with us to the lake, carrying a kind of cake and some roasted meat with a pitcher of wine mixed with honey. We found [the crocodile] lying on the edge of the lake; and when the priests went up to it, some of them opened its mouth and another put in the cake, and then the meat, and then poured in the honey mixture.2 Pampering crocodiles was not a quaint custom domesticated for tourism by the new rulers. The crocodiles (and the other sacred animals of Egypt) served as a constant reminder of the limits of Roman power. Egypt could not be ruled without the acquiescence of the crocodiles, as this anecdote in Plutarch (from the second century CE) illustrates: They have long told the story that when king Ptolemy summoned the sacred crocodile it did not obey in spite of his blandishments and urgings. For the priests this was an omen that his end was near (as happened not long after).3 The longevity of crocodile worship is a normative assumption of the history of ancient Egypt under the Macedonian Greeks. Retelling the story of the Ptolemaic conquest and occupation of Egypt, classicists and Egyptologists alike say that the natives remained in their villages along the arable portions of the Nile valley (called in Greek, the chora), working the land in traditional ways, while the Ptolemies built cities, especially Alexandria on the Mediterranean, for their newly arrived Greek and Macedonian subjects. The ideologically loaded word apartheid has often been invoked to describe the interrelationship of these two worlds. Egyptologists concur in this assessment: they see the ancient culture of the pharaohs as more or less impervious to the set of behaviors imported by the new overlords. The traditional religious practices continued, and not until the advent of Christianity and then Islam was Egypt fundamentally altered. The grip of this narrative has been tenacious because the disciplines of classics and Egyptology muster different evidence in support of it. Classical historians use sources

lessons of the crocodile

313

written in Greek and Latin, while Egyptologists read materials in hieratic, hieroglyphics, demotic—and scholars of the one discipline only rarely read the languages of the other. In this way, Ptolemaic rule has come to be characterized as “double”: the Ptolemies were monarchs who ruled their Greek subjects as Greek kings but simultaneously ruled their Egyptian subjects as pharaohs. As Greek kings, the Ptolemies headed an army of occupation who were rewarded for their service by allotments of land (most extensively in the Fayum region), from which they derived rents but where they also settled and continued their Greek cultural behaviors. To mollify Egyptians, the Ptolemies allowed themselves to be portrayed in a seamless continuum with the pharaohs of the past in temple representations and liturgy. Yet narratives of “doubleness” fail to account for the necessary interaction of the differently configured groups. Whether we categorize by ethnicity (Greek, Egyptian) or by class (kings, priests, soldiers, embalmers, donkey drivers), ad hoc ways of negotiating power and space came to be defining factors in the Greek conquest of this most alien locale. Nor do the standard histories take into account self-conscious acquiescence in the construct of “doubleness” as a displacement for the more pervasive experiences of accommodation and assimilation. It is time to assess the contrivances of cultural separation between the established categories—Greek ruling class, Egyptian subject people—and their mutual interdependencies to see if the categories themselves may need replacement. Egyptian Alexandria By 323 BCE, a Macedonian, Alexander the Great, had claimed Egypt, as well as the whole of Greece, northern Africa, Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Iraq, by virtue of military conquest.4 His sudden death at age thirty-two left no suitable heir; and his generals, “the Successors,” rushed to fill the power vacuum. The ensuing fifty years saw a series of wars to determine who would control what regions—and even after power was distributed into four, more or less stable kingdoms, territorial wars continued intermittently

314

peace and mind

throughout the three hundred year period of the Successors’ reigns, until their kingdoms were absorbed by the advancing Roman empire. One of these generals, Ptolemy, the son of Lagos, staked his claim in Egypt, which was not only the richest of Alexander’s dominions (in terms of agricultural productivity and ease of access to mineral wealth) but also the easiest to defend—with daunting natural obstacles of deserts to east and west, and cataracts to the south. Ptolemy I must have consolidated power by means of the military, who then served both as an occupying force within the country and as the core of his private army in wars waged to extend his territory beyond. Commencing his rule in Memphis (modern Cairo), Egypt’s oldest and most sacred city, Ptolemy I acted as a local regent in the name of Alexander’s young son. Once Ptolemy I had consolidated power, he moved his base of operations to the Mediterranean coast, to a new foundation named for his predecessor. Alexandria quickly became the center for Greek culture and the prime city of the ancient Mediterranean world until, in 30 BCE at the death of the last Ptolemy (Cleopatra VII), Egypt became a province of Rome. Modern scholars operate within two implicit models for Ptolemaic rule. A perspective inherited from ancient sources has it that the aftermath of Alexander’s conquest of the Middle East was a grand civilizing process: “mankind” was now united under the influence of Greek culture and education. This was a world in which Syrians, Jews, Persians, and even Egyptians submerged their native cultural practices in order to enjoy the elevating experience of Greek paideia—the writings of Greek philosophers, historians, orators, and poets: Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Demosthenes, and Homer.5 This tradition has it that the Ptolemies revitalized an exhausted culture in Egypt by means of a strong central administration that monetized the economy and increased agricultural productivity. Alternatively, the Ptolemies are seen as economic imperialists, like the British in India or the Dutch in Indonesia, extracting wealth from the hapless natives to enrich the conquering few. Neither model fits very well, though there are elements of truth in each. On the one hand, Egyptians did learn Greek, and many had a Greek education. By the fourth century CE, Egyptian even came to be written with a Greek alphabet (Coptic).

lessons of the crocodile

315

On the other hand, the Ptolemies did exploit the economy of the country for their own interests, particularly to support their foreign wars; but their power was limited. They ruled as resident monarchs, in contrast to earlier and later occupiers of Egypt, the Persians (c. 500–420 BCE) and the Romans (29 BCE–641 CE), both of whom depended on provincial governors to maintain order and manage the flow of goods from Egypt to their imperial centers. Residence in Egypt made the Ptolemies much more vulnerable to local demands, from both the Greek and non-Greek population. Meanwhile, the application of centralized authority could be no more than selectively successful. Only the northernmost parts of Egypt—from Alexandria to as far south as Memphis and the area of Herodotus’s crocodiles, the Fayum—were constantly exposed to the new regime. South of Memphis and remote from the new capital, the towns and villages bordering the Nile were strung out like beads on a string. Local behaviors proved resistant to change. Moreover, the new ruling house brought neither religious nor social agendas. Egyptian religion was left intact and the occupiers were drawn inexorably into its orbit. The Greeks became permanent settlers, and the majority intermarried with Egyptians over the three centuries of occupation. Although the imperial elite remained Greek and clustered together in Greek social structures like the gymnasium, there does not seem to have been any systemic discrimination against natives or native advancement. Hostility between conqueror and conquered is easily documented, but so too are intimate legal and social interactions. Linguistic arrangements were equally complex. The Ptolemies administered the country in Greek. But Egyptians, not Greeks, soon formed the bilingual scribal administration—and in matters of state religion, the Egyptian language was maintained for centuries. The picture thus includes cultural accommodation and adaptation as well as exploitation on both sides, played out in small and localized venues rather than in coherent state policies marked by long-term achievements. Alexandria is the central monument to Ptolemaic power. It also provides our first example of the layers of cultural accommodation that underpinned that power. Designed to be the capital for the new

316

peace and mind

ruling house, Alexandria was the first coastal city in Egypt’s long history. Even so, it was sited on or near an Egyptian village (Rhacotis). Greek architects were credited with the design, which included typical features of a Greek city—a theater, stadium, and temples—but also untypical features, such as the vast palace complex. The city facilitated economic exchange with the rest of the Mediterranean by providing a safe and extensive harbor; and as an entrepôt, Alexandria attracted a wide variety of immigrants from Greek-speaking cities, from Syria and Persia, as well as a large number of Jews.6 While Alexandria was ostensibly a Greek city, Memphis remained the religious capital for Egyptians who populated the chora. The two cities are thus taken to epitomize the polarities that we find in Herodotus—the one, urban, open, dominated by Greek speakers, its library a repository of Greek learning; the other, a closed religious center, dominated by indigenous priesthoods locked into age-old animal worship. Yet at least half of the initial population of Alexandria would have been Egyptian, and its architecture seems to have deliberately blended Egyptian elements with Greek. Recent underwater excavations by Jean-Yves Empereur, who has recovered submerged objects in the harbor area, confirm that the Ptolemies had themselves portrayed in colossal statuary executed in Egyptian style.7 Other Egyptian artifacts of power—obelisks and sphinxes—were brought to the new city from elsewhere in Egypt. The major temple was not to a Greek god but to a newly devised divinity, Sarapis. The mixed architecture of Alexandria and the mixed populace are reliable indices of the lived reality. Likewise, generalizations customarily made about Memphis, a city synonymous with the old Egypt, are flawed.8 Memphis was by no means exclusively Egyptian: it too had a multinational immigrant population of Jews, Phoenicians, Carians, and assimilated Greeks, many of whom had come as mercenaries to serve in the armies of the last pharaohs. Memphite Greeks even had their own temple, the Helleneion, devoted to a Greek deity. At times, pharaonic dynasties moved their cult centers to Thebes (Memphis’s great religious rival in the south) or north to the Delta, but Memphis always remained important because of its strategic location and its association with

lessons of the crocodile

317

the divine creator (Ptah). To control Memphis was to control Egypt. Sited at the apex of the Delta, Memphis was a central hub for river traffic south, and for overland access from east and west. Military expeditions to and from Egypt to the east were staged in Memphis because the city represented safety in face of external threat. (It was to Memphis, for example, that Ptolemy IV would move his administration before the battle of Raphia in 217 BCE, when the Syrian dynast Antiochus III threatened invasion.) Moreover, the Memphite priesthoods of Ptah constituted the aristocracy of old Egypt, with offices passed down from father to son. They not only presided over the daily religious ceremonies and seasonal festivals deemed necessary for the well-being of the country, they also regulated the coronation of the pharaoh and superintended his sometimes extensive estates, the produce of which supported the temple’s upkeep and activities. Any ruler of Egypt had to reach an accommodation with the Memphite priests. Alexander marked his official conquest of the country by entering Memphis and paying homage to the Apis bull (the physical manifestation of Ptah). Ptolemy I secured Memphis and ruled from there for about ten years before moving his court to Alexandria. As a result of Ptolemy I’s efforts to placate them, the Memphite priesthoods, unlike the priests of Thebes, consistently supported the new regime. In Alexandria, despite its largely Greek populace, temples of familiar Greek gods appear deliberately to have been omitted from the city’s design. Instead, Ptolemy I introduced a new deity for the city, Sarapis—a consciously constructed hybrid of the Greek god Dionysus, from whom Alexander (and the Ptolemies) traced their lineage, and the Egyptian Ptah, in his manifestation as OsirisApis.9 On one level, Ptolemy’s action fits a pattern observable for centuries—the Greeks’ habit of identifying their own deities with those of the non-Greek peoples they encountered. Herodotus in his Histories, for example, equated Egyptian and Greek gods: Horus as Apollo, Isis as Demeter, Osiris as Dionysus (2.156). But Ptolemy I’s introduction of Sarapis went further. This new god had no existence before his arrival in Alexandria. A new Egyptian dynasty would sometimes build a capital city into which it introduced a patron

318

peace and mind

divinity idiosyncratic to the dynasty, like Amon-Ra at Thebes. In much the same way, Ptolemy I had a temple to his new god built in his new capital, and Sarapis was given a family like other Egyptian deities—Isis was his consort and Harpocrates (Horus) their child. In Alexandria, Sarapis was represented in human form: a man in his mature prime, bearded, enthroned, and wearing a crown, he most resembled the chief god of the Greek pantheon, Zeus. In Memphis, however, when the new cult was introduced, Sarapis was given Egyptian, rather than Greek, iconographic associations and was represented as Osiris-Apis, the dead bull. Greek cities had tutelary gods, and Greeks in their international shrines, like Delphi and Olympia, worshipped pan-Hellenic deities like Apollo and Zeus. The lack of central temples to such familiar Olympians in Alexandria, combined with the prominence of novel gods like Sarapis and Isis, must have marked the new space for its Greek residents as un-Greek. The Ptolemies strove in part to fill the emotional vacancies thus created with cults and festivals that featured the new reign—the deified Soter (Ptolemy I now associated with Zeus) or the deified Arsinoe II (now associated with Aphrodite). But the lack of familiar Greek gods must also have facilitated (deliberately or otherwise) the local Greeks’ turning to cults of the indigenous gods. Worshipping the Animals Egypt under the pharaohs had evolved into a theocracy: the pharaoh was divine and responsible for the maintenance of cosmic order, which manifested itself through the economic and social wellbeing of the state. The unique ecology of the region—rainfall being negligible or nonexistent in most years, agricultural production depended on the height of the annual inundation of the Nile— was made to reinforce this structure of belief. Temples and rituals evolved to support or guarantee the ecological and human order, and in turn the pharaoh’s real power depended on how successfully he managed the balance among his own interests, the interests of the religious elites (who controlled as much as fifteen percent of

lessons of the crocodile

319

the arable land), and the needs of the general populace. In times of agricultural prosperity, this balance might be easily maintained. But in times of low Nile—or of external threats to the throne, or of tensions between clergy and state (as in the crisis precipitated by the pharaoh Akenaten’s iconoclasm)—the kingdom tended to fragment. North and south would take independent directions. During his early years in Memphis, Ptolemy I had the dual task of garnering support from the temple elite and of curbing their economic power, because in the past they had proved themselves potent rivals to the throne. He appears initially to have returned lands to the clergy taken from them by the Persians but also to have installed superintendents over temple estates and expenditures—and he seems as well to have reserved a portion of revenues for the state. He required the upper echelon of priests throughout the country to meet annually in Alexandria, which suggests that the royal house hoped to keep a close watch on native religious matters. The cost of native acquiescence was not trivial. By any measure, building projects under the Macedonian occupation of Egypt were impressive.10 During the reigns of Alexander the Great and his immediate successors, Philip Arrhidaeus and Alexander IV (332– 304), fourteen Egyptian temples were extended, ornamented, or built new. We know of building projects at another twenty-three temples under the first two Ptolemies (304–246); and under the next two (246–205), twenty-one projects. Under Ptolemy II, the massive temple of Isis at Philae in the far south of Egypt was begun, and work continued on it throughout the period of Ptolemaic rule. Philae came to be a significant site of international pilgrimage in later times as the popularity of Isis worship expanded into non-Egyptian realms. Under the third and fourth Ptolemy, at least five new buildings were added to the massive complex of Karnak (in modern Luxor), which was the center of Amun worship from the beginning of the New Kingdom (c. 1600 BCE). A new temple of Horus was begun at Edfu in Middle Egypt, and work continued on it intermittently until the end of the dynasty. The Edfu temple contains friezes with accompanying hieroglyphic texts that illustrate the events of the coronation of the pharaoh and their cosmogonic and theological significance.

320

peace and mind

Without this Ptolemaic construction, our understanding of Egyptian religion and its animal worship would be substantially impoverished. In the Fayum, the area being readied for Macedonian veterans—regarded as the most Hellenized area of Egypt outside Alexandria—Egyptian temples were also built, the majority to Sobek (Souchos in Greek), the local crocodile deity in his regional or attributive manifestations. A new temple to Sobknebtunis (Sobek of Tebtunis) was built in Tebtunis (modern Umm el-Breigat). In the capital city of Crocodilopolis (Medinet el-Fayyum), Ptolemy II rebuilt the large sanctuary to Sobek, adding to both the pylon gates and the enclosure walls. A smaller temple to Pnepheros (another manifestation of the crocodile deity) was built in the newly established town of Theadelphia (Batn Ihrît). An oracle for yet another version of the sacred crocodile, Sokanobkonneus, was built in Bacchias (a village of Egyptian priests), and a shrine to the snake goddess, Renenutet, was restored at Medinet Madi. Smaller shrines to deified members of the royal house, particularly Arsinoe II, the sister and wife of Ptolemy II, are also known in this region, but the largest religious structures were temples in the Egyptian style devoted to the animal numen of the deity. As pharaohs the Ptolemies not only paid for, they seem actively to have participated in, animal cult. Alexander apparently set the precedent by venerating the Apis bull in Memphis. When the Apis died during the first Ptolemy’s reign, the entire country mourned as the dead animal was ritually mummified and then interred in the Serapeum after seventy days. The king provided fifty talents of silver for the burial. The installation of the new Apis, which took place in the temple of Ptah in Memphis, was similar to a coronation. Divine animals of other regions received similar veneration. An illuminating example of the interaction of Greek king and divine animal is provided by an inscription in hieroglyphics erected at Mendes (Tell el Rub’a, in the eastern Delta region) during the reign of Ptolemy II. The inscription commemorates the royal family’s visit to the shrine of the sacred ram of Mendes: His Majesty came to the Ba of the Lord of Djedet [the Sacred Ram] to pray for kingship from him who is master, by doing

lessons of the crocodile

321

what the Great Ram desired. His Majesty visited the living Ram, for the first time he visited the sacred animals when he ascended the throne of his father…. His Majesty took the cable of the sacred barge of this god and led it down to the Great Sea and up to the Canal of Agert, just as the kings of Upper and Lower Egypt in the time before him…. His Majesty took care that the Ram appeared on his throne in his Chapel while he kept behind this god…. His Majesty inspected the Mansion of the Rams and found that the work was in progress in accordance with his order to make right the damage that the cursed barbarians [in this instance, the Persians] had caused. His Majesty ordered that it be finished as a work for eternity, His Majesty examined the stall of the august Ram and had it restored…. After this, His Majesty returned home, his heart rejoicing on account of what he had done for his fathers, the great living rams which are in Anpet. May they grant him a long reign and happiness!11 The type of ritual that Ptolemy II performed at Mendes is commemorated in other locations as well. The ceremony was accompanied by praise for the king’s support of temple construction, doubtless the true reason for his visit. State-sponsored building projects, like the restoration of the House of the Ram, returned (in the form of workers’ pay and temple upkeep) at least some portion of the taxes that the crown collected. From the perspective of Greek writing about Ptolemaic Egypt, such acts were invisible. Either they were too much a part of the internal affairs of the kingdom to come to the notice of historians focused on the interactions of Greek-speaking rulers; or else, if such acts were noticed, they fell outside the Greek category of activities relevant to kingship. Prime mover in the establishment of the library at Alexandria, the ultimate repository of Greek learning, Ptolemy II was praised by Greek writers for his urbanity and elegance. Yet here he was participating in animal worship of a kind treated as inexplicable, if not abhorrent, in Greek writing about Egypt. In order to make the sacred ram at Mendes and its attendant rituals

322

peace and mind

comprehensible to Greek readers, Herodotus, two centuries earlier, had identified it with the Greek god Pan (often portrayed with goat horns and feet). Herodotus then added that the Egyptians did not think the god actually looked like his animal manifestation but rather, in his true form, like a normal, anthropomorphized Greek deity (2.46). The elaborated theriomorphism found in the Mendes stela fits a well-documented power play on the part of the Egyptian priesthoods. The most explicit instance relates to rituals at the temple of Horus in Edfu. As son of the gods Isis and Osiris, Horus was mythologically assigned the role of first king of Egypt. He was the prototype for subsequent pharaohs, all of whom (including the Ptolemies) took a “Horus name” when they ascended the throne. Horus was represented either as a divine child, iconographically signaling the rebirth and renewal that each new monarch promised, or as a manifestation of the Sun (Re) in the form of a falcon. Priests from the time of the Persian occupation responded to the threat of a king exercising divine power: they shifted the power of the royal office away from the human manifestation of Horus (the ruling king) to the animal manifestation. The falcon supplanted the human being who sat on the throne.12 At Edfu, a falcon was chosen each year to act as the divine king. The selection, anointing, and procession of the falcon mirrored court ceremonial attached to the pharaoh at an earlier period. The bird now held audience in the “window of appearance” and received the ritual adoration. This supplanting of the non-Egyptian ruler had several important consequences. In psychological terms, Egyptians who were emotionally invested in the well-being of the pharaoh (as the divine expression of universal order) could project those emotions onto the pharaoh’s eternal manifestation, the Horus falcon. Priestly elites, in the name of the falcon, now arrogated the powers of the throne to themselves as more and more rituals were performed by priests as surrogates for the king. If they were unsuccessful in negotiating with the current incumbent, resistance was easily justified; and competitors’ claims to legitimacy would have equal theological footing with those of the crowned king.

lessons of the crocodile

323

The temple of the Horus falcon at Edfu is a remarkable demonstration not only of the vitality of the native culture under Ptolemaic occupation but also of the symbiotic strategies that created it. The temple was begun under the third Ptolemy, and building on the site continued for over a century. Friezes in the temple depict symbolic events that maintain cosmic order and are ritually reenacted by the new king at the time of coronation. Ptolemaic patron kings appear in the friezes. More significantly, however, annual rites that reenact the divine birth and enthronement foreground the falcon. The temple also contains a long inscription recording the donation of surrounding lands for its upkeep in perpetuity. Debate continues over the truth value of the inscription. Were these lands in fact dedicated for support of the temple, and were contemporary priesthoods thus attempting to lay claim to the estates? Or does the inscription record what (ideally) should belong to the god, who after all was the incarnation of the primordial pharaoh, to whom the whole of Egypt belonged symbolically if not actually?13 In either case, at the heart of Egypt, the occupying rulers, from the third to the eighth Ptolemy, collaborated in the construction of a temple that redeployed the enormously potent symbolic power of the divine king for the benefit of the priesthoods and that, in addition, laid claim to extensive properties, not on behalf of the king at Alexandria but on behalf of the king (the falcon god) at Edfu. Those symbolic claims could, when opportunity arose, become the basis for material claims. Competing Egyptian responses to Greek rule interacted in ways that first undermined and then reestablished the Ptolemies in the period from 206–196 BCE. A central piece of documentation for this process is the Rosetta stone.14 Found originally by the French in 1799 and appropriated by the British when they defeated the French in 1801, the stone is now prominently displayed in the British Museum and celebrated because its discovery led to the decipherment of ancient Egyptian. The Rosetta repeats the same information in two languages (Egyptian and Greek) and three scripts: hieroglyphics (the traditional religious form of Egyptian), demotic (the contemporary administrative form of written Egyptian), and Greek. The bilingual inscription allowed François Champollion to establish the

324

peace and mind

equivalents between Greek and Egyptian that led to decipherment in 1811. The inscription, erected by a synod of Egyptian priests in 196 BCE, sets out the hierarchy: Egyptian languages occupy the first two registers, while Greek, the language of the ruling elite, is relegated to the lowest band. The text announces the coronation of Ptolemy V (Epiphanes)—identified as pharaoh in hieroglyphics, basileus in Greek. The priests’ acceptance of this thirteen-year-old king was a conciliatory gesture, intended to end a decade-long revolt against Ptolemaic authority that began with the death of Ptolemy IV in 206 and that led to the creation of rival kingdoms in the south. The revolts were native led yet the Ptolemies only reasserted central authority with the aid of the Memphite priesthoods, who exacted a price for their support. The Rosetta is a long account of the newly crowned king’s victory over the rebels and the concessions made for reunification (couched as gifts to the people). The priesthoods gained substantial tax benefits for their temples, including a stipulation for “giving lavishly and splendidly” what was necessary for the burials and temples and festivals of the sacred animals throughout Egypt. Those dispossessed through rebellion were given amnesty, and their former possessions restored. In addition, the new pharaoh relieved the priesthoods of the hitherto annual duty of sailing to Alexandria for a religious synod—a sure sign that the original purpose of the synod was to exert some control over priestly activities. In return, statues of the new king were included in the major temples and he was to receive cult worship along with the principal deities of Egypt (which in turn entailed more royal support for the temples.) From the perspective of ancient Greek-speaking historians, the Ptolemies were kings ruling over Greek-speaking subjects. Modern historians have followed their lead and have either ignored or underestimated the Egyptian factor. The Rosetta stone, erected by native clergy in collaboration with their Greek overlords, tells a somewhat different story. The only way the Ptolemies could rule successfully over the majority population, whose participation in the rural economy was essential to the economic survival of the state, was by taking up the traditional role as pharaoh, an office that did not confer unlimited power. On the contrary, the hereditary

lessons of the crocodile

325

Egyptian monarch had operated within a circumscribed dominion in the pre-Ptolemaic state—and military power alone (as the first Ptolemies realized, and later Ptolemies were compelled to learn) was not enough to overcome long-entrenched patterns of action and structures of belief (often elaborated in sacred animal cults). Native elites were invested in the temple structure that guaranteed their own power and prestige. The first Ptolemies courted or coopted or coerced the support of these elites, and such practices set in motion a pattern of reciprocal actions. As pharaohs, the Ptolemies participated in prescribed behaviors determined by the priesthoods. These Greek kings towed the barge for the sacred ram, and the event visually enacted the subservience of the occupying power to Egyptian religion (as articulated by native priestly elites). In return, the priests, in temple worship, validated the incumbents’ claim to both secular and divine authority, thus ensuring the status quo. Failing to support native elites was to court disaster. Living with the Crocodiles The first Ptolemy ruled Egypt with Macedonian troops. While the need for an army continued, this early wave of immigrants did not. The Ptolemies maintained the necessary military by recruiting mercenaries throughout the Greek city-states, as well as (by the end of the third century BCE) native Egyptian troops.15 But mercenaries needed to be paid in money, worked only for stipulated periods, and might not re-enlist when most needed. Continuing regional conflicts required a more stable arrangement. Therefore, the first Ptolemies adapted a practice employed by the pharaohs: namely, settling their veterans on allotments of land, where they formed a reserve force, capable of recall when the need arose. This strategy had numerous advantages— it eliminated pay for these veterans, because they were theoretically given income-generating land; it broadened the agricultural base by bringing marginal land into cultivation, land that could be taxed; and it created a de facto military class, as children of the settled veterans in turn became soldiers. The majority of these land grants were in the Fayum, a place that, according to Dominic Rathbone,

326

peace and mind

became a dynastic monument of Ptolemy II, renamed the “Arsinoite” nome [administrative region] after his deceased sister-wife, with new villages named after dynastic epithets (Philadelphia, Theadelphia), divine patrons (Dionysias, Bacchias) and royal allies (Lysimachis, Pyrrheia), and from then on it was where important visitors from other states were always sent to demonstrate the power of the Ptolemies over the land of Egypt, complementing Alexandria which was the symbol of Mediterranean power.16 We know more about the Fayum than about any other region of Ptolemaic Egypt.17 It was a roughly triangular area of about 950 square miles, lying seventy miles southwest of Memphis. Lake Moeris was the name given to the natural depression at its eastern edge, which was fed by a channel from the Nile (Bahr Yusuf). The irrigation project that drained the basin to bring more land under cultivation required intense effort to maintain, and was, as Rathbone says, a clear demonstration of the new imperial power. But there were definite limits to the exercise of this power. When the central administration lacked the will or the manpower to maintain the system, the land became unsustainable. By the third century CE, much of the region had been abandoned: thousands of documents written on papyrus and broken pieces of pottery (ostraca) were left—along with the villages—to the desiccating sands. Cemeteries throughout the region also yielded a rich store of documents because, in the process of mummification, bodies were wrapped within a stiff protective casing made (during the Ptolemaic period) from recycled papyri. It has become possible to extract documents from these wrappings. The crocodiles have also played a role: the village of Tebtunis was the site of a large necropolis of mummified crocodiles, and many of these animals were not only wrapped in used papyrus, a number were stuffed with papyrus rolls to maintain their natural contour. The discovery of these papyri began in a systematic way during the nineteenth century. The colonial occupation of Egypt by Britain and France facilitated expeditions to search for the remains of Greek literature, with the result that today over 100,000 fragments

lessons of the crocodile

327

of documents, as well as of Greek and Roman literature, have been excavated and exported to universities and museums in Europe and North America for study. The house foundations, garbage heaps, and cemeteries have yielded a store of Greek documents, among which are tax and land registers and receipts, official and private business transactions, as well as a range of more personal communications from which life in this most Greek area of the Egyptian countryside can be reconstructed. From tax lists, it is possible to extrapolate a population for the Fayum of about 80,000–100,000 in the mid-third century BCE, about 15 percent of whom were Greek military settlers.18 At most, another 10 to 15 percent were Greek immigrants attached to large estates as agents, or engaged in local trade and small businesses. A few received gifts (dorea) of 10,000 arouras (6,800 acres), but the majority were allotments (klêroi) for the military.19 Allotments, either newly brought under cultivation or from previously existing crown lands, were conferred in proportion to status—cavalrymen might receive 100 arouras (68 acres), infantry between 20 and 30. Many received far less, 5 to 7 arouras.20 Although the vast majority of the earliest land grants were to immigrating Macedonians and other Greeks, after the battle of Raphia in 217 BCE, where Ptolemy IV relied heavily on Egyptian soldiers, natives too obtained these perks. It is obvious that the new settlers did not constitute the majority of the population. Even if they lived in enclaves that were mainly Greek, they shared the space with the majority population of Egyptians; and without new populations of immigrants, the military settlers were increasingly likely to marry native women. As already indicated, at the same time that the Ptolemies were settling Greeks in the region, they were also supporting the construction of local temples to the crocodile god. Priests of these temples constituted the local native elites. They too owned land, but seemingly in smaller amounts; and like the priesthoods in Memphis and other regions, they augmented their incomes from temple industries.21 Further down the social scale would be part-time priests and others involved in temple sacrifice and upkeep—pastophoroi (carriers of sacred objects in processions), prophets, weavers, butchers of sacrificial animals, those who tended

328

peace and mind

the sacred herds, and mummifiers. In a tax list of the mid-third century, for example, out of a district population of 1,689 men and women, there are 30 pastophoroi listed, 37 prophets, and 11 ibis buriers.22 At the very bottom was the day laborer: he did not own land himself and received his wages in rations of bread and beer. Egypt was a mature bureaucratic system under the pharaohs. It had a well-defined process of record keeping and justice, and a process (carried out in the temples) for adjudicating local complaints, protocols for land tenure and rents, even rights for women to own property and enter into contracts. The system was operated by a scribal class that extended from villages to nomes to the pharaoh’s court at the center. Temples had their own scribes, who copied sacred texts as well as documents relating to temple administration. The Ptolemies retained many of these institutions, including the Egyptian legal system to which they added Greek law for Greeks.23 Their most significant change was the introduction of coinage into Egypt and the gradual attempt to shift from taxes in kind to a fully monetized economy. How successful these changes were is a matter of debate, since much of the country continued to operate on payments in kind, and only by the Roman period did full monetization take effect. Like native pharaohs, the Ptolemies required a scribal bureaucracy to process the paper—the land surveys, registers of individuals, and declarations of households—that they employed to track available sources of wealth.24 State bankers collected and exchanged monies as well as recorded transactions of loans secured against property. State agents collected taxes in money and kind, and they advanced loans of seed against future harvests. Bilingual scribes were a pressing need for the new government, and the shift from records in demotic Egyptian, during the first few decades, to a fully Greek administration masks the extent to which the country continued to be Egyptian and operated within traditional patterns of behavior.25 Within the new administrative structure, there are observable patterns: the regional governors (stratêgoi), upper echelons of the police, and officials in finance were usually Greek (that is, they bore Greek names), but the village head men, local police and guards, and scribes at all levels were Egyptian (that is, they bore Egyptian names). Egyptians

lessons of the crocodile

329

therefore controlled the local power structures, though presumably with oversight from above, and de facto Egyptians were thoroughly involved in every phase of record keeping. How Greek-speaking immigrants to the Fayum lived, and how their intricate relationship with native Egyptians worked (especially in times of political crisis), are questions worth further discussion. The capital city of the Fayum was Crocodilopolis, with a population of perhaps 4000.26 The richest landowners held large holdings and visited infrequently. Some of the soldiers rented their allotments, since they spent their lives on active duty elsewhere; but the majority settled. Most Greeks lived in the capital or the larger villages, where the central architectural feature would have been a temple to the crocodile god. The effects of the new regime would have been seen in new crops—vines, fruit trees, and olive trees on the less fertile land, and new varieties of wheat. The larger villages would have had a gymnasium and baths (which functioned as social centers for Greek immigrants) and even occasionally would have had athletic coaches to prepare suitable boys for competitions connected to the gymnasium and public festivals. There were doctors, schoolteachers for education in Greek, very likely scribal instruction attached to the Egyptian temples (and many Egyptian children learned Greek). Immigrants who worshipped Greek gods would have done so in private local shrines—or else, within Egyptian temples where some space would have been allotted to Greek divinities. (The shrine of the Greek goddess Demeter, a particular favorite among these immigrants, was set up in a chamber of the crocodile temple in Crocodilopolis.)27 For those at the top of the economic order, their children might be sent to Alexandria to school, but most would have been taught locally. Sons of immigrants followed their fathers into the army, while others took up farming and trades. We do not know how many of the new immigrants brought Greek wives but the percentage is not likely to have been high; the rest would have intermarried with local Egyptians. The original Greek settlers came inevitably to live lives comparable to those of the natives.28 The best known of the new landowners was Apollonius, who was Ptolemy II’s superintendent of the treasury (dioecetes).29 Normally

330

peace and mind

resident in Alexandria, Apollonius left the workings of his land in the village of Philadelphia to his agent, Zenon, but sent instructions frequently. A note of this type from 257 BCE provides a glimpse at the difficulties of supplying Alexandria, the national capital: When you were staying here I warned you that in a very short time we should have no hay left for the horses, and now I find it necessary to write you about this matter. Now so that the horses may not suffer through want of provender, please see to it at once. For it is not easy to buy it in the city [Alexandria] because the old crop is exhausted and the new is scanty; otherwise we would have done so. There is not even one day of hay. If you do not see to it at once, the horses will be in trouble.30 The year before, Apollonius had written, in the same vein, to Zenon: “Out of the dry wood, select as many of the thickest logs you can and send them immediately to Alexandria so we can have them for the festival of Isis.”31 These notes highlight the complexities of providing adequate resources for the day-to-day workings of the capital. Fodder and fuel had to be provided from outside, and shortages were felt acutely. There is no evidence of a crisis in these notes; the shortages were chronic. Apollonius himself makes the context clear—there was nothing available to buy because the new crop was small. Similarly, Apollonius requested wood because trees were at all times extremely scarce in Egypt. Wood was carefully collected and rationed and must have been sent to Alexandria from the interior (or from other regions of the Mediterranean). Elsewhere we find complaints to the police about thieves who have stolen the wooden doors of houses— and there are accounts of trees fallen during a wind storm, in which every branch is carefully listed for length and girth. The fact that Apollonius himself makes these requests, rather than a bureaucratic minion, is an indication of the relatively limited scale of imperial bureaucracy. While there were defined hierarchies, a man at the top still needed to concern himself with hay and wood. And Apollonius’s request for wood (the arrival of which Zenon carefully noted) came too late for the festival—from which we learn much about the central

lessons of the crocodile

331

administration’s ability to communicate efficiently with the chora. The Fayum is relatively close to Alexandria, and Zenon was a very capable agent. But days or weeks might well elapse between request and response, if indeed letters arrived at all.32 Apollonius’s enthusiasm for the Fayum project is infectious and has conditioned the assessments of modern scholars. For example, he wrote to Zenon in 257: [When] Antikritos [arrives, show him] the … village, and the site where we propose to [build the temple] of the king and Queen Philadelphus [Ptolemy II and his sister-wife, Arsinoe II] and the sacred way and the sacred grove. [Show him] also the irrigation basins and … make it clear that we have only recently begun to build the village. We can see the pride Apollonius takes in the new irrigation system, the key to Ptolemy’s economic miracle. Water, dammed up during the inundation, was then shunted into the appropriate fields for later use as the crops matured in the dry season. It was an annual chore, tedious and labor-intensive, and the power of the managerial class was limited. The following passage is excerpted from a long memorandum concerning their annual duties to local officials: [Inspect] the water-conduits which run through the fields from which the farmers are accustomed to divert water onto the land that they each cultivate, and see whether the water-intakes have the prescribed depths and whether there is sufficient room in them; and similarly [inspect] the said cuttings from which the intakes pass into the abovementioned conduits, [to see] whether they have been made strong and the entries into them from the river are thoroughly cleaned and whether in general they are in a sound state. (lines 29–40)33 Besides checking out and repairing the systems, the officials are formally instructed on how to field complaints:

332

peace and mind

In your tours of inspection try in going from place to place to cheer everybody up and to put them in better heart: and not only should you do this by words but also, if any of them complain about the village scribes and the village headmen about any matter concerning agricultural work, you should make inquiry and put a stop to such doings as far as possible. (lines 40–49) Inspection and oversight were easier to write about than accomplish, as the official who sent these instructions acknowledges (“put a stop to such doings as far as possible”). Once the necessary work was identified, men were needed to do it; and if sufficient numbers were not available, they had to be commandeered and transported from elsewhere, then housed locally. The process was time-consuming and seemed never to go as planned. Apollonius was at the top of the economic hierarchy but he too depended on the centralized irrigation system for his land to be productive. In the following letter, one of his agents addresses the commissioner in charge of the irrigation, asking for help and even offering workers for the project: We sent you word on the 29th to send a crew to reconstruct the bends of the small canal. But it seems you passed us by…. Come and meet us tomorrow at the sluice and direct what we must do to get the water past the bends, for we are inexperienced. We will provide the manpower and the rest of what you need…. But if you do not show up, we will be forced to write to Apollonius that … his land alone is not irrigated.34 Billeting soldiers or workers with understandably reluctant householders was a constant source of tension, complaints to officials, and in some cases violence. This memorandum, dated 241 BCE, attempts to address the problem of locals who found a novel way of thwarting the central administration’s need to billet workers in town for irrigation work:

lessons of the crocodile

333

Memo to Aphthonetus. We find that several houses in Crocodilopolis which had formerly been used for billeting have had their roofs demolished by the owners, who have likewise blocked up the house doors and built altars against them. They have done this to prevent them from being used for billeting. If therefore you approve, since we are short of quarters, write to Agenor to compel the owners of the houses to move the altars to the most convenient and conspicuous places on the house tops and to rebuild them better than before in order that we may have accommodation to give to the overseers of the works who are now arriving.35 It is clear from this and other sources that the Ptolemaic administration was extremely concerned that military personnel and non-Egyptians treat Egyptian religious shrines with proper respect. There is a famous notice posted in Saqqara: “By order of the Peukastes let no one enter the residence of the priests.” Householders took full advantage of administrative scruples—they not only removed the roofs from their houses to reduce the space available to one story, they built religious shrines in all available doorways to prohibit or restrict access. There exists a memo from a reluctant local official to a superior, asking that someone else be sent to deal with such a matter. This memo has two appended notices. One is by the superior, Aphthonetus, acknowledging receipt and forwarding the memo to Agenor. Agenor also acknowledged receipt and forwarded the memo to Theodorus, the commissioner in charge of the irrigation work, asking him to report back. Strategies of creative noncompliance and bureaucratic and/or logistical delays made centralized planning more often a wish than an attainment. The royal treasury depended heavily on income from crown lands, but lapses in the efficiency of managerial oversight inevitably led to unproductive farming and a diminution of revenues. Egyptian priesthoods and scribal elites could write in Greek, and they interacted at every level with the new administration—as we also see from Apollonius’s correspondence. His note about wood, for example, indicates that a festival of the Egyptian deity Isis was

334

peace and mind

taking place in the supposedly Greek capital, Alexandria. He visited the crypt of the Apis bulls (the Serapeum) in 258 BCE, presumably on official business, and donated land for a Sarapis temple in 257. In the following letter from 257—a letter written in Greek—the high priests of the Isis-Hathor temple in Aphroditopolis (modern Aftih) write to Apollonius in his official capacity to provide funds for the burial of the Hesis (the sacred cow worshipped as the incarnation of the goddess Isis-Hathor): The priests of Aphrodite to Apollonius, greeting. In accordance with the king’s instructions to provide 100 talents [a weight] of myrrh for the burial of the Hesis, please order [this to be provided]. For you are not unaware that the Hesis cannot be brought back to the nome unless we have everything ready for the burial . . . on the same day. Know that the Hesis is Isis, and may she grant you favor in the eyes of the king. Farewell. The author of this letter is not only fluent in Greek, he plays a series of punning games. He styles the petitioners “priests of Aphrodite,” using a syncretism for Isis-Hathor, then concludes with: “may she [Aphrodite = Isis-Hathor] grant you epaphroditên in the eyes of the king,” where the choice of the word for “favor” is a pun on the goddess’s Greek name. Further, he writes “know that the Hesis is Isis” in Greek: gignōske de einai tēn Esin Eisin. Greek has a flexible word order and does not mark aspirates. The scribe deliberately chooses to juxtapose the two names so that Hesis (Esin) is almost literally Isis (Eisin).36 With its casual demonstration of linguistic control, this letter is not a plea from a member of a subservient underclass, but a reminder to Apollonius of the king’s orders. He is instructed, not beseeched, to comply with them. Despite the problems and complaints that Apollonius’s correspondence documents, the archive has led to assessments like Rathbone’s, quoted earlier, that the Fayum was “a dynastic monument of Ptolemy II.” Naphtali Lewis has likewise described the Fayum as “Eldorado on the Nile.”37 The archival documents do paint

lessons of the crocodile

335

a picture of thriving economic activity and of problems that—at least in the minds of the writers of extant memos and letters—are in the process of being solved. That archive dates from 261–239 BCE. But Rathbone’s main support for his claim of full Ptolemaic power over Egypt is a much later letter (112 BCE) directing locals to provide tidbits for a visiting Roman senator to feed the sacred crocodiles—a letter that was itself found, perhaps fittingly, within a mummified crocodile. Let us now fast forward to the period of this later document and take cognizance of the crocodiles’ testimony. For the most part, the documents recovered from mummified crocodiles belonged to the archive of the village scribes of Kerkeosiris.38 At some point, the documents were culled and many reused for personal matters; when no longer useful, they were sent on to recyclers—for either burning or mummification. Principally, the texts in question concern the activities of Menches, the village scribe from 120–110 BCE. The times are not quite as prosperous as they once were. From 132–124 BCE, Ptolemy VIII and his sister Cleopatra II engaged in a civil war that had divided the country; and in 118, Ptolemy VIII issued an amnesty decree in an attempt to reconcile the factions.39 During this period, the land seems to have been neglected. Menches lists about a 50 percent untenanted rate for royal lands, and exchanges with his superiors bear out the impression of frustration and disarray. We get vivid accounts of the water wars: locals who had undermined the dikes by digging up an embankment in order to use the dirt on their own land; one man diverting water from another’s channel to use on his own property; another flooding his neighbor’s field in an effort to remove excess water from his own. We learn of nome officials preoccupied with ordering the chaos (or reining in the entrepreneurial spirit) as locals took advantage of the system. According to a report of 117 BCE, a number of local officials failed to report for the annual inspection of land, on the assumption that the “the record would be submitted in the temple in Crocodilopolis without inspection”—that is, on the assumption that their figures were not going to be checked. The reporting official writes that, when the locals realized they were caught out, “supposing that they would bring me to a standstill from the start, they retired to

336

peace and mind

the Heracleopolite nome.” He concludes: The majority of them have been appointed without the cognizance of the superintendent of the treasury, and some have wormed themselves into positions of [power] … inconsistent with their own work, others have transferred their duties to their sons who are quite young men.40 We get a few more details from another letter, in which an official remarks on “hindrances placed in the way of the performance of our work through the insolent conduct of the village scribes in the nome”: When we visited various places in the nome, having been appointed for this duty and wishing to inquire into the reports sent from the nome, namely the list of deductions and so on, they [the scribes] had gone without giving us the written records, this being recounted by us to Irenaeus, in the appended letter.41 When challenged, in other words, the scribes simply walked off the job for a month. Subsequently, there was a strike of crown tenants, who refused to farm the land for which they had contracted, then took refuge in a local temple. Tax collectors were impeded in their duties, the black market in oil thrived (to the consternation of government officials), and suitable tenants for crown lands could not be found. Yet through all these difficulties, the scribe Menches seemed to prosper. He farmed or rented at least 94 arouras of diverse agricultural land. He had close connections in Alexandria and used the annual working visit of officials to the capital for private networking. The archive provides clearer insights into local strategies to sidestep or thwart imperial authority than it offers demonstrations of Ptolemaic power. One of the elusive questions about Menches is whether he was among the village scribes who took advantage of the casual inspections to increase his own holdings or whether he remained,

lessons of the crocodile

337

throughout his tenure, the model of rectitude that his superiors were seeking. But a more basic question is: who was Menches? He appears to have been Egyptian—Menches is an Egyptian name, as is his father’s name, Petesouchos. He lived in a small Fayum village and held a job in which Egyptians predominated. Yet he described himself in an official letter as a “Greek born in the country,” and he occasionally would use a second name, Asclepiades, which is Greek. Such characteristics are not unique: Menches typifies many whom we meet in Ptolemaic and Roman documents. For the first half of the third century BCE, names combined with official titles seem, in any case, to convey accurate ethnic information. But after that time, ethnicity becomes more difficult to assign with any degree of confidence. By the end of the third century, many of the figures whom we meet in documents record themselves with two names, one Greek and one Egyptian, in the form “Menches, also called Asclepiades,” or “Petesouchos, also called Polemon.” This practice may mark the inevitable results of Greek-Egyptian intermarriage: those bearing double names may be descendants of ethnically mixed families. Many soldiers, after all, did not bring wives with them to Egypt and married local women. Census returns provide ample evidence. For example, as early as 250 BCE, an Alexandrian Greek, Monimos, son of Klearchos, is listed as married to Esoeris, whose name is Egyptian.42 In this environment, children might be given Greek names to assert their status as members of the occupying elite yet have an alternative name at home in their bicultural families. But this cannot be the entire story. Early tax registers from the Fayum record a category, “Greeks,” whose members had a favored status. The obvious assumption that those entered as “Greeks” are the Greek settlers must be in part correct, but others listed as “Greeks” for tax purposes are clearly not settlers. For within this category, “Greeks,” are some who are explicitly said to be of other ethnicities—Syrians, Persians, Jews, even Egyptians. This anomaly in the application of the term “Greeks” has led the editors of the registers to coin the term “tax Greeks.” Who were they? Or rather, how did one acquire the privileged status of being “Greek” for tax purposes? Willy Clarysse and Dorothy Thompson have made the compelling

338

peace and mind

argument that, in order to administer the country, the Ptolemies found themselves in immediate need of bureaucrats who could operate in both the Egyptian and Greek languages. To encourage the educated Egyptian elites to learn Greek, they were accorded this favored tax status.43 Their argument makes good sense of the evidence. “Tax Greeks” might thus include a subset of assimilated Egyptians who spoke and wrote Greek, and who functioned within the imperial bureaucracy. Since the category was heritable, some “Greeks” might never have been Greek at all but, like Greek-speaking immigrants from other locations in the Mediterranean, these may have achieved Greek status through linguistic facility rather than ethnic or cultural identity. Whether Menches and his father were Egyptians whose forebears had acquired “Greek” status at some point in the past or were descendants of Greek immigrants (as most scholars assume), Menches’s use of a double name is paralleled by his ability to operate in two realms at once—a local village sphere, in which Egyptians were the majority, and the world of Alexandrian officialdom, in which Greeks still seem to have been the majority. What emerges increasingly from the study of Ptolemaic documents is that names were not markers of ethnicity but were often used instead to reflect particular environments. For example, Menches uses his Egyptian name in his office as village scribe, since village scribes (it seems) were usually Egyptian and dealt with local residents who were predominantly Egyptian. Menches’s brother, Polemon, also called by the Egyptian name Petesouchos, used his Greek name in his official role as policeman. (And policemen do seem to have been mainly Greek.) There are numerous examples of this practice—of bankers and notaries and soldiers having two names but using their Greek name in specifically Greek environments. Since the two names were not always used together, this adaptive behavior is difficult to track, emerging only when there is enough documentation to identify the same individual in two distinct roles. This habit of adaptive nomenclature both substantiates and undermines standard assumptions about ethnic hierarchies. That those who were Egyptian or Greco-Egyptian were impelled to use Greek names in certain environments would support a view that those environments

lessons of the crocodile

339

were (mainly) Greek. But the more we find double named and thus ethnically mixed people operating in so-called Greek environments, the more the ethnic hierarchy takes on a kind of fictional status. The majority of ethnically specific offices might, at some point in history, no longer have been held by members of the ethnic group that originally predominated, and yet holders of those offices may have been habituated to using ethnically “correct” names. The possibility suggests that, as in so much of ancient Mediterranean culture, ethnicity was less a matter of bloodlines than of the public performance of assigned roles. This hypothesis may be confirmed by a conspicuous exception to the Greek-Egyptian model of double naming. Certain Egyptian priestly families used double names but both names were Egyptian. Does this practice indicate a native elite disdain for the adaptive behaviors of those who tried to assimilate? Is it, in other words, a statement of “pure” Egyptian status, as opposed to the ethnically mixed Egyptian + Greek? Or is the practice a feature of Egyptian life that we simply do not comprehend? Might the doubly Egyptian names of some priests have inspired or provoked the Greek-Egyptian style of naming? In any case, these double names confound the usual narratives of Greek cultural domination and ethnic separation, though the names may have come into existence originally to maintain the fiction. Egyptians “acting Greek” would be typical of assimilation to a dominant group, but Greeks “acting Egyptian” (as seems to have been the case with Menches) clearly undercuts the paradigm. Possibly the pattern was so entrenched that Menches felt compelled to assume a lower status persona when he assumed the job of village scribe. Or else: to be Egyptian was not automatically regarded as lower in status. Menches exemplifies what had come to be the paradox of the Ptolemaic bureaucracy—”Egyptians” were marked as the writing class, and through them much of what we now regard as the Greek heritage was preserved. Greek had come to be the official language of Egypt (and continued to be so under Roman control). Even though demotic continued to be written, and demotic contracts and law courts continued to operate, virtually all those who owned property or engaged in business needed to employ the Greek language. The

340

peace and mind

vast majority of professional Greek writers at first were assimilated Egyptians, and this trend is likely to have continued, if only because the traditions of a scribal class were unfamiliar in Greek culture but entrenched in the Egyptian. Egyptians who wrote and read Greek lead us to a final observation about the roles of conqueror and conquered. When the British and French came to Egypt in the nineteenth century to excavate villages like Tebtunis, they were not interested in ancient village life; they were hoping to recover fragments of lost Greek literature.44 Local workers were paid for what they recovered—and, when one of them, in frustration at finding nothing but hundreds of mummified crocodiles, smashed in a croc’s head, the rolls of the Ptolemaic era poured out. These were not literary texts but documents of village (notionally Egyptian) scribes. Still, a considerable amount of Greek literature has been recovered from the Fayum. It comes from locations like the temple areas and villages that were the traditional homes of the Egyptian priesthoods—the same priests who worshipped the sacred crocodiles.45

lessons of the crocodile

341

Notes 1. Herodotus, The Histories, 2.35: “The Egyptians are completely different in their laws and customs from the rest of mankind, just as their climate differs and their river is wholly different in nature from other rivers.” 2. Strabo, The Geography, book 17.1.38. 3. Plutarch, On the Cleverness of Animals, 976B. The lack of specificity in the anecdote situates it as a prophecy for the whole of the Ptolemaic rule, rather than for the reign of one king. 4. The normative term (as a source of pride) is “spear-won land.” 5. W.  W. Tarn, “Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind,” Proceedings of the British Academy 19 (1933): 123–66. 6. By ancient estimates, Jews made up a fifth of the population of the new city. Hellenized Jews of Alexandria, like Philo, were important figures in antiquity. According to the Letter to Aristeas, it was in Alexandria that, at the request of Ptolemy II, Jewish Scripture was translated into Greek (the Septuagint). 7. Jean-Yves Empereur, Alexandrie redécouverte (Paris: Fayard, 1998), 64–81. 8. The Greek name Aigyptos seems to have been derived from one of the Egyptian names for Memphis: Hwt-ka-Ptah—“palace of the spirit of Ptah.” 9. See Philippe Borgeaud and Youri Volokhine, “La Formation de la lègende de Sarapis: Une approche transculturelle,” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 2.1 (2000): 37–76. The Serapeum—the extensive necropolis of Osiris-Apis—may still be visited today on the outskirts of Memphis. 10. For a survey, see Dieter Arnold, Temples of the Last Pharaohs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 320–22. The prosperity of Egyptian priesthoods under the Ptolemies receives further corroboration from the marked increase in stone sculptures as their personal monuments. 11. The translation has been adapted from Günther Roeder, Die Ägyptische Götterwelt (Zurich: Artemis-Verlag, 1959), 179–81, and the hieroglyphics in Kurt Sethe, Hieroglyphische Urkunden der

342

peace and mind

griechisch-römischen Zeit, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1904). 12. Jean-Claude Goyon, “Ptolemaic Egypt: Priests and the Traditional Religion,” in Cleopatra’s Egypt: Age of the Ptolemies (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1988), 29–40. 13. Joseph Gilbert Manning, Land and Power in Ptolemaic Egypt: The Structure of Land Tenure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 74–79. 14. Stephen Quirke and Carol Andrews, The Rosetta Stone: Facsimile and Drawing with Introduction and Translation (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988). 15. At the battle of Raphia in 217 BCE, for example, the Greek historian Polybius commented that Ptolemy IV employed 20,000 Egyptian forces to augment his army in the struggle against the Syrian dynast, Antiochus III. Polybius attributed the subsequent revolt of southern Egypt to the military training of these Egyptians. Modern historians are more likely to attribute the revolt to a combination of low Niles (which devastated the economy) and a palace coup that culminated in the assassination of the king and queen, leaving their young son in the control of the rival faction. Christelle Fischer-Bovet, Army and Society in Ptolemaic Egypt (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2008) provides an excellent analysis of the role of Egyptians in the Ptolemaic armies. 16. Dominic W. Rathbone, “Ptolemaic to Roman Egypt: The Death of the Dirigiste State?” in Production and Public Powers in Classical Antiquity, ed. Elio Lo Cascio and Rathbone (Cambridge: Cambridge Phililogical Society, 2000), 52. 17. See the Fayum Project, fayum.arts.kuleuven.ac.be. 18. Though, as I will argue, “Greek” is loosely applied in many cases. The immigrants included Macedonians and Greek speakers from regions like western Turkey and Syria as well as the Greek mainland, and even Greek-speaking Jews. 19. Of the five 10,000–aroura holders, three have Egyptian names, two Greek. See the discussion in Willy Clarysse, “Egyptian EstateHolders in the Ptolemaic Period,” in State and Temple Economy in the Ancient Near East, ed. Edward Lipínski (Leuven, Belgium: Departement Oriëntalistiek, 1979).

lessons of the crocodile

343

20. For a list of kleruchs and their holdings, see Willy Peremans and E. Van ’t Dack, Prosopographia Ptolemaica, Studia Hellenistica, vol. 24 (Leuven, Belgium: Bibliotheca Universitatis, 1980). 21. See Clarysse, “Egyptian Estate-Holders.” Priestly wealth is difficult to assess in comparison to that of Greek settlers, since few documents record an individual’s entire holding. 22. Clarysse and Dorothy J. Thompson, Counting the People in Hellenistic Egypt, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 185–86. 23. A proclamation dated to 118 BCE makes clear that the language of the contract (Egyptian or Greek) determined the legal system that obtained. Greeks are found executing documents in demotic Egyptian, and Egyptians certainly executed documents in Greek. 24. On the other hand, censuses seem to have been sporadic and survey lists not always adequately maintained. 25. Dorothy J. Thompson, “Literacy and Power in Ptolemaic Egypt” in Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, ed. Alan K. Bowman and Greg Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 67–83. A sure sign that Egyptians were now working as Greek scribes is that many Greek scribes were using the brush characteristic of Egyptian writing rather than the reed pen characteristic of Greek (see Thompson, “Literacy and Power,” 77). 26. For the topography of the Fayum, the settlements and populations, see the Leuven website, above n. 17. 27. Dorothy J. Thompson, “Demeter in Graeco-Roman Egypt,” in Egyptian Religion: The Last Thousand Years, ed. Clarysse, Antoon Schoors, and Harco Williams (Leuven, Belgium: Peeters, 1998), 699–708. 28. For tax purposes, Egyptian wives of Greek soldiers were counted as Greek, as were their children. 29. Apollonius’s estate was in the village of Philadelphia, though he had land elsewhere as well. One thousand seven hundred eightynine documents have survived from the archive spanning a period from 261–239 BCE. They include private communications from those connected to Apollonius, petitions, accounts, and notes. For a detailed list of archives found in Greco-Roman Egypt and how to locate them, see lhpc.arts.kuleuven.ac.be/archives.

344

peace and mind

30. C. C. Edgar, Zenon Papyri in the University of Michigan Collection (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1931), 81. 31. Arthur S. Hunt and C. C. Edgar, trans., Select Papyri, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), 272–73. 32. Other letters in the archive took from 24 to 48 days to reach their destinations. 33. Bernard P. Grenfell, Arthur S. Hunt, and J. G. Smyly, eds., The Tebtunis Papyri, vol. 3.1 (London: Humphrey Milford, 1933), no. 703, 83–84. 34. Willy Clarysse and P. W. Pestman, eds., Greek and Demotic Texts from the Zenon Archive, Papyrologica Lugduno-Batava, vol. 20 (Leiden: Brill, 1980). 35. Hunt and Edgar, Select Papyri, vol. 2, 560–61. See above n. 31. 36. The pun is carried over from Egyptian in which ‘Is.t –Hs-t is used. For a discussion of the text, see Clarysse and Pestman, Greek and Demotic Texts, 188–94. 37. Naphtali Lewis, Greek in Ptolemaic Egypt: Case Studies in the Social History of the Hellenistic World (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 8–36. 38. There are 128 such documents, mainly land registers and petitions. The village had a population of about 1500. The most recent study is Arthur Verhoogt, Menches, Komogrammateus of Kerkeosiris: The Doings and Dealings of a Village Scribe in the Late Ptolemaic Period (120–110 BC), Papyrologica Lugduno-Batava, vol. 29 (Leiden: Brill, 1997). 39. The amnesty decree is also preserved in one of the Tebtunis crocodiles. 40. Grenfell, Hunt, and Smyly, Tebtunis Papyri, vol. 1, no. 24, 60–65. 41. Grenfell, Hunt, and Smyly, Tebtunis Papyri, vol. 1, no. 28, 2–9. 42. Willy Clarysse, “Some Greeks in Egypt,” in Life in a Multicultural Society: Egypt from Cambyses to Constantine and Beyond, ed. Janet H. Johnson (Chicago: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1992), 52. Clarysse here points out that demotic tax documents have evidenced a higher proportion of these mixed families than Greek documents have done, probably because Greek language

lessons of the crocodile

345

documents are already a context in which identity as Greek would take precedence. 43. See Clarysse and Thompson, Counting the People, 125–32. 44. The archaeologists were hoping to recover items like the tragic fragment of Timotheus that had been recovered from a Memphite tomb burial earlier in the nineteenth century. 45. Peter Van Minnen, “Boorish or Bookish? Literature in Egyptian Villages in the Fayum in the Graeco-Roman Period,” Journal of Juristic Papyrology 28 (1998): 108–9.

346

peace and mind

COSMOPOLITAN A Tale of Identity from Ottoman Alexandria Maya Jasanoff

July 20, 1767, Alexandria, Egypt: a muggy season, when haze mutes the sun and the sea sits flat. Around noon, Etienne Roboly walks to the old port, northwest along the great curve of the harbor. He is the chief dragoman, or interpreter, for the French consulate, and has lived in Egypt for some thirty years. He knows the place about as well as anyone. As dragoman, Roboly not only interprets between French, Turkish, and Arabic (the word dragoman is derived from the Arabic verb “to translate”) but often conducts negotiations with Ottoman and Egyptian authorities himself. Well-versed in local protocols, and deeply acquainted with the customs agents, Roboly also dabbles in private commercial ventures of his own: trading, and sometimes smuggling, through Alexandria with the help of collaborators in other Mediterranean entrepôts. This has been a difficult summer in Alexandria. Fever, which visits the city with nearly annual regularity, is rife. Demands and extortionate taxes (known as “avanias”) from the port officials are becoming more frequent and more appalling. Westerners are moving cautiously. All this the dragoman knows. But in his long Turkishstyle robes, the usual clothing for men of his profession, Roboly attracts no notice. He, at least, should be safe. Then suddenly there is a hand on his shoulder. It is the hand of a well-dressed Turk, who knows Roboly’s name, his business, and some of his acquaintances in Constantinople. Is the man a friend of a friend? Roboly walks on further with him. Within minutes, catastrophe is upon him. The Turk, it turns out, is an officer of the sultan, armed with an order issued by the grand vizier to arrest the dragoman. Roboly is beaten, abused, and dragged on board the Ottoman ship Reala, where he is imprisoned in chains.1

348

peace and mind

I read about this incident in a letter from the French consul in Alexandria to his superiors in Versailles, bound up in a volume of diplomatic correspondence in the Archives Nationales in Paris. I was researching cultural exchange on imperial frontiers; I had encountered Roboly earlier in my readings, and my curiosity had been piqued by this character who seemed (not least because of his occupation) the very type of a “marginal” European, seeking out overseas opportunities. Before I could read on, the archive closed for the day, and I was on tenterhooks wondering about the rest of the story. Why was the dragoman arrested? What happened to him next? I would soon discover that his life story held greater relevance to questions of nation, empire, and identity than I had anticipated. I had been drawn to these volumes in the first place because I was curious about the origins of European imperial desire in Ottoman Egypt. Inspired in part by Edward Said, who famously identified the French invasion of Egypt (1798–1801) as the launchpad of modern Orientalism, I wanted to turn the page back to the period before the French invasion. Looking to these decades, when European ambitions were only beginning to take shape, and when Europeans constituted a small and relatively weak minority in Ottoman domains, helped to frame questions of culture and power in different terms. In the dispatches and memoranda of French diplomats—documents rarely consulted by cultural historians—I found not so much the foreshadowings of Orientalist discourse as repeated evidence of the cross-cultural relations that formed part of daily life for French nationals living in an Eastern, Muslim, imperial domain. The consular records were a treasure trove of incidents and encounters: adultery, madness, murder, apostasy, antiquities, the drunken escapades of French sailors on shore, or the regular avanias levied against French commerce by Ottoman authorities. The lines between empowered and powerless, even East and West, did not always seem clearly drawn; nor did individuals’ allegiances necessarily fit neatly within the borders between cultures or nations. Roboly’s story in particular, as it unfolded in the dispatches, cast the ambiguities of national versus imperial identity into relief. It underscored the point that empires—while they develop hierarchies

cosmopolitan

349

and rhetorics of difference—also contain considerable potential for crossing and cosmopolitan mixing. Alexandria, Roboly’s home, had been a hub of cosmopolitanism since ancient times. The city was perhaps history’s first melting pot and was inhabited in antiquity by Egyptians, Greeks, Jews, Romans, and such a wealth of Christian sects—Orthodox, Arian, Monophysite, Gnostic—that “Christians,” a baffled Emperor Hadrian wrongly concluded, must be “those who worship Serapis,” or Jupiter.2 You can still descend directly into the cosmopolitan world of the ancients, in the labyrinth of tombs that winds beneath the streets. In the catacombs of Kom ash-Shuqaffa, you can see Egyptian figures, standing with fists clenched, one foot before the other—but their heads are Roman portrait busts. There are bodies of Roman legionaries, wearing sandals, armored skirts, and breastplates—but they are topped with the animal heads of the Egyptian gods: jackal, ibis, and hawk. Crowned, knotted serpents, and Apis bulls, figments of the weird pantheon of Ptolemaic Egypt, join Medusa and Horus on the walls. This is a place of fusions and mixtures, survivals and innovations.3 And well into the twentieth century, when approximately a third of its residents were non-Arab or non-Egyptian, Alexandria remained a byword for diversity. The city’s greatest poet, C.  P. Cavafy, was Greek; the city’s best-known prose memorialist, Lawrence Durrell, managed to write four novels about Alexandria without including a single major Muslim character.4 The Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti was born in Alexandria in 1888, to a father who had emigrated from Tuscany to work on the Suez Canal. The historian Eric Hobsbawm was also born there, to British and Austrian Jewish parents in 1917. The same year, another Briton in Alexandria, the novelist E. M. Forster (working for the International Red Cross), enjoyed a freedom he had not experienced in Britain by beginning a love affair with a tram conductor named Mohammed el Adl.5 Alexandria’s status as a haven for foreigners, entrepreneurs, and outcasts may come as no surprise considering the crosscurrents of trade, culture, and migration that have always linked the shores of the Mediterranean. But the city’s age-old cosmopolitanism owes as much to its history as it does to geographical setting. For, during

350

peace and mind

most of its past, Alexandria was an imperial city. Founded by the Greeks, conquered by the Romans, ruled by the Arabs and the Ottomans, occupied briefly by the French and later by the British, Alexandria has flourished (and not) within empires extending over such far-flung regions as Algeria, Bulgaria, Australia, and Jamaica. Modern Alexandria boasted an international aura, with Europeanizing architecture and a grid street plan, laid out in the nineteenth century by Egypt’s ruler Muhammad Ali Pasha (himself an ambitious imperialist) and his successors; with an economy built on trade in wider imperial networks; and most conspicuously with a population marked by Greek, Italian, Syro-Lebanese, Jewish, and British communities, among others. As long as Alexandria was a city of empires, it was a city of many cultures. Today so much attention is paid to the way that empires divide people against each other that it is easy to forget how empires have also brought populations together, forcibly at times, yet often with enduring effects. The cosmopolitan possibilities of empire, as opposed to narrower definitions of national belonging, would shape the life of Etienne Roboly for good and for ill—just as they would shape the city in which he lived. Alexandria was not bustling in Roboly’s time. By the mideighteenth century, a combination of frequent plague epidemics and bad water supply had reduced Alexandria’s population to five thousand or so residents, while nearby Rashid (Rosetta) was a flourishing town three times the size. Alexandria remained significant, however, as the only port in Egypt capable of harboring large ships and as the busiest port in the southeastern Mediterranean. Maritime trade was its lifeblood, exporting cotton, coffee, rice, and untanned leather, while importing textiles, paper, iron, silver, and gold. Power rested locally in the hands of Janissary governors and Jewish customs agents. (The latter would lose their offices, violently, to Syrian Christians in 1768.) Muslim merchants, particularly from the Maghreb, dominated Alexandria’s commerce, but there were merchant houses from every European Mediterranean region with the apparent exception of Spain; and Austria, Holland, Sweden, and (sporadically) Britain were all represented there by chargés d’affaires.6

cosmopolitan

351

In addition to running a permanent consular establishment in Alexandria, France maintained a resident population of civilians. They lived in an oquelle (English okel, derived from the Egyptian Arabic word wikala), a multistory compound with a central courtyard, which was divided into fifteen separate dwelling units, shops, offices, and a chapel.7 The community called itself la nation, and each year, the consul sent his superiors at Versailles a list of its members, almost all of whom were from Provence: eight or ten businessmen and clerks, a few domestic servants and carpenters, an innkeeper, and, for a time, a wigmaker from Grenoble.8 In outline, the French in Alexandria seemed to be a modest little nation of secluded, busy, God-fearing folk.9 But the tidiness of this picture is misleading. Contemporary lists of French subjects and protégés drawn up for other Near Eastern ports give a much more complete image of the kinds of communities these often were.10 The Alexandria consuls only listed the males of la nation, but their wives often would have been Greek or Italian, and quite possibly Ottoman subjects. Consular lists for Alexandria also (unlike those for Smyrna, for instance) excluded non-French residents of the okel, as well as people under French protection living outside it. The likely reality is that most of these French men were married to non-French women, sharing their compound with non-French neighbors—and, of course, conducting all their daily business with non-French merchants and officials, in languages, more likely than not, other than French. The streamlined “French” community that Alexandria consuls described may suggest a certain anxiety about how “national” it really was. Never were the boundaries of la nation more obviously threatened than when a Frenchman decided to “turn Turk” (se faire turc), or convert to Islam. Consuls did not say, and perhaps did not know, how often Frenchmen slipped through their net, settling down with Muslim women, or taking jobs on Turkish or Maghribi ships. But the cases in which the consuls intervened were frequent, striking, and poignant. There was the young monk from Languedoc who turned up in Egypt with a declaration of Islamic faith in his pocket. “Happily,” the consul “was able to arrest him at the very moment at which he apostatized,” and he was sent back to his parents by the

352

peace and mind

next available ship.11 More shocking was the case of Rashid’s French priest, who decided to convert after suffering years of ill treatment from his father superior. The priest took refuge with the aga of the Janissaries, where the consular officials were “frozen with surprise” to see him, “still clothed in the habit of his Order, and with the cord of St. Francis, but having on his head a white turban of an ordinary Janissary.”12 There was Honoré Olivier, the leather buyer, who “went mad in consequence of a love affair” and insisted on turning Turk. “Since he would not stop crying out in Arabic that he wanted to apostatize,” he too was saved from himself and packed off to Livorno on a Dutch ship.13 And then, there was Etienne Sauvaire, womanizer, gambler, and pimp, who was on the verge of converting to Islam with his grasping Greek mistress, when the consul clapped him into chains: “I spared his family and la nation the discomfort of seeing him turn Turk.”14 These and other less extreme crossings were part of daily life for the French community in Alexandria—and regulating them was part of Etienne Roboly’s job as interpreter. Yet this invaluable servant to the interests and security of the French nation was himself, of course, a professional go-between, living on cultural borders. Many of the dragomans used in the various courts of the Ottoman empire were European renegades and converts; by the eighteenth century, most came from the Greek community in Constantinople’s Phanar quarter. European embassies in the Ottoman empire generally recruited their dragomans from various Eastern Christian communities.15 But France, uniquely among European nations, trained its own dragomans beginning in 1669. In Roboly’s day, many French dragomans began their careers as young boys, when they were sent off to Constantinople or Smyrna to learn Turkish and Arabic under the watchful eyes of Capuchin friars. Others were born in the Near East, often into mixed French-Ottoman families, and also often into veritable dynasties of interpreters. The Fornetti family, for instance, whose scions could be found manning French Levantine consulates well into the nineteenth century, had been producing dragomans since about 1600.16 The Robolys seem to have been something of an interpreting clan too, furnishing dragomans in Smyrna, Salonika, and Egypt.17

cosmopolitan

353

Raised partly in foreign lands and trained to speak (among other languages) Turkish, French, and Arabic with almost equal ease, a dragoman was the quintessential cosmopolitan—an insider and outsider rolled into one. As such, he was both an asset and a liability to his employers. On the one hand, dragomans had a native understanding of the local customs and rituals at the heart of diplomacy. More than the consul’s tongue and ears, a dragoman served as his eyes and hands too—especially, as was often the case, when the dragoman had lived in the region much longer than the consul himself. It was not unusual for France’s dragomans, for instance, to pay official visits and conduct negotiations without the consul even present. On the other hand, these were men of mixed, possibly suspect, loyalties. The French king was their master, and they lived in compounds with fellow “French” subjects and protégés. Yet their strongest ties were not to France— where many had hardly been—but to their homes in the Ottoman empire, where they were rooted by family and job, pragmatism and preference. Until 1806, for instance, French dragomans were given the choice between wearing “Oriental” dress and Western uniforms; nearly all opted for turbans and robes, in place of hats and tight trousers.18 In short, these were men for whom, as one of Louis XVI’s ambassadors in Constantinople put it, France “is a fatherland in name only, and to which they have no desire to return.”19 Like many dragomans of his time, Roboly seems to have maintained at best a distant connection to France. By his own account, he had been in Egypt since 1735 (we must take his word for it, because too many Robolys appear in the French records to allow one to track his early career precisely), which meant that when a new consul, Etienne Fort, came to take over the Alexandria office at the end of 1762, he found in Roboly a chief interpreter with nearly three decades’ service in Egypt.20 He also found, as his reports reveal, a dragoman deeply enmeshed in local business and politics—and a man who might be more capable of running the consulate than he himself was, which both of them knew. The new consul relied heavily on his veteran dragoman as an emissary, informant, and adviser. There were Turkish officials to be wooed, French sailors to be bailed out of trouble, and European

354

peace and mind

commercial rivals to be outdone. Most important, there were the unpredictable customs officers of the port, whose fluctuating demands regularly had to be confronted and appeased. Fort entered the consulate at a particularly difficult time for foreign trade in the city: the “wicked, cruel and seditious” behavior of Alexandria’s governors, he said, had reached “unheard-of excess.” They demanded payments from French ships, refused to allow cargoes to be unloaded, and generally obstructed the flow of commerce. Roboly was more necessary than ever. Using his friendships with high-ranking officials, and especially with Alexandria’s Jewish customs agents, Roboly was able to help set French commerce back on an even keel by 1764.21 It helped that Roboly had a vested interest in facilitating trade. Dragomans were not, on the whole, well rewarded for their work. In supplement to their small salaries, it was customary for them to receive a portion of ancrages, a tax paid by incoming ships. It was also common, albeit officially prohibited, for them to engage in private trade—which Roboly certainly did. A one-off venture of his (and there must have been more) involved shipping tobacco from Salonika to Genoa, in conjunction with a local French merchant and with Jewish traders in Greece. But his chief business seems to have been exporting rice and coffee, staples of Egyptian trade, to Salonika and Smyrna. It was a veritable multinational concern, which took advantage of all his cosmopolitan connections: kinsmen could probably help Roboly in Smyrna and Salonika, while his partners in Alexandria were Muslim merchants hailing from Crete, Persia, and Greece.22 Another, more unusual endeavor was Roboly’s collecting of antiquities. Though the catacombs of Kom ash-Shuqaffa were only discovered in 1900—by accident, when a donkey slipped through a hole in the ground—Alexandria’s denizens had long known about the buried ancient tunnels beneath the city. Roboly certainly did, and he also knew about the high social value his European contemporaries placed on antiquities. He intended to make the most of it. In a 1751 letter to Versailles, the French consul reported: I have read to Sieur Roboly the response with which you honored me, Monseigneur, on the subject of his statues

cosmopolitan

355

and antiques. Since M. de Tournehem does not deem it appropriate to acquire them for the King…this dragoman… will profit from the first occasion that presents itself to dispose of them advantageously. I have nothing to add to the wide and judicious observations of M. de Boze; he is able to judge the merit of these sorts of monuments more surely…than I.23 It is a brief passage, but a very tantalizing one, not least because it presents an early documented example of European antiquitiescollecting in Egypt. It also suggests Roboly’s considerable powers of self-promotion.24 Here was an obscure functionary in a secondtier French consulate who had managed to attract the attention of the Parisian elite (Le Normand de Tournehem was Mme. de Pompadour’s guardian, and Monsieur de Boze a noted book collector and connoisseur) and even to make propositions to the king himself. This was no small achievement. In 1763, Roboly’s interest in antiquities-collecting was enhanced when he made a fascinating, influential new friend: Edward Wortley Montagu (or as one French diplomat rendered the name, “Edoüard d’Owertlay Chevalier de Montaigu”), the irresistibly eccentric son of the celebrated Eastern traveler Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.25 The French consul in Rashid, where Montagu settled, could not believe his eyes when he encountered this bizarre Englishman. Not only had Montagu come to Egypt simply “for curiosity”—already unusual enough, at a time when few Western Europeans ventured even as far Greece. Within weeks, he had “abandoned the rank of a person of his station, and became friends with all manner of Turks … adopting all their ways be they hard or soft, of eating, drinking, dressing, etc.… He knows Arabic well enough to be understood and he is studying to make it perfect.” Montagu was also “a great friend of the French, enchanting them (leur fascinant les yeux) with his manners.” And Etienne Roboly had ample opportunity to fall under his spell: Montagu made a three-week trip around the delta “to see and find antiquities there,” and Roboly went with him.26 The ambitious dragoman could only have been inspired by this charismatic collector, living proof that antiquarianism was a sport of gentlemen (even strange ones).

356

peace and mind

Statues were in his reach. Consul Fort was in his debt and easy to manipulate. The time was ripe to approach the king of France again. On the first day of spring in 1765, an eerie season, when the city bolted its doors tight against the plague, Fort wrote off to Versailles. “Sieur Roboly,” he said, has acquired “a statue of white marble, which was found in the ruins of ancient Alexandria by the Catacombs. This piece  … is provoking here, Monseigneur, the admiration of everybody, and especially those who have some knowledge of drawing and sculpture. It seems truly worthy of being … placed in some Palace of the King or in one of His Majesty’s gardens.” He went on to make a diplomatic proposition: Some people have expressed to M. Roboly the desire to buy this statue from him, but I do not think that this officer will let himself be seduced by self-interested motives to [sell it to] … foreigners … without first knowing what your Grandeur’s thoughts about the object might be.27 This “magnificent fragment of antiquity” was virtually undamaged and stood some seven feet high. The following month, Fort sent along an accomplished pencil sketch of it by the Austrian consul, Agostini, “who possesses the art of painting and drawing.”28 The drawing answers one question straight away: Roboly’s statue was nothing like the sculpture from pharaonic Egypt most familiar to museum goers today—sleek, crowned rulers, squatting scribes, and stiff-armed gods. This statue was a Roman Egyptian or Ptolemaic grande dame, enthroned on a winged chair, full-bosomed, high-browed, thin-lipped, and proud. She represented Egypt as metropolitan, Enlightenment Europe liked to see it (and primarily did see it until 1798, when the French savants traveled to Upper Egypt and brought back detailed descriptions and drawings of the fantastic pharaonic monuments there). “All the connoisseurs,” said Fort, including the visiting duc de Picquigny, a sprig of one of France’s most distinguished families, thought her excellent.29 She conformed beautifully to prevailing European tastes, as exalted in Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art, published just the previous year.

cosmopolitan

357

Agostini’s drawing was excellent, and it worked. Versailles expressed an interest in the piece by return of post. What did Roboly hope to gain from the transaction? Not money, for sure— at least not explicitly, since between gentlemen, that expectation would be crude. “It is enough that your Grandeur seems to want this piece of antiquity for him to sacrifice it,” said Fort. No, Roboly looked for his rewards in the intangible currency of prestige. By “sacrificing” his statue for his king, he showed himself, in a single stroke, to be discerning, capable, generous, and loyal—all of which, naturally, he made sure the consul spelled out: “Sieur Roboly has had to spend a great deal here to procure the statue…and it still costs him a lot of trouble, care and work. I doubt that anybody other than this Dragoman, who is as well-known in the area as he is esteemed, could have succeeded in getting this piece, and I dare say … that this is one of the most upstanding people to be found in these parts.” “Embellishing the King’s antiquities Cabinet,” continued Fort, was Roboly’s only goal, “and he expressed to me several times his ardent desire to be able to have this honor.”30 In September 1765, Roboly’s wish was at last fulfilled. The statue was packed up, permission obtained from the authorities to export it (which was itself a tricky task, requiring all Roboly’s manipulative skills), and it was loaded onto a Marseilles-bound ship. On the whole, the episode was a splendid piece of selfpromotion for Roboly—and a splendid example of how marginal figures could use collecting as a device to advance themselves in European society.31 The statue opened doors, just as Roboly had wished. Within six months, timing that was surely not accidental, he wrote directly to the minister to protest the suspension of anchorage fees—the only legal supplement to a dragoman’s salary— and to demand compensation.32 A direct address to the top brass by a low-ranking officer was most unusual, and only Roboly’s recent coup with the statue could have emboldened him to make it. He also requested and received special permission to get married, a rare privilege for somebody of his rank. In March, 1766, “without noise and ceremony,” Roboly wed Maria de Sommo, daughter of a Neapolitan merchant based in Alexandria.33

358

peace and mind

It was no small irony that Roboly’s patriotic gesture toward France hinged on his intimate local knowledge of Egypt—on his close contacts with Alexandria’s scavengers and port authorities alike. According to a visiting Briton, “when any of the Bedouins (the people who spend their time in searching among the ruins) find any [antiquities], they generally offer them first to him.”34 Perhaps this was Roboly’s greatest talent. For while his position as dragoman made him almost by definition a man of the margins, a permanent go-between, it also gave him the wherewithal to make his mark on a European elite and to assert his loyalty to France. Collecting paved a way from the cosmopolitan to the metropolitan, from Egypt to France. And his arrest by the Turks, on July 20, 1767, would show just why he had been so concerned to prove his “Frenchness” all along. At one o’clock in the morning after Roboly’s capture, the officer who seized him, Ali Capitan, Ottoman vice admiral, barged into the French compound, calling for the consul. He demanded a substantial bail for Roboly and spelled out the charges against the dragoman. Fort, bewildered and terrified, took up a quivering pen to convey the news: “All that I have been able to learn up till now is that enemies he has in Constantinople gave the Grand Vizier to understand that this dragoman is not French, but Armenian, a raya [subject] of the Grand Seigneur; that he never paid the Karach [tax]…[and] that…he loaded French boats with all kinds of products, and under the pretext of sending them to Smyrna, Salonika, and other countries under Ottoman rule, he sent them to Christendom.”35 This stunning set of allegations was all “an abominable lie if ever there was one,” he insisted, and a gross violation of the “capitulations”—the agreements outlining European privileges in the Ottoman empire—that shielded French subjects from Ottoman law.36 But the more Fort pleaded for Roboly, the more they abused him. Egyptians who saw the dragoman down in the harbor reported that the Turks treated him worse than a slave. It would be a miracle if he reached Constantinople alive. Fort was hysterical with fear. They might be coming for him next! “No

cosmopolitan

359

Frenchman is safe in this country.”37 And without a dragoman, he was of course paralyzed, unable to communicate. Vergennes, the French ambassador in Constantinople, protested personally to the grand vizier about this outrageous abuse of diplomatic conventions. France’s chief dragoman in Cairo went to the pasha of Egypt and actually showed him the article of the written capitulations that forbade the arrest of a French subject. Yet these efforts to free Roboly were to no avail. In Alexandria, French trade was in ruins; merchants, customs officials, and the consulate’s Jewish dragoman fled in fear of their lives. And on the Reala, Roboly continued to “groan in chains,” sometimes up to twentyfive hundredweight of them, lashed to the slaves down in the sordid bowels of the ship.38 What of the allegations against him? “Calumny,” insisted Fort. But that Roboly was up to his ears in tricky business nobody could deny. Even Fort never confidently said that Roboly did not smuggle rice out of the Ottoman empire; he merely said that the accusations were unproven. And what about Roboly’s Frenchness? This was the crux of the case: if Roboly really was Armenian, as the Turks alleged, then the rest of their charges were justified; he had indeed dodged his taxes for forty years and had entered French service without the sultan’s permission. If, on the other hand, he was really French, then his arrest was an absolute and inexcusable violation of the capitulations—a casus belli, should France choose to make it so. (In 1830 France would invade Algeria on a lesser pretext, in retaliation for an incident three years before, when the dey of Algiers struck the French consul with a fly whisk.) Fort and his superiors in Cairo and Constantinople referred again and again to the capitulations in their attempts to free Roboly, insisting that he was French. But one piece of evidence is conspicuously absent. Not once, in over twenty documents on the subject, does anybody say where Roboly was born. This single fact could have proved the point beyond doubt—if, that is, Roboly had been a native-born Frenchman. Roboly must have known things could only get worse when the ship set sail, bound first for Syria, then on to the imperial capital. A tiny scrap of his writing, scrawled on a quarter-sheet of paper,

360

peace and mind

slanted and nearly illegible, survives to tell of his torment. It took the ship an arduous thirty-three days from Syria, tossed on the swell of autumn storms, to reach land again. He arrived in Constantinople on December 22, five months and two days from the start of his captivity on the ship. But land was no better. He was immediately loaded down with chains and flung into prison with the slaves, the sultan’s dreaded bagnio, from which even a slip of paper would be lucky to get out.39 Astonishingly, Roboly had survived the voyage, but the slave prison was too much. On April 15, 1768, “broken by suffering and worry,” Roboly died, with the slaves, a captive of the sultan. After nearly a year of sustained torture, for him and for his employers, it must have been a kind of release. Roboly’s arrest and captivity were part of the greatest crisis in French-Egyptian relations for a generation—an indirect consequence of what, in retrospect, was also one of the biggest political upheavals in Egypt until the French invasion in 1798. And it was just this kind of explicit, traumatic, personal experience that helped formalize French imperial designs on Egypt. (The blueprint for Napoleon’s invasion would be drafted by a prominent, longterm French expatriate in Egypt called Charles Magallon, who lost most of his fortune in 1786, when the Ottomans deposed the leading beys in an attempt to reassert authority.) It took at least two years for things to settle down in Alexandria. And it took nearly ten years for the whole truth about Roboly to come out. It appeared in a report written by the comte de Saint Priest, French ambassador in Constantinople from 1769 to 1784, which recommended wide-ranging reforms for Levantine consulates and for the dragoman service in particular. Speaking of the practice of choosing dragomans born in the Levant, Saint Priest said: “The Porte has never wanted to recognize French citizenship to children born in its states… . Sr. Roboly, Dragoman of France in Alexandria, born in Constantinople, was recently the victim of this principle.”40 Born in Constantinople—perhaps of mixed parentage, perhaps never having visited France at all. The French called Roboly French, and the Ottomans called him Ottoman. The likely truth, which neither of these competing definitions could accommodate, was that Etienne

cosmopolitan

361

Roboly was both: claimed by an imperial identity, while laying claim to a national one. Though Roboly “had the reputation for being rich,” when Consul Fort turned to his estate in the fall of 1768, he found Roboly’s affairs in shambles. His assets were “in the hands of Turks, Moors, and Greeks, dispersed around Egypt and the Levant, and for the most part now insolvent, or of bad faith”; his debts were greater.41 Ambassador Vergennes arranged a pension of five hundred livres for his widow, Maria. Roboly’s story ends with one last unconventional letter to Versailles. It is written in one hand and signed in another, clearly unaccustomed to the pen: “La Veuve Roboly”—the Widow Roboly. “The King’s goodness,” she said, will never be erased from my memory and [I] will  … number among my most essential duties the obligation to pray to God for the prolongation and happiness of His Majesty’s days. The sentiment of humanity which has made Your Grandeur take an interest in my unfortunate plight, makes me look at the Grace that the King has been so kind as to offer me, as a good which I owe to the generous feelings of Your Grandeur, to whom I can only very feebly express the true recognition which I hold in my heart.42 Roboly would have approved of his wife’s loyalty to the king of France. After all, he had died seeking acknowledgment of his own allegiance to France. In much the way that he had helped pull Frenchmen away from “turning Turk,” he had been arrested for “turning French.” He died, under Ottoman law, an Ottoman subject. But in death, with the belated interest of France in his affairs and the award of a state pension for his (Italian-born) wife, was he not also in some sense validated as French? After more than a year of imagining Alexandria from the pages of crumbly archival volumes and literature, I finally visited the city in May, 2001. Since the eighteenth century, Western visitors to Alexandria, steeped in tales of Alexander and Cleopatra, have lamented the absence of visible ancient vestiges. Little remains

362

peace and mind

standing of the ancient city but a single column, known as Pompey’s Pillar, perched on a weedy ridge south of town. (Florence Nightingale, for instance, “went to the catacombs” in 1849, “which, after those of Rome, are rather a farce; to Pompey’s Pillar, through a great dismal cemetery: I thought we were coming to the end of the world.”)43 But today the city invites reflections on a different set of absences. It seems more than coincidence that Roboly’s collision with identity and empire took place in Alexandria, since his experience eerily foreshadowed the postcolonial history of Alexandria itself. Had he been born a century and a half later, Roboly would have found himself wrong-footed for a different set of reasons concerning national and imperial identities. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had seen Alexandria’s population reach its high-water mark of diversity, with up to 30 percent of its inhabitants hailing from non-Arab or non-Muslim ethnic and religious communities.44 In 1956, President Gamel Abdel Nasser passed legislation nationalizing foreign-owned companies and encouraging (or in some cases forcing) foreign nationals and “non-Egyptians” to leave. Massive exoduses of Jews, Greeks, and other minority groups followed; and within a couple of years the city’s population was, as it remains, composed almost entirely of people considered to be Egyptian.45 Etienne Roboly had painfully experienced the potential dangers of an inclusionary, imperial definition of identity, that claimed him as Ottoman within an imperial regime that included Armenians, like other minority groups (or dhimmis), among the taxable ranks of its subjects. But in the postcolonial era, as a non-Muslim, non-Arab, and non-”Egyptian,” he would have been shunted out of Alexandria by a nationalist and fundamentally exclusionary definition of identity— one that completely transformed the city itself. Only two generations ago, you would have been hard-pressed to find Arabic-speakers in certain parts of central Alexandria. Now it felt as if I was the only foreigner to spend more than a night there. Imagine London or New York without their ethnic communities: London’s Edgware Road without the Lebanese eateries; Chinatown shop fronts without roasted ducks in the window; Twenty-Ninth and Lexington without the smell of curry and spices. Imagine Spanish

cosmopolitan

363

Harlem with the bodega signs faded out and only English on the streets; or Brick Lane without Bengali. That was a bit how Alexandria seemed now. “It’s all changed,” says an Alexandrian Greek in Naguib Mahfouz’s novel Miramar. “My dear,” ripostes her Egyptian friend, “it had to be claimed by its people.”46 The cosmopolitan cityscape remains, inhabited by a largely homogeneous “native” population. I walked past art deco apartment blocks and peered into grand, decrepit foyers with rococo plasterwork and dust-caked elevator grills, marble stairs with dented brass railings. They were lit by bright, naked bulbs of irregular sizes, as if each had been handblown to order. My hotel also gave off the distinct sense of being a relic. In the lobby was a telephone the size of a cash register, with a crank on the side and cloth-wound wires, and a glass case filled with tatty stuffed birds, surmounted by a swan, frozen in take-off or landing, it was unclear which. I sat in Western-style cafés, a novelty in a country where cafés are very much mens’ worlds, for smoking hookahs and playing dominos. Pastroudis, once the haunt of Alexandria’s cosmopolitan elite, seemed like a set on an abandoned Hollywood lot. A whole wall of Sophianapolou’s coffee store, with its big brass roasting machines, was covered with a poster of the Kaaba at Mecca by night. One afternoon, I was at a café on the Midan Saad Zaghloul, facing the sea, diligently plowing my way through Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, when I heard another reminder of changed times: a throat clearing, a cough, and a tentative “allahu akbar.” Somebody had set himself up with a loudspeaker in the square to conduct prayers. Men crossed the street to join him; minibuses pulled over and drivers jumped out. And for ten minutes, in answer to this makeshift call amid the azans from area mosques, men prayed on plastic mats, twenty feet away from the Hotel Cecil— where Durrell had staged scenes in his rather chauvinistically nonMuslim, non-Arab tales of Alexandria past. But the most vivid sense of what had vanished came when I wandered around the antique market in the Attarin district of town. Only a couple of stores had distinctively Middle Eastern items (octagonal tables, inlaid mirrors, antique brassware). Shop after shop was filled, instead, with European-style furnishings, heavy rosewood

364

peace and mind

armchairs and bulbous little chests, garish crystal chandeliers. There were oil paintings of autumnal Western landscapes, Arab horsemen against lurid orange hills and skies, and women of indeterminate ethnicity, captured in states between posing, pouting, lounging, and contemplating. There were assorted metal cups, trophies, browned family photos in frames, cigarette cases, and trinkets so corroded it was impossible to tell what metal they were made of. Only gradually did it strike me what all this stuff was: the debris of the families who left Alexandria behind, after 1956. These were the true relics of the city’s cosmopolitan past, now being bought up and absorbed into Egyptian homes, or bought for export and sent “back” to the West. Like Etienne Roboly, or like the families who had once owned them, these objects, at home in a cosmopolitan setting, now had to take sides. Of course, one only needs to read Durrell, with his ethnocentric, neo-Orientalist perspective on Egypt, to see why the city needed to be reclaimed, as Mahfouz put it, by its people—just as one only needs to survey Egypt’s modern history, in thrall to Western informal and later formal empire, to understand why Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. And the prayers by the Hotel Cecil, or the antique objects changing hands, show that some forms of cultural juxtaposition, even mixing, remain part of the present-day Alexandrian scene. But one lesson from all this is obvious: nation-states, as the briefest glance at twentieth-century history will confirm, have often proved themselves to be hostile toward minority populations. Everybody knows that nationalism is not nice. Yet we have also been taught to see empires as evil things, which makes the second lesson—that empires have sometimes been more accommodating of difference than many independent nations—seem somewhat counterintuitive. Rather than looking at empire only as a force of division and control, segregating cultures according to racial or ethnic hierarchies, the history of Alexandria invites us to look at how empire may provide an umbrella of common security for people from a range of cultures to coexist, and at times even intermingle.47 This is not to say, of course, that empires treat all people fairly, without prejudice. Nor is it to overlook the ways in which, for many postcolonial nation-states, imperial legacies have

cosmopolitan

365

cursed the process of identity-formation from the outset. If anything, Roboly’s story shows that neither nations nor empires can claim to possess the secret to harmonious cosmopolitanism per se. The larger question is whether and how inclusionary definitions of belonging can be made to outweigh exclusionary ones—and whether empires or nation-states can find ways of embracing human difference in tolerant, even congenial, forms.

366

peace and mind

Notes 1. This incident is described in the letter from the French consul in Alexandria, Etienne Fort, to the ministry of foreign affairs in Versailles, July 23, 1767, Archives Nationales de France, Paris (hereafter cited as AN): AE B/I/109. 2. Anthony Sattin, The Pharaoh’s Shadow: Travels in Ancient and Modern Egypt (London: Indigo, 2000), 40. 3. Jean-Yves Empereur, A Short Guide to the Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa, Alexandria, trans. Colin Clement (Alexandria, Egypt: Sarapis, 1995). Cf. William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium (London: Flamingo, 1998), 382–84. 4. On cosmopolitanism in modern Alexandria, see Robert Ilbert and Ilios Yannakakis, eds., with Jacques Hassoun, Alexandria 1860–1960: The Brief Life of a Cosmopolitan Community, trans. Colin Clement (Alexandria, Egypt: Harpocrates, 1997), 18–88. 5. Michael Haag, Alexandria: City of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 28–53. 6. Michael J. Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead: Government and Society in Alexandria, 1807–1882 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1997), 25–41; Michael Winter, Egyptian Society Under Ottoman Rule, 1517–1798 (London: Routledge, 1992), 26. On the customs revenue of Alexandria, which was jointly collected with Rashid’s, see Stanford J. Shaw, The Financial and Administrative Organization and Development of Ottoman Egypt, 1517–1798 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 109–10. 7. Vallière to ministry, December 16, 1769, AN: AE B/I/108. The Alexandria okel was in present-day Anfushi, on the eastern harbor (the only one open to European ships), and near the customs house. A wikala is a caravanserai or rest house; many can still be seen in Islamic Cairo. 8. See, e.g., “Liste des françois qui Resident à Alexandrie, et qui s’y sont etablis avant le premier Janvier 1758: Dans laquelle sont compris ceux qui sont venus s’y etablir, et qui ont discontinué de resider pendant le cours de la dite année,” and similar lists for 1762,

cosmopolitan

367

1766, and 1771, AN: AE B/III/290, ff. 23, 130, 160, 197. There had been a French baker in Alexandria (as in Cairo) until the early 1750s, but he was forced out of business when French sea captains started patronizing cheaper Egyptian bakers instead. (Sulause to ministry, February 1, 1753, AN: AE B/I/107.) 9. For an overview of French life in Egypt at this time, see Raoul Clément, Les Français d’Égypte aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1960), 149–69. 10. See lists in AN: AE B/III/290. The records for Aleppo are especially thorough and revealing. 11. D’Evant to ministry, July 25, 1756, AN: AE B/I/108. 12. Chaillan to ministry, August 18, 1769, AN: AE B/I/970. 13. Vallière to ministry, December 15, 1760, AN: AE B/I/108. 14. Vallière to Ministry, October 27, 1758, and January 10, 1759, AN: AE B/I/108. 15. Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe (New York: Norton, 1982), 78–79. A fascinating book remains to be written on dragomans; but see the catalog of an exhibition organized by Jean-Michel Casa, François Neuville, Emile Mantica, and Stéphane Yerasimos, Enfants de langue et Drogmans (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1995) for some useful remarks. 16. Enfants de langue et Drogmans, 17–50; “Memoire envoyé par M. le Cte. De St. Priest Ambassadeur à la Porte sur les Officiers du Roy en Levant,” AN: AE B/III/241. 17. Names drawn from index entries in AN series AE B/III. 18. Enfants de langue et Drogmans, 53–60. 19. “Memoire envoyé par M. le Cte. De St. Priest,” 6. 20. Roboly to ministry, March 24, 1766, AN: AE B/I/109. 21. See Fort’s letters from these years in AN: AE B/I/109. The commercial resurgence that he observed was due more generally to the ending of the Seven Years War. For a slightly later Ottoman critique of extortionate behavior among the Egyptian beys, commissioned for the Porte in 1785 from the governor of Syria, Cezzâr Ahmed Pasha, see Ottoman Egypt in the Eighteenth Century: The Nizâmnâme-i Misir of Cezzâr Ahmed Pasha, ed. and trans. Stanford J. Shaw (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962).

368

peace and mind

22. Fort to ministry, September 11, 1767, AN: AE B/I/109; January 26, 1768, AN: AE B/I/110. 23. Sulause to ministry, December 8, 1751, AN: AE B/I/107. 24. But see the equally tantalizing unfootnoted quotation from Sulause in Leslie Greener, The Discovery of Egypt (New York: Dorset, 1966), 77: “The great stir this discovery has made in the country, in spite of all the precautions taken to keep it secret, prove beyond anything one could say, how much these three statues verily smell of antiquity. The authorities, indifferent to this kind of thing, of which they take no notice ordinarily, have become so annoyed at not possessing them themselves, that they wanted to take them by command from sieur Roboly  … and it is only by the use of tact, manouevre, and money that he managed to calm their envy.” 25. Though the eldest son of a hugely rich family, Montagu had been left with what he felt to be the unfairly small sum of £ 2,000 per annum on the deaths of his parents in 1761 and 1762. He spent 1762–64 in the Near East, and parts of 1769–75 in Egypt, where he owned a house “thirty feet” from the French okel in Rosetta. (Chaillan to ministry, August 8, 1772, AN: AE B/I/970.) The original Dictionary of National Biography concluded that “there is little doubt that he was more or less insane” (Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, eds., Dictionary of National Biography, 66 vols. [London: Smith, Elder, 1885–1901], 13: 686). 26. Vaugrigneuse to ministry, October 26, 1763, AN: AE B/I/970. 27. Fort to ministry, March 22, 1765, AN: AE B/I/109. 28. Fort to ministry, April 22, 1765, AN: AE B/I/109. 29. Fort to ministry, September 15, 1765, AN: AE B/I/109. Picquigny, later duc de Chaulnes, had fled for Egypt the day after his wedding in 1758. The marriage was eventually dissolved; and the duke went on to write treatises on acids. 30. Fort to ministry, September 15, 1765; Roboly to ministry, September 15, 1765, AN: AE B/I/109. 31. For parallel cases in contemporary India, see my “Collectors of Empire: Objects, Conquests, and Imperial Self-Fashioning,” Past and Present, no. 184 (August 2004): 109–35. 32. Roboly to ministry, March 5, 1766; March 24, 1766, AN: AE B/I/109.

cosmopolitan

369

33. Fort to ministry, March 10, 1766, AN: AE B/I/109. 34. James Haynes, Travels in Several Parts of Turkey, Egypt, and the Holy Land (London, 1774), 40. 35. Fort to ministry, July 23, 1767, AN: AE B/I/109. Ali Capitan wanted 1500 patacoons (pieces of eight) for Roboly, but Fort was unwilling to pay more than 700. 36. Fort to ministry, July 23, 1767, AN: AE B/I/109. 37. Fort to ministry, July 25, 1767, AN: AE B/I/109. 38. Fort to Vergennes, August 7, 14, 31, and September 11, 1767, AN: AE B/I/109. 39. Roboly to Fort, September 2, 1767, AN: AE B/I/109; Fort to ministry, January 26, 1768, AN: AE B/I/110. 40. “Mémoire envoyé par M. le Cte. De St. Priest,” 6–7. 41. Fort to ministry, August 21, 1768, AN: AE B/I/110. 42. Maria Roboly to ministry, November 21, 1768, AN: AE B/I/110. 43. Florence Nightingale, Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile, 1849–50 (New York: Grove, 1987), 25. 44. It is hard to quantify these communities in part because of shaky definitions of “foreign” or “European” status. To give one example, however, according to an 1878 tally, there were almost 43,000 “Europeans” living in the city. The total population at that time was approximately 220,000. See Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead, 160, 110. 45. For a somewhat fictionalized, firsthand account of cosmopolitan Alexandria and its demographic transformation, see André Aciman, Out of Egypt: A Memoir (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994). 46. Naguib Mahfouz, Miramar, trans. Fatma Moussa Mahmoud (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1978), 8. 47. This argument is developed further, with reference to India and Egypt, in my book Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850 (New York: Knopf, 2005).

370

peace and mind

“NOT LIKE ANY FORM OF ACTIVITY” Waiting in Emerson, Melville, and Weil Clark Davis

The attitude that brings about salvation is not like any form of activity. —Simone Weil, Waiting for God To believe that will has power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality (which is always potentiality to do and not to do)—this is the perpetual illusion of morality. —Giorgio Agamben, “Bartleby; or On Contingency” I would prefer not to: this sentence speaks in the intimacy of our nights: negative preference, the negation that effaces preference and is effaced therein: the neutrality of that which is not among the things there are to do. —Maurice Blanchot, Writing the Disaster

In a meditation on Emerson and self-reliance, George Kateb, the political philosopher, takes up the question of Emerson’s politics—or, more abstractly, the relationship between self-reliance and collective social action. “What provision,” Kateb asks, “does Emerson make for a self-reliant individual to work with others, to cooperate and collaborate?”1 Kateb reminds us that Emerson was generally, and perhaps temperamentally, skeptical of reform movements. Self-reform had to precede, and possibly obviate, reforming others: “The unreformed cannot reform the unreformed; all must reform themselves” (176). But what if the issue at hand is slavery; or, as Kateb puts it, “what follows when cooperation is desperately needed?” (186). Having developed a theory of self-sufficiency based in part on deliberate contrariness,

372

peace and mind

Emerson was faced with a problem so overwhelming and in such a locally odious form—the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850—that he was forced to “suspend” (this is Kateb’s term) self-reliance in favor of concerted opposition and even, eventually, civil war. To Kateb’s credit, he presents the moment as a fracture in Emerson’s thinking rather than a natural development.2 While selfreliance can lead to action, the action it leads to is properly outside any theory of historical progress. The action of a self-reliant individual is an unpredictable because unsystematized expression of chaotic inwardness. “Chaotic” may seem a judgmental adjective, but if chaos is beyond or even beneath ordering, then Emerson’s spontaneous self is indeed an instance: in “that deep force”—“Spontaneity or Instinct”— “the last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all things find their common origin.”3 What tames this seeming anarchy is precisely that “common origin,” a posited source or inner well of shared “genius”: “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts” (CW 27). The self-reliant individual is thus absurdly free, but free ultimately to discover a collective vision. Is this an adequate form of control for the self pursuing its necessarily illogical or irruptive urgings?4 And does it support a notion of progress dependent on collective social action? Probably not. In Kateb’s view, Emerson’s self-reliance is always a bit more inclined to passivity, receptivity—to waiting and watching and listening—than it is to joining or acting. A faith in deeper correspondences may not overcome a contrarian temperament or inveterate skepticism: “There are also times when Emerson professes a faith in progress, but he could not profess it unless divinity sponsored it. Optimism must be cosmic. It cannot be merely social because Emerson sometimes expresses doubt that society ever progresses” (78). Put another way, a “cosmic optimism,” avoiding at all costs system or narrative, may not amount to an optimism at all. And though the reliant self may, and probably will, act, it cannot say in advance how or why or when. And so it waits. Or rather, its predominant posture is one of waiting attention, of sitting quietly, monitoring the stirrings of both outer and inner worlds: “I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

“not like any form of activity”

373

How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary! So let us always sit” (CW 41). To locate Emerson’s temperament, his deeper preference, we should focus on his verb “like.” It suggests not only a predilection or taste but a fondly projected dream, a vision of society without shape or structure other than the shared distance within silence and stillness. If Kateb is correct, Emerson’s impassioned entrance into antislavery politics was therefore not merely a departure from selfreliance but a tonal and philosophical shift so profound that it could only be an exception. There is no path, in other words, from the silent church full of separate individuals to the collective church organized for social action. Or if there is one, it is beyond the logic of historical progress or reform that typically provides reasons for surrendering self to society. From that perspective, politics is the sacrifice of the self to organized power; and Emerson is never comfortable with this transaction, even when the cause is worthy. Again, Kateb: The regular immorality of political life—even when democratic—appalls him. The inveterate nature of political life—even when democratic—appalls him… . The unfortunate essence of government is the executive power, and the democratic assembly scarcely restrains it from becoming dictatorial, and often does not restrain it at all, but encourages it. (188–89) And finally: Emerson would be an anarchist if he could. (189) I I would like to pause a moment over this last insight. It seems to lay bare a primary question key to any discussion of activism versus quietism, particularly if we consider these poles as they are understood by progressivists. Emerson would be an anarchist, presumably, because he distrusted power, particularly as it takes the shape of a group (or

374

peace and mind

state) that requires solidarity for its goals. The solitary self, quiet and cool, is its own church and cannot, strictly speaking, be mobilized; it may act in concert with others but only through an unplanned, instantaneous rhyming of instinct. A solitary self, in the anarchy of waiting, is neither wholly passive nor intentionally disruptive. Its passivity—more properly its stillness, its quiet—signals a listening or attentiveness that may or may not turn to action at any moment.5 Its potentiality disrupts or disallows any notion of progress, which is not to say that passive listening is opposed to betterment, but rather that attending to what is said (and how and why it is said) tends to weaken the pull of story and render narratives of forward movement more interesting than persuasive. Lawrence Buell sums up Emerson’s apparent ambivalence about reform by noting that “both opponents and outsiders counted him among the sympathizers of reform. But true believers found him a hesitant and fastidious ally. Temperamentally he was more a thinker than a joiner or doer.”6 It is probable that Emerson understood the frustration he could produce in others, particularly the “true believers,” as a positive sign of his resistance to conformity. “Friendship and association,” he wrote, are very fine things, and a grand phalanx of the best of the human race, banded for some catholic object: yes, excellent; but remember that no society can ever be so large as one man. He in his friendship, in his natural and momentary associations, doubles or multiplies himself; but in the hour in which he mortgages himself to two or ten or twenty, he dwarfs himself below the stature of one.7 This remark appears in a discussion of communal living experiments underway in 1844 when “New England Reformers” was delivered at Armory Hall in Boston, and it is the sort of thing that tended to make social evangelists queasy, if not angry. It is worth asking, though, if this remark of Emerson’s is really an instance of his preferring thinking over joining or doing. It would seem so to us and probably to those around Emerson at the time of

“not like any form of activity”

375

the lecture, but his own conception of thought and action—and of the relationship between the two—may not work like ours. Buell’s description suggests an interesting complication. To couple “joining” and “doing,” as Buell does, makes clear just how accustomed Emerson’s current readers are to seeing isolation as a form of thinking, and essentially passive; while they understand joining with others as a prelude to, or even as itself a form of, action. Most of the familiar criticisms of quietism today contain some element of the assumption that there is only one kind of genuine action, and that individual effort is meaningful only when it leads to collective movements and leaves individualism behind. In part, this reflex can be explained by democracy’s demand that large numbers of people mobilize around points of agreement. “Action” thus comes to mean effective political action of a sort that fits a concept of liberal historical progress.8 Inaction, on the other hand—or even, simply, quiet— tends to designate forms of passivity that seem to impede progress. It is clear, however, that from Emerson’s perspective individual actions do matter, even if (or perhaps because) they emerge outside of the imagined narrative of progress. Moreover, in his writing, he seems eager to disturb his audience’s assumption that meaningful action is necessarily collective, that democratically motivated collectivism automatically makes for progress, and that the anarchic individual is too isolated to remake the world without surrendering autonomy to the crowd. Even when Emerson himself relies on the division between passive isolation and active joining, he does so in order to undermine the assumptions that sustain it about society’s ability to contain the self: There are two theories of life; one for the demonstration of our talent, the other for the education of the man. One is activity, the busy-body, the following of that practical talent which we have, in the belief that what is so natural, easy and pleasant to us and desirable to others will surely lead us out safely; in this direction lie usefulness, comfort, society, lower power of all sorts. The other is trust, religion, consent

376

peace and mind

to be nothing for eternity, entranced waiting, the worship of ideas. This is solitary, grand, secular.9 There is always, in Emerson, a bit of bravado in such lines; or if not bravado, then a heroism that is more gestural than real. To “consent to be nothing for eternity” is the sort of phrase that maps an imaginary journey, that sets not so much the path as the attitude toward it. The result of such consent will not make us into “nothing,” but it will change the sort of something that we become.10 It often seems as though Emerson required a quietist or nominally passive picture of himself to structure his interaction with the world. Is this quietism fully fledged? Possibly. But it is also a temperamental preference that locates meaning in the self’s spiritual rather than political connections, and that seems unable to commence any social engagement without imagining an inscrutable and independent source of the self’s truest motives. For the promptings of this source, the individual must wait—sit quietly “entranced.” Action may or may not follow, and in that uncertainty we can locate the individual’s nonrational, indeterminable potential. Everything is possible, it seems, including continued silence and passivity. No reasoning—no outside structure of thinking, no cause or accumulation of argument—can break the trance. Hence the government of this impulse cannot be organized by others; there can be no order other than the one that springs spontaneously from or through the expectant self: “The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle” (CW 190). The circle radiating outward, unknown and uncontrolled, does not allow for instruction from others: “We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions” (CW 37). We might think of Emerson’s bent toward anarchy—along with his inability to be an anarchist—as an artifact of Calvinism’s strained separation of grace and works. Grace, God’s inscrutable choosing, presupposes a kind of passivity or, at least, a recognition that actions will not determine the fate of the soul:

“not like any form of activity”

377

The essence of this Protestant piety was a vision of the divine-human relationship as based on the gratuitous mercy of God in the absence of human deserving, with humankind the object of a supernatural renovation worked only by the divine favor. Within the constellation of theological formulations connected to this apprehension of God’s free grace were such ideas as the bondage of humankind to sin and a consequent inability to initiate a relationship with God; justification by the imputed righteousness of Christ appropriated instrumentally by faith, rather than by human merit; the irresistibility of grace; regeneration and sanctification by the Holy Spirit operating upon the human soul, leading to an actual holiness of life; the indefectibility of salvation, or the perseverance of the saints; Christ’s atoning death as an effectual gift to the redeemed only; and the doctrine of predestination to eternal life whereby the will of God alone is the ultimate cause of salvation.11 Grace makes inspired actions possible but only as products of a faith that provides little if any necessary (or legible) relation between the inner voice and the outer manifestation. It would be impossible for grace to issue from other individuals, from groups or political movements. Nor could grace demonstrate the logic of political organization or any other kind of concerted action. Grace is, fundamentally, a private experience, relatable only through a recognition of the self’s inability to control it. By understanding the source as divine, however, individuals can claim the paradox of a shared privacy—the community formed not through the motives of the people themselves but through the unpredictable movements of “election.” God has formed the church, in other words, through startling interventions of grace. Temperamentally at least, Emerson suggests something similar: the source of grace has simply migrated into the deeper reaches of the self and found a perhaps more human, if still mysterious, power and origin. By contrast, a progressive politics that understands quietism only as the failure to act (or to join in action) is temperamentally allied

378

peace and mind

to the covenant of works. Whether theologically grounded or not, the fundamental visions rhyme. In each, God (or providence, which is to say: history) demands a specific form of communal behavior in exchange for worldly progress, and concerted action is thereby linked to civic improvement. John Winthrop, for one, understood the power of works and used it to good effect aboard the Arbella: We are entered into covenant with Him for this work. We have taken out a commission. The Lord hath given us leave to draw our own articles… . Now if the Lord shall please to hear us, and bring us in peace to the place we desire, then hath He ratified this covenant and sealed our commission, and will expect a strict performance of the articles contained in it; but if we shall neglect the observation of these articles which are the ends we have propounded, and, dissembling with our God, shall fall to embrace this present world and prosecute our carnal intentions, seeking great things for ourselves and our posterity, the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us, and be revenged of such a people, and make us know the price of the breach of such a covenant.12 Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity” may not seem to share the progressive political assumptions that typically disallow quietism, but in the following sense it does: Winthrop’s contractual logic implies a relationship between action and communal progress, and it depends upon a theory of history in which improvement results from concerted effort toward a defined end. There can be no room for “entranced waiting.” There is, after all, work to be done, and order to impose, in a difficult and strange land. The body of Christ itself, which is Winthrop’s major metaphor, binds the group, creating a powerful sense of shame—and there is also the threat of divine punishment, should anyone decide to “prosecute” his “carnal” (which is to say, his individualistic) “intentions.” In the grace/works conundrum, Emerson would appear to side with Winthrop’s much-discussed “opponent” Anne Hutchinson.13 As an antinomian, she may have been the first Puritan thinker to

“not like any form of activity”

379

lay bare the collision of radical individuality and progressive social management. As David D. Hall explains, “between free grace and man’s own righteousness she saw no connection, and therefore insisted on treating sanctification as a ‘work’.”14 Sanctification was the specialized term used by the Puritans to name the righteous conduct of the elect. What caused controversy was the complex question of its relationship to justification (salvation through God’s grace). If the covenant of grace, enacted by Christ, had supplanted the older covenant of works, then good deeds could be the result of election but not a proof of it, and certainly not a way to earn salvation. Hutchinson took from her minister, John Cotton, a suspicion of the determinative value of works and carried it to an extreme unacceptable to the Puritan authorities.15 In Hall’s phrase, it was from “the radical disjunction between grace and ‘duties’” that the “the rhetoric of the Antinomians” flowed (19). Though Cotton eventually pulled back from the more disruptive implications of this idea, Hutchinson maintained them; and because of her insistence that her knowledge came directly from the Holy Spirit, she was banished. She had asserted, in other words, that truth came to the individual through a direct and private communication with spirit (rather than indirectly through the Bible) and that the link between this personal realm of spirit and one’s social actions was essentially unknowable and unbridgeable. Good deeds could emerge from genuine salvation, but there was no discernible relationship between the two. “In this sense,” according to Hall, “the Antinomian Controversy was a turning point in the religious ideas of the colonists. But the Controversy was not the point at which New England left the mainstream of the Reformed tradition. The Antinomianism of Anne Hutchinson was the real departure, for it prefigured the radical stance of the Quakers” (20). If Emerson found himself caught in the space between grace and works, it was because, like Hutchinson, he refused to accommodate his inner experience to a rationally constructed relationship between self and society.16 His move into organized opposition to slavery was therefore not a compromise but, as Kateb argues, a complete suspension of his prophetic individualism: “The aberration is that

380

peace and mind

he urges solidarity—indeed mobilization—on others, and, when the occasion arises, does not shrink from advocating violence in the effort to destroy slavery. That profound change is a deviation from his theory of self-reliance, not its transformation” (178). To be an anarchist, Emerson would have had to wait quietly, to have demonstrated that waiting was, taken whole, a sign of the self’s unreadable divinity, its ability to be “nothing for eternity.” There would be no outside calls of conscience, no regional demand for justice. As though unmoveable, he would sit in the stillness of the church—the space of the potential self, listening, attentive to the whispers of instinct—“before the service begins.” That “before” is a profoundly strange time, prior to the social world. It is a time before opposition or joining that, though always open to action, foresees nothing but patience. Though patience and waiting may well not be the proper words. II It is a commonplace of Melville criticism that many of his major characters were responses to, or versions of, Emerson. Plotinus Plinlimmon in Pierre and Mark Winsome in The Confidence-Man are the most obvious versions of the man himself; but Emersonian ideas are pervasive catalysts for Melville’s grousing philosophical commentary, parodies, and pastiches in both of those novels (and in Moby-Dick). “Bartleby, the Scrivener” offers no specific portrait of the Sage of Concord among its Dickensian lawyers and copyists, but it speaks directly to the challenges posed by Emerson’s radical account of self-reliance and social responsibility. Melville’s story can be read plausibly as a relentless and uncompromising exploration of Emerson’s implied but unrealized anarchy.17 Before exploring two remarkable responses to “Bartleby” within twentieth-century philosophy, it is worth remembering how the story structures its fundamental ethical and social questions. The narrative’s superbly held tension issues directly from its primary relationship, which is between a very odd copyist and his employer, an unadventurous Wall Street lawyer. After initial frustration, the

“not like any form of activity”

381

employer applies himself to understanding his employee in order to be of help, those two terms—“understanding” and “help”—linked in a larger conception of what it means to make something or someone better. The lawyer analyzes, does research—he reads Jonathan Edwards’s “On the Will”—and makes suggestions to Bartleby, based on the idea that a solution can be found. As befits the lawyer’s business, always reasonable and quotidian, he seeks an exchange: Bartleby is to be replaced by what ails Bartleby. The lawyer will then offer a cure for whatever the ailment turns out to be in exchange for freedom from Bartleby’s illogical resistance. The lawyer’s solution is to be a covenant of works. Famously, infamously, Bartleby refuses. But what does he refuse? Not only does he decline his employer’s repeated offers of help but also the economy of charity and rational betterment presupposed by those offers. With nothing but the phrase “I would prefer not to,” Bartleby explodes the lawyer’s progressive thinking and denies the logic of interpretation and action upon which the lawyer relies. Bartleby is self-reliant; or at least, he presents to his employer and to us the outward manifestation of a radical individualism. Of course, we do not know what is going on inside Bartleby, what his motives and his thoughts may be. All we know is that he impedes the social and economic order of the lawyer’s office. Bartleby is waiting, listening for some inward prompt; or else he is not listening at all and is catatonic, empty. There is no way to distinguish one state from the other, because he refuses explanation or any form of narrative that might bring him into the logic of his employer’s and the reader’s world. Bartleby is simply outside. From the lawyer’s perspective, his employee can be seen only in one way: as troubled, lost, pained, broken. Because Bartleby is passive, almost silent, nonresponsive, he must be ill. His failure to do something—anything that the lawyer recognizes as doing something—means that Bartleby does not make sense, is not part of the sense-making world. This pattern suggests that Melville understood, as perhaps no other writer of his time, the deep incompatibility of individualism with theories of social improvement and social mobilization. Remarkably, Melville does not condemn his self-reliant character

382

peace and mind

for passivity but instead fixes his critical eye on a comfortable man of society who fails to see the inadequacy of his goodwill. Like the equally blind and blithe Captain Delano in Benito Cereno, Bartleby’s employer is a pleasant man who needs to think well of himself and of the world in which he lives. His assiduously maintained innocence blinds him to the inadequacy of the notions he needs in order to keep his illusions. Chief among these is that the expectation of progress renders mutual understanding, and thus mutual aid, possible. The world can be made better because it is good in the first place; it is capable of improvement and so is essentially benevolent. That the world might function otherwise, that it would resist this positive interpretation of itself, would be unthinkable. The style of thought is best expressed by Delano in an infamous bit of interior monologue: “What, I, Amasa Delano—Jack of the Beach, as they called me when a lad—I, Amasa; the same that, duck-satchel in hand, used to paddle along the waterside to the schoolhouse made from the old hulk;—I, little Jack of the Beach, that used to go berrying with cousin Nat and the rest; I to be murdered here at the ends of the earth, on board a haunted pirateship by a horrible Spaniard?—Too nonsensical to think of! Who would murder Amasa Delano? His conscience is clean. There is some one above. Fie, fie, Jack of the Beach! you are a child indeed; a child of the second childhood, old boy; you are beginning to dote and drool, I’m afraid.”18 In an obviously nervous moment, Delano resorts to a forced naïveté; remembering himself as a child, thinking of himself as still a child, he forces the world to be innocent, as clean as his own conscience. But Benito Cereno—typed here as the “horrible Spaniard”—proves as unreadable and past help as does Bartleby. Cereno can be rescued from the slave revolt but not saved from the “shadow” (of “the Negro” Babo). Though safe in Lima and ostensibly free, Cereno wastes away and dies.19 Melville, like Emerson, reacted against the belief, typically American in the mid-nineteenth century, that social progress reflects,

“not like any form of activity”

383

and results from, the innocent goodness of individuals in a world that, because reality is benevolent, can be improved. But unlike Emerson, Melville did more than worry about conformity, about the effects of collectivism on individual possibility. Taking self-reliance to its logical conclusion, Melville stripped away the transcendental faith that a single source feeds and unites all radically separate selves. He transformed “entranced waiting”—Emerson’s realm of possibility, of a waiting for buoyed up by belief—into Bartleby’s catatonic stillness: a quiet disengaged from hope of motivation, let alone betterment. The lawyer cannot understand the scrivener’s condition, because “understanding” in itself makes no sense in the context that Melville has imagined for Bartleby. There is only the presence of one who will not be transformed into a problem susceptible of solution. In Maurice Blanchot’s reading of the story, what matters is that the scrivener never denies the lawyer his premises, for refusal only tends “toward the absolute, independent of any determination whatsoever.” Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” expresses no more than an abstention which has never had to be decided upon, which precedes all decisions and which is not so much a denial as, more than that, an abdication… . “I will not do it” would still have signified an energetic determination, calling forth an equally energetic contradiction. “I would prefer not to…” belongs to the infiniteness of patience; no dialectical intervention can take hold of such passivity.20 If patience is infinite, that is because it subverts time. Patience may or may not be understood as a kind of waiting, but the “infiniteness of patience” is, according to Blanchot, beyond or before waiting—and it is “prior to negation,” as Gerald Bruns explicates Blanchot’s point: “outside the dialectical struggle of Collaboration and Resistance.”21 This quiet, this stillness, is not in mere opposition to progress, not opposed to the taking of action. “I would prefer not to: this sentence,” Blanchot would have it, “speaks in the intimacy of our nights: negative preference, the negation that effaces preference and is

384

peace and mind

effaced therein: the neutrality of that which is not among the things there are to do.”22 What is, what does it mean to be in, a space outside of things to do? Emerson’s before (“before the service begins”) flirts with pure neutrality in a way that his later calls to action—or even his conviction that act can flow from instinct—necessarily ignore. Still, Emerson’s parishioners—those alert and reliant selves—seem capable, however patient he believes them to be, of turning to action.23 Melville, however, was the man who claimed, via Father Mapple in Moby-Dick, that truth-tellers should “appall” their congregations by telling truths so dark that they expose a longing for illusion.24 Melville could argue, for example, against South Sea missionaries or against flogging, without necessarily believing in a general narrative of improvement. Bartleby refutes the complacency of expecting good intentions to result in good actions with good effects. By standing aside from will and action, the scrivener makes a claim—an incoherent one but inchoately moral—on his employer that is far greater than that affluent man’s ability to satisfy it, because it is below, above, outside, beyond, or perhaps prior to the economy of payment. The narrator tries and fails to implicate himself in a covenant of works. There is no contract that will exchange the lawyer’s charity for the absence of his copyist. There is nothing at all to do but wait; and waiting may well not be a subset of doing. Blanchot is not alone, among thinkers in the Continental tradition, in taking “Bartleby” to name an ultimate problem. In his essay “Bartleby; or On Contingency,” Giorgio Agamben argues that the basic dilemma of the story was set not by Emerson but by Aristotle: “all potential to be or to do something is always also potential not to be or not to do…without which potentiality would always already have passed into actuality and would be indistinguishable from it.”25 As Agamben reads Melville’s story, Bartleby “dwells” in the “abyss of potentiality”—an “extreme figure of the Nothing from which all creation derives” (254, 253). And as “the man of the law” (Bartleby’s employer) discovers to his surprise and disquiet, potentiality cannot be subjected to will:

“not like any form of activity”

385

Our ethical tradition has often sought to avoid the problem of potentiality by reducing it to the terms of will and necessity. Not what you can do, but what you want to do or must do is its dominant theme. This is what the man of the law repeats to Bartleby… . But potentiality is not will, and impotentiality is not necessity; despite the salutary impression that the books [on will and necessity] give him, the categories of the man of the law have no power over Bartleby. To believe that will has power over potentiality, that the passage to actuality is the result of a decision that puts an end to the ambiguity of potentiality (which is always potentiality to do and not to do)—this is the perpetual illusion of morality. (254) “The illusion of morality” is a phrase that might have appealed to Melville. It is said that he had a keen eye for hypocrisy, but his eye was more trained on those who assumed that doing good is a simple matter of willing others into one’s own moral vision. The ConfidenceMan can be read in these terms, less as a series of tricks played unscrupulously on others than as one scrupled self-deception after another. It is a book in which actions do occur, but whether they have any relation at all to the values expressed by the confidenceman remains a potent mystery. Bartleby’s employer and Delano are, in this wider sense, confidence-men as well. Melville presents each, Agamben argues, as an earnest actor but on a stage—in a world—defined by the skeptics’ refusal of predication. The ou mallon of Pyrrhonism, as in the statement “X is true no more than [ou mallon] it is not true,” is a term of neutral assertion, undermining even itself. Agamben emphasizes that classical skepticism affirms “the self-referential status of ou mallon,” and he quotes Sextus Empiricus on the point: “Even as the proposition ‘every discourse is false’ says that it too, like all propositions, is false, so the formula ‘no more than’ says that it itself is no more than it is not” (256). Thus, the “rather” of Bartleby may be neither negative nor positive but indifferent—“between Being and Nothing,” as Agamben puts it:

386

peace and mind

Only inside an experience that has thus retreated from all relation to truth, to the subsistence or nonsubsistence of things, does Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” acquire its full sense (or, alternatively, its nonsense). The formula cannot but bring to mind the propositions with which Wittgenstein, in his lecture on ethics, expresses his ethical experience par excellence: “I marvel at the sky because it exists,” and “I am safe, whatever happens.” The experience of a tautology—that is, a proposition that is impenetrable to truth conditions on account of always being true (“The sky is blue or the sky is not blue”)—has its correlate in Bartleby in the experience of a thing’s capacity to be true and, at the same time, not to be true. (261) So we might say that Bartleby—“impenetrable to truth conditions”— is the human version of a tautology. But are the rest of us so penetrable? If not, then the lawyer’s story may suggest a model for human interaction more generally: the encounter with a presence beyond the range of one’s will or action. The lawyer responds as we all might to Bartleby, wondering what to do, and then, after failure, deciding there is nothing to do and moving away. But the scrivener disables the choice between doing and not doing, helping and giving up. The story seems to ask: what do you do with others when there is no choice between active and passive engagement—not simply no way to choose but no structure of choosing? And the story appears to answer: wait. There is a kind of waiting that we might call a “waiting with,” though again such stillness is outside of time. It is not anticipation but an infinite patience. Perhaps it is another word for friendship. III Bartleby is a disturbance. He is not subjectable to—he interrupts— moral awareness, moral action, rational good intentions, good works, and every expectation of improvement, advancement, or progress. His position is that of friend: he is a friend, or he is nothing. But Melville’s

“not like any form of activity”

387

reader knows what friendship is, and presumably his narrator does as well. Would either one—would anyone—consider Bartleby friend material? Blanchot, in this context, proposes that friendship is an “impossible relation” or, as Bruns explains Blanchot’s point: “there is no such thing as friendship in principle; it is without principle—an anarchic relation that knows neither beginning nor end. It is outside the dialectical relation of mastery.”26 The friend, in this sense, stands aside from time; his demand is not for understanding or help but for attention of a sort founded on “an-archic,” “unconditional” responsibility, “without foundation.”27 Then “waiting with” would seem to imply a shared condition or suspension, like the dedication of May Bartram to John Marcher in “The Beast in the Jungle”: May agrees to “watch with” Marcher for “the thing” that will happen to him, and she does so unconditionally (until her death). Apart from this “an-archic” and even absurd anticipation, Henry James’s story lacks any sense of development, whether of history or characters or even plot. The attention of the watcher-with is on the friend; she attends patiently, without expectation. Marcher is for her neither a problem to be solved nor a story to be completed. Whereas in Melville’s story, the lawyer works assiduously, egregiously, to complete Bartleby’s biography and find or impose a narrative cause for his affliction. The story’s final words—“Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!”—comprise a final betrayal, self-protectively shifting the burden of attention from Bartleby to a generality that too easily answers an unanswerable claim. Missing from this sentimentalized coda, and from the story entirely, is the sort of attention about which Simone Weil writes: The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough…. The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?” [“Quel est ton tourment?”] It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the

388

peace and mind

social category labeled “unfortunate,” but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction. For this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way.28 Melville’s reader might agree that such attention would be miraculous in the Wall Street milieu of “Bartleby,” but Weil does not intend a mere criticism of capitalist hard-heartedness. Real attention, and thus friendship, is rare because so many “think they have” it, and have “warmth of heart” as well, while lacking all “recognition that the sufferer exists.” The sufferer, the friend, must be looked at in “a certain way,” or else there is no attentiveness. “The soul,” Weil continues, “empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth” (115). Lacking this self-negation, there is no avoiding the distinction— which Weil takes to be self-serving—between justice and charity: We have invented the distinction between justice and charity. It is easy to understand why. Our notion of justice dispenses him who possesses from the obligation of giving. If he gives all the same, he thinks he has a right to be pleased with himself. He thinks he has done a good work. (139) The covenant of works—justice as a contractual economy—may or may not be at odds with responsibility, but that is the point Weil is making. Justice, judgment, morality, ethics, and responsibility are all at odds with attentiveness. What the friend stands in need of is a displacement of will, which according to Weil is a form of generosity allied to divine self-denial in the act of creation: “On God’s part creation is not an act of self-expansion but of restraint and renunciation” (145). This “original generosity,” she says, models interactions between human beings and between individuals and God. “Active searching,” which is never generous, disconnects intelligence and will from love. The proper form of generosity is waiting:

“not like any form of activity”

389

The attitude that brings about salvation is not like any form of activity. The Greek word which expresses it is ὑπoμεvἡ, and patientia is rather an inadequate translation of it. It is the waiting or attentive and faithful immobility that lasts indefinitely and cannot be shaken. (196) “Immobility that lasts indefinitely” might imply some kind of “waiting for,” though Weil’s extended example suggests a form of patience that is beyond result: The slave, who waits near the door so as to open immediately the master knocks, is the best image of it. He must be ready to die of hunger and exhaustion rather than change his attitude. It must be possible for his companions to call him, talk to him, hit him, without his even turning his head. Even if he is told that the master is dead, and even if he believes it, he will not move. (196) In attentive waiting, then, not only is hope of recompense abandoned but even teleology and good sense (“told that the master is dead…he will not move”). The will is overridden, suspended; and the waiting is a gift and, thus, faithful, patient, anarchic, effortless. Bartleby’s employer would be an obvious target for such radically quietist thinking. Bartleby himself embodies what it means to wait, in Weil’s terms; and the story’s tone makes it clear that he expects nothing. His is not a will suspended to invite human or divine intervention, for he can neither give nor receive. That he ends his life in the “Halls of Justice,” also called “the Tombs,” indicates how dubious Melville was about the idea of justice applied to Bartleby.29 If Melville did not allow the lawyer to practice charitable good works, it may be because he saw the distinction of justice and charity as self-serving and fake. Justice cannot be “done” to Bartleby, it cannot be “dispensed” to him; “justice done” and “justice dispensed” is justice commodified, handed down, and ended. The expectation of justice may be a form of impatience, and “justice done” an excuse for inattention. Hence Weil’s call for “the absolute identification of

390

peace and mind

justice and love,” failing which there is no “dignity of affliction in the afflicted.” Weil’s position is uniquely suited for seeing differences between the forms of waiting to which Melville and Emerson were inclined. Like Emerson, Weil worried about the relationship between the various social claims of religion: “What frightens me is the Church as a social structure. Not only on account of its blemishes, but from the very fact that is it something social” (52). Once an intense and enthusiastic social crusader herself, Weil came to fear the influence— which had been extremely attractive to her—of “collective emotions” (54): “Well, I do not want to be adopted into a circle, to live among people who say ‘we’ and to be part of an ‘us,’ to find I am ‘at home’ in any human milieu whatever it may be” (54). Perhaps she, like Emerson, preferred to sit in church before the service began, but hers was not a romantic need to resist conformity so much as it was a kind of renunciation—allied to her renunciation of food, and meant to heighten attentiveness and release the will.30 Emerson waited, but his was a waiting for: he was waiting for the anarchic emergence of self, for instinct or intuition to pour forth and motivate action. But if Weil was waiting for, it was for the unpredictable, perhaps impossible, and surely unspeakable intervention of grace. Her quiet was akin to Bartleby’s, though hers took in as well suspicions (better associated with Melville than with the scrivener) about the self-serving formulas of progressive thinking. Progress (as an idea and an interpretive desire) sets a circular and self-inflating logic into motion. What the lawyer most wants is not to help Bartleby but to reassure himself. He is a good man, but maintaining one’s own goodness is an evasion of what there is to do—or rather, not-do: it is a means of being busy with self-service. When mentioned at all, quietism tends, in our day, to be characterized as a kind of failure or as a way in which to fail. The quietist is afraid or too lazy to take action, join a cause, take a position, keep busy—do something. It is not difficult to see that doing is not always better than not-doing, that collective action (even when in service to a moral end) is not infrequently immoral, and that what motivates the distaste for quietism is an anxiety about our sense of

“not like any form of activity”

391

human progress. It is not difficult to understand, either, that ideas about human progress are essentially materialistic. The disquiet of materialists about inaction bespeaks their distrust of traditions, styles of thought, that do not—as materialism does—consider doing and not-doing within the framework of economic exchange; the accumulation of resources, pleasures, or prestige; and the use of power. In order to get or take (we like to say “earn” or “win”), and in order to affect (we like to say “improve”), we must do. And it is “we” rather than “I” who must do the doing, unless what I do (we call this “leadership”) leads toward effective collective action. The thinking, religious and philosophical, that informs quietism shares very close to nothing with such assumptions. Emerging from the mystery of grace, the anarchy of giving, quietism imagines a form of human existence in which actions are not measures of the self, and history is not a product of our intentions or an account of our progress (and our failures to progress). Rather than set goals, the quietist acknowledges responsibilities and acknowledges that the most important exceed our ability to live up to them. From this position, there is no rational passage back to a world conceived in narrative (let alone in teleological) terms. For most of us, that position seems an abyss, a place of anarchy, whose denizens lack self-regard and all the protocols that follow from it. Yet those who reach it experience the place as still and quiet—a space lacking the disorders that follow from rival claims. For where there are no claimants, there are no claims. The activity of quietists is to wait (though not to wait for anything) and (if others are about) to wait with. Emerson yearned to occupy this position but turned away, as even those who are most attracted to it tend eventually to do, under pressure to oppose immorality. He felt pressure, internal as well as external, to take action against an undoubted evil—slavery—and to rectify that clear injustice. Melville and Simone Weil were more able than Emerson was to shut out the voices, external and internal, always shouting news of what it would be moral to do now. All three of these significant and significantly modern thinkers, however, came independently to realize why quietism and the conditions of modernity should seem at odds. Why should quietism occasion so much disquiet?

392

peace and mind

IV In an essay bearing the title “Action Restricted,” another significantly modern thinker, Stéphane Mallarmé, considers a colleague, a writer, who came “to confide in me his need to act.”31 Wondering at the naïveté of this confidence, Mallarmé asks, “what did he mean exactly.” A writer, an artist, “unclenching his fists,” should break away from ordinary pursuits—from the “violent tête-à-tête” with mere ideas— into a “sedentary dream” divorced from motion, politics, “physical exertion,” and (Mallarmé adds, perhaps frowning) “the fiction” of the “continuous dazzling speedway” that has been ushered into modern life by “the machine at present in favor.” A “visitor” to Mallarmé’s home—the same colleague presumably—lights up and smokes his cigar “only…to effect motion,” and the host reflects that “acting,” plenitude,” and “haste” yield “the happy thought that you, being the cause of it, therefore exist: no one is sure of that in advance.” The threat of quiet—implicitly, of oblivion—is the motive for lighting up or speaking out. One talks to hear oneself talk, and acts to prove vitality or sheer resolve. In response to this spectacle, the artist must reserve “the right to accomplish nothing exceptional,” for being exceptional means engaging in “vulgar bustle.” He reserves the right, however, to pursue “exploits…committed while dreaming, so as to bother no one.” But what will have been accomplished, done, achieved, if such exploits are merely dreamed? “A delicate being,” the poet replies, will have, “or so I hope, suffered—.” Meanwhile “outside,” a traveler— again, the colleague?—hears a train “whistle’s distress”: “Probably,” he persuades himself, “we are going through a tunnel—the epoch—the last long one, snaking under the city to the all-powerful train station… .” The underground passage will last (how impatient you are), as long as your thoughtful preparation of the tall glass edifice wiped clean by Justice in flight. Suicide or abstention, doing nothing, why?—Time unique in the world, since because of an event I still have to

“not like any form of activity”

393

explain, there is no Present, no—a present does not exist… Lack the Crowd declares in itself, lack—of everything. Illinformed anyone who would announce himself his own contemporary, deserting, usurping with equal impudence, when the past ceased and when a future is slow to come, or when both are mingled perplexedly to cover up the gap. Except for the first Paris editions supposed to divulge some faith in daily nothingness, inept of the malady measures its duration by a fragment, important or not, of a century. The “last long” epoch of modernity, run by the “all-powerful” moving parts of machines, will drag on while subways sink, skyscrapers rise, and Justice on the run wipes all clean. Yet the epoch is not temporal, “present”: modernity is but a “lack—of everything” valuable. And so moderns concentrate such attention as we have (“how impatient you are,” the poet tells us parenthetically) on covering “up the gap” between past and future, leaving to the newspapers our “daily” expression of “faith in…nothingness.” This nothingness is not le Néant, the ghost that haunts Mallarmé’s poetry. Here the reference is to quantities measurable in units—Thirties, Sixties, Nineties—of an unimportant century. From this viewpoint to Christian Quietism is not a very long step, and at least one Mallarméan took it. T. S. Eliot would come to find liberal democracy, capitalism, fascism, socialism, and communism, one after the other, nothing but “a beehive” of “activity.”32 These were all ways, nearly indistinguishable, he thought, of making noise and keeping busy. “Teach us to sit still,” he prayed, to no result, as the 1920s roared to their end.33

394

peace and mind

Notes 1. George Kateb, Emerson and Self-Reliance (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995), 173. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text. 2. The debate over the relationship between Emerson’s concept of selfreliance and his participation in the Abolitionist movement is still unresolved. Some, like Kateb, argue for the complete incompatibility of self-reliance and externally compelled social organization; others attempt to bring a degree of consistency to Emerson’s positions. Even these latter readers, however, are often obliged to admit some degree of accommodation or “evolution” in Emerson’s thinking. For a good overview of Emerson’s changing level of commitment to Abolition, see Len Gougeon, “Historical Background,” in Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, ed. Len Gougeon and Joel Myerson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). For an argument that Emersonian self-reliance evolved to take in the material conditions under which individuals might think and act, see Michael Strysick, “Emerson, Slavery, and the Evolution of the Principle of Self-Reliance,” in The Emerson Dilemma: Essays on Emerson and Social Reform, ed. T. Gregory Garvey (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 139–69. I agree with John Carlos Rowe that Emerson likely “changed his mind regarding his earlier commitment to self-reliant man resisting the fashions and even the laws of his day for the sake transcendental genius.” But unlike Rowe, I would resist measuring the full value of self-reliance by the degree of its practical applicability to a particular political crisis. See At Emerson’s Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 22. 3. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2, Essays, first series, ed. Alfred R. Ferguson, Jean Ferguson Carr, and Joseph Slater (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1979), 37. Subsequent references, abbreviated CW, are cited parenthetically in the text. 4. Amy Schrager Lang argues that Emerson’s “doctrine of correspondence,” in which the self’s deepest promptings will necessarily express the “moral law” and so produce social harmony, controls and contains (or perhaps predetermines) the potentiality of individual-

“not like any form of activity”

395

ism: “With this grand democratic gesture, Emerson attributes divinity to all men. He also defines a position from which individualism becomes both the source of moral law and the guarantor of social harmony. If men would only attend to themselves, they would be led unerringly toward the truth—and they would all move in the same direction.” This doctrine is indeed a part of Emerson’s faith, but it offers no logical or narrative guarantee that intuition will always already be moral. It relies instead on a retrospective reinterpretation of morality, based upon the hitherto unreadable and unpredictable upwelling of inwardness. In other words, Emerson believed that individuality would produce truth, but only if the individual was left in an entirely unpredictable, and essentially risky, space in which anything might happen. See “‘The Age of the First Person Singular’: Emerson and Antinomianism,” ESQ 29.4 (1983): 171–83, at 176. 5. The question of Emerson’s flirtation, conscious or unconscious, with anarchic thinking is of long standing in Emerson criticism. See, for instance, Stephen E. Whicher, Freedom and Fate: An Inner Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953): “To see the whole quality of his rebellion against tradition, therefore, we need to look beneath the moralistic language in which he was always ready to formulate it and discern the radical egoistic anarchism it sanctioned and masked” (49). 6. Lawrence Buell, Emerson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 243. 7. “New England Reformers,” in The Political Emerson: Essential Writings on Politics and Social Reform, ed. Daniel M. Robinson (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2004), 79. 8. It is of course possible to praise individual action as an example of moral courage and clarity. But interpretations of the isolated act of courage often depend upon a later reading of its place in a narrative of struggle. The act is then measured by its effect on the narrative— was it useful? did it advance the cause?—rather than purely for its independence. 9. Emerson, “Natural History of the Intellect,” in vol. 12 of Collected Works, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–4), 56.

396

peace and mind

10. For an extraordinary discussion of what can be involved when Emerson invokes this personal “nothing,” see Sharon Cameron, Impersonality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 11. Dewey D. Wallace, Jr., Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology, 1525–1695 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), viii. 12. John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” in The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649, ed. Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 9. 13. There is a well-developed discussion among scholars of Emerson’s links to antinomianism. See Whicher, Freedom and Fate; Larzer Ziff, Puritanism in America: New Culture in a New World (New York: Viking, 1973); and Joel Porte, Representative Man: Ralph Waldo Emerson in His Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979). 14. The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–38: A Documentary History, ed. David D. Hall (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1968), 17. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text. 15. According to Dewey D. Wallace: “the relationship of Anne Hutchinson to Cotton is probably paradigmatic of the rise of Antinomianism altogether; spiritual preachers exalting grace begot in some auditors a taste for ever more extreme formulations of the role of grace in redemption until nature was entirely swallowed up in grace” (Puritans and Predestination, 117). 16. Amy Schrager Lang considers Emerson much more conservative than Hutchinson, less an antinomian than a proponent of individualism as a kind of social conformity: “Whereas Hutchinson claimed that sin was sin and assurance, assurance—that no crime, however deadly, could cast doubt on the election of the saint— Emerson assures his readers that a crime urged by the heart will surely turn out to be a virtue” (“Age of the First Person Singular,” 173). 17. One such interpretation is Christopher Sten’s 1974 essay arguing that Melville is responding directly to Emerson’s “The Transcendentalist”: “a comparative examination of the two suggests that [Melville] had read [the essay] with care, using Emerson’s idealist for his portrayal of the incommunicative Bartleby and Emerson’s materialist…

“not like any form of activity”

397

for his portrayal of the Wall Street lawyer.” See “Bartleby the Transcendentalist: Melville’s Dead Letter to Emerson,” Modern Language Quarterly 35 (1974): 30–44. 18. Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno” (1855), in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, vol. 9 of The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford, Herschel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1987), 77. 19. Most readers agree with Michael Paul Rogin’s claim that Benito Cereno is “haunted to death” by the memory of Babo, his severed head, and the deeper complications of slaveholding that he represents. See Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 220. 20. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 17. 21. Gerald L. Bruns, Maurice Blanchot: The Refusal of Philosophy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 32. 22. Blanchot, Disaster, 145. 23. See Kateb: “Still, it would be absurd for me to divorce self-reliance from being and acting or doing altogether. Emerson does not permit it. Rather, he makes active self-reliance lesser than mental self-reliance” (32). 24. See Moby-Dick, chap. 9: “Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonour!” (vol. 6 of Writings of Herman Melville, 48). 25. Giorgio Agamben, “Bartleby; or, On Contingency,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 245. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text. 26. Bruns, Maurice Blanchot, 119. 27. Bruns, Maurice Blanchot, 212. 28. Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Crauford (New York: Harper & Row, 1951), 115. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text.

398

peace and mind

29. The Confidence-Man speaks generally to the issue, particularly chap. 19, “A Soldier of Fortune,” in which the wounded “veteran” explains that his legs, now paralyzed, were ruined not in the Mexican War but in the Tombs, where he was being held as a material witness to a murder. The murderer, because he had “friends,” was acquitted, and the crippled witness, without money for bail, spent three years in prison, unable after the trial to resume his work as a cooper. 30. For a discussion of Weil’s anorexia, see Francine Du Plessix Gray, Simone Weil (New York: Viking, 2001). For a consideration of Bartleby as an anorexic, see Jane Desmarais, “Preferring Not To: The Paradox of Passive Resistance in Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby’,” Cahiers de la nouvelle 36 (2001): 25–39. 31. This and the following passages are taken from Mary Ann Caws’s translation of “L’Action restreinte” (1895), in Stéphane Mallarmé: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Caws (New York: New Directions, 1982), 77–80. 32. T.  S. Eliot, “Commentary,” The Criterion 11 (Jan. 1932): 273. He had remarked on the essential identity of communism and capitalism, in a Criterion “Commentary,” as early as Jan. 1925 (163). 33. T. S. Eliot, “Ash-Wednesday” (1930), I: 39, VI: 28.