Hyewon Ryu: "The Metropolitan Body in the Rise of the Early English Novel"

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A few years back, though not many, Professor Julie Choi here at Ewha Womans University asked if I could assist with one of her doctoral students in English literature, an especially gifted student, Ms. Hyewon Ryu (류혜원), who was working on the emergence of the English novel, and since I'm interested in literature, I agreed to serve as proofreader and occasional adviser.

That was a good decision, for I enjoyed working with Ms. Ryu, mostly offering editorial suggestions, but occasionally referring her to a book, e.g., Martin Jay's Downcast Eyes for the line Jay draws between Christianity's stress on God's clear, corrective vision of the individual and modern regulation of the body through observation that has been internalized. Whatever I might have contributed through such suggestions -- and there was little improvement for me to suggest -- Ms. Ryu recently submitted her thesis, "The Metropolitan Body in the Rise of the Early English Novel," and found it approved, making her now "Dr. Ryu." Here's the first paragraph of her "Abstract":

This thesis examines the eighteenth-century English novel in terms of the metropolitan body, molded in and by the discursive space of London. Viewing the body as both specific and collective, somatic and discursive, this thesis traces the interrelation between the construction of the novel and the body, particularly with regard to the city of London. The analysis is based upon the assumption that many strata coordinate the construction of the body as a nexus of discursive, spatial, and somatic operations. The eighteenth-century novel not only reflects the physicality of the body but shapes it through the production and consumption of discourses about the body. How the disruptive corporeality of the metropolitan body and its discipline configure the topography of London in the new form of the novel is the main concern of this thesis. Extending the Foucauldian framework of changing technologies of discipline, and incorporating the critique of everyday lived experience to the literary domain of the novel, this thesis views the structure of the eighteenth-century novel as corporeally and topographically figured.

Abstracts are always abstract. Her main point is an extension of Foucault's analysis of the way in which Modernity disciplined the body by subjecting it to continual observation, but she also draws upon the insights of Norbert Elias on the civilizing process. Now that I think of it, I ought to have directed her to Marcel Mauss's 1934 essay, "Techniques of the Body," in which he observes, "We no longer know how to squat." Well, I cannot think of everything, and perhaps not of this point in particular because, like modern folk everywhere, I'm too preoccupied with standing tall. Actually, I tend to slouch, but my teenage son, who stands straight, is working on disciplining my body by subjecting me to continual observation -- a domestic variant of Foucault's panopticon -- and correcting my slouching lack of discipline through his endless observations! Speaking of discipline and its lack, I've gotten off-topic. I wanted to add that despite the abstractness of Dr. Ryu's "Abstract," the thesis is in fact very easy to read -- well written, well supported, well done! And in spite of my inadequacies as informal adviser, Dr. Ryu mentions me in the "Acknowledgements":

I also appreciate the time and effort Horace Jeffery Hodges has spent carefully reviewing my thesis.

Dr. Ryu didn't really need much of my help, but anyway, if others out there are interested in the rise of the English novel, this thesis is a good place to start. I suppose it'll be in Ewha's library.

Oh, that image above! Ned Ward's London Spy is one of the early texts Dr. Ryu analyzes . . .

Bernstein on Kolakowski's "Big Lie"

Richard Bernstein

(Master Media Speakers Bureau)

I guess that mainstream media ain't dead yet, or I wouldn't be learning so much from it. Yesterday was Ignatius applying Dostoyevsky to Putin; today is Bernstein applying Kolakowski to Iran.

I first read Leszek Kolakowski in Martin Jay's U.C. Berkeley seminar nearly 30 years ago, and except for excerpts since then, I've read little . . . though I keep promising myself to read more because every time that I read words that he wrote, I feel that I've learned something very important, such as what he said about "the big lie" -- which Richard Bernstein summarized a couple of days ago in his New York Times "Letter from America" column, "In Tehran, Shades of Tiananmen" (July 1, 2009):

Years ago, the Polish-born philosopher Leszek Kolakowski explained the remarkable adherence of totalitarian dictators to the big lie, which Mr. Kolakowski distinguished from the ordinary political mendacity -- an excellent recent example of which was the claim by Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina that he was enjoying a respite by hiking in the Appalachian Mountains when he was with his mistress in Argentina.

The ordinary political lie, in Mr. Kolakowski's view, didn't seek to erase "the distinction between truth and falsity," while the totalitarian big lie does. It defines truth as what the holders of power say it is, and, in this sense, as Mr. Kolakowski wrote in an 1983 article in Commentary Magazine, it is "the very core of a political system, the heart of a new civilization."

"By training people in this confusion," Mr. Kolakowski wrote, "and by inoculating them to believe that nothing is true in itself" it will "produce a new 'socialist man,' devoid of will and of moral resistance."

Kolakowski was speaking of Soviet-style socialism of the totalitarian sort, but Bernstein wonders if the concept can be extended further, a question stemming partly from his conversation with a Yale history professor:

"The Iranians are telling medium-sized lies," Timothy Snyder, a professor of East European history at Yale said in a conversation this week. The main thrust of the Iranian propaganda is to blame external enemies for internal problems, a practice, Mr. Snyder said, that was first used on a grand scale in mid-19th-century Europe, well before the era of total thought control.

Still, there seem to be more than faint echoes of the classic big lie in the case of Mr. Ahmadinejad and the actions of the security services.

"One reason the lie has to be big," Mr. Snyder said, "is that people will feel that if their leaders must have a lot of confidence to tell a lie that big, they are either crazy or they have a powerful security force behind them."

This doesn't mean that the lies Iran’s leaders are telling are going to work. Indeed there are plenty of signs that they won't. At the same time, events in Iran have proved that the leaders are eager to control information and they do have a powerful and ruthless security force behind them.

I wonder if the big lie can ever truly work anymore. Contemporary media is making the control of information significantly more difficult. Even something as 'silly' as "twittering" turned out to play a serious role in relaying information through short "tweets." Imagine how much more the young Chinese today would know about the killing of demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in Beijing 20 years ago if the new media that we have now had been available then. I don't think that any totalitarian system can erase "the distinction between truth and falsity" anymore because such a system requires "absolute control over every living soul" -- as Leonard Cohen puts it in "The Future" -- and that sort of system cannot be maintained without enormous expense of wealth, time, and energy against the tides of democracy.

As for those of us who belong to the more sophisticated West, we disdain the crude attempts at an erasure of "the distinction between truth and falsity" used in Soviet Russia, Communist China, or Islamist Iran, for we've developed a far subtler, much more efficient means: a quotidian relativism of everyday life.

Paradoxically, then, the West is best. Relatively speaking.

Expat Living: "Eyes, I's and lustful desires"

My Expat Seoul's New Dawn?

(Image from Wikipedia)

Today's Korea Herald has my column in its Expat Living pages, along with the columns of such better known figures as Robert Koehler, aka The Marmot, who -- as he tells his readers -- "is the administrator of The Marmot's Hole blog," a source of enough wonder, information, and bitchiness to keep the one's idle curiosity idling for hours.

Or you can also let yourself be more briefly distracted by my article in the Expat Living, but since the Korea Herald maintains the unusual practice of preventing netizens from linking directly to online articles, I can link only to the newspaper itself, but if you follow the link and let your eyes and cursor scroll briefly down the left margin, you'll find the link to Expat Living, where the section's most recent columns will appear . . . for a few days, perhaps.

The man organizing this new section, Matthew Lamers, has encouraged those of us with blogs or similar online sites to publicize our collective efforts and even to re-post our own columns after they appear in the Korea Herald, so I'm posting mine today, for the online site published it yesterday evening and the paper's hard copy has already been delivered this morning.

What you'll read here is my original copy, but if you want to read the edited version, which differs a bit, then take a look at the Korea Herald's Expat Living section . . . if it hasn't been pushed out of sight by the time you read this.

Originally, I wanted to call my column "Expatiate" and today's headline "Eyesore," but the editors had other ideas, and that's their call, so they're calling the column "Jeffery Hodges on Language" and today's headline "Eyes, I's and lustful desires," which is not bad, actually, and might get more attention than my original punning title.

Anyway, here is my original copy:

Expatiate: "Eyesore"

If language really is a virus from outer space, as William S. Burroughs claims, then my words could prove contagious. Despite that risk, I write the Language column for Expat Living.

I interpret this to mean that I can write about anything I please so long as I use language. That sounds straightforward enough, but there is one restriction. I am told to avoid overusing the word "eye."

Apparently, well-written journalism shuns this word, which is news to me. Whatever happened to eyewitness reports? I do not mean to imply that eyewitnesses are entirely dependable, for the eyes often fool us. Think of a magician's sleight-of-hand trick in making things disappear before our very eyes!

That happens even when our eyes are striving to perceive the truth. More disturbing, if religious thinkers are right, our eyes actively deceive and mislead us. The Bible's First Letter of John warns against "the lust of the eyes," for their lustful desires turn us toward worldly things.

Saint Augustine, commenting on this very letter, cites that same scriptural expression to disparage ocular curiosity, which distracts one from proper, spiritual pursuits and focuses one’s attention upon worldly affairs. In his infamous Confessions, he even provides an example of curiosity gone disturbingly wrong, describing how it draws his fascinated gaze to the sight of a spider entangling flies that have rushed into its web.

Lest one imagine distrust of the eyes to be a purely religious concern, the historian Martin Jay has shown in Downcast Eyes that even many secular thinkers denigrate vision. The atheist existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, coined the expression "the gaze" in Being and Nothingness to describe how the observing eyes of strangers transform us into mere objects in their field of sight.

So great a cloud of witnesses would darken anyone's view of vision. Perhaps Expat Living's censure of the word "eye" has merit: "eye" as eyesore!

Yet, the word has also a venerable history and is beloved by poets. Consider W.B. Yeats' eyeable poem A Drinking Song:

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

Lovely poem. And yet . . . is it true? Has not Yeats perhaps attributed too much significance to the eye? Arguably, he has. If so, has he thereby overused the word? Arguably, he has. Ought I therefore misquote the poem? Arguably, I should:

Booze comes in at the mouth
And lust comes in at the ear;
We'll not know north from south
If we grow too old on beer.
I lift the glass to my mouth;
I look at you, and I leer.

Just look how this radical eye surgery has marred Yeats' formerly lovely poem! All that now remains is a none-eyed leer! Though the rhyme scheme works rather better. After all, "truth" does not truly rhyme with "mouth," does it? I have therefore excised that eye-rhyme, which ought to make the Expat Living authorities happy.

Speaking of whom, those same individuals will doubtless also be very pleased to hear that further columns of Expatiate will avoid overusing the forbidden word "eye."

(The restricted word is not "eye," but "I." - Editor)

Ah . . . I see. Er, this columnist sees. That being so, today's column has apparently wrong-footed everybody. My most sincere apologies offered to all who were misled through my egregious misunderstanding. Uh . . . will my column for Expat Living be allowed to continue?

Regular readers will note that I've cannibalized Gypsy Scholar to write this column. I promise to continue masticating bites of my blog to be incorporated within future language columns for Expat Living, so you might as well get used to this.

Finally, a practical role for my impractical blog...

Blumenberg: On Stoic Teleology and Limits to Curiosity

Luca Giordano, The Death of Seneca (1684)

Ordered by Nero to 'be taken care of'...

(Image from Wikipedia)

Readers will recall yesterday's long quote from Martin Jay's review of Blumenberg's Legitimacy book. I want to call attention to Jay's summary of Blumenberg's argument with respect to the Stoics:

With the Stoics, Blumenberg argues, came a further obstacle to unlimited curiosity. Far more skeptical than their predecessors about the possibility of achieving a human version of divine truth, they preached against the inevitable disappointment that seeking it would engender. Instead of an open-minded and open-eyed contemplation of the world, they counseled a therapeutic form of ataraxia, in which disillusionment is avoided by a preemptive refusal to seek the truth at all. (Martin Jay, "Review: The Legitimacy of the Modern Age by Hans Blumenberg; Robert M. Wallace," History and Theory, Vol. 24, No. 2. (May, 1985), p. 190. Accessed via JSTOR.)

Stoics were not entirely consistent on the vexed issue concerning a legitimate care for expanding one's knowledge. Blumenberg notes that the Roman Stoic Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Seneca the Younger, aka Seneca) uses teleology both to justify seeking after knowledge and to restrict seeking after knowledge. On justifying the desire for knowledge, Seneca says:

Nature has given us an inquisitive spirit (curiosum ingenium), and being aware of her own skill and beauty she has brought us forth as spectators of the great spectacle of things, since she would have sacrificed the enjoyment of herself if she had displayed her works so vast, so wonderful, so artfully constructed, so luxuriant, and so various, to empty solitude. That you may understand that she wants to be investigated and not only contemplated, notice the position she has assigned to us: She has set us in her center and given us a panoramic view in all directions, and she has not only given man an upright posture but also an elevated head resting on a flexible neck, so that he can follow the course of the stars from rising to setting and let his face turn with the movements of the heavens. (Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, pages 260-261; citing (p. 623, n. 37) Seneca, De otio, c. 32; see Epistulae ad Lucilium 94, 56.)

Blumenberg remarks that "In such a [teleological] context curiositas still cannot carry a negative value; in the observation of the heavens it is the very highest objects that compel our intellectual curiosity (curiosos nos esse cogunt)" (Legitimacy, p. 261). The Latin expression is taken by Blumenberg from Book 7 of Seneca's Naturales quaestiones (VII 25, 5; cf. Legitimacy, p. 623, n. 38) and would seemingly allow for rather open study of nature, except that it does not, as Blumenberg notes:

But in the 88th Letter to Lucilius, Seneca uses the same teleological premise to argue for theoretical self-restriction, for the economy of necessary knowledge: "Plus scire velle quam sit satis, intemperantiae genus est" [To want to know more than is sufficient is a form of intemperance]. (Legitimacy, p. 261)

Teleology, thus, is a two-edged sword, cutting two ways, both for and against curiosity. The ancient assumption of a teleologically arranged cosmos allowed for some pursuit of knowledge through curiosity, a legitimate care for that to which one's senses and intellect were fitted but simultaneously restricted that same curiosity if it sought knowledge beyond what was sufficient, namely, beyond that for which one's senses and intellect were fitted.

The ancient assumption was that the cosmos could be trusted, and even skepticism retained a residue of trust in the cosmos, as Blumenberg argues in his chapter on that theme (Legitimacy, pp. 269-277). As Blumenberg notes elsewhere in his comments upon this same theme:

Trust in the teleological background hypostatized as Pronoia [providence] and Logos [word, reason] makes possible indifference as a mode of behavior toward everything that impinges on man from outside. An apocryphal remark ascribed to Ptolemy characterizes the basic Hellenistic concern with being unconcerned in such a way as to subsume even the Stoa in this totality: Inter altos altior est qui non curat in cuius manu sit mundus [Among the profound, the profoundest is he who does not care in whose hand the world is]. This multiply significant formula indicates what the Hellenistic attempts to unburden man metaphysically had in common and designates at the same time what, in the sense of the late term curiositas, is superfluous concern, extending beyond what is possible and needful for man. (Legitimacy, p. 258)

As Blumenberg notes, the origin of the quote attributed to the astronomer Ptolemy is unknown but that "it is unlikely that the philosopher and writer of [that great astronomical work of antiquity, the] Almagest was its author" (Legitimacy, p. 623, n. 28). It nevertheless reflects the ancient assumption underlying restriction on curiosity, the assumption that one could trust the cosmos. Ironically, Blumenberg might point out, the Christian theology of high scholasticism broke open the possibility of unrestricted curiosity by its nominalistic destruction of any teleological trust in the cosmos.

More on that another time. For now, I'd like to note -- so that I don't forget it -- Blumenberg's citation of a study on that "late term curiositas":

On the verbal history of curiosus and curiositas, see A. Labhardt, "Curiositas. Notes sur l'histoire d'un mot et d'une notion," Museum Helveticum 17 (1960): 206-210. (Legitimacy, p. 623, n. 29)

By the way, concerning the apocryphal quote attributed to Ptolemy:

Inter altos altior est qui non curat in cuius manu sit mundus [Among the profound, the profoundest is he who does not care in whose hand the world is]

Blumenberg's translator, Robert M. Wallace, reminds us that "curiositas, 'curiosity,' derives from curo, to care" (Legitimacy, p. 262, n. a).

Hence, the ancient view might be that curiosity, by caring for things beyond its concern, leads into unnecessary cares, from which it must be cured.

Blumenberg's Legitimacy of the Modern Age: Reviewed by Martin Jay (On Curiosity)

Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration

Curious Odyssey through the Pillars of Hercules...

(Image from Bibliothèque nationale de France)

The Christmas season is upon us, the season of giving, and dozens of students are generously giving me their final papers.

Well, I believe in the Christmas spirit of reciprocity, so each one of these same students will soon be receiving something particularly fitting in response.

Merry Christmas, O My Students...

Anyway, due to this holiday cheer, I won't be writing much this morning, nor perhaps for several mornings, though I'll keep posting daily snippets.

Today, a long snippet. First, though, I should inform you that I contacted my old history professor Martin Jay because I wanted to get a copy of his review of Blumenberg's Legitimacy book. I read it some 20 years ago but couldn't recall where I had found it. Jay wrote back:

I was very interested to hear that you are working on Blumenberg, a thinker who definitely repays the effort it takes to read him. I don't know of anything as penetrating on the theme of curiosity as his discussion in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age . . . . As for my own review of the Blumenberg book, it first appeared in History and Theory back in about 1975 [sic: 1985] and then was republished in my collection Fin-de-siecle Socialism a few years later. I don't have an electronic copy to send as an attachment, but if you can't find it anywhere, I would be happy to send a reprint.

Once I knew where to look for it, the search became simpler -- though I could have located it anyway through a Google search but didn't want to deal with logging in to the university's document retrieval system. Well, I had to log in anyway, and I've easily found the review. Jay does such an excellent job of summarizing Blumenberg's thesis that I will simply quote the five central paragraphs on curiosity:

[I]t was the unleashing of curiosity, so Blumenberg contends in the third major section of his book, that marks the modern sensibility. Turning a remarkable amount of erudition on the question of why that unleashing took so long, Blumenberg presents a brilliant account of what he calls the "trial" of theoretical curiosity. Theory in its classical guise was, as we have already had occasion to note, contemplative rather than experimental, which meant that the ancients refrained from doing more than passively "reading" a cosmos whose objective existence they did not doubt. What made it even more inimical to the full unleashing of curiosity was the assumption that such contemplation could produce human happiness, an assumption itself tied to the belief, still held by many medieval thinkers, that knowledge of the Truth was the road to contentment. In this sense, both classical and medieval theory could be called "pragmatic," for its ultimate goal was not knowledge per se, but the happiness its possession would bring. But this kind of pragmatism, which perhaps can be traced back as far as the Socratic quest for the good life, proved hostile to any kind of knowledge that does not translate into personal fulfillment. Thus, Blumenberg concludes, it created an impediment, more passive than active, to the complete valorization of human curiosity no matter what its purpose.

With the Stoics, Blumenberg argues, came a further obstacle to unlimited curiosity. Far more skeptical than their predecessors about the possibility of achieving a human version of divine truth, they preached against the inevitable disappointment that seeking it would engender. Instead of an open-minded and open-eyed contemplation of the world, they counseled a therapeutic form of ataraxia, in which disillusionment is avoided by a preemptive refusal to seek the truth at all. For the Stoics, Blumenberg writes, "intellectual curiosity is now the disastrous drive that misleads us into violating the boundary settlement between the human and the divine sphere" (264). Although Christian thinkers like Augustine had to work their way through the skeptical implications of this doctrine, they nonetheless did not come to accept theoretical curiosity as a viable alternative. For now the road to happiness was understood to be through faith, not philosophy and certainly not science. Augustine was particularly uneasy about worldly curiosity because of its potential to distract man from his proper sacred concerns. Moreover, insofar as legitimate knowledge comes only from its rightful author -- here the Platonic residue was still potent -- the Truth can be grasped not by examining the world through the fallible senses, but rather through the unmediated acceptance of God's word. What Augustine damned as "ocular desire" (312), because it led man into temptation, was thus as far removed from the classical emphasis on contemplative vision as the modern stress on its experimental counterpart.

Although the Scholastics were poised ambiguously between Aristotle's affirmation of a contemplative knowledge of the cosmos and Augustine's warning against all curiosity as a vice, it was not really until the modern age that the verdict of the "trial" was finally rendered in favor of unconstrained curiosity. One major reason for the change was the uncoupling of happiness and salvation from knowledge, which followed the growing popularity of the doctrine of predestination prepared by the nominalists and brought to a head by Calvin. For if man's redemption had nothing to do with his practical life on earth, then it was unnecessary to be so anxious about the distracting effects of curiosity about allegedly superfluous matters. In addition, the growing hiddenness of God in the early modern era meant the world could no longer be passively read as a divine text. A Deus Absconditus meant a "speechless" world lacking the marks of the divine word, a world as a result open to man's own constructs and manipulations.

The vindication of curiosity was therefore closely linked to the emergence of self-assertion as an alternative answer to the still unresolved Gnostic question of the meaning of an imperfect and corrupt world. Only when the qualitative knowledge assumed to be the analogue of divine wisdom was abandoned as a goal and replaced by an inevitably imperfect knowledge expressed in quantitative terms could modern science begin. Only then could man break through the forbidding Pillars of Hercules standing as the image of transgression as far back as the Odyssey and embark, as the famous title page of Bacon's Instauratio Magna implies, on uncharted seas.

Moreover, only when personal happiness was decisively severed from the collective pursuit of a truth that could be sought but never completely won, only when the hope for immortality was displaced from the individual soul to the species as a whole, only then could curiosity be utterly without limits. As such, it could then be extended from nature to man himself by philosophers like Hobbes and projected by others like Feuerbach into a desire to know what is not yet knowable. Faust's famous pact with the devil, an early modern invention that expressed a still ambiguous attitude towards the "vice" of curiosity, could ultimately become a triumphant symbol of modern man's insatiable desire to know, which Freud would later naturalize into a sublimation of an infantile sexual curiosity to see. (Martin Jay, "Review: The Legitimacy of the Modern Age by Hans Blumenberg; Robert M. Wallace," History and Theory, Vol. 24, No. 2. (May, 1985), pp. 190-191. Accessed via JSTOR.)

The irony in Blumenberg's moral tale lies in the way that Christianity liberated the 'vice' of curiosity from its Ancient and Medieval constraints by its dissociating human happiness from any human effort, a feat achieved first through the late Medieval Nominalists but carried forward by the Protestant Reformation, especially by the Calvinists.

In short, Blumenberg argues that modern science emerged not through Christianity's conception of a rational God but through its conception of an irrational one.

Martin Jay: Briefly on Blumenberg's Trial of Theoretical Curiosity

Martin Jay

(Image: History Dept, UC Berkeley)

One of the greatest influences on my thinking in the early years of my long 'gradual' study at Berkeley was the thought of intellectual historian Martin Jay, whose influence impressed itself upon me in the several graduate seminars that I took under him, and although I was certainly not a brilliant student, he nevertheless took a personal interest in helping my intellectual development, and I owe him a great debt of gratitude for two things, a grounding in European intellectual history and a sharpening of my critical skills.

Jay has also written the occasional passage on Hans Blumenberg's study of curiosity's trial and afflictions. In his book Downcast Eyes, Jay writes:

One of the preconditions for the arrival of the scientific revolution, as Blumenberg has suggested, was the long process of liberating human curiosity from its pejorative status as a frivolous distraction from man's meditation on the wisdom of the past, divinely or classically inspired. Augustine's hostility to ocular desire exemplified a general distrust of the temptations of "idle curiosity" and the appetite for dangerous new experiences it whetted. Once what Blumenberg calls the "trial of curiosity" was over and the defendant acquitted, the unleashing of the mastering, exploring, scrutinizing potential in sight meant that modern science could begin -- for that science was a far more active and interventionist enterprise than the contemplation of the ancients. As such, it roughly paralleled those other great exploring ventures of the early modern era, the voyages to unknown lands, which were themselves fueled in large measure by visually charged curiosity. The mapping impulse, which Alpers has linked to the Dutch art of describing because of its valorization of flatness, can also be seen as a more active search for controlling and dominating the earth, not very different from the imposition of the Albertian grid on visual space in paintings. (Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), page 63)

Jay's focus on Blumenberg's argument concerning how the trial of theoretical curiosity ended in declaring the "defendant acquitted" and thereby unleashing human curiosity's "scrutinizing potential" for modern science interests me, given my background in the history of science, but between 1994, when Jay's Downcast Eyes was written, and 2006, when Jay published Songs of Experience, his view on the trial's result may have shifted somewhat:

Augustinian inner experience was, to be sure, not yet directed at encounters with the profane world -- in fact, his abhorrence of the sin of curiositas led to the opposite outcome -- and memory could be marshaled in the service of a more impersonal Platonic anamnesis. Although there were certainly medieval movements that implicitly valued experience over following rules, such as the communal order of Franciscans who imitated Jesus's life of poverty and humility, they were still relatively isolated occurrences, often losing out in the struggle against dogmatic church authority. It was not really until the dawning of what we now like to call the modern age that the "trial" of experience, like that of the curiosity whose comparable valorization is traced by Blumenberg in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, ended in an acquittal for the defendant, or more precisely, with a hung jury that continues to debate its merits to this day. With the erosion of trust in Scholastic rationalism, the loss of the Catholic Church's corner on spiritual power, and the reversal of the hierarchy of the Ancients and the Moderns, modernity sought a new ground of legitimacy. As Jürgen Habermas has put it, "Modernity can and will no longer borrow the criteria from the models supplied by another epoch; it has to create its normativity out of itself." (Martin Jay, Songs of Experience Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pages 19-20)

In Songs of Experience, Jay speaks of two trials stemming from Augustine's thinking, a trial of experience and a trial of curiosity, and may imply that both trials ended in a "hung jury" -- though I'm not certain how far he wants to take the analogy. Perhaps I'll ask him.

Meanwhile, on this dark, early, mid-December morning, with the northern nights lengthening and the semester drawing to a close, I leave you to experience your own curious thoughts as I head off to prepare my day...

Paul Berman on Tariq Ramadan: Part 6

Carlos Schwabe, La mort du fossoyeur

Digging the Grave of the West?

(Image from Wikipedia)

Now, Paul Berman tells us clearly: It's all about Rousseau:

Salafi reformism, judging from Qutb and Ramadan, turns out to be a kind of Rousseauianism. There is a pure and authentic way of living, which is the Muslim way. And yet the Muslims, who were born free, are everywhere in chains. The Muslims are oppressed by what Ramadan calls "a Western aggressive cultural invasion" -- which is the kind of language that Qutb liked to use half a century ago (and al-Banna before him). A very great danger arises from the Western "colonization of minds," in Ramadan's phrase, by which he means the influence of television. This was Qutb's worry exactly, even in the pre-television age, which he described as "the cultural influences which had penetrated my mind." And so the road back to the pure and authentic way of living must be found. ("The Islamist, the Journalist, and the Defense of Liberalism," page 25)

Or maybe it's only a little about Rousseau. I was expecting rather more than this, yet the point seems not analytical but analogical.

Sayyid Qutb may be influenced by Romantic and Symbolist poets, Hassan al-Banna may be similar to the Romantics in his apocalyptic revolt against Modernity, and Tariq Ramadan might be 'romanticizing' about a postmodern, European Islam, but do any of these various manifestations of 'the Romantic' suggest any serious 'Rousseauianism'? Berman's terminology is more gesture than analysis.

I suppose that one could call this a Bermanian trope, in the sense that Martin Jay explained to me years ago, an oft-repeated figure of speech that pre-analytically shapes our way of seeing historical processes (if I recall, but Marty can correct me). Perhaps Berman is predisposed toward seeing irrationalist revolts against Modernity (or Postmodernity) as Rousseauian. Perhaps it's only a bit more substantive than Percy Bysshe Shelley's poetic title The Revolt of Islam. Stanza 43 in Canto 2 can sound rather Rousseauian:

Can man be free if woman be a slave?
Chain one who lives, and breathes this boundless air,
To the corruption of a closèd grave!
Can they, whose mates are beasts condemned to bear
Scorn heavier far than toil or anguish, dare
To trample their oppressors? In their home,
Among their babes, thou knowest a curse would wear
The shape of woman -- hoary Crime would come
Behind, and Fraud rebuild Religion's tottering dome.

Talk of chains, slavery, and a free-waving goodbye to all that grave stuff certainly reminds one of Rousseau, but freeing women wasn't what exactly Rousseau had in mind even if the trope of chains, slavery, and freedom is Rousseauian. Similarly, Berman might be using a Rousseauian trope.

Or could he, instead, be thinking along the lines of Hans Blumenberg "reoccupation thesis," but in a different historical context, implying that salafi reformism, like many political ideologies of revolt, 'reoccupies' a position left vacant by the departure of genuine Rousseauianism.

Oh, maybe ... but Berman doesn't say, and perhaps I'm making too much of something that Berman seems to have spent little time on, for neither Rousseau nor Rousseauianism ever surfaces again in Berman's essay. Instead, we get Tariq Ramadan as a postmodernist ... of sorts:

Ramadan, being a man of the post-modern era, prefers to sound like a liberation theologian from Latin America. Or he sounds like one of his anti-globalist allies, railing against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. He cites the Greco-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, the philosopher of left-wing "autonomy," which is Ramadan's way of indulging in his own anarchist-like flights of fancy. Or Ramadan sounds like a moderate reformer in the conventional civic and not the salafi sense -- like someone who has a few practical and well-intentioned proposals to make on behalf of marginalized populations. ("The Islamist, the Journalist, and the Defense of Liberalism," page 26)

But don't be misled by Ramadan's terminology, says Berman:

Yet the [post-]modern rhetorics always turn out to be translations, in one fashion or another, of Qur'anic concepts. They are worldly exteriors with Islamic interiors . . . . Ramadan invokes civil libertarian arguments in order to defend the autonomy of his reconstructed Muslim community. He invokes the anti-globalist rhetoric of his left-wing allies in order to defend the mainstream Islamist movements in the Muslim world. And so forth, throughout the entire modern [or post-modern] terminology. ("The Islamist, the Journalist, and the Defense of Liberalism," page 26)

Nevertheless, thinks Berman, neither Ramadan nor Qutb have intended to deceive us by this:

None of this is meant to deceive anyone. These people are trying to conduct a thorough "reform" not of the world, but of Islam -- a campaign to ensure that Islamic thinking will expand to match each new innovation of modern life without losing the connection to the original revelation. So they look for modern concepts, and for Qur'anic equivalents, and they fill the modern with the Qur'anic. And with all of this in hand, they set about posing their challenges to the unreformed Muslims, and to the modern, non-Muslim world. ("The Islamist, the Journalist, and the Defense of Liberalism," pages 26-27)

If this is so, then Islam itself (in my opinion) will likely be transformed in its translation from older Muslim terminology to contemporary non-Muslim terminology. The result still might not be something that non-Muslims like, but it could be an entirely different Islam. Why, then, are some critics like Caroline Fourest and Paul Landau so panicky about Ramadan and his putative intentions? Here -- according to Berman -- is why:

Exactly why the panicky critics harbor these suspicions ought to be easily understood. The Muslim emigration has turned out to be one of history's largest events, and in scattered regions across the whole of Western Europe, old-stock populations nowadays wake up to discover that people from the Muslim world have suddenly come to dominate this or that neighborhood or town, and Arabic or Turkish has begun to outpace some of the smaller European languages, and here and there Islamist groups are demanding censorship of one thing or another, or are demanding gender-segregated beaches, or the curricular demise of Voltaire or Darwin, or an end to history instruction on the crimes of Nazism. And there are always sermons by one or another exotically costumed Islamic scholar fantasizing about a Muslim conquest of Europe and the world, which therefore can be cited as evidence of a giant conspiracy. And it is true that, in Europe, the Muslim Brotherhood and similar groups are prospering among the immigrant populations, not to mention Qutb's radical fringe groups, which are thoroughly terrifying; and true that Ramadan is theorizing the Muslim advance; and true that Ramadan wants his Muslim counter-culture to promote the mainstream Islamists elsewhere in the world. ("The Islamist, the Journalist, and the Defense of Liberalism," page 28)

The fears, therefore, are neither baseless nor irrational. Still, thinks Berman, one need not situate Ramadan here:

Only none of this [about Ramadan] needs to be interpreted as a fifth column acting on the [Muslim] Brotherhood's secret plan. Mostly Ramadan's worldwide ambition appears to be something else entirely: the dream of a Western Islam, in his own salafi reformist version, taking the lead among Muslim currents everywhere; the dream of Western Islam, in his version of it, becoming the center, instead of a faraway outpost, of the larger Muslim world. But that is not a millenarian eschatology. ("The Islamist, the Journalist, and the Defense of Liberalism," page 28)

Does Berman therefore think that we have nothing to fear from Ramadan? Let's see where this goes, as we follow Berman's lead ... tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow...