Groping Towards Humanism
I finished Edward Said's Humanism and Democratic Criticism this afternoon, and for all of my own troubles remembering the title (often muddled as Democracy and Humanist Criticism or Democracy and Critical Humanism), it reminded me how much Said's work consistently engages me both personally and professionally.
My interest in humanism was recently sparked after reading some of the tributes (see here or especially here) for Denis Cosgrove after his death this past spring. Working within an academic discipline that is sometimes overburdened with a hyperspecific vocabulary, I find something compelling in work that insists on the necessity of trying to think without irony, if only for a moment. Humanism, to my mind, seems to hold out a way of knowing that is aware of its limits and insists on the value of speaking broadly and synthetically in the same breath. Humanism, as an epistemological commitment, risks a great deal (think, perhaps, of the complicity of humanist thought in the excesses of imperialism, colonialism, nationalism), but I think it still remains a viable alternative to post-structuralist theory.
Hence my interest in Said's work. Early on, he identifies the particular way in which he is approaching the topic of humanism: "As a useable praxis for intellectuals and academics who want to know what they are doing, what they are committed to as scholars, and who want also to connect there principles to the world in which they live as citizens."
Said, to his credit, insists throughout his writing on the public dimension of his intellectual work, but it's a public understood in a very particular way. Rather than write to an imagined audience, Said quotes Jonson in arguing that one should always imagine one's subject as reading over one's shoulder as a piece is being written. Said's formulation is, as one might expect, far more succinct, but has a great deal of bearing on my current academic orientation. His formulation suggests, I think, an incumbency to render the world in its own words; it is to move away from theory (not to move from theory as a way of knowing but theory as a mode of expression; the two are not, I think, the same), to move away from policy, and to move towards an engagement based on a belief in the essential commonality of human nature. Importantly, however, this is not to collapse the whole of human experience into a handful of terms (truth, liberty, justice, human nature, beauty).
It is rather to examine the particulars of human experience for precisely that which makes them particular. In Said's case, this requires a renewed emphasis on language, on the practice of philology. In Cosgrove's case, it may have been an insistence on the relationship between geography and vision. But in both, I hope, there is the suggestion that one can cultivate a critical perspective towards the past for the present.
Reading Said's chapter on Auerbach yesterday, I made a couple of notes in the margin as a kind of commitment to myself:
My interest in humanism was recently sparked after reading some of the tributes (see here or especially here) for Denis Cosgrove after his death this past spring. Working within an academic discipline that is sometimes overburdened with a hyperspecific vocabulary, I find something compelling in work that insists on the necessity of trying to think without irony, if only for a moment. Humanism, to my mind, seems to hold out a way of knowing that is aware of its limits and insists on the value of speaking broadly and synthetically in the same breath. Humanism, as an epistemological commitment, risks a great deal (think, perhaps, of the complicity of humanist thought in the excesses of imperialism, colonialism, nationalism), but I think it still remains a viable alternative to post-structuralist theory.
Hence my interest in Said's work. Early on, he identifies the particular way in which he is approaching the topic of humanism: "As a useable praxis for intellectuals and academics who want to know what they are doing, what they are committed to as scholars, and who want also to connect there principles to the world in which they live as citizens."
Said, to his credit, insists throughout his writing on the public dimension of his intellectual work, but it's a public understood in a very particular way. Rather than write to an imagined audience, Said quotes Jonson in arguing that one should always imagine one's subject as reading over one's shoulder as a piece is being written. Said's formulation is, as one might expect, far more succinct, but has a great deal of bearing on my current academic orientation. His formulation suggests, I think, an incumbency to render the world in its own words; it is to move away from theory (not to move from theory as a way of knowing but theory as a mode of expression; the two are not, I think, the same), to move away from policy, and to move towards an engagement based on a belief in the essential commonality of human nature. Importantly, however, this is not to collapse the whole of human experience into a handful of terms (truth, liberty, justice, human nature, beauty).
It is rather to examine the particulars of human experience for precisely that which makes them particular. In Said's case, this requires a renewed emphasis on language, on the practice of philology. In Cosgrove's case, it may have been an insistence on the relationship between geography and vision. But in both, I hope, there is the suggestion that one can cultivate a critical perspective towards the past for the present.
Reading Said's chapter on Auerbach yesterday, I made a couple of notes in the margin as a kind of commitment to myself:
That the world in which we live is made by men... Thus to understand the richness of language, of our inheritance. To affirm the richness of history, of historicism, is not to excuse the past or to reconstruct some triumphant grand narrative. The goal is, I think, to cultivate a critical attitude towards the present, an attitude which seeks to represent the richness of our experience in and through the world, but which also ranger far afield and sets itself against dogma, doxa, prejudice, or discrimination. It is, further, a perspective that does not admit a fixed methodology, but demands an accordingly rigorous intellectual and moral discipline. And in the end, in spite of it all, it is a perspective that remains invested in (risks fascination with) the world and our place in it.In no way do I have a final suggestion or even a proper close to the argument. But it might help to close with Said's final paragraph from his last essay on "The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals":
Overlapping yet irreconcilable experiences demand from the intellectual the courage to that that is what is before us, in almost exactly the way Adorno has throughout his work on music insisted that modern music can never be reconciled with the society that produced it, but in its intensely and often despairingly crafted form and content, music can act as a silent witness to the inhumanity all around. Any assimilation of individual musical work to its social setting is, says Adorno, false. I conclude with the thought that the intellectual's provisional home is the domain of an exigent, resistant, intransigent art into which, alas, one can neither retreat nor search for solutions. But only in that precarious exilic realm can one first truly grasp the difficulty of what cannot be grasped than go forth to try anyway.
Comments