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by
Kenan Malik
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December 2 - December 11, 2022
It is paradise without a deity or a theology, a paradise not discovered outside, but realized within.
The Silk Road ran from the Chinese seaboard to the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. It was not a single road but a network of trade routes, extending some four thousand miles. First constructed in the Han Dynasty, around the first century BCE, it became the superhighway of the ancient world, linking the civilizations of China, India, Persia, Arabia, Greece and Rome. Along it were traded gold, jade, spices and, of course, silk. Along it were traded, too, ideas, philosophies and religions. It was along the Silk Road that Buddhism came to China.
There was no burning bush on Mount Sinai. There was no resurrection three days after the crucifixion. And there was no Angel Gibreel in a cave on Mount Hira. But the belief that there was has, in each case, helped shape not just a faith but a moral outlook too.
The first ever philosophical novel, and the first to strand its hero upon a desert island, there are few books that today lie as neglected as Hayy Ibn Yaqzan and yet historically have been more influential. Translated into Latin in 1671, and later into English, it became a bestseller in Europe, influencing novelists and philosophers, its echo to be heard in books such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and in concepts including the tabula rasa and the noble savage that helped shape the Enlightenment.
Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 and the Vandals did so again in 455, events that shocked contemporaries and signalled the disintegration of Roman authority.
In 1277, just three years after Aquinas’ death, many of his doctrines were denounced as heretical by both the Bishop of Paris and the Archbishop of Canterbury. The universities of Paris and Oxford banned much of his teaching. Yet within forty years Pope John XXII had made Thomas into a saint. The shifting fortunes of Aquinas following his death, journeying from heretic to saint within half a century, reveal the difficulties faced in interweaving pagan philosophy and Christian theology.
The Church had debased itself and sullied the moral landscape by confusing its secular and religious roles, by fusing the vengeful sword and the pastoral crook. Dante’s was an astonishing attack on the Papacy, though explicable given the political turmoil in Florence and his exile from the city. It was also an understanding of good and evil distinct from the Augustinian view that had shaped Christian attitudes for a millennium.
The most important of these early collectors was the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca, known in English as Petrarch, who is of ten called the ‘father of humanism’. Petrarch it was who coined the term ‘the Dark Ages’ to describe the millennium that separated the end of antiquity and the beginnings of the Renaissance.
The Renaissance was not created, like the Christian universe, ex nihilo, but emerged from an age that was already vibrant and creative, and that had already rediscovered the philosophical and literary legacy of Greece and Rome.
The beauty and the art they desired they found in Plutarch and Cicero, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Lucian, Virgil and Livy, Horace and Homer. They devoured those texts of which Scholastics had little knowledge, and for which they had even less respect: essays, letters, histories, biographies. And when it came to philosophy, the humanists were enthused less by Aristotle’s dry treatises than by Plato’s stylish dialogues. They established a new model of intellectual excellence that emphasized literature, philology, oratory, history, ethics and politics – the studia humanitatis, or
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‘dignity of man’.
In contrast to the traditional Christian view of humans as fallen creatures unable to redeem themselves by their own works, a view to which even the most rational and optimistic of believers such as Aquinas and Dante subscribed, humanists saw them as self-creating agents, free to transform themselves and the world through their actions.
‘Here I stand. I can do no other.’ Martin Luther’s famous response to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, defending his right to challenge the authority of the Pope on the basis of his personal convictions, sounds to a modern reader like a ringing endorsement of personal conscience, individual freedom and free will.
Luther’s thunderstorm story is in keeping with the Christian tradition of theatrical conversions to a life of faith, such as that of Paul and of Augustine. As with Paul and Augustine, the drama of a sudden religious transformation provided a means of making sense of a longstanding personal trauma, a personal trauma that came also to have historical resonance because the psychological agony of the individual mirrored a deep-rooted social distress.
The irony of the Renaissance was that its beauty and light emerged from the depths of continental darkness and despair. But that darkness and despair left an indelible mark, especially as the plague returned regularly well into the sixteenth century. There was a widespread obsession with death and salvation, a pervasive sense of insecurity and despond. Luther’s personal demons echoed Europe’s social desolation.
He wrote to his bishop, Albert of Mainz, protesting at what he saw as the purchase of salvation. Enclosed with his letter was a document entitled Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, which we now know as The Ninety-Five Theses.
Do the gods love the good because it is good, Socrates had wondered in Plato’s Euthyphro, or is something good because it is loved by the gods? Luther’s answer, like that of Muslim Traditionalists, was unambiguous. There was no rhyme or reason to God’s law. Humans had to accept God’s idea of the good simply because God tells us it is good, not because they could justify it through reason or through any external measure. Morality was indeed arbitrary. That was the whole point of
In 1492 Pope Alexander VI, a member of the Borgia family, had artfully bribed his way to the Papacy, despite having several mistresses and at least seven known illegitimate children. Forty years earlier, Duke Amadeus VIII of Savoy had managed to get his eight-year-old son appointed as the Bishop of Geneva. If the higher clergy were lacking in any sense of moral virtue, the lower clergy were of ten illiterate, uncouth and ignorant. Little wonder that huge resentments had built up against Papal power.
The chasm between Sophocles’ Antigone and Brecht’s is the chasm between the ancient world and the modern, between the ancient concept of the primacy of the polis and the modern view of individual liberty.
In the ancient world, Aristotle, who found Antigone perplexing and did not regard it as a great work of tragedy, nevertheless agreed with Sophocles that no citizen ‘should think that he belongs just to himself’. All citizens belonged to the polis and ‘the responsibility for each part naturally has regard to the responsibility for the whole’.
The burgeoning age of exploration, exemplified by the voyages of Columbus, Magellan and Vasco de Gama, had further weakened traditional ideas of right and wrong by bringing to the attention of Europeans different cultures and moralities and suggesting to some that, in the words of the great sixteenth-century French humanist and essayist Michel de Montaigne, ‘The laws of conscience which we say are born from nature, are born of custom’. There was, for Montaigne, no absolute truth.
In 1629 Thomas Hobbes published a translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Born in Athens in 460 BCE, the year that the first Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta broke out, Thucydides had spent much of his life contemplating the nature of war and the role of human nature in war. His account of the conflict between Athens and Sparta is of ten seen as the first ‘scientific history’ and the first work of political realism.
Amidst his official appointments, he made an arduous detour to the village of Rijnsburg, near Leiden, to visit a young philosopher who held no academic position, had published nothing, and was an outcast in his own community. Yet, even then, Baruch Spinoza was recognized as one of the finest philosophical minds of his age, a mind worth travelling a mighty distance to meet.
He lived largely in isolation, training himself to make lenses and manufacture optical instruments. Spinoza, who never occupied an academic post, became the first major philosopher since antiquity to have earned his living working with his hands.
Moral liberation and human freedom depend, paradoxically, then, on accepting the necessity of all things, on acknowledging that things cannot be otherwise. But there is another paradox here. Spinoza insists that the world, and the actions of individuals, cannot be otherwise and that freedom comes from accepting the system of necessity. But in accepting that the world cannot be otherwise, we are demonstrating that it can. Spinoza believes that we have a choice: either we accept that the world cannot be otherwise and in so doing achieve freedom and demonstrate virtue, or we continue to rage
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But if everyone followed the maxim of making promises and breaking them, then social life itself would break down. At the same time, it is not the way that you would wish someone else to act towards you. A categorical imperative is one of which you would be happy to be the object as well as the subject.
Humans possess an intrinsic worth by virtue of being human, a worth that cannot be diminished simply to enhance someone else’s worth.
Context matters because we live in an imperfect world. It is that imperfection, of the world and of human nature, that creates the very need for morality. It is also the reason that such morality cannot be categorical.
The idea that humans are motivated simply by pain and pleasure is, as the English philosopher Roger Scruton has put it, not so much a distinctive theory of human nature as an ‘attempt to describe the whole of morals and politics without one’.19 It squeezes the rich complexity of human emotions and needs into an accountant’s grid. Contemporary critics were wont to dismiss Bentham’s utilitarianism as ‘pig philosophy’, as Thomas Carlyle dubbed it in his Latter-day Pamphlets.
Should someone’s desire to stay in bed all day have the same preferential weight as another’s to spend the day reading Kant’s Critiques?
The solitary human, Rousseau observed, cannot be selfish. Selfishness can only express itself in a social setting because it has meaning only in a world in which it is possible also to be altruistic. One is selfish only if one has the opportunity to be altruistic and refuses to take it.
Under capitalism, labour becomes something to be despised rather than to be embraced. A worker, Marx writes, ‘does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind’. To be human is to occupy one’s hands and mind. But under capitalism when one does this, when one works, one feels most estranged from oneself. The worker, Marx writes, ‘only feels himself freely active in his animal functions – eating, drinking, procreating’. But ‘in his human functions he no longer feels
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It was in Paris that Marx met his lifelong friend, comrade and personal banker, Friedrich Engels, with whom he wrote many of his early works.
The Leopold and Loeb trial was probably the first time that Nietzsche had been called upon as a defence alibi. It was certainly not to be the last. ‘Nietzsche made me do it’ has become commonplace. Among the latest is Jared Lee Loughner, the man who opened fire at a Democratic Party political rally in Tucson, Arizona, in January 2011, killing six people, and injuring fourteen others including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. He was said to be a nihilist who drew his inspiration from Nietzsche’s The Will to Power.
He himself saw his work neither as philosophy nor as literature, but as ‘declarations of war’. He was not a writer, nor even a prophet, but a ‘battlefield’ on which was being fought the struggle for Europe’s soul. There was always a touch of the megalomaniac fantasist about Nietzsche.
The triumph of Greek culture was to achieve a synthesis between the two. Dionysus is the explosive, ungoverned force of creation, Apollo the power that channels that force into creative wonders. The Greeks were at once cruel and creative, brutal and innovative, physically savage and aesthetically sensitive. Abandon the brutality, Nietzsche suggests, and one foregoes the creativity. As the eponymous prophet puts it in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘The greatest evil belongs to the greatest goodness: but that is creative.’
Christianity, in Nietzsche’s eyes, was driven not by a love of the poor and the dispossessed but by a rancorous hatred of nobility and strength. Nietzsche describes this as a process of ressentiment, a term he borrowed from the Danish Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, and by which he meant the projection onto an external scapegoat of the pain that accompanies one’s sense of personal inferiority.
The problem of truth for Nietzsche was not, in any case, simply that of perspective. It was also that the very search for truth often obscured the values by which humans had to live their lives. Meaning does not exist in the world, to be discovered as one might discover scientific facts, but must be invented by humans. ‘A “scientific” interpretation of the world’, Nietzsche suggests, might ‘be one of the most stupid of all possible interpretations of the world, meaning that it would be one of the poorest in meaning.’ A world in which all we knew was scientific truth would be ‘an essentially
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Kierkegaard is as much a poet as a philosopher. He attracts the reader as readily by the fluency of his words as he does by his argument. He possesses the poet’s desire to explore the unsayable and the unknowable. His philosophy begins and ends with the individual and with the moral choices that an individual has to make. He rejected the idea that there could be an objective or rational basis for moral claims.
But the idea of a leap of faith anchored by nothing beyond that faith itself, the idea of a God who can call upon any individual to violate any ethical law on grounds that cannot be justified in worldly terms, is deeply troubling. How can we tell a genuine call from a delusion? We cannot. In the post 9/11 age, that cannot but seem a terrifying moral black hole.
Sartre was born in Paris in 1905. He studied at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, where he met the writer and social philosopher Raymond Aron, the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and his lifelong friend, muse and lover Simone de Beauvoir.
his existentialist magnum opus Being and Nothingness, which he published in 1943.
The key distinction for Sartre was that between people and things. Things have a definable essence, exist to perform a function, follow natural laws, and are determined by prior causal conditions. Persons have no definable essence, but define and redefine themselves constantly, and are radically free.
reason. To flourish, humans had to act in accordance with reason. Sartre dismissed this vision of human function and human flourishing. Humans, and only humans, could define for themselves their function, their role in life. ‘Man’, as Sartre put it, ‘is nothing else but what he makes of himself.’
Sartre, too, sees what he calls ‘anguish’ as the condition of human freedom. Since nothing can determine our choice of life for us, neither can anything explain or justify what we are. There is no inherent meaning in the universe. Only we can create meaning. Albert Camus, the French-Algerian novelist and fellow existentialist, called this sense of groundlessness the ‘absurdity’ of life. There is, Camus observed, a chasm between ‘the human need [for meaning] and the unreasonable silence of the world’.
The only way to find meaning, the only way to bridge the chasm between the cold, silent world and the human need for moral warmth, is to create our own meaning, our own values. Sartre similarly sees the world as absurd in the sense that there is no meaning to be found beyond that which humans themselves create. The price of making meaning is anguish.
A wholly authentic or truly human life, Sartre suggests, is only possible for those who recognize the inescapability of freedom and its responsibility and are happy to live with anguish. But humankind, Sartre agrees with T.S. Eliot, mostly ‘cannot bear too much reality’. They fear, they dread, they feel enchained by, the responsibility of freedom. Humans try to avoid the anguish that comes with looking over the cliff edge by hiding the truth from themselves, by pretending that there is no cliff, that something or someone has erased that edge.
Meaning, Camus insisted, can come only through struggle, even if that struggle appears as meaningless as that of Sisyphus.
existentialism could not simply be a philosophy of the individual or the subjective, and that freedom was collective as well as individual.
For Sartre, as for Marx, social transformation was the link between the subjective and the objective, between individual moral choice and the objective needs of society. Through mass movements, individual desires became transformed into historical possibilities. As such movements disintegrated in the last decades of the twentieth century, as the very possibility of such transformation seemed to ebb away, so the question was posed: if freedom is defined through struggle and through conscious social transformation, what does freedom mean in those conditions in which such struggle and such
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