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These considerations were in my mind the second
year I studied at Chicago, where I became aware through studies of
philosophical moral systems that philosophy had not been successful in the past
at significantly influencing peoples morals and preventing injustice, and I
came to realize that there was little hope for it to do so in the future. I
found that comparing human cultural systems and societies in their historical
succession and multiplicity had led many intellectuals to moral relativism,
since no moral value could be discovered which on its own merits was
transculturally valid, a reflection leading to nihilism, the perspective that
sees human civilizations as plants that grow out of the earth, springing from
their various seeds and soils, thriving for a time, and then dying away.
Some heralded this as intellectual liberation,
among them Emile Durkheim in his “Elementary Forms of the Religious Life”, or
Sigmund Freud in his “Totem and Taboo”, which discussed mankind as if it were a
patient and diagnosed its religious traditions as a form of a collective
neurosis that we could now hope to cure, by applying to them a thorough
scientific atheism, a sort of salvation through pure science.
On this subject, I bought the Jeremy Shapiro
translation of “Knowledge and Human Interests” by Jurgen Habermas, who argued
that there was no such thing as pure science that could be depended upon to
forge boldly ahead in a steady improvement of itself and the world. He called
such a misunderstanding scientism, not science. Science in the real world, he
said, was not free of values, still less of interests. The kinds of research
that obtain funding, for example, were a function of what their society deemed
meaningful, expedient, profitable, or important. Habermas had been of a
generation of German academics who, during the thirties and forties, knew what
was happening in their country, but insisted they were simply engaged in
intellectual production, that they were living in the realm of scholarship, and
need not concern themselves with whatever the state might choose to do with
their research. The horrible question mark that was attached to German
intellectuals when the Nazi atrocities became public after the war made
Habermas think deeply about the ideology of pure science. If anything was
obvious, it was that the nineteenth-century optimism of thinkers like Freud and
Durkheim was no longer tenable.
I began to reassess the intellectual life around
me. Like Schopenhauer, I felt that higher education must produce higher human
beings. But at the university, I found lab people talking to each other about
forging research data to secure funding for the coming year; luminaries who
wouldn’t permit tape recorders at their lectures for fear that competitors in
the same field would go one step further with their research and beat them to
publication; professors vying with each other in the length of their courses
syllabuses. The moral qualities I was accustomed to associate with ordinary,
unregenerate humanity seemed as frequently met with in sophisticated academics
as they had been in fishermen. If one could laugh at fishermen who, after
getting a boatload of fish in a big catch, would cruise back and forth in front
of the others to let them see how laden down in the water they were, ostensibly
looking for more fish; what could one say about the Ph.D.s who behaved the same
way about their books and articles? I felt that their knowledge had not
developed their persons, that the secret of higher man did not lie in their sophistication.
I wondered if I hadn’t gone down the road of
philosophy as far as one could go. While it had debunked my Christianity and
provided some genuine insights, it had not yet answered the big questions. Moreover,
I felt that this was somehow connected I didn’t know whether as cause or effect
to the fact that our intellectual tradition no longer seemed to seriously
comprehend itself. What were any of us, whether philosophers, fishermen,
garbage-men, or kings, except bit players in a drama we did not understand,
diligently playing out our roles until our replacements were sent, and we gave
our last performance? But could one legitimately hope for more than this? I
read “Kojves Introduction to the Reading of Hegel”, in which he explained that
for Hegel, philosophy did not culminate in the system, but rather in the Wise
Man, someone able to answer any possible question on the ethical implications
of human actions. This made me consider our own plight in the twentieth
century, which could no longer answer a single ethical question.
It was thus as if this century’s unparalleled
mastery of concrete things had somehow ended by making us things. I contrasted
this with Hegel’s concept of the concrete in his “Phenomenology of Mind”. An
example of the abstract, in his terms, was the limitary physical reality of the
book now held in your hands, while the concrete was its interconnection with
the larger realities it presupposed, the modes of production that determined
the kind of ink and paper in it, the aesthetic standards that dictated its
color and design, the systems of marketing and distribution that had carried it
to the reader, the historical circumstances that had brought about the readers
literacy and taste; the cultural events that had mediated its style and usage;
in short, the bigger picture in which it was articulated and had its being. For
Hegel, the movement of philosophical investigation always led from the abstract
to the concrete, to the more real. He was therefore able to say that
philosophy necessarily led to theology, whose object was the ultimately real,
the Deity. This seemed to me to point up an irreducible lack in our century. I
began to wonder if, by materializing our culture and our past, we had not
somehow abstracted ourselves from our wider humanity, from our true nature in
relation to a higher reality.
At this juncture, I read a number of works on
Islam, among them the books of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who believed that many of
the problems of western man, especially those of the environment, were from his
having left the divine wisdom of revealed religion, which taught him his true
place as a creature of God in the natural world and to understand and respect
it. Without it, he burned up and consumed nature with ever more effective
technological styles of commercial exploitation that ruined his world from
without while leaving him increasingly empty within, because he did not know
why he existed or to what end he should act.
I reflected that this might be true as far as it
went, but it begged the question as to the truth of revealed religion. Everything
on the face of the earth, all moral and religious systems, were on the same
plane, unless one could gain certainty that one of them was from a higher
source, the sole guarantee of the objectivity, the whole force, of moral law. Otherwise,
one mans opinion was as good as anothers, and we remained in an
undifferentiated sea of conflicting individual interests, in which no valid
objection could be raised to the strong eating the weak.
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