Humanism and Democratic Criticism (Columbia Themes in Philosophy)

Rating:
Summary: An elegant last work
Review: These series of lectures represent Said at his most eloquent and heartfelt. Brief and therefore not as rigorously argued as his longer works, he makes his case for what studies of the humanities can be, in fact need to be in the 21st century. While making only cursory swipes at his usual opponents (Bernard Lewis, Harold Bloom)his book is more celebratory and admiring of the writers he has emulated and been influenced by: Eric Auerbach most prominently. An elegiac summa from a writer who will be missed.

Rating:
Summary: A small book from my kind of scholar
Review: This book lists from six to 22 references at the end of each chapter and includes an index on pages 145-154. Those who find the source of their ideals in humanism might expect to find Edward W. Said providing strong support for the political application of such ideals, as the final selection in this book, "The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals" (pp. 119-144) was previously published in `The Nation' (2001). Lectures that were begun in January 2000 at Columbia University were expanded in October and November 2003 with delivery at Cambridge University, then revised for publication to address "a world of heightened animosities" (p. xvi) due to the unfortunate events of September 11, 2001.

I found Nietzsche more often in the text than in the (two) listings in the index, but the two listings in the index for "Vietnam War, 12-13, 34" merely suggest how much motivation can be wrung from "This Cold War cultural tension" in spite of the desire of those who wish to teach refinement above all else as "an unpolitical, unworldly, and oblivious (sometimes even manipulative) attitude to the present, all the while adamantly extolling the virtues of the past" in the choice of subjects for study. The situation breaks the hearts of those who get all fired up to do one thing, only to discover "that there are no jobs for them or that they have to teach many hours of remedial courses in several institutions as adjuncts or part-timers without health benefits, tenure, or prospects for advancement." (p. 14). This is so sad, it brings to mind how many people of the next generation found some mild recognition of their own intellectually tortured times by turning to comedy. In truth, when the loyalty of Americans is questioned, entertainers who can show some comic supernatural powers in a way that is far over the top of whatever level the late Edward W. Said (may he rest in peace) is on in his consideration of changes that occurred in the years he taught, prior to his death on September 24, 2003, are far more likely to be appreciated by the generation currently starting out in life, if the comic nature of everything that American society attempts is fully understood, than this overly serious summary of professional thinking. Columbia University even found its way into remarks that Ted Rall used to introduce himself to the Yale Political Union in New Haven, Connecticut, on December 4, 2003, just a year ago:

"Thank you for inviting me here tonight. As someone who has been both expelled by and graduated with honors from Columbia University, a place you rarely think about, I know that you'll accept the sympathies that I'd like to offer on behalf of a beloved Yalie George W. Bush. . . . Sadly, this middle-aged white man . . . finds himself, in the immortal closing voiceover from Kubrick's `Full Metal Jacket,' in . . ." (GENERALISSIMO EL BUSHO, p. 181).

The profane flavor of the knowledge that Ted Rall flaunts in his opening remarks is primarily a warning to those who might follow the political footsteps of their own times if comedy fails to deter such an outcome by showing that no one is being fooled unless such foolishness is freely chosen by those who fall for an immortal closing line. Said attempts to provide the same warning on an intellectual level by pointing out that "Immanuel Wallerstein has, over the last couple of years, been writing a sustained intellectual critique of Eurocentrism that serves my purposes here very well," (Said, p. 52). The lecture on philology begins with a comparison of the hermeneutics of language in Arab-Islamic culture with interpretation in Europe since Vico's NEW SCIENCE (1744) that brought about the insights of Nietzsche, Emerson, and Richard Poirier. After a number of attempts to describe close reading, we find the advice, "Only connect, says E. M. Forster, a marvelous injunction to the chain of statements and meanings that proliferate out of close reading." (p. 66). The goal of entering a text allows the reader "a component of personal commitment and extraordinary effort, called `ijtihad' in Arabic." (p. 68). "It is not surprising that since the fourteenth century there has been a robust struggle going on about whether ijtihad is permissible, to what degree, and within what limits." (p. 69). The danger of going too far "is what Swift parodies mercilessly in A TALE OF A TUB." (p. 69).

The intellectual tradition of exiles has much in common with a topic of a book of essays by Isaac Deutscher on "how great Jewish thinkers--Spinoza, chief among them, as well as Freud, Heine, and Deutscher himself--were in, and at the same time renounced, their tradition, preserving the original tie by submitting it to the corrosive questioning that took them well beyond it," (pp. 76-77). A humanist asserting anti-superpower values in America is prone to its own form of toughness, "maintaining rather than resolving the tension between the aesthetic and the national," (p. 78).

Chapter 4, Introduction to Erich Auerbach's MIMESIS, provides an example of an exile who wrote a major book in the German language while in Istanbul during World War II, but who then came to America to be a professor at Yale until his death in 1957. Auerbach also relied on Vico, who provided "a cycle that goes from primitive to advanced and degenerate epochs, then back to primitive, Vico says," (p. 91). There are some sweet instincts, and some not so sweet, and America today, as a place for thinking, confounds anyone who is seriously going to contend that this is being figured out. All that follows from the simple observation that America was attacked threatens to prevent any thought that would like to jump back to before that happened to try to arrange things a bit differently. It is even economically preposterous to try to think that this epoch is not totally degenerate.