The Unfinished Project

Toward a Postmetaphysical Humanism

Lorenzo C. Simpson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135242954
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

As humanity becomes increasingly interconnected through globalization, the question of whether community is possible within culturally diverse societies has returned as a principal concern for contemporary thought. Lorenzo Simpson charges that the current discussion is stuck at an impasse-between postmodernism's fragmented notions of cultural difference and humanism's homogeneous versions of community. Simpson proposes an alternative-one that bridges cultural differences without erasing them. He argues that we must establish common aesthetic and ethical standards incorporating sensitivity to difference if we are to achieve cross-cultural understanding.

1

On Arnold and Herder: The Idea of Culture and the Idea of Difference

An engagement with the work of Matthew Arnold, Victorian English poet and critic, and Johann Gottfried von Herder, late-eighteenth-century German critic, theologian, and philosopher, provides an important historical context for contemporary debates. Moreover, as I hope to show, their contributions are of more than purely historical interest. For whatever we think about the idea of humanism itself or of the closely allied concept of culture that is often implicated in arenas where humanism is on trial, Arnold and Herder can be seen to have initiated or consolidated important strands of our conversation and to have prefigured much of what we are struggling with in our current attempts to come to terms with the fate of “the human” in a global society. Herder inaugurated an anthropologically tinged, descriptive deployment of culture that underwrites much contemporary multiculturalist discourse, while Arnold introduced a prescriptive or “humanistic” use of culture that authorizes much of the current “traditionalist” and neoconservative assault on that discourse.¹

Ultimately, I wish to negotiate between these two positions. Like Arnold, I want to retain the evaluative or normative dimension long associated with humanism while, like Herder, foregrounding an acknowledgment and embrace of diversity. Neither Arnold nor Herder was known for the systematic nature of his thought. Conflicting and contradictory tendencies abound in the work of each. My aim here is not primarily exegetical, but reconstructive. Without downplaying the ambiguities and tensions in their thought, my intention, to borrow an expression of Herder’s, is to bring forward the “center of gravity” of their teaching, with the goals of exhibiting them as representative thinkers and of excavating the implications of their respective positions for the concerns that animate this project.

On Matthew Arnold and the Idea of Culture

The sea is calm to-night.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits;-on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanch’d land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

—Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”

Given the context within which this book is written and the concerns it addresses, it may seem somewhat odd, if not downright perverse, to turn to Matthew Arnold with anything but a censorious eye. Like E. D. Hirsh for literary theorists, Matthew Arnold has been a canonical foil for cultural theorists for some time now. In particular, the latter’s Culture and Anarchy, widely regarded as a sort of ur-text for Anglo-American humanistic education, has long been a favorite target. In the poem that constitutes the epigraph for this section, Arnold gives voice to a peculiarly modern anxiety—the withdrawal and eclipse of certainty brought on by the ebbing of the “Sea of Faith,” a withdrawal accompanied by a sense of the forlornness, isolation, and alienation of modern humanity. Culture and Anarchy is a response both to this existential vision and to the threat of political disorder. Published in 1869 and conceived at the time of both a working-class riot in London’s Hyde Park and the tragic Morant Bay Rebellion, in which blacks in the then English colony of Jamaica struggled for civil and economic rights, the book stages an opposition between culture as “the study of perfection” and the feared “anarchy” of an unbridled democracy bereft of standards and a firm sense of direction. By seeking and discerning such perfection, by concerning itself exclusively with “the best which has been thought and said in the world,” culture would reoccupy the place vacated by religion’s withdrawal and allow a reason and reasonableness to prevail that would be a healing balm, mending a tattered social fabric and exorcizing the uncanniness of individual existence. And this redeeming culture was taken by Arnold to be the property not of any one class of society but, as embodied in the state, of the society as a whole.

This Arnoldian conception of culture has met with determined opposition. Not atypical are claims to the effect that Arnold defines the racialist culture of the nineteenth century as culture tout court,² or Edward Said’s claim that culture as Arnold conceives of it is a system of exclusions backed up by the power of the state in such a way that culture’s hegemony over society marginalizes, devalues, and ultimately silences the other.³ While there is clearly much to be said for such assessments, and we would only at our peril lose sight of what is important in them, there are aspects of Arnold’s account that are salutary for my project. So while the racial subtext of Arnold’s work would no doubt belie his claim to “disinterest,” my suggestion is to read with Arnold against Arnold—to use, in his terms, his own “best self” against him in order to extract what is useful about his work, not from what it actually is, but rather from what it purports to be. I want first to attend to what I find promising in his views and subsequently to indicate why our continued wariness of Arnold’s conception of culture is warranted.

We might begin by noting that Culture and Anarchy constitutes an explicit attack on English smugness and provincialism.⁴ Further, it was Arnold’s belief that the marginalized, defined as those who lack a vital connection to an organic national culture, to an integrated way of life, were fated to remain undeveloped and provincial. He believed, as did Herder before him, that only integration into an organic national culture assured true flourishing. Culture, as embodied in the larger sustaining and embracing wholes of established national churches and universities, worked for Arnold to situate us within contexts that are broader and more inclusive than are acknowledged by the limited vision of “special interest groups.” Culture, then, has as its aim to bring us out of ourselves. Limited only to itself for the critical resources that would guide its action, such a parochial interest group could achieve only a circular affirmation of its narrow outlook.⁵ Such a group would also presumably find itself engaged in the ultimately arbitrary project of a Sartrean self-grounding, where the good is the good only insofar as one has chosen it. Arnold accordingly takes great pains to contrast the privation intrinsic to iconoclasm’s privacy with the edification bestowed by “swimming with the tide of national culture.”⁶

Not only was Arnold a critic of English provincialism, he also openly acknowledged the hybridity of the English character.⁷ Just as the English social agent was for him a composite of the inclinations and sensibilities of the three main classes (the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the working class), English culture was to be understood as a dialectic between Greek and Hebraic spiritual imperatives. As a consequence, Arnold’s account of culture does not in principle require the expulsion of the other in order for a national culture to establish its identity.⁸ So while he does take at face value nineteenth-century racial science’s claim to have demonstrated salient racial differences, he is inclined to speak of such difference in a Herderian fashion, alluding to the peculiar “genius” of various peoples and of the affinities among them.⁹ Of course, the range of peoples whose genius he thinks fitting for incorporation into English culture, or for that matter, human culture, is predictably narrow—only Indo-Europeans and Semites need apply—and in this sense, his acceptance of nineteenth-century racial biology is unarguably, seriously to understate the matter, unfortunate.¹⁰

In spite of this, what is perhaps most salutary in Arnold’s account of culture is his emphasis upon adopting critical perspectives on received wisdom and the importance he attaches to pursuing an ever-enlarged point of view.¹¹ In his estimation, the spirit of the human race finds its ideal in making endless additions to itself, in the endless expansion of its powers and in endless growth in wisdom and beauty. Consequently, within the ambit of culture, which is the sine qua non of such growth, perfection consists not in a settled achievement, not in the “given” or in “being,” but in “becoming.”¹² He invokes the idea of the “best self” to capture the importance of the development and transformation of the given self, a best self that is the site of a “free play” and an “enlargement of consciousness” that constantly interrogates “fixed rules of action.”¹³

Also to be found in his writing (though I do not wish to make more of it than his work warrants) are hints of an appreciative awareness of a process that I shall discuss in this book under the label ‘fusion of horizons.’ In his discussion of the roles of Hebraic moralism and Greek intellectualism in culture, Arnold speaks of the importance of these two inclinations reaching a “mutual understanding.”¹⁴ Though he does not offer anything approaching a theoretical analysis of such a process, his discussion does indicate a recognition of the value of what we might call a symmetrical learning process wherein both viewpoints are brought to an awareness of their respective limits and of what in the other can be profitably used to supplement itself.

Even as we acknowledge the value of these insights, if we pursue Arnold’s thoughts on these matters more deeply it becomes clearer why his views have met with such stiff resistance. While he explicitly challenges the idea of a perfect and final expression of truth,¹⁵ he apparently operates with what can be called a “convergence thesis” with regard to the destination and destiny of the best self’s efforts. He is keen to impress upon us that the criterion for the constant interrogation of fixed rules of action is to be the “intelligible law of things,” a nomological structure beheld by “right reason,” the legitimate source of authority.¹⁶ Culture is to shepherd us in this direction, toward the realization of a Platonically conceived apprehension of a firm, intelligible law of things, whose apprehension can serve to guide action. The best self, the self that heeds the sublime call of culture, “is not manifold, and vulgar, and unstable, and contentious, and ever-varying, but one, and noble, … and the same for all mankind.”¹⁷ Or, as one commentator puts it, Arnold’s conception of culture posits the idea of the universal formal identity of the human.¹⁸ This assumption that both physis and ethos are one, stable and the same for all, that they are somehow self-announcing, naturally gives rise to postmodernist charges of naive, if not deluded, objectivism, of an invidiously universalistic and absolutistic conception of culture. And Arnold does indeed have a rather presumptuous sense of what “all the rest of mankind” does or should admire.¹⁹

In fact, Arnold’s appeal to the “best self” is in many important respects similar to the invocation of the “true self” in various doctrines of “positive freedom,”²⁰ and to Hegel’s appeal to “reason” in his political philosophy. In such cases, questions of autonomy or of self-determination are adjudicated, not with respect to the expressed wishes of the given empirical or “natural” self, but with respect to a putatively truer and higher rational self of which the given self may or may not fall short. Given the peculiar history of notions such as that of the best self and its cognates, we would do well to ask: What content is to be given to the notion, even as a developmental or regulative ideal, and what warrants the claim for that content? What insures the neutrality of that content vis à vis given class and cultural loci?²¹ These questions are even more pressing in Arnold’s case because he, like G. W. F. Hegel, understands the state as the organ of the collective best self and as the power representing the right reason of the nation.²² It is this vision of the state’s arrogating to itself the power to enforce culture’s monolithically construed system of exclusions that must give us pause.

Arnold does acknowledge what might be called a pluralist or relativist challenge. But to this Weberian rejoinder he offers little in the way of an argument except to aver that now that the lower classes are in on the political act, the threat of anarchy makes the defense of the monolithic order of right reason and of the site of its ideal embodiment, the state, paramount. He assumes that right reason’s presumptive neutrality vis-à-vis social distinctions will ultimately resolve conflict.²³ His single-minded insistence that human perfection is obtainable only within a stable social order blinded him, or made him insufficiently sensitive, to the social and moral consequences of his vision. Even a “bad” state presumably furnishes the prerequisite stability for human perfection. Arnold’s belief that the avoidance of anarchy is more important than withdrawal of support from even what is acknowledged to be a flawed established order, indeed even one that supports the slave trade, gives credence to Said’s charge of “reactionary political quietism.”²⁴

The state of culture and the culture of the state are, for Arnold, opposed equally to the barbarism of the aristocracy, to the philistinism of the bourgeoisie, and to the crudity of the working class. Accordingly, because they are aliens to class allegiance but not to the humane national culture that is to come, intellectuals are for Arnold the “insiders-outsiders” who, though supposedly the vehicles of the interrogatory and critical spirit of free play, stand impotent before the established state. On the state itself they have no critical leverage. It would appear that Arnold did not think through this apparent contradiction deeply enough. Perhaps his political imagination was too parochial to allow him to see that his vision of the connection between culture and the state was viable, even on his own terms, only within certain fairly well-described political boundary conditions. What about cases where the state, no matter how organically well-integrated, is explicitly antithetical to culture as he understands it, for example, as in the case of “socialist realism” or of fascist aesthetics? Though Arnold goes to great lengths to criticize the liberalism of his day, it is, ironically perhaps, only in a polity approaching the characteristics of a liberal democracy that a conception such as his could gain a foothold.

At any rate, Arnold’s intellectuals, his seekers after and purveyors of “sweetness and light,”...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Humanism, Postmodernism, and Irony
• I. HISTORICAL CONSIDERATIONS
• 1. On Arnold and Herder: The Idea of Culture and the Idea of Difference
• 2. Musical Interlude: Adorno on Jazz, or How Not to Fuse Horizons
• II. THE UNFINISHED PROJECT
• 3. Critical Theory and the Politics of Recognition
• 4. Situated Cosmopolitanism
• 5. “Postmodern” Rejoinders
• Epilogue: Toward a Humanistic Multiculturalism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index