By the end of the year an old friend of mine will be wandering Indochina with a business card that reads "Joachim Heldenberg: Adjustments." He's the kind of man I want at the cultural keel--mercurial, daring, a little heroic, a man who could nudge our society when it isn't looking. If blogging has anything to do with really disseminating real ideas, let me be honest--he should be writing here, not me.
Ah, well. We'll say that Shams writes the poem. So--four words from a friend I love:
1. Metaphysics is creative.
2. Metaphysics is not a discovery; it is an invention.
3. Metaphysics is aesthetics run through rhetoric.
4. It is permissible to engage in metaphysics with a teleological goal fashioned a priori.
31 March 2010
30 March 2010
How small a thought.
I've been reading a lot of Auden lately. His "Epigoni" runs through my mind as I drive between my university and DC; it treats the late Latin scholars on the eve of systemic collapse, their cultural diversions, their anxiety at the end of empire in the West. He speaks to my condition as an academic and the fragility too near to my vocation to be relinquished or ignore:
My disposition is modernist; that feeling of hopeless fragmentation and irrecoverable loss probably prefigures my tastes rather than proceeds from them. I'm not even convinced that cultural relevance is still possible, not anymore, not in the postmodern period--but maybe it doesn't have to be like that. Maybe the treason of the clerisy can be mitigated, and maybe--in part--by me. Tyrtaeus writes that a man is unwelcome in his poems if he has every excellence except a fighting spirit; I understand this. I talk about uncertainty, but at the end of history I can't accept the hard alternative, can't concede the city of G-d in the name of graceful quietism. The answer is neither Roger Kimball nor the glass bead game: whatever my acceptance is worth, I accepted a moral stake in that answer when I entered the academy.
We came in our benched ships, carrying English common law and the humanists' genius for the misuse of classical antiquity; we spun wildly off course as our intellectuals turned the 20th century into an abattoir. Now, at the end of the postmodern period, we've run aground on the edge of a dark continent and have bought an oxhide with the murdered Jews of Europe. So monoculture is over; that was the cost of the Shoah, of empire, of the European civil war 1914-1989. So we--if that "we" means anything, now--we who loved liberty as an abstract and now must enact it in the marketplace of ideas, first as practice and only then as virtue ethics, we who have inherited the barbarous efficiency of Rome and self-immolating democracy of Athens, the mixed constitution of the American polity and the terrible abstract G-d of the second temple (Ark absent, kodesh haKodashim blown open, and Titus on his column)--we, whatever we are, whatever I am, are a faction, a small faction among many others, in possession of an oxhide on which to found a city. Well, the Carthaginian trick is old. We have knives unrusted in our keeping. I'm here to cut a strip of my own, if able.
I like using the byrsa as a metaphor because I think the project of liberalism in the 21st century will be one of roping-around and roping-in, a process of coalition-building in a disintegrated culture. I come from a double background, Classics and English literature: I'm a hybrid, not really a reception-studies classicist and not really a philological critic, either--so my sympathies are ecumenical. The humanities need a course-correction from economics and history; classically liberal policy, and policymakers, will be better able to achieve their goals in partnership with the legitimating voice of literary humanism.
The contemporary Republican party is a frustrating example of economic liberalism become illiberal and neurotic in separation from humanist convictions, its other systemic flaws and irrationalities only irritated by populism and the religious right; meanwhile, huge swaths of the academy fester in its long-standing romance with philosopher-kingship, casting a schizophrenic eye over the 20th century as they radicalize in toxic secession. I study classics in order to rope-in the modernism I love, to retie the frayed cords of continuity in the western literary tradition and claim it, or reclaim it, and in so doing reclaim them both; I do that because I love it, and because I believe that a free society begins in the republic of letters as much as in equal laws. Isonomia begins in the constitution--eunomia, the contemplative soul.
.שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ יְהוָה אֶחָד
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life.
No point pretendingIt's my dilemma, the dangerous poles of my life, the mandarin and the political animal--how should I behave? How can I? It's an impossible dichotomy. My life is divided between UVA and the capital, the classics and realpolitik, between a fading discipline and a power in decline. This tension, this double consciousness, has defined my self-concept and my anxiety throughout my adult life. Do I become a cultural conservative--that loud and bloody-minded creature--and lose my culture? Or do I live in mandarin quietism, tending Auden's garden of rhopalics and anacyclic acrostics, and plead nolo condendere as the republic degrades into something huge, shapeless and vile? Is it possible to be both cultivated and politically relevant?
One didn't foresee the probable ending (10)
As dog-food, or landless, submerged, a slave;
Meanwhile, how should a cultured gentleman behave?
My disposition is modernist; that feeling of hopeless fragmentation and irrecoverable loss probably prefigures my tastes rather than proceeds from them. I'm not even convinced that cultural relevance is still possible, not anymore, not in the postmodern period--but maybe it doesn't have to be like that. Maybe the treason of the clerisy can be mitigated, and maybe--in part--by me. Tyrtaeus writes that a man is unwelcome in his poems if he has every excellence except a fighting spirit; I understand this. I talk about uncertainty, but at the end of history I can't accept the hard alternative, can't concede the city of G-d in the name of graceful quietism. The answer is neither Roger Kimball nor the glass bead game: whatever my acceptance is worth, I accepted a moral stake in that answer when I entered the academy.
We came in our benched ships, carrying English common law and the humanists' genius for the misuse of classical antiquity; we spun wildly off course as our intellectuals turned the 20th century into an abattoir. Now, at the end of the postmodern period, we've run aground on the edge of a dark continent and have bought an oxhide with the murdered Jews of Europe. So monoculture is over; that was the cost of the Shoah, of empire, of the European civil war 1914-1989. So we--if that "we" means anything, now--we who loved liberty as an abstract and now must enact it in the marketplace of ideas, first as practice and only then as virtue ethics, we who have inherited the barbarous efficiency of Rome and self-immolating democracy of Athens, the mixed constitution of the American polity and the terrible abstract G-d of the second temple (Ark absent, kodesh haKodashim blown open, and Titus on his column)--we, whatever we are, whatever I am, are a faction, a small faction among many others, in possession of an oxhide on which to found a city. Well, the Carthaginian trick is old. We have knives unrusted in our keeping. I'm here to cut a strip of my own, if able.
I like using the byrsa as a metaphor because I think the project of liberalism in the 21st century will be one of roping-around and roping-in, a process of coalition-building in a disintegrated culture. I come from a double background, Classics and English literature: I'm a hybrid, not really a reception-studies classicist and not really a philological critic, either--so my sympathies are ecumenical. The humanities need a course-correction from economics and history; classically liberal policy, and policymakers, will be better able to achieve their goals in partnership with the legitimating voice of literary humanism.
The contemporary Republican party is a frustrating example of economic liberalism become illiberal and neurotic in separation from humanist convictions, its other systemic flaws and irrationalities only irritated by populism and the religious right; meanwhile, huge swaths of the academy fester in its long-standing romance with philosopher-kingship, casting a schizophrenic eye over the 20th century as they radicalize in toxic secession. I study classics in order to rope-in the modernism I love, to retie the frayed cords of continuity in the western literary tradition and claim it, or reclaim it, and in so doing reclaim them both; I do that because I love it, and because I believe that a free society begins in the republic of letters as much as in equal laws. Isonomia begins in the constitution--eunomia, the contemplative soul.
.שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ יְהוָה אֶחָד
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life.
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