Plotinus is nothing if not an intricate thinker, so it strikes me as odd that his philosophy sets so little value on the process of thinking. It’s somewhat paradoxical, but though reason is necessary for human beings, it’s a sign of being stuck in a low place. The more human beings ascend to Intellect, the more thinking can be left behind. This comes up all over the place in the Enneads, but here’s an example:
Does the soul use discursive reasoning before it comes and again after it goes out of the body? No, discursive reasoning comes into it here below, when it is already in perplexity and full of care, and in a state of greater weakness; for feeling the need of reasoning is a lessening of the intellect in respect of its self-sufficiency; just as in the crafts reasoning occurs when the craftsmen are in perplexity, but, when there is no difficulty, the craft dominates and does its work. [IV.3.18]
We are thinking and reasoning beings here on earth; we follow Aristotle’s strictures on logic. But is this something our soul would engage in if not connected to a body? No, reasoning is a sign of weakness. It’s when we don’t know something that thought must be employed to feel our way toward an answer. If we know fully, there will be no need to employ reason. We’ll just be. Something of this anticipated state can be grasped in mystical experience when reason is left behind.
Sections IV.3-5 of the Enneads treat matters of the soul.. and views on psychology are wrapped up with this topic. At one point Plotinus describes the influence of the outer world on the human intellect.. and this gets interesting as the implications become clear. We can start with Plotinus’ psychology of perception:
When what is perceived makes no difference, or the perception is not at all personally relevant, but is provoked involuntarily by the difference in the things seen, it is only the sense perception which has this experience and the soul does not receive it into its interior, since the difference is not of concern to it either because it meets a need or is a benefit in some other way. [IV.4.8]
That is a description (from 3rd century AD) of a daily experience we all share. Our senses take in far more information than is actually treated by our thinking mind. For Plotinus this is explained through his model of the soul, which includes perceptions and intellect. When perceptions are ruled as no concern for the body, then they can be ignored, and the intellect need not trouble itself with them.
This line of thinking develops into a passage in which Plotinus describes the process of a walk:
…if it is never a primary consideration to us in local motion to cut through this piece of air and then that, or, even more, to pass through the air at all, we shall not observe the air or have an idea of it in our minds as we walk. For if it was not a primary consideration to us to complete a particular stretch of the road, but we could go on our way through the air, it would be no concern of ours at what milestone in the land we were, or how much of the way we had covered… [IV.4.8]
As human beings we need to get places, and that need to get places means that we have to navigate through cities and along roads. This necessity of navigation leads to our paying attention to what we receive in the way of sense perceptions. We have to remember landmarks and think to ourselves “turn left at the tall building, then go straight for a mile.” This paying attention to the world is a concession to the body.
Now, what if one were a star? The journey of a star (a higher intellectual being) would be unconcerned with turning left at any point. Its journey through space is perfectly and rationally mapped out in advance. Since this is the case, the star is in the enviable position of being able to disengage from sense perception and attend wholly to the intellectual part of the universe. Plotinus writes on this state:
It is well known that when our reason grasps what is being done as a whole, and has confidence that it will be completely carried out in this particular way, it will not any more attend to the details as they occur. [IV.4.8]
We might think of this as the chauffeur effect. If we are the drivers who need to get from point A to point B, then we will have to take note of the world to arrive successfully. But if we were in a car with a driver, then we could lean back, close our eyes, and ponder ideas. If we had confidence in the chauffeur we would not have any cause to look out the window and engage with the items presented to us by sense perceptions.
I love reading Plotinus (and highly recommend it).. but I often define my values in opposition to his views. I find it worrisome how easy it is to disengage the mind and move around the world on auto-pilot. I like to carry around a camera for the simple reason that it’s a way to jog me into really looking at where I am. Once our surroundings get familiar our conscious mind tunes it out. That’s a tendency that must be fought. But for Plotinus it’s a feature not a bug; the mind’s release from the tugs of perception is prized. The world is to be engaged only so far as necessary, and then attention turned back to Intellect.
This is a philosophy that makes travel literature all but impossible. That’s a genre whose whole point is, after all, to notice what is going on around one. For Plotinus the point is that such noticing is another form of distraction. I find it fascinating the extent to which travel writing pre-supposes a philosophy of the world. No Neoplatonist is going to write a great travelogue or city description. And, to bring this all back to al-Maqrizi, it’s worth considering how the great work of city-description came from a scholar associated with the Zahirites, a school of Islamic law dedicated to the principle of literalism. Those would be people who are dedicated to noticing whatever they pass on a walk.
A couple of weeks back I came across this story via someone I follow on Twitter (I can’t recall who). The story is about the serial misuse of a satirical blog on the topic of French president Nicholas Sarkozy’s response to Ramadan. The blog was humorous, with an Onion-style citation of Sarkozy urging French Muslims to maintain their French identity and continue to have coffee and croissants at 8am for breakfast “like all other French people do.” This would conflict with the rule that a Muslim must abstain from all food and drink during daylight hours for Ramadan. As if that weren’t enough, pseudo-Sarkozy urges Muslims to read the Qur’an and pray in French, not Arabic.
Although the blog post was satirical, it goes through several transformations, described in the link above. The crucial first step is that it gets posted on CNNArabic without any note that the story should be read as satire only. From there it was posted on a variety of smaller blogs and sites, neglecting to link to the original source. Among these responders was the Muslim Brotherhood on their official site, and they naturally denounced Sarkozy and demanded a retraction. Now, as the story began to gain some traction, it was picked up by some print newspapers in the Middle East.
It’s funny, but it’s also instructive to look at the stages by which something like this begins to go viral. The first stage is for the story to get legitimated by any kind of mention on the website of a major news organization. That CNNArabic post had a link to the original, so it was still possible to investigate, but obviously many people just took the story as straightforward news. The story then elicited responses based on the assumed factuality of the story. As the story became a news item stirring up controversy, it spread to more established news publications.
What feeds this kind of story? There were clearly many people who wanted to hear a story like this about Sarkozy and the West. It confirmed—in an absurd fashion—the suspicions of many people about the hostility toward Islam. The fact that many people were willing to believe this is itself noteworthy. Stories that go viral must meet a willing audience.. and that’s a big part of their strength (witness the continued belief of some people in all manner of strange things about Obama). Where deep misunderstanding is present, there is something like a will to believe.
Note also how the story picks up on a real loopholes in the global media system. The CNNArabic website acted as an authority, but you can also be sure that not a lot of thought went into this story. A site like CNNArabic, like all mainstream media players, is trying hard to be relevant and at the same time dealing with fewer resources. So the fact something is posted on CNNArabic is not exactly a lock on its truthfulness. But in the absence of a functioning system of authority, the mainstream name CNN becomes as good a sign as anything for that truthfulness. Information and stories have become harder to vet and censor in our globalized media environment.. and there’s all kinds of downsides to that, which we are just beginning to understand.
Had this story been able to take root, we undoubtedly would have seen defenders of the Sarkozy statement step up and make fun of fundamentalists for taking offense at the coffee and croissants suggestion. It would have played into an anti-Muslim counter narrative, again based on suspicion. How easily this kind of thing can blow up is evident from the whole Danish cartoons saga from a few years back.. which has been admirably traced in its details by Jytte Klausen. Of course in that case there really were offensive cartoons, but the discourse about them quickly leaped the bounds of fact.. on all sides.
The depressing thing about these media-driven misunderstandings is that it’s hard to know how to stop them. It’s almost like we’re destined for fake viral news to be the driver of discussion (recall last summer’s “death panels”). The only real answer might be plain old education. We need people who are able to: 1) judge online information critically through the evaluation of sources, and 2) curbing of the kind of cultural suspicion that underlies these events. Both the critical judgment and the easing of suspicion is part of the job of a liberal arts college, though I don’t have faith that the world is heading in that direction any time soon.
The uproar over the “ground zero” mosque was depressing, but hey, it will make for interesting discussion in my upcoming Islam class. The Glenn Beck rally, with its surprisingly religious rhetoric, has made me re-think about my Hebrew Prophets class. When Beck comes on stage** he talked about America in language that could be ripped straight out of the prophets:
Something beyond imagination is happening. Something that is beyond man is happening. America truly begins to turn back to God. For too long this country has wandered in darkness and we have wandered in darkness in periods from the beginning. We have had moments of brilliance and moments of darkness..
Beck goes on to call attention to God’s work through Moses (“a guy with a stick who was talking to a burning bush”). The Hebrew prophets are there in the overt call to national repentance, the charge of sinfulness, and the summoning of God as the historical actor. Add to that the potent use of sacred history as a metaphor for the present. Beck is hardly the first person to apply this kind of prophetic message to the United States (Puritans perfected the “Jeremiad” and I grew up in the Evangelical community which routinely spoke like this), but to hear it from a big media personality like Beck is bracing.
As it happens, I am reading an amazing book on the origins of Judaism—Judaism, the First Phase: The Place of Ezra and Nehemiah in the Origins of Judaism by Joseph Blenkinsopp. The book examines the situation described in Ezra and Nehemiah, in which a portion of the exile community (the golah) returns to Jerusalem. Imagine the situation: a smallish group of exiles returns to Jerusalem after 60 years in Babylon, and this small group immediately begins to impose its version of correct rituals on the temple and others still in the land. We get a hint of this in Ezra 4.1-3:
When the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin heard that the returned exiles were building a temple to the Lord, the God of Israel, they approached Zerubbabel and the heads of families and said to them, “Let us build with you, for we worship your God as you do, and we have been sacrificing to him ever since the days of King Esar-haddon of Assyria who brought us here.” But Zerubbabel, Jeshua, and the rest of the heads of families in Israel said to them, “You shall have no part with us in building a house to our God; but we alone will build to the Lord, the God of Israel, as King Cyrus of Persia has commanded us.”
The book is written to praise the actions of its protagonist, so these statements are couched in a way that reflects positively on the leadership of the exiles, but if we read between the lines we see something a little frightening: the Israelites who are still in the land and who might have an argument for their own continuity of worship are being overruled by the band of exiles who bear the ritually “correct” version of being a Jew. So even though the people nearby tell the exiles “…we worship your God as you do.” They are nonetheless repulsed. In both Nehemiah and Ezra this leads to an insistence on keeping community boundaries pure, which brings about a call to disband marriages with local women.
This does have something to do with Beck.. as I’ll try to explain. But first think about the oddity of this situation: a group of exiles has developed new institutions and patterns of worship, which they label as correct. In actual fact, it’s a very different religion than the one that existed during the period of statehood. Blenkinsopp brings this discussion round to the idea of sectarianism, an important sociological concept developed by Max Weber. It’s well known that later biblical books such as Daniel.. and then the Essenes as glimpsed through the Dead Sea Scrolls.. present us with a sectarian version of Judaism. But Blenkinsopp shows that the impulse for sectarian development can be found as early as Ezra/Nehemiah. Here is a description of how these early figures can be thought of as sectarian:
…we add that the sect will tend either to define itself with reference to the parent body from which it has dissociated or has been forcibly dissociated, or it will stake an exclusive claim to be the authentic heir and possessor of the traditions cherished by the parent body. In other words, in early Judaism we witness the emergence of a type of sect which takes over the identity and the claims which it either believes the parent body has forfeited or to which it denies title to other claimants. It will see itself as the only representative of the Israel to which the traditions testify, with the result that the world outside its boundaries consists not only of Gentiles but of other Jews. [192]
Just to put that yet another way: we tend to think of a sect as a small community defined against a more general body of believers. But there is also the “takeover” scenario in which a community appropriates as its own the traditions of a larger body.. thus defining itself as simply “Israel.” This type of sect wraps itself in common traditions but at the same time excludes people who would otherwise be thought of as “Jews.”
Now back to Glenn Beck. As I’ve mentioned, religious use of prophetic messages are commonplace in American history. The idea of getting “their” country back. The idea of “real Americans”.. expressed in various guises. The emphasis on the Constitution and the glorification of the founding fathers. Re-read the paragraph above from Blenkinsopp and apply it to the Tea Party. To a liberal like me, it all looks either racist or stupid, but maybe we are seeing a sectarian version of patriotism arising. That is, something that is explicitly not a new church, but rather a sect with a new definition of being American.. with America now taking the role of a common community of believers, which is more of less excommunicated by the new sect as they become the true “America.” This pushes a lot of political discussion into a new sphere.. and I fear it will be very tough to combat. I’m not sure this kind of sectarian patriotism has been seen before.. and right now I think it’s different than nationalism.
When I think of the spiritual descendants of the Hebrew prophets I like to bring up William Blake, Martin Luther King, Jr., Rachel Carson, etc… I do think it’s important to recognize the existence of figures who speaks out to authority, and the way societies legitimate those voices in different areas. But in actual fact, I think the Hebrew prophets have a little more Glenn Beck in them than I like. That’s not to praise Beck..
**BTW, Beck comes on stage to Fanfare for the Common Man by Aaron Copland, which is also the music to which Bob Dylan enters for his concerts. I wonder if Dylan will change that piece?
As a professor involved in teaching medieval and ancient texts (or as I sometimes say: old and very old), I often reflect on how students engage with these texts.. and with reflection this has come to be a theoretical interest. What we look for is a good “translation” of a text.. by which we mean a text that is rendered in English that is vivid and attention-grabbing. This translation treatment also means appropriate cuts in lengthy run-on material that might distract students from reading. What we are saying is: “Give us a work from the past packaged in a way that most fits our genre expectations.” The genre to which every work is editorially molded, whether it be the epic of Gilgamesh or 1001 Nights, is the novel.
The book What Is World Literature? by David Damrosch is a rare book that examines this process of reading distant texts. Most important is that he frames the issue not as “great books” but as an issue of circulation and translation. Both of these words get us thinking about how texts get used and picked up by different cultures. At the conclusion of his book he notes three characteristics that make for a work we could classify as part of world literature: 1) it is an elliptical refraction of national literatures, 2) it gains in translation, and 3) it is a form of detached engagement with worlds beyond our own. I was especially caught by what he had to say about point #2:
It is important to recognize that the question of translatability is distinct from questions of value. A work can hold a prominent place within its own culture but read poorly elsewhere, either because its language doesn’t translate well or because its cultural assumptions don’t travel. Snorri Sturluson’s dynastic saga Heimskringla is a major document in medieval Nordic culture, but it only makes compelling reading if you are fairly knowledgeable about the political history of Norway and Iceland, and it remains unknown abroad outside specialist circles. By contrast, Norse mythological texts like the Elder Edda and Snorri’s own Prose Edda have been widely translated and much appreciated. [289]
I would actually count the text I spend a lot of time on—al-Maqrizi’s Khitat—as similar to what Domrosch says about the Heimskringla. That is, it’s a great book when seen from the vantage of knowledge about medieval Egypt, but one that will leave many other people cold. It’s length is also prohibitive, and world literature classics have to fit in well with the semester system. This point about translatability also nicely explains why some minor works become stars while works that medieval readers might have chosen to represent them are discarded. Of course the upshot of this is that culture and its artistic values are constantly changing.. and if we shake up culture and its artistic values, then we would expect a different canon to emerge (although it’s not quite this simple since generations don’t start as a blank slate and books that don’t make the first cultural cut are often lost.. so we’re to some extent stuck with other canons, from which to make selections).
I’ve begun to read some of the panegyrics of al-Mutanabbi recently. He is one of the giants of Arabic literature, whose poetry amassed a lot of criticism in the Arabic tradition, but whose works are almost completely unknown to general readers now. If I look him up on Amazon these are the only works currently available on him. The first book is a quite old book with the Arabic text and facing translation (it’s the book I’m slowly working on). Then there’s a recent short biography from the very useful “Makers of the Muslim World” series. Finally, a prohibitively expensive critical study published by Brill. These are not best-sellers, by any stretch of the imagination. We don’t find well-known poet laureates taking a crack at translating Mutanabbi as they do periodically the work of Dante. Yet Mutanabbi is a poet of that same stature. The problem? He doesn’t translate well. The language is a resonant and difficult medieval Arabic, in a tightly controlled meter. As for his values, A.J. Arberry writes:
These Arab virtues, together with others—loyalty, sincerity, affection, generosity, chivalrousness, compassion—were applauded by al-Mutanabbi in language felt to be exactly appropriate, proved to be supremely memorable. His neo-classical style is a perfect blend of the traditional and the romantic, an exact compromise between the simple and the contrived, colloquial of the sophisticated city-dweller overlaid upon the more austere idiom of the desert. [14-15]
But however memorable his work, and how finely it comes across to a reader of Arabic, it is in the process of being bypassed for works that translate much more easily into our modern world and its expectations.
The most important biographical note on al-Maqrizi in English is without doubt Nasser Rabbat’s essay “Who Was al-Maqrizi? A Biographical Sketch” from Mamluk Studies Review 7/2 (2003), pgs. 1-19. The essay explains what we know about the life of al-Maqrizi and takes up for special investigation a handful of outstanding issues, such as his supposed relation to the Fatimid caliphs or the issue of his association with Islamic legal schools. These issues are interesting, but they provide little in the way of personal details that might allow us to know the person al-Maqrizi.. such as the question: “Who was this guy?” So I’m embarking on an odyssey to discover what can be known about the man. Pursuant to that goal I’ll translate sections from biographical notices about his life (tarjamah) preserved in other authors. I’ll mostly avoid some of the larger issues (covered well in Rabbat’s essay), and focus on anything anecdotal in character.
The first biographical notice I’ve rounded up is from Ibn Taghribirdi’s biographical dictionary Al-Manhal al-Safi wa al-Mustawfa ba’da al-Wafi. Ibn Taghribirdi lived from 1410-1470, and since al-Maqrizi died in 1442 there was about 32 years of overlap between them. It is evident from Ibn Taghribirdi’s biographical notice that he knew al-Maqrizi on a personal basis and studied with him:
I read [as a pupil] to him much from his works and he used to depend upon my statements about what I mentioned as correct, and he would change what he had first written in his works. He granted me a license [for teaching] everything that he had been licensed to teach.
This is something like a grad-student to full-professor relationship.. to put it in our own terms. Life can be unfair since the grad student so often gets to write the story of the teacher! And Ibn Taghribirdi is interested in portraying himself taking everything there was to take from his teacher.. and helping to correct his books. It’s a a subtle dance here, since you can’t denigrate your teacher without denigrating yourself. So Ibn Taghribirdi demonstrates his own precociousness, but maintains his teacher’s greatness as well.
The paragraph before this (in a six page biographical notice) tells us something of the personality of al-Maqrizi:
He had a good number of virtues, and gave extremely good talks, especially about the pious forebears among the ulema’, rulers, and other topics. He applied himself [to work] in his house, much attached to devotions and solitude. It was rare that he went out to see someone except by necessity and except because of the fact that he was quite ardent against the eminences of the Hanafi legal school and others on account of his leaning toward the Zahirite school.
A well-known trait of al-Maqrizi is his somewhat reclusive character. As Rabbat notes, he withdrew increasingly from public life in his later years.. which could be dated from 1413. Ibn Taghribirdi must have known him in his last years, and his reclusive nature was quite pronounced. This is something I particularly like about al-Maqrizi.. and to my mind sets him apart from some of his status obsessed peers. This is what gives his Khitat a taste of bitterness to go with the nostalgia.
Al-Maqrizi also has a dogmatic side.. made clear by his association with the Zahirite school. He wrote an essay against the followers of the Sufi Ibn ‘Arabi, so he had no sympathies for the popular mysticism of his day. He’s a literalist.. so much so that it is his passion and one of the only things that will draw him out of his house to engage with other people! I wonder to what extent the author of a book filled with historical details about the life of a city had to be a literalist. No Sufi could have written the Khitat.. or would have been drawn to a project like that.
Much of the biographical notice by Ibn Taghribirdi is filler. It consists of his full name, details about his education, the works he wrote, where he died—that’s most of what is present in these pages. But here is one last anecdote that comes up in the account of the books written by al-Maqrizi. Ibn Taghribirdi mentions a specialized book on details about the life of the Prophet, completed in six volumes, and then cites a personal communication:
[Al-Maqrizi] said to me, God have mercy on him: “I asked God Most High that a copy be written at Mecca of this book, and that I relate it. This happened during my sojourn there, God be praised.”
Al-Maqrizi made a number of trips to Mecca, and this is a personal note of pride about his rare monograph’s presence at Mecca. It seems an odd hope.. or a scholar’s hope.. not that a work be a best-seller and hugely influential, but simply that it wind up in one library collection. His later works would have no trouble meeting that threshold, and the Khitat is a book that has suffered neglect because of the huge number of extant manuscripts that someone someday needs to collate. He had more modest hopes for this earlier work..
Jonathan Franzen has a new novel out, and apparently Macmillan convinced him to do a video talk as part of its promotion (HT Daily Dish). He used part of this time to talk about why he’s against this kind of promotion.. although he notes that a video makes commercial sense since so much commerce is centered on the Internet. Franzen is clearly no friend of the Internet, and I can imagine him siding strongly with Nicholas Carr in the Google-is-making-us-stupid debate. Here is Franzen’s main point concerning books and the Internet:
To me the point of the novel is to take you to a still place. You can multi-task with a lot of things, but you can’t multi-task with a book. You’re either reading a book or you’re not. To me the world of books is the quiet alternative. An ever more desperately needed alternative.
I’m on board when it comes to the primary sentiment: the quiet alternative is what we need today. I’m also a book lover.. in fact a bibliophile. But I think it’s wrong to connect the quiet alternative with the form of the book.. or with print culture more broadly. In my view that’s a fundamental mistake. The rise of the novel is itself connected to important sociological changes in society and the way books were experienced (in personal private space). It’s no accident that novels are the form that takes off in the early modern period. But what about before then? before the novel was so dominant? Were they not enough invested in the “quiet alternative”? You bet they were, only they lived in worlds where poetic performance or group activities like scriptural commentary were the outlets for that quiet meditation.
The interesting thing to watch now is how new forms of creativity are arising.. and thoughtful, meditative creators will find these outlets. I happen to suspect that the novel is not the form of the future.. it just doesn’t have the payoff I look for, and seems more like TV watching than anything else.. but I could be wrong about that. At any rate, what I know is that the Internet, while dominated by TMZ, Perez Hilton, and other purveyors of loud popular culture, is becoming here and there a place that is a quiet alternative. That is the explicit aim of this website.
