Left-Hand Path, Right-Hand Path: someone being wrong on the internet

Good versus evil is not a universal religious or moral framing

I have a wide range of interests, many of them historical. One of the YouYube channels I have watched regularly is Dr Jackson Crawford’s channel on old Norse culture: serious scholarship delivered congenially in (generally) bite-sized pieces.

I have also listened to several of Tom Rowsell’s offerings from his Survive the Jive channel. He is mainly interested in matters Indo-European, but he ranges more widely, and some of his videos can be charming, such as this one on Hinduism in Bali. His material seems to be accurate (I have not spotted a significant error yet) and is engagingly presented.

Which brings me to Arith Harger’s channel. I listened to his video on What is the Left Hand Path? My interest in these matters is entirely historical and intellectual, but he gets SO much wrong in this video. Rather than give a detailed critique, I will cover the same ground based on available scholarship.

The first section of the video is actually quite a good discussion of the difference between Right-Hand Path and Left-Hand Path. He is correct in arguing that it does not neatly line up with good and evil. Even though, for Star Wars fans, the Right-Hand Path seems a bit Jedi-like and the Left-Hand Path rather Sith-like. It is when Harger tries to put the matter in a larger context that he goes seriously wrong.

The original source of the Left-Hand Path/Right-Hand Path distinction is from India. Specifically, from Yogic and Tantric traditions.

There is an excellent introduction to this distinction, and its likely cultural and historical origins, in Thomas McEvilley’s classic essay The Archaeology of Yoga. This is available on Jstor here and on Scribd here. The essay is, in part, a precursor to McEvilley’s masterpiece The Shape of Ancient Thought in which he examines the history of Greek and Indian philosophy and their interactions.

McEvilley argues that the Left-Hand Path/Right-Hand Path distinction is driven by the interaction between the patrilineal (and patricentric) culture of the invading Indo-European pastoralists and that of the matrilineal (and matricentric) culture of the resident farming population. To use slightly old-fashioned scholarly language, Aryans versus Dravidians.

Whether the culture was patrilineal or matrilineal matters because, in a patrilineal culture, a child without a father lacked a crucial element of social identity. Patrilineal cultures tend to be particularly restrictive of female sexuality for that reason. Conversely, in a culture where a child gets their social identity from their mother, not having a designated father is likely to be less of an issue. Especially if uncles can readily substitute as protective male relatives.

So, mystical and occult traditions in patrilineal cultures are likely to be sex-restrictive, to be ascetic. Conversely, mystical and occult traditions in matrilineal cultures are more likely to be sex-permissive. The former naturally inclines towards the development of spirit-focused disciplines, where ascetic denial of indulgence and the body is the seen as the path to self-development. The latter naturally inclines to the development of self-capacity-and-bodily-focused disciplines.

There is no direct connection in this to any good-versus-evil dichotomy. But, outside the monotheistic traditions, good-versus-evil is not the normal religious dichotomy. In religions in the animist-polytheist spectrum, the more normal distinction is order-versus-chaos. This is particularly true in agrarian societies, where a bad harvest presages disease, death and, if there is a sequence of such harvests, disaster. This concern for order can be seen in the ancient Egyptian concept of maat. How to construct and maintain social order is a central concern of Chinese philosophy while to seek the Tao (or Dao) is seek to be in accordance with the natural order of the universe.

Ascetic, sex-restrictive disciplines tend to be more orderly than than more sex-permissive disciplines. Especially if, as is the case in various forms of Left-Hand-Path, the deliberate breaking of conventions and restrictions is seen as a technique to develop one’s capacities. The highly patrilineal Indian elite would clearly tend to see the mother-right vestiges of Dravidian mysticism and occult practices as very much other. So, the Left-Hand-Path would be seen as more chaotic (because it was) and therefore negatively.

Arith Harger does not seem to be aware of any of this background. Of course, admitting the Left-Hand Path/Right-Hand Path distinction is originally Indian does rather get in the way of presenting it as Old Pagan Wisdom. Though somewhat similar, though less developed, patterns of patrilineal pastoralist Indo-European overlay interacting with matrilineal farming-religion survivals can also be traced in European cultures and their pre-Christian religious and occult traditions.

Where Harger gets particularly confused is over the good-versus-evil distinction. This is not remotely an originally European idea. The pre-Christian religious traditions of Europe fairly clearly follow the normal order-versus-chaos division. Thus, in Norse mythology, various monsters of chaos threaten the order upheld by the Aesir in a pattern that recurs across mythologies.

The good-versus-evil distinction is essentially (as far as we can tell) an invention of Zarathustra (aka Zoroaster). It fits nicely in with monotheism — with a Creator God who creates both the material and the moral order. Opposition to such a God is not merely chaotic and disorderly, it is anti-moral and destructive.

Hence the original Jewish understanding of the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was that they were cities that were systematically anti-moral, preying on the weak and vulnerable and refusing to respect others. (Which makes way more sense than the later interpretation of the key sin of the cities of the plain being unnatural sex: see Chapter Four of Michael Carden’s Sodomy: A History of a Christian Biblical Myth.)

Norman Cohn’s book Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come is a good introduction to the hugely important shift in moral perspectives from order-versus-chaos to good-versus-evil. A shift in moral perspectives that explains much of the antipathy between the Romans (who were mostly definitely all about order, including in ways that seem wildly immoral, or even evil, to us) and the Jews and later the Christians. If one is going to truly embrace a pagan perspective, good-versus-evil has to go.

So, the Right-Hand Path/Left-Hand Path distinction does not map to good-versus-evil. As it originally arose in the intermixing of cultures on the animist-polytheist spectrum, that is not surprising.

The Right-Hand Path/Left-Hand Path is originally an Indian distinction, but as patrilineal pastoralist Indo-European overlay over the culture and religious perspectives of resident matrilineal agrarians we see in India also occurred in Europe, the distinction has a relatively easy path into European pagan traditions, even revived ones.

But surely it is better to get the history correct, rather than hopelessly confused.

Cross-posted from Medium.

Islam's recurring patterns

Like many people, I have been doing a lot of reading on Islam and Islamic history since September 11 2001. But my interests in history – particularly military and medieval history – meant I have been building on previous knowledge. Indeed, in the early 1990s, I gave a paper to a private discussion group when, in the course of the discussion, I was asked where the next challenge to the West would come from, I said ‘Islam’ simply on the basis that it is the other universalist civilisation.

In the end, what most strikes me is how much Islamic history seems to be stuck in recurring patterns. Islam comes basically in four varieties – modernising, reformist, traditional and splinter. The modernisers wish to open Islam up to achievements in other civilisations, particularly science and critical reason. The reformers wish to return to the purity of original Islam – that is, they hold C7th Arabia as the pinnacle of human social order. The traditionalists are based on lineages of teaching, notably via Sufi orders, which often incorporate local traditions on the way. The splinter groups are small, permanent minorities who may not be accepted as Muslim by many mainstream Muslims: classic splinter groups are the Alawi, the Ismailis and Ahmadis. Some splinter groups, notably the Druze, have left Islam.

Generally speaking, the splinter groups are the easiest for non-Muslims to deal with. As permanent minorities, they eschew the idea that their religious rules are to be imposed on others, turning religious law into community law following a path originally pioneered by rabbinical Judaism. Even the ruling Alawite regime in Syria, no matter how vile it is, parades its ‘secular’ nature in ruling over a Sunni majority.

Traditional Islam often incorporates various techniques to soften aspects of Shar’ia, something also pioneered by rabbinical Judaism in dealing with the homicidal severity of Torah rules. Since, however, traditional Islam retained full judicial power, the softening never went as far as with the rabbis.

While there has been some tendency for Westerners, particularly in the Anglosphere, to romanticise the Sufis – there have been strains of Sufism which were enthusiastically jihadist – nevertheless, due to its mysticism, Sufism has also included rather more humanitarian strains of Islam, open to non-Muslim influences. The notion of a direct connection to the divine provides grounds on which to restrain or reinterpret some of the harsher elements of the teachings of the Prophet.

Non-Muslims have often managed to reach accommodations with traditional Islam. A revealing study of anti-Americanism in the Islamic world (pdf) points out that one of the most overtly pious of Muslim countries (Senegal) is also the one of the most pro-American. There, religion is controlled by various Sufi orders who have reached a working accommodation with the secular political elite. Senegal (and Muslim West Africa generally), Javanese Islam, Bangladesh, Morocco are examples of such “accommodationist’’ or “traditionalist” Islam being dominant.

Islam has also had various modernising movements, at least as far back as the Mu’tazilites of the C8th to C10th. Kossovo, Bosnia, Tunisia and Azerbaijan are examples of countries where modernising Islam is currently dominant. (Though post-revolutionary Tunis is showing some tensions over that.)

[Read the rest at Critical Thinking Applied.]

Celebrating heterosexuality, ignoring women

It is an odd thing, misogyny that celebrates heterosexuality. Particularly if it privileges heterosexuality. (By ‘privileging’ I mean making it normative such that same-sex attraction is viewed as some form of perversion or deviation from proper human sexuality.) On one hand, one celebrates sex and erotic love between men and women as the proper path of sex and love, even as being sex and love at its most uplifting and spiritual. On the other hand, the status of women is something to, at best, ignore and, at worst, denigrate. It celebrates the complementary of sex with, and love for, the opposite sex yet conceives that complementarity as one of superior and inferior. Not only is heterosexuality normative, so is masculinity.

Two pieces on pederasty in the Islamic world by the Asian Times columnist Spengler managed to display the weirdness that is heterosexuality-privileging misogyny quite strongly. Not that he ever explicitly says women are inferior and masculinity is normative: his is the misogyny of silence, not of denigration, but silence in the face of profound subordination and denigration.
So a silence that is very striking.

The two pieces are a systematic attack on same-sex attraction to younger males – i.e. pederasty – in the Islamic world. Both are marked by a consistent refusal to make pertinent distinctions. Pederasty can involve paedophilia (sexual interest and involvement with pre-pubescent child: a boy, in this case), but need not. It can be ephebophiliac, or even involve someone in their early 20s. A ‘beardless boy’ is not necessarily pre-pubescent.

So, there is a profound intellectual dishonesty at the core of both pieces.

Also, a fair bit of psychological ignorance. In his first piece, Spengler tells us that:

As the psychiatrists explain, pederasty is an expression of narcissism, the love of an idealized youthful self-image.

That is wrong about both paedophilia and narcissism. First, being attracted to youth is hardly a homosexual peculiarity: ads in magazines and elsewhere proclaim the pervasively attractive power of youth.

Second, paedophilia is a typically a failure of emotional-sexual development, often the result of childhood abuse. Sexual interest is “frozen” at an earlier period in life based on a deep confusion of childhood and adult roles due to early breaches in basic boundaries. Paedophiles’ sexual interest in children often involves attraction to both boys and girls: paedophilia is a sexual condition that is often not interested in differentiating its sexual fixations by gender. Whether one’s adult sexual interest is opposite sex or same sex has no bearing on the predilection to paedophilia: indeed, heterosexual male paedophiles tend to be drawn to younger boys, since they do not have the masculine features they are not attracted to.

Third, narcissism is not a self-idealisation in the “fall in love with one’s own image” sense, it is a form of profound selfishness that turns one’s convenience into one’s reality principle. Indeed, at the core of narcissism is often a weak sense of self that ultimately vicious ego-defences are constructed to shield: the self-idealisation is a defense mechanism, one that is the more pathological the more intensely it is adhered to.

Being narcissistic can make paedophilia easier, but it makes any personality disorder “easier”. It is a feature of many personality disorders, but not a defining one of paedophilia. Most narcissists are not paedophiles. I doubt that most paedophiles are narcissists, though I would expect some narcissistic traits to be common among paedophiles, since a weak and damaged sense of self is at the core of both conditions. Either way, paedophilia is neither defined by narcissism nor caused by it.

It is, however, true, as Spengler sets out, that much Sufi mysticism and Islamic poetry was fixated on male beauty. The question is, why?

Singular mysticism
In the first of his two essays, Spengler blames it on the dynamics of Sufi mysticism:

Sufism seeks one-ness with the universe through spiritual exercises that lead individual consciousness to dissolve into the cosmos. But nothing is more narcissistic than the contemplation of the cosmos, for if we become one with the cosmos, what we love in the cosmos is simply an idealized image of ourselves.

And here was me thinking mysticism was about the unification and loss of self.
But no, Spengler assures us:

Mysticism of this genre provides a pretext to worship one’s self in the masquerade of the universe.

The problem being, in Spengler’s analysis, that the God of the Old Testament and the New Testament reveals himself in his acts, but the God of the Qur’an is utterly Not a Person:

There is no Other in Sufism, only your own ego grinning back from the universe. To embrace the cosmos implies the destruction of individuality. … To Christians and Jews, God reveals himself as a personality, and through acts of love – the Exodus and the Resurrection. There is no such event in Islam. Allah does not reveals himself, that is, descend to earth; instead, he sends down from heaven his instruction manual, namely the Koran. Allah remains unknown, and ultimately indistinguishable from the nature in which he is embedded. Confronted by this absolutely transcendental entity the individual human personality shrivels into insignificance.

Historian of medieval philosophy Etienne Gilson made the point that that the God of the Jews and Christians was a Person was a profound shift from classical Greek philosophy. Spengler is claiming that Islam – at least in its mystical manifestations – negates the Personhood of God.

The Greeks, of course, famously celebrated pederasty and did so without the mystical underpinnings of Sufism. So, perhaps mysticism does not explain all that much. Indeed, perhaps the mysticism Spengler points to is a product of social patterns rather than a basic cause of them.

Anyway, Spengler gets around to celebrating heterosexuality:

Men and women are so different that the experience of heterosexual love is analogous to the spiritual encounter with the divine Other. Love is as strong as death, says the Song of Songs

Spengler does note the existence of Greek pederasty:

The Greeks of the 6th century BC preferred young boys, procreating out of patriotic habit while their women closed their eyes and thought of Athens. Adoration of youth is a very different way to capture from love a sense of immortality. In Greek legend the gods turned Narcissus into a flower to punish his pride in refusing male suitors. Pederasty thus was present at the origin of the concept of narcissism.

Very Platonic of Spengler, privileging a concept (indeed, the origins of a term) over the psychological reality.

Noting that the medieval Persians were even more effusive on pederasty than the classical Greeks, Spengler points out that Hebrew literature lacks celebration of same-sex love until the late C20th while Classical Persian and Arab literature is full of it. Considering the relative size and selection process differences between a minority and two majority cultures would muddy this confident clarity in distinction, but it is true there is much effusing over male beauty and desirability in Classical Persian and Arab literature. One also notes that those cultures lacked equivalents of the hetaira of classical Greece. Or artistic representations of female beauty of anything like the prominence of statues and other representations of Greek goddesses.

Spengler then warns that:

But the experience of divine love reflected in the love of men and women and their children is the foundation of society, and gay marriage would have dreadful consequences.

Really: a careful study of the many human societies that had various forms of same-sex marriage (which clearly no society under Sharia did) demonstrates this, does it?
Finally, he concludes that:

pederasty has become a plague in parts of the West, and widespread abuse of children has occasioned a crisis in the Catholic Church. It is hard to avoid the impression that sexual misbehavior is associated with a retreat from faith in a personal God, namely the Jesus who lived on earth and was crucified and was resurrected, in favor of a mushy and unspecific spirituality – something like Sufism, in fact. Perhaps the same link between spiritual and sexual narcissism is at work in the West.

Really? The crisis in the Catholic Church is due to a lack of belief in a personal God? Really? It is not because of changing opportunity costs in the centuries-old practice of steering same-sex attracted boys into the Church, the wider role of the priesthood as a refuge from conflicted or problematic sexuality and the commitment of a celibate hierarchy to preserve the authority of the priesthood above all else?

The absence of women
So, what is missing from Spengler’s celebration of heterosexuality? Women: specifically the role and status of women in the societies Spengler is critiquing. He is so concerned with whether men are having complementary sex with difference, or are “narcissistically” focusing on sameness, that the question of the role and status of women in these societies is not mentioned in the essay. At all. But, surely, it has some importance?

In fact, it is central.

In what circumstances are homosexual acts most common? In prison. Why? Because there are no women inmates in male prisons, nor male inmates in female prisons. If you do not see or interact with women, then even men who are otherwise heterosexual will begin to focus on their own sex. If you have a whole society like that, such as Saudi Arabia, you end up with a Kingdom in the Closet. What, in the West, we would call prison sex becomes a much wider social pattern.

See how different things look if you just start asking: where are the women? What is their status?
Questions of status, gender and sexuality are deeply intertwined. If sex is properly between unequals, then slaves, “beardless boys” and women all become acceptable partners for dominant males. If women are socially closeted, hidden by obscuring clothing and denied education opportunities, then male beauty becomes the only living and (in the absence of significant visual representations) accessible beauty to celebrate. Medieval Islam and Classical Athens had similar celebrations of pederasty because they had similar social patterns. This turned out to be much more important than the fact that one was monotheist – and officially decried same-sex activity as a capital crime – and the other was polytheist, and did not. The difference monotheism made was medieval Islam was, for religious reasons, far more starved of representations or public manifestations of female beauty than classical Greece: which is to say, it made the public absence of the female more thorough.

The interconnections of status, gender and sexuality is why, in the West, homosexual liberation has marched behind women’s liberation. It is a nice historical resonance, that The Subjection of Women was published in the same year that the term ‘homosexual’ was coined. For the more sex is properly between equals, as the status of women increases, then the more adult male homosexuality conforms to the normative sexual pattern of sex properly being between equals, rather than subverting it. As, if sex is properly between unequals, a man of the dominant group providing sexual pleasure to another man is subverting the status of his masculinity.

Monotheism’s misogyny problem
That loss of status and rights by women due to the Christianisation of Roman law mirrored the loss of status and rights by women due to the Christianisation of Anglo-Saxon, and then common, law provides even more problems for Spengler’s analysis. The pattern in both legal realms was the same. First, women lost control of their bodies, with the strictures against abortion and contraception and the notion that a wife had, in consenting to the marriage, permanently consented to sex with her husband. Then, women lost the right to exit a marriage, tending to trap them within the power of a husband who was typically bigger, stronger and had more access to formal power than they. Finally, women – not trusted to control their bodies, not trusted to judge their marriage – lost control over property within the marriage, except as the agent of their husband, with the subordination tending to get worse over time. Largely due to the Christianisation of law, woman in C8th Anglo-Saxon England had more legal rights and social opportunities than a woman in C18th England.

In both the Roman and common law legal realms, the process of women losing rights and status was clearly driven by the sex-and-gender logic of monotheism in general, and Christianity specifically. Just as the increase in the legal rights and status of women in more recent times has flowed from the de-Christianisation of law. The process unravelled in reverse order. First, married women had property rights, previously lost, restored to them. Then, they gained legal right to exit a marriage (which lowered the rates of marital homicides and of domestic abuse). Finally, they regained control of their bodies.

As Skepticlawyer has noted to me, conservative Catholics and other Christians clearly find it deeply frustrating that arguments over abortion, contraception, homosexuality and so on that they thought had been definitively won in the C4th, C5th, C11th or whatever century have since been re-opened, even reversed. The most important single reason why that is so is that women have regained (or more than regained) status and rights previously taken from them by the process of Christianisation of law.

So, it is not that Christianity-as-a-historical reality has operated in a different direction than Islam regarding the status of women, it is that it did not take the logic of the denigration of women as far. Probably in large part due to interactions between geography and culture – if you draw a line from Trieste to St Petersburg, north and west of that line, marriages tended to be later and children fewer (i.e. the status of women tended to be higher): south and east of that line, the reverse tended to be true.

About those Pashtuns
In his more recent piece, on homosexuality among the Pashtuns of Afghanistan, Spengler manages some glimmerings that paying attention to the situation of women may be appropriate. Though it only turns up in a quoted comment by a researcher:

The trouble, the researchers surmise, is “Pashtun society’s extremely limited access to women,” citing Los Angeles Times interview with a young Pashtun identified as Daud. He only has sex with men, explaining: “I like boys, but I like girls better. It’s just that we can’t see the women to see if they are beautiful. But we can see the boys, and so we can tell which of them is beautiful.”

In other words, a society with a pattern of prison sex.

Why is there such limited access to women? Because Islam puts women in second-class status (with lower legal status and their physical appearance being far more controlled); because tribal honour systems say women can only lose honour, they cannot gain it; because women are ritually unclean. That Sharia discounts the legal status of women, even in giving evidence, and does so particularly severely in rape cases, leads to the development of rape cultures, since it is so hard for women to legally defend themselves and, even if they legally win, they lose due to their loss of “honour”. From this comes the “need” to control the entry of women into public space or male company: God’s logic as a very misogynist logic.

As Spengler quotes the report on Pashtun sexuality:

“Loving a man would therefore be unacceptable and a major sin within this cultural interpretation of Islam, but using another man for sexual gratification would be regarded as a foible – undesirable but far preferable to sex with a ineligible woman, which in the context of Pashtun honor, would likely result in issues of revenge and honor killings.”

In other words, the fundamental problem is a profound and systematic misogyny. But that is not what Spengler sees.

What he wants to opine about is not the subordination, even denigration, of women, but patterns of Sufi mysticism:

The team’s results are striking, but they place too much emphasis on the weirdness of Pashtun tradition and give too little attention to the broader role of homosexuality in Islamic (and especially Sufi) culture. What scholars now consider the Golden Age of Islamic love poetry, the Persian high middle ages, made homosexual pederasty the normative mode of love.

Well, yes, but when would they get to see or contemplate female beauty? If the answer is “nowhere”, why would not the artists and mystics respond like the Pashtun men (or, indeed, Saudi men) and focus on what they could have access to?

Prison sex accompanied by prison mysticism, each reinforcing the other.

It is all very well to suggest that life imitates art, but cannot art (even mystical art) reflect patterns of life?

Spengler does not want, however, to talk about women. He wants to talk about men being good heterosexuals, or not, depending on getting their religious perspective correct, concluding that:

All forms of contemplative mysticism involve the danger that the object of adoration into which one dissolves might turn out to be one’s self. It sounds well and good to seek God in the all, that is, no place in particular. The trouble is that if one tries to dissolve one’s self into the all, one’s self becomes part of the all. The lover cannot distinguish himself from the all. The self and the all are the same, and one loves one’s self. There is no other in Sufism, only your own ego staring back in the carnival mirror of mysticism. The adept does not worship a God who is wholly other – YHWH of the Hebrew Bible or Jesus of the Gospels – but a younger and prettier version of himself. In that respect, pedophilia in Afghanistan may have a distinctly religious motivation.

I have a different theory: prison sex encourages prison mysticism (and vice versa). The problem is not the sex causing the mysticism, nor mysticism encouraging the sex, it is the monstrous structures of misogyny that the whole thing, the whole social prison, is built on.

General George S. Patton (who was not without his own, if very heterosexual, sexual peccadilloes) spotted the problem:

To me it seems certain that the fatalistic teachings of Mohammed and the utter degradation of women is the outstanding cause for the arrested development of the Arab. ... Here, I think, is a text for some eloquent sermon on the virtues of Christianity.

Misogyny that privileges heterosexuality is a very strange thing. It stops you seeing the bleeding obvious. Because, to the heterosexuality-privileging misogynist, women are either invisible – apart from their role as the proper object of male desire – or their social subordination is proper.
But, if you are as clever as Spengler (and he is a very clever and often perceptive), you can invent wonderful, consoling theories that hide you own blindness from yourself. (That, by the way, is a fundamental pattern of narcissism.)

I am not heterosexual, but I apparently pay more attention to, and have more concern for, women than Spengler does. Heterosexuality-privileging misogyny is a very strange thing indeed.

The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (2)

This is the second part of my review of Jean Gimpel’s The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages. The first part was in my previous post.


Believers in progress
Gimpel argues that a crucial difference between medievals and classicals is that the medievals believed in progress. As the medieval scholar and friar Gilbert de Tournai wrote:

Never will we find truth if we content ourselves with what is already known … Those things that have been written before us are not laws but guides. The truth is open to all, for it is not yet totally possessed (p.147).

While it was another medieval, Bernard, master of the Episcopal school at Chartres from 1114-9, who produced the much quoted:

We are as dwarfs mounted on the shoulders of giants, so that although we perceive many more things than they, it is not because our vision is more piercing or our stature higher, but because we are carried and elevated higher thanks to their gigantic size (Pp147-8).

Medieval writers noted and marvelled at the invention, the creation of new things, they saw around them. The surgeon Theodoric, in a 1267 treatise, said of the extraction of arrows:

every day a new instrument and a new method is invented (Pp148-9).

While the Dominican Fra Giordano of Pisa held that:

Not all the arts have been found; we shall never see an end of finding them. Every day we could discover a new art … It is not twenty years since there was discovered the art of making spectacles which help one to see well, an art which is one of the best and most necessary in the world. And that is such a short time ago that a new art which never before existed was invented … I myself saw the man who discovered and practised it and I talked with him (p.149).

The good Fra, one suspects, personally experienced the benefits of this new marvel.

According to my general rule about invention—if something was invented before 500BC, it was first invented in the Fertile Crescent: if it was invented after 1500, it was first invented in the West but if it was invented between 500BC and 1500, it was first invented in China; unless it had something to do with horses, in which case it was invented in Central Eurasian steppes—the most complex mechanical clock was that developed by Su Sung in the Sung capital in the C11th. But prediction of astronomical events was a closely guarded secret of the Chinese imperial court, as it was used to buttress imperial power. When, in 1126, the Sung fled their former capital to a new Southern capital, they were unable to replicate the clock due to lack of required specialists. The conquering Jin, and their later supplanters Yuan Mongols, kept the clock going. When the Ming overthrew the Yuan in 1368, they had no interest in the clock and no more is heard of it. By 1600, Jesuits were introducing European mechanical clocks to a China that showed no sign of ever having created such a thing (Pp150ff).

Back in Europe, interest in creating a mechanical clock (primarily for astronomical purposes) had developed in the C13th, partly spurred by Hindu astronomer and mathematician Bhaskara’s perpetual-motion machine of about 1150, known through Arabic treatises. Indeed, Giovanni di Dondi’s C14th treatise treats a “common” or time-telling clock as presumed knowledge before reading his manuscript. It is likely that the weight-driven clock with mechanical escapement was invented in the late C13th. Gimpel traces the development of an effective mechanical clock through various treatises (including a reference in Dante’s Paradiso Canto X) peaking in Giovanni di Dondi’s complex and much-celebrated astronomical clock (Pp152ff).
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Keeping di Dondi’s clock going was also a trial for medieval Europe. But, in the meantime, “ordinary” mechanical clocks spread throughout Latin Christendom in the C14th. The Latin Church accepted the “mechanical” time of evenly spaced hours rather than the “eternal” time of 12 divisions of daylight: unlike the Orthodox Church, which banned installation of any mechanical clocks in Orthodox churches until the C20th. To Gimpel, the difference flowed from the power of the mercantile interest in Western Europe, who knew that “time is money” (Pp168ff).

Gimpel explores how the C12th Renaissance differed notably from The Renaissance:

There was, however, one fundamental difference between this earlier renaissance and the later, more famous, one. While the latter was primarily concerned with literature and art, the twelfth-century renaissance was primarily taken up with philosophy and science (p.174).

Of his representative figures:

Giovanni di Dondi, the horologist; Villard de Honnecourt, the architect-engineer; Walter of Henley, the agronomist—all had one thing in common: a rational outlook on life (p.171).

This did not mean they were not men of faith, but that they applied a reasoned, empirical practicality to the problems they confronted.

For:

From the first quarter of the twelfth century to the last quarter of the thirteenth century—until the year 1277 to be precise—there was a sustained effort to marry reason and faith (p.171).

An upsurge that started as early as Gerbert of Aurillac (Pope Sylvester II) “the first to set Europe on the path of science”, reviving the use of the abacus, developing Boethius’s treatises on arithmetic and music, writing a treatise on astronomy (p.172).

Figures such as Lanfranc and St Anselm—both C11th Archbishops of Canterbury—led the application of reason to faith. In Anselm’s words:

It seems to me negligent, if after we have been confirmed in the faith, we do not strive to understand what we believe (p.172).

But it is the career of Peter Abelard who Gimpel most warms to, quoting him at considerable length and celebrating his intellectual acumen and combativeness (Pp172ff).

It was a period where philosophical treatises (including those of natural philosophy, the study of the world—what became science) were sought out and translated. Gimpel tabulates some of the authors translated in the C12th and early C13th:

It was the work of these translators that made possible the rise of modern science, for it was they who made accessible this vast body of knowledge to the humanists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the schools and universities of Europe. They deserve our respect—quite as much as the over-praised humanists of the fifteenth century (p.175-8).

Take that Petrarch!

It was a period of both praise and appreciation of the value of classical antiquity and belief in the growth of knowledge. In the words of William of Conches, in opposition to the opponents of natural philosophy:

since they themselves are unacquainted with the forces of nature, in order that they may have all men as companions in their ignorance, wish them to investigate nothing but to believe like rustics. We, on the contrary, think that a reason should be sought in every case, if one can be found (p.179).

Shades of C. P. Snow’s “Two Cultures”. William was avid in his support of natural philosophy, saying on the question of whether God could find a way of reconciling the element of fire and earth:

We do not place a limit on divine power, but we do say of existing things none can do it, nor in the nature of things can there be anything that would suffice.

Or, similarly:

God can make a cow out of a tree, but has He ever done so? Therefore show some reason why a thing is so, or cease to hold that it is so (p.179).

William of Conches was a doughty manifestation of the ultimate triumph of Aristotelian philosophy in Latin Christendom, at a time when it was being routed in Islam by al-Ghazali and his followers, despite the efforts of Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥusayn ibn ‘Abd Allāh ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) and Abū 'l-Walīd Muḥammad bin Aḥmad bin Rushd (Averroes), who were very influential in Latin Christendom but whose tradition was to prove stillborn in Islam.

Gimpel sees some of the effects of Christianity as feeding into this triumph, as the works and efforts of these medieval natural philosophers:

furthered the demythologising of nature that Christianity had begun (p.180).

Gimpel quotes historian Lynn White who noted that:

In 1956 Robert Forbes of Leyden and Samuel Sambursky of Jerusalem simultaneously pointed out thatChristianity, by destroying classical animism, brought about a basic change in the attitude towards natural objects and opened the way for their rational and unabashed use for human ends. Saints, angels and demons were very real for the Christian, but the genius loci, the spirit inherent in a place or object, was no longer present to be placated if disturbed (p.180).

(The connection between the Judaeo-Christian world view and the rise of science is further discussed here.) The Cathedral school of Chartres put representative statues to represent (the mostly pagan) masters of each of seven arts: Priscian for Grammar, Aristotle for dialectic, Cicero for rhetoric, Boethius for arithmetic, Ptolemy for Astronomy, Euclid for Geometry while Music is apparently accompanied by Pythagoras. Gimpel quotes period scholars to convey the sense of intellectual excitement, particularly centred on the Paris and its University (Pp180ff).

Not that this intellectual ferment went without challenge. As Gimpel notes:

The teaching of Aristotle was prohibited in Paris in 1210 and 1215 and in Toulouse in 1245. In 1263, Urban reiterated condemnations directed at the Averroists. The Bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, in 1270 condemned 13 propositions taught at the Faculty of Arts (p.182).

All this leading up to his 1277 condemnation of “219 execrable errors which certain students of the Faculty of Arts have the temerity to study and discuss in the schools” (Pp182-3). While Aristotelian thought—in the form of the Thomist synthesis—was to be embraced by the Church in ensuing decades, the condemnations did put a crimp on natural philosophy at Paris.

Gimpel places Roger Bacon in his time, particularly by looking at the work of his master Robert Grosseteste (c.1175-1253), a translator of Aristotle, a prolific writer who wrote on optics and held that:

the mathematical laws of geometrical optics were the foundation of physical reality, essential to the understanding of nature (p.186).

Bacon admired and continued the work of Grosseteste (who he probably never met). He also advocated reform of the calendar, though his work did not bear full fruit for some centuries. Gimpel describes him as:

the first man really to have undertaken planned experimental research (p.193).

Gimpel shows us a Bacon who was a man of his time, rather than some weird burst of light in medieval darkness. A time which included such people as Peter of Maricourt, whose work on magnets was not to be surpassed until William Gilbert published his De Magnete in 1600, acknowledging and incorporating the work of his C13th predecessor. Thanks to Peter, European compasses came to surpass in quality the Chinese originals (Pp183ff).

The peak of C13th exploratory confidence was the efforts of the Vivaldi brothers of Genoa who set out with two ships to find the Indies in 1291. After sailing down the coast of Africa to beyond Cape Non, all trace of them is lost (p.196). But one of Bacon’s works, according to Columbus’s own testimony in 1498, helped inspire the later Genoese adventurer on his own voyage two centuries later. Curiously, the two Franciscan brothers who sailed with the Vivaldis probably did not know about the work of Bacon, their fellow Franciscan, because the head of the order (the future Pope Nicholas IV) had placed restraints placed on some of his writings (p.197). Whatever the reason for the constraints, and the form of house arrest he suffered, Gimpel sees it as bringing to an end the surge in natural philosophy, and the effort of the Church to marry reason and faith, leading to the surge in mysticism in the C14th and C15th (p.198).

Various reactions
The C14th was a hard, even calamitous, century. The Great Famine of 1315-1317, the start of the Hundred Years War in 1337 and of the great trading house bankruptcies, the Black Death 1347-50, the revolutionary upheavals of 1378-82 (most famously, the Revolt of the Ciompi and the Peasant's Revolt).

Gimpel identifies two long-term effects from the 1277 condemnations:

by separating philosophy from theology it served to establish the intellectual climate in which science developed almost independently of liberal humanism; and, on the other, it caused Christianity to revert to mysticism (p.200).

Which he defines as:

Mysticism is the attempt to penetrate the riddle of the universe not by logic, but by sympathetic intuition (p.200).

Mystical monastic orders saw a major surge, as did interest in

superstitious arts and occult sciences – geomancy, hydromancy, aeromancy, pyromancy, chiromancy, augury, and necromancy; for alchemy, for astrology, and for witchcraft (p.202).

We enter into Europe of the witch burnings. The Crusading impulse lost power, particularly after St Louis's disaster in Egypt. Islam was once again resurgent, with the Turks steadily advancing, while the climate turned colder and Europe experienced the re-appearance of regular famines. Gimpel takes us through the horrors of famine and plague, noting that Europe did not recover its medieval peak population until around 1600 (Pp202ff). (Edward I ruled over more subjects as monarch of England than did Elizabeth I.)

For the survivors, the great dying meant higher wages, while prices generally declined. Struggles over these shifts led to the uprisings of 1378-82, whose rhetoric prefigured that of socialists of later centuries (Pp213ff).

It was also a period of monetary upheaval. Philip the Fair devalued the coinage in 1294-5, 1306 and 1313, to considerable social angst and upheaval (p.221). The relative price of gold and silver shifted: early in the medieval period, in the Islamic Empire it was 14:1, in Europe 12 or 10:1. Predictably, gold moved eastward and silver westward. In the C13th, the relative values shifted and the flows went the other way. Financial crisis followed, with most of the major Florentine banking houses collapsing in the 1340s while overall economic activity declined (though generally not as sharply at population) (Pp222ff).

European inventiveness applied itself to war, inventing cannon in the early C14th, there being no record of Chinese cannon until three decades later (p.228). Gimpel chronicles various indicators of the late medieval period being one of decline from its C13th peak; with non-military technology basically reaching a plateau, though the improved navigational techniques and printing were the basis from which the Renaissance blossomed (Pp229ff).

In his Epilogue, Gimpel considers why the dynamism of the medieval period has been so ignored or forgotten. Dissing the medieval is a long, even venerable, historical tradition:

While the Renaissance viewed medieval society as scholastic and static, the Reformation saw it as hierarchical and corrupt, and the Age of Enlightenment considered it to be irrational and superstitious (p.238).

That is a lot of received hostile lenses to view the past through.

And neo-medievalist enthusiasts—such as those of the Romantic era—often just added in new myths (including horns on Viking helmets). Conservatives saw the medieval period as one of “natural” social order and stability, radicals as a period of a blessedly non-technological age of artisans and craftsmen (Pp238-9). In the mid-C20th, interest in the technological history began to grow and slowly rescued medieval achievement (Pp239-40).

The fatal urge to predict
Having done such a splendid effort in rescuing the past, Gimpel moves into giving a fine example of Why Historians Should Not Predict, proceeding to analyse the current era as one of technological stagnation, where the impetus of the Industrial Revolution was running out of puff (Pp240ff). He was, of course, writing his first edition as the information technology revolution was just beginning.

To be fair, from 1973 onwards there was a dramatic slowing in productivity growth in developed economies that economists are still trying to determine the reasons for. Still, anyone living in the age of the personal computer, mobile phones, multimedia and the internet is going to read the last few pages of The Medieval Machine in some puzzlement. Particularly as Gimpel updated and extended this section for the 1988 second edition.

Gimpel had caught the Grand Theory of History bug, developing a theory of technological dynamism as a pattern of rise, peak and ageing where psychological drive leads technological evolution. Since he compares France (the peak country of the medieval period) with the US, a lot of this seems typical European “our decline will happen to you!”. Paul Kennedy's infamous late 1980s prediction that the US was suffering worse “imperial overstretch” than the Soviet Union is an (even more unfortunate in timing) example of the same genre.

I have a lot of sympathy for Gimpel’s concern that regulation (for example, of pharmaceuticals) is choking off innovation. Not least because there is some truth to it—which is why biotech and related fields are now dominated by the US. But his fiscal and trade alarmism seems overdone (particularly as the US moved into fiscal surplus in the next decade). His final sentence is:

China is at the beginning of a cycle that could last a millennium, while Western civilisation stands at the end of a cycle that is already one thousand years old (p.271).

Maybe. And maybe China, for all its current economic vigour, will get old before it gets rich. I very much believe in learning about the past to get a sense of the present: but not in predicting the grand future. That is what history teaches me NOT to do: I will stick to those rather more specific “robust predictions of general tendency” that the better bits of social science can reveal to us.

But if I disagree with the last 30 pages of grand historical theorising (based, to be fair, on a range of empirical indicators), the rest of The Medieval Machine is a splendid corrective to much of the conventional un-wisdom on the medieval period.

Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India

William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India is a highly readable, engaging, even enchanting, examination of religion in the Indian subcontinent through his encounters with nine different participants in religious traditions, encounters in which they tell him their life story.

So we have The Nun’s Tale, the story of a Jain nun; The Dancer of Kanmur, a prison warder and labourer who spends two months of the year as a neyyam, being worshipped as a dancing incarnation of a god; The Daughters of Yellamma, a woman who is a member of the repressed and increasingly marginalised but persistent tradition of the sacred prostitute; The Singer of Epics, one of the two remaining hereditary singers of the Epic of Pabuji, the full performance of which takes five, eight-hour, dusk to dawn, nights; The Red Fairy, a much-admired woman who is a devotee of a Sufi saint at his tomb in Sindh; The Monk’s Tale, a Tibetan monk who atones for his life of violence in the Tibetan resistance by making prayer flags; The Maker of Idols about a scion of a 700-year old family tradition of idol making whose son apparently wants a career in computing; Lady Twilight, a Tantric skull-drinking sorceress who lives in a burial ground; and The Song of the Blind Ministrel, a Baul or traveling mystic minstrel who has been blind since childhood.

What comes across very strongly is how much India is a preserver of sacred traditions and religious patterns that have largely died out (due to the impact of monotheism) in Western and Islamic civilisations. The notion that Hinduism is what the Vedic religion became in response to the challenge of Buddhism becomes very plausible. (The rough analogy would be if Neoplatonism had rescued classical paganism from the threat of Christianity.)
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On the way, we also get some highly revealing vignettes into contemporary India. Hari Das, the gaoler who is a part-time god, for example, explains how politically-based criminal gangs (either far right—the RSS—or far left—the CPM) control the prisons—even the prison officials are beholden to them: mobile phones making it easier for those in gaol to control life outside it (Pp32-3). Of the religious tradition he embodies, Dalrymple writes:

The word theyyam derives from daivam, the Sanskrit word for ‘god’. Some scholars maintain that they theyyams of northern Malabar are a rare survival of some pre-Aryan, non-Brahminical Dravidian religious tradition that was later absorbed into Hinduism’s capacious embrace. Others argue that the theyyams were tolerated as an acceptable safety valve to allow complaints against the misdeeds of the upper castes to be expressed in ritualised and non-violent manner. Either way, there is no doubt that today they are a stage on which the social norms of everyday life are inverted, and where for a short period of the year, position and power are almost miraculously transferred to the insignificant and powerless (p.36).

Gaoler to god in the course of each year is certainly quite an inversion.

Some of the theyyam parables are charming. Lord Shiva, manifesting with his wife and child as a landless Dalit family and teaching a Brahmin—close to enlightenment but blinded by his caste-pride—a lesson in shared humanity (Pp39ff). Or the guru giving two disciples a rupee each and asking them to use it to fill a room. One buys a huge pile of garbage, the only thing cheap enough to fill a room completely. The other meditated in his room, then bought a match-box, an incense stick and oil lamp and filled the room with light and a beautiful fragrance (p.48).

Hari Das the theyyam detects a religious revival going on, with rising interest in theyyam performances, but is worried that increasing education will give his children more opportunities which may preclude—since they will not be able to take the time off each year—following the tradition of being a part-time god (Pp49-50).

The histories of the traditions Dalrymple explores in Nine Lives show the effect of social and religious changes. The devadasis (sacred prostitutes) used to come from the grandest families and hold honoured positions in the temple hierarchies; now they come low-caste families and are generally simply sex-workers. The response of Hindu reformers to the taunts of Victorian-era Christian missionaries—a response continued in government policy which attempts to discourage sacred prostitution—has had much to do with the loss of status (Pp70-1). Monotheism’s issues with sex and gender are, alas, contagious since they became associated with “modernity” and “being civilised” (and, often, male power). The practice of dedicating girls to the Goddess continues, however, because poor families still see it as a path out of poverty and a way to get the Goddess’s blessings (p.72).

Dalrymple interweaves the efforts of scholars nicely into his narrative—at the end of the book is an extensive glossary as well as a bibliography for each chapter. So the efforts of Milman Parry (apparently “the Darwin of oral literature”) to demonstrate the oral origins of Homer via study of existing Balkan traditions of oral poetry revolutionising study of the Greek classics is a nice segue in the story of the narrator of epics (Pp89ff). The Mahabharata is fifteen times as long as the Bible—an epic singer explains that he remembers by imagining each stanza as written on a different pebble—and it remains part of the reference of a society whose level of cultural erudition exceeds that of more literate, but movie-obsessed, societies (Pp90-1). Parry’s studies found that a bard learning to read was the death-knell to the oral tradition: that the illiterate were capable of feats of memory that literacy destroyed (p.95).

Part of the continuing power of the epics is that their religious references, the religious life they invoke, still has power for the listeners: indeed, the minor local deities have more resonance than the great Gods of Hinduism. Though, even so, a singer of the epics notes that it is many years since he heard the hooves of the hero of whom he sings circling a village at night (Pp108ff): shades of the “retreat of the oracles” of late Antiquity.

Sufi syncretism
Due to its geography of narrow fertile strips, rocky hills and deserts, Sindh is a province that is hard to rule. It is still a place of landlord control—to the extent of private (“feudal”) armies, landlord prisons and bonded-labour—and dacoit highwaymen. (Bonded labour being both a way of extracting a surplus and paying for protective services.) It is also a place of religious syncretism, where heterodox religious notions take refuge from more orthodox religious hinterlands. (This despite being the first part of the Indian sub-continent conquered by Islam: Andrew Bostom’s The Legacy of Jihad has some appalling descriptions of the brutality and violence of the Muslim conquest—but Hindus and Buddhists counted as pagans rather than “people of the book” so, until more lenient interpretations gained some acceptance, confronted the choice of convert or die; hence Muslim incursions and conquests in India tended to be particularly savage.)

Of this religious syncretism, Dalrymple writes that Sindh’s own geography and:

its geographical position as the bridge between Hindu India and the Islamic Middle East, has always made Sindh a centre of Hindu-Muslim syncretism, with every kind of strange cult, part-Hindu, part-Muslim, flourishing in its arid wastes.
Much of this intermixing took place in the Sufi shrines that are still the main focus of devotion in almost village here. For Sufism, with its holy saints and visions, healings and miracles, and its emphasis on the individual’s search for direct knowledge of the divine, has always borne remarkable similarities to certain currents in Hindu mysticism.
All religions were one, maintained the Sufi saints, merely different manifestations of the same divine reality. What was important was not the empty ritual of the mosque or temple, but to understand that divinity can best be reached through the gateway of the human heart – that we all have Paradise within us, if we know where to look (p.113).

Sufism is a very mixed religious phenomenon. Possibly because of influence of British rule in India, Western concepts of Sufism tend to be very much of the sort of Sufism that Dalrymple presents here. Other strains of Sufism (particularly in North Africa) have been avidly jihadist. Sufism has long been the way Islam has presented itself to tribal and local peoples: it is currently losing out to the book-based salafi surge that propagates more easily in an age of mass literacy, global migration and the confronting cultural medley of the “global village”.

The Sufism Dalrymple is describing is one deeply influence by the interaction with Hinduism (and, though not mentioned, Buddhism):

The Sufis believed that this search for God within and the quest for fana – the total immersion in the absolute – liberated the seeker from the restrictions of narrow orthodoxy, allowing the devotee to look beyond the letter of the law to its mystical essence. This allowed the Sufis for the first time to bring together Hindu and Muslim in an accessible and popular movement which spanned the apparently unbridgeable gulf separating the two religions. The teachings of Sufi poetry and song also provided a link between the devotions of the villagers and the high philosophical subtleties of the mystics (p.113).

For the Sufis wrote in the local languages and used metaphors and images familiar to everyday rural lives.

Influences went in both directions:

If the Sufi brought many Hindus into the Islamic fold, then they also succeeded in bringing an awareness of Hinduism to India’s Muslims. Many Sufis regarded the Hindu scriptures as divinely inspired, and took on the yogic practices of the Hindu sadhus: sitting meditating before a blazing fire in the heat of summer or hanging themselves by the feet to recite prayers – a practice that is still performer by South Asia Sufis, who sometimes use the hat racks or luggage rails of trains from which to hang (p.114),

Dalrymple then gives us a brief biography of C18th Sufi master Shah Abdul Latif of Bhit Shah, including an English translation of a poem by the Sufi master praising the wandering sadhus of Hinduism (Pp114ff). The Sufi saint continues to inspire devotion. A few years previously, Dalrymple had observed:

The wild and ecstatic night-long celebrations marking the anniversary of the saint’s death were almost a compendium of everything of which Islamic puritans most disapprove: loud Sufi music and love poetry was being sung in each courtyard, men were dancing with women, hashish was being smoked, huge numbers were venerating the tomb of a dead man and all were routing their petitions through the saint, rather than directly to God in the mosque (p.115).

“Corpse-worship” is what the salafis would call it.

And the contempt is returned:

But for the Sindhis attending the ’Urs [annual festival of commenoration], it was not they who were the heretics, so much as the stern Wahhabi mullahs who criticised the popular Islam of the Sufi as shirk, or heresy: ‘These mullahs are just hypocrites,’ said one old fakir I talked to in the shrine. ‘Without love, they distort the true meaning of the teaching of the Prophet. They are just interested in themselves. They should all be jailed for life.’ (p.116)

The old fakir urges Dalrymple not to miss meeting a famous lady fakir, Lal Peri Mastani, or the Ecstatic Red Fairy—described as being known by everyone, regarded as the most passionate of the saints devotees and as dressed in bright red, very fat and carrying a club (Pp116-7).

When he meets Lal Peri, he finds she has the same views on the mullahs as the old fakir:

‘Today in our Pakistan there are so many of these mullahs and Wahhabis and Tablighis who say that to pay respect to the saints in their shrines is shirk. Those hypocrites! They sit there reading their law books and arguing about how long their beards should be, and fail to listen to the true message of the Prophet. Mullahs and Azazeel [Satan] are the same thing.’ (p.132).

(Which is, of course, not very far from Christ’s criticism of priestly and letter-of-the-law Judaism in the Gospels.)

Lal Peri quotes some couplets from Shah Abdul Latif:

Why call yourself a scholar, o mullah?
You are lost in words.

You keep on speaking nonsense,
They you worship yourself.

Despite seeing God with your own eyes,
You dive into the dirt.

We Sufis have taken the flesh from the holy Quran,
While you dogs are fighting with each other.

Always tearing each other apart,
For the privilege of gnawing at the bones. (Pp132-3)

Shah Abdul Latif was a contemporary of the founder of Wahhabism, but preached a very different Islam.

Dalrymple sees the parallels between contemporary Pakistan and C16th Reformation Europe, with text-based reformers and puritans attacking popular devotions to saints and shrines (p.133). People who say Islam “needs a Reformation” understand neither Islam nor the Reformation. What Islam missed out was the Aristotelian renaissance of the C12th and C13th (which it did not miss out on so much as deliberately rejected), the classicist Renaissance that never ended (due to the invention and spread of printing) and, above all, the Enlightenment response to the bitter religious strife of the Reformation.

Saudi money pouring into the madrassas is recruiting young devotees to an text-based puritanism, leading to demonstrations and destruction of shrines (as the Wahhabis did to the tombs of Muhammad’s Companions in Mecca). As Taliban control spreads, shrines are blown up or closed down: a common excuse being the shrines opening their doors to women for prayers and healing (Pp134-5).

As Dalrymple notes, this three-cornered contest of Hinduism, Sufi Islam and Islamic orthodoxy has a very long history (Pp135-6). Dalrymple’s interview with the head of a new madrassa which has opened up near the shrine of Shah Abdul Latif contains themes which are familiar to anyone aware of Reformation history. The madrassa head’s railing against “tomb worship”, “grave worship”, against the use of music, critiquing heretical departure from scripture could be that of any C16th or C17th Calvinist or Lutheran denouncing paganism-contaminated Catholicism (Pp137ff).

If one believes that one has texts which come directly from God—and that those are the only true guides to His absolutely trumping wishes—then anything which engages mere humans, and is not text-God-directed, is a diversion from God and thus sin and error. Given mainstream Islam’s adoption of occasionalism, contemplation of the created world as also being God’s work provides no counterbalance to this narrow textualism. But, even in Catholicism and Orthodoxy—where scripture is only indirect work of God while the created world is His direct work, so music and beauty can be utilised—priestly authority works to reproduce many of the patterns of the exclusory rigidity that monotheism is so prone to.

Insisting on the primacy of God’s compassion and love leads to a rather different perspective than does text-driven puritanism. For it is the authoritativeness of the text that is crucial: the content will remain open to interpretation; hence the real authority sits with the interpreters of the text. Thus Quakers are notoriously small ‘c’ Christian: they have no priests, so no religious intermediaries intent on using God to strip people of moral protections, as weapons for their own authority as “gatekeepers of righteousness”.

Lal Peri takes Dalrymple to meet her own teacher or pir Sain Fakir, a man in his eighties living at a small shrine. Sain Fakir tells Dalrymple:

‘The mullahs distort the Prophet’s message for their own purposes,’ said Sain Fakir. ‘Men are so blind as them cannot even see the shining sun. Their creed is extremely hard. It doesn’t understand human weakness.’
‘It excludes everyone,’ says Lal Peri, ‘Even other mullahs, at times.’
Sain Fakir shrugged his shoulders. ‘In this world, everyone commits sin. The Sufis always understood this. They understand human weakness. They offer forgiveness, and people will always love those who forgive.’ (p.143)

He is confident that the self-destructive nature of the Wahhabi teachings—as manifested in their internecine violence—and the enduring values of the Sindhis will block the spread of such teachings. The Red Fairy is brutal about the text-based puritans:

‘The Wahhabis are traders who sell their faith for profit,’ said Lal Peri angrily. ‘They are not true Muslims – just fuel for the fires of hell’

Her teacher responds:

‘A lot of it is about power … The Sufis are a threat to the mullahs because we command the loyalty and faith of the ordinary people. No one is excluded. You can be an outcaste, a fallen woman, and you can come and pray at the shrine and the Sufi will forgive you, and embrace you.’
‘You don’t even have to be a Muslim and you will be welcomed,’ said Lal Peri (p.144).

Dalrymple’s tale of the Red Fairy ends with a charming tale of a Sufi saint who decides to collect some of the fires of hell to warm himself and a friend, but returns empty-handed reporting that:

There is no fire in hell … Everyone who goes there brings their own fire, and their own pain, from this world (p.145).

I am reminded of a charming Vietnamese folk tale about the difference between Heaven and Hell. In Hell, people have all the rice they want but can only pick it up with 6-foot chopsticks, so everyone is starving, as they cannot bring the rice to their mouths. Heaven is exactly the same, except everyone is happy and well-fed, because they feed each other.

Divine eroticism
In telling the story of the maker of idols, Dalrymple explores the eroticism that pervades Hinduism’s polytheistic conception of the divine, contrasting it with the Judaeo-Christian tradition:

The Judaeo-Christian tradition, which tends to emphasise the sinfulness of the flesh, the dangers of sexuality and the idealisation of sexual renunciation and virginity, begins its myth of origin with the creation of light. In contrast, the oldest scripture of the Hindu tradition, the Rig Veda, begins its myth with the creation of kama – sexual desire: in the beginning was desire, and desire was with God, and desire was God. In the Hindu scheme of things, kama remains one of the fundamental goals of human existence, along with dharma, duty or religion and artha, the creation of wealth.
… the same erotic concerns found in the secular poetry of classical India are equally evident in the devotional and religious poetry of the period: Kalidasa’s poem The Birth of Kumara, for example, has an entire canto of ninety-one verses entitled ‘The Description of Uma’s Pleasure’ which describes in graphic detail the lovemaking of Lord Shiva and his divine consort. The poetry of the Tamil saints, who walked from temple to temple converting the local Jains and Buddhists, likewise dwell on the sensuous beauty of the deities they adore (p.187).

Such saints were perfectly happy to dwell on the erotic beauty of both Gods and Goddesses: Dalrymple quotes a poem of one such saint imagining himself as a dancing girl wanting to press her body against that of Shiva (Pp188-9).

This exploration of the eroticism within Hindu tradition continues in Dalrymple’s tale of the Tantric sorceress Manisha Ma. Tantra is a tradition that reaches into Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism and aspects of Sufi Islam and connects back to some very ancient traditions such as shamanism. It overturns convention, seeking ecstatic direct connection with the divine, existing in both high philosophical and more oral and spontaneous popular forms, including aspirations to magical powers. Its rituals have often involved use of bodily fluids, notably blood and semen (Pp213ff).

Tantra has been in long decline:

These original esoteric medieval Tantric traditions nearly died out in India, sinking from view around the thirteenth century AD, probably partly as a result of the disruption that followed in the wake of the violence of the Islamic invasions, which broke many of the lines of guru-disciple relationships through which Tantric secrets were passed. Tantrics later became a particular target of European missionaries who made ‘the obscene ceremonies of the Hindoos’ central to their polemics. The nineteenth-century rise of the Hindu reform movements, many of which emanated from Bengal in reaction to British missionaries, nearly finished this process. For the reform movements championed what some scholars have called the ‘Rama-fiction’ of Hindu worship in the Ganges plains: the rise of the Vaishnavite bhakti cults of Lord Krishna and especially Lord Rama, to the extent that they eclipsed many other more traditional and popular forms of local devotion involving DeviLINk cults and blood sacrifices, which were judged primitive, superstitious and anti-modern by the urban and often Western-educated reformers (p.215).

The process Dalrymple describes parallels the way the original Vedic religion was renovated into Hinduism in response to the Buddhist challenge.

Tantra is generally a marginal phenomenon:

everywhere except in certain areas of Bengal, Kerala and Assam, as well as in Nepal and Bhutan, where Tantra still flourishes as a mainstream form of religion, in the latter case within a Buddhist rather than a Hindu context (p.215).

Tantrics seek to reach the divine by opposing conventions and breaking taboos. One can clearly see the animistic roots of much Tantrism, as well as the notion of sex as a path to divine that recurs in both animism and polytheism.

The Bauls of Bengal are saffron-clad wandering minstrels who date back at least 500 years. They seek the Enlightenment in the moment, refusing to follow the conventions of caste-conscious Bengali society:

Subversive and seductive, wild and abandoned, they have preserved a series of esoteric spiritual teachings on breathing techniques, sex, asceticism, philosophy and musical devotion. They have also amassed a treasury of beautifully melancholic and often enigmatic teaching songs which help map out their path to inner vision (p.235).

Shrines, temples, mosques are only signposts on a road to Enlightenment, never ends in themselves.

They come out of longstanding traditions in Indian society:

The near-atheism and humanism of these singing philosophers is not in any sense a new departure in Indian thought, and dates back at least to the sceptical and materialistic Charvaka school of the sixth century BC, which rejected the idea of God and professed that no living creature was immortal. Ancient India in fact has a larger atheistic and agnostic literature than any other classical civilisation. (Pp235-6).

An ambiguity in the face of the divine which can be traced back at least as far as the Rig-Veda (p.236).

All the nine lives that Dalrymple uses to explore the different religious traditions of the Indian sub-continent are appealing in themselves, and part of the joy of the book. But the final story, that of the blind minstrel, is in fact two stories. Because Kanai the blind minstrel—the son of day labourers, he was blinded by smallpox at an early age—has a great friend and travelling companion Debdas, a Brahmin brutally rejected (indeed beaten bloody) by his father (and older brother) for seeking to become a Baul. They talk to Dalrymple of their connection, during which Debdas says:

At times, I am Kanai’s guru ... and at time, Kanai is my guru. He reminds me even of my own songs (p.248).

Dalrymple’s Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India is perceptive and engaging travel writing: humane, informed, deeply observant. It is an excellent way to connect to other religious traditions outside the confines of monotheism and so enabling us to see those confines more clearly.

Prometheus Rising

Some people are synthesisers of ideas. They take notions from all over the place and work them into a coherent picture, or something close to it. Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising is the work of such a synthesiser, and one not afraid to openly consult occult perspectives in building a picture of us and our of place in the world.

Which is not as silly as it seems, since whatever else they do, occultists build pictures of us and our place in the world. For good and ill. The career of Hitler makes more sense once one realises his perceptive use of occult images and ideas to build his political movement. And Wilson has no problem saying 95% of what occultists write is rubbish (p.220).

There is nothing, as far as I am aware, particularly original in the details of Prometheus Rising, the originality lies more in the taking ideas from all over and pointing out their resonances. Wilson is trying to reconcile mysticism with neuroscience.

Trouble is, it is hard for a layperson to judge how well he covers the neuroscience. Though his understanding of psychological, occult and mystical systems does seem to be sound: and he does produce a schema that ties a lot of such systems into identifiable patterns.

I found Wilson’s cheery optimism (indeed, over-optimism) very engaging. Given his notions of emerging human potential, the writers of Stargate and Stargate: Atlantis with their notions of ascension may have read Wilson. (Or they may be role-players.)

And, like Camille Paglia, the Archwizard and the Wizard of Footscray, Wilson wants to rescue the good 1960s from (to use Wilson’s language) the dogmatic Rationalists who hi-jacked it. He also has the elementary sense to see that the Marxist “cure” is worse than the capitalist disease (p.55), which puts him way ahead of many putatively clever folk.
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Wilson shows a genial open-mindedness that is quite refreshing, though he does have some trendy lapses. For example, the “age of Aquarius” generation did not end the Vietnam War (p.117), the Hanoi regime’s military victory did. While the military-industrial complex does not consume 72% of US tax dollars (p.139). In 1960, Defense outlays were (pdf) 9.3% of US GDP and 52% of federal outlays, in 1980 4.9% and 28% respectively, in 2006 4% and 20% respectively. And Federal outlays do not including state and local taxes – $US1trn in taxes in 2004 (pdf), compared to US federal revenues (pdf) that year of $US1.9trn. There are also some irritating lapses into people who agree with me politically are more advanced rhetoric.

On the other hand, his attack on Rationalists (Pp 104, 174) is amusing.

Wilson starts off with the notion that what the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves: i.e. that something believed in strongly enough will be “proved” to the satisfaction of the believer. But he talks as if, in so satisfying themselves, they do so prove. This sad modern tendency to waddle between patterns of belief and actual epistemic success is vastly irritating. The perennial problem of epistemic success words (refuted, proved, disproved … etc) is that they imply that this is what has actually been done (i.e. is objectively so) but can also be used to refer to the belief that is what has actually been done (is subjectively so) or, worse, to wander back and forth between the two usages as Wilson does. The last is more or less inevitable with the subjective use because the words inherently have the objective implication – that’s why they are success words. (And I have no patience for "they actually change the world" claims since as such claims simply cannot be maintained consistently.)

On the other hand, Wilson's point that people box themselves into Reality tunnels as he calls them has merit. And his various suggested psychological exercises at the end of each chapter would certainly encourage mental openness.

Does Wilson tap into how things are in any deep way? Not convinced. Still, it is a fun and thought-provoking (and above all cheery) read: he does provide a schema for seeing underlying similarities in a lot of psychological and occult systems. And I have a soft spot for folk who are prepared to think boldly.

It also occurs to me that if you take his and the book’s initials you get RAW PR. Which would no doubt amuse him.

Metaphysical Horror

I read Leszek Kolakowski’s Metaphysical Horror for the same reason I read Etienne Gilson’s God and Philosophy. Because the former book and the latter’s The Unity of Philosophical Experience (now on my to-read list) had been the subject of a review essay by B. J. Coman on the history of philosophy in the October issue of Quadrant.

Gilson’s God and Philosophy I found an admirable history of Western philosophy’s approach to God, admirable particularly in its clarity of exposition. Kolakowski’s book I found rather less clear. For two reasons: first Kolakowski does not put enough effort into taking the reader with him. One is constantly being expected to remember previous points that were often expressed very briefly in the first place. (Though the occasional flashes of wry wit are welcome: my favourite is:

… I, then a young and omniscient student (alas, I was soon to lose both these virtues) … (p.118)

An oldie, but a goodie.)

The second difficulty is because so much of the book is about philosopher’s concern with the Absolute. I have never understood or warmed to this long-running philosophical obsession. Coman, in his essay, puts the origin of the issue (from a fragment of Parmenides) quite nicely:

There is being, and since being is, it is impossible for us to conceive of non-existence. Being, then, is absolute.

From which Plato went on his philosophical frolic which Western philosophers have been wrestling with ever since. Since much of Metaphysical Horror is about precisely that, it adds to my difficulty in appreciating Kolakowski’s book. Which is, nevertheless, a fine wrestling with the history of philosophy: particularly its inconclusiveness.

Which starts with its arresting first sentence:

A modern philosopher who has never once suspected himself of being a charlatan must be such a shallow mind that his work is probably not worth reading.

Noting that for over two millennia, philosophers have been wrestling with the Socratic questions of distinguishing real from unreal, true from false, good from evil, Kolakowski presents to us the confronting fact that philosophers have done so without coming to any generally agreed answers.
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But attempts to abolish the whole thing do not work either. The issues of being and non-being, good and evil, oneself and the universe just keep coming back (p.8). Even the Karl Jaspers approach of accepting ultimate insolubility but seeking understanding anyway:

… cannot escape the infernal circle of epistemology: whatever claim we make about knowledge, even the claim that we can never have any, implies some knowledge on our part (p.10).

The sceptic turns out to be claiming to know, so is either not a sceptic at all or is intellectually incoherent (p.11).

Philosophers want a language that is absolute in the sense of being:

perfectly transparent and able to convey language as it ‘truly’ is, unadulterated by the filter of naming and describing (p.12).

But, alas, we are stuck with language as it is.

So why not be just pragmatic about it? Why worry about whether there is any difference between what appears to be and what “really” is? One answer is: because it is necessary for science to emerge to have such a distinction. That Democritus on atoms and Pythagoras on mathematics were necessary building blocks.

Well, yes (it matters whether Phlogiston exists or not, for example): but science is, as Kolakowski points out, an incidental result of pre-existing speculations. Humans seem inherently inclined to think there is some deeper reality than what we perceive. Aware of our own fragility, the fallibility and uncertainty of our knowledge and endeavours, we seek a deeper and more reliable reality and understanding (p.17).

Indeed—a continuing argument goes—we are so fallible, fragile and limited that certain understandings could not have come to us on their own, but must have come from some deeper reality (Pp18-19). Rejecting this concern is, Kolakowski, holds one of the building blocks of modernity:

… an implicit normative premise: that the idea of experience should be applied restrictedly, to concepts that are, or might be, useful in dealing with objects, and therefore somehow ‘better’ or ‘genuine’ (p.20).

A utilitarian principle, not one required by the rules of rationality.

Kolakowski notes that the Cartesian and Humean ideas about no certainty apart from no self-contradiction and our own existence had been worked out by late medieval nomimalists, notably John of Mirecourt and Nicholas of Autrecourt (Pp 21-2). But, if the distinction between dreams and reality remain—but we reject any deeper notion of metaphysical reality and unreality—then the notion of existence becomes pointless in its application to two ultimate realities: one’s own existence and God. From this comes the horror metaphysicus, which is:

… if nothing really exists except the Absolute, then the Absolute is nothing; and if nothing really exists except myself, then I am nothing (p.23).

Existence needs some further content to it.

Modern philosophy starts with Descartes’ search for a certain basis for knowledge, his famous cogito ergo sum, whose intellectual history Kolakowski provides an excellent survey of. The subsequent obsession with the problems of subjectivity leads to all sorts of places (such as Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre). Kolakowski seems to take positive delight in pointing out the medieval antecedents of much of this:

Sartre would not have been pleased to be told that he was a partial disciple of St Augustine. But what he took from Heidegger was deeply rooted in ancient and medieval metaphysics (p.31).

Which brings Kolakowski to the Absolute:

… it is hard not to feel that the quest for the Absolute – the Ultimum, or rather two Ultima, not necessarily identical – arose from a kind of mental compulsion. The objects of this quest are, first, the cause or creator of the visible universe, and, second, the self-supporting, self-rooted, logically necessary ground of whatever exists contingently (p.32).

Philosophy interests and intrigues me, but this question has simply never resonated much with me. Not that the quest has ever been terribly successful:

… the eternal curse of the vicious circle still operates here, as in any search for ultimate foundations. The vicious circle, however, is a natural result of the simple fact that we are not gods: we can never, except perhaps through mystical experience, begin our search from an epistemological point zero, without any presuppositions (p.33).

(Calling Kurt Godel, calling Kurt Godel.) Now, that sort of problem—the limits of reasoning and representation—I find much more interesting: probably because it is grounded much more in the realities of the human condition, not dubious abstractions.

But people keep trying for ultimate foundations:

… the search for ultimate foundations is just as much an ineradicable part of the human condition as the denial of its legitimacy (p.34).

Metaphysical ideas matter because they influence how people think and what they believe (so Proclus leads to Hegel who leads to Marx). More importantly, people desire and seek truth, beyond the:

… normal and obvious need to distinguish illusions from genuine perceptions and mistakes from correct reasoning (p.34).

For

Once we know that error and illusions occur, the search for a reality that cannot be an illusion, for a truth about which no mistake is possible, is unavoidable (p.35).

Which leads us back to the Absolute. And to the Neoplatonists, who loom large in Metaphysical Horror, including an extended discussion of Damascius, the last significant pagan philosopher, whose Problems and Solutions (aka On Principles) represents the end point of pagan philosophy’s wrestling with the problem Parmenides had posed a thousand years earlier.

Damascius so purged the Absolute of any person-like characteristics, it became the Eschaton, Nothingness, utterly ineffable, thereby falling into self-contradiction, for:

The self-reference trap is unavoidable in any attempt to speak of that of which nothing can be said (p.50).

Damascius arrived at an idea that Hegel expressed as:

Pure Being and pure non-Being are the same (p.52).

Damascius was the last leader of the Athenian Academy when Justinian closed it down. Medieval Christian and Jewish thinkers wrestled with identifying the Christian and the Jewish God with the Absolute. Which led some to Nothingness too:

A theologian who pays tribute to the principle of God’s ineffability but none the less talks about Him at length can be coerced into admission that God, sharing no properties with His finite creatures and being impossible to identify, even negatively, within a discourse that applies only to the world of things, is necessarily not-something or no-thing. And here language breaks down (Pp54-5).

So we are back to wrestling with language, with re-examining cogito ergo sum and thinkers such as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty (and Gilson). Gilson argued that existence is simple but cannot be contextualised, something that, if true, Kowalowski feels would be a strange thing to have been forgotten (p.70).

What modern philosophy is left with as its Absolute—the certain point on which to stand—is the Cartesian cogito ergo sum, the modern equivalent of the God of Moses declaring I am Who am. But the certainty of the Cartesian ego does not lead anywhere, leading to a philosophical world divided between attention to the world, the wider reality, without attending to the ego-identity that takes us nowhere, or an endless attention to the ego-identity that ends up turning the world into the ego’s creation (p.74).

In modern physics, there has been some tendency to see mind-like characteristics in reality, which would be one way of re-connecting across the post-Descartes divide (Pp76ff). Which leads to discussions of Spinoza, Jaspers (again) and Leibniz.

The influence of received tradition (another form of the lack of a presumption-free starting point) turns up in all sorts of ways, such as the equating the ability to create with goodness:

One can argue, then, that apart from the strength of the biblical heritage there are no firm grounds for such an equation (p.88).

Which leads to the question of what we mean by ‘creation’, creation ex nihilo being a philosophical postulate. And the basis of accepting any notion of human creativeness—which certain conceptions of God’s creative uniqueness imply is either non-existent or is inherently malevolent. The Catholic notion that we can refuse Grace creates (a fairly minimal) space for human creativeness: the Cartesian idea that we share choice with God, it is His power and knowledge we lack, gives far more (Pp90-1). Which looks blasphemous to Christian Neoplatonists. But the Biblical God is clearly a Person, something the Christian Neoplatonists resist by claiming such anthropomorphising is a necessary means of communicating with limited human minds. Somehow, however, they can untangle what is “really” the case, trumping the mythic nature of biblical revelation, a treatment of myth Kowalowski strongly disagrees with:

If myths had metaphysical equivalents, they would be dispensable. If they both express and conceal an ultimate reality, it is because this reality is not expressible in abstracto, irreducible to theoretical language (p.95).

Certain intense religious and ritual acts can hint at what is otherwise “nameless and impossible to depict”. The mystical (dare one say existential) tradition in Christianity—the one that holds knowledge of God comes from our devotion, worship, faith, hope and charity and is otherwise not only not expressible, it is not knowledge at all—is strong (including such figures as St Bernard, St Bonaventure, Tauler, Thomas à Kempis, St John of the Cross, St Teresa) and goes right back to parts of St Paul’s epistles (p.100). There is an even stronger example Kolakowski does not mention for even St Thomas Aquinas, the exemplar par excellence of using reason to understand God, at the end of his life had a mystical experience which, he claimed, utterly overshadowed all his intellectual efforts. Kolakowski notes that the Catholic Church has always accepted intellectual paths to knowledge of God.

But this is not only a Christian issue:

… the belief that our knowledge of the Absolute is an aspect of our spiritual life as a whole, and in particular of the way we experience good and evil as our own good and evil, is part of the Buddhist, Jewish, Christian and Neoplatonic legacies (p.101).

Though perhaps more as scattered manifestations than any clearly structured tradition. Still:

… the belief that we come to know Being by enlarging or injuring it through our good or evil acts is very much a traditional one – a fact indirectly confirmed by the clear historical link between the enfeebling of metaphysical faith and of religious worship and the gradual disappearance of the very notions of good and evil (p.101).

It is also an approach which is very un-Kantian in content and approach (p.102).

Also very un-Cartesian. The Cartesian ego is cut off from all context, moral and otherwise:

By blocking off the ego, Cartesianism consigned it to nothingness (p.104).

Kowalowski argues the ego needs to be situated (in communication, community, time, space, etc) to be real, but being situated does not deny its reality. Autonomy is real, but it is autonomy in context (which is also real):

Whatever his actual intentions, Descartes, by trying to save the self while at the same attempting to rob it of its communal and historical dimensions, reduced ‘me’ to something as unreal as community, history, good and evil (p.105).

For:

… there is no access to an epistemological absolute, nor any privileged access to absolute Being, such that might result in reliable theoretical knowledge. … This double denial need not lead to pragmatic nihilism; it is compatible with the belief that metaphysical, non-pragmatic insight is possible as a result of our living within the realm of good and evil and experiencing good and evil as our own. But it does explain why philosophy, like Peter Pan, never matures (p.106).

(Kolakowski leaves open the possibility of mystical knowledge, but not as the basis for any theoretical understanding.)

The notion of the self-contained Cartesian ego does not make a lot of sense to me, for much the reasons that Kolakowski adduces. We do start from our own subjectivity in some important sense: we look at things from a point of view that can seem to be the base of our knowing anything. Yet, this is largely illusory, since so much of what we think comes from others. (Such as the Cartesian cogito ergo sum itself: there is also something a little odd about a ground of certainty that has to be discovered.) We did not invent the concepts we use, nor the language we communicate in. Our sense of how to behave has been built up from interactions with others. Even our sense of self has, as has much of our sense of the world around us. The scientific method deals with this quite directly: the requirement for replication tests reality by requiring others to be able to perceive the same thing.

The reality of our subjectivities always existing in particular contexts takes Kolakowski to the inevitably contextual nature of language and the tension between using a particular language to try to express universal and ultimate ideas:

In making one of all possible languages operational and intelligible – and thus making a metaphysical or epistemological standpoint credible – we never start from the beginning. The choice among all possible languages is made not by God but by civilizations. And it is philosophies that voice the aspirations and choices of civilizations (p.107).

(So, one may ask, what does that say of the Islamic claim that the Arabic of the Qur’an is, indeed, the language of God? Particularly in contrast to the Christian notion that God speaks in whatever language His interlocuter uses. The Islamic claim that Jews and Christians have perverted the unchanging message of God, and Islam’s conception of a God who demands submission, fits in with the notion of singular authoritative communication. Just as the Judaeo-Christian notion of successive covenants and a God who seeks friends and partners fits in with the notion of a God who communicates multi-linguistically. Which then also fits in with an instrumental morality of what expands submission to God is good versus a notion of morality as universal.)

That philosophies (and philosophers), and the languages they use, are always situated may be problematic in seeking ultimate foundations but it does give philosophers a major role:

By making the choices and aspirations of a civilization explicit, they help it expand and assert itself – just as we, by an effort of expression, open up new and unexpected avenues in our own evolution (p107)

So, being limited and never impartial, they affirm some aspects of a civilisation at the expense of others. While no civilisation is ever perfectly coherent – just as well, for that way lies stagnation and collapse.

So Kolakowski sees philosophers as both reflecting and changing culture:

By being selective in revealing the hidden premises of a civilization and so providing it with a self-understanding that is partial and coloured by their personal biases, great philosophers, although they can never simply break out of their own time, create points of discontinuity and push ‘the spirit of the age’ in a new direction (p.107).

Though, it may never be clear, even centuries later, whether they are a continuation or a rupture in that history.

In doing what they do, they effectively create new languages. Some of which fail and some of which put down cultural roots and feed into the evolution of the culture. But if the language of philosophers is irredeemably personal, this would explain the constant difficulty they have being understood, even by other great philosophers (Pp108-9). Which is, in itself, an illustration of the lack of an all-encompassing language. This leads us back to the metaphysical horror:

For how can I opt for a particular language (or angle from which to see the world, or rule for interpreting all of existence) and stick to it without believing it has privileged cognitive powers? (p.110)

Any claim to a lack of privileged position for a language cannot be expressed in that language: any such statement moves into a super- or meta- language, in which that position is inexpressible. A metaphysical position cannot be coherently both as good as any other and incompatible with them:

Alas, tolerance and generosity provide no escape from the paradox of self-reference (p.111).

I am not sure this works for me. I get the point about metaphysical ecumenism being incoherent. As Kolakowski goes on to point out, religious worship often involves an implicit, something explicit, statement about there being things which human language cannot express.

Philosophy, on the other hand, makes claims to not only not only to the truth, but to the literal truth (p.115).

Surely the claim in the meta-language that a particular language is not privileged is not actually about that meta-language, it is about the language? That is what makes it meta, even if we are still using the words of that language.

Kolakowski is sceptical about the possibility of people understanding people across cultures, across civilisations. This seems dubious to me on a couple of grounds, for clearly the teachings of religious leaders and philosophers speak to us across time and culture. Moreover, what about science? Science seems to operate happily across such boundaries. The commonalities of human nature, including human cognition, and experience seem to enable rather more communication than such worries about communication across time and space imply (without then claiming there are no difficulties in such). Translation may be an art: it is not an impossibility.

But science can achieve a unity that philosophy patently cannot.

Philosophy’s task was to discover, on a deserted field, the meaning and unity of the world; the tools for this task were the senses and logic (p.119).

One that it has never completed, and possibly cannot:

… philosophy boasts that it was the truth-seeker par excellence; on the other hand, it claims a monopoly on the right to establish what truth really is (p.121).

So philosophy becomes a judge in its own case, all the way down, but there is a price:

… the concept of truth, and consequently truth itself, can become the exclusive property of anyone who wants to possess it (p.121)

With no authority to judge between them:

So the horror metaphysicus, and the spectre of never-ending uncertainty, are bound to appear (p.121)

Which makes the contrast with science I drew above, if anything, more stark. But science constrains itself by what sort of questions it asks, what it attends to, and what answering methodologies it will accept. As Kolakowski points out, philosophy attends itself to the entire universe of meaning and reference.

Between the constrained (but clearly immensely powerful) questioning and answering of science and the unbounded ambitions of philosophy:

… there is a grey area, inhabited by a number of half-sciences (p.120)

As for philosophy trying to replicate the success of science by adopting its approach to truth, Kolakowski argues that both cuts philosophy off from its roots and makes it fairly pointless (p.121). And, in the clash of mutually incompatible philosophies, there is much room and energy for cultural growth (Pp122ff).

We will continue to attempt to “read the world”.

And is it not reasonable to suspect that if existence were pointless and the universe devoid of meaning, we would never have achieved not only the ability to imagine otherwise, but even the ability to entertain this very thought – to wit, that existence is pointless and the universe devoid of meaning (p.129).

Which seems to be as close as Kolakowski is going to come to an ultimate conclusion.

Metaphysical Horror is the fruit of great philosophical erudition and thought by a major C20th intellectual. I could wish for better attention to what the reader needs. Nevertheless, Kolakowski brings alive issues that have occupied great philosophers for millennia.