Quotes thread

Quotes from Rise of Eurocentrism Princeton University Press 1993

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After the Symbolists cultivated the fear of the festival and the orgy, mystery was decisively left out of poetry. It is therefore no exaggeration to claim that “the terrible spiritual conflict in Heine’s soul between Nazarenism and Hellenism is . . . the most significant spiritual happening in the period of declining Romanticism” (Robertson 1924: 24) It was he who gave to the distinction between Hebraism and Hellenism its modern currency, which he found in the work of Ludwig Börne. In one stroke, Heine turned against Dionysus, Hellenism, Christianity, and political radicalism. In his writings, for the first time, the god became the carrier of destruction—a threat to morality, tradition, and balance.

The revolution had turned out to be an orgy. “The case of Heine is particularly interesting with regard to the past for which he is nostalgic. In his ‘aveux de l’auteur’ (author’s confessions) which conclude De l’Allemagne, he reveals that although once a philhellene (like most Jacobin-democrats), he has recently turned back to his Judaic antecedents; and he affirms that the true prefiguration of the French Revolution is neither ancient Greece with its slavery, nor Rome with its legalistic chicanery, but rather Mosaic law and the customs of ancient Judaism” (Sayre and Löwy 1984: 78). In this public atonement, the revolutionary fervor of Jacobinism, with its radical critique of both monarchy and bourgeois oppression, comes to an end—succeeded already by the utopian socialism of Moses Hess and the yearning of Rome and Jerusalem (1862).

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The issue of assimilation was by definition (like all questions of emancipation in modernity after the Battle of the Books) one of Hellenization. Those who were challenged to integrate through modernization were faced with the dilemma of aesthetic paganism: “We can do what the German Jews did, and what Isaac D’Israeli did—we can give ourselves over altogether to Gentile culture and be lost to history, becoming a vestige-nation without a literature; or we can do what we have never before dared to do in a Diaspora language: make it our own, our own necessary instrument, understanding ourselves in it while being understood by everyone who cares to listen or read. If we make out of English a New Yiddish, then we can fashion a Yavneh”, a Jerusalem Displaced Although the aesthetic has been Hebraicized, it seems that it still is what it always has been—inalienably Western.

According to the tribalist view, the only place of true consolation and integration remains the traditional community. “[L]ike the Buber-Rosenzweig group in Germany, the alienated American Jewish intellectuals will, I imagine, return to the integrally alienated, the highly individual Judaism of our literature, and of the remaining Jewish communities which have retained their wholeness” (Halpern 1946: 17). The larger problem is as old as the social disenfranchisement of the early German Romantics: “How to find the community: that, you recognize, is the dilemma of the Jewish intellectual of our day—but not only of the Jewish intellectual! And inthis fact that you think you may have discovered a way out. That way is through the community of all the disinherited—the ‘alienated,’ those who see the world ‘as disenchanted’”. This time, though, the advice is very different from Schiller’s and the proposed solution opposite to Heine’s, warning that “you are letting yourself be beguiled by a theory which would endow the condition of ‘alienation’ with significant psychological compensations exclusively available to you, as a Jew, but denied to him as a Gentile”. The answer to the dilemmas of emancipation is a typically postmodern separatism that defiantly goes the way of its difference, pride, and communal tradition.

This decision, inspired by the perceived failure of Enlightenment and assimilation, is accompanied by a deep feeling of disgust and rage of mis-Hellenism. It confesses “arevulsion against the values—very plainly I mean the beliefs—of the surrounding culture itself: arevulsion against Greek and pagan modes, whether in their Christian or post-Christian vessels, whether in their purely literary vessels, or whether in their vessels of Kulturge-schichte. It is a revulsion—I want to state it even more plainly—against what is called, strangely, Western Civilization” (Ozick 1970: 265–66).

Christianity, too, becomes a target of contempt: “I am no advocate of some earlier credal organization. In particular, I have not the slightest affection for the dead church civilization of the West. I am a Jew. No Jew in his right mind can long for some variant of that civilization. Its one enduring quality
is its transgressive energy against the Jew of culture”(Rieff1972: 27). There are declarations of religious war that go beyond “the aesthetic warfare between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament” (Bloom 1984: 13), a perennial problem for Protestant criticism, and that also express hatred: “I am an enemy of the New Testament. My enmity is lifelong and intensifies as I study its text more closely”. Beyond the revulsion, the contempt, and the hatred, the open war against Christianity (which has not been met with any protests) is the final assault against the source of all evil, including the gospel of love—pagan orgy and intelligence.

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This dictates the need for the ultimate project of Mythology, which has been called “de-Hellenization”: the total elimination of the Greek element from Western thought, an effort pioneered by Adorno and Horkheimer. This is the message of the aphorism: “It is time not for first philosophy but last philosophy” (Adorno 1983: 40). When they proposed Judaism as theproject of atonement and return to the kingdom of God, their message to their sinful age was simple: repeat, repent, return. But it might have no urgency or potency without a terrifying enemy, a satanic ghost conjured up as the incarnation of evil. Accordingly, a sinister, frightful model of Greek thought was constructed to play this role and represent thirty wretched centuries of Western civilization, from Odysseus to Hitler.

It is frightfully alarming, however, to realize that, had Horkheimer and Adorno not built this monstrous Hellenic idol and sacrificed contemporary culture to it, had they not invented a mythology of their own, their invocation of the Hebraic God might simply not have been possible at all. It is equally alarming to notice that, in their iconomachic virulence, postmodern plans for de-Hellenization also construct Greek idols on which the absence of justice and freedom are blamed in order to preserve the legitimacy and status of contemplative ethics. In sharp contrast, the socio-political realities in Bucharest, Bombay, Beirut, Buenos Aires, or Birmingham, Alabama, remind us that demonology cannot restore the validity of aesthetic faith. “Theory cannot prolong the moment its critique depended on. A practice indefinitely delayed is no longer the forum for appeals against selfsatisfied speculation; it is mostly the pretext used by executive authorities to choke, as vain, whatever critical thoughts the practical change would require” (Adorno 1973b: 3). When the moment of self-referential culture, the rule of autonomy, passes, critique languishes in the mirrors of logology, theory fades into ersatz sacrament:

“What is the city over the mountains /Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air / Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens . . . / Unreal” (Eliot).

Beyond just the privileges of interpretation, the very promise of emancipation is questioned and the quest for independent governance begins again: What can be the auto- of autonomy if not the demos of democracy? The regime In Ithaca, rather than the nostos of Odysseus, is at issue here.

MacIntyre argues that ... it cannot be the case that we can first comprehend the rules of morality in the abstract and then ask how they are applied. "For were this to be the case, the rules of morality as such would be effectively contentless. On the dominant view, for example, we are first and independently to frame a rule or rules about truth telling and honesty in general and then only secondly need to enquire how they are to be applied in such relationships as those of physician to patient or lawyer in respect to his or her client's affairs and so on. But no rule exists apart from its applications, and if, as we approach the question of whether a physician on a particular type of occasion ought to answer a question by a patient, truthfully or not, it must be in the light of previous applications of the rule. But these applications will have been to situations and relationships quite as socially specific as the physician-patient relationship."

For the problem is not ... that philosophers have tried to do ethics on the model of scientific detachment, but rather, they have tried to do ethics free from any concrete traditional and corresponding moral practices. In order to accomplish this they have sought to reduce morality to a few basic moral principles that are allegedly constitutive of rationality qua rationality. Unless ethics be so grounded, it was assumed that there could be no defense against relativism, subjectivism, and arbitrary starting points.

In this respect it is interesting how modern accounts of Christian ethics has attempted to model the philosophical project of modernity. Thus theologians stress love, justice, or some other monistic principle as all-determining for ethical rationality and judgment. I say it is interesting because we might have expected that those from religious traditions would have resisted such monistic reductions because they would have noticed that they were working from within an ongoing tradition. I suspect, however, that because of the social and political context we occupy makes the particularity of traditions something to be overcome, we perpetuate this kind of ethical reductionism. We try to use our theories to supply for reason and the self a unity that can only be forthcoming from our communities and their practices.

-- Stanley Hauerwas, "Casuistry in Context"