The Legitimacy of the Human
The Legitimacy of the Human
by Rémi Brague
St. Augustine’s Press, 2017
177 pp., $26.00
ISBN: 9781587314605
Reviewed by Kenneth Colston
If you think the Church is hurting, then read Rémi Brague about mankind. In the second chapter, after an historical “opening movement” of the “rise and fall of humanism,” this erudite French classicist follows the most perceived threats (environmental collapse, nuclear catastrophe, and demographic implosion) with a catalogue of less-obvious philosophical horrors: the replacement of classical learning with statistics, the schizophrenia caused by the non-verifiability of particle physics, the rejection of final cause, the rupture of morality from reality, and the replacement of human work and intellection by technology. Man looks more than embattled and diseased: he seems obsolete, and some philosophers call for his eradication.
But man has often been embattled. Brague’s third movement begins with a look back at the ancients to expose “the myth of joyous paganism,” which he calls a Romantic invention. Thinkers from Sophocles to Quoholeth to Pseudo-Diogenes took a dim view of our species; even the Talmud wonders whether God did well when he created man. Classical philosophy attributed human dignity only to the aristocratic élite, which offers no grounding for our democratic age. Brague then shows that the question of man’s legitimacy has been denied in three domains: of man’s relation to nature, where he has been seen as a shedder of blood by angels in the Koran and a predatory nomad by Hermes Trimegistus; of man’s presence on Earth, where his bodily creation is seen as evil by Gnostics and Platonists; and of man’s mixed nature, where man as the middle being in creation between angels and beasts has been lost to such a degree that young academic philosophers can write books with a title like this one by David Benatar: Never to Have Been. The Harm of Coming into Existence (Oxford University Press, 2006).
Taking up man’s relation to nature, the fourth movement reveals Brague’s virtuosity. An accomplished Arabist, he unearths a medieval text by an anonymous Islamic sect, the Brothers of Purity, in which animals enslaved by men engage in a formal debate for manumission judged by an objective Jinn. Men tout their superiority, but animals refute each claim. A Syrian Jew advances that only man practices religion; the nightingale responds that birds praise God in song but, being sinless, not as expiation. A Persian boasts about man’s division of labor; a parrot replies that animals too admit a pecking order, with nothing demanded in exchange for leadership. A Muslim from Hejaz (the region of Mecca and Medina) says man can achieve paradise; the wise parrot adds that he can also suffer eternal fire. Mohammed then steps in to calm the audience with the promise of salvation for all Muslims, irrespective of sin. Brague ends with a question that adds suspense to his exegetical, historical, linguistic, and philosophical symphony: “Is human life truly livable without the promise of an absolute joy?”
In an interlude, Brague hunts down the first appearance of the word “anti-humanist,” by the Russian poet Alexander Blok, just after the Great War, following also a prior apocalyptic movement that saw civilization as sick and decadent and that looked forward to the music of the “more vigorous barbarous masses.” (The assaults on our ears today make that prophetic!) The “new man” to emerge from this preserver of culture will be the artist, and Brague lets it go without saying where that contemporary paragon has led.
Brague then takes up Foucault as the arch anti-humanist who still dominates the academy by breaking down a little-known interview in 1971 with high school students in which he is singularly lucid and direct about his project to overturn traditional ideologies. Foucault’s text is worth quoting, for it is the vademecum of the activist academy that drives away the search for truth and goodness and the real in its lecture halls and in the courts:
I understand by humanism the set of discourses by which Western man has been told: “Even if you do not exercise power, you can still be sovereign. Even better: the more that you renounce the exercise of power and the better you are subject to the one who imposed on you, the more you will be sovereign.” Humanism is what successively invented these subject-sovereignties: the soul (sovereign over the body, subject to God), consciousness/conscience (sovereign in the order of judgment; subject to the order of truth), the individual (sovereign possessor of rights, subject to the laws of nature or the rules of society), liberty as fundamental (inwardly sovereign, externally consenting and in accord with its destiny). In short, humanism is everything by which the West blocked the desire for power—forbade the desire for power, excluded the possibility of taking it. At the heart of humanism is the theory of the subject (in the dual sense of the word). That is why the West rejects with so much insistence everything that could spring this bolt. This bolt can be attacked in two ways. Either by a “desubjectification” of the will to power (i.e., by political struggle understood as class struggle), or by the effort to destroy the subject as pseudo-sovereign (i.e., by cultural attack: the overcoming of taboos, of sexual limitations and divisions; the practice of communal existence; getting rid of inhibitions towards drugs; breaking down all the interdictions and boundaries by which normative individuality is constituted and directed). Here I am thinking of all the experiences that our civilization has rejected, or admitted only in the element of literature.
Welcome, brave new post-sixties world, with its casualties glaringly obvious now! While Brague scrutinizes the terms of Foucault’s interview, his real concern is to expose Foucault’s claim about God in a parallel text from his introduction to Kant’s Anthropology: “The death of God, did it not make manifest, in a double murder, that by putting an end to the absolute, at the same time man himself was killed?” How? Since man is in God’s image, then the divine—or the special, the distinct, the higher—in man disappears when God leaves the intellectual stage. Conceptually, man becomes a mere animal when he doesn’t look up to live beyond himself. Brague proposes instead that man’s obedience to God not be seen as an alarming submission but a means of freedom with responsibility: as a plenipotentiary, “invested with a task, and thus granted full powers that allow him to fulfill, but at the same time responsible for its execution.”
Thus, the major motif of Brague’s symphony is resolved in the final movement of the last three chapters. To make man legitimate, the transcendent must be found, but not in Foucault’s God, “an archaic representation from which the Bible broke in decisive fashion.” Brague rather shows how a little-known German thinker, Hans Blumenberg (1920-1976) demonstrated that Gnosticism, by an overemphasis on fallen creation and a suspicion of intellect, lingered in medieval thought and that modernity is trying to exorcise it through blind faith in man’s ability to know and control nature through science. Instead, Brague urges a restoration of creation as good and of Providence as “the indispensable condition of the continuation of the human adventure.” Neither the self-affirmation God of existentialism, nor the elimination of mankind by Gaia-worshippers, nor the “blackguard” God of the will to power and of Gnosticism, nor the blind evolutionary God, can legitimize man: their paths are bleak with suicide. Where might such a God of “freedom,” “Providence,” and “goodness” be found? In Genesis, Brague concludes, but there is one huge problem: “no has ever seen God” (John 1:18). How can the hidden God be a model?
Brague’s solution is brilliant and requires his full scholarly powers as historian, linguist, philosopher, exegete, and even Arabist. He finds in a close reading of the Pentateuch, including Talmudic and Islamic commentaries, that man’s legitimizing task is the primal mitzvah of being. God is Being and commands being. In Hebrew grammar, the first command to be is in the jussive rather than the imperative mode because nothing is prior to receive and follow the command. Divine creation simultaneously implies action: “Follow what called your nature into being.” The divine Logos of John is simply a reissuing of this primal command. Perhaps some readers will find this concluding tour de force paradoxically too simple and abrupt. Once man’s being is commanded, Brague has a certain French intellectual’s optimism: “Men are perfectly capable of grasping what allows them to lead a harmonious and peaceful existence. For that they do not need a reference point.” He is doubtless talking about knowing and following the natural moral law with Thomistic confidence. It would be interesting to see what Brague would do with the darker passages of Augustine and Pascal. He is surely correct, however, that man’s hardest task is finding a final reason for living. That reason, which affirms “that it is good that we are,” comes only from the God of Genesis and John. Since Brague is so heavy in diverse theistic and philosophical traditions and so light in Christian sources, this God has a chance even with hard-bitten atheistic secularists.
