Aided by social networking sites, blogs, and popular YouTube videos (found here and here), Pussy Riot’s plight became something of an international media sensation. Amnesty International and Madonna took up the cause, and British Prime Minister David Cameron questioned Putin about it in a face-to-face meeting. Indeed, as some commentators noted there did seem something almost pre-packaged about the whole event, as though it were designed for western consumption.

Fascinatingly, however, religion played a central role within this media event. Many orthodox clergy were quick to label the performance blasphemous, noting its “sacrilegious humiliation of the age-old principles aimed at inflicting even deeper wounds to Orthodox Christians”; claiming that the women’s “chaotically waving arms and legs, dancing and hopping…cause[ed] a negative, even more insulting resonance in the feelings and souls of the believers”; and describing the performance as “desecrating the cathedral, and offending the feelings of believers.”

The Orthodox Church occupies an odd space in relationship to the secular power of the state. Historically aligned with the czars, it was driven largely underground during the Soviet era, thus becoming one site of opposition to politics as usual. In recent years it has emerged as a potent political force in Russia, one largely aligned with Putin’s hold on power. In her closing statement, Yekaterina Samutsevich, one of the members of Pussy Riot, positioned their performance in precisely this way. The cozy relationship between church and state in contemporary Russia, she claimed, “has required considerable quantities of professional lighting and video equipment, air time on national television for hours-long live broadcasts, and numerous background shoots for morally and ethically edifying news stories, where the Patriarch’s well-constructed speeches would…help the faithful make the correct political choice during a difficult time for Putin preceding the election….Our sudden musical appearance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior with the song “Mother of God, Drive Putin Out” violated the integrity of the media image that the authorities had spent such a long time generating and maintaining, and revealed its falsity.”

So far, the performance feels like a classic punk gesture: a mixture of aesthetic, political, and religious dissidence inserted deliberately into spaces of order and control. Perhaps its most obvious precursor is the intervention staged by several young lettrist poets at Notre Dame Cathedral, on Easter Sunday, 1950. In the middle of the service Michel Mourre, dressed as a Dominican monk, climbed into a pulpit and began to read a sermon/poem that condemned the Catholic Church for “infecting the world with its funeral morality,” and announced that God was dead “so that Man may live at last.” As Greil Marcus details in Lipstick Traces, the response was dramatic: the Cathedral’s guards attacked the four with their swords, and the crowd chased them out of the Cathedral and down to the Seine, where they were apprehended by the police.

The afterlife of these two events, however, is remarkably different. Though the Notre Dame incident was much more shocking and disruptive, it drew a light response from the authorities: of the conspirators, only Mourre was held for 11 days and then released, and the event itself quickly faded away. By contrast, the disruption caused by Pussy Riot, though more modest in every sense, has had the more dramatic afterlife: the two-year sentences, the international attention, and the clear belief on the part of the authorities that, the accusation of blasphemy notwithstanding, the real stakes are political. As one of the prosecution lawyers put it in a remarkable example of official paranoia: “Lurching behind [Pussy Riot] are the real enemies of our state and of the Orthodox Christianity; those who instigated this multipurpose provocation are hiding behind Tolokonnikova’s group, and [there are also others] hiding behind those who are hiding behind them.”

While there are doubtless many reasons for the divergent responses, the really striking difference is that while Mourre’s group had conceived its gesture as boldly and simple-mindedly anti-religious, in the spirit of French atheist anti-clericalism stretching back to the Revolution and the philosophes, Pussy Riot categorically refused the government’s claim that they were motivated by religious hatred. Indeed, all three women used their closing statements to engage in a debate over the meaning of the gospels themselves. In Catholic France, even in 1950, blasphemy was apparently separable from a threat to the state. Not so, apparently, in the Russia of the twenty-first century.

Maria Alyokhina, for example, asserted that for the Orthodox Church “[t]he Gospels are no longer understood as revelation, which they have been from the very beginning, but rather as a monolithic chunk that can be disassembled into quotations to be shoved in wherever necessary.” Noting that Jesus himself had been accused of blasphemy, Alyokhina goes on: “I think that religious truth should not be static, that it is essential to understand the instances and paths of spiritual development, the trials of a human being, his duplicity, his splintering. That for one’s self to form it is essential to experience these things.” And she makes the link to contemporary art explicit: “all of these processes—they acquire meaning in art and in philosophy. Including contemporary art. An artistic situation can and, in my opinion, must contain its own internal conflict.” Here Alyokhina mounts a defense of dissidence, intervention, rupture, and conflict—the aesthetics of punk, to be sure, but not far removed from the language of “contradiction” favored by critics like Theodor Adorno—by aligning them with what she calls “religious truth:” namely, the splintering and the spiritual development that become manifest only when the Gospel is treated as a process of revelation rather than a “monolithic chunk.” Moreover, Alyokhina’s distinction between process and monolith implicitly reflects back upon the long history of doctrine in the history of Western Christianity. Historians have noted, for example, that questions of doctrine and belief achieve a new importance during the early modern period, or what is sometimes called the “confessional period,” when the chaotic politics of Western Europe in the aftermath of the Renaissance and Reformation led to an emphasis on religious uniformity. Some scholars have further proposed that this process of reform and uniformity is a secular development, insofar as its real goal is not religion per se but the consolidation of state power and control over its subjects. When she aligns monolithic doctrine with state power, Alyokhina implicitly offers a similar diagnosis.

The radical power of that diagnosis becomes most clear in Yekaterina Samutsevich’s closing statement: “In our performance,” she writes, “we dared, without the Patriarch’s blessing, to unite the visual imagery of Orthodox culture with that of protest culture, thus suggesting that Orthodox culture belongs not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch, and Putin, but that it could also ally itself with civic rebellion and the spirit of protest in Russia.” Most striking here, perhaps, is the language of “uniting” orthodox and protest culture, rather than setting them against each other. This is done, Samutsevich suggests, in the name of a democratic ideal: both orthodox and protest culture are properties of the people rather than of one group or another. The performance, on this analysis, becomes a visual and aural demonstration of what Alyokhina had called “internal conflict,” something posed by all three women as the space in which religious revelation happens. Thus art, religion, and the state are not conceptually separated here but deliberately mixed up, in the name of religious truth.

The sincerity of these various statements is of course an open question. While the women were careful to acknowledge their “respect” for what they called “Orthodox culture,” their words came far short of a confession of faith. Perhaps they also hoped that the repudiation of anti-clericalism would help their legal case. Moreover the statements themselves, which draw on a series of iconoclastic heroes from Socrates to Solzhenitsyn but return, again and again, to the figure of Jesus, might seem over-cooked. Was Pussy Riot’s “punk prayer” really analogous to Socrates’ risky performances in ancient Athens, or to Jesus’ confrontations with worldly authorities? For his part, the theologian Harvey Cox, writing in the Boston Globe, is happy to place Pussy Riot in a prophetic tradition; “The prophet Isaiah walked through the streets naked and barefoot for three years to warn his people of their impending captivity. Hosea married a prostitute to shame people into recognizing their infidelity to God. Ezekiel baked and ate bread he made of cow dung. These prophets often chose the temple area in which to act out their warnings and denunciations. Jesus followed suit. He overturned the tables of the profiteers in the temple courtyard itself.…Protests and reforms often begin in religious venues. When an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther posted his complaints against the papacy…, he tacked them up on the door of the cathedral itself. The Scottish Reformation started in Edinburgh when an angry woman hurled a stool at the head of a preacher…”

Emphasizing that Christianity does not have a patent on such religious innovators, Cox also references Gandhi, who “led nonviolent bands of “untouchables” into the Hindu temple precincts from which the higher castes banned them.

It may seem a bit much to compare thirty seconds of amateurish dancing and shouting with such heroes of the faith. In most cases, the dramatic interventions of true religious revolutionaries are the result of long-standing oppositional practices. Though the stool-throwing woman in Edinburgh might be a distant ancestor of Pussy Riot, Cox is closer to the mark when he notes that the group stands within the Orthodox tradition of the yurodivy, or “holy fools.” “Orthodox theologians for centuries have recognized this as an authentic from of asceticism. Holy fools are not dismissed as crazy or criminal, but as people who, in using annoying or provocative acts, are saying something people need to hear.”

Does Pussy Riot hate religion or love it? Or merely respect it? Are they threats to the state or its victims? Is their Gospel-inflected self-defense opportunistic or genuine? Are they punks, prophets or holy fools? Is the event itself an example of a resurgent secularism or a resurgent religion? These questions and—to use Alyokhina’s word—conflicts are playing out simultaneously in a Russia lurching toward modernity and in a media sphere that exists (almost) everywhere but nowhere in particular. This suggests how much we need a truly global analysis of both secularism and religion.

[Thanks to Anahid Nersessian for first calling my attention to the religious and secular dimensions of this event.]

First, the exposition. Most importantly, (S) is about religion; it is a “stance towards religion,” as Bilgrami puts it. He wants to narrow the concept in order to give it analytic purchase and clarity, and so he distinguishes it from “secularization” and “the secular.” Others have made similar distinctions, of course, but usually in order to identify a range of discourses and practices that are not obviously about religion but nevertheless central to its historical construction: Charles Taylor’s “secular age,” for example, or Talal Asad’s “anthropology of the secular.” Bilgrami goes in the other direction: he knowingly excludes from (S) a whole range of things that might be said to belong to the secular. Meditating, for example, on why some religious communities tend not to speak out against their more extreme fundamentalist elements, Bilgrami writes that:

In the case of Islam, this defensively uncritical psychology has been bred by years of colonial subjugation, by continuing quasi-colonial economic arrangements with American and European corporate exploitation of energy resources of countries with large Muslin populations, by immoral embargoes imposed on these countries that cause untold suffering to ordinary people, by recent invasions of some of these countries by Western powers, and finally by the racialist attitudes towards migrants from these countries in European nations.

Colonialism, neo-colonialism, economic neo-liberalism, and the presumed cultural superiority of the West do not seem unconnected to the history of secularism. Some might add mass incarceration and other forms of state-sponsored violence to the list, techniques of the body and new sensory repertoires, even capitalism itself.

(S) runs directly counter to this discursive expansion of secularism. We might think, Bilgrami writes, that the “rhetoric of ‘secularism’ … plays a role in the anti-Islamist drumbeat of propaganda that accompanies these other factors,” like neo-liberalism and the legacies of colonialism. But even if that is so, he argues, “the right thing to do is not to ask that secularism be redefined, but to demand that one should drop talk of secularism and focus instead on trying to improve matters on what is really at stake: the effects of a colonial past, a commercially exploitative present, unjust wars and embargoes, racial discrimination….” For Bilgrami, to discuss these things under the rubric of secularism is to make a category mistake.

I don’t intend to be making a point of which Bilgrami is unaware. Indeed, the whole goal of his paper is to produce a remarkably modest, minimal account of secularism (a goal not all of the commentators on the paper here on The Immanent Frame seem to have grasped). But it’s important to see what that minimalism entails. Here is Bilgrami’s description of (S):

In a religiously plural society, all religions should have the privilege of free exercise and evenhanded treatment except when a religion’s practices are inconsistent with the ideals that a polity seeks to achieve, in which case there is a lexical ordering in which the political ideals are placed first.

Importantly, (S) does not stipulate what the polity’s substantive ideals are or ought to be; it says only that those ideals have lexical priority over religious ideals when the two come into conflict. Modern democracies will likely tend toward familiar ideals—freedom of speech and association, for example—but other kinds of societies may well place other ideals first. The point is simply that those ideals, whatever they are, come first.

Bilgrami admits that this picture of secularism is “more adversarial” toward religion than Taylor’s multicultural ideal of neutrality. But it is adversarial in a limited sense: (S) only cares about religion “as it affects the polity. It is not dismayed by or concerned with the presence of religiosity in the society at large or in the personal beliefs of the individual citizens.” For (S), private religion is fine: even public religion is fine. Conflict only arises when religion tries to drive policies that run athwart the polity’s ideals. In that case, and only in that case, the lexical ordering kicks in.

Lest this sound imperious, Bilgrami emphasizes that the only reasons for holding (S) in the first place are “internal reasons” (a concept he adapts from Bernard Williams).

Internal reasons are “reasons we give to another that appeal to some of his own values in order to try and persuade him to change his mind.” We are all internally conflicted in some way. This doesn’t mean blatant contradiction, in the sense of believing both p and not-p; it just means that there are tensions among values that an interlocutor can help bring to the surface. In the same fashion, reasons for holding (S) must be “internal”—that is, those reasons cannot be separated from the values and commitments of the individuals or groups holding (S). They are not universal or context-independent. So internal reasons will persuade some people but not others. However, as with John Rawls’s notion of the “overlapping consensus,” Bilgrami suggests that there are plural reasons for holding (S). In a plural society, it is the consensus that overlaps, not the reasons. In the matter at hand, then, secularism should drop talk of universal rights in favor of seeking “local concepts and commitments within the [religious] community … that might put pressure on the community’s own practices.”

This is not only a matter of reasoning with someone in a cognitivist way. For even agents who hold tightly to an apparently unconflicted set of principles are subject to the changes of history: “internal conflicts may be injected by historical developments into moral psychological economies.” Indeed, most successful activist movements work in exactly this way, by bringing to light or making visible a historical change already underway, thereby forcing majorities to confront the historically-bound nature of their own commitments, which they might otherwise have continued to think of as timeless.

Yet the historical record certainly offers plenty of examples of unchanged minds, or of minds that change and then change back, or of minds that change for the worse rather than the better, becoming more entrenched, more dogmatic, and so on. These possibilities don’t register very strongly in Bilgrami’s paper. This is what I meant when I said above that one tonal register of this paper is hope. For Bilgrami has a humanist confidence that the movement of history will eventually force illiberalism to confront its own internal tensions. Here is where he takes an evaluative stand: he believes this not for metaphysical reasons (some grand Theory of History) but because to believe it is to care about the truth in a certain way. To want to argue with someone and convince them that their own deeply held principles are tension-filled and therefore ought to be modified is to care about truth as you see it in such a way that you want others to see things your way too. This is a sign of respect, and it also fosters an ethical project: generating “empathetic attitudes of engagement with the tradition and mentality of those one opposes.”

I like all this very much. It nicely sidesteps much of what is unpalatable or just plain shallow in some fashionable versions of relativism. It proposes a kind of dialogue that is respectful but also deeply committed to getting things right. And its picture of truth is dialectical and internal: we move toward truth through the hard work of examining internal points of tension within our own substantive commitments and moral/psychological principles. (This is why I think Justin Neuman rather misses the point when he writes in his post that Bilgrami is too ready to generalize about groups of people; as I understand it, one primary purpose of Bilgrami’s emphasis on moral psychology is to make it harder to engage in such generalizations.)

And yet it is clear that (S) depends upon a certain historically-specific definition of religion.  It builds on a picture of “religion” as ideally heading towards post-Westphalian Protestantism—a formation that, several historians have plausibly argued, helped to build the modern nation state as we know it. It seems likely that this hopeful trajectory is in some tension with a different theme that emerges in the middle of the paper. Here Bilgrami notes that secularism as a policy is the result and requirement of a post-Westphalian Western Europe, which strove to develop a “feeling for the nation” by identifying internal others (the Jews, the Irish) and thus “inventing” the problem of minorities. For Charles Taylor, those cases in which majorities and minorities are understood in terms of religion demand secularism in the form of neutrality. Bilgrami is skeptical that secularism as neutrality can actually handle the challenge of majoritarianism. When majorities and minorities are defined in terms of religion, he argues, “there inevitably arises a sense that religion itself is the problem, even though the historical source of the problem lies in majoritarianism.” At this point something stronger than neutrality is needed, namely the lexical ordering.

What I am calling the secondary tonality of tragedy enters here, because Bilgrami is clear that it didn’t have to turn out this way. Mohandas Gandhi, for example, tried hard to prevent the development of a situation in India (of nationalism and majoritarianism) that would in turn require secularism. (This argument isn’t really developed in the present paper, but Bilgrami has written of it elsewhere.) In this example, history is not a progressive force that gradually loosens the hold of illiberalism, but actually creates the conditions in which illiberalism can flourish, which in turn brings forth the need for (S) as our best hope in a situation that hasn’t turned out very well.

And, finally, the third tonality. Whether history is ultimately progressive or tragic, it is at least dynamic. Religion, by contrast, seems quite static. In Bilgrami’s schema, secularism points out to religion (or waits for history to do the pointing out) that its picture of things is full of internal tensions; it thereby hopes to convince religion to sign on to (S)’s lexical ordering for reasons that remain religious (that’s the overlapping consensus part of the argument) but have now been pluralized (that’s the moral psychological part of the argument). I don’t get any sense that for Bilgrami the arrow might sometimes point in the other direction. Like Lars Tønder and a few of the other commentators on the paper, I wonder whether this simply reintroduces the conceits of secularism (its confident sense that it is right, and that history is on its side) in more modest garb. Can we really envision, on Bilgrami’s grounds, an engagement that reveals that secularism, too, has internal tensions that should be confronted—a conversation, that is, that actually changes both participants? This is the possibility that William Connolly gestured toward in a brief reading of Søren Kierkegaard in Why I Am Not a Secularist, and that Tønder develops very nicely out of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “tolerance of the incomplete” in his piece: “rather than beginning with the issue of how to order political ideals,” Tønder writes, “Merleau-Ponty’s dialectic begins in the midst of lived experience, where perceptions, judgments, and ideals have not yet reached the threshold of conceptual clarity….” This would lead to epistemic modesty of a different kind—neither a liberal recommendation of tolerance because we might turn out to be wrong, nor the modesty of the overlapping consensus, but a modesty born of the sense that things are still in flux, still in process, and that all of us find ourselves suddenly in the middle of things and without fully secure footing. Elsewhere I’ve suggested that the romantic theory of the fragment offers a useful way to think about this kind of modesty.

I suspect that Bilgrami would say that I’m missing the point here. (S), he insists at the very beginning of his paper, isn’t a good in itself, and so it can’t be internally conflicted, nor can it be anthropomorphized. (S) merely seeks to promote other kinds of goods (to be established by the polity in question) and it is in order to protect those goods that the requirement of lexical ordering comes into play. Yet there is one good that (S) seems to be not simply protecting but also promoting, and that is the good of helping religions pluralize their own self-conceptions. This is where (S) becomes activist in a way that Bilgrami, I think, doesn’t fully admit. If I may introduce a new term here, we could say that (S) is prophetic in its relation to religion.

There are good reasons to think that religion is more dynamic than Bilgrami’s picture of it allows. Indeed, it seems to me that religion has often been prophetic in its relation to the state—even, perhaps, to the point of convincing it to change its lexical ordering. But that is a topic for another day.

The question matters because historically liberal arts colleges have liked to think of themselves as places where students can ask the big questions (hereafter BQs): “What is the meaning of my life?” “How do I understand death?” “Does evil exist?” “What are my obligations to my neighbor, my country, my world?” And finally, “How might my education—in whatever field I study—help me assimilate these questions?” The authors were struck, they report, by how discussions of the secular re-invigorated these BQs, and one in particular: what is an education for, anyway?

Kahn and his co-investigators come out in favor of a sensible distinction between secular and secularist. To be a secularist is to want to rid a pedagogical space of religious commitments; to be secular is, to quote Jeffrey Stout, to recognize a condition in which participants cannot “take for granted that their interlocutors are making the same religious assumptions they are.” This is the condition that Charles Taylor refers to as “fragilization,” and it is quite close to his general account, in A Secular Age, of the secular as our often implicit knowledge that, under the shared conditions of modernity, we often bump into people whom we respect and yet who do not share our own deepest commitments. (Whether there was ever a time when we could assume that our interlocutors were making the “same religious assumptions” we were is of course another question.)

If “the secular” in this sense is indeed the condition of our intellectual life together, what should we do about it? How can we thin the ranks of narrowly ideological secularists and develop more epistemically-generous “seculars”? Here is the beginning of an answer: “When the authority of knowledge is less important than the things that can be done with knowledge,” the authors write, “the secular becomes a discussion between religious and non-religious citizens who are acutely aware that the demands of secularized democratic life require an extraordinary balance between cherishing one’s own convictions and holding to the awareness that these same cherished convictions are contestable and that they may at times act as a bludgeon against other democratic citizens.”

Call me naive, but this just looks like good pedagogy to me. Most of us who teach for a living lay down a few ground rules—basically: talk, but also listen, and don’t be an asshole—and then try to model for our students the reflexivity that we all internalized somewhere along the way in our own educations. We try to get them to articulate not just what they think, but why they think it. What does their knowledge reveal, and what does it obscure? Are there other possibilities? If there are, do they matter? If the other fellow is right, or even just different and interesting, then what? Teaching students to take these questions to heart is our job. Does anybody really subscribe to the notion that teaching should “arrogat[e] authoritative forms of knowledge”? I doubt it. Of course, if the topic is quantum mechanics, then there are right answers and wrong answers, and it’s important to be able to spot the difference. If the topic is the history of science, by contrast, then the wrong answers might be as interesting as the right ones. In practice, this is not a very difficult distinction to keep track of.  So Kahn et. al.’s category of “secularist” here, like its supposed corollary “enlightenment reason,” seems something of a straw person.

In any case, Kahn and his colleagues discover a more subtle and interesting problem: “What appeared glaringly conspicuous to us is the lack, across academic fields, of adequate models and examples of constructive exchange between conflicting deep commitments.” Here, the theory/practice problem reasserts itself. Kahn and his colleagues channel William Connolly’s accounts of deep contestability, but it is easier to say that we should simultaneously cherish our convictions and acknowledge their contestability than it is to actually do it.

I think this is also what James K. A. Smith is after when he writes, over at his blog, that Kahn’s “model still refuses to think about education as formation. It’s willing to make room for a variety of “views” and “perspectives” to help students ask ‘the big questions’—giving them lots of options to consider.” But this is still quite different from the task of forming a person, a “thick task … that constitutes inculcation in a tradition, habituation to a particular vision of the good.”

Wittgensteinian “form of life” arguments of this sort have gotten a certain amount of traction in recent years, and for good reason. Smith, in a nice little twist, is in fact suggesting that his own unabashedly sectarian approach is truer to the secular ideal proffered by Connolly, Kahn, and Stout than is their own pluralism. Just asking the BQs, or even exploring them historically and culturally, isn’t enough: it still tends to flatten out into liberal tolerance. I think that Smith wants his students to be able to say: “well, yes, we understand that our view on this BQ is ‘contestable’ and we can even imagine how our view might look from somewhere else, but we’re arguing from a comprehensive vision of the good that, for a whole host of reasons, we’re pretty sure is right. That’s how we do things around here.”

Smith is picking up on one weakness of Connolly’s account in Why I Am Not a Secularist: it’s long on recommendations, but it doesn’t really provide a robust-enough account of the subjectivity required for putting those recommendations into practice. (For an account of Connolly’s shortcomings on this point, see my essay “After the Secular: The Subject of Romanticism.”) We could put the disagreement like this: Does multidimensional pluralism derive from a comprehensive vision of the good (Smith’s position)? Or can multidimensional pluralism itself be a comprehensive vision of the good (Connolly’s position)? And if it’s the latter, could the account of how we foster multidimensional pluralism be thickened enough to avoid the charge that it is reducible finally to some version of tolerance and anodyne respect for “difference”?

This matters for two reasons. First, most of us don’t teach at sectarian institutions, so we need an account that builds in competing definitions of the good at the ground level. And second, most of us also don’t teach at elite secular liberal arts colleges, so we need an account that “pluralizes” Kahn and his colleague’s somewhat rarified sense of what happens in the classroom. I want to address both of these needs by describing two pedagogies that derive from the romantic-era writers. (As I’ve suggested elsewhere on this site, the romantics offer remarkable resources for thinking through the problematics of the secular.) One I’ll call “Soul-Making,” and the other, “Careless Steps.”

Soul-making

The phrase comes from a famous passage in John Keats’s letters, this one written in 1819 to his brother and sister-in-law. It’s a long and rambling (and grammatically irregular) passage, but here is the gist:

Call the world if you Please “The vale of Soul-making” Then you will find out the use of the world … Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence-There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions—but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. . . . how then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them—so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each ones individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? . . . I can scarcely express what I but dimly perceive—and yet I think I perceive it—that you may judge the more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible—I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little children to read—I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that School—and I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul! A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways! . . . —As various as the Lives of Men are–so various become their souls. . . .

Note, first, that this is a deliberately post-Christian vision: Keats calls the idea that “we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven” a “little circumscribe[d] straightened notion!” And note, second, that it assays something like a multidimensional pluralism: identities or souls “possess a bliss peculiar to each ones individual existence.” But note, third, that Keats is also trying to figure out how that pluralism comes into existence. Multidimensional pluralism is not a fact of life, nor is difference to be celebrated simply for itself; Keats thinks that we begin merely as “intelligences,” sparks of potential. As such, we are not that interesting, and not really worth taking seriously. The whole point of the world is to take those intelligences and turn them into something; the world is a classroom, and its pedagogical method is to make us “feel and suffer” until we have become the souls that we would not otherwise be. There’s a bit of stoicism in there, but there’s also a commitment to transformation that draws its energy from (post-) Christianity. As a result, it cuts considerably deeper than, for example, Stout’s rather obvious acknowledgement that we cannot take for granted that our interlocutors share our religious presuppositions; at the same time, it begins to address, from a non-sectarian perspective, Smith’s focus on character formation. Soul-making is character formation, but uncoupled from the comprehensive theory of the good to which Smith wants to wed it.

Careless steps

At the good but underfunded and underappreciated state university where I teach, Kahn and his colleagues’ description of the undergraduate classroom as a place that “promote[s] education as a way for students to consider larger questions of meaning and value” seems an almost unattainable goal. My brightest students are, I am sure, as bright as theirs are. But, almost to a person, they are also out of time. Far too many of them work virtually full-time jobs, and they often take an overload of classes so that they can graduate in 3 years. Many live at home to save on expenses or to help care for younger siblings; commuting to campus in the New Jersey traffic, and squeezing their classes in between everything else they have to do, too often they arrive late, frazzled, happy just to get there and have most of the reading done. Larger questions of meaning and value? Sorry: they don’t have time for that stuff.

Really great teaching can overcome some of this general harriedness, some of the time. And like many, I have my moments. But it also seems to me that I’m combating forces over which I have little control: the obsessive marketing and branding of the academy, the casualization of academic labor, what Randy Martin calls the “financialization” of everyday life, and the juggernaut of economic neoliberalism: all these are pressures that transcend the classroom and the university, and they combine to make the BQs luxuries rather than necessities, the kind of thing that only a few students, on a few leafy campuses, have the privilege of debating. The rest of the world careens down a path increasingly dominated by outcomes and assessments: if it can’t be measured, it doesn’t count. (For my own further thoughts along these lines, see my essay “The Demands of the Day.”)

So while I wholeheartedly endorse Kahn et. al.’s call to put the BQs back at the center, this requires more than drawing a careful distinction between secularism and the secular.  Lately I’ve been thinking that my main job in the classroom is to create a space in which something unexpected can happen. I’m inspired by a project of the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who in 1794 planned to leave England and start a radically egalitarian experiment in communal living in the wilderness of Pennsylvania. For this crazy scheme Coleridge coined the word “Pantisocracy,” or “all-governing society.” In a letter to his friend Robert Southey about his efforts to drum up support for the plan, Coleridge writes that he “preached Pantisocracy . . . with so much success that two great huge Fellows, of Butcher like appearance, danced about the room in enthusiastic agitations.” Coleridge linked Pantisocracy to bodily movement again in a modest poem written the same summer, in which America appears as a place

Where Virtue calm with careless step may stray,

And dancing to the moonlight Roundelay

The Wizard Passions weave a holy Spell.

Both passages used verbal invention to link a political project with unscripted movement. The “careless steps” in the poem are, among other things, a reference to practices of land management in eighteenth-century England, whose picturesque enclosures, ditches, and hedges make it impossible to move freely across a landscape. Coleridge’s sense of Pantisocracy as a rhetorical exercise with radical possibilities, something to be preached, poeticized, and invented, makes it a pedagogical exercise that rewards straying, stepping out of line, moving in enchantment and agitation. Those “great huge fellows” dancing around the room are figures for the kind of political subjectivity that might, under the right conditions, come into being simply through the power of words.

What does this have to do with secularism? If Talal Asad is right and secularity is about many things other than “religion”—a point that Kahn and his colleagues don’t seem quite to have grasped—then branding, casualization, financialization, and neoliberalism are all ways in which secularism reshapes our experience of time and of embodiment. The “empty, homogenous” time of modernity that Benjamin described has now been filled to the brim: in a world of metrics and measures, no one ever has enough time; we are all too burdened with what Coleridge calls “care.” If we really want the BQs to come back in all their richness, then we may have to recapture a different, non-secular relationship to temporality. Coleridge’s pantisocracy project suggests that we begin by considering the possibilities of carelessness. And if a secular body is in some sense an inexperienced body unable to dance with “Wizard passions” because it can no longer hear the music, then a non-secular body might be one that has been re-tuned to such sensory possibilities. Who among us wouldn’t want our students to dance?

It could be that heteronomous thinking is bad because it leads to unpleasant things. This would be a kind of consequentialist argument and would therefore live or die on the empirical evidence. This is Christopher Hitchens territory. Rightly recognizing that this is not where he wants to go, Gourgouris opts for the other kind of answer, which is to insist that heteronomous thinking is problematic in itself—a kind of formal argument. But at some point any argument along these lines will beg the question, for it will need to assert that thinking for oneself is a good in itself. And that assertion can’t in turn be justified without appealing—heteronomously, if you will—to some scheme of values outside the mode of thinking in question.

At stake here is a certain kind of intellectual posture. In his debate with Mahmood, Gourgouris bases his argument on two suppositions that Mahmood wants to question. Those suppositions are that enlightened reason (“secular criticism”) can be purged of its own heteronomous tendencies, and that religion is an archetypal example of heteronomous thinking. If this description is right, then the dispute is really over the Enlightenment and its legacies—a point that Charles Taylor alludes to in his post in this thread. Like his enlightened forbears, Gourgouris thinks that the critique of religion is the archetype of critique as such, and he thinks that the critical project, while itself at constant risk of becoming arrogant or disconnected, can correct itself from the inside so long as we exercise sufficient care. Mahmood has a different understanding of what “critique” entails. Her more Foucaultian approach involves asking questions about how particular assumptions (that the veil is a symbol, for example) produce particular kinds of subjects, enable and dis-enable certain kinds of work, and so on.

Must we choose sides? Gourgouris apparently wants sides to be chosen. Mahmood wants to question the drive to choose sides. But I would rather try to inflect these choices differently by reading them through a category that has not received enough attention in the debate about secularism. That category is the literary.

***

If we follow Gourgouris and assume for the sake of argument that heteronomy/autonomy is the best scale we have for thinking about the question of critique (though I’m not sure it is), we can see immediately that a certain picture of the intellectual life follows naturally. In this picture, intellectual activity at its best involves the rigorous guarding against the temptation toward heteronomy. If we relax our guard, it seems, we’re going to find ourselves mired in some appeal to external authority. In this way certain values are brought into rough equivalence: reflexivity, critique, and the secular (in its proper, non-doctrinal, form).

This picture of the intellectual life as a rigorous guarding against the temptation toward heteronomy is what Chris Nealon in the initial post on this thread called “a left-secular structure of feeling.” And its dynamics should be pretty familiar. It is striking, for instance, that this picture is formally very much like the Christian life as it is imagined by St. Paul (“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do”) and by Augustine. Both of these thinkers call their flocks to vigilance against patterns of worldly thought and behavior understood to be always just around the bend. Worldly criticism reverses the poles (where before the picture was of people pulled away from divinity and toward the world, now the picture is of people pulled away from the world and toward divinity) but it doesn’t alter the basic pattern. To note this similarity is not to say that secularity is “like” religion. It’s just to remark on our widely shared picture of what the intellectual life looks like: we’re on a hair-trigger, concerned above all never to relax our guard.

But we do relax our guard, or take a nap, or just get distracted for a while. Reflexivity is exhausting, after all. And so things sneak in: unexamined presuppositions, various essentialisms, historical blindspots, moments of “heteronomy.” We trust in authorities when we shouldn’t; take things on faith because we’re too tired or busy to run all the background checks that we might. And then we startle awake, and realize what’s happened. This may, in turn, inspire us to build better defenses and bigger data-bases. But we might also be led to reflect on the inevitability of such moments, and to confront the fact that despite our best intentions we will always betray the rigorous demands of our calling. This is the melancholy of criticism—let me say, melodramatically, of criticism in the aftermath of Enlightenment.

No one practiced this critical melancholy with more effect than Paul de Man. Consider two brief examples from his 1969 essay “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” which was for a time perhaps the single most influential essay in literary studies. Discussing the romantic symbol as an attempt to resolve the split between subject and object introduced by Enlightenment reason, de Man dissents from the humanist critics who came before him. Following some hints in Coleridge and elsewhere, those critics had proposed that the symbol repairs the breach between subject and object. De Man, on the other hand, says that subject/object is the wrong problem; the real problem is that we can never escape from time, but by focusing on the pseudo-problem of subject and object the romantic symbol simply encourages us to deny our “authentically temporal destiny” (ie., death) and flee into timeless universals. The symbol, he says, is thus “a temptation that has to be overcome.” Then, later in the essay, having produced an impressive comparison between allegory and irony, de Man writes that “this conclusion is dangerously satisfying….Things cannot be left to rest at the point we have reached.” These are two examples of the kinds of critical restlessness for which de Man is famous. The act of reading itself is the purest form of that restlessness; throughout his critical oeuvre reading appears as dreadful, as painful, as adding up to nothing. The only thing worse than reading, for de Man, is not reading, for that would mean giving in to temptations like that of the symbol, whose “dangerously satisfying conclusions” encourage us to forget about our temporal predicament.

Note that this is not criticism undertaken in the name of liberation. As de Man pictures it, all that reading can do is tie us ever more intimately to the object of our critique. Having seen through the “dangerous satisfactions” that emerge when we stop reading, the critic cannot then take refuge in those satisfactions without bad faith. But having also recognized that the pull of such satisfactions is so great that no amount of criticism will ever fully emancipate him, the critic finds himself plunged ever more deeply into a condition both intolerable and necessary. The only way to resist the temptation to stop reading is to keep reading, but the reading simply reconfirms the power of the temptation to stop. Loving what you hate; hating what you love: this melancholy predicament becomes the critic’s professional identity.

***

De Man was not especially interested in religion or in the secular, though he did assume that modernization meant secularization, and he wrote of religion as a typical example of the “dangerously satisfying” conclusions against which he set his critical project. So in that way he was a secular thinker, though I think he understood pretty well that criticizing something is not the same thing as leaving it behind. Indeed, one might read most of his writing as a continual rediscovery of the stubborn fact that the thing you most want to leave behind is also the thing you can’t leave behind—like St. Paul, who cannot do what he wants to do, but instead does the thing he hates to do.

For de Man–and for many of the literary critics writing in his wake—this kind of vexed melancholia simply was the literary experience. It is a secular experience, but of a tragic kind. It bears more than a passing resemblance to the picture painted by Edward Said, in his “Secular Criticism” essay, of the heroic worldly intellectual, resolutely suspicious of anything that might entice him to rest. Said’s metaphors in that essay, as throughout much of his work, contrast the “the quasi-religious authority of being comfortably at home” with the exile and homelessness that is for him the mark of the critic. Because he is not at home, the critic is able to take the measure of modernity and its loss of filiation: “because of that perspective, which introduces circumstance and distinction where there had only been conformity and belonging, there is distance, or what we might also call criticism,” Said writes. The critic is permanently homeless in this conception—and once again there’s an interesting inversion of the Christian imaginary here, something of which Said was very much aware.

Said’s more programmatic statements may lack the melancholy quality often found in de Man, but Said’s own body of work attests in manifold ways to his deep attachment to the very objects whose siren call he must nevertheless resist. And in this way Said’s secular criticism, like de Man’s version of deconstruction, foregrounds the relationship between secularism and the literary without ever quite saying so. To be sure, Said makes it clear that by “criticism” he means more than simply “literary criticism.” Yet it is also evident that he is modeling habits of critical attention upon the forms of attentiveness solicited by literary writing. “Obviously I’m not suggesting that everybody has to become a literary critic,” he once noted in an interview. “[T]hat’s a silly idea. But one does have to give a certain attention to the rather dense fabric of secular life….” Note the elective affinity among secularism, criticism and literary “attention.” And of course, the importance of literature to Said’s image of criticism has been further reinforced by the fact that many of those currently writing under Said’s influence are located in departments of literature.

***

Gil Anidjar’s recent book, Semites, pushes this line of thinking as far as I’ve seen anyone take it. One project of the book is to mediate between the positions of Talal Asad and Edward Said. (This is one of the things at stake in the Mahmood-Gourgouris debate. In the background, meanwhile, stands the legacy of Foucault and Said’s own critical use of Foucault.) So we get an interpretation of Orientalism in which it emerges that Said’s real target in that book was secularism. I don’t have room here to go into the complexities of Anidjar’s counter-intuitive argument, and in any case what’s relevant to my discussion here is the shape of the book rather than its local engagements. What is that shape? The first half of the book traces, in genealogical fashion, the complicated histories of the categories of Jew and Arab, Semite and Aryan. Having established how fraught and entangled those histories are, Anidjar turns in the second half of the book to “Literature.” The publisher’s description on the back of the book, in fact, says that the book “turns to the literary imagination as the site of a fragile and tenuous alternative, the promise of something like a ‘Semitic perspective’.”

As I understand it, the political resonance of that last phrase is found in the book’s historical argument that “Jew” and “Arab” where once jointly “Semitic,” so that a “Semitic perspective” would be an important alternative to prevailing contemporary narratives of “Jew vs. Arab.” The stakes, then, could not be higher: the “literary imagination” holds out something like the promise of reconciliation, in the sense of which Said spoke of it (see the essays collected in The End of the Peace Process). As Anidjar writes, “I attend to the way in which the texts of Arabic and Jewish literatures undo the narrow limits to which they are confined by the topological imagination and by the disciplines.” And later: “throughout and against history, literature resists.”

What the book largely offers, however, are discussions of that confinement—by the discipline of comparative literature, for example—rather than of literary resistance to it. I confess that I’m still trying to follow Anidjar’s argument, so maybe I’ve got this wrong, but it seems to me that in the places where we might expect discussion of literary texts, we are given instead a resonant picture of the kind of critical brooding I have been discussing. That is, it is the critic’s relation to his object—anguished, anxious, treasonous—that interests Anidjar. The idea is that any such relationship will betray the most important thing about literature, indeed the only thing that matters about it, namely its resistance to history. The critic, who is institutionally located and bound by networks of affiliation she can never quite escape, can only ever be a representative of history, and of the disciplines, can therefore even at her generous best—again with the largest stakes in mind—only imagine a “two-state” (that is, institutionally and historically determined) solution to such intractable questions as that of Palestine. The one-state solution for which Said advocated and which he turned sometimes to literature in order to imagine—that is destined to remain out of reach, though not out of mind for the critic aware enough of her own failings.

It is Paul de Man who becomes the guiding figure in Anidjar’s account. Riffing on de Man, Anidjar writes of “The [critic's] treason, which is also an active joining (a treacherous obedience), a belonging without allegiance, perhaps.” This, he concludes enigmatically, “is the promise, no more than a promise and, equally, the threat of another future, if not of another modernity.” What I take this to mean is that the critic’s treason is the promise of another future because it holds out the possibility of breaking definitively with the past. But this promise is also a threat, because any true break will throw all cherished categories out of the window. And this will be true not only for our illiberal/facist/fundamentalist opponents but for us too, no matter how progressive, generous, and reflexive we imagine ourselves to be.

But this is for the future. What does critique looks like now, in the aftermath of enlightenment? For de Man and Anidjar (and possibly Said) it seems to be a reflexivity so crosscut with humility and tragedy that it keeps generating, as if in compensation, a concept of literariness that is always just around the bend. I think it is not accidental that de Man’s own critical career continued to circle around those texts loosely termed “romantic”—the works of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century that were striving to come to terms with the secular horizons opened up by the Enlightenment, and striving to find a voice for ways of being that those secular horizons were unable or unwilling to recognize. What I think de Man sensed in those texts and writers is what Anidjar senses in de Man. If we had to label it, we could call it “non-heteronomous critique.” Or, we could just call it “literature.”

Perhaps we can get a sense of this anxiety by observing that both “secular” and “critique” are frequently defined negatively, in terms of what they are not: the secular is not the religious, while critique is the opposite of enchantment.

Secularism in some common-sense definitions means policing the bounds of the religious. Thus we see images of division and containment—the “wall of separation” between church and state, the idea that religion is private and governance public, and so on. Much of the most interesting contemporary thinking about secularism has contested this conception, of course—or at any rate contested its neutrality. Thus Talal Asad, to take one example, shows how secularism has its own interests, powers, and so on. But even if one were to assert (as Asad emphatically does not) that these interests and powers are beneficial, such secularism is not exactly something one consciously signs up for—it’s just not a first-person sort of thing. Secularism on this definition is like what Foucault calls “governmentality,” and governmentality is not the kind of thing that someone sets out to do; it’s just something that gets done. And so from a first-person perspective secularism might seem rather empty.

And critique, too, is often defined negatively. “Critique,” as Kant understood the term, involved the disciplined reigning-in of the temptation of speculative metaphysics. To be sure, there is a positive project here: philosophically, in the focus on “conditions of possibility;” dispositionally, in the development of a stance or practice of critique, something that we live into and that carries with it its own forms of discipline and agency. There are also forms of critical negativity such as those developed by Adorno. In his Aesthetic Theory, for example, Adorno does hold out the possibility of what he calls “reconciliation,” but this can only be conceptualized, he argues, through an artwork that renounces the possibility of reconciliation in the present and thus casts the possibility forward into an infinitely deferred future. This may be intellectually exciting, but it is also very severe, and by design remains a minority position. How many of us will resist the siren song of (even specious) reconciliation in the here and now in favor of its possible realization somewhere down the line?

So I think there is a phenomenological affinity between secularism and critique, a kind of shared “feel”. The anxiety that I am speculating lurks behind the question “is critique secular?” has its source here, in the worry that the “feel” of critique, the “feel” of the secular, leaves out something important. And without that something, whatever it is, neither critique nor secularism is going to be able to attract and hold people.

Consider, in this regard, a recent interview with Michael Hardt, speaking about his books Empire and Multitude, which he co-wrote with Antonio Negri:

One thing I have been interested in, in the last few years is the reaction of theological scholars to my and Toni’s work…. Toni and I are both always focused on the possibility of a project, and what I think I’ve understood as a frustration of many theological scholars with much of the political theorizing is its inability to or refusal to pose a political project. I mean, it’s closure at critique let’s say, that that seems unsatisfactory, and that in some ways people who work in preaching or people who work in all other forms of theological enterprise require that transformative moment, and I think that that is the real point of contact … the need for a collective and human moment of transformation. [my emphasis]

I am less interested in the accuracy of Hardt’s diagnosis than I am in the terms in which that diagnosis is cast: “closure at critique” vs. a “transformative moment.” As I read Hardt, the first of these is understood as formal, perhaps empty, certainly closed—perhaps rather bloodless and severe. The second is understood as having content, being full, invested in the messiness of human life, and as projecting a possible future. It’s as if Hardt is saying: “Yes, critique is secular, and that’s precisely the problem. People, even intellectuals, are hungry for more.”

Now I think this opposition is simplistic. It would have a hard time with more expansive notions of secular critique embedded in what Charles Taylor calls “exclusive humanism,” or with the Spinozist immanence about which Beth Hurd and Lars Tønder have written on this blog. Indeed, Hardt seems to have narrowed his conception of “critique” so much that even his own Spinoza-inspired political philosophy can enter only under the sign of the “theological.” But why divide things up this way? Surely the truth of the matter is that religious and theological traditions have critical dimensions, and critical traditions make room for transformative projects. From this perspective, the precondition of Hardt’s admiration for religion is in fact his secularism (as Asad understands the term), which accords religion a good deal of respect but in doing so defines it as a distinct area of human endeavor, cut off from such activities as “critique.”

At the same time, however, I think the very secularism of the quotation captures a pre-reflective sensibility regarding the intellectual field, perhaps a kind of mirror-image of the “left-secular structure of feeling” that Chris Nealon blogged about recently on this site. The most basic and depressingly familiar form of this pre-reflective sensibility is the not-infrequent accusation that intellectuals are habitually “too critical,” that they suck all the joy out of things. As a literature professor, I am from time to time accused by my students of “ruining” a poem by “over-analyzing” it. The smarter ones quote Wordsworth back to me: I am “murdering to dissect,” they tell me. More seriously, those intellectuals who proposed that we look to American imperial adventuring as a cause of 9/11 were accused of “blaming America first.” In such cases, it seems, to be committed to critique is not, somehow, to be committed to enough—and if you’ve got to explain why it is that critique is so important, why it can be a value in its own right, you’ve already lost the battle. Analogously, when the French government decides that it needs to teach secularism, it is of course true (as Saba Mahmood and others have argued) that governments have been “teaching” secularism all along through the practices and subjectivities that they authorize and legitimate. At the same time, it seems to me that something has happened, some important Rubicon has been crossed, when the necessity of teaching secularism, and the necessity of explaining critique, has been brought to consciousness. It’s the anxiety attendant upon that crossing that I’ve tried to point to here.

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

This passage comes quite early in Charles Taylor’s new book, while he is still assembling the pieces of the “story” that he will tell over its almost-900 pages. The passage is perhaps most easily read (allegorically, as it were) as a defense of the sheer length of the book. Stories, at least good stories, are full of details that demand time and space in a narrative. They are worth it, though, because they make narratives more like real life: good stories are thick and messy rather than thin and sterile. They take surprising twists and turns, double back on themselves, try things out from another angle.

What is the other option? According to Taylor, the opposite of a history is bare conceptual analysis: “But why tell a story? Why not just extract the analytic contrast, state what things were like then, and how they are now, and let the linking narrative go? Who needs all this detail, this history?” (28). The implication is that a shorter, more strictly analytical book would have missed the heart of the matter. Why is this? Because “this detail, this history” is not just an optional extra, not just a set of examples or illustrations. Rather, details are where the action is. This is a normative anthropological claim: details are where we live, because details are where history lives, and we are historical creatures.

The question that remains, then, is how best to capture this sense of history. Now one answer to this question, which began gathering steam during the period of which Taylor writes, is literature. Literature is frequently praised for bringing abstraction down to earth, fleshing it out, making it live and move. An oft-quoted example of this claim comes from Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “[T]he poet’s pen,” he writes in Act V, “gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.”

By far the most sophisticated attempt in this direction, however, belongs to a group of German thinkers briefly gathered at Jena in the late 1790s and known to posterity as the Romantics. This group—principally Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, and Schleiermacher—came of age in a Germany intellectually dominated by Kant and Fichte. Against what was rapidly hardening into a battle of systematic philosophies, Friedrich Schlegel in particular argued for an anti-systematic approach that he linked to the literary genre of the fragment. Philosophy had run stuck in the wake of Kant, Schlegel argued, because it mistakenly assumed that thinking must begin from a first or unconditioned principle, a still point in a turning world. Schlegel thought this was exactly backwards: philosophy should begin in medias res, with the place where we find ourselves, conditioned creatures that we are. The fragment is the only form capable of answering this requirement, Schlegel proposed, because it reflected the state of incompletion and partiality from which we inevitably begin our reasoning. And part of that incompletion, of course, stems from the historicity of our situation. Thus, writes Schlegel in the famous Athenaum Fragment 116, “Other genres are fixed and capable of being classified in their entirety. The romantic genre is, however, still in the process of becoming. Indeed, that is its essence: to be eternally in the process of becoming and never completed.”

Taylor’s book is hardly a romantic fragment, of course. In its sprawling ambitiousness it is more like a nineteenth century novel by Tolstoy or Eliot. Still, Taylor’s defense of his method is a romantic one precisely insofar as it is literary—precisely insofar, that is, as its emphasis falls on the story that it has to tell.

One characteristic of romantic theories is that aesthetic productions cannot be paraphrased, because to paraphrase them inevitably distorts or misses everything worthwhile about them. (This idea was elevated into a theory of literature as such by the American New Critics, who for the most part hated romanticism but adopted this fundamental tenet into their thinking; see for example Cleanth Brooks’s famous essay “The Heresy of Paraphrase”.) That is the point of the romantic fragment—if you ask what a particular fragment “means” you are asking that it be translated into philosophy’s conceptual language, which is precisely what Schlegel and company were trying to avoid. There is a story about the composer Robert Schumann: after he was finished playing a new piano piece, someone in the audience asked him what it meant. For answer, Schumann simply played the piece again.

In a roughly analogous way, Taylor’s book is unparaphrasable: the level of detail and richness—the story—is so great that any attempt to extract a single thread from it inevitably mars its fabric. It would be better, given world enough and time, to simply read the book again.