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?

Jager is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University and is currently at work on a second book, After Secularism: Romanticism, Literature, Religion.

*  *  *

NS: What makes modern sociological terms like “secularism” and “secularization” useful for interpreting eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature? Is there a danger of falling into misleading anachronism?

CJ: There’s always that danger when we use a term from one historical period to describe aspects of another one. “Secularism” first emerges in Victorian England as a self-description, a way to avoid being labeled an atheist, and it has a long history within Christianity before that, as the secular, or worldly, time before the Second Coming. “Secularization” is a bit trickier, since it aims to describe a process and to give that process the aura of scientific neutrality, like the weather. I think the danger is not so much anachronism—which, frankly, I don’t think is a bad thing anyway—but rather forgetting that terms are never merely descriptive. So, I use the term, and I try to be reflexive about it. It’s comforting for many people to see themselves as living on the far side of a secularization process, and it’s that sense of comfort that I’d like to disrupt a bit.

NS: What does it mean for you to be reflexive?

CJ: What I mean by “reflexivity” is really just a critical consciousness that whenever you invoke a term, you are also invoking its history—the conditions under which it was forged and the uses to which it has been subsequently put. At the same time, we need these terms: something has changed over the course of modernity, for instance, and I’m comfortable with calling that change “secularization,” as long as it’s defined very carefully and I know what the stakes are in a given definition. Reflexivity is just my shorthand for the process, which I take to be central to serious intellectual practice, anyway—to strike the balance between using a term or concept or idea and simultaneously being aware of what you’re doing when you use it. It’s a mental habit of disembedding from the stuff you really care about—which, appropriately enough, is a pretty good definition of the secular!

NS: If I may speak of anachronism again, is this kind of secular reflexivity foreign to the texts you’re dealing with?

CJ: Of course not. In The Book of God I discuss a remark made by one of Jane Austen’s characters—Mary Crawford is her name—who hears that prayers are no longer said in the family chapel attached to the large mansion that she’s visiting. She says, “Every age has its improvements.” What she means most immediately is that family prayers are unpleasant and boring, and in the context she’s being clever and rather arch. But, by linking her personal feelings about family prayers to a theory of history as progressive secularization, she’s also invoking a whole range of historical processes. In England at the time, “improvement” meant a certain kind of landscape design that improved the view but neutralized or buried the actual historical presence of people within that landscape: moving the tenant farmers out of sight, maybe building a fake ruin or two. Mary may think that you can just invoke historical processes to further your own agenda—in this case, she’s trying to flirt with another character—but Austen’s narrator is simultaneously telling us something else: you can’t invoke historical processes without also invoking the history that those processes claim to describe but also inevitably distort, marginalize, cover up, re-write, and so on.

This is reflexivity in action, and it’s on the page: as readers, we’re being asked to see that what Mary sees as the whole truth is only a partial truth. Her easy assumptions about historical progress cause her to miss a great deal that is going on in this scene and in the book as a whole. She knows she’s being clever, but she doesn’t realize that she’s coming off as insensitive and really kind of clueless. All this that I’ve laboriously explained happens in just one line in the novel! That’s a wonderful example of how literary experience can do all kinds of nuanced intellectual work.

NS: The design arguments for God’s existence that you address in The Book of God are typically treated by philosophers and the public as sheer abstractions, or even scientific hypotheses; why treat them instead as literary creations?

CJ: No one discipline owns the design argument and its critiques. Historically, the distinctions that people typically draw today among literature, philosophy, and theology just don’t hold up. Professional literary study, especially, has only been around for a hundred years or so. A thinker like David Hume, who is very important to the story I tell about design, did not think of himself as a philosopher but as man of letters: he wrote history, philosophy, and theology, and he served as a diplomatic secretary. This was a typical “literary” career. I try to restore some of that broad range to the topics I write about—though no diplomats have signed me up yet!

NS: What’s an example of how you, as a scholar of literature, can shed light on a philosophical debate?

CJ: In Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Philo, who is skeptical of design arguments, wins the battle, but Cleanthes, who supports them, wins the war. One thing Hume might be suggesting is that if you’re on Philo’s team, you’d best give up your belief that better arguments can win the day all on their own. Yes, the philosophical or conceptual idea of design seems rather abstract, but, at the same time, those arguments are lived and experienced by real people in real time. This is one thing Hume figured out—and it’s a literary point, if you want to put it that way: the rhetoric, the habits of mind, the practices of sociability that accompany what we could call the culture of design aren’t just window-dressing for some philosophical argument. Those things are the argument. That’s why the culture of design is easier to come at through literature rather than the history of philosophy—through practice rather than theory, if you will. We’ve misunderstood the way secularization works if we think that better arguments drive the discussion.

NS: How do you square the Intelligent Design movement’s design arguments today with the narrative of secularization? One often hears them described as an anomaly in a modern society, but they’d have to be a pretty gigantic anomaly, demographically speaking.

CJ: Hardly anyone signs up just for a given argument—the design argument or any other. They sign up, rather, for the worldview and value-system, along with the habits and communities in which they understand those arguments to be embedded. The fact that Intelligent Design hasn’t yet produced a single creditable scientific claim is regarded as devastating by most in the scientific community, but it’s unlikely to faze the folks who have latched onto it. What they’ve latched onto is an articulation, however poorly conceived or executed, of the kind of world in which they want to understand themselves as living, one presided over by a powerful and benevolent force. At least for some, design arguments mark a compromise between science and faith. Lots of folks who hold to some version of theistic design also benefit—especially when it comes to medicine—from sciences that take bottom-up evolution for granted. At this level, design is very much a contributor to secularization. There’s a certain pathos and poetry to being caught in what Charles Taylor calls these cross-pressures of modernity.

NS: What drew you, originally, to the study of romanticism and, with it, to the question of secularity?

CJ: Romanticism and the secular really began as two separate interests for me. My interest in romanticism goes a long way back to my undergraduate years. What excited me then, and still excites me, was the heady, ambitious mix of philosophy and literature. You don’t have to read very far in Shelley or Coleridge or the Schlegels before you realize that the most extraordinary kinds of conceptual claims are being made. I liked the idea of “literature” doing the work of “philosophy”—and doing it better, because it takes in a wider compass of the human experience. My father was a philosopher, so maybe there was a little bit of healthy oedipal competition there, too! Later, in graduate school, I read Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s book The Literary Absolute, which argues that literature completes the task that philosophy had begun but couldn’t, on its own, finish. I liked that idea—it put literature at the top of the heap!

NS: And the secular?

CJ: The secular as such came a bit later for me. I wanted to find a way to write about religion, mostly because literary critics tend to write about it so unintelligently. Eventually it dawned on me that you can’t really write about religion without writing about the background against which it appears. Religion is not a thing that you can study apart from its surroundings. Most literary scholars still are not asking about the background against which something gets to count as “religious.” And then it was reading and hearing the usual suspects—Talal Asad, Michael Warner, William Connolly, Charles Taylor—that convinced me that the secular was itself an appropriate object of study, analysis, and critique. At some level, I think I was writing about secularism before I knew it, since one of the things that always appealed to me about the romantic moment was its promise of this-worldly redemption. Why wait for heaven when you can have it now? Now, when I look at romanticism and secularism, I have a hard time telling them apart.

NS: But wasn’t romanticism at least as much a reaction against excessive this-worldliness in the kind of society that was then emerging?

CJ: That’s why, for some people, it’s way too “religious”—by which they mean Christian—because it holds onto so many redemptive tropes even as it displaces and transforms them. They believe the critique of religion learned from Feuerbach and Marx needs to be applied to romanticism, or perhaps even to literature tout court—we’re not yet secular enough. I incline to the opposite position, namely, that secularism isn’t so much a break from Christianity as a process internal to it. Romanticism is a huge part of this story because it’s the moment when writers like Herder and Coleridge try to preserve the spirit of Christianity by universalizing it. For me, the fact of romanticism as a historical phenomenon shows that you can’t separate out the religious and secular, either historically or conceptually. You’ve got to speak of them together. And it’s the “literary,” once again, that finds a way to do that.

NS: You suggest that romanticism has often been identified today with “a failure of nerve.” What do you mean by this?

CJ: One thing that “romanticism” supposedly gave us was cultural relativism. For defenders of the Enlightenment, even chastened defenders, the idea that culture goes all the way down, and that it has to be evaluated not against a universal yardstick—reason, progress, whatever—but against itself, looks like weakness. But this is hardly “relativism” of the banal “I’m OK, You’re OK” sort. At its best, it is anti-dogmatic, open to new information and new ways of seeing the world. Far from weak, it has the courage and confidence of its own convictions. It says that the way I see the world and the way the world is are probably not the same thing. By contrast, the current shouting about “Islamofascism” suggests a real fragility and lack of confidence underneath all the bluster. This doesn’t mean that an inspired romantic multiculturalism is the answer to all our problems. But part of what the writers and thinkers of the romantic era figured out was that the world was filled with lots of different people, and that secularism—whether a state-ordained policy or a theory of procedural liberalism—just wasn’t going to be able to deal with all of them non-coercively.

NS: What alternative to cries of “Islamofascism” do you think the romantics might suggest to us, in terms of the West’s encounter with others?

CJ: Once again, I would say that romanticism is valuable for us today precisely because it offers a much more complex picture of the actual situation. To be sure, for romantic writers, the Muslim is a largely exoticized, Orientalized figure—as in Byron, Shelley, and Coleridge. But even that is useful, since it tells us a great deal about the cultural depictions available today; it’s no accident that Edward Said’s Orientalism spends so much time on romanticism, nor that the recent work of Akeel Bilgrami has unearthed a romantic counter-Orientalism that ends with Gandhi. Moreover, so much romantic-era writing returns to the figure of the outsider, very often figured as some kind of Semitic other: the Jew, the Turk. And what one sees over and over again, in Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, for example, or DeQuincey’s Confessions, is how intertwined are the histories of “Aryan” and “Semite,” “Christian” and “Turk” and “Jew.” They already understood that these distinctions can be made only through acts of violence.

NS: Is cross-cultural reflexivity, in this way, a discovery we owe to the romantics?

CJ: I would put it like this: when we come against our own internal limits, and we know there’s a territory beyond that limit, but we don’t have a map—the romantics give us the language for that feeling.

But of course, like all scholarly analysis, Geroulanos’s has its limits. It does indeed embed atheist antihumanism into its social and historical setting—but rather as a backdrop than as a shaping force. Which is to say that Geroulanos’s analysis is incompletely sociological. In the end, it belongs to a mode of intellectual history that recoils from imputed, provisional, typologically grounded theses upon which the classical sociology of knowledge depends. This is especially worth noting since Heidegger’s nonhumanist existentialism needs to be read, not just against neo-Kantianism, but against Marx and Weber and their heritage, including precisely that sociology of knowledge developed by Karl Mannheim, in dialogue with Lukàcs, from about 1917 on, one of whose polemical purposes was to reveal positive “intellectual history” as reductive. The young Mannheim (to stay with him for a minute) insisted that the modern era was primarily politically regulated, and it’s a sign of the particular limits of Geroulanos’s method that his interest in the politics of antihumanism is never allowed full extension, even if he offers an illuminating account of interwar left-wing humanism, for instance.

So we don’t really find an answer to the obvious question: what were atheist anti- humanism’s politics? Geroulanos does note that after 1945 these politics tended to switch from right to left, but that seems a more mysterious and important phenomenon than is here quite allowed for. One specific problem in this context is that Geroulanos’s sense of the prewar French ultra-right is too indebted to Zeev Sternhell’s partisan analysis, which means that he uses the term ‘fascism’ too vaguely and readily.

Likewise, while Geroulanos shows that atheist antihumanism developed in dialogue with French Catholic antihumanisms, he shows little interest in the politics and institutional bases of irreligion in the period. Presumably, for instance, it was partly the extraordinary difficulties involved in institutionalizing atheist antihumanism that kept alive what we might call the nonhumanist irreligious inhabitation of religion (i.e., either irreligion that affirms ecclesiastical structures or doctrinal truths, or irreligion under the guise of a religious persona or mask), and which we sometimes find encouraged by Leo Strauss or, in France, by Charles Maurras and his followers.

Even were this a place to pursue such historicist enquiries, I would be incapable of taking them far. But let me open a way by making a couple of observations. The atheist antihumanism that Geroulanos describes is both philosophical and programmatic: it is consciously and strategically antihumanist. As such, it emerges from a looser, larger constellation that we might call irreligious non-humanism. By that I mean all those forms of art and thought that were neither religious (in the Judeo-Christian sense) nor humanist, that is, which, while rejecting theism, neither conceived of the human as a value nor thought of history as the gradual and progressive realization of human potential. Such irreligious non-humanism reaches back into classical antiquity—from this point of view, classicism is not a humanism—but takes a recognizably modern form after about 1830 in figures (who otherwise may share little) like Schopenhauer, Stendhal, Flaubert, Thomas Hardy, Henry Adams, Samuel Butler, Wittgenstein, George Sorel, etc. Although Geroulanos would appear to think otherwise, I’d contend that it first becomes programmatically antihumanist in Nietzsche (who declared himself insufficiently Saint-Simonian to “love humanity”) and in Proudhon, although he uses the concept of “human dignity” against bourgeois liberal and statist humanisms, and so can be described as a humanist antihumanist. At any rate, irreligious non-humanism is structurally connected to anti-enlightenment conservativism simply because it implies the rejection of progress, and by the same stroke, and no less determinedly, the rejection of democracy. This is true even if many irreligious non-humanists did not identify themselves as conservative at all.

Observation number two: One important moment in the mutation of irreligious non-humanism into atheist antihumanism occurred in 1911, when T.E. Hulme had a meeting with Pierre Lasserre in Paris. T.E. Hulme was then an obscure English critic, attached to Orage’s avant-garde little magazine New Age. He was becoming Henri Bergson’s leading proselytizer in Britain, and he was soon to translate Sorel’s Reflections on Violence. He had published the poems that would help to define imagism. He was also a polemicist for a new kind of Toryism: one removed from Disraeli’s Burkean appeal to King, Church, and people, and aligned instead to anti-romanticism and to what would later be called “modernism.”

For his part, Lasserre was then Action Française’s leading literary intellectual, Action Française being a powerful ultra-rightist movement, at the time still loosely allied to the Catholic church but led by the irreligious Maurras, and which simultaneously affirmed royalism and popular nationalism against republicanism, socialism, and democracy. It did so under the banners of order, hierarchy, and classical French civilization. In effect, it too detached conservatism from romanticism, as well as from a de Maistrean political theology that interpreted the struggle between revolution and reaction primarily as one between Satan and God. But it never solved the problem of how conservative irreligious non-humanism might make of itself a political, as well as an intellectual, force. Although it could mobilize violence on the streets, it never attracted meaningful electoral support.

Lasserre was then most famous for his book on French romanticism, which was to popularize the notion that romanticism began with Rousseau and that it energized progressive revolutionary action. As Hulme himself was to put it, in his proto-Orwellian journalese, romanticism fomented the mindset in which “you don’t believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a God. You don’t believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth,” and which, therefore, “falsif[ied] and blur[red] the clear outlines of human experience.” Within this strand of conservative thought, then, human experience could be posed against doctrinal humanism. And for it, characteristically, human experience was most lucidly and finely delineated in the seventeenth-century literature of the passions, most particularly, for the French, in Racine. Lasserre’s argument had a transnational impact: the young T.S. Eliot drew upon it in his wartime extension lectures, for instance.

Indeed, after the meeting with Lasserre, Hulme was gradually to turn away from Bergsonian philosophy of life to embrace a more antihumanist political Toryism, now not just a modernist classicism, but what he thought of as the new objectivisim that was being worked out in thinkers like Husserl, George Moore (of the Principia Ethica), and Maurras himself. This move would prefigure, and probably influence, his friend T.S. Eliot’s gradual conversion to an English rendition of Maurras’s politics (and his turn to English seventeenth-century poetry).

Hulme, Maurras, and Eliot’s antihumanism is important because it takes us to the border where atheist antihumanism, in its search for an institutional base, meets orthodox and reactionary Catholic antihumanism. Little illuminates the difficulties of occupying this border more than Action Française’s highly charged relation to Catholicism, which, despite the breadth of the movement’s support among French Catholics, would culminate in its formal prohibition by Pius XI in 1926 (the same year, interestingly, that Carl Schmitt broke with the Church). And I think it likely that the antihumanism that develops in and out of Heidegger and Kojève, and which Geroulanos illuminates so well, is also, at certain moments, shaped at this border.

One remembers, in particular, Maurice Blanchot. As a young man, he had been a radical, sometimes terror-embracing ultra-rightist in Action Française’s slipstream. But, as Geroulanos shows, he receded into post-Kojèvean antihumanism from about 1942 (in a world where the institutional barriers to secular nonhumanisms were breaking down). But, while a “negation of God,” Blanchot’s thought is famously hard to call irreligious. Let’s say that it is as if Blanchot chooses the other side of Pascal’s wager: he makes a bet against God, a bet that the world is not just immanent and Godless but “catastrophic.” That’s a wager that can’t pay out—it’s staked in a kind of madness—except insofar as it rescues you, if not exactly from atheism, then from mundaneity. At this point, maybe “atheist antihumanism” can be conceived of as positioned against ordinary social being, and belongs in that sense to the right, even where (as was the case for Blanchot in the 1960s) its sponsors join the radical left. At the very least, it is where the world is judged catastrophic in terms that Maurras and Racine and Pascal, those conservative nonhumanists, share.