When I heard of Rob Riemen's Nobility of Spirit, I was immediately eager to get hold of it. Riemen is the head of the Nexus Institute, a humanist think tank based in the Netherlands. Humanism is as close to a political or religious system as I have, and I've been looking for some model that resembles my own somewhat unrefined instincts. To my mind, humanism celebrates learning and wisdom without denigrating the poorly educated, the less imaginative, or the less intellectual. It encompasses atheism as well as the life of faith, neither are turned away. Humanism celebrates virtue, but it engages with our faults and flaws equally, without denial or revision and with courage. It values the common humanity that all people share, the value of all individuals regardless of ephemeral characteristics, and is not limited by the scale of a single tradition or culture.Riemen's book is not what I had hoped. It is, first of all, deeply personal. It is less a treatise on humanism than a reflection on certain humanistic issues, very much a product of his European background and his canonical interests. There is no claim here to define terms or set agendas (although Riemen does clearly implicate ethical judgments). As such, it would be unfair to hold his volume up to standards which it makes no claim of meeting. That being said, I'm sure that is exactly what I'm going to do. Because, while I agree with Mark Sarvas' assessment that 'nobility of the spirit might strike some modern ears as quaint but it seems more desperately necessary than ever', I am not sure that this book is the answer.
Nobility of Spirit is split into three sections: the first reviews Thomas Mann's life as a model, tracing his emergence as an ethical leader as well as a cultural one; the second section imagines key conversations in Europe's ethical life, where Camus emerges as a sort of hero for accusing intellectuals of being 'responsible for the lack of values'; and the third section considers what it means to be brave, 'the courage to be wise, to continue making the distinction between good and evil, to be loyal to the quest for truth'.
Each section has its flaws. Riemen seems too blindly reverential of the flawed person that Mann was, and especially forgiving of the questionable opinions he held before the end of the First World War. His tone is too coy in re-imagining scenes from the canon, such as of The Republic and the tale of The Magic Mountain, in part two. Throughout, but especially in the third section, National Socialism is used as the personification of evil; it looms as a demonic force, and Riemen fails to recognize the far more difficult truth: that Nazism was itself a result of values and human decisions, the plans of human beings, and was as much a product of European culture as Mann. These flaws strike one as being oddly naive — particularly strange given the author's erudition and his role as the head of a humanist think-tank.
Still, the book's biggest problem lies in the easy hindsight with which Riemen views history. He recasts his chosen moments and works with an almost complete ethical clarity. There are heroes and there are villains. Nowhere does he engage the all-too-human uncertainty of holding one value over another when the consequences are still unclear, or of the conflict between mutually exclusive values. He does not question whether good men can be disastrously wrong. When ethical questions appear to be as clear as they do in this book, it means somehow that humanity has been removed from the equation.
It is very, very likely that I'm being unreasonably harsh. I haven't given enough credit to the careful choices Riemen made of scenes to highlight — I found the meeting of French intellectuals in section two and the story of Ginzburg's imprisonment in section three especially compelling. Riemen is admirably unafraid to use the 'big words' (truth, justice, virtue, good, bad), but some of his pronouncements — on the intrinsic value of 'truth' particularly — feel empty. He skirts some of the simplest questions that skeptics, modern philosophers, and extremists have used to successfully undermine humanism: what is truth? how to we decipher good from bad? what is culture? Sophomoric questions, to be sure, but ones that are powerful only when they are ignored or treated as unworthy. They seem to me, though, the very questions that are burning to be answered.
1 comments:
I don't think you are being too harsh at all! I do think you are very fair in your review. I have just finished this book and am a little aghast at the lack of rigour, to put it politely.
Just to add a few thoughts, I think it bizarre to use The Republic as one of the heroic texts for 'immortal values' given the moral equivalence of many of its sections. I find it troubling that the head of a think tank would be so intellectually uncourageous as to assert that there is simply 'good' and 'bad'; this is a real retrograde step in ethics, particularly when the world is just recovering from the unhelpful notion of a 'war on terror'.
The parts where he makes up conversations wanders into the territory of comic pastiche. I don't know how we are helped to understand Nietzsche or any other ideas presented here by pretending he said "Headache. I must get to bed" to end a section.
Over a third of the book devoted to how he came to write this strange tome, un-translated Latin in a section about the importance of language, contradicting views on the importance (or is it destructiveness) of those pesky intellectuals who refuse (or is it continue) to see morality as absolute. I found it all a bit confusing.
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