Author: Peter Diamond
Teaching intellectual history from a global perspective requires, at a minimum, transcending national or regional boundaries. But what else might a global perspective entail? Adding non-Western works to a course that was formerly limited to Western European or North American texts is certainly a worthy goal if by global we merely mean “inclusive.” But inclusiveness alone is of limited value if we fail to explore connections between cultures across space and even over time. By focusing on connections we heighten awareness of what Charles Taylor has called the “horizons of significance,” i.e. the background against which people’s judgments and choices, tastes and desires, make sense,[1] but which otherwise may remain hidden or taken for granted. Often, it is not until the members of one culture come into contact with another that we (or they) become aware of the limits and entailments of those horizons.
But what if the ideas and cultures we study were not influenced by or otherwise connected to one another? That is often the case when we study ancient worlds. One possible response has been offered by political theorist Duncan Bell, who argues that a properly global intellectual history is best conceived as a history of “world making,” which focuses on “enunciations of universality, on attempts to cognitively encompass a given world (of whatever physical scale).”[2] From this standpoint, the global does not depend upon any spatial orientation, but rather refers to the scope of the arguments or worldviews under consideration. To be clear, this does not require that such worlds be considered apart from their social or political contexts. Indeed, an important goal of this sort of global history consists of exploring how worlds come to be, how they subsist, and how some displace others.[3] The interconnection of ideas is a central part of this history as well, though often it is the instructor that brings this to light through the comparisons he or she draws between worlds.
Let me illustrate this approach to global history with a brief account of two of the worlds featured in a Social Foundations course I offer to first-year students at NYU, called “Ancient Worlds.” The first is the world of the ancient Hebrew nation, a world ordered by the Israelites’ belief in a covenant between themselves and an omnipotent and perfectly just God. The Israelites pledged to obey God’s law in return for their protection and prosperity. My students read selectively in Genesis and Exodus to explore the ideological framework within which the Hebrew people emerged and flourished, but the centerpiece of this section of the course is the Book of Job.
While it’s certainly possible to read Job without reference to a specific place—indeed the book’s author intended as much by recalling an ancient Judaic legend about a man “from the land of Uz”—locating the text in terms of its context enables us to understand the social or geographic conditions that prompted its author to make (or seek to unmake) a certain world. Despite the book’s mythical beginning, my students and I eventually side with most scholars by assuming the book was written in response to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jews’ deportation to Babylon in 587 BCE—a time of suffering that was not easily reconciled with the world created by the covenant. Reading the text closely, we ask why the poetic sections of the book are framed by an ancient prose tale about a Gentile, at this particular moment and place in history. And what was intended by the manner of its re-telling? The Job of the poem bewails his fate and proclaims his righteousness to his friends and to God alike, in passages of great lyrical power. The Job of the legend, servile and patient to a fault, inhabits a world that translator Stephen Mitchell aptly likens to a puppet show. If the prose section alludes—perhaps ironically—to the world of the covenant, then the poetry was designed to call that world into question.
Our central concern is of course the poetic core of the book, in which the problem of evil in the form of undeserved suffering is raised, and God’s justice is exposed as ultimately grounded in his unreasoning power. “But he wills,” Job says, ”and who can stop him? / What he wishes to do, he does.”[4] What did Job’s author wish his (or her) readers to understand about this divine-command perspective? As this question has worried history’s greatest thinkers within the Abrahamic tradition and beyond, it’s important to avoid assuming that the author meant to endorse that grim perspective (as Hobbes concluded). What of Job’s repeated calls for “a witness” to whom Job could appeal in God’s court? “If only there were an arbiter / who could lay his hand on us both, / who could make you put down your club / and hold back your terrible arm. / Then, without fear, I would say, / You have not treated me justly.”[5] Considering Job’s growing awareness of his own capacity and obligation to make moral judgments, the author may well have been demonstrating the limitations of a world ordered by unreasoning command. When at last God appears and taunts Job, directing him to consider the unfathomable wonders of creation, Job realizes that God’s justice is beyond human comprehension. What are we to make of Job’s decision to “speak no more”? Did he choose pious silence over angry dissidence? Or was he acknowledging the limits of our ability to reason, much as Wittgenstein would, centuries later: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”[6]
If the Book of Job questions the cogency of a world ordered solely by divine command, then we do well to compare that text to Plato’s Euthyphro, which conceptualizes a world in which the source and validity of our moral obligations depends upon rational argument, rather than the threat of force by those who would act on behalf of the gods. There is of course no evidence that these two texts or their cultural contexts were connected to one another, but that should not stop us from juxtaposing them in a meaningful way. Indeed, it is not despite, but rather on account of their lack of historical connection that these texts acquire significance for us. A direct influence between them might even defeat the purpose of comparison, which inheres in our ability to discern the limitations of putatively universal worldviews. More specifically, by juxtaposing the Book of Job with the Euthyphro, students become increasingly aware of the problematic nature of certain claims regarding the source and the nature of our moral obligations, claims that they might otherwise take for granted.
The Euthyphro was likely written in the first decade of the fourth century, BCE, not long after Athens’ defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. It was a period of prolonged social and economic upheaval, which gave rise to the religious persecution of intellectuals who had dared to question the gods’ existence—an act that, in wartime, bordered on treason. Having read Plato’s Apology and Crito as well in “Ancient Worlds,” my students are keenly aware that Socrates was prosecuted for impiety and subversion of the religion of the state. The Euthyphro is set on the porch of the courthouse where Socrates is about to be tried. Euthyphro is there to prosecute his father for murder, an action that would be thought by most Athenians to violate some of the most sacred duties of sons toward their fathers, and so to be impious. This opening provides Socrates with the opportunity to cross-examine Euthyphro, who claims to have “accurate knowledge” of the divine and of piety and impiety. That turns out not to be the case, but his third try at a definition—“that the pious is what all the gods love”—enables Socrates to question the divine-command theory by posing the following dilemma: “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?”[7]
The question is never fully answered, but Socrates does show us that “pious” should not be defined as “what the gods love.” That definition does not explain why pious things have the attributes they have; nor does it allow us to tell whether a disputed case is a case of piety or not. This may seem a minor point, but not when you realize what follows from this position. What follows is nothing less than the claim that there can be no theological or religious basis for ethics. This is because you have to suppose that God has some reason for commanding or approving what he commands or approves. In the world envisaged by Socrates, the real task for the ethical thinker is to work out what that reason is.
I‘ve found that this sort of comparison of worlds inevitably leads students to declare Socrates the winner in what appears to be a contest of ideas. It’s a conclusion I do nothing to promote; students, after all, can make up their own minds. But I’ve found that keeping context in mind is often the best way to slow the rush to judgment. I like to remind my students that rational inquiry and naturalistic thinking can provoke deep discomfort, as the Athenians’ decision to condemn and execute Socrates demonstrates. Perhaps Job was right to be comforted by the realization that there are limits to our ability to reason.
My aim in approaching the global in this manner is to create a course narrative that respects the diversity of worlds and that extends the bounds of thought beyond the narrow limits defined by cultures that have traditionally shaped Western or Eurocentric curricula. I also hope to sharpen students’ awareness that the resolution of arguments is very often illusory, and that texts ending with silence are an invitation for us to think further.
[1] Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991), p. 34, 37-39.
[2] Duncan Bell, “Making and Taking Worlds,” in Global Intellectual History, eds. Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori (NY: Columbia UP, 2013), p. 257.
[3] Ibid., p. 260.
[4] The Book of Job, trans. Stephen Mitchell (NY: HarperPerennial, 1979), p. 59.
[5] Ibid., p. 29.
[6] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ed. A.J. Ayer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 151.
[7] Plato, Five Dialogues, trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), p. 11.