Introduction
The nature of knowledge in the humanities, as involved knowing, is to be inextricably contextual and therefore comparative. To this extent, such knowledge is destined also to be inherently international. While working in and visiting universities in Macao, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines, over the years 2013 to 2016, I had occasion to observe how traditional humanities are often being pursued most energetically and ambitiously in East Asia. Ironically, the West can relearn from East Asia the meaning and purpose of studying the humanities. I have found humanities cultivation to be still comparatively youthful and vital in greater China and its neighbors. The liberal arts there are often still felt to afford accession to a new kind of empowerment and self-awareness. This has been my experience in certain teaching institutions oriented to broad enculturation rather than serving narrowly defined career goals of professional development.
The crisis in the humanities is, of course, worldwide, and in the end Asia is no exception. However, the effects of history in the evolution of society and culture in the East are understandably out of phase with their movements in the West. This a/synchronicity enables East Asia to offer an intriguing foil affording sometimes surprising perspectives counterpointing developments in Western universities, as well as in other types of educational and research institutions.
To the end of interpreting the purport and motives of any such flourishing of the humanities, the issue of the specialization of knowledge in the context of the university, with its double mission of fostering research and general education, serves especially well as a key focus. Taking up just one aspect of the broader topic of the progressive specialization of knowledge, I wish to pursue the question: Why do we still need unspecialized knowledge? Our specialized scientific knowledge seems to have become so successful today that we take it to be the absolute paradigm of what genuine knowledge should be. Empirical science has given us prodigious powers to transform our world. Yet, unless we have some measure of understanding and control over its potentialities and take responsibility for the final ends to which it is put, this knowing is at risk of becoming only that much more mighty a form of manipulation and even recklessness. Not that we can know, in any definitive way, the ends of human existence or the ultimate purpose and potential of the universe. But we can and do need to know and take account of our own ignorance vis-à-vis its endlessly open possibilities. This self-awareness is a fundamental premise for the benign use and humane exploitation of any branch or aspect of our knowledge, and it is essential to protect us from the worst ravages of our own limitations and inevitable blindnesses.
My thesis, then, in its baldest and most outrageous form, is that knowledge in the humanities is—and should be—fundamentally ignorance. The humanities’ highest purpose is to teach us our ignorance. This was the lesson of Socrates near the outset of the Western tradition of philosophy: he understood that the oracle of Apollo at Delphi had designated him as the wisest of men simply because he knew that he did not know. Instead of being a possessor of knowledge, he was simply a lover of wisdom, a devotee in the pursuit of philo-sophia (literally, “love of wisdom”). This Socratic wisdom is not without close parallels in the Daoist and Confucian traditions, where the sage is acutely aware of how the Dao persistently escapes from human grasp and from all the constructions of knowledge and language.
Still today, as in all ages, this may well be the hardest thing of all for us to know—or at least to acknowledge and accept. The unknowing that underlies, antedates, and conditions all our knowing, remains in essential ways the better part of wisdom—however advanced and powerful our technical know-how becomes. This unknowing is what relates us to everything else beyond our ken and releases us from confinement to the narrow sphere of our own familiar territory surveyed and charted by our measuring instruments into grids of information. This cognizance of our ignorance, as a form of acknowledgment of what is beyond and other to our own systems of explicitly rationalized knowing, projects us into relation with the All and the Unknown.
Humanities knowledge, then, at a certain fundamental level, is about human limits. Such knowing of one’s own limits is the gist of the injunction “Know thyself” inscribed over the temple of Apollo, the god of wisdom, at Delphi in Greece. Yet the limit is also what enables us to think past a circumscribed field of knowledge and to intuit an uncircumscribed, undelimited region beyond. The limit marks what is beyond the limit and opens this “beyond” in another register of awareness trained on what exceeds objective representation and explicit conceptual grasp. The narratives and archetypes of myth and religion offer us a fertile resource for this purpose: they provide what we could call an “imaginary.” In millenary traditions across cultures, the deepest wisdom of humanity consists in knowing our own ignorance, and this knowing opens upon an unspeakable dimension of consciousness that is profoundly expressed across cultures in the modes of literature and religion, as well as in other artistic genres and ritual activities, and in other types of human endeavor.
The negation of discourse and mystical surrender to knowing “nothing” turn out to be intimately bound up with a kind of (un)knowing of everything, or more precisely with an inarticulable relation to and awareness of the connectedness between and among all things without limits. The negation of our claim to definitive knowing, our understanding of ourselves as more fundamentally in a state of unknowing or of learned ignorance (docta ignorantia), opens this infinite sphere. This is the sort of wisdom that the oldest traditions of myth and religious ritual have perennially intimated by indirect means in their own poetic and symbolic vocabularies. It is also the kind of knowledge that the humanities have a mission to continue to cultivate in our modern, ever more technocratic and managerial civilization. Otherwise, we are ever more fatally gripped in the vice of specialized, technical knowledge that ignores and obliterates all such intuitive, as-yet-undifferentiated awareness. We lose our peripheral vision of a nonobjective dimension of existence as underlying everything human and sustaining its meaning.
Whether or not we believe in any special intuitive cognitive faculties, or in any sort of higher mind or reality, still we must concede that the knowledge of every discipline is both limited and open on all sides in the direction of other disciplines. Such knowledge necessarily looks toward what remains unknown to a given discipline’s knowledge taken simply by itself and on its own terms. Without presupposing any kind of mystic sensibilities, we are all nevertheless aware, in any given act of cognition, of the impingement on all our apparent knowing of background factors that cannot be determined or thematically focused in a fully exhaustive manner. This circumambient reality saturates knowing but can never be taken in as a whole, since it is no distinct object of knowledge: it is in effect “nothing” insofar as exact or objective knowledge is concerned. Yet it is all-important as a kind of connective tissue for determining contextually the purport and sense of all that we might claim to grasp or understand by means of our mental powers. This is the unspeakable basis of knowledge in the humanities that the following reflections endeavor to make indirectly discernible. We need to recognize and appreciate it as the secret source of value in all our knowing, even knowing of the most technical, precise, and positive sorts.
The Humanities as Involved Knowing
Shifting our perspective to East Asia helps us to discern what is truly universal about the university in its vocation to cultivating humanity. How[1]ever, the universal turns out also to be in the end the singular, since we are all unique individuals. Accordingly, I will take up this topic in a more personal voice and from an autobiographical angle, with reference to particular occasions. This more subjective dimension—which has some claim to belong to what may be called, to use William Desmond’s term, an “intimate universal”—is, after all, inextricable from humanities knowledge.
A recent book of mine—The Revelation of Imagination: From the Bible and Homer through Virgil and Augustine to Dante (2015)—mounts a defense of the humanities as an indispensable and universal way of knowing. It considers the humanities specifically as “Involved Knowing,” starting from the very title of the introduction. The Revelation of Imagination concentrates on the tradition of epic and prophetic poetry that sustains Western literature as perhaps its central axis and brings this tradition into relation with the claims to inspired knowledge that are characteristic particularly of revealed religion. Underscoring an irreducibly personal and poetic dimension as mediating such revelation, the book outlines a philosophical theory of the ways and means of acquiring insight in the humanities. The introduction and conclusion of the book work out a “poetic epistemology of knowledge in the humanities” that contrasts with—but in the end also encompasses—scientific method as itself just one more means of human knowing.
Science, too, as actually practiced by human beings, needs to be viewed, finally, as a kind of poetry. It, too, entails the creative invention of modes of seeing and experiencing. Human knowledge is personal, contextual, historical, perspectival, and relational, and this includes even scientific knowledge considered as a form of human knowing. Knowledge, at its origins and in its core, is necessarily involved knowing: it cannot be made purely detached and objective. As Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) convincingly showed several centuries ago, we know essentially by doing and making. We cannot abstract our knowledge from this human rootedness in existential acts of being. Scientific objectivity apparently demands making some such abstraction. Nevertheless, the significance of all our knowing is indissolubly bound to embodied and encultured human subjects. Such subjects alone can make knowing meaningful by their conscious and participatory acts of reflection.
This notion of knowledge as a fully concrete act rooted in both physical and social existence is enshrined in the traditional model of the liberal arts. As involved knowing that engages whole individuals at every level of their being, both body and spirit, the liberal arts naturally and necessarily resist the more extreme sorts of pressure toward ever greater specialization. It is impossible to completely objectify and exhaustively analyze an act of knowing in which one is currently involved. The knower is enveloped within an unfolding process rather than standing outside of it and able to encompass it all with an adequate concept in a bird’s-eye view. We an only reflect on our participation in this process: we cannot fully comprehend it as a whole because we are ourselves within it and are part of it. Our relation to and within this imaginable whole remains paramount. We cannot abstract from this wholeness without forgetting or distorting the nature and purpose of knowing itself as an incalculably meaningful form of life.
Therefore, we must think of the liberal arts not as separate disciplines—a handful of specific options among others on a menu of course offerings or choices for a major, options that in the course of time seem to have become increasingly obsolete and irrelevant. Instead, every one of the liberal arts, more deeply considered, is an angle of approach to the whole of knowledge. A liberal art, considered profoundly, is not just a specific subject focused on a designated type or category of things, such as forms in space for geometry, or different permutations of numbers for arithmetic, or mathematical proportions for music and astronomy. These quantitative disciplines, making up the quadrivium, are to be understood as more generally about relationships that structure the entire universe. Moreover, they presuppose, at a minimum, the verbal arts of the trivium. Here again, we tend to think of grammar as dealing only with the valences of verbal expressions, of rhetoric as concerned just with constructing discourses, and of dialectics as about valid syllogistic forms of argument for the discernment of truth. However, each of these latter three disciplines (the trivium) was conceived of anciently as geared to training a whole individual to be perfect in every excellence—to possess every moral and intellectual virtue.
According to their long-attested tradition in the ancient and medieval worlds, each discipline of the liberal arts is a window on the whole of life and being—a window opening on the overall order (or disorder) and purpose (or meaninglessness) of the universe. Each of the seven artes liberales just mentioned, those making up the trivium and the quadrivium, is distinguished by having been established as canonical already in ancient and medieval tradition. Today they are studied alongside many more subjects, including all those designated as “sciences, social sciences, and humanities” in the curriculum of the liberal arts college. Each of these furnishes a way of exploring the relation of the knowing subject to others as a self-aware, individual person. Each brings into focus from a particular angle of vision the totality of the person’s relation within the world, and thus their relation to knowledge as a whole.
One of the most transformative and significant implications of this orientation to wholeness is that each of these disciplines fosters fundamentally a form of self-knowing, of knowledge of oneself within the unlimited context of the international community and of the entire cosmos. What is known in liberal arts, and most transparently in humanities studies, is not just an isolated object or even a specific field walled off from others. It is rather the whole of knowledge viewed through the prism of a specific disciplinary subject matter by a certain unique individual—a self-reflective, thinking subject. This is the nature of wisdom (sapientia) as opposed to knowledge simply of facts and objects (scientia, in its vulgar acceptation).
Authentically human knowledge has a self-reflective structure shaping it into a whole that is actualized by a human being: it is not made up merely by the accumulation of objective data in a definable domain. The specific objects known in any of the liberal arts—geometrical or grammatical or astronomical or whatever—serve chiefly as material for an exercise in self-reflection that is unlimited in scope and that aims at self-comprehension on the part of the knower in relation to others in the global situation. A self-reflective subject is thereby placed in unlimited relations with others throughout the universe.
A college course today, for example, one covering U.S. trade wars and foreign relations with China, or even one focusing on the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century between Western powers and the Qing dynasty, is not just about a certain segment of history, with its particular protagonists and special issues and problems. Instead, such a course illuminates also the way that any of us—and the communities to which we belong—engage in relations with one another, negotiating compromises in the face of real or perceived threats and conflicts of interest. This more general and applied type of insight and awareness is likely, in most cases, to be of more lasting significance to those acquiring it than all of the specialized knowledge of facts that may also be learned. Most students taking such a class will never become foreign affairs experts or work in the State Department. But all can learn to comprehend something significant about the complex interaction among incalculably shifting factors in creating and upsetting the delicate sorts of equilibrium in which human relations consist. This humanly universal type of dynamism has a direct pertinence for all students in their own life struggles and aspirations.
In this sense, humanities educators are all engaged in what can be called “general education.” However, it is not by creating another box with the label “General Education” that this purpose can be served best. We should not deceive ourselves into thinking that general education as such can be taught by offering courses earmarked by that label. The general can only be approached through the specific, the global through the local. It is disciplinary courses in the liberal arts that have the duty to carry out “general education,” with its vocation of awakening the intellect and attuning the human spirit to become capable of entering into fruitful participation with others in the general order of things. This type of enculturing study is not a separate and supplementary material that can be added in alongside the others. It is rather the common goal and purpose of all of the liberal arts, including the social and even the natural sciences. They approach and achieve it each in their own way and from their own differentiated disciplinary backgrounds. They offer so many different incitements—suited to different students’ tastes and talents—to contemplate the overall frame of things.
The purport of specialized knowledge concerning geology, history, art, or whatever discipline taken as a liberal art is to be understood analogically and exemplarily. Whatever the specific subject matter, it involves an instance of an individual human being engaging in a relationship with others in the world as determined by specific cultural coordinates and filtered through certain identifiable traditions, with their characteristic concepts and methods of thinking.
Saint Augustine understood each of the liberal arts as revealing analogically something about the nature of the divine mind and intelligence that informs the universe in every feature and aspect throughout all levels of reality. In this spirit, knowledge in the liberal arts is not fundamentally about a circumscribed field of objects but rather about a relation to the whole of being. For Augustine, the liberal arts were all ways of contemplating God. Yet they were not merely propaedeutic to theology. They were already themselves implicitly theological in the sense of revealing some aspect of the whole of being in its deepest grounds and cause.
The leading role of theology here as “queen of the sciences” (regina scientiarum) became much more explicit later in the Scholastic period with Bonaventure’s De reductione artium ad theologiam (Reconducting the Arts to Theology). In this light, liberal arts knowledge shows up not as a means to an end, but rather as ordered to envisioning a unity that reveals all things in their deeper natures in and through manifesting their relations with one another. It is in this sense that humanities consist, from the ground up, in irreducibly relational knowing.
Human Encounter and the Unknown
Unlike the strictly specialized knowledge of the sciences, humanities learning teaches us to pursue knowledge as a way of relating to an infinite—or at least an endlessly open—world consisting in unlimited relations. We are concerned with the quality and vitality of our relation with the whole and not just with solving particular problems within defined parameters and coordinates. This relation to the whole of the universe, however, has to start with our relations to those immediately around us. A humanities course is first and foremost about human encounter with the others in the course—and about the horizon of being human that discloses the unlimited potential of such encounters. From there, its scope expands to touch on the many different contexts of these encounters in the uncircumscribed horizon of the universe and even to its “beyond.” This “beyond” gestures toward the transcendent dimension that, even if it remains unknown in itself, can, via relation—by its being related to and relativizing all our action and even our passivity—lend a different kind of meaning to everything that is within the sphere of our knowledge and experience.
Already in the ancient world, geometry and arithmetic, for example, were not only about figures and numbers, but also about the design of the universe and about the proportions necessary for harmony between people and among all beings. If knowledge cultivates only technical expertise in managing factual information, without moral reflection or spiritual vision and aesthetic inspiration, it becomes merely mechanical. We are then no longer educating persons, but are merely programming machines. We might as well be training robots.
Of course, the infinity of our relations is nothing that is ever knowable in any definitive terms. Accordingly, the disciplines of the liberal arts and sciences, together and all at once, are forms, above all, of relating to the unknowable—to what cannot be objectively grasped or controlled. The unknowable is our true starting point in any endeavor to pursue knowledge to its ultimate grounds, and it remains a constant point of reference ever after. This, in the last analysis, is what we need to acknowledge in order to preserve our knowing as authentically human and so prevent it from turn[1]ing into a monster—like Frankenstein—that will threaten to destroy us. The unknowable has priority because it is the horizon necessary to allow the unencompassable whole of things to remain operative on our minds in their striving after the unconditioned that lies beyond all the finite limits and conditions of our knowing. Otherwise, we are liable to force a reduction to our own known and artificially delimited frame of reference applied for purposes of defining a circumscribed field of objects that we can manage and control.
This idea of humanities knowledge as orienting us to unlimited relatedness of all with all, and as being based above all on human encounters, requires us to learn to be open to one another, as well as to acknowledge what we can never completely know even about ourselves. It leads us ineluctably in the direction of an international, and indeed a global, perspective on learning. Since it entails unlimited openness to others and to the Other, humanities knowledge is intrinsically international and is naturally destined to become worldwide. It fosters communications across national and cultural boundaries. It cultivates knowledge of local and regional traditions, yet it cannot help but seek to place them in a global context. Knowledge in the humanities understands universal human concerns, furthermore, as impinging incisively on the present—on our own decisive and inescapable moment in world history.
My previously mentioned book The Revelation of Imagination is exclusively about the Western humanities tradition, but my working in East Asia enabled me to extend my vision of the humanities to comprehend also Eastern traditions. In the course of my several years as head of a program in philosophy and religious studies at the University of Macao, I wrote a book engaging these traditions: Apophatic Paths from Europe to China: Regions without Borders, now in a series on Chinese Philosophy and Culture, with SUNY Press. As a testament witnessing to my transglobal experience, this work elucidates how my pursuit of the way of unknowing, or of “what cannot be said,” through what I call “apophatic” thought, led me to East Asia, especially to its ancient mystical traditions, which are so keenly sensitive to and reflective about the limits of knowledge and language. The preface to the work lays out this itinerary in both an autobiographical and a theoretical register.
Through this experience of geographical displacement, my approach to Western humanities has expanded into a work of comparative philosophy engaging particularly with classical Chinese thinking. I endeavor to explain, specifically in terms of my apophatic philosophy, what is at stake for me in extending humanities studies beyond the borders of the Western tradition by bringing it into conversation with East Asian thought and literature. I focus on currents of apophatic thinking, which are actually very strong in both the East and the West, but especially and most obviously in ancient Eastern traditions such as Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. Apophatic Paths from Europe to China serves to illustrate the deeper grounding for an approach to global humanities education in a postmodern—and now even postsecular—world. Such an approach, as I conceive it, is based on the classical wisdom of unknowing.
The Imperative of De-Specialization in the Humanities
Humanities knowledge quite generally proceeds by attempting to understand something in relation to something else, and even, finally, in relation to everything else. For all delimitations of context are relative to certain interests and reflect pragmatically motivated decisions: they thus show up as arbitrary in relation to the whole of knowledge. This makes the humanities inextricably comparative in method. Most importantly, comparative humanities studies enable us to glimpse in the interstices something absolute that is neither Western nor Eastern but connects with both and is imaginable as their common source—or, equally and inversely, as the global future in which East and West share a common stake. For, in addition to the aggregation of different disciplines, there is also something between disciplines, in their mutual critique and reciprocal challenge, as well as in their coherent complementing of one another, that highlights each one’s insufficiency in itself.
The interdisciplinary, as the space between disciplines and diverse subject matters, is not just a matter of gathering up leftover fields of study that are not quite adequately accommodated within the categories of one discipline or the other. Instead, interdisciplinarity exceeds the disciplinary framework altogether and thereby opens upon a dimension that encompasses, or at least conditions, all disciplines: this in-between space precedes their differentiation and can even call it into question. This dimension of the undisciplined and absolute opens in and through the negation of every specific discipline as determined by the fiction of a delimited field of objects that is isolatable from the rest and so can be known with certainty on just its own terms. Beyond such artificial constructs lies the dimension of the absolute that is explored in various ways by religion and the arts. It requires being conceived of as transdisciplinary and transcultural.
What I have presented so far bears indirectly on the issue of the pressures in our institutions of higher learning toward specialization and contains resources for rethinking this demand. It leads me to undertake, in the name of traditional humanities study, to advocate for nonspecialized forms of knowing. I defend these humanistic studies not in opposition to specialized knowledges of a technical, scientific nature, but rather as their necessary ground and background. The humanities have a crucial role to play in countering the incessant pressure toward specialization and the consequent loss of global vision and of any kind of awareness reaching beyond the objective field of arbitrarily and artificially defined formal objects. I advocate specifically for what I call an “apophatic” (literally “negative”) approach to culture, an approach that places the emphasis, first, on what cannot be objectively articulated and differentiated but rather abides as an inarticulate ground or background of all possible makings of sense.
Such nonspecialized knowing is to be found eminently in literature and art and in other humanities studies. It includes the study of culture and, in particular, a study of religion that remains open to personal imaginative appropriations of symbols. Such appropriations can be motivated not only by religious belief but also by ethical conviction, aesthetic vision, social sentiments of solidarity, and so on. However, in any of these cases, an element of de-specialization is vitally necessary for humanities studies aiming at the unity of knowledge. We need to hang on to a kind of knowing that cannot be distilled into various types of expertise with their parceled-up and mutually exclusive fields of research. We require a knowing that, instead, connects us with the unsayable and unclassifiable. As necessary as specialization may be to scientific advance and technological progress, it is the inchoate and global intelligence of what cannot be specifically defined that is the lifeblood of the humanities.
This uncategorizable awareness of unlimited potential for connectedness courses through the entire body of human knowledge. It is cognizance of and sensitivity to this unencompassable and only imaginable dimension of the whole that is most necessary for the vitality of the pursuit of knowledge in a global sense. This undelimitable pursuit entails, above all, the wisdom of unknowing famously articulated at the origins of Western philosophy almost two and a half millennia ago with Socrates’s realization that his superior “wisdom,” proclaimed by the oracle, was knowing that he did not know. We have already noted the comparable wisdom of unknowing in the Daoist tradition of Laozi and Zhuangzi in classical China. It is also in this intercultural sense that we need to understand what de-specialization can mean and why it is so incomparably important.
This perspective, which I call apophatic, contributes, furthermore, to setting up worldwide dialogue across humanities disciplines. One concrete step that we can take in the direction of non-specialization is to move toward the study of world literature (see chap. 10 below). Something emerges in the cross-cultural comparison of texts and traditions that is otherwise missed in the always further dividing of humanistic fields and regions from one another with a view to ever more specialized examination in terms of differentiated languages and cultures. A potential for relation and connection is disclosed through the overarching synthesis that is greater than the sum of its isolated parts.
The idea of world literature is being probed today in the wake of a crisis in humanities education. In part, this global reconceptualization of literature is driven by curricular reform in universities reflecting demographic and cultural shifts. I have explored this idea recently, with other scholars especially of comparative literature at an international summit on world literature at Beijing Normal University: Ideas and Methods: What Is World Literature? Tension between the Local and the Universal. This summit discussed the topic of world literature in the tension between the demands of worldwide accessibility and the requirements of language-bound and culture-specific informed reading. I have also recently debated with classical scholars the topic of “Comparative Global Antiquity” in a workshop on “Global Classicism” hosted at the Yale NUS (National University) campus in Singapore. Drawing on my conclusions from these events, I offer here some reflections—cast in terms of my apophatic philosophy—concerning the paramount place and catalyzing role of literary study and comparative cultural inquiry in humanities education from a perspective encompassing both Eastern and Western approaches.
Meeting of East and West as Catalyst to Global Humanities Education
The idea of global humanities education is all too easily misunderstood as masking an imperialistic bid for territorial expansion, or as dissimulating an insane aspiration to conquer and dominate the entire world. Yet, the idea of worldwide humanities education, cast in an apophatic mode, can be turned rather in just the opposite direction. The encounter with the Other places us face to face with our own insuperable limits. Most importantly, it is in crossing borders into encounter with other cultures that our own limits first become visible to us so that they can become objects of self-conscious reflection.
It is necessary, therefore, for us not to set up a dichotomy between Eastern and Western incarnations of humanity, but rather to underline the continuities between them as deriving from a common basis that is properly nowhere, neither East nor West: it is a basis that neither culture can encompass or confine. The much-maligned Rudyard Kipling stated as much with disarming ingenuousness in proffering an apocalyptic image of the overcoming of a seemingly fatal divisiveness between peoples who inhabit opposite ends of the earth:
OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!
Kipling’s “neither/nor” rhetoric happens to be one of the principal resources also of apophatic thought and writing as used, for instance, in the Upanishads (neti neti). It enacts what Madhyamika Buddhists would call “nondualism” and is an effective device for surpassing dichotomous thinking. I do not mean to attribute deliberate and consciously nondualistic thinking to Kipling; nevertheless, even such a faint echo or vestige is not insignificant. The universal propensities toward negation and self-limitation, and even prophecy, inhering in our language are operative at the most ordinary and mundane levels, and they can be placed into relief—so as to produce heightened awareness—by poetry of genius, regardless of its style and orientation. Today, furthermore, we might imagine Kipling extending this logic by supplementing his statement with a further corollary: “But there is neither man nor woman when two true singularities meet face to face in the impassioned fray of the oldest war in the world.”
Ernest Fenollosa’s essay “The Coming Fusion of East and West,” first published in 1898, is similarly clairvoyant in envisaging not only mutual nonaggression, but also a necessary and a fertile marriage between Western and East Asian cultures. Fenollosa was an American philosopher and art historian who, as professor at the Imperial University in Tokyo, participated in the modernizing reforms of the Meiji Era (1868–1912) in Japan. Situated historically on an international frontier fraught with the mounting tensions of the decisive age of crisis for Western colonialism, Fenollosa prophetically urges such a union of opposites as indispensable for uniting people everywhere into a complete Humankind. Each culture needs the other for its own completion. This was a vision appropriate to Fenollosa’s fin-de-siècle, and it energized specifically the modernist movement in poetry. This fusion of cultures was imagined by him with an ardent religious fervor true to the prophetic cast of his outlook and communicating its apocalyptic import.
As the historical record attests, Fenollosa’s vision was a crucial catalyst in the West’s encounter with East Asian culture. It conveyed vital impulses that proved seminal to the dynamism of the West’s own artistic and literary development. Ezra Pound’s modernism was to a very significant degree derived from Fenollosa’s discovery of the Orient and its aesthetic sensibilities. Pound’s new “imagist” movement in poetry took its captivatingly innovative orientation especially from Fenollosa’s idea of the classical Chinese written character, the Hanzi (漢字), as adhering to the language of nature.
As a prominent educator and political commentator on East–West relations in his time, Fenollosa disseminated influence and outlined broad historical perspectives that are still coming to fruition and being verified today, especially with the rise to eminence of China as an economic and political superpower on the world scene. Still, new work was necessary, and has indeed been forthcoming, in order to update the analysis of the crisis of encounter and confrontation provoked by the emergence of Asian nations to new leadership roles in the modern community of nations. Prasenjit Duara, in The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future, carries the analysis of this crisis forward to our global situation today.
More and more scholars everywhere today are responding to this geopolitical transformation and are beginning to work in this comparative mode. Comparative scholarship by Wm. Theodore de Bary and Anthony Yu, among numerous other contributions, might be taken as exemplary of the sort of cross-cultural literary and cultural studies that this type of reciprocal reflection between Eastern and Western traditions can produce. Alongside Chinese and Japanese classics, and the Vietnamese verse epic, Nguyen Du’s Tale of Kieu, Korean classics such as the epic Songs of the Flying Dragons (Yongbi och’on ka), The Memoires of Lady Hyegyong (1795– 1805), and The Song of the Faithful Wife Ch’unhyang, the so-called Romeo and Juliet of Korea, likewise belong in this curriculum of an emerging world literature.
Today, however, I feel, it is imperative not just to celebrate the plenitude and completeness that is to be achieved through fusion of universal archetypes, but also to emphasize that from the apophatic point of view each culture needs the others in order to remain open to otherness so as to be exposed to its own insuperable incompleteness. Facing the other is indispensable in order for us to avoid recoiling into a complacent posture of self-enclosure, which would be deadly in our world of shrinking distances and imperative interactiveness. Beyond all descriptive typologies, there is something that no culture grasps on its own or in any terms—“something” that remains, nonetheless, for all that, precisely what is most essential. This sensibility for and openness to the ungraspable and indefinable is what enables each culture also to relate to the others. Comparative criticism between cultures helps make us aware of and sensitive to what otherwise remains invisible: it is a dimension of being that emerges only in and through our relations.
Only in relinquishing our relative cultural identities can this elusive nonidentity or the “Nothing” of our unlimited relatedness to others be glimpsed so as to be remarked at all. It is proper to no culture: it is found only where each and every culture tends to lose—or to escape from—itself. This empty space of the inter is where identities—whether geographical, national, racial, or sexual—and wars all come from, even though it is itself unidentifiable and therefore also unopposable. This dimension is dealt with explicitly in terms of “transcendence” as defined by the Axial Age cultures of the first millennium BC embracing Confucianism and Daoism, along with Buddhism in India, the prophets of Israel, the Greek pre-Socratic philosophers, and Persian Zoroastrianism. This exalted and sublime dimension of self-reflexivity and freedom can be touched on provocatively even through the exercise of laughter.
These references suggest the sense in which we might adopt Fenollosa’s prophetic anticipation of the future union of East and West. Indeed, I take such prophetic vision to be inherent in the often explicitly visionary outlook propagated in humanities texts. I have traced a certain genealogical line of such texts in Secular Scriptures: Modern Theological Poetics in the Wake of Dante (2016). This work, having nothing to do explicitly with Asia, brings my understanding of the prophetic vocation of poetry forward from the ancient world and the Middle Ages into modernity. It thus completes and complements my other recent book (The Revelation of Imagination) mentioned earlier in this chapter. The topic of the prophetic inspiration of literature calls for (in)completion through correspondences and echoes from Asian traditions. This prophetic strain running through all ages in humanities knowledge remains more than ever fundamental to our efforts in the present. Universalizing prophetic vision, which in some regards is the most robust precursor to a necessarily global vision today, is essential to humanities teaching aimed at opening a path for us and for the next generation to a future that can be genuinely new. Such a new future must also be regenerative of human wholeness as our collective and common birthright—or perhaps rather our imaginable destiny.
Conclusion
In an apophatic perspective, one that can hinge from the East as well as from the West, we are all most deeply identified not by our differential identities, but by the “nothing” (nothing expressly sayable) that we share in common and that alone can unite us. We must simply find the courage to embrace it as our own rather than running away from the exposure of this nakedness of our common—unqualified and undisguised—humanity. This, finally, is the greatest lesson to be learned from humanities studies, one that has to be constantly relearned in innumerably specific and concrete ways corresponding to the contingencies of our lives and potentially illuminated by the extremely variegated insights offered by the explorations of science and literature. This level of learning is not a matter of being filled up and programmed with information, or of being flush with the pride of knowledge, but rather of knowing our limits and ignorance as harboring our infinite potential for learning. This precious faculty of emptying ourselves and becoming “nothing,” “no-thing”—not just some definable thing—in the end, is the source of the constitutive freedom and openness of being human. It emerges in and through apophatic theoretical reflection on human culture and literature—and can touch on the divine.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay is excerpted from On the Universality of What Is Not, by William Franke. It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press. You can read our excerpts from this collaboration here. All rights reserved.
