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Response to Athens Dialogues: Identity and Difference
There is a lot in the papers presented here that one can only agree with. But as difference more than identity seems to be the driving force of any fruitful debate, let me make some critical points about the general terminological framework of this session – with reference to Professor Shapiro’s paper but especially to Professor Hunter’s.
The concept of “otherness” and its dualistic structure have been a standard of discourse in history, sociology and politics not just on the academic level for at least two decades. Polarities, their emergence, their use and abuse, their tendency to worsen open conflict and the ways to reconcile them are ubiquitous topics, ranging from an almost unconscious figure of speech to elaborate analyses of ethnic relationships. But I think this concept, handy and universally applicable as it may appear and is taken by most of us, is a doubtful tool for historical explanation and of even less value for political discussion. Let me explain this in a few steps.
To use the expression “identity and difference” in a minimalist attempt to describe, say, cultural interplay, from the exchange between ethnic groups or political traditions up to the scary “clash of civilizations”, all this means to state an antagonism and thus a duality of images and counter-images and then stick with it, rather than offering from the start a chance to descriptively transcend polarities. Since Foucauldian thinking, with its shift away from personal agents to anonymous power-struggles, has permeated academic talk for many years now, it is almost taken for granted that history is mostly a big arena of political and cultural oppositions that fight and even destroy each other, are forced to unite, sometimes inherit from one another but (at least today) should always be told to listen to one another. I put it very bluntly and leave out all constructionalistic caveats, because this way you can most easily detect what is missing: proper dialectics – historical dialectics in a much more emphatic and profound sense than several contributors have adopted for their papers about the dialogues of civilizations.
From ethnogenesis to the meeting of cultural traditions and their mutual repudiation, the development of a self-image is an open process of infinite complexity right down to the individual person. Even today, talking about identity briskly overlooks the fact that each case remains unique – as news about migrants worldwide prove almost every day – and that even for a single individual one can never really pinpoint such a thing as identity. To be sure, any decent cultural historian will have realized this early on, and contrary to Prof. Hunter’s sceptical view of Herodotus I am convinced that the founding-father of history as a literary genre implicitly knew as much about the problem as most of us do.
So I would like to argue that a more fruitful mode of discussion about identity and difference should begin with an awareness that the sheer descriptive function it outwardly suggests is misleading. Whoever mentions identity, be it about the Greeks and Persians in classical times or about any similar confrontation today, should have overcome essentialistic notions like “A sees B as the Other” that will lead to a static and oppositional picture and mere linguistic diplomacy afterwards. Instead, we should try to open up a broader perspective that leaves oppositional thinking behind in favour of dialectics proper with at least the option of an overarching integrity, be it of a single person or of a group.
The question how to approach historical identity in a rewarding manner has been a topic for many eminent philosophers of the history of culture, from the ancient Greeks onwards. Arguably the most advanced reflections in this field are the fruit of German idealism around 1800, and it is certainly more than just a coincidence that the German thinkers of this age took classical Greece as their pivotal example. To explain this, let us take a brief look at just two of them: Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) and his fellow student Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854).
Hölderlin’s fame today is chiefly due to the visionary poetry he wrote before his mental disintegration. He started his literary activity as an admiring imitator of Friedrich Schiller who glorified Greek virtue and aesthetics, contrasting modern petty characters, arts, dealings and events with the greatness of Homeric and Attic times. Declamation in an almost nostalgic vein, mixed with a fair amount of Rousseauism, mourned the absence of lively gods and an ideal age of poetical harmony; national pride was aroused, at least on the page, by frequent allusion to Greek role-models. Like Schiller, Hölderlin soon developed this image of a golden age of mankind further to include tragic conflict as a crucial part of aesthetic education and full humanism.
But he did not stop there. His epistolary novel, Hyperion, written between 1797 and 1799, indicates parallels between the struggle of modern Greeks for their freedom as well as their debate about the ideal life amidst the “Volk” (people in a cultural sense) and the endangered values of the French Revolution that had triggered such enormous hope in many of Europe’s young intellectuals. Working on Hyperion, Hölderlin came to realize that any imitation of the classical Greeks would be not only a historical impossibility but a categorical mistake. The occidental Europe of his time – he calls it “Hesperien” – can only find its true role and reason in this world by self-determined reflection about its unique historical place. The ideal wholeness of modern character (I deliberately avoid the term identity) is a labour that inevitably leads to sacrifice and a break with much of the past. At each level, from person to nation and even further, this emerging character can take the beloved Greeks only as a sign from the past, not as a model. In fact, Hölderlin’s late hymns which try to emulate Pindaric sublimity quintessentially face the task of creating a new notion of poetry itself, on a new and independent “Gipfel der Zeit” (peak of time) from which Mount Hellas is a cherished but distant view.
Nevertheless, to understand Greek ideals remained a central aim for Hölderlin. Thus, by 1801 he was convinced that Homer had been a genius just because he incorporated “occidental Junonian sobriety for his Apollonian realm” and so appropriated the genuinely unfamiliar, whereas modern poets would need to do the opposite to achieve true fluency in their own tongue and thought. Working on a translation of Sophocles, shortly after he stated that he had tried to enliven the essentially foreign poetry by enhancing the oriental factor that Sophocles himself had denied.
I stress these points so much because Hölderlin’s thinking goes way beyond our all-too-usual terms for cultural confrontation, coexistence and exchange. Terms like “borrowing” for instance or “transmission” may be helpful on a very elementary level, but to describe thus the cultural relationship between classical Greece and Achaemenid Persia has the effect of reducing a highly complex, incessantly changing and changeable, intellectual and aesthetic web of knowledge, fashion and many other subtle challenges to a mere list of imports and exports. The ever-curious and very even-handed Herodotus never did this, as far as I can see. Likewise, by sticking to a description of a mutual “otherness” – which mostly means elaborately to repeat ideological positions of authors who write for their particular cause – we will at best reach a close-up image of differences but never a fruitful judgment about the context as a whole. A survey of contrasts may be sufficient for a timid historian but does not encourage any proper dialogue that is driven by the intention to seek out more common ground for understanding.
Admittedly, even Hölderlin could not avoid talking of fixed polarities of character. His thoughts on identity and difference are influenced by practically all of the most advanced philosophical reasoning of his age, but he did not get the chance to develop his profound ideas on history in a less poetic and more explicit style. I venture to claim that of the two fellow philosophical geniuses and lifelong admirers of classical Greece whom Hölderlin was lucky enough to encounter during his student years at Tübingen between 1788 and 1793, it was not Hegel but Friedrich Schelling who presents us with a mode of thought on identity and difference that is the most useful complement for today’s discussion.
The whole philosophical system Schelling propounded from 1800 onwards is based on identity and difference, albeit on such a fundamental level that cultural or political encounters and the emergence of individual and collective character by historical consciousness (a dynamic equilibrium which Hölderlin called “lebendiges Verhältnis und Geschick”) are almost taken for granted in most of his work. Nevertheless, one can observe throughout Schelling the pervading certainty that reality is a vast but in the last analysis hierarchic web of polarities constantly reassessing itself. To ensure this dynamic we need to concede a metaphysical principle: Neither individual nor political history nor even the final object of the human mind can be thought of without reference to a primal unity, a unity which itself suggests that all history is ultimately the unfolding of self-consciousness, in the mind and for the mind at the same time.
Though all this may at first sound very abstract and remote, it is important in that it shows what a risk we run if we take identity and difference as plainly discernible features, as diagnostic evidence that we only need to detect and then form an opinion about. Frankly, this negates the very notion of change and development, the openness of historical character or, if you prefer, the mental flexibility of the subject of history called man. In other words, hasty talk of identity and difference may obfuscate or even dispose of the very quality of the human condition one would like to promote and strenghten by it.
Especially in today’s climate of oversensitivity and mistrust regarding such matters, Hölderlin’s and Schelling’s points can give pause to consider what we are really achieving on a global scale with our frequent discussions of the confrontation of so-called values, beliefs, and frameworks of culture that almost always name as their worst-case scenario the clash of civilizations: With the best of intentions we are trying to establish a supposed objectivity that in fact does away with most of human individuality and potential. Instead, as eminent thinkers from ancient Greek times onwards have noticed and later philosophers of idealism have analyzed in depth, what we are talking about is an unfathomable process of life that involves a vast, never-ending and changeable tangle of sympathies, temperaments, traditions, patriotisms, to name only a few of the elements that contribute to the formation of individual and collective character. To demand a more “holistic fashion” when dealing with these issues and, especially for cases of conflict, to preach that both sides should “try to define themselves in a positive manner and not solely in opposition to the hostile ‘other’” – well-meaning demands like these have missed the essential complexity.
No one who does not feel forced to do so will come up with a neat definition of her- or himself, neither will a community. Trying to establish a dialogue between identities, then, is basically too late as an effort and too superficial as an approach. What historic examples – among which the case of Hellenic Poleis vs. Persian Empire certainly remains the classic – suggest, what the best philosophers of culture have repeatedly hinted at and what historians and politicians today should keep in mind is that we do not face different identities in a competition to survive but a universal challenge for the diversity of character and for individual opportunities in an age of global equalization. As Herodotus shows with his keen interest in character, its integrity and its diversity: Greek historians and philosophers were the first in Europe to see that the decisive point is which words we use for what purpose. We should be responsible, courageous and sensitive enough to take their example more seriously.