ABSTRACT
Australia, the Middle East to the Far East – three archetypal characters have dominated answers on the good life: the theologian/priest, the sage/ philosopher, and the statesman/politician. “How are we to live?” A great many religious traditions have replied, “As the gods (or God) decree.” The priest unveils the horizon of reward and rest as a transcendent realm vouchsafed to a chosen faithful who are obedient to holiness codes that uphold order and hierarchy, and purity oaths separating the natural from the unnatural, the sacred from the profane. But if the priest is astringently absolutist that his particular god is the only true god, the pitch and volume of his claims grows ever more strenuous in precise calibration to a bewildering Babel of sect, schism, and cult each laying claim to the sole ownership of Truth. It has not been lost on critics, moreover, that, notwithstanding pious proclamations of an allegiance to an otherworldly power, the upper reaches of the priestly caste is often a profitable economy. The philosopher, like the priest, begins with disavowals – of the anthro-
pological and thus of the worldly; of rhetoric and thus of the ordinary; of
slaves and thus of the relational. Unlike the priest, the philosopher rarely promises a beatific union with the divine. Rather, he lays claim to possessing a pure contemplative gaze predicated on a clear and distinct method, technique, logic. The philosopher’s horizon of ambition is transfixed by the prospect of formulating the perfect definition and concept – universal, transcendent, and unimpeachable. A cordon sanitaire is drawn around this concept and fumigated mercilessly against vague definitions, stray premises, and flabby concepts. The priest’s concern is moral hygiene; that of the philosopher epistemic purity. Like George Eliot’s Casaubon – “nervously conscious that he was expected to manifest a powerful mind,” his orientation to the world a “proud narrow sensitiveness which has not mass enough to spare for transformation into sympathy, and quivers thread-like in small currents of self-preoccupation or at best of an egoistic scrupulosity” – the philosopher may have begun in quest of an intriguing if rather fantastical “Key to all Mythologies,” but he has grown sallow, his élan vital sapped, his writings scholastic, pedantic, “scrupulous and dim-sighted.”1
