Well, Horace Kallen's quite the character. Given the chance to write something about him. I'm feeling more than a little overwhelmed. The man was beyond prolific - forty books and countless articles, in all kinds of different venues and fora. I've found my Virgil, though, a scholar who's just completed a biography of Kallen (coming out end of this month!), with whom I've been exchanging passionate e-mails. He's helped me understand many things, not least how Hebraism - a term Kallen wrested from Matthew Arnold's pejorative usage - comes to define modernity and all its values: science, justice, democracy, internationalism. The "Hellenism" Arnold praised has been refuted by Darwin, who has shown concern with unchanging essences to be not just untrue to the world we live in but a refusal to accept and engage it.
We've persuaded the biographer to write a piece for the New School histories vertical, and it's been fun to watch it take shape. While New School was a center for Kallenism, most Kallen scholarship focuses on work he wrote before he came here, and on his participation in secular Jewish movements which crossed paths only implicitly with the New School. For each story, it turns out, Kallen left a not inconsiderable archive of works. For the moment I'm trying to find a way to characterize his engagement on multiple fronts simultaneously, to audiences which might have been distinct - but might also have overlapped. Was the Jewishness of Kallen's understanding of American democracy (Hebrew prophets by way of the Puritans, but especially by way of the proto-secularist Job) an open secret, an accepted open secret? Was Kallen operating in discrete worlds or linking them?
Today's discovery: at the very time Kallen was giving the talk on toleration at the New School which it's my task to contextualize, he had just published a poem in a journal called The Humanist. Another tussle with Arnold, this does "Dover Beach" one better (well, not perhaps poetically better), evoking the desolation someone might feel on a shore ever assailed by waves of gods called forth by human fear! A taste:
There's a denouement, which rather scrambles the metaphor. After a lampoon of assorted religious rituals (Catholic litany and Buddhist/Hindu Om) appears a lighthouse
promising safe harbor - at Sankety, which a note explains is the easternmost point in the United States. America, refuge from the dull booming roar of old world religion!
Land ho! Strange prophet.
We've persuaded the biographer to write a piece for the New School histories vertical, and it's been fun to watch it take shape. While New School was a center for Kallenism, most Kallen scholarship focuses on work he wrote before he came here, and on his participation in secular Jewish movements which crossed paths only implicitly with the New School. For each story, it turns out, Kallen left a not inconsiderable archive of works. For the moment I'm trying to find a way to characterize his engagement on multiple fronts simultaneously, to audiences which might have been distinct - but might also have overlapped. Was the Jewishness of Kallen's understanding of American democracy (Hebrew prophets by way of the Puritans, but especially by way of the proto-secularist Job) an open secret, an accepted open secret? Was Kallen operating in discrete worlds or linking them?
Today's discovery: at the very time Kallen was giving the talk on toleration at the New School which it's my task to contextualize, he had just published a poem in a journal called The Humanist. Another tussle with Arnold, this does "Dover Beach" one better (well, not perhaps poetically better), evoking the desolation someone might feel on a shore ever assailed by waves of gods called forth by human fear! A taste:
Land ho! Strange prophet.
Horace M. Kallen, "Dr. Freud Says It's Compensation,"
The Humanist vol 10 (1 Jan 1950): 54-57, 55
