The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought (review)

Rémi Brague's interesting contribution to the history of cosmological thought, six years in the making (1992–1998; original French edition 1999), mimics the style of the philosophically minded Marc Bloch, Emmanuel Le Roy-Ladurie, and, most tellingly, Georges Duby. The salient characteristic of Brague's writing, the constant elision of high and mass culture, remains unexplored—fully in line with his predecessors—but, as with them, this results from the constraints imposed by Brague's longue durée analysis of ancient cosmology diverging in the medieval Christian, Jewish, and Muslim aftermath. Less successful than Duby in combining incisive cultural critique and etymological scrutiny with institutional history, a stylistic signpost of the French historico-philosophical essayiste school, Brague widens our understanding of Western civilization as "a specific phylum" (p. 9) of human civilization through an exhaustive, close reading of the primary sources, reminding us of the best of Duby's brand of cultural and historical sensitivity. Building on his thesis in Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization (Paris: Critérion, 1993; South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine's Press, 2002), Brague argues that Western philosophical eccentricity was not the result of ancient Greek dilettantism adopted falteringly by medieval thinkers, but of the dialectical demise of ancient cosmology-cosmography when moderns after the sixteenth century began to espouse a nonanthropological and noncosmological view of the "world."

If right, this view of the "death of the cosmos" in modern Western thought—not radically new in essence but certainly much more nuanced, culturally speaking, than earlier literature on the scientific revolution (e.g., Steven Shapin)—has serious consequences for today. The book's trajectory, as well, has interesting, not coincidental parallels to Europe's current problems. Brague's work consciously evokes a certain European intellectual insistence on maintaining the Greco-Roman/Biblical dialectical underpinnings of both the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution (though he expands the intellectual playing field to include Judaic and Arabo-Muslim medieval cultures); unconsciously, however, his story of Western exceptionalism suggests that the recent constitutional disputes within the European Union, triggered to an extent by Turkey's possible entry (negotiated in 1982 unsuccessfully but resurfaced in 1999) inevitably constitute an "Islamic litmus test" for the cultural particularity of the "Western" and "European" identities Brague defines historically in his book. His analysis, then, is a challenge to those who would deny that Western civilization in its European federal incarnation is a "cosmos," so to speak, of cultural self-adscription with deeply ingrained and inevitably exclusivist political tendencies.

Though "human thought does not begin with the Greeks" (p. 9), the ancient Greek divorcing of "human" from "world" allowed them to discover a "cosmos" that could then provide humans with both models of perfection to gaze upon (cosmology) and natural spaces to define and conquer (cosmography). Brague acknowledges this chronology fits in with Karl Jaspers's notion of an "Axial Age." However, unlike Jaspers, he argues no ancient tradition other than the Greek invented humanity's unique place outside the cosmos. This created a "perspective," a mental attitude diverging from what the Egyptologist Eva Brunner-Trauthas has called "aspective" attitudes, which position humans within nature and thus allow for no dominant single point of view. "It is necessary, for the world to appear," states Brague, "that the organic unity that linked it to one of its inhabitants—man—be broken" (p.13). Once dehumanized nature (phusis or physis) was conceived as a separate entity, kosmos, human artifice (tekhnë), and convention (nomos) were freed from worldly constraints. Brague contrasts this positive Greek cosmology with Jan Assmann's description of its opposite, the ancient Egyptian "negative cosmology" that made just human action (ma'at) integral to the cosmos. Instead, Greek cosmological perspective, "the conceptual decision" to make the cosmos uncreated by gods or humans first attested in the writings...