In his new book, “Bob Dylan, Prophet Without God,” political philosopher Jeffrey Edward Green of the School of Arts & Sciences offers a vision of Dylan as a modern-day prophet, providing an overarching account of the significance of Dylan’s political, religious, and ethical ideas.
Green, director of the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy, asserts that Dylan is not only one of the greatest living artists but “a prophet who has bestowed a message uniquely suited to a time such as ours.”
The following is an excerpt from “Bob Dylan, Prophet Without God,” published by Oxford University Press. Copyright ©2024. All rights reserved. The excerpt from the preface has been edited and abridged for length.
This book aims to demonstrate that Bob Dylan is not just a prophet but a prophet of a very special type: namely, not a prophet of salvation who transmits a singular fount of ethical direction (whether freedom, justice, or divinity) or for whom all three foundations coalesce into a no less singular source of normative direction, but rather what I call a prophet of diremption—or, metaphorically, a prophet without God—that is, someone who does indeed speak in support of a free selfhood, the claims of social justice, and adherence to God, but who continually insists, tragically, on the divergences and conflicts between these ideals and whose prophetic discourse is thus in a constant process of rearticulation rather than recurrence and stability.
What emerges in Dylan’s telling from the diremption besetting these sources of normativity—freedom, justice, and God—is not mere confusion and indeterminacy, even if it is true that Dylan prophesizes our sense of not having figured out how to live by clarifying the clashes undermining our attainment of that ultimate wisdom. The most remarkable feature of Dylan’s prophetic contribution is that the specific conflicts between the grounds of normativity are themselves imbued with ethical meaning.
Consider, for instance, the relationship between individual freedom and social justice, which I examine in Part I. Against the ideology of liberal democracy, which imagines both individual freedom and social justice being mutually realized in a well-ordered liberal-democratic state—and against the idealistic view of activists, civic leaders, journalists, and most philosophers that freedom and justice are mutually reinforcing social goals—Dylan sings as someone for whom social justice comes at the expense of individual freedom, as someone who, virtually without precedent (Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are the only historical analogues of whom I am aware), helps to inspire and lead a social justice movement (the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s) yet at the same time also comes to publicly acknowledge his lack of full commitment to that movement because of an overriding preference for the free use of his individuality. For we who are bourgeois, this conflict between self and other ought to be all too familiar, but it is a feature of bourgeois existence to resist confronting it at all costs. Dylan explodes this blockage, this lack of bourgeois self-awareness. He does not solve the problem of which way to go—justice or freedom—but he insists upon the dilemma of being pulled in two different directions, and when he does practice individual self-reliance, he does so without the triumphalism and complacency that typically have accompanied the ideal, even and especially in Emerson’s and Thoreau’s foundational articulations of it. If for Emerson and Thoreau self-reliance is inseparable from “God-reliance” and faith in the providential achievement of social justice, Dylan models, by contrast, how to practice self-reliance in a world of permanent injustice and suffering, without appeal to unverifiable, metaphysical sources of comfort such as divinity and providence.
When Dylan practices individual self-reliance, it is without the self-satisfaction of believing he is also adequately fulfilling his social responsibility or abiding by an individualism that everyone is equally free to practice if they wish. Self- reliance is indeed a value, but it is not the only one; while we ought to under- stand the genuine attraction of the ideal, we also ought to understand the moral costs. In helping us do so, Dylan performs prophetic leadership that operates not through the moral exemplarity frequently associated with prophetic figures, but through his testimony to his lack of full moral goodness—a paradox that is one key modality of what I mean by describing Dylan as a prophet without God.
But it seems wrong to say that interpreters of Dylan find only what they themselves are looking for and never a more genuine perception of the man and his work. Even if there are limitless possible accurate interpretations of Dylan, this does not mean that all interpretations are accurate. And even if any accurate interpretation is itself limited—capturing only a sliver of what Dylan represents—this does not make it false. Dylan is not, after all, a brook or a fire in a hearth—objects that ignite intellectual reflection in those who gaze at them but possess no cognitive content in themselves—as there is indeed potent cognitive content in Dylan, which is to say there are recurring ethical, political, and theological concerns that abide within Dylan’s oeuvre. In addressing these, I do not claim to have addressed the entirety of Dylan’s vast work, as much has not been included. But in addressing what it has focused on—Dylan’s withdrawal from dependable social activism, his conversion, his pessimism—this book cannot be said to have concerned itself with something that is not there.
Further, my approach has tried, more than many others, to respect and accept the mysterious and ultimate inaccessibility of the man, as my purpose has not been to assign familiar ideological labels to him—or to suggest that he provides some singular or stable ethical message—but to understand Dylan as wrestling with ethical conflicts that arise between the three sources of authority most typically at stake in the prophetic tradition: individual freedom, justice, and divinity. In presenting Dylan as a prophet of diremption, not a prophet of salvation, I not only emphasize how he differs from more typical expressions of the prophetic conscience, but also make clear that he gives us no overarching answer—no “one thing that is needful”—by which we might orient our lives. In this regard at least, the book has respected the “I’m not there” idea, though the difference is that the book attends to numerous ethical consequences that follow from Dylan’s tragic testimony of ethical conflict: his practice of a self-reliance without the self-satisfaction that traditionally has accompanied the ideal, the demand for post secular respect for religiosity and non-religiosity as coequal possibilities for any human being, and the call for a realer realism that gets beyond the elitism of more familiar realists within the history of political thought.
Closely connected to the “I’m not there” refutation of Dylan scholarship is the insistence that Dylan is not equivalent to the perspectives and personalities from which he sings. Dylan himself has reminded us of this difference. He not only has suggested that Bob Dylan is a persona he wears—“I’m only Bob Dylan when I have to be”—but also, on the basis of his unique relationship to this persona, has cautioned against over-interpretation: “If I wasn’t Bob Dylan, I’d probably think that Bob Dylan has a lot of answers myself.” In response to this challenge, it should be said that I do not think the book suffers if it turns out that it has analyzed only the persona of Bob Dylan and not the man behind the persona. The persona is itself sufficiently brilliant, perceptive, and distinct, regardless of whether it is authentically owned or only performed. Nonetheless, it needs to be stressed that the main ideas and concerns I have attributed to Dylan seem very likely to be those of the man himself. Is there any debate that Dylan withdrew from the social justice movements he had helped to inspire, thereby raising—and himself reflecting on—the question of the relationship between individuality and social justice? Does any biographer doubt the truth of Dylan’s religious conversion in the late 1970s? Is there any evidence that Dylan’s pessimism about the political world is not authentically held? These topics seem to have “been there.” They constitute the abiding ethical, political, and religious issues that Dylan—and so many of us—wonder and worry about.
As Dylan has said, “Passion is a young man’s game, older people gotta be wise.” Whether his words of wisdom are intentional or beyond his control, whether they reflect his own thoughts or those of someone he is pretending to be, whether they are consistently great or only unevenly so, the wager of this book is that they have made Bob Dylan an extraordinary contributor not just to popular music, but to our apprehension of the contemporary world and its challenges.
It is remarkable that Dylan’s potency extends to his dismissal and would-be regulation of those who would aim to understand him. Be awed by me, but don’t think you can ever understand me, he seems to say. But awe is the mother of philosophy. That which fascinates beckons us to understand. Whether my effort to do so has been for naught I leave not to Dylan but to you, the reader.
Jeffrey Edward Green of the School of Arts & Sciences is a professor and director of the Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy. The text above was excerpted from his book “Bob Dylan, Prophet Without God” (Copyright ©2024 Oxford University Press). Used by arrangement with the publisher.
