American Lit Notebook: Melville

Every class we had for American Lit, we were required to write a single page about our reading. I've pulled them together, unedited. So they will read a little odd, as my audience was my professor, and occasionally they refer to lectures (though that is rare).

References are to some stocky, big-boned edition of Moby-Dick. I don't have it with me, so I can only hope pagination has become standardized. Not that anyone really cares and is checking up on me.

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Moby-Dick, I

The way one opens a book is massively important, setting the stage and telling the reader what to expect. Those worth reading more than once, let alone down through the centuries, typically do not waste space nor write without design. We all know Moby-Dick’s opening line, “Call me Ishmael,” a short, though drawled summons to gather about its storyteller. However, that is not how Moby-Dick actually opens, not the first pieces of place-setting Melville gives us, just as Hawthorne did not open with Hester in shackles. The first is his dedication—not Mom or a son, but in fact Hawthorne. Melville’s admiration for Hawthorne, if only indicated through the dedication of this book to him, should suggest to us the kind of writing Melville goes in for: compacted symbolism, interplayed ideas through the medium of persons and story.

All great writers view their craft and the nature of words in distinctive kinds of ways, often as a kind of magic, so it is always wise to pay attention as it might give us a clue as to the kind of power the writer is wielding. I have yet to see to the bottom of it, but when Melville further prefaces his story with an Etymology and Extracts, it may be something to press into. The most intriguing line: “He [the pale Usher] loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.”

It seems needless to say that Moby-Dick is deep, but as I have a tendency to say large things, I have a tough time saying much until I have some sort of grasp on the subject, one which still eludes in the present case. But I will say something about Father Mapple’s sermon. Biblical allusions are always important because it contains the West’s central repository of shared reference and quickly allows one to say quite philosophical pronouncements. I particularly liked Mapple’s cable metaphor: “this book [Jonah] … is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures.” (47) This is a nice metaphor, particularly for those who use symbols (one that Peirce uses to describe knowledge). Just like the Bible, a philosophical allegorist’s story is layered, not all in a single chain, but fitted together and twisted, and finding those twists and how the cord all fits together tells us the cord's strength.

Moby-Dick, II

In its simplest terms, Moby-Dick is an allegory about Humanity’s relationship to nature. Ahab stands in for humankind, Moby-Dick for nature. In addition, the contrast of land and sea provide us this conceptual landscape, and heightens the idea of whaling as a conceptual vehicle. In Chapter 23, Melville briefly describes the safety of land as contrasted with the sea: “the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends….” (105) These we get because of humanity, unlike the “uncivilized seas.” (169) The landscape Melville sets is a civilized, peopled land that offers security, but a sea where “in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God,” a “howling infinite.” (105) Melville says “all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea.” (ibid.)

This is something like an echo of Emerson’s self-reliance and Whitman’s rough individualism. Great thinking, and so writing, seeks independence, the howling infinite (something of an image of the sublime we’d inherited from Kant). It doesn’t want the towns, though they offer security, and is indeed why we built them, just as Whitman says in the “Open Road.” What is interesting is that Melville points out that the safety of shore is, in fact, more dangerous for a ship in a storm. If we take sailing to be code for writing, we might say that the shore, the security of writing in an expected manner for an audience, is occasionally dangerous depending on the weather, the “climate of opinion” as Carl Becker called it. “Which way is the wind blowing?” a politician might ask, but the advice Melville is giving is that, in a storm, one might as well be audacious—“better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee” (ibid.).

What’s more, if Ahab is our great writer, then the great are those who seek the storm, that howling infinite. Ahab may have been a good whaler before, but it was because he chose to go up against Moby Dick and was scarred that he “did now possess a thousand fold more potency than ever he had sanely brought to bear upon any one reasonable object.” (176) Great writers don’t fight for a reasonable object, they fight for immortality. It is impossible, but it is by insanely going toe to toe with the infinite that they gain the strength to go farther than had ever been achieved before.

Moby-Dick, II

There’s a sequence in the latter half of the book that occurs with one of the Pequod’s crew, Pip, that proves to hook up quite well with the humanity/nature dichotomy, particularly in relation to genius and madness. Pip is a black sailor who is usually left back at the ship when the whalers go on the chase. In Chapter 93, Pip is taken out and, what with one thing and another, cast out into the ocean and left for a time, as the rest go after the whales. Pip, left in the “awful lonesomeness” (383) of the empty sea, proceeds to go insane.

Civilization, people and all of its products, disappear for Pip and he is left with an “intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity.” (ibid.) Pip has only himself and nature. Melville says perceptively that “man’s insanity is heaven’s sense”—we receive from all mystic traditions from the world over a relatively stable body of description of what is experienced, often epitomized with “oneness with everything.” With no other people, and just himself, Pip draws in and concentrates on it as the last vestige of humanity.

This is the true test for a genius, to stare into the abyss and come back. The clichés are many, but Melville stands ahead. Pip is stated to be a smart fellow, and if we take him as a poet thrust into the thick, he is found wanting—like Ahab, he is marred, but Ahab is able to come back and double down, whereas Pip goes off the deep end. Melville tells us that “the sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul.” What is curious here is that the sea is the “howling infinite,” and yet the sea drowns what Melville now calls an infinite soul. I think Whitman helps us here saying, “yes, our soul is infinite, that’s why I keep saying I’m one with God and everyone else.” For both, whatever our “self” is (though not Whitman’s me myself), it is produced by society, humanity, civilization and the towns and ports. Our soul, however, is as infinite and empty as the sea (which is why it is pointless to “ask the world to solve them” (397)). Facing the infinite sublime of nature, we face our own nothingness and, predictably, find nature’s nothingness somehow larger, awesomer, and more infinite, and thus our infinite drowns in nature’s. The great poet, however, is able to empty themselves and stand toe to toe with nature’s infinite.

American Lit Notebook: Fuller

Every class we had for American Lit, we were required to write a single page about our reading. I've pulled them together, unedited. So they will read a little odd, as my audience was my professor, and occasionally they refer to lectures (though that is rare).

References are to Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 (University of Illinois Press, 1991).

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Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843

Paul de Man once wrote one of his tidy little deconstructions on the impossibility of demarcating autobiography from fiction, arguing, roughly, that autobiography wants to efface its writtenness, but can never ultimately do that. Every time we go about theorizing what it is, the fact that it is written and full of tropes and poetic devices of our own invention always reasserts itself.

Thankfully, great writers have never much cared about the theorizing happening around them and have gone on writing whatever the hell it is they want to write without caring what it exactly is. Fuller’s example is a good one in this regard, being more self-conscious then most. Unlike Emerson’s exhortations, Thoreau and Fuller sought to set themselves in the narrative of life, carefully crafting sections of their lives for designs of their choosing, much as we craft our career arcs and much else. Indeed, Fuller announces the analogy between book and life so appropriate to the memoirist: “Since you are to share with me such foot-notes as may be made on the pages of my life….” (3) She occasionally makes gestures that recall us to this story’s writtenness throughout the book (e.g., “…if I had not been guilty of rhyme on the very last page” (36)). It’s interesting, though, that she says, “I had no guide-book, kept no diary…. What I got from the journey was the poetic impression of the country at large….” (42)

It’s this impression that’s interesting, though that she is a lesser Transcendentalist makes itself evident insofar as a few comments here and there invite interest, though without a powerful or original design behind them. If there is a design, it is one of harmony and balance, which Chapter two illustrates helpfully. At the top of page 18, Fuller speaks of “times of slower growth,” showing a nostalgia for times in which situations were entered, by woodcutter, shepherd or poet, and drawn from it “in some proportion, its moral and its meaning.” (18) “Proportion” is an important concept here, as she then goes on to describe, distastefully, the environment of “mushroom growth.” Without the “gentle proportions” of slow growing villages, this growth is disproportionate and “broken down.”

Fuller’s reaction to this is fascinating and reminds us of Emerson’s call for a true Americanness.

I have come prepared to see all this, to dislike it, but not with stupid narrowness to distrust or defame. On the contrary, while I will not be so obliging as to confound ugliness with beauty, discord with harmony, and laud and be contented with all I meet, when it conflicts with my best desires and tastes. I trust by reverent faith to woo the mighty meaning of the scene, perhaps to foresee the law by which a new order, a new poetry is to be evoked from this chaos…. (italics mine)

Two things should strike us: first, that Fuller is looking for the spirit of America, its new disruptiveness may strike us as simply heretical of tradition, but there just might be a “mighty meaning” behind it. But second, that Fuller is passive to this, unlike Whitman and Emerson who sought to weave America’s fate themselves (though, true, often with tropes of wooing).

American Lit Notebook: Whitman II

Every class we had for American Lit, we were required to write a single page about our reading. I've pulled them together, unedited. So they will read a little odd, as my audience was my professor, and occasionally they refer to lectures (though that is rare).

References are to individual lines in the poem.

I should also note that Bloom is hiding behind my reading of Whitman (particularly the vocabulary deployed).

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Whitman: “The Sleepers”

Whitman is constantly at pains to both create a poetic argument that overflows, so stark and radical that its pieces are vivid and unmistakable, and yet balances everything in its reach, which ultimately, if successful, is everything. This is ultimately what leads him to echo Emerson in “Song of Myself”: “Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself,/(I am large, I contain multitudes.)” (“Song,” v. 1324-26) Whitman creates these ebbing ratios, where his argument shifts concurrent to the stance his opposition will mount, by at various times blurring and then differentiating, engulfing and subsuming, and then urging to independent growth and life.

A good example of this is in “The Sleepers.” In the stanza at v. 132 Whitman mounts one of his blending exercises, listing a great series of opposites and antagonists. He begins, notably, with “The homeward bound and the outward bound” (v. 132). This is a grand signal, to those who point inwards, to themselves, and those who point outside of themselves, to others. And after his long list of

The antipodes, and every one between this and them in the dark,
I swear they are averaged now—one is no better than the other,
The night and sleep have liken’d them and restored them. (v. 141-3)

The darkness, the night, blend everything together—when you can’t see anything, how do you tell them apart? Whitman isn’t finished, though. His great transumptive move lies in the formula: “The myth of heaven indicates peace and night.” (v. 148)

“Myth” indicates a longstanding, though wrong, belief, “heaven” the typical, universal-type Godness, and the extraordinary move is that the fact that we have this myth, that indicates “peace and night.” The death of agonism, of our push and pull with each other, this peace promised by heaven eternal is bought with a relativistic averaging, with darkness, not the usual talk of God’s light. By Whitman’s reckoning, the very idea of heaven is what gives us the idea of night—by creating the illusion of an absolute, that is when we create the spectare of relativism.

Whitman: “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” “Song of the Open Road”

It is difficult, once one gets going, to see anything in Whitman other than figure after figure designed to pull in and appropriate as much for himself as possible, something like a rolling back of time so that Whitman, rather than God, might name everything (the same goes for Emerson). “Song of the Open Road” is no different. It is difficult not to see in Whitman’s “old delicious burdens” (v. 12) Harold Bloom’s burdens of influence, those anxieties of past relations that not only cause the poet pain, but also enable his craft. Whitman calls them “delicious” because he has moved beyond fear of the past and instead sees them as his playthings, meals on which to gorge himself. Bloom’s revisionary ratio of apophrades, whereby the later poet attains such strength as to seem to write his precursors poems, is carried out in, “I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return” (v. 15)—Whitman takes in the past, only to make it seem as if he had put the past there in the first place.

The sway between the modern distinction of inward and outward, and the Greek distinction between essence and accident, characteristically make a significant appearance in Whitman’s poetic argument. On the first score, the “open road” appears as a figure embodying freedom and self-creation. Whitman, like Emerson, is constantly at us to create ourselves, not “old smooth prizes,” but “rough new prizes.” (v. 141) Entrenchments of various kinds are treated as the enemy to the high adventure of wandering. Line 145 offers an interesting one:

You but arrive at the city to which you were destin’d, you hardly
settle yourself to satisfaction before you are call’d by an
irresistible call to depart,

What leaves us puzzled is that we are called by an irresistible call. Being called by a call doesn’t really tell us anything about where the call came from, and I surmise that the call was internal. Whitman doesn’t say that the road called us, but simply a call, isolated and unoriginated, like an echo without a source, thus rising up mysteriously within us. Later, however, we do get its source, formerly obscured—Whitman himself: “You must not stay sleeping and dallying there in the house, though you built it, or though it has been built for you.” (v. 190)

The image of the house, or in the other poem’s case, the spider’s web, allows me to bridge to the essence/accident contrast. Whitman commonly uses the image of Nature, and standing naked to it, as a picture of desired unmediatedness. In “Only the kernel of every object nourishes,” (v. 88) he calls upon the Greek distinction in order to claim that words are tidied up and fashioned for us, and that these were accidents, “husks” (v. 89) to be stripped away. This may be a speculative leap, but I consider that to be hidden in this line: “Where is he that undoes stratagems and envelopes for you and him?” It is difficult to tell whether Whitman is shifting to the verb “envelopes,” which he uses quite frequently, after the conjunction, or whether he’s using the noun. Say he meant the noun—where is the guy who will undo the packaging of our letters? Upon that derivation, we see the Platonist’s distrust of words, that how our alphabet is packaged, in words and sentences that mean certain things, is all contingent and a big accident. Whitman wants to start over again, get to the kernel, and name everything over again.

American Lit Notebook: Whitman I

Every class we had for American Lit, we were required to write a single page about our reading. I've pulled them together, unedited. So they will read a little odd, as my audience was my professor, and occasionally they refer to lectures (though that is rare).

References are to the individual lines of each poem.

I should also note that Bloom is hiding behind my reading of Whitman (particularly the vocabulary deployed).

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Whitman: “Song of Myself,” I

The poet of Emersonianism, Whitman quickly states his subject-matter with “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” (v. 1) It is not that Whitman is himself singing, it is that he’s singing a song called “Myself.” The first thing Whitman must set to move out of the way is the past, a recurrent theme during the Romantic period. “Creeds and schools in abeyance,/Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten.” (10-11) What Whitman seeks is “original energy.” (13)

In the second section Whitman sets out on his leisurely, light voyage, sniffing “shelves crowed with perfumes.” (14) Books stand in for the past and by likening books with odors, he imbues them with an optional ephemerality, a wafting buoyancy that the past rarely displays. Whitman will not let the past intoxicate him, but instead wishes to find Nature and “become undisguised and naked,” seeking “for it to be in contact with me.” (19-20) It is interesting and significant that Whitman should be naked, for in the long Platonic tradition of standing reality apart from her appearances, it is most often reality that we wish to see naked. Whitman has already internalized the Kantian Copernican shift that Emerson saw clearly—reality is always naked and it is us who need to shed our encumbrances.

This shedding maneuver climaxes with the section’s last stanza:

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

If with the first line Whitman states his premise, “what I assume you shall assume,” (2) the conclusion of the second section states his “intricate purpose.” (382) Persons, and indeed the whole cosmos (“earth and sun”), are likened to poems and that is the originary power we are seeking. We are ever-elongating texts, songs whose melodies may repeat motifs and accumulate harmonies, but whose true power lies in the note not yet sung, a repetition of what the first note was also—new. Whitman’s design is Emersonian. He realizes that the only way for us to follow him, as in Emerson, is to be non-didactic, even anti-didactic (“not look through my eyes”), though of necessity something is taught, something imparted, something passed from Whitman to the reader. Whitman and Emerson can be seen to be teaching forms, while leaving content to their newly self-reliant auditors, but Whitman is so strong a poetic power, so keen to protect its originality and newness, that he recognizes that any repetition will diminish him, take from him, like a metaphor dying. And so Whitman wishes also to block us from that (“nor take things from me”). Whitman’s method (which, given his poetic paranoia, we should wonder if it is his actual method, or simply the one he’s putting on the screen) is to take in all around and then filter what you find from yourself. An echo of Emerson’s dark anxiety, “In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty,” (Emerson 139) Whitman finds the path to the origin of all poems as an emptying gesture, taking in the past so as to ebb it all away, leaving us with only what is uniquely us.

Whitman: “Song of Myself,” II

Stanza 24 sees a continuance of Whitman’s Emersonianism. It begins grandly, “Walt Whitman, a kosmos….” (v. 497) “Kosmos” is the transliteration of the Greek word, which otherwise in English is “cosmos.” Whitman’s use of the Greek, rather than English, may be just fancy, but it is notable that in Greek kosmos is the noun form of a parent verb that means something like “to set in order, or arrange,” with aesthetic and moral overtones (whereas the English “cosmos” has no verb counterpart and so hangs more statically). Leaving aside the Greek roots, “cosmos” has come down to us as more or less coextensive with “universe.” What is significant is the article, “a kosmos,” not “the kosmos” as would be expected if we were talking about the only one of something, like the universe.

This is a tone of paradoxicality that Whitman breeds and thrives on throughout the poem—Whitman, “me myself,” is both universe and multiverse, one voiced and several, individual and society, everything and nothing and something. Whitman gives “the sign of democracy,” which is that he “will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.” (v. 506-7) This should strike us as a tremendous move of equality, similar to Gloria Allred’s current legal argument about the recently passed Prop. 8 in California banning gay marriage—under California’s equal protection clause, if some class is forbidden marriage, all shall be forbidden marriage (and so the reductio ad absurdum).

However, notice the fourth line of the stanza: “…no stander above men and women or apart from them.” (v. 499) This is, again, a democratic move, eliminating the hierarchical nature of other modes of government and being. It also strikes a tone of solidarity, “or apart from them.” This figure, neither above nor apart, tends to meld in Whitman into a homogenizing relativism. Whitman will be the voice of “many long dumb voices,” (v. 508) but these are the voices of not only the inhumanly silenced, like slaves, but also the wicked, like thieves. By eliminating hierarchy, Whitman also seems to be eliminating value judgments. Whitman calls these voices “forbidden,” (v. 516) which suggests that these voices are silenced by an external authority, and that “by me” they are “clarified and transfigur’d.” (v. 518) What they are is him, the kosmos, nobody apart from anybody, all the same—him.

Whitman: “Song of Myself,” III

As I meditated on previously, Whitman is the poet of a paradoxical democracy and we can see one of his techniques in his gargantuan lists, lines that begin similiarly, and in most cases exactly, to each other, but are filled in differently. In stanzas 31 and 33 we encounter two more substantial lists. On the one hand Whitman’s lists have the effect of lighting areas that were commonly neglected by the so-called “higher arts” and so can be seen to be a kind of “poetry for the people.” By taking “low” subject-matter, particularly bodily and sexual (for example, v. 520’s “bowels” and 819’s “thighs and lips”), he is able to extend the purview of art and discourse to areas previously “forbidden.” (v. 516)

The problem with Whitman’s lists is that while they call attention to a vast array of items, “the buzzard,” “the snake,” “the elk,” (v. 679-81) “the native,” “the foreign,” “the homely woman,” “the handsome,” (v. 774-5), they are also pallid images with no life outside of their brief mentions in a litany that is expressly built to blend, and therefore homogenize. Metaphors and similes work to break down contrastive effects, they take two different things and bring them together through the verb “to be” or the preposition “like,” but while both poetic figures require two different things to create the effect, if overused they die and the items lose contrast, becoming not metaphoric but literal. As with Whitman’s lists, they are homogenizing tropes, blending all together to make equal and the same.

Whitman, however, seems to see us coming. Whitman is dancing in this poem, enacting a sequence of poetic defense, shifting his posture in time to the music of our protests. If we might protest that his poetry reduces us, Whitman will reply: “If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces, were this moment, reduced back to a pallid float, it would not avail in the long run” (v.1191). Whitman’s true goal, he will remind us, is to get all of us to become ourselves. He meditates quite frequently on himself, and “any thing is but a part,” (v. 1195) no doubt of himself, that kosmos, but Whitman is “the teacher of athletes” (v. 1234) and we are all, to ourselves, a kosmos.

Rorty, Religion, and Romance

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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Rorty never produced a lot of work on the specific topic of religion, but what he did write has a certain intensity that cuts to the quick of the consequences he sees for pragmatism on culture. The two pieces in Philosophy and Social Hope show well two sides of Rorty’s personality, and their two corresponding sides of his view of religion. Whenever I read “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” I almost begin to think I should start talking about God more. When I follow it as I always do with the succeeding piece, “Religion As Conversation-stopper,” I’m reminded why I don’t. The former is Rorty’s tender-minded reading of James’ “The Will to Believe,” his empathetic defense of the religious experience in the face of scientific reductionism and intellectual rationalism. The latter is Rorty’s viper quick, and slightly catty, defense of the Jefferson compromise with religion in the public sphere. These two papers correspond to the two sides of Rorty’s infamous private/public distinction in his political philosophy: as a private project, as personal path to redemption, religion is as equally valid as any other path, just so long as it does not encroach on others’ paths. This is the concession to the public sphere all projects—religious, philosophical, or other cultural manifestation—must make. And just so long as these projects are not shared with others, they become practically inappropriate to public deliberation because not shared.

David Hall said some years ago, about half way through Rorty’s mature phase, that Rorty probably chose Dewey over James as his philosophical hero, if only subconsciously, because he was too close to James and couldn’t get any traction in talking about him. I think Rorty and James’ personalities were too close, both humanist intellectuals less interested, in the end, with science than Dewey because they both felt personally more attached to conversation with their fellows than fidgeting with the stuff surrounding us. Like true humanists, they felt conversation far more important to life and the legacy of humanity than technology, even if they understood on some level that none of our progress would be possible without science and its more practically-minded offspring. Still the best discussion of James’ philosophy and personality is Santayana’s chapter on him in Character and Opinion in the United States and I suspect much of what he says there could go as well for Rorty.

Rorty’s orientation to life is reflected straightaway in his essay on James when he says, “One of James’s most heartfelt convictions was that to know whether a claim should be met, we need only ask which other claims … it runs athwart.” (“Faith,” 148, italics his) The ellipsis blots out some of James’s words from “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” where he says, “we see not only that without a claim actually made by some concrete person there can be no obligation, but that there is some obligation wherever there is a claim. Claim and obligation are, in fact, coextensive terms; they cover each other exactly.”[fn.1] We see here immediately the instinctive humanism they both felt, the conversational inquisitiveness that drove them. Where there are not real threats, we should not see real tensions in belief. The inquiry that philosophy should take is not into some smooth, unchanging object called Truth or Reality, but into what obligations, and what kind exactly, we have to each other because of the beliefs we find ourselves with. And as obligations come into conflict do we find ourselves with the obligation to shift our beliefs.

Rorty’s first face to religion is a defense of the religious experience. Rorty’s more ecumenical name for religious experience, in that wide, quasi-universal sense we find our latter-day I’m-not-religious-but-spiritual types using, is “romance.” The underlying reason for this choice, I think, is ultimately conversational. Whether talking about our love for God or our love for our husband and children, this love—in conversation with others—is often intensely felt, difficult to convey, and sometimes inscrutable. Love is deeply personal. The only thing more universal than the fact that everyone loves is the idiosyncratic variety of the objects of our affection.

And because our love often subsists in ephemeral waves of crashing euphoria, we find it difficult to describe what it is we are actually feeling. So it is that we often keep these feelings to ourselves, or rest content in short phrases and beaming faces, only occasionally expressing them to our reciprocating objects or fellow enthusiasts (the mutually culpable typically being more forgiving of clumsiness). Some, though, think themselves quite good at expressing their awkward innerness, and a few of these actually are—we call these latter “poets.” For the rest of us, however, our muteness should not be taken as a sign of unfeeling or uncaring. All similarity is an imagining by analogy, and this pragmatist point about how language functions is merely punched up the fact of seemingly inexpressible experience.

Rorty’s own minimalism on the topic of romance—and experience—I believe, are evocative of a personal shyness in regards to his own powers of expression and, more importantly, of a rhetorical gesture of space clearing—by outlining the space of romance and refusing to populate it in any detail with his own words of power, Rorty seeks to defend our right to our own words. His passivity is designed to actively engage our own imaginations, to fill this space with ourselves. This is a supremely Emersonian and Whitmanian endeavor. Rorty’s gesture is neither command nor assertion—it is a sweeping arm of protective welcome and a suggestive come-hither look of experimental freedom. Strong poets impress upon us metaphors that dominate our consciousness, but the metaphors of Emerson and Whitman were designed to hold open the world to each of our imaginations, to clear a space from dominance so that we may each plant our own gardens of delight and fantasy.

If this face owes far too much to reading Romantic poetry and not enough to religious creed, then so much the worse—so Rorty would say—for creed. Rorty’s second face to religion is slightly irritated by the still existing presumption that readers of Wordsworth or Blake don’t have consciences according to American law. Rorty enforces the secular, democratic separation of church and state with an admittedly small amount of peevishness. Western democracies institutionalized the separation of religion from government in order to protect the freedom of people with different religions. In practice, Rorty again enforces this protection by thinking about conversation—what do you do when somebody proposes public policy on the basis of a religious belief you don’t share? How do you debate that? And in Rorty’s view, this goes for basing them on Nietzsche as much as on Christ.

Conversations, in Rorty’s manner, come in two different kinds—some we don’t have to agree with the person’s terms, and can just empathize and seek understanding, because the conclusions drawn in their thinking have nothing to do with us. Whether they love Carol or not, it shouldn’t exactly matter to us since we aren’t the ones going to bed with her. But other conversations, these don’t just demand understanding, but agreement in terms because the entire point of them is to lock down societally-binding conclusions and direction. So what needs to be created is a public language, if ever so thin, in which to debate these questions without begging the question over any particular side.

There is a third face, however, that Rorty displays to religion, though not so much in the two essays in Philosophy and Social Hope. This face might be summed up in pragmatism’s historicism—if religion began as the first attempts of primitive humanity to explain their surroundings, then surely some of these are outmoded. This face is conscientiously stern in open debates about where our culture should be heading. Dewey, on par, was better at this than James, and so was Rorty, which might explain Rorty’s overt affinity with Dewey, given his shyness. James was much more the phenomenological adventurer, exploring our current consciousnesses and sussing out the real tensions. Dewey, on the other hand, had more of an historical sense and was better at telling evolutionary stories of how we got these tensions—and where we might go to relieve them.

For pragmatists, beliefs are tools. They are inherently artifactual. We created non-linguistic practices like carpentry to help keep ourselves dry and we created linguistic practices to help tell other people how to do it. We created physical tools, like hammers, to help bind wood together and we created intellectual tools, like logic, to help bind our beliefs together. Every habit, every practice that was created throughout history was done so in response to a felt need. The question pragmatists wish us all to face down, religious or otherwise, is what were our needs and do we still have them? If Rorty’s private and public face to religion are somewhat oriented towards the past and present, the third face of historicism looks to the future with a somewhat open-ended, though no less urgent, question: So we know where we’ve been, now where should we go?

Endnotes

[1] In The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, p. 194 of the 1956 Dover edition. Italics James's.

American Lit Notebook: Hawthorne II

Every class we had for American Lit, we were required to write a single page about our reading. I've pulled them together, unedited. So they will read a little odd, as my audience was my professor, and occasionally they refer to lectures (though that is rare).

References are to the Portable Hawthorne, edited by William C. Spengemann.

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Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, I

I suspected at the time of writing that my harsh judgment of “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” was perhaps a bit overhasty and that I was missing something. Post-lecture, placed in the context of a bald American nationalism and seeing the conflicted Rousseauian spirit of the mob scene, I see more clearly its power. Rousseau’s chained freedom is precursor to Emerson’s all-is-mediated and they form the conflict at the heart of an American form of life. What is clear from the miss, however, is that of the two kinds Henry James called Hawthorne’s “stories of fantasy and allegory” and his “little tales of New England history,” I clearly am most at home in the former (being more algebraic in Emerson’s sense), whatever James’ denigration of it. The Scarlet Letter, on most scores, moves back to this form, though it must in a more complicated sense.

The first interesting facet of the story to be noticed is Hawthorne’s relation to the writing of it. The Scarlet Letter does not present itself as simple piece of made-up fiction. Hawthorne presents it as a recorded narrative, like an historian. “Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers and present it to the reader.” (160) Hawthorne’s figural gesture of plucking one flower to present creates the illusion of a larger reality in which the story sits, which is the illusion of reality, realness. Hawthorne isn’t, of course, pretending that he’s telling us about something that actually happened. What this gesture does is create a mask behind which Hawthorne can hide, essentially creating an Author persona that mediates between Hawthorne and the story.

This allows Hawthorne to use an ironic aside to his readers throughout the story. For instance, “On the other hand, a penalty which, in our days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself.” (162) The question of what Hawthorne thinks about his contemporary situation is completely blocked behind the mask of the Author. What we are left with is an irony that reflects back on us the question of whether the statement itself is true or not: have we moved past the Puritanism of two hundred years ago? This is the constant question forced upon us by Hawthorne through the Author.

The great question in force, it would seem, is that of the nature of sin. I’m guided her by a comment of D. H. Lawrence’s at the outset of an essay on Hawthorne: “Sin is a queer thing. It isn’t the breaking of divine commandments. It is the breaking of one’s own integrity.” This is a distinctively Emersonian transvaluation of sin and gets something importantly right about the common project of mid-19th century American writers. Hester Prynne wavers a good deal on the scaffold, though almost always keeping a bold face to the crowd. What is fascinating is her summons of strength at the moment of truth: “Never!” she tells Dimmesdale, looking not at the crowd or her questioner, but straight into “the deep and troubled eyes of the younger clergyman.” (178) And though her second cry breaks a bit, the strength of her will, having traversed the chapter’s rising sense of agony, is thunderous, and could only adhere to one of singular character. I take the “wildness of her nature” (188) to signal Hester’s authentic self, the one that thundered “Never!” in the face of society’s shame, and that her great sin is that she holds out hope for a reunion with Dimmesdale. Her wildness is chained in New England, the truth of which she must hide from herself, the great strike against sincere authenticity: “doubtless it was so, although she hid the secret from herself, and grew pale whenever it struggled out of her heart, like a serpent from its hole.” (189) The serpent, Satan’s form in Eden, “the tempter of souls,” is here the form of her love for Dimmesdale.

Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, II

Much of the middle section of The Scarlet Letter is given over to the development of Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, two characters, I must confess, I find far less fascination with than Hester and Pearl. But part of the growing power in Hester and Pearl lies in their relations to the two, so pass through them we must.

Pearl, in her earlier chapter, is shown to be a vast font of unpredictable, unlawful power, akin by her perceivers to an imp and delivishness. I think this marks the unmistakable odor of a rising feminism. The rules of the past are being broken, and though Hester rests between the past and the future, she does wish “to create an analogy between the object of her affection, and the emblem of her guilt and torture.” (209) Pearl embodies her own passion and wildness, her own break with the past, her sin, and so is consistently held, as Chillingworth cogently sees, as having “no law, nor reverence for authority, no regard for human ordinances or opinions, right or wrong, mixed up with that child’s composition. … Hath she any discoverable principle of being?” Dimmesdale responds, equally cogently, “None,—save the freedom of a broken law.” (237) The wild unpredictability of Pearl depicted by Hawthorne, I think, is his correct apprehension of the unseen vistas of the future to which we in the present must hammer out. This is the romantic Coleridge’s (or was it Wordsworth?) suggestion that we create the taste by which we are judged given its American twist in Emerson’s call for internal, authentic self-reliance, setting out our own rules for ourselves, for Whitman’s vision of democracy and the eratic, yet internally compelled Pearl, with her as yet undiscovered principle of being.

The “melancholy prophecy of decay” (225) in Dimmesdale’s voice is partly found in this breakdown of law, impelled as he is “powerfully along the track of creed,” which was “essential to his peace” “while it confined him within its iron framework.” (228) It is again noteworthy that the breath of fresh air Chillingworth gives Dimmesdale, amidst the “musty fragrance, be it sensual or moral” of his books, is the unfamiliar counterpositions of “other moral scenery” (ibid.). But Dimmesdale’s sin lies elsewhere, too, in D. H. Lawrence’s supposition that sin is lying to yourself. Dimmesdale is unaware of Chillingworth’s hunt because of a “certain morbidness” which “rendered him suspicious of all mankind,” (234) a malady we first saw at the close of “Young Goodman Brown.” What Dimmesdale then conjures are sick self-rationalizations, putting him further from himself. He wraps himself in the cloak of God, reasoning that humanly revelations “are meant merely to promote the intellectual satisfaction of intelligent beings.” (235) If I read Hawthorne aright, with his belief in the power of symbols, when Dimmesdale declares that there can be “no power, short of the Divine mercy, to disclose, whether by uttered words, or by type or emblem, the secrets that may be buried with a human heart,” (ibid.) Hawthorne is marking Dimmesdale’s blindness and self-interested swerving from justice, which ultimately is an authenticity to oneself.

Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, III

Emerson and Thoreau are always pulled together, taken to be from common stock, but less often do we match Hawthorne with the so-called Transcendentalists. Chapter 13, “Another View of Hester,” however, maps on quite well with the Romantic view of nature American Transcendentalists were known for and seems to throw Hester into the mode of a prophet.

After Hester and Pearl’s encounter with Dimmesdale on the stockade, Hester recesses into herself, spending the chapter meditating on her situation, which is suggestively called “Another View of Hester.” In Hester, Hawthorne set up a strong dichotomy between outward and inward appearance, a conflict that manifests itself in deliberation over action, the greatest muddle between our private internals and public externals. To begin, Hawthorne rings a strong Emersonian bell when he says, “Little accustomed, in her long seclusion from society, to measure her ideas of right and wrong by any standard external to herself…,” (261) one that even carries Thoreau’s hermetic influence.

Her seclusion, however, is forced by Puritan society, a decision she in part agrees with. She herself views her time with Dimmesdale as a sin and lives her life as Puritan virtue would have it: “it could only be a genuine regard for virtue that had brought the poor wanderer to its paths.” (262, italics mine) But the doubleness of Hester’s behavior always remains—“This might be pride, but was so like humility….” (263) Though Hester acts like a Puritan, and does as a matter of course, believe in its virtues, her outward behavior passes through the third-person reported ambiguities (“pride or humility?”) to their mirror opposite in her mind, the world of thought where she acts as a true radical. What is interesting is that, like Thoreau, Hawthorne emphasizes the outward, behavioral aspect of this inward turn.

“Standing alone in the world,—alone, as to any dependence on society, and with little Pearl to be guided and protected,—alone, and hopeless of retrieving her position, even had she not scorned to consider it desirable,—she cast away the fragments of a broken chain.”

This mirroring of Hester’s Puritan virtue with her “emancipated,” radical theories, the outward behavior with the inward, ineffectual thinking is central to reading Hawthorne’s tale as an allegory for the human condition. Hester, like humanity, sits astride her warring passions and cool thinking, her puritanical behavior and radically feminist thought. The height of the allegory is achieved at the end, as Pearl, embodying the free, yet-unforeseen future, “that unknown region where Pearl had found a home,” (354) leaves her mother, who must return home to New England. Hester is shackled to the past, straddling past and future. Hester birthed the future, but she herself cannot be a part of it. If “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” suggests that the most fluid time for social norms—and so the only moments for transcendence—are during revolutions, Hester must come back because we cannot exist in total, permanent revolution.

American Lit Notebook: Emerson

Every class we had for American Lit, we were required to write a single page about our reading. I've pulled them together, unedited. So they will read a little odd, as my audience was my professor, and occasionally they refer to lectures (though that is rare).

References are to the Portable Emerson, edited by Carl Bode and Malcolm Cowley.

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Emerson: “Nature,” “The American Scholar,” “The Divinity School Address”

I wasn’t exactly shocked to hear that Emerson holds a recessed position in our contemporary minds, but it was odd, having read a handful of his essays previously, to hear that people have a hard time figuring how so many found their voice in him (like people in the 60s in Dylan). All I hear in myself, since reading him, is my own voice, and in others besides. Perhaps I’m overdetermined by Harold Bloom, on Emerson no less than most of what I read.

The former Unitarian minister wreaks fantastic revenge on the profession in “The Divinity School Address” (DSA). In a stance that should be called an aggressive anti-clericalism, Emerson takes the form of the Protestant Revolution radicalized. Luther and Calvin wished to replace one orthodoxy with another, but the centuries-long transplantment of religious minorities in America produced a cultural space that was consistently at odds with orthodoxy in general. Railing against all priest classes, he says that religion in American “suffers this perversion, that the divine nature is attributed to one or two persons, and denied to all the rest….” (DSA, 77) Prophesizing our contemporary desire to say, “I’m spiritual, but not religious,” Emerson says, “The idioms of [Jesus’] language and the figures of his rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes.” (78)

This last is a dark saying, particularly for the writer. Emerson struggled with this impetus, that we are all, at last, only with ourselves, his long life and this produced his strong (and easily appropriated) sense of individuality. The moral, religious sentiment, for Emerson, “is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely; it is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation….” (76) Emerson’s style, consequently, is one of exhortation, and not argument. Emerson wishes to provoke us into an “original relation to the universe,” one that through “revelation to us” will help us produce “our own works and laws and worship.” (“Nature,” 7, italics mine) Without mediation by tradition we shall make ourselves by ourselves.

What Bloom calls the “anxiety of influence” produces in Emerson one of the strongest, most provocative versions of reading. What Emerson preaches is a refashioning, the taking of contingent materials in order (only in order?) to make something authentically “you,” where this at the same time means “new.” “It came into him life; it went out from him truth.” (“American Scholar,” 55) Emerson essentially shucks off concern with “authorial intention,” something an ordinary literary critic cannot do without. But for Emerson, the first pragmatist, “the sacredness which attaches to the act of creation … is transferred to the record,” and this is a “grave mischief.” (ibid.) “Genius,” for Emerson, “is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over-influence.” (57) The suggestion is that “One must be an inventor to read well,” that the only good reading is a selective, “creative reading,” a misreading in Bloom’s terms—“the discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least part,—only the authentic utterances of the oracle;—all the rest he rejects….” (58)

Emerson: “Circles,” “The Poet,” “Experience”

Harold Bloom once remarked that, despite his preternatural verbal memory, he had a tough time recalling the placement of prominent passages in Emerson, thinking it in one essay and instead finding it in another. The experience must be a common one, and I’ve already encountered it many times. It no doubt has much to do with Emerson’s solid foot in oral tradition, with its reliance on interchangeable formula, but also with his obsession with the transumption of the past, which he often identified with power and the promise of America.

Emerson is America’s theorist of self-creation and this comes out well in “Circles.” The trope of the circle contains the core of Emerson’s vision of an agonistic relation to the past. We are born into life and find ourselves amongst circles already drawn, but Emerson’s Law of Compensation says that “every action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn….” (“Circles,” 228) Emerson analogizes thinking and acting to the activity of drawing circles, as summing up a situation as this or that. As always, though, Emerson wants us to focus on the activity of drawing as the important bit, not the circle itself: “a little waving hand built this huge wall, and that which builds is better than that which is built.” (229)

Emerson’s conception of the poet goes back to its Greek roots: poiesis, or “making.” The poet is the self-maker, involved in “the transcendency of their own nature….” (“The Poet,” 255) Emerson twice calls poets “liberating gods” (257, 258) and one has to think that, in America’s lionization of freedom, that Emerson has Shelley’s maxim at heart when he says, “They [poets] are free, and they make free.” (258) This comes to a head (a little later on then our reading) when Emerson laments that he looks “in vain for the poet whom I describe.” (261) Emerson slyly bids to be that poet for America, but in the wide sense in which the Greeks first used it before the coming domination of prose in Plato’s Athenian 5th century. Presaging Whitman, America’s poet in the narrower sense, Emerson declares that “America is a poem in our eyes….” (262)

Emerson takes a much darker form in “Experience.” Waxing to the philosophical milieu current in the Old World, Emerson echoes to the gulf between the subject (person) and object. For Emerson, though, this isn’t simply a distinction between us and rocks, but between us and our desires, us and other people. This creates a great pathos, one summed up by the cliché “The grass is always greener…,” but in Emerson, “Every ship is a romantic object, except that we sail in. Embark, and the romance quits our vessel and hangs on every other sail in the horizon.” (267) Emerson grieves for the time we once had originary participation with the world, called Eden, which we were fated to be ejected with “the discovery we have made that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man.” (284) Emerson’s darkest passage, however, is the knowledge that all we hold dear is held together simply “by love on one part and by forbearance to press objection on the other part….” (285) All life is a continual negotiation, fragile and always open for option.

Bloom and Criticism

Pirsig's use of "philosophology" is a pet peeve of mine, probably the major place at which I have to break ranks with Pirsig and leave him to his own devices. I mentioned the other day that Bloom has been deepening my notion of the "critic" and her travails, which is only natural considering how Rorty was influenced by Bloom. I'm currently reading Bloom's The Breaking of the Vessels and I'd like to bring out some passages that I think reflect and deepen the stance I've taken earlier when claiming that all explicit criticism of philosophy is philosophy and that all philosophy is implicitly criticism of other philosophy.

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Criticism is not a science, not even a "human science," and it is not a branch of philosophy. The theory of poetry need not meet the tests by which science and philosophy rate theory, or by which they decide what is or is not theory. The theory of poetry, like all criticism, is an art, a teachable and useful art, and its true criteria are poetic: it must be memorable, pragmatic where it is most visionary, and it must give pleasure, even if only to an elite. I would sum up its necessary attributes in one formula: it must be strong, with the strength of usurpation, of persistence, of eloquence. By these criteria, most current theory can be given back to the empirical scientists, to the social scientists, and to the dialectical philosophers. Facts and arguments alike have little to do with poetry, or with poetic criticism. In homage to Emerson, who changed my mind about nearly everything when I was in the middle of the journey, back around 1965, I call upon him here as my incessant authority:

A man of genius or a work of love and beauty will not come to order, cant be compounded by the best rules, but is always new and incalculable result, like health. Dont rattle your rules in our ears; we must behave as we can. Criticism is an art when it does not stop at the words of the poet, but looks at the order of his thoughts and the essential quality of his mind. Then the critic is poet. 'Tis a question not of talents but of tone; and not particular merits, but the mood of mind into which one and another bring us.

...

Rhetoric, in Emerson's definition, is the "sovereignty of thought to make facts and men obey our present humor or belief." What Emerson calls metonymy is technically the metonymy of a metonymy, or metalepsis, and was Emerson's favorite trope, as it was Nietzsche's. No critical speculator, not even Nietzsche, was more aware than Emerson of the rhetorical drive that the poetic will directs against anteriority, against prior tropes. And no critic, not even Oscar Wilde, matches Emerson in his valorization of criticism over literature. This maxim, which gives such offense today, is stated by Emerson in one fierce transumptive formula:

Criticism must be transcendental, that is, must consider literature ephemeral, and easily entertain the supposition of its entire disapperance. In our ordinary states of mind, we deem not only letters in general, but most famous books parts of a pre-established harmony, fatal, unalterable, and do not go behind Dante and Shakespeare, much less behind Moses, Ezekiel, and St. John. But man is critic of all these also, and should treat the entire extant product of the human intellect as only one age, revisable, corrigible, reversible by him.

Emerson is calling upon the reader to revise, correct and reverse all of literature, until the reader has become more transcendental and extraordinary than all the wealth of texts. I do not think that Emerson idealizes or is ironic here. Our own rejected thoughts, returning to us with an alienated luster, are what account for the uncanniness of the strong reading experience. Emerson praised Milton for the adage that the poet "ought himself to be a true poem," and then transcended Milton by urging the reader to become an even truer poem than the poet. But how can such a program be pragmatic, and thus proper to criticism? How can the critic as strong reader so revise, correct, and reverse Paradise Lost, as to become a poem truer than that magnificence? I have discovered that what many moldy fig academics and most literary journalists authentically share is a capacity for boundless indignation when I advocate a contemporary version of the Emersonian program. With what zeal they come forward, proclaiming the sanctity of the text of Milton and of Shelley, of Whitman and of Stevens, which the responsible reader is not to revise, correct and reverse, but rather to repeat, congeal, and revere. Their name is legion, and they are what our father Emerson meant when he spoke of "the sterile & stingy Nature." (25-8)

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Where do we find Pirsig in these lines? When Bloom says that criticism is not philosophy, he means not anglophone, let's-analyze-the-nature-of-logic philosophy. In its widest sense, I do not see a difference between criticism and philosophy, criticism and the love and search for wisdom. Without criticism, what could value possibly mean? Which is why I've always found Pirsig's knee-jerk response to the academy in Lila's 26th chapter to more indicative of Pirsig's mood then very good criticism. Of course, as Emerson reminds us, the mood is very important. I think Pirsig's place is as standing beside Bloom and Emerson. Bloom says that Emerson knew that "reading strong poems costs us a great deal, or, as he said, nothing is got for nothing." (28) I find Pirsig more Bloomian in criticism and Bloom more Pirsigian in philosophy when Bloom says, "All criticism that matters is experiential criticism, and experience here means literature in life and life in literature. When has loving another person, or even loving oneself, cost nothing?" (29) I see Pirsig above all when Bloom says, "Poetry, like criticism, is conflict and crisis, is projected jealousy and the death drive, is the horror and the allure of incest," that "the true paradigms both for poetry and for interpretation include the family romance." (ibid.)

I see Pirsig in Bloom's lines, but I often see Pirsig acting out his childish demand to be unique. And in those places I see his children regressing even further back, until we get his moldy fig successors demanding that we repeat, congeal, and revere. It's not Pirsig's demand that is childish, for that demand is repeated by all strong poets. It is what tells us more than anything that Pirsig demands to be seen in his family romance with Plato, Carnap, and the Buddha. What's childish is the petulance with which he delivers his demands, like a child demanding a cookie before dinner, rather than an authority demanding obeisance. Pirsig has some authority, which is what makes the petulance all the stranger.

I cheer most readily, and I can hear Pirsig behind me, when I read these lines:

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When Paul de Man tells me that an epistemological stance in regard to a literary text is necessarily more privileged than any aesthetic or moral stance, all I can do is grin cheerfully and rejoin that such a stance is no more or less literary, no more or less a trope, than the most self-abasing belly-prone reverence of professor Moldy Fig or the self-aggrandizing Bloomian wildness. What can a trope provoke except a trope, would be the Yeatsian question, to which I would reply: only the troping of a prior trope, or of the concept of trope itself.

...

[From Emerson] The Supreme Critic on all the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other...

I want to convert this to a Low Transcendentalism, which is to say, to a Pragmatism. It is like Emerson that he carries his dark doctrine of reading to the point of scandal, by rejecting even Shakespeare, when the rejection is done from the Gnostic perspective of absolute freedom, from the stance of the Oversoul, which the ancient Gnostics called the pneuma or spark. My own quarrel is not with deconstructions of the psyche; as a belated or Emersonian Gnostic I am more than prepared to see that reduced to the trace of a trace. But what I have called the poet in a poet, or the poet qua poet, I would call now by the ancient name of the Orphic or Gnostic or Kabbalistic spark, the pneuma of the poet and of the knowing reader. "The soul knows only the soul," Emerson said, which I translate as: the strong reader and the strong poet know only the strong reading, a reading which is a relational event, a concept of happening and not a concept of being. (30-2)

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I read a lot out of this for my pursuits with Pirsig, and someday I will try and make its relation to static and Dynamic more apparent. But part of my project is to relocate the Dynamic as not outside the static, but as something in between the static. And in criticism, this is my forerunner:

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I have quoted extensively [from Emerson], yet the best commentary I can provide is one antithetical apothegm: even the strongest poem, particularly the strongest poem, costs us too much, but without that cost the poem is only so many words, and not human action. Emerson, precursor of Pragmatism as he was, knows that only a difference that makes a difference matters. Poems matter only if we matter, and so there is no true criticism that is not experiential criticism, and poems must rely upon such criticism. But experiential criticism itself relies upon consciousness, and consciousness is of the Oversoul. Call the Oversoul the Orphic or Dionysiac commonal, democratic and yet elitist, and center it where it must be centered, in the antithetical reader. There are no texts, so that it makes little difference to affirm that there is nothing outside the text. Rather, there are configurations, richly perverse interlockings of a multiplicity of strong texts and a few scattered handfuls of strong readers. Poetry happens within those configurations, within those ratios of revision that adjust the intricate balances of psychic warfare between and within texts and readers. (34)

Begging the Question, Part II

Answering the Nazi
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What I would like to bring out of Pirsig's texts is how Pirsig seems to want to usurp the rhetoric of the "hard" sciences as paradigms of argumentation, that Pirsig seems to want to make morals arguable. Whether, in the end, Pirsig does want to make the Nazi answerable, I think, is still left open.

To do this, I would like to use the example of the Nazi as the paradigm case of a morally corrupted individual. For our purposes, the case of the Nazi is only interesting if he is a convinced Nazi, as convinced of the morality of Nazism as we are convinced of its immorality, and a sophisticated philosopher, as sophisticated in the art of argumentation and rhetoric as we are. What many individuals want is a knock-down, logical argument, the force of which would, if the Nazi were to remain a sane, logical interlocuter, demand that the Nazi recant his erroneous ways.

Rorty's reply to such a request is that "there is no neutral, common ground to which an experienced Nazi philosopher and I can repair in order to argue out our differences. That Nazi and I will always strike one another as begging all the crucial questions, arguing in circles." (p. 15, PSH) Rorty says that we cannot answer the Nazi because we do not hold enough of the relevant premises in common to have an argument in which our arguments and his arguments are engageable, answerable in terms we both would recognize as good, sufficient, and relevant.

It has been pointed out on many occasions that Pirsig has this to say about morality and pragmatism: "James would probably have been horrified to find that Nazis could use his pragmatism just as freely as anyone else, but Phaedrus didn't see anything that would prevent it. But he thought that the Metaphysics of Quality's classification of static patterns of good prevents this kind of debasement." People have tried to say that this makes the MoQ impossible for the Nazi to use, that, in effect, you can answer the Nazi by using the MoQ.

There are several problems with Pirsig's analysis of pragmatism and the Nazis. For one, the reason why pragmatism appears to be cooptable is because pragmatism only makes a negative point about the state of philosophy, it makes no positive contributions to our discourse about literature, morality, or politics. James would not have been horrified at the cooptation of his philosophy because James held too much in common with Nietzsche. What protected James from the Nazi was his American politics, not his philosophy. It was his Whitmanian faith in democracy and plurality that confronted the Nazi. This, however, isn't the problem I want to focus on, so I will not attend to the various arguments and counters.

The second problem is that I see no reason to think that a sophisticated Nazi philosopher could not co-opt the MoQ just as easily as an American rhetoric teacher. Just as a sophisticated rhetoric teacher can redescribe the history of philosophy in terms of Quality, so can a sophisticated Nazi redescribe a metaphysical system and tailor it to fit his needs. The problem with metaphysical systems, with philosophy in general, is that it is too general. When you have a systematic moral hierarchy of Dynamic Quality, intellectual static patterns, social static patterns, biological static patterns, and inorganic static patterns, what's to stop the Nazi from describing Jews as no more than animals, the fascist state as being the most evolved government, Alfred Rosenberg's "blood, race, and soil" interpretation of the MoQ as the greatest philosophical achievement, and Adolf Hitler the great brujo of our generation? As far as I can see, as long as we stay at generalities, nothing.

What stops the Nazi is concretizing the MoQ, defining the terms of the MoQ so that democracy is the greatest government and freedom the greatest intellectual achievement. However, this creates the third problem of reading Pirsig as answering the Nazi, in being able to do something that James cannot: if we insist on our definitions of the MoQ, we beg the question in our favor over the Nazi. In effect, we don't answer him, we merely exclude him from our conversation. In fact, when we look closely, it isn't clear that Pirsig is saying that the MoQ answers the Nazi. He says that the MoQ "prevents this kind of debasement", meaning that the way the MoQ should be interpreted prevents the Nazi from arguing for his own morals, in other words, it excludes him from continuing the conversation in terms he would use. It stops him cold and causes him to reply, "Well, have it your way. I refuse to enter the arena."

But it certainly seems like Pirsig wants to answer the Nazi, particularly if he denies he can be criticized the same way he criticizes James. The problem is that Pirsig seems to want to say that we can argue about morals, that reason in the Platonic, dialectical sense, is something that should not be divorced from morals. In ZMM, Pirsig felt that the solution to the Platonic, SOM mess was "a new philosophy ... a new spiritual rationality--in which the ugliness and the loneliness and the spiritual blankness of dualistic technological reason would become illogical." (ZMM, 368) Pirsig wants to erect a new philosophy, a new rationality, a new five-step deductive proof in which, with our new assumptions in tow like how Quality comes before subjects and objects, we can argue with people about morals and art. "Reason and Quality had become separated and in conflict with each other" (ibid., 368) and Pirsig wants to bring them back together.

Pirsig continues his cooptation of an argumentative model of morality in his rhetoric in Lila by usurping the rhetoric of the sciences. On page 183 he says, "it is absolutely, scientifically moral for a doctor to prefer a patient. ... We're at last dealing with morals on the basis of reason. We can now deduce codes based on evolution that analyze moral arguments with greater precision than before." "[A]bsolutely, scientifically", "the basis of reason", "deduce codes", "precision". These are things we find routinely in physics and chemistry, but not so often in ethics. Two more times: "Is it scientifically moral for a society to kill a human being?" (ibid., 184) and "A culture that supports the dominance of social values over biological values is an absolutely superior culture to one that does not...." (ibid., 357) His use of this rhetoric isn't extensive, but it is evocative and overbearing. It overshadows all of his moral pronouncements and his system.

To reformulate everything I've been saying so far, pragmatists are Humeans, they think reason the slave of the passions. Pragmatists think this because they think you can be a perfectly logical and reasonable and intellectual if you are a convinced Nazi, just the same as a convinced liberal or conservative or religious fundamentalist. The moral engine is not reason, as if you could argue a Nazi down, but passion, getting people to feel sorry about the immiseration of other people, jerking their tears at the sight of Holocaust victims. Rorty's point is that there is no way to answer the Nazi, there is no way to argue with him. The Nazi has different moral intuitions. We beg the question over each other when we argue because we are using different assumptions. However, while we can't answer the Nazi, Rorty urges that we can convert him. This doesn't occur by argumentation, it occurs by persuading him with pictures of the atrocities he has done, accounts of how the Jewish family acts and behaves and loves just like the Nazi family, that the Nazi shouldn't exclude the Jew from his we-consciousness. Clear thinking and reason and rationality are great. But Hume's point is that our clear thinking will always be in the service of our passional natures. In other words, clear thinking occurs on the model of a 5-step proof and that will always be in the service of a final vocabulary.

Pirsig's big enemy is the lack of value in science and reason, but what is he really doing, what is going on? Pirsig was right, there was nothing to stop the Nazi from coopting James' pragmatism, but Pirsig was sorely wrong to think that his MoQ was somehow safe from cooptation if it is simply based on his new hierarchy for reality. If you abstract away from the concrete, away from moral intuitions, you are either easily cooptable (like pragmatism and the morally abstract MoQ), or begging the question (like when you fill in the abstract with the concrete).

So we are led back to our question: does Pirsig want to answer the Nazi? I think the answer is still inconclusive. I think given the language he uses, it still appears that Pirsig wants to be able to wrestle the Nazi down, he wants to rely on more than our "soup of sentiments". But can he, can Pirsig, given the tools laid out presently, wrestle the Nazi down? No, he cannot. Even if Pirsig wants to create a new spiritual rationality, a logical game where the Nazi couldn't possibly win, it isn't clear yet that Pirsig is implying that the Nazi is forced to play this game, is compelled to play by our assumptions, in our terms. The question is still open.

To bring this question through one last twist, one last spin of the hermeneutical wheel, I will offer the most compelling reason I've found to believe that Pirsig thinks that the Nazi should be compelled to play our game. It hinges on the acquisition of our moral intuitions and hence, as one might guess, on Dynamic Quality.

To Part III