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.

Quine, Sellars, Empiricism, and the Linguistic Turn

Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" is thought of by most analytic philosophers as the watershed moment in the destruction of logical positivism. He may have been the first major post-linguistic turn philosopher to identify themself as a pragmatist (and here I'm not counting his Harvard colleague Morton White in the equation). Replaying the death agonies of logical positivism is a good way of seeing where the classical pragmatists tie in with the contemporary, analytic dialectic, and that paper is a must read in that sense.

What Quine wanted to do was purify empiricism, which in its post-linguistic turn phase is what logical positivism was supposed to be a form of. Analytic philosophers, ever since somebody thought it would be brilliant to turn to the study of the way we use words (whether mainline positivists like Rudolph Carnap and A.J. Ayer or Oxford/ordinary-language philosophers like P.F. Strawson and Gilbert Ryle), thought their job was to study "meaning," to find the meanings of words, display how meaning was created, etc. "Conceptual analysis" became what philosophers thought they did, what their special provenance was in relation to the other disciplines. It promoted the thought that, since science was the empirical discipline, science would tell us about the stuff of the world, but philosophy would explain to science what their words meant.

How empirical is that? is roughly the thought that motivated Quine. The very idea of "conceptual analysis" was of basically an a priori discipline, an activity where one didn't have to study anything in the world, but could just sit in your armchair and figure the stuff out--just like Descartes' problems of other minds and the external world. But wasn't the motivation behind logical positivism the destruction and avoidance of pointless metaphysical problems, weird things like whether there was anything going on outside your door ("leave your office" would have been G.E. Moore's reply), which are specifically produced by a kind of armchair speculation that required no input from the world?

Quine's first dogma was the analytic/synthetic distinction, something Kant had made up at the spur of the moment in the First Critique as a way of splitting the difference between the Rationalists and Empiricists (only so named because of Kant's work). Kant's distinction became the basis of the distinction between statements whose meaning and truth was derived only in virtue of their relationship to other statements ("analytic statements" such as "All bachelors are single") and statements whose meaning and truth one not only needed other statements, but also participation of the world to figure out ("rocks fall to the earth," the truth of which can only be determined by a synthesis of the meanings of each individual word and then looking out into the world). Science would do the "looking out into the world" bit, but they would need someone to help them with the other bit, the analytic statements you don't need experiments for. This, for someone like Quine, basically just looks like a Rationalist throw-back, a haven for the Cartesian speculation the sober-minded English Empiricists had wanted to throw cold water over.

By ditching the first dogma, we eliminate the basis for an armchair, a priori discipline like "conceptual analysis," thus putting us back on the path of a thorough-going empiricism. Quine, it is largely thought, didn't quite make it by himself, however. His second dogma, reductionism, was the pernicious reduction of knowledge statements to sensations, or "immediate experience." People impressed by James and Dewey, who still used such locutions, shouldn't be fooled by the term into thinking that Quine's dogma swings at what the classical pragmatists were talking about. James' radical empiricism was supposed to be as much a purification of the terms of empiricism as the post-positivist dialectic was. Quine, though, didn't in the end mean the end of that dogma was much as he should have. He erects in his work the idea of "observation sentences" as opposed other sentences, and the latter end up playing the same role as before. And then there's Quine's over-bearing scientism, his penchant for saying that everything can/should be reduced to physics, the only language that "limns the world."

Philosophers dissatisfied with Quine's tack at reductionism have increasingly turned to Wilfrid Sellars, a by-comparison neglected figure that I believe recently has been receiving a substantial reappreciation (primarily motivated by the rise of Robert Brandom and John McDowell). Sellars' seminal "Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind" was produced at just about the same time as Quine's "Two Dogmas," but received much less attention. Sellars' enemy in that paper is what he calls the Myth of the Given, the idea that there is a bald experience given to our minds that we simply add the hairplugs of language to. This was the attack Quine should have made on reductionism, but didn't.

Sellars, too though, didn't quite make it to a pure empiricism. He, too, liked to talk about science as the end all be all, and his way of making the point was a distinction between our manifest image of the world and the scientific image of the world. The manifest one was the fake one that, while not reducible to the scientific one, needed to be dealt with properly in the face of the true, scientific image--and philosophy could help with its "conceptual analysis."

Rorty liked to say that it was almost as if Sellars and Quine were only able to reject the one dogma of the other, and needed their respective second one to retain their self-image as analytic philosophers. Donald Davidson, Quine's greatest pupil, helped ditch the whole damn thing and finally set us on the path of a fully purified empiricism. He called the third, and hopefully last, dogma of empiricism the scheme/content distinction. This distinction underlaid the others and its motivation was to call into question the idea that language was a kind of scheme we laid on top of experienced content. This, too, was a Kantian relic, that between what he called "concepts" and "intuitions," such that one could say, "thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind."

This is what Kant meant by the mind constituting the world--the world's there, sure enough, but its only presentation to us is by virtue of our mind's constitution of it in our own mind. But this raises the Cartesian spectare again, that we are trapped in our own minds, maybe knowing that there are other ones out there, but not knowing whether we are constituting the world in just the same way--if we are using different conceptual schemes, we might be living in different worlds. Please Obi-philosophy Kenobi--tell us what our conceptual schemes are and how they constitute. Davidson's ditching of the scheme/content distinction again destroys the basis for an armchair, speculative discipline and thrusts us all back into the same world, the one no one has ever really left.

The punchline to the story is that whereas Quine wanted to be both an empiricist and a pragmatist, Davidson isn't sure what's left of either once we pull the underpinnings out. Rorty and Hilary Putnam, the two most prominent post-linguistic turn self-identified pragmatists, themselves have wondered explicitly about what is left of empiricism once one ditches all the dogmas of positivism, though they think the core insights of James and Dewey untouched. (I have a brief talking up of Putnam on this score here.) Even more weird is Brandom calling his Sellarsian inferentialism a kind of rationalism--a much different sort than the 17th century Europeans, but the resurrection of the title bearing out how much damage Brandom thinks Locke's confusion of causation with justification caused philosophy.

The "confusion of causation with justification" is a direct allusion to Rorty, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. In the chapter that opens the second part, the part that deals with representational epistemology, he titles one of the sections "Locke's Confusion of Explanation with Justification," which is roughly between knowledge of where something came from and knowledge that something is so and so. This leads to Davidson's distinction between reasons and causes, such that a reason (part of the web of justification) can be a cause (can change your mind, spur you into action, etc.), but a cause is not in itself a reason. You can be caused to think you see water, but the fact that you see water is not, by itself, a reason to think so--it is only within a network of other beliefs, the whole context of the situation, that a caused-belief can become a reason-to-believe. For instance, the fact that you are in a desert, dying of dehydration, and gored out of your mind on shrooms might give one pause before transferring the sight of water to having a good reason to think there's water over that horizon ahead.

I think it an open question as to whether retro-pragmatists like David Hildebrand are right about there being an important line to be drawn between classical pragmatists like James and Dewey and neopragmatists like Rorty and Putnam, one roughly centering around the "radical empiricism" of the former set, and supposed lack there-of in the latter. I still tend to think that there's simply an unimportant line between the classical tendency to talk about experience and the neo tendency to talk about language, with no further major philosophical implications.

The main thesis for this line of thought is that the role radical empiricism plays for James (with Dewey having an analogous section of his philosophy that could be so-named) is the same role "psychological nominalism" plays for Sellars (with a likewise analogous section in Rorty). We might call the slogan of radical empiricism "everything is experience," and the intuitive appeal of this slogan makes it easy to see why James and Dewey might wield it opposition to those who take, for instance, meanings to be analytic, and therefore non-experiential (for if they were, they'd be synthetic in the requisite sense). Psychological nominalism's slogan, however, is "all awareness is a linguistic affair," which on the surface seems counter-intuitive--am I really aware of that sunset I'm appreciating silently linguistically? I don't think psychological nominalism, however, quite means this kind of thing. It has to be understood in the context of various kinds of atomism, particularly the kinds that surfaced in early analytic philosophy.

My suggestion about the parallel qualities of radical empiricism and psychological nominalism is that both are kinds of holism, and that the only difference between the two is a difference in jargon, in the state of the philosophical dialogue that each arose out of and responded to. We might encapsulate the differences by saying that modern philosophy was birthed out of Greek when talk moved from being about "reality" to being about "experience." Rorty, Whitehead, and Dewey all advanced historical arguments about the lack of an internal "place" called the mind where reality played itself out for us (Whitehead called it the birth of the "subjectivist principle"). This created a divorce between reality and our experience-of-reality such that now we had to deal with problems about just when we were in touch with reality.

The atomistic response are various correspondentisms, philosophical theories about how this bit of experience rubs up against this bit reality, which it does in a one-to-one relation. Dewey and James advanced their ideas about experience in this milieu of experience-talk, and their basic suggestion was to collapse experience back into reality--experience is reality (witness James' "a world of pure experience" and Dewey's appreciation of Aristotle's pre-modern, anti-Platonism). Their's was a kind of holism, for it consisted in the idea that our experiences all relate to each other in a hanging web, and trying to pinpoint connections between this web and something else is pure folly. For the web, our experience of life, works in getting us through life, and it is only a kind of retrograde metaphysical dogmatism that keeps us trying for something more--we need to stop thinking there is something more.

Psychological nominalism, on the other hand, consists in the same move, except now the linguistic turn has made philosophers think that there is a divorce between language and experience. Early atomists like Russell and Carnap spent their time trying to elaborate theories that specified when this linguistic-bit here connected to that experience-chunk over there. Sellars attack on the Myth of the Given was on the idea that our linguistic concepts overlaid bald experiences. "All awareness is a linguistic affair" is simply the analogous collapse of language into experience that James and Dewey did for experience into reality.

What we basically have is a line that looks like this: language-about-experience-of-reality. The Greeks, having just become leisured, reflective individuals, talked about "reality," though they occasionally would stumble down a path where it sounds as if they recognize the modern fact that we each experience reality differently. They did understand this commonsensically, but they didn't charge it with any special philosophical significance. It was only after the march of thousands of more philosophers, trampling down the philosophical terrain, trying to get various theories to work, that Descartes, Locke, and the rest suddenly get the idea that, maybe we should charge the fact that different eyeballs see different ways with philosophically-charged metaphorical significance. And so they began promoting an expansion of what knowing is of from the object "reality" to tacking on "experience-of-reality."

This new philosophical situation took hold in part because of an equivocation in terminology--Descartes and Locke used the word "idea" to denote both (what we might now distinguish as) perceptions and conceptions. As modern philosophy moved passed Kant, who isolated explicitly the two (in intuitions and concepts respectively), and thousands of more philosophers (aided by expansions in population, education, and professionalization) trampled down this new terrain, philosophers began sniffing more and more around the idea that, hey, what really is the difference between a concept and word? Isn't it just a silly Platonism, with a universal Realm of Forms, that would make us think otherwise? (This is what makes sense out of the "nominalism" bit in Sellars' platform name--nominalism was the medieval counter to Plato's Realm of Forms idea.)

The linguistic turn was roughly the realization that when we talk about reality, we are talking about experience or reality, we are using words, language, and that when this or that philosopher, be they Platonist, Thomist, Cartesian, Kantian or Russellian, suggests taking up this or that philosophical position, they aren't changing the world like a bridge-builder does, they are suggesting a change in thought, which is to say, in our conceptions, which is to say, in the words we use to describe the world. And so analytic philosophers began promoting a further expansion of what knowing is of from the object "experience-of-reality" to tacking on "language-about-experience-of-reality."

One way to conceive of what the holists are up to is to see them as trying to get us back to a kind of pre-Platonic common sense position, before the whole obsession over knowing what knowing was even started. The only point in collapsing language-into-experience or experience-into-reality is if you'd also be just as willing to finish the collapse into the remainder, unconsidered term.

The classical pragmatists got the feeling that philosophy was taking us away from life, and they adumbrated radical empiricisms as a way of returning us to the scene of life. Retro-pragmatists see the linguistic turn as another philosophical circumlocution that just gets in the way life. Retro-pragmatists are attracted to the classicals' repeated insistence that their philosophical positions will reestablish life as first in the philosophical order of things.

My thought tends to run, "How could life not come first? Life is everything." As I understand Dewey, his notion of indirect experience was as reflective experience, but direct experience wasn't necessarily non-linguistic (I adumbrate this understanding here). Abstract, reflective thinking pulls us out of "direct experience," but this is just to say that it pulls us out of our typical habits with which we approach the world. The first principle that all three classical pragmatists held in equally tight fashion was Alexander Bain's, that thoughts are habits of action. People who live in their heads live in worlds constructed out of their imagination, an indirect world if you will. But people who write, read, or talk a lot aren't necessarily neglecting direct experience, in Dewey's sense. We can easily achieve equilibrium in our lives, between reading the newspaper, watching sunsets, loving our partners, and writing philosophical papers about the pointlessness of atomism.

I think at the heart of the difference between philosophers attracted to the classical pragmatists but repelled by Rorty is the thought that radical empiricism returns us to the scene of life, a counter to abstract philosophical sterilities. I can empathize with the formulation, to the idea of pragmatism "returning us to the scene of life," a formula I've grown fond of. However, what I think we should rather say in most cases, is that philosophy is abstract by nature--that's what it is--and returning to the scene of life is something that people need to figure out how to do, not necessarily philosophies, or other abstract activities. For instance, why would we necessarily want theoretical physics to do so? Philosophy is Dewey's indirect experience--returning to life is knowing, as Wittgenstein put it, when to put philosophy down.

And yet still, to say as many want to, particularly amateur philosophers, as I am, that we should return philosophy to the scene of life, I have continued sympathy with. But I also have a strong regard for the division of labor, and a suspicion that if we let a thousand flowers bloom, there's a good chance we might find one we like in a garden that we didn't plant. That's what I take amateur philosophy, in particular, to be--one of our major purposes is to steal other people's flowers and bring the ones we like, even if they were grown in a sterile hydroponic farm, back to the grubby garden we got going behind the house. We shouldn't rip on the hydroponic farmers too much--without them, we wouldn't have gotten that flower and, hey, at the end of the day, they go back to their houses, too. I sense this wisdom in Rorty's writings about the relative merits of professionalization in philosophy, and that that is the parallel to James and Dewey's talk about getting back to life. All three talked a lot about setting aside pointless philosophical puzzles. This is just to say that perhaps we've improved this particular flower as much as we can, so perhaps we should move on to some others.

Be that as it may, reading Quine or Sellars or Davidson can help one figure out what kind of empiricist one wants to be by helping see what the destruction of logical positivism pans out to mean. Empiricism began as a reaction to Descartes' attempt to laud science's place in culture. The rationalists thought the New Science was an expansion of Reason's will over us (it was) whereas the empiricists thought the New Science was inauguration of a new experimentalness (it was). They were both wrong in their rightness, and while there may yet be interesting disagreement about the rhetorical upshot of this or that old wine bottle ("Empiricism stands and falls with the idea of unconceptualized content, and to say otherwise is just confused." "Nominalism? Really? Should we really be going back to the Middle Ages?"), what needs to be kept at the forefront is the new wine that everybody is drinking.

American Lit Notebook: Douglass

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 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Yale University Press, 2001).

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Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

There are many fascinating things about Douglass’s text and his technique, but I should like to focus on a few of the episodes in which Douglass sheds the decorum he was shackled with by his position in arguing with, and for, a white crowd. Douglass’s first attempt at autobiography was written as an argument, plain and simple. Closely held by the abolitionists, what we might call Douglass’s curbing of authenticity is also just smart rhetorical policy—one has to be very subtle and very smart in how one goes about exploding deeply held assumptions.

Perhaps the first example of a subtle rebuke to the white culture he seeks to rationally convince occurs on page 19:

“The competitors for this office sought as diligently to please their overseers, as the office-seekers in the political parties seek to please and deceive the people. The same traits of character might be seen in Colonel Lloyd’s slaves, as are seen in the slaves of the political parties.”

This is no mere figuration—there were actually slaves, so using that figure is no slight thing. It is always easy, then as today, to take pot-shots at politicians. But abolitionism itself was something of a political movement and I can’t help but see here a slight rebuff to his own compatriots. Another prominent example, now far less subtle, was his explicit rebuke of the famed underground railroad at the head of Chapter 11, suggesting that it might as well be called the “upperground railroad.” (71) We, as children, still learn about the underground railroad and the good it performed (it even featured in the origination of the Bat Cave in the recent remakes of the Batman myth), but one can’t help but feel, given Douglass’s very sensible remarks about its publicity “enlightening the master,” that the fame the underground railroad still receives might be in part to white people trying to emphasize their own contribution.

Be that as it may, Douglass’s comments about religion are still by far the most shocking, even today. He’s right in every word, its obfuscation of morality and intensifying of the slaver’s cruelty appearing consistently throughout the latter half of the narrative, but the intensity and explicitness that occurs in the Appendix still surprises. (Enjoying these kinds of rhetorical provocations, I still remember with pleasure my first reading of Douglass’s Fourth of July speech, which, if memory serves, is even more scathing than the Appendix, and on more fronts.) Our reading is severally conditioned: first, Garrison prefaces by commenting, “The effect of a religion profession on the conduct of southern masters is vividly described….” (9) Here, impropriety might be thought circumscribed to the south. Second, the first appearance of religion ambiguously affects those of the south: Captain Auld became worse, but Mr. Cookman was a “good man” and Mr. Wilson tried to teach them to read. (44) Thirdly, and most importantly, the first generalizing comments Douglass makes about religion are introduced with “the religion of the south” (57) This is, in effect, a designed seduction. When we get to the Appendix, we are used to just glossing the comment about religion as “southern religion.” That way northerners won’t get their panties in a bunch. But that’s when Douglass hits us really hard. He introduces his real topic as “slaveholding religion,” (81) which we might naturally by this point gloss as “religion of the slaveholders,” and then go on to gloss “this land” as the South. Not so, it turns out. In a tremendous reversal, Douglass begins a paragraph about “professed Christians,” which we are still reading as only Southerners, though perhaps with a little growing apprehension, until we get to “They love the heathen on the other side of the globe. … while they despise and totally neglect the heathen at their own doors.” (83) One can almost hear the bubble-breaking, and even I was so caught up that I scrawled, “Wait, is he talking about the North now?” Which he makes explicit a few lines later: “those bodies, north and south.”

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.

Religion, a Utilitarian Ethics of Belief, and the Public/Private Distinction

*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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Towards the end of his life, one of Rorty’s favorite passages to quote from Dewey was, “democracy is neither a form of government nor a social expediency, but a metaphysic of the relation of man and his experience in nature….”[fn.1] The earliest, clearest expression of what Rorty took this passage to mean is his “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy.” In that paper, Rorty sought to defend Rawlsian liberal philosophy from liberal theorists like Ronald Dworkin and communitarian liberal-critics like Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor by urging that Rawls, like Dewey, is putting democracy before philosophy—democracy does not need philosophical justification (nor a fortiori has philosophical presuppositions), but it can, if people would like one, have philosophical expression. A few years after writing that paper, Rorty wrote the centerpiece of his lifework, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. This book famously erected the public/private distinction that so many liberals have found troubling. Rorty, however, meant no more and no less than what Jefferson meant by the separation between church and state—keep your private life out of the government, and the government will stay out of your private life.

The formulation of “man’s metaphysic,” the philosophical expression of the democratic ethos, that Rorty favored when talking about religion was as a “utilitarian ethics of belief.” The staging point is Jefferson’s incarnation of Mill in his swerve from Locke—the point of life is happiness, and let all be free to pursue it as they choose, just so long as their pursuits don’t infringe on the pursuits of others. Because we all have a right to our own private pursuits, just so long as they do not infringe on each other or public projects, Rorty argues that James formulates a new philosophy of truth and knowledge to suit the new cultural ideal created by the signing of the Declaration of Independence. A utilitarian ethics of belief suggests, first and foremost, that the only claims that should be met are the claims made by actual people. A generalized update of Peirce’s disposal of Descartes’ fake doubt, this assertion doesn’t mean we can’t use hypotheticals or the examples of literary texts in our deliberations, but simply that their occasion must be, in James’ words, “live, momentous, and forced.”

Of course, what is as up for deliberation as any decision we may face is whether a particular choice is genuine, whether it is live, momentous, and/or forced. Abstract philosophizing, such as it is above the fray of life, must be careful not to pronounce too sharply on the denizens below, though it is tempting. James found this temptation in Clifford’s demand that the religiously pious give up the charade of warranted belief in the face of science’s advance. James and Rorty push back: the scientistically pious are as bad as the religious—perhaps everyone should hand in their clerical collars.

In Rorty’s efforts to fend off scientific reductionism and intellectual rationalism, however, he employs a mishandled strategy in several of his papers. The general strategy is this: by deploying the public/private distinction, we may separate out two kinds of demands respectively. Public demands are those we find when making laws, setting tax code, or when a nation struggles in the face of a neoconservative induced economic depression. For these kinds of demands, we need a thin level of discourse with which we can argue out disagreements. We may not always agree that the terms of debate are the best ones, but what is only required is that they are thin enough to not be too disagreeable to anyone. For private demands, on the other hand, disagreeability of terms of expression are grounds for considering the demand to be unforced. Unhappy with your boyfriend’s constant demand for attention? Get a new boyfriend. Don’t like the fact that women can’t be priests? Become a Methodist. Don’t like the Monopoly guy’s stupid face? Play Sorry. One doesn’t always have to set up a new shop somewhere else, one can alter their tradition from the inside (just look at poor Gary Wills), but unlike one’s government, switching private allegiance can be a bit easier.

Rorty’s strategy with religion, then, is to privatize it. On the one hand, we have the thin level of public discourse with which to debate public policy. On the other hand, we have as many modes of private discourse as we have private communities made up of like-minded, happiness pursuers. Something might seem initially wrong with this—when did science become a private path towards happiness?—but it is imperative that the pragmatist approach at this high level of abstraction construe science as such. Science is a private path because it is not political discourse. It is a job, for one thing, and then, on occasion, it is a source of intense private pleasure for some, with no end of scientists who enjoy waxing poetic about the relationship of science to the universe. Most importantly, however, science—though it may inform public discourse—is not itself the mode in which we interact with our fellow democratic citizens on issues of joint societal determination.

“Private projects versus public discourse” is not, however, the way Rorty often construes the distinction, most prominently in “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance.” Rorty there construes “the supposed tension between science and religion as the illusion of opposition between cooperative endeavours and private projects.”[fn.2] This is a mistake, and we can begin to see the road it takes us down by noting the fact that most religions (or, at least, most people involved in a religion) are still by and large traditions of group worship. Those atheists among us might not see the connection between what a scientist does with other scientists and what a pastor does with his parishioners, but we can’t make the mistake a wresting control of the religious believer’s right to self-description (not at this level, at least). A utilitarian ethics of belief is the philosophical formulation of a democratic citizen’s ethos qua citizen. It is a high-falutin’ way of putting the right to privacy. As a citizen, just so long as the other citizens’ projects of self-creation, pleasure, or redemption do not conflict with your ability to pursue your own, there should be no objection. As we put on different hats, however, or start distinguishing between the short-term and long-term effects of various options, legitimate objections might start being raised.

This might be just a slight mistake on Rorty’s part here, a kind of over-assertive preference for the Protestant turn against creed towards a personal relationship with God. And we might take Rorty’s preference for Tillich over Barth as a misguided intervention by an outsider. Rorty certainly has a right to these preferences, and to articulating them in the hopes of persuading others to reject creed, but not as part of the overall package of a utilitarian ethics of belief. Rorty leads himself this way because of his earlier identification of the issue between science and religion as “cooperative v. private,” but this leads to a formulation that is just empirically false on its face for any self-respecting Wittgensteinian. After noting that the heart of classical and contemporary pragmatism is the notion of a “holistic view of intentional content,” that “beliefs have content only by virtue of inferential relations to other beliefs,” a Sellarsian move which effectively substitutes objectivity-as-intersubjectivity for objectivity-as-correspondence, Rorty wonders rhetorically, “what becomes of intersubjectivity once we admit that there is no communal practice of justification – no shared language game – which gives religious statements their content?”[fn.3]

Rorty rightly supplies the answer in our ability to “use the attribution of such beliefs to explain what is going on,”[fn.4] but this is an outsider’s view, the external view of Davidson’s radical interpreter, the field anthropologist dropped in the middle of an alien society, trying to understand their language and culture (which one does holistically and at the same time). Certainly there might be no shared language game for enthusiasts (as Rorty is) of Whitehead’s definition of religion as “what the individual does with his own solitariness,”[fn.5] but traditions of group worship, let alone theological articulation, fly in the face of “no communal practice of justification.” An internal view of the language game used by Southern Baptists or Anglicans, if we are Wittgensteinian and Sellarsian enough, would most certainly include practices of communication and understanding intelligible to its practitioners.

I don’t think this does a whole lot to Rorty’s overall point, however, in regards to pragmatism, religion, and the requirements of democracy. It simply means that when Rorty redescribes “intellectual responsibility” as “simply responsibility to people with whom one has joined a shared endeavour”[fn.6] we take that to include religious communities. Rorty, in his defense of private projects, says that the religious believer legitimately lapses intellectual responsibility with regards to her religious beliefs because all we need do is make “a distinction between what needs justification to other human beings and what does not,”[fn.7] but what we really need are more nuanced, contextual distinctions between different types of communities to whom we owe responsibility, and when and how. Rorty is entirely right to construe intellectual irresponsibility as “the wrongness of pretending to participate in a common project while refusing to play by the rules,”[fn.8] he just needs to be more sensitive to the desire of others to spend their alone-time with others.

Endnotes

[1] From his “Maeterlinck’s Philosophy of Life” in The Middle Works, vol. VI.

[2] Philosophy and Social Hope, 149

[3] Ibid., 159

[4] Ibid.

[5] Whitehead, Religion in the Making, (New York: Macmillan Company, 1926), 16

[6] PSH, 151

[7] Ibid., 154

[8] Ibid., 151

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.

Quote of the Day 2

Once again, instead of New Me or Old Me, let's have some Repeated Me:

"What the pragmatist is suggesting ... is that reductionism is a special case of redescription and realism (in the sense of pluralism, the attempt to "save the appearances") is a special case of pragmatism. What both special cases hinge on is a so far fruitless and conversation stifling essentialism. After brushing aside essentialism, what is left is our ubiquitous power to create new descriptions and our particular power to choose which descriptions we use for which purposes. This means that a scientist can go on reducing color to wavelengths in the laboratory without worrying about whether red doesn't exist and that a poet can go on writing sonnets about love without worrying about whether the Freudian next door will say that it's all in his id."

--The Parable of the Reductionist