Living Philosophy in Kierkegaard, Melville, and Others

Intersections of Literature, Philosophy, and Religion

Edward F. Mooney

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501357725
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria moderna

Edward F. Mooney takes us into the lived philosophies of Melville, Kierkegaard, Henry Bugbee, and others who write deeply in ways that bring philosophy and religion into the fabric of daily life, in its simplicities, crises, and moments of communion and joy. Along the way Mooney explores meditations on wilderness, on the enigma of self-deception, the role of maternal love and the pain of separations, and the pervasiveness of "difficult reality" where valuable things are presented to us under two (or more) aspects at once.

1

Passionate speech: Improvisations in the disorders of desire

I’ll let Kelly Dean Jolley set the stage for a retrieval of passionate speech, as it’s found in poetry and elsewhere, and as it connects to mystery and the folds of the soul.

We have become secular people, partial people; we no longer believe in, much less live in the interpenetration of the natural and the supernatural: we have lost that sense of mystery that creates ceremony, that reveals to us the garden of the world we live in. In our loss of that sense of mystery, we have lost what galvanizes us against sloth, prevents our souls from growing woolly and fungous … Blind to the seasons’ gifts, numb to nature … careless of ourselves and of others, bored alike by damnation and salvation, we become graceless by inaction. It is one (one) aim of poetry to recover that sense of mystery, to beckon us from sloth.¹

Here’s a plaque from the foot of Mt. Washington, a great instance of passionate speech.

CAUTION: The appalling and needless loss of life on this mountain has been due largely to the failure of robust trampers to realize that wintry storms of incredible violence occur at times even during the summer months. Rocks become ice-coated, freezing fog blinds and suffocates, winds of hurricane force exhaust the tramper, and when he stops to rest, a temperature below freezing completes the tragedy. If you are experiencing difficulty, abandon your climb! The highest wind velocities ever recorded were attained on Mt. Washington. Since the worst is yet to come, turn back without shame, before it’s too late.²

Stanley Cavell would call this passionate speech. It gets under my skin; it invades my psyche in the area of my shames and prides and fears. It “improvises in the disorder of my desires.”³ Should I go on up the trail, not yet icy—or turn back? That might seem like a straightforward practical question to be settled by experts—perhaps I should ask a park guide. Yet it’s not hard to imagine that this CAUTION brings me into Dante’s dark woods where the troubled soul is exposed, where a simple caution drifts toward a sort of life-crisis: how do I handle this challenge—who will I be, or become, in meeting, or fleeing it?⁴

Care for the soul moves in different terrain than care for the self. The self takes on executive initiatives, has critical and rational drives, and has a will to take charge of life and master its obstructions—“just do it.” Care for the soul is something else again. To value the soul is to be open to one’s deepest passion, its capacity to value. As W. E. Hocking puts it, to care for the soul is to “prize the personal center of caring, the heart.”⁵ It is to yield to and care for the untamed, the irresolvable or intractable, the realm of conflicting shadows. David Rothenberg captures the risks: “There is something dangerous about the grooves that capture the soul. They pull us in and there is no escape.”⁶

Why should a trailhead warning strike me as an address to my soul—rather than an innocuous traffic sign: “Danger: Bump ahead!”? No doubt it’s about grappling with shadowy, exciting, and dangerous challenges. Life and death then appear as a symphony of thrills, falls, threats, and vast vistas. Perhaps this CAUTION is a reminder of my finitude. The majestic and sublime can be supremely indifferent to my well-being, despite the self’s will-to-mastery. A sharp reminder of finitude, the failure of mastery in death, calls me to a piety I’ve abandoned. It addresses me in an idiom not solely secular.

Against detachment

I inhabit a typical secular university. Despite my invocations of the sacred or the soul, I doubt I’ll be called before academic inquisitors. If I were, the indiscretion would be my trespass on private property. I’d be taking from the selves in my charge their executive privileges, their right to be masters of their thoughts. This is a prerogative of priests but not of professors. In my appeal to regions of their souls, I am disrespecting the sanctity of our shared secular calling. My students seek simple knowledge or skills in critique—not transformation of soul. I touch on gods, prophecy, or piety, not just in an abstract theoretical way, but by letting reverence and prophecy touch down in the class. This passionate text at the foot of Mt. Washington is reproduced as I read it with passion, making my classroom a place for pious souls, not just for secular selves. It intrudes on the privacy of an innocent listener, that one, in the second row.

If I were asked collegially what piety and soul were doing in a secular classroom, I could ask in return why I should stick with a valorization of the secular that excludes evocations of piety. After all, I didn’t hold a church service but exposed a piety half-concealed in an otherwise fully secular trailhead CAUTION. And I could ask why in this age of dark woods and horrors, questioning the limits of the executive self violates the aims of the humanities.

Literature, philosophy, art, religion, and music—the humanities—are portals to all things human, and piety is one of those things. There’s truth in piety’s reticence, patience, and listening. It’s relief from relentless self-assertive critique. In teaching, I move naturally from a mountain-trail CAUTION or a poem of Emily Dickinson to contemplative activities, such as reading, writing, thinking quietly, focused on texts tilted toward the religious.⁷ These words are prophecy: “The Worst Is Yet to Come! Turn Back without Shame!”

Passion, the soul

A prolific man of letters and elegant philosopher, Stanley Cavell takes “passionate utterance” to mark the place where soul is at stake. Passionate utterances are “invitations to improvisation in the disorder of desire.”⁸ He doesn’t cite the CAUTION posted at White Mountains trailheads. That’s my “art trouvè” that sets me improvising on mortality and hubris, shame and self-assertion, piety and impiety. Cavell links passionate speech to “redemptive writing” and “redemptive reading.”⁹ Souls, not selves, need redemption.

We can find witness to “passionate speech,” witness to souls in dark woods, in the epigraph to Cavell’s signal 1962 article, “The Availability of the Philosophy of the Later Wittgenstein.” He quotes Jean Giraudoux:

Epochs are in accord with themselves only if the crowd comes into these radiant confessionals which are the theaters or the arenas, and as much as possible … to listen to its own confessions of cowardice and sacrifice, of hate and passion … For there is no theatre which is not prophecy. Not this false divination which gives names and dates, but true prophecy, that which reveals to men these surprising truths: that the living must live, that the living must die, that autumn must follow summer, spring follow winter, that there are four elements, that there is happiness, that there are innumerable miseries, that life is a reality, that it is a dream, that man lives in peace, that man lives on blood; in short, those things they will never know.¹⁰

Can a philosopher’s solely rational analysis make anything of this? The words seem sermonic or acceptable only as poetry, far from levelheaded philosophy. They appeared in the most poetry-averse of philosophical journals. Reading them in the 1960s was a breath of fresh air.

Mainstream philosophers have by and large disowned passionate speech. We teach critical thinking but not feeling attentively; we teach rational decision theory but not responsible passions. Many read the poetry of Genesis as botched evolutionary biology—as if ballet is a botched dash for the bus. Our blindness to the varied registers of biblical narration, ballet, and biology is both bad logic and stunted passion. Seeing better and feeling with more subtlety can mark metamorphosis of spirit. The worst of passions can be deflated by rational critique, but defeating the worst is not attaining the best.

The great novels of Henry James or George Eliot (among many others) show conversational and emotional exchange—mild passions—effecting change in persons and desires.¹¹ We arrive imaginatively at a more tempered, less imprisoning or explosive, set of passions. Here is George Eliot redeeming us not from sin but from a certain blindness.

That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.¹²

Is it tragic that our rhythms, our inhalations and exhalations, poorly match the rhythms of seas, seasons, or stars? Is it tragic that our breathing is manic relative to the breathing of oaks or the drift of clouds? Is it tragic that the stride of our walk is nothing compared to the stride of mountains? Should our heartbeats be more akin to those of the humming bird? Eliot raises unanswerable but haunting questions.¹³

Her words bring us to think on first and last things, the hallowed ground of the sacred. She reminds us that dull vision or numbness toward ordinary life is imprisoning. Salvation is better seeing, imagining, and feeling. If we opened to revelations of “quite ordinary” reality, we’d die on the spot from the sublime roar. Ethics can tell us what might release the good as well as tell us how to restrain the bad. A vision of the “frequency” of life might do this.

Pleadings and warnings

As Cavell has it, “passionate utterance” is speech neither purely descriptive nor the ceremonial or quasi-legal domain of performative utterance. To say, “freezing fog blinds and suffocates” might be construed as simply fact-stating. But at a trailhead it’s a screaming CAUTION, not only informative but also a pleading and warning. It’s urgently uttered from the heart, meant to impact my heart, realign my desires. It’s meant to burn into the tramper’s soul. It’s meant to instill imaginative empathy with another tramper, one caught in mortal tragedy. It improvises pleadingly in the disorder of my desires.¹⁴ Unlike the performative “I thee wed,” uttered by a pastor in a ceremonial setting, it does not alter the social world. It has none of the force of a ranger’s shout at close quarters: “Evacuate!” If I head back rather than continue, it’s due to its elegant improvisation, not to overt threat or coercion or ceremonial effectiveness.

Giraudoux leads me to ask if my desires are disordered and distort my knowledge. I know and don’t want to know that I’m cowardly, or will die, or that there is misery, or that man lives on blood. Passionate utterance invokes shapes of passion and desire, of imagination and sensibility, prompting the responsiveness Kierkegaard calls our subjectivity. Arcing words can lift us—or leave us indifferent. They live or die as we receive or refuse them. We might find them saving or banal: “No man is an Island …”—“The readiness is all …”—“Let it be!”—“Ain’t I a woman?”—“The unexamined life is not …”—“I have a dream…”

I hear Hamlet’s “Let it be!” or Donne’s “No man is an Island” or Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a woman?” and I am moved to iterations, and to critical and furthering comment, carrying the words forward in my own voice. These words (and mine) spread exponentially, broadening their echo spatially and temporally over an ever-widening community. They are proposals—invitational, intimate universals. They are lifelines—to grasp or not.

If philosophy infiltrates my passions, commitments, or desires—if it evokes passionate speech improvising in my soul—then it will not be lawyer-like argument, or analysis of social contracts, or debate about sense and reference. The exemplars of this wider sort of writing would include Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Kierkegaard’s The Point of View of My Work as an Author, and Montaigne’s Essays. Philosophy needs passion and song, for it is, after all, a love story. Love of wisdom means attention to the fine textures of lives. It means love of a form of life suited to oneself and to others, in the light of the good, in the light of a love and life one can affirm in passionate speech.

Work in the dark

We find passionate truths of self and soul affirmed in the writings of Bugbee, Melville, and Kierkegaard. Yet in times of mass death, in Haiti or Yemen, what is literature—or philosophy’s passionate speech? At a different level, after the extinctions that have befallen Rwandans and Jews and so many others, how is human being to go on? If atrocities gut their landscapes, what is left for reviving future Jewish or Yemenite souls?

Henry James has a writer confess:

We work in the dark—we do what we can—

we give what we have.

Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.

The rest is the madness of art.¹⁵

We work in the dark reading certain passages from Melville or Kierkegaard. We wonder if we sense what they sense and wonder if it can illuminate our own dark woods. We submit to the madness, the slight mitigation, of art. There are moments in passionate writing when interpretation does not “go all the way down,” where there is no space between words and their impacts. Presence leaps from the page the way wonders leap from the world, leaving enormous room for love of the world, for ongoing revelation, for suspension of doubts. Here is a taste of brie, a wince at sudden light, the flight of an ethereal hawk. At such moments digressive interpretations will miss the grounding tenors of life.

The poet’s unclouded lyrical eye gives us presence. Glaring styles of representation and analysis, or those that take flight only at dusk, muffle the eloquent presence and passionate speech that calls philosoph...