A Community of Inquiry

Conversations Between Classical American Philosophy and American Literature

Patrick Dooley

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781631010422
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire nord-américaine

Explores the ways literature and philosophy enrich each other's inquiry into the human condition

"I applaud the novel ways in which Dooley brings to life the interchanges between philosophy and literature in America during this period. Although numerous literary scholars have published in this field, Dooley is, to my knowledge, the first professional philosopher to make a major contribution. As a philosopher thoroughly trained in the American tradition, Dooley is able to highlight features of the conversation hitherto neglected by those with literary training."
—from the Foreword by Peter H. Hare

"These truly are 'conversations' between two distinct fields that rarely talk to one another in such precise and revealing ways, and Dooley is superbly equipped to conduct that conversation. A Community of Inquiry is fresh, lively, and original."
—Tom Quirk, professor of English, University of Missouri

Recently and increasingly, literary and philosophical scholars are subscribing to the view that philosophy and literature are allies. However, nearly all of these scholars have concentrated on analyses of Greek philosophers and dramatists as well as English novels and novelists with reference to the nature of a good society and a moral life. The essays presented in A Community of Inquiry explore often-neglected works: classical American philosophy, especially pragmatism, and American literature, particularly the realists and naturalists, and mostly ignored fundamental issues of epistemology and metaphysics.

This interdisciplinary study examines the connections between American philosophy and literature, demonstrating how a cluster of elements normally identified as the signature components of classical American philosophy are prominent in the canonical works of American literature. The subjects discussed range from Stephen Crane's metaphysics to business ethics in William Dean Howells, pragmatic religion in Willa Cather and Harold Frederic, John Steinbeck's philosophy of work, and Norman Maclean's philosophy of community.

Dooley is uniquely qualified to handle this study of the interactions and intersections of philosophical thinking and literary writing. His philosophical background and analytical rigor provide a new perspective on the authors and subjects discussed in A Community of Inquiry, making this book appealing to those interested in American literary, intellectual, historical, and/or philosophical studies.

PART I
Stephen Crane:
Metaphysical, Epistemological,
and Ethical Pluralism

1

Spectators and/or Participants

Crane on Epistemological Privilege

A wound gives strange dignity to him who bears it.

—Stephen Crane

Artistically, Stephen Crane’s quest was capturing experience, mostly human experience and experiencers. But his genius also disclosed the lived worlds of animals. “Experience” customarily refers to the obvious and ordinary stuff of consciousness, but as we shall see, Crane’s notion of experience was more complex and sophisticated. Philosophically, the upshot of his work amounts to an epistemological and a metaphysical shakedown. Although common sense has us believe that we have a reliable grasp of what is out there (in reality) and what is inside (within consciousness), Crane was more attentive and sensitive and therefore more suspicious. He noticed that the contents and status of the inner and outer worlds are problematic and that the borderline between them is permeable. He also explored situations in which experiencers have the epistemological advantage over observers and, strikingly, the opposite—occasions wherein onlookers are in a better position to understand and assess what happens to those who undergo an experience. And so as Crane’s artistic sensitivity uncovered the mystery of experience, his philosophical legacy earned him a place in a distinguished company of thinkers, beginning with Plato, who believed that wonder is the beginning of wisdom.

“Wonder” is too weak a word for Crane’s artistic and philosophical accomplishment; “surprise” comes closer. His objective was not to create doubt, neither the comprehensive and corrosive upheaval wrought by Descartes’ methodic doubt nor the beneficial, though unsettling, irritation of doubt that is central to the thought of Crane’s American contemporary, the scientist and philosopher C. S. Peirce. Nor was it Crane’s goal to address the epistemological panic that haunts postmodern theorists and deconstructionist critics. Instead, his goals were positive: to foster awareness and to cultivate openness to experience.

Scott Slovic recommends the works of Annie Dillard as an anecdote to the “anesthesia of routineness” (1992, 65). But whereas Dillard’s artful and leisurely paced essays gently wake us, Crane’s potent prose and poetry startle us with shocks of recognition. How powerful, how unpredictable, how disorienting it is to let Crane control one’s stream of thought! His prose is so highly charged that the ozone smell of a cracking thunderstorm still lingers. A surge protector, or at least a transformer, is needed to buffer the excessive voltage of Crane’s writing. Forewarned and even shielded, readers of Crane continue to discover that neither the external world nor the internal world is as it seems. For Crane, human experience is an epiphany to be explored. With Crane as tour guide and commentator, richness, complexity, wonderful surprises, and unsettling questions supplant the obvious and everyday world we ordinary mortals are used to.

A brief explanation of the term “experience” is in order. Crane’s contemporaries, the American pragmatists C. S. Peirce, William James, and later John Dewey, sought to overcome the subject/object duality and the commonsense spectator view of knowledge. William James, in his Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912), argued that a neutral stuff, pure experience, is epistemologically and metaphysically basic.¹. James proposed that a bit of pure experience can be both public (out there) and private (within consciousness). Such bits of experience exist in separate but compatible histories—as an experiencer’s mental biography and as an experienced fact in the world. James insisted that we cannot and do not deal with the world as detached observers. Instead, we interact and interfere with an environment. John Dewey suggested that the terms “sensation,” “perception,” “apprehension,” and “knowledge” be replaced with more active and interactive notions. He insisted that cognition is not an affair of getting an accurate account of what is external to a disembodied knower: rather, knowledge is a process better characterized as a transaction or a negotiation that remakes the neutral stuff that is prior to both the known and the knower.². In this proposed renovation of our notions of both truth and reality, veracious ideas are not static, accurate mental duplicates, but road maps that prompt fruitful (or faulty) behavioral incursions. “The truth of an idea,” writes James, “is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation” (1907, 97).

As I will now show, such a concept of experience (as well as similar concepts of truth and reality) function vividly in Crane’s accounts of the experiences of wounds and being wounded in three short stories: “An Episode of War,” “The Price of the Harness,” and “The Mystery of Heroism: A Detail of an American Battle.”

As it turns out, a wide range of expectations about pain and being wounded are overturned in these accounts. However, not only readers but also Crane’s own fictional characters themselves discover that very little of what they expect to happen ever happens. Further, through a subtle enfolding, the reader becomes both spectator and participant. So, too, Crane’s fictional characters both observe and constitute the experiences that occur. As a result, neither the spectator’s nor participant’s vantage point is epistemologically privileged.³. Accordingly, at both extremes of the continuum, both being an onlooker and being a sufferer involve serious liabilities as well as significant advantages; moreover, as noted above, the “real” event that occurs is a tertium quid that is both public and private and is thus both shareable and idiosyncratic.

For Crane, perhaps the most surprising misinformation regarding wounds has to do with pain. Pain is not always agonizing. It can be an intriguing, revelatory experience. I am reminded of my own experience of twice being in shock. Both times everyone who watched grimaced and/or averted their glances, but I did neither because I was not suffering excruciating pain. Some pain can also be pleasurable. Consider this passage from Edward Abbey’s journal, Confessions of a Barbarian: “My lips are stiff and chapped, with a small crack in my upper lip, a reliable source of a kind of interesting tiny, dry pain which I take continual delight in experiencing” (1994, 32). And I recall a provocative article in Sports Illustrated on athletes and pain that I read more than twenty-five years ago. In “The Face of Pain,” Mark Kram relates how Los Angles Rams star (now sportscaster and actor) Merlin Olsen thought of pain as an opportunity for mental gymnastics: “Pain is an interesting thing.… Man is an adaptable creature, … and one finds out what you can or cannot do. It’s like walking into a barnyard. The first thing you smell is manure. Stand there for about five minutes and you don’t smell it anymore. The same thing is true of a knee. You hurt that knee. You’re conscious of it. But then you start to play at a different level.” Kram comments that Olsen “looks upon pain as an interesting companion, as something which arouses his contempt and inexhaustible taste for pragmatism” (1976, 62). For Crane, too, pain brings illumination and insight along with suffering.⁴.

The wounding of the lieutenant in “An Episode of War” is first described as an irritating, random occurrence that disturbs a mundane routine. “The others cried out when they saw blood upon the lieutenant’s sleeve” (Crane 1984, 671). They cannot see the wound, only the blood on his uniform, though they notice that their superior “winced like a man stung” (671). But Crane does not focus upon the pain—actually very little is made of the wound sufferer’s suffering. Instead he stresses the ways in which the gunshot debilitates the officer. He can no longer sheath his sword; he cannot use his right arm but must carry it. That part of his body becomes an alien thing: “He held his right wrist tenderly in his left hand, as if the wounded arm was made of very brittle glass” (672).

The irony, of course, is that while pain can enfeeble, more importantly, in this case it capacitates the lieutenant. The remainder of the story dramatizes how, “as the wounded officer passed from the line of battle, he was enabled to see many things which as a participant in the fight were unknown to him” (672). The image Crane uses to capture the strangely ambiguous power of pain to innervate and empower is one of his favorites: a curtain.⁵. “A wound gives strange dignity to him who bears it. Well men shy from this new and terrible majesty. It is as if the wounded man’s hand is upon the curtain which hangs before the revelations of all existence.… The power of it sheds radiance upon a bloody form and makes the other men understand sometimes that they are little” (672).

Among the things that being wounded makes possible is the lieutenant’s realization that, even as a frontline combatant, his understanding of battle is faulty. Indeed, the farther he removes himself from participating and the more distant and spectator-like he becomes, the more accurate are his (and others’) observations: “He came upon some stragglers and they told him how to find the field hospital. They described its exact location. In fact these men, no longer having part in the battle, knew more of it than others. They told the performance of every corps, every division, the opinion of every general. The lieutenant, carrying his wounded arm rearward, looked upon them with wonder” (673).

More participant/spectator reorientations are in store. Even the sufferer of an injury does not automatically grasp its seriousness or significance; under the influence of shock, the patient does not feel the real damage of an injury. Further, in the lieutenant’s case a rearward officer corrects the lieutenant’s appreciation of his own injury. “‘Why man, that’s no way to do it. You want to fix that thing.’ He appropriated the lieutenant and the lieutenant’s wound.… His tone allowed one to think that he was in the habit of being wounded every day. The lieutenant hung his head, feeling, in this presence, that he did not know how to be correctly wounded” (673–74).

Interestingly, the term “appropriate” is apt for describing our dealings with things (instead of persons). As noted earlier, the arm had become an alien object to the lieutenant; in fact, both the soldier and his arm have been reified.

Soon after the lieutenant learns how to be “correctly wounded,” he sees a man who is dying but who apparently does not realize it. He wonders if he should alert the dying man about his condition. “Sitting with his back against a tree a man with a face as grey as a new army blanket was serenely smoking a corn-cob pipe. The lieutenant wished to rush forward and inform him that he was dying” (674). Two additional perspectives on wounds can be found in “An Episode of War.” The surgeon who tends to him treats him with “great contempt” because the doctor views the wound as having “placed [him] on a very low social plane” (674). This stands in stark contrast to the “strange dignity” with which his wound was invested by those formerly under his command. Finally, by Crane’s radical questioning of the privileged or compromised positions of participants and spectators in understanding pain, the significance of an injury and the lasting impact of a wound bring the story to its pungent conclusion. “And this is the story of how the lieutenant lost his arm. When he reached home his sisters, his mother, his wife, sobbed for a long time at the sight of the flat sleeve. ‘Oh, well,’ he said, standing shamefaced amid these tears, ‘I don’t suppose it matters so much as all that’” (675).

Really? When the head of a household loses an arm, who are the observers and who are the participants? Crane’s ending is as problematic as it is poignant.

In “The Price of the Harness,” Crane again uses the curtain image—“the steep mountain range on the right turned blue and as without detail as a curtain” (1016)—for his exploration of the complex and confusing experience of battle. This story, one of Crane’s longer short stories, examines all sorts of misapprehensions and mistakes made both by participants and observers. In Crane’s American Civil War stories—for instance, in “An Episode of War”—distance from the battle is the coefficient of clarity; in his Spanish-American War stories, detachment and spectator neutrality often have the opposite effect. The drawback that comes from being too remote is symbolized by a military reconnaissance balloon that does not provide reliable intelligence but only gives away the troops’ position, drawing both friendly and hostile fire. In “The Price of the Harness” the balloon is shot down, and all witness its demise: “The balloon was dying, dying a gigantic and public death before the eyes of two armies” (1022).⁶. Apparently those on the ground involved in the battle are sometimes, but not always, closer to the truth. In exploring the perspective of the infantry, Crane uses a technique later exploited by Alfred Hitchcock and more recently by Steven Spielberg in Jaws. First false suspense is created when the men sense danger but they are safe; then false security follows when the men feel safe but are truly in mortal danger. And so, Crane explains, after a long, tense wait, when the troops are finally able to return gunfire, “a new sense of safety was rightfully upon them” (1029). Of course, then the real carnage begins.

“The Price of the Harness” tallies up the costs of war: death, destruction, wounds, and pain. Crane depicts a variety of wounded men. Some are in shock, walking rearward, looking back whence they had fought. “The wounded paused to look impassively upon this struggle. They were always like men who could not be aroused by anything further” (1028).

Others suffer terribly on the field and in the hospital. In particular, Martin (whom Crane follows for the first half of the story) is badly wounded. As in “An Episode in War,” Martin shuns the surgeons’ comfort and care, choosing instead to rest against a tree: “Martin saw a busy person with a book and a pencil, but he did not approach him to become officially a member of the hospital. All he desired was rest and immunity from nagging. He took seat painfully under a bush and leaned his back upon the trunk. There he remained thinking, his face wooden” (1028).

The climax of “Price of the Harness,” perhaps even more emotionally wrenching than the close of “An Episode of War,” concerns a soldier who is wounded and dying but does not realize it. Again the epistemological advantages and handicaps that one assumes accrue to participants and observers are undercut in Crane’s account of experience. James Nolan has suffered a fatal stomach wound but believes his wound is minor. His only complaints are that he is cold and that the ground he is lying on is wet. The ground is not damp, his comrades insist. Nolan will not be persuaded:

“Just put your hand under my back and see how wet the ground is,” he said.

Grierson seemed to be afraid of Nolan’s agitation, and so he slipped a hand under the prostate man, and presently withdrew it covered with blood. “Yes,” he said hiding his hand carefully from Nolan’s eyes, “you were right, Jimmie.”

“Of course I was,” said Nolan, contente...