Welcoming the Other: Student, Stranger, and Divine (Political Theory for Today) 9781793631206, 9781793631213, 1793631204

Citation preview

Welcoming the Other

Political Theory for Today Series Editor: Richard Avramenko, University of Wisconsin, Madison Political Theory for Today seeks to bring the history of political thought out of the jargonfilled world of the academy into the everyday world of social and political life. The series brings the wisdom of texts and the tradition of political philosophy to bear on salient issues of our time, especially issues pertaining to human freedom and responsibility, the relationship between individuals and the state, the moral implications of public policy, health and human flourishing, public and private virtues, and more. Great thinkers of the past have thought deeply about the human condition and their situations—books in Political Theory for Today build on that insight.

Titles Published Tradition v. Rationalism: Voegelin, Oakeshott, Hayek, and Others, edited by Gene Callahan and Lee Trepanier Democracy and Its Enemies: The American Struggle for the Enlightenment, edited by Paul N. Goldstene Plato’s Mythoi: The Political Soul’s Drama Beyond, edited by Donald H. Roy Eric Voegelin Today: Voegelin’s Political Thought in the 21st Century, edited by Scott Robinson, Lee Trepanier, and David Whitney Walk Away: When the Political Left Turns Right, edited by Lee Trepanier and Grant Havers Idolizing the Idea: A Critical History of Modern Philosophy, edited by Wayne Cristaudo The Spartan Drama of Plato’s Laws, edited by Eli Friedland Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents: Rethinking Politics in the Age of Brexit and Trump, edited by Lee Ward Eric Voegelin’s Asian Political Thought, edited by Lee Trepanier Welcoming the Other: Student, Stranger, and Divine, edited by N. Susan Laehn and Thomas R. Laehn

Welcoming the Other Student, Stranger, and Divine

Edited by N. Susan Laehn and Thomas R. Laehn Foreword by T. Wayne Parent Afterword by James F. Lea

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

In Chapter 9 “Political Philosophy as Apprenticeship and Practice”. © “Political Philosophy as Apprenticeship and Practice,” National Affairs, American Enterprise Institute. An earlier version of this essay was published in National Affairs 44 (Summer 2020). In Chapter 1 “The Subversiveness of Desire: Descartes, Hobbes, and the Suppression of the Erotic in Modern Thought”. © “The Subversiveness of Desire: Descartes, Hobbes, and the Suppression of the Erotic in Modern Thought,” originally published in VoegelinView. In Chapter 6 Cited throughout: Hannah Coutler by Wendell Berry. Copyright © 2004 by Tanya Amyx Berry, book by Wendell Berry, from Hannah Coulter. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press. Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2021 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020949867 ISBN 978-1-7936-3120-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-7936-3121-3 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Essays in Honor of Cecil L. Eubanks

Contents

Foreword ix T. Wayne Parent Introduction: The Search for Community in the Postmodern Age N. Susan Laehn and Thomas R. Laehn PART I: POLITICAL THEOLOGY

1 17

1 The Subversiveness of Desire: Descartes, Hobbes, and the Suppression of the Erotic in Modern Thought Thomas R. Laehn

19

2 Dorothy Day, Emmanuel Levinas, and the Transcendent Experience in the Political William P. Schulz, Jr.

47

PART II: POLITICS AND ETHICS

63

3 Toward a Politics of Care: Heidegger, Freedom, and the Moral-Political Posture of Authentic Solicitude Andrea D. Conque

65

4 Subjectivity in Crisis: Emmanuel Levinas and Albert Camus on Exile and Hospitality N. Susan Laehn

89

PART III: POLITICS AND LITERATURE 5 The Poets and Professor Peter A. Petrakis

113 115

vii

viii

Contents

6 The Role of Care Structures in Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter: Surrogacy, Memory, and Membership in Port William, Kentucky Drew Kennedy Thompson 7 Terror, Nihilism, and Joy: Reconsidering Camus’s Confrontation with Political Violence John Randolph LeBlanc and William Paul Simmons PART IV: PEDAGOGY AND THE POLIS

133

147 173

8 The Birth of Tragedy: Political Theory and the Classroom W. King Mott

175

9 Political Philosophy as Apprenticeship and Practice David D. Corey

187

Afterword: Cecil, Nikos, and Me James F. Lea

205

Index 209 About the Contributors

215

Foreword T. Wayne Parent

Conversations with Cecil Eubanks, whether about poetics or pot roast, set a high bar. The mind doesn’t wander. The contributors to this volume, all former PhD students and established scholars, are more likely to have had conversations about the former. My conversations with Professor Eubanks have tended to the more mundane aspects of politics and everyday life. The countless conversations were always the same—immersive, clear-eyed, alert. My remembrance, of even the specifics of our conversations, often lingered for years. Cecil Eubanks holds a BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Michigan and joined the political science faculty at Louisiana State University (LSU) in 1968. He is one of a select group of professors at LSU who hold one of its most prestigious honors, a Distinguished Alumni Professorship. Professor Eubanks is a leader in the Department of Political Science, the college, the University, and the discipline. He has served as department chair, is a creator and current director of the University Ethics Institute, and has served as coeditor of the Journal of Politics, a preeminent journal of the discipline. While it is tempting to highlight the list of awards he has received on this campus, his status at LSU is probably best characterized by simply stating that he is one of a handful of faculty members at the University who could accurately be described as a legend. While Professor Eubanks is rightly highly regarded for his work in the discipline and in the University and Department, it is his role as a mentor, teacher, and public intellectual that he values most and, as this volume attests, is probably his greatest gift. When he first arrived on campus during the political upheaval of the late 1960s, he was a leader of some note; he was involved in antiwar and civil liberties activities on campus and in the community, he spoke in protest against authoritarianism, and he embraced the civil rights ix

x

Foreword

movement. He continues to be a voice for inclusiveness and diversity and has been ahead of the curve on several issues on campus. His appeal is personal. He freely uses, and sets examples from, his own life in both his activities and his teaching. The remarkable number of students he has supervised as they undertook undergraduate theses, master’s theses, and doctoral dissertations seems impossible given the amount of care and time he spends with each. His impact is breathtaking. The connections he makes with these students are an integral part of his humanity. Stories of his humanity extend even to retellings of his off-campus book talks at local hangouts and his playing folk music on television. These stories, and others like them, continue to be passed from class to class today. I will always know Cecil Eubanks as my freshman year American government professor in a large nondescript classroom in Allen Hall in 1974. I was a first-generation college student living at home, and his class opened a new world for me. I was expecting a civics course; instead, I experienced the life of an activist, a poet, and a philosopher. We were given access to a spectrum of ideas of prominent and less celebrated philosophers. We read absurdist plays and we were granted a peek into his own life of hope and activism. And, according to my spiral notebook from the class, we learned a fair amount about the nuances of the workings of the American government as well. About a decade later, I joined him on the faculty of the Political Science Department, and for the next thirty-five, or so, years, he was a trusted colleague. It seems remarkable to me that Cecil is still teaching while students he had as freshmen are retired! We remain dear friends, he still on the faculty, and me living a fulfilling life in retirement that those years with Professor Eubanks and at LSU defined. This volume is wonderful testament to how the contributors, and more broadly, how scholars worldwide, felt his profound impact. The reader will have gained access to a breadth of insight that this singular scholar, teacher, and friend brings to our understanding of the world.

Introduction The Search for Community in the Postmodern Age N. Susan Laehn and Thomas R. Laehn

The modern turn in political philosophy, which can be traced to the publication of René Descartes’s Discourse on Method in 1637 and his Meditations on First Philosophy in 1641, established the ontological primacy of the individual, thereby reducing the community to a mere assemblage of individuals, and led to the repudiation of natural, unchosen, duties in favor of inherent individual rights. Whereas ancient political philosophy’s foremost concern had been the creation of moral communities—which, to be sure, allowed for individual flourishing—modern thinkers have placed the locus of meaning in the individual and have sought political structures rooted in, and fully compatible with, the supreme political value of individual autonomy. Yet, this emphasis on the individual came at a cost. As Karl Marx observed, by the nineteenth century, the inhabitants of modern liberal political systems had become “isolated monads,”1 and as Tocqueville foresaw and as the outcome of Marx’s own project confirms, they were consequently readily susceptible to totalitarian ideologies.2 Moreover, the elevation of the principle of individual autonomy within the political realm, according to which no law is just unless based on the consent of the individuals who are subject to it, has had deleterious consequences. First, the establishment of political autonomy as the supreme political value required the adoption of certain legitimizing myths, including, especially, the noble lies that an individual is obligated to obey the law because he has tacitly (rather than actually) consented to it and that a system of representation guarantees the autonomy of the individual by translating private opinion into public law.3 Second, and perhaps more dangerously, the acceptance of autonomy as the primary normative value in the political world also ultimately led to a repudiation of the laws of nature

1

2

N. Susan Laehn and Thomas R. Laehn

in the natural world, including any abiding limits on the nature of man himself, insofar as the individual never consented to them.4 Indeed, arising from a blind faith in the power of human ingenuity and in the limitless potential for human technology to free man from the bounds of nature, modern man has displayed an utter disregard for the natural world with significant consequences for both the future of human life and the health of the planet. The modern project culminated in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings ushered in a new, postmodern era. Nietzsche’s emphasis on radical individuation created a paradox: human beings were both liberated and exiled. The individual was free to create (and to recreate) himself anew, but he was simultaneously uprooted from any larger community. Indeed, the very possibility of shared meaning, let alone shared political life, was called into question. The disastrous wars of the twentieth century and the totalitarian ideologies associated with them revealed the failure of the modern project. Much of the scholarship in the field of political theory since Nietzsche has been an effort to remedy the problem of exile and to reestablish some form of community amid the (literal and metaphorical) ashes of modernity. This volume consists of chapters addressing the efforts of philosophers, artists, caretakers, and—perhaps most importantly—teachers to reestablish a new foundation for political life in the postmodern era. The origins of these efforts are diverse, and their modes are varied. Individuals seek communion with the divine, either with or through others; they pursue friendship among strangers; and they search for meaningful relationships in both the classroom and the public square. Reflecting the various means by which individuals seek communion with others or with the divine, transcendent, Other, this book is divided into the following parts: Politics and Literature, Political Theology, Politics and Ethics, and Pedagogy and the Polis. Each of these parts, and the chapters contained within them, are united in their attempts to explore the modes through which individuals forge relationships with others in an age of isolation. The chapters included in this volume attend to the ailments of postmodern life by exploring the ways in which authors and practitioners have sought to establish a home in a world seemingly devoid of meaning. In doing so, each chapter honors the research and teaching of Cecil L. Eubanks, whose commitment to conscientious teaching and reflective research has shaped the life and work of thousands of students across five decades. Each chapter contained in this festschrift has been authored by one of Professor Eubanks’s former doctoral students on one of the aforementioned themes. There are many scholars in the field of political science who are deserving of festschrifts. Some professors have extensive publication lists, others have considerable influence in the implementation of public policies,

Introduction

3

and still others have contributed to the development of a subfield of the discipline. This festschrift came about for different reasons. Certainly, one could point to Professor Eubanks’s publications in the Journal of Politics or the American Journal of Political Science, his books, and his many book chapters. Likewise, one might note his service on editorial boards, his several fellowships and grants, or his decades of dedication to his department as additional reasons to pay him homage. Indeed, even after fifty years of service to Louisiana State University, Professor Eubanks has found the time and energy to serve as the chair of the LSU Ethics Institute. However, this festschrift honors Professor Eubanks for his teaching, and for all the ways in which he used his role as a teacher to do so much more than “teach,” in the narrow, truncated, misused sense of giving lectures and administering exams. All too often in our discipline, teaching is relegated to a secondary consideration, at best, or, at worst, treated as a mere nuisance that interferes with research. Yet, always, it has been through a process of educating the youth that great political philosophy emerges. Martin Heidegger delivered lectures that would later form the basis for some of his most famous writings. Socrates shaped the foundations of the occidental tradition through the education of young Athenians, most notably Plato, whose Academy went on to produce Aristotle. Indeed, so important was the Socratic mission that Socrates himself was willing to die for it. Yet, our discipline often forgets the classroom as a source of academic inspiration. Our universities neglect the classroom in favor of a neoliberal emphasis on measurable research outputs. But the greatest gift a university can bestow upon a student is a caring and inspirational teacher. Like all great teachers, Professor Eubanks’s influence has extended far beyond the four walls of the classroom. In his graduate and undergraduate classes, he often taught on politics and ethics, contributing to his students’ moral development. And in his role as a mentor, he put those ethics into practice, not only caring for his students’ academic progress, but also nurturing their growth as whole persons (physically, intellectually, morally, and spiritually). In Levinasian terms, he treated each of his students as an Other, valuable in his or her own right. For, at its best, the study of politics, philosophy, and ethics extends beyond the mere discussion of abstract theories and systems and into the actual exercise of responsibility for others. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau notes in Émile, it is not enough merely to recognize pathos, that is, to acknowledge the other’s suffering; instead, one must also act, wherever possible, to alleviate that suffering.5 Through his decades of teaching, but most importantly through the way he has lived his life, Professor Eubanks has shaped multiple generations of scholars and teachers. His profound influence can be seen in the chapters contained within this volume.

4

N. Susan Laehn and Thomas R. Laehn

MODERNITY AND THE ONTOLOGICAL PRIORITY OF THE EGO The philosophers of the medieval period produced a synthesis of Aristotelian metaphysics and Catholic theology that rendered the world intelligible and instilled both human life and the course of history with meaning and purpose. However, with advances in science that exposed the shortcomings of Aristotle’s explanation of the natural world, the collapse of the feudal order following the Black Death, and the failure of the Church to establish lasting political peace in Europe, Western man suddenly found himself in a world filled with uncertainty and seemingly devoid of meaning. In retrospect, the first inklings of the modern age can be found in the medieval tradition itself in the debates among scholastic theologians. Most notably, William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347), whose theory of nominalism implied the ontogenetic priority of the individual, split with traditional Church authorities, who had argued for the ontological priority of the essence of a thing—including the human person—over its individual incarnation. As Mark C. Taylor has written: “For nominalists, only individuals are real. In the case of human beings, individuals are not constituted by any universal idea or atemporal essence but form themselves historically through their own free decisions.”6 According to Ockham, the ability of the human mind to contemplate universal terms does not imply the existence of the universals they appear to denote but, rather, merely demonstrates the capacity of the human mind to consider simultaneously multiple concrete objects with the same predicable qualities. And so, in contradistinction to Aristotle’s claim that the community is “prior by nature . . . to each of us,” Ockham established the ontological priority of the individual and the derivative, if not illusory, character of the genus to which he ostensibly belongs.7 The seeds of individualism planted by William of Ockham were brought to their obvious theological terminus in Martin Luther’s assertion that individual judgment is the supreme arbiter of truth following the composition of his Ninety-Five Theses and their apocryphal affixation to the door of Wittenburg Cathedral in 1517. Taylor posits that Luther’s appeal originated in three, anxiety-inducing historical developments, specifically: (1) the dissolution of social and economic structures following the century-long struggle with the bubonic plague, which dislodged the individual from his formerly secure location within a feudal hierarchical order and forced him to sell his labor in an emergent market-based economic system; (2) the breakdown of the Thomistic synthesis of Catholic doctrine and Aristotelian philosophy, which had previously rendered both the physical universe and the course of history meaningful and intelligible; and (3) the Avignon Papacy and the Western Schism in the fourteenth century, which resulted in the discrediting of

Introduction

5

traditional ecclesiastical authority.8 Luther’s doctrine of sola scriptura obviated the need for the Church to mediate man’s relationship with the divine and allowed for the development of radically individualized interpretations of the sacred text. Luther further undermined the Church by positing that man is justified by faith alone, which guarantees his salvation, thereby providing the individual with certainty regarding matters of infinite and eternal import in an otherwise uncertain world. Luther’s writings instigated a paradigm shift in theology, which eventually made its way into philosophy and politics. Luther’s emphasis on one’s personal relationship to God established the primacy of the individual more generally. And, perhaps most importantly, when Luther refused to recant his doctrines at the Diet of Worms in 1521 and defiantly declared, “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise,” he implicitly established the ego (Latin for “I”) as the ultimate arbiter of truth over and against traditional ecclesiastical authorities. Approximately a century later, that which had rested implicit in Luther’s declaration at the Diet of Worms was made explicit in the philosophical writings of René Descartes, who sought to establish a new, secure, foundation for political life during a transition between two epochs in the history of man. The ego reached its apotheosis in Descartes’s Meditations, in which the ego’s certainty of its own existence as a “thinking thing” provided a seemingly secure basis for a new age in human history. As with Luther’s doctrine of justification through faith alone, the supposed indisputability of the ego’s existence seemed to provide a firm epistemic and ontological foundation in the wake of the collapse of the medieval world. In the subsequent writings of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant, the ego would gradually be reconceptualized as an autonomous rights-bearing being, whose free consent would ground and legitimate the modern state.9 Thus, modernity was built on the self-certainty of the ego. Indeed, most importantly for our purposes here, for a quarter of a millennium following the publication of Descartes’s Meditations, the ego provided the foundation for political life. As Tocqueville would quip in the early 1830s following his travels in the United States, the quintessential modern state, Americans were Cartesians without knowing it.10 Nevertheless, by the end of the very century in which Tocqueville had sojourned in America, the existence of the ego as a thinking thing was no longer indisputable. Writing in the second half of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche subjected the ego to a damning critique, declaring it “a fable, a fiction, [and] a play on words,”11 and he thereby called into question the very foundation of the modern world. As Nietzsche’s influence spread among intellectuals and eventually bled into mainstream culture, the modern world collapsed just as the medieval world had before it.

6

N. Susan Laehn and Thomas R. Laehn

Nietzsche’s critique of the ego stemmed from his perspectival theory of knowledge, according to which the assumption of a particular perspective is the basic condition of human life.12 Indeed, if knowledge is truly perspectival, as Nietzsche asserts, it necessarily follows that “untruth [is] a condition of life,”13 insofar as the adoption of any particular perspective both simplifies reality by excluding other, equally valid, perspectives and falsifies reality by implicitly denying their truth.14 Moreover, for Nietzsche, a belief in the existence of things-in-themselves behind their perspectival appearances is a needless assumption, such that the philosophers who sought “to abolish the ‘apparent world’” for the sake of some transcendent truth risked losing “truth” altogether.15 The application of Nietzsche’s perspectivalism to the ego exposed the ego as the product of an underlying interpretive act rather than an “immediate certainty.”16 In Nietzsche’s words: With regard to the superstitions of logicians, I shall never tire of emphasizing a small terse fact, which these superstitious minds hate to concede—namely, that a thought comes when “it” wishes, and not when “I” wish, so that this is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject “I” is the condition of the predicate “think.” It thinks; but that this “it” is precisely the famous old “ego” is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an “immediate certainty.” After all, one has even gone too far with this “it thinks”—even the “it” contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. One infers here according to the grammatical habit: “Thinking is an activity; every activity requires an agent; consequently,— ”17

Hence, according to Nietzsche, the existence of the ego is not a certainty, but rather the product of an act of subjective interpretation, “a seduction by [the rules of] grammar,” according to which every verb must have a subject.18 Whereas Tocqueville declared in the middle of the nineteenth century that Americans were Cartesians without knowing it, today one could assert instead that Americans are Nietzscheans without knowing it. Following the successive assaults of Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger and their intellectual progeny, the “fable” of the ego was exposed, and the ego was consequently no longer able to provide a secure foundation for political life. Moreover, the embrace of Nietzschean perspectivalism not only precluded the identification of a new, common, foundation for the postmodern age but also replaced the older, Aristotelian conception of human flourishing as the actualization of an individual’s inherent potential with a conception of human flourishing as individual self-creation.19 Accordingly, in the United States today, the

Introduction

7

promise of American life has increasingly been identified with the individual’s right to endless self-creation unhampered by the moral and natural limits once considered intrinsic to the human condition itself. Following the repudiation of the modern project, man has now arrived at another epochal break in human history. Individuals can retreat no longer into the certainty of the ego, setting the individual adrift in an increasingly globalized world during a time of rapid technological, economic, ecological, and social change. Furthermore, political, economic, and international systems predicated on a conception of the individual as an autonomous bearer of rights, ontologically prior to the larger community of which he is a member, are under siege.20 The political and economic realms in man’s current, postmodern age have devolved into arenas for combat in which isolated individuals assert irreconcilable rights in the unvarnished pursuit of their respective self-interested ends. Finally, the entire Westphalian state system, including the international structures built upon it in the wake of the Second World War, has proven inadequate to the needs of our time. Indeed, over the course of the past twenty years, it has become apparent that both the modern nation-state and the Westphalian state system are unable to respond effectively to the postmodern world’s most pressing problems, including international terrorism, global pandemics, the transnational migration of dislocated populations, and global climate change, to name but a few. However, for the contributors to this book, the greatest failing of the philosophers of the modern and postmodern periods is their disregard for the importance of community and interpersonal duty in a functioning polity. Through their focus on the subjective ego, modern philosophers prompted individuals to turn inward toward themselves, at the expense of their neighbors, their communities, and the stranger at their door. Furthermore, the assertion of individual autonomy as the preeminent political value during the modern period and the subsequent reconceptualization of individual autonomy as the individual’s unlimited freedom to create and recreate himself anew in our current, postmodern age have left man politically and existentially isolated and unmoored in a world once again seemingly devoid of meaning. At first glance, the chapters contained in this volume appear to have only the most tenuous of connections. In reality, they are closely intertwined, both in the source of their inspiration (the teachings and example of Cecil Eubanks) and in the common problems they address. Each of the contributors to this volume is conscious of the epochal break in human history through which we are presently passing, and each author, either explicitly or implicitly, offers a new foundation for political life in the age to come.

8

N. Susan Laehn and Thomas R. Laehn

SURROGACY, EDUCATION, ART, PATHOS, AND LOVE The chapters contained herein are divided across four parts corresponding to four areas of study within the field of political theory: politics and literature, political theology, politics and ethics, and classroom pedagogy. Each of these parts directly relates to the writing, research, and teaching of Cecil Eubanks, who has taught countless classes on politics and literature, political theology, and politics and ethics, who currently chairs the LSU Ethics Institute, and who has provided his students and his colleagues with both formal instruction and informal guidance on effective teaching. While these chapters are thus grouped in terms of their subject matter, we believe the interconnections between them are, in some ways, more significant than their respective topics. Indeed, attention to the common threads connecting the various chapters contained in this volume reveals both the artificial nature of the divisions currently structuring the discipline and the ultimate futility of any effort to understand politics, art, theology, ethics, or pedagogy in isolation. In other words, questions concerning the relationship between politics and art, for instance, necessarily implicate theological, ethical, and pedagogical questions, and without attending to these questions, any understanding of the relationship between politics and art is necessarily deficient. Accordingly, these common threads do not respect the topical organization of the book, but instead lead the reader from one section to another before looping back through an earlier section of the book. Hence, each chapter contributes to the meaning of the whole, but the meaning of the whole in turn imparts additional meaning to each chapter, which cannot be fully understood in isolation from the others. In the opening chapter, The Subversiveness of Desire: Descartes, Hobbes, and the Suppression of the Erotic in Modern Thought, Thomas R. Laehn furthers the Nietzschean critique of the conception of man underlying the modern order by revealing that the construction of both the Cartesian ego and the Hobbesian subject at the dawn of modernity entailed the suppression of the erotic dimension of human existence. He thus argues that the modern nation-state was purposefully predicated on a false conception of the human person. According to Laehn, whereas Plato had recognized the erotic longing underlying the philosopher’s search for truth as a politically disruptive force, modern philosophers self-consciously suppressed the experience of erotic desire in order to protect both the modern state and its foundational texts from the destabilizing effects of erotic longing. Laehn’s chapter suggests that any viable foundation for the emerging postmodern age must take into account human longing as an experience inseparable from the human condition.

Introduction

9

While never made explicit, Laehn’s account of the suppression of human longing as a dimension of human existence in the writings of Descartes and Hobbes raises the possibility that desire or love could itself provide a basis for political life in postmodernity. The contributions to this volume by Andrea D. Conque, Toward a Politics of Care: Heidegger, Freedom, and the MoralPolitical Posture of Authentic Solicitude, and John Randolph LeBlanc and William Paul Simmons, Terror, Nihilism, and Joy: Reconsidering Camus’s Confrontation with Political Violence, inquire more deeply into the possibility of a politics based on love rather than on its suppression. In chapter 3, Conque proposes the adoption of a “politics of care” predicated on a conception of love as authentic solicitude as defined in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time and as developed more fully in his own personal love letters to Hannah Arendt in 1925. Indeed, for Conque, Heidegger’s epistolary reflections on the nature of love provide insight into his understanding of authentic solicitude, and she argues that a rereading of Being and Time in conjunction with Heidegger’s letters to Arendt allows for the development of the politics of care otherwise contained only in nascent form in Being and Time. According to Conque, love qua authentic solicitude consists in letting others be what they authentically are by taking up a watchfully attentive stance toward them and by freeing them for their ownmost possibilities. Conque rejects Gregory Fried’s contention that polemos (or “war”) is the fundamental concept underlying Heidegger’s thinking on politics, arguing instead that authentic solicitude would provide the true foundation for a Heideggerian polity. While Conque admits that the Western tradition has generally rejected “love” as a possible basis for political life, she believes love as authentic solicitude, and the empathy it requires, would provide an antidote to the ailments of the modern liberal state and its emphasis on individual rights. Finally, Conque uses the example of an aunt’s attentive care for her nephew as he attempts to learn how to tie his shoes to illustrate the posture assumed by someone displaying authentic solicitude for another, linking Conque’s chapter to those expressly concerned with the role of pedagogy in the polis, as well as LeBlanc and Simmons’s chapter Terror, Nihilism, and Joy. In chapter 7, LeBlanc and Simmons undertake a careful reading of Albert Camus’s play The Just Assassins, based loosely on the actual members of a terrorist cell operating in czarist Russia who successfully carried out the assassination of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich in 1905. For LeBlanc and Simmons, the Camusian rebel—most certainly not only an actual historical personage but also an artist’s representation of man confronting the absurdity of his existence—is able to find moments of solidarity with his fellow rebels, but only if he resists the siren call of revolutionary nihilism.

10

N. Susan Laehn and Thomas R. Laehn

The “just” assassin must, therefore, remain mindful of the thin boundary between authentic rebellion and nihilistic revolution. Whereas the standard reading of The Just Assassins focuses on the juxtaposition of two of the play’s characters—Yanek, the poet-rebel, who is primarily concerned with abstract principles, and Stepan, the nihilist-revolutionary, whose foremost concern is for that which is tangible and concrete—LeBlanc and Simmons instead argue for the centrality of a third member of Yanek and Stepan’s terrorist cell: Dora, the “pedagogue of rebellion.” According to LeBlanc and Simmons, it is Dora who embodies Camus’s ideal of the authentic rebel. Dora teaches Yanek and Stepan that there is both a wrong way and a right way to engage in revolution, and what distinguishes them is the latter’s recognition of limits. Dora’s ability to entertain simultaneously her revolutionary ideas and her concern with the flesh and blood of human beings makes her both the model Camusian rebel and an effective teacher of rebellion. Most importantly, through Dora’s instruction, Yanek is able to experience love as the solidarity that exists among rebels, thereby linking an abstraction (love) with the human body (one’s fellow rebels) and connecting both to the modes and orders of human existence. LeBlanc and Simmons suggest that Yanek was ultimately even able to experience joy while standing at the gallows knowing that he would die without having revealed the identity of his comrades. LeBlanc and Simmons contend that for Camus, love must anchor rebellion, and their exegesis of The Just Assassins suggests that the comradery that exists among rebels could potentially provide both a foundation for political life and a source of happiness despite the absurdity of man’s existence. LeBlanc and Simmons’s chapter is thus related thematically to the chapters authored by Thomas Laehn and Conque, who suggest that love, properly understood, may provide a basis for the postmodern state. In addition, LeBlanc and Simmons’s recognition of Dora as a pedagogue links their chapter with those of Drew Kennedy Thompson, W. King Mott, and David D. Corey. In his chapter The Role of Care Structures in Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter: Surrogacy, Memory, and Membership in Port William, Kentucky, Thompson contends that the application of the neglected concept of a “care structure” to the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, described in the literary works of Wendell Berry, including especially his Hannah Coulter, reveals that “surrogacy” and “memory” are fundamental political concepts that modern political scientists fail to recognize due to the ascendancy of the modern liberal state and their preoccupation with it. For Thompson, these care structures arise from an ethic of personal responsibility and neighborly obligation that has been largely forgotten in contemporary American political culture due to the emphasis placed on individual rights and economic self-interest. According to Thompson, Berry’s depiction of the “Port William Membership” provides an alternative model for political life superior to the

Introduction

11

modern liberal nation-state. The historical integrity of the Membership as a community depends not only on the telling and retelling of stories, which establish a form of collective memory across the succession of generations, but also on surrogates whose assumption of otherwise unfulfilled roles within the Membership ensures the perpetuation of the Port William community. Importantly, for Berry, the act of assuming the responsibilities of surrogacy is neither legally commanded nor made in response to the other person’s assertion of a right, but rather a voluntary act made in gratitude for the relationships that have endowed the surrogate’s life with meaning. Interestingly, as described by Thompson, surrogates often fulfill the role of a teacher, and he thereby indicates that surrogacy may be essential to the politics of care for which Conque is an advocate. Whereas Conque uses the image of an aunt teaching her nephew how to tie his shoes to exemplify the type of authentic solicitude underlying a politics of care, and whereas Thompson suggests that one of the most important responsibilities of a surrogate is the instruction of those who are under his or her care, Mott and Corey directly examine the role of the teacher in the postmodern world. In so doing, they illustrate the role of the educator as a caretaker for students who are often “homeless” insofar as they have suddenly been thrust into a world filled with unfamiliar faces and in which their core beliefs are frequently called into question. The teacher is thus the archetypical surrogate, and the classroom becomes a model for the postmodern polity. Mott opens the section on Pedagogy and the Polis with his chapter The Birth of Tragedy: Political Theory and the Classroom. Drawing from the Nietzschean analysis of the eternal struggle of Dionysus and Apollo—of chaos and order, passion, and reason—he argues that the teacher in a contemporary classroom is called both to disturb and to structure the thoughts of his or her students. Undergraduates and graduate students deserve this freedom as they refine themselves and their ideas. Mott contends that Mary Daly, Paul Monette, and Audre Lorde all advocated for this same kind of safety found in freedom. A pattern of intellectual consciousness emerges as Mott explores their struggles with intellectual and existential joy and suffering. The writings of these activists and intellectuals reflect not only the interplay of the Dionysian and the Apollonian forces at work in the universe but also Cecil Eubanks’s pedagogical philosophy. Interspersed with some of Professor Eubanks’s own stories, this chapter provides a glimpse into a paradigmatic form of care, offered by a teacher to a student. Corey’s chapter, Political Philosophy as Apprenticeship and Practice, offers a distinct pedagogy for students of political philosophy that focuses on apprenticeship to traditional authors. Corey offers several reasons why students often fail to study political philosophy in this manner: the allurements of analytic philosophy, the fear of smothering one’s own originality,

12

N. Susan Laehn and Thomas R. Laehn

and an overly cynical suspicion that the tradition is somehow inherently biased or corrupt. But despite these allurements, the traditional approach is defended here in terms of its fecund images, doctrines, and methods. Corey proposes that apprenticeship should stop, at a certain point, to make way for the practice of political philosophy, which is described as high-level reflection on what politics is and should be. Even here, certain prominent voices conspire to discourage the would-be practitioner: the dogmatists who suppose all the questions have been answered, the exegetes who cannot put down their traditional texts, and the contentious quibblers who are more interested in winning debates than exploring the often-puzzling nature of political reality. Nevertheless, Corey encourages the practice of political philosophy, whether it takes a disinterested, theoretical form or one that is aimed at affecting the world. Corey’s contention that the student of political philosophy should begin as an apprentice but end as a practitioner constitutes both a defense of the traditional canon in political philosophy and a recognition of its limits. Corey’s understanding of apprenticeship thus mirrors Conque’s understanding of love as authentic solicitude. Just as Conque contends that the lover never seeks to dominate the beloved but instead to free the beloved for his or her ownmost possibilities, Corey posits that the purpose of apprenticeship to the tradition and its teachers is not indoctrination but freedom: freedom from ignorance and freedom for independent inquiry and practice. In chapter 5, The Poets and Professor, Peter A. Petrakis not only builds on Corey’s defense of the traditional philosophical canon, but also explicitly calls attention to an important premise underlying the contributions made to this volume by Thompson, LeBlanc and Simmons, and—as we shall see—N. Susan Laehn; namely, that a solution to the maladies of modernity, the articulation of an appropriate response to the nihilistic tendencies of our time, and the establishment of a new foundation for the emerging postmodern age will require a more expansive conception of the canon encompassing not just philosophical texts but also works of literature, music, painting, and poetry, as well as other forms of art. Petrakis begins by recounting a class on “Tragedy and Political Theory” he audited with Professor Eubanks in the spring of 1995 while working on his dissertation. Petrakis explains that his close reading of the Greek tragedians under Professor Eubanks’s tutelage informed his own research and writing on the search for a new foundation for politics while avoiding the Scylla of foundationalist traditions and the Charybdis of nihilism. Petrakis, as with Jimmy F. Lea in his afterword, Cecil, Nikos, and Me, thus provides his readers with a concrete illustration of an educator freeing his apprentice for the practice of political philosophy and helping him to realize his ownmost possibilities. Petrakis subsequently developed a philosophical approach to the challenges of postmodernity based on the ambiguity of art, which is able to tell a coherent story without asserting absolute truths.

Introduction

13

Indeed, for Petrakis, the constriction of philosophy to the narrow limits of human reason has prevented our discovery of a new foundation for political life, leaving us trapped in a nihilistic age with neither foundationalism nor foundations. In short, our hope for the future may very well depend on the poets’ readmission into the polis. Admitting one of the greatest poets of our time into the pages of this volume, chapter 4, Subjectivity in Crisis: Emmanuel Levinas and Albert Camus on Exile and Hospitality by N. Susan Laehn, takes the baton handed off by Petrakis. Though most political philosophers who examine the work of Albert Camus do so using his “philosophical texts,” namely, The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel, this chapter provides a careful exegesis of one of his overlooked literary works, Exile and the Kingdom. Though Levinas was a Jewish phenomenologist, and Camus an atheist novelist and playwright, both recognized the implications of the failed modern project first discussed in the opening chapter of the book. Levinas and Camus were united in their recognition of the exilic experience of modern man; both realized that the individual is called to something beyond the self, while marooned within the walls of the cogito. As a remedy for the exiled subject, Laehn presents the concept of pathos, which resembles the sort of empathy discussed by Conque. However, both Levinas and Camus self-consciously reacted to their perception of Heidegger’s philosophical shortcomings. Levinas explicitly sought an alternative to the Heideggerian emphasis on ontology, and Camus did so implicitly. But both thinkers advocated the sort of care for and solidarity with others outlined by Thompson and LeBlanc and Simmons, respectively. When confronted with the suffering of others, one experiences a call to respond with acts of hospitality, and in so doing establishes the basis for ethical community. For Levinas, this comes in the form of the experience of the transcendent in the face of the Other, which beckons one to act and which fulfills modern man’s subconscious metaphysical desire. For Camus, community can develop among strangers, so long as selfless acts of responsibility are undertaken in service to others. Here one finds a new humanism and a philosophy of duty. Finally, in chapter 2, Dorothy Day, Emmanuel Levinas, and the Transcendent Experience in the Political, William P. Schulz, Jr. further explores the postmodern search for transcendence through the writings of Dorothy Day and Emmanuel Levinas. Day was the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and Levinas was a Jewish phenomenologist. Yet, Schulz notes, both thinkers rediscover the transcendent in the phenomenal world, primarily through the suffering of others. The experiences of pathos and care resurface in this chapter, recalling the importance of empathy, care, pathos, and solidarity in the foregoing chapters. Schulz details Dorothy Day’s time as a journalist, and her subsequent writings on the suffering of the poor revealed her experience

14

N. Susan Laehn and Thomas R. Laehn

of the transcendent—an experience largely banished from contemporary philosophical discourse. In this way, Levinas and Day were united in readmitting the transcendent to the world, via the experience of pathos in the faces of others. Schulz explains that for Day, through participation in political events, broadly construed, individuals could, for a brief moment, interact with the transcendent. As those in the ancient world realized, but as our modern and postmodern philosophers have failed to acknowledge, only through community with others, namely through political community, can individuals flourish. While different in subject matter, scope, and method, the contributions to this volume all contain intimations of a new foundation for political life following the collapse of the modern project. Surrogacy, education, art, pathos, and love will likely all play a role in providing a foundation for the postmodern period and in reinjecting meaning into both human life and the course of world history. And, for the contributors to this volume and the countless undergraduate and graduate students who have served their apprenticeships under him, Cecil L. Eubanks will be remembered as one of the prophets of our time.

NOTES 1. Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 60. 2. For Tocqueville’s discussion of the dangers of individualism, see especially volume II, part 4 of Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); see also Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 46: “Individualism and statism advance together, always mutually supportive, and always at the expense of lived and vital relations that stand in contrast to both the starkness of the autonomous individual and the abstraction of our membership in the state.” 3. See Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988). 4. “Today’s liberals . . . insist upon the conquest of humanity—whether through the technological control of the natural world (‘conservative’ liberals) or the technological control of reproduction and mastery of the human genetic code (‘progressive’ liberals). A core feature of the liberal project is antipathy to culture as a deep relationship with a nature that defines and limits human nature.” Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, 72. 5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Dent, 1911), 180ff. 6. Mark C. Taylor, After God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 58.

Introduction

15

7. Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 37. 8. Taylor, After God, 49ff. 9. Hobbes similarly sought to ground political life in the free consent of the individual subject, thereby establishing the ontological primacy of the individual as a foundational political precept. While we have identified Descartes as the principal author of the modern age, one could easily give pride of place to Hobbes instead. Of course, Niccolò Machiavelli is a contender for the same title. Indeed, chronologically, The Prince preceded even Luther’s Theses. However, his project was an attempt to reestablish republican government, which would not occur for hundreds of years. Nevertheless, in both The Prince and the Discourses on Livy, one can see a corresponding rejection of Aristotelian virtue ethics and of the role of the Church in establishing and maintaining political order. As Leo Strauss notes in Natural Right and History, “It was Machiavelli, that greater Columbus, who had discovered the continent on which Hobbes could erect his structure.” Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953), 177. 10. Tocqueville wrote: “America is . . . the one country in the world were the precepts of Descartes are least studied and best followed.” Democracy in America, 403. 11. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Richard Polt (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 32. 12. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche calls “perspective . . . the basic condition of all life.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), 193. 13. Ibid., 202. 14. “In what strange simplification and falsification man lives!” Ibid., 225. 15. Ibid., 236. 16. Nietzsche rejected the existence of immediate certainties more generally, pronouncing a “faith in ‘immediate certainties’ . . . a stupidity that reflects little honor on [philosophers].” Ibid. 17. Ibid., 214. 18. Ibid., 192. 19. “In man, creature and creator are united: in man there is material, fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, formgiver, hammer hardness, spectator divinity, and seventh day.” Ibid., 344. 20. For critiques of individual human rights, see Ronald Dworkin, “Rights as Trumps,” in Theories of Rights, ed. Jeremy Waldron (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 153–67; Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: Free Press, 1991); Onora O’Neill, Toward Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); A. Belden Fields, Rethinking Human Rights for the New Millennium (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Sonu Bedi, Rejecting Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

16

N. Susan Laehn and Thomas R. Laehn

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aristotle. The Politics. Translated by Carnes Lord. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984. Bedi, Sonu. Rejecting Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Deneen, Patrick. Why Liberalism Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. Dworkin, Ronald. “Rights as Trumps.” In Theories of Rights, edited by Jeremy Waldron, 153–67. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Fields, A. Belden. Rethinking Human Rights for the New Millennium. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Glendon, Mary Ann. Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse. New York: Free Press, 1991. Marx, Karl. “On the Jewish Question.” In Selected Writings, edited by David McLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Morgan, Edmund S. Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988. O’Neill, Onora. Toward Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Émile. Translated by Barbara Foxley. London: Dent, 1911. Strauss, Leo. Natural Right and History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953. Taylor, Mark C. After God. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Part I

POLITICAL THEOLOGY

Chapter 1

The Subversiveness of Desire Descartes, Hobbes, and the Suppression of the Erotic in Modern Thought Thomas R. Laehn

While images of philosophers floating among the clouds, untethered from real-world concerns, or falling into wells while gazing at the stars, having allowed their abstract speculations to eclipse the concrete realities of human life, are perhaps not entirely unmerited, Plato’s dialogues suggest that an innate desire for that which is beautiful anchors the philosopher’s search for knowledge “concerning the gods . . . and the whole”—the highest and presumably most pulchritudinous realities—in the realm of immediate personal experience.1 Importantly, according to the collective testimony of poets, theologians, and philosophers across the ages, erotic longing is an essential feature of the human condition, intrinsic to man’s intermediate position between the beasts and the gods within the hierarchy of being. As Augustine observed, “There is no one who does not love.”2 Yet, for reasons to be examined shortly, from the perspective of the regime and those interested in its preservation, the seemingly apolitical experience of erotic longing is a dangerous political force. As Laurence Cooper has written, erotic desire constitutes a permanent and ineradicable “threat to order and justice” sown into the very nature of man.3 The following chapter is divided into three sections. In the first section, I examine the essential properties of human erotic longing as described in Plato’s middle dialogues. Then, in the following section, I rebut the prevailing, Freudian reading of Socrates’s teachings concerning the nature of human longing, providing evidence that the Platonic sublimation of sexual desire in the philosopher’s quest for knowledge exacerbates, rather than mitigates, the inherent subversiveness of desire. Lastly, in the final section, I argue that the political philosophers whose texts inaugurated the modern age sought to 19

20

Thomas R. Laehn

suppress the erotic dimension of human experience in order to protect the modern state from the politically subversive search for the ultimate object of human longing. In particular, it is my contention that despite their well-known rivalry, René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes were engaged in a common project to provide a secure foundation for political life through the composition of a foundational text immune to the destabilizing force of erotic desire. THE CONCEPT OF THE EROTIC IN PLATO’S MIDDLE DIALOGUES Conventionally translated as “desire” or “sexual love,” erōs first acquired the status of a philosophical concept in Plato’s middle dialogues.4 Plato’s explication of erōs as a distinctively human longing for that which is beautiful, especially in his Symposium and Phaedrus, allowed for the subsequent conceptualization of two additional, theoretically distinct, types of love: philia, or friendship love, in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and agapē, or God’s love, in the Pauline epistles. In the Phaedrus, Socrates defines erōs as a species of divinely inspired madness that occurs whenever someone descries something beautiful in the world and has a remembrance of the “true,” heavenly Beauty glimpsed by every human soul prior to its embodiment.5 So defined, erōs has five essential properties. First, erōs is transitive: to desire is always to desire something. For Socrates, the transitivity of desire is an analytical proposition: just as a father is always, by definition, the father of a son or a daughter, erōs is always, by definition, erōs of something, and in particular, of something the subject of the erotic experience lacks. This is the first lesson concerning the nature of desire Socrates teaches those present at Agathon’s drinking party in the Symposium. “The desiring subject,” Socrates explains, “must desire something he lacks, and if he does not lack, he does not desire.”6 The transitivity of erotic desire is thus its most elemental feature. In her superb exposition of the teachings of the ancient poets and philosophers concerning the nature of the erotic and its relationship to the nature of reality itself, Anne Carson observes that according to this most basic insight into the experience of desire, the erotic encounter necessarily consists of “three structural components—lover, beloved, and that which comes between them.” “A space must be maintained” between the lover and the beloved, writes Carson, “or desire ends.” Although other proposed attributes of erotic longing are revised or discarded as Socrates’s account of the nature of erōs in the Symposium progresses, the initial insight that erotic desire is always directed toward something the desiring subject lacks is left unchallenged as “something essential to eros.”7

The Subversiveness of Desire

21

Second, erotic desire is ironic. As a rhetorical trope, “irony gives the impression that [the speaker is] saying something different from (alium, aliter), not contrary (contrarium) to, what [he is] thinking.” Hence, unlike a lie, an ironic statement is not meant to deceive but is rhetorically effective only insofar as the speaker signals to his listeners that he should not be taken literally. Nevertheless, the particular nonliteral meaning intended by the speaker “is thereby left unclear.”8 Similarly, the irony of erōs consists in the incongruity, which is not to say the absolute opposition, between the true aim of a person’s longing and its immediate object. For Socrates, the immediate object of the erotic experience attracts the desiring subject only insofar as it participates in the true Beauty upon which the desiring subject’s soul had gazed prior to its embodiment. That which is Beautiful in itself is always the true aim of the desiring subject’s longing regardless of the particular object of the erotic encounter. While the dissatisfaction experienced in the acquisition of the immediate object of his desire may cause the desiring subject to recognize the object’s inadequacy, there is no guarantee that such dissatisfaction will disclose the true aim of his longing. Erōs is thus deeply ironic, in that what the subject of the erotic experience “ultimately or really wants is one thing,” but what he “thinks [he] wants . . . may be, and in fact usually is, something else.”9 “Love’s ironies are many,” writes David Halperin in his definitive treatment of the ironic nature of erotic love. “But they all come down to a single paradox: the object of desire is not what you think it is.”10 The irony of erōs explains its remarkable conceptual breadth. Conceptually, erōs embraces an amplitude of meaning, ranging from animalistic sexual desire to a longing for immaterial realities. This amplitude of meaning is reflected in an important change in terminology in the Phaedrus: whereas Socrates initially asserts that “everyone knows that erōs is a desire,” he corrects this universal opinion in his palinode by repeatedly referring to erōs as a “yearning” (himeros) rather than a “desire” (epithumia).11 In other words, as the experiential depths of erotic attraction are plumbed, physiological desire shades into existential yearning. Likewise, in the Symposium, as the desiring subject ascends Diotima’s ladder, the initial experience of erōs as a desire to possess that which is beautiful is reinterpreted as a longing to behold or to contemplate that which is Beautiful in itself.12 As Cooper rightly surmises, “As eros ascends, not only its objects but also its character changes.”13 The acquisitive character of desire in the immanent stratum of human experience is necessarily shed as the desiring subject ascends to the transcendent realm of the forms, wherein the object of human longing, strictly speaking, is no longer an “object” at all.14 Third, insofar as Platonic erōs subsumes both man’s most animalistic desires and his noblest aims under the heading of a single concept, it is erōs’s anamnestic, or recollective, character that unites the basest and most sublime

22

Thomas R. Laehn

manifestations of human longing as aspects of a single phenomenon. It is not simply the case that erotic desire is based on a recollection (anamnēsis) of the Beautiful—that is, that a memory of the Beautiful inspires erotic longing—but rather that human longing is itself anamnestic and anamnesis is itself erotic. A man desires that which is beautiful only insofar as he recollects that which is Beautiful in itself, but the recollection of the Beautiful occurs in and through the desire experienced in the erotic encounter. Thus, according to the Socratic conception of erōs, mystical anamnesis grounds and pervades human longing. In short, for Socrates, “love is recollection.”15 The unipolarity of erōs, its fourth essential property, is inseparable from each of the foregoing features of the erotic encounter.16 According to Socrates, a common aim underlies the manifold forms of human desire, the mistaken objects of which point anamnestically beyond themselves toward a single transcendent goal, namely, the contemplation of that which is wholly, perfectly, and eternally Beautiful in itself.17 In the sixth book of Plato’s Republic, Socrates famously describes the Good as the ultimate aim and final referent of every human endeavor, and although the nature of the relationship between the Beautiful and the Good in Plato’s thought is obscure, “the Beautiful itself” (auto to kalon) appears to fulfill an analogous role in the structure of human erotic longing.18 Santas’s insightful suggestion that Socrates may be differentiating between a “generic” desire for the Good, which subsumes every species of human desire, and “eros proper,” which refers specifically to man’s anamnestic yearning for the Beautiful, would resolve Plato’s apparent equivocations, although Gerasimos Santas’s solution necessarily—and perhaps erroneously—presupposes the nonidentity of the Beautiful and the Good.19 Alternatively, G. R. F. Ferrari has proposed that the Beautiful is simply that quality of the Good most amenable to sensible apprehension, such that “the ascent to the Beautiful itself is indeed also an ascent to the Good itself.”20 In either case, a single, transcendent aim underlies the manifold forms of human erotic longing observable in the world—a structural feature of the erotic encounter inseparable from the transitivity, irony, and anamnesticity of erotic love. As Cooper writes, “However numerous its objects, eros . . . has a limited number of proper or true objects; indeed, in the deepest sense just one true object . . . . The philosopher’s eros is directed to that toward which all eros is, but does not know itself to be, directed.”21 The recognition of a single aim beneath the manifold forms of human desire marks a key turning point in the analysis of erōs contained in Plato’s Symposium. As those present at Agathon’s party take turns offering encomia in honor of erotic love, a recognition of the unipolarity of desire distinguishes the final three speeches from the three, less sophisticated, speeches delivered earlier in the evening. As Ferrari observes, the six eulogies can thus be divided “into two groups. . . . And the substantive issue that distinguishes

The Subversiveness of Desire

23

them is this: The speakers of the first group draw a fundamental distinction . . . between a good and a bad variety of love, while those of the second group do not. This development comes to a head with Diotima’s teaching that love in any of its manifestations is directed toward the good.”22 According to the Socratic account, all forms of human longing, including the most degraded or perverse, are expressions of a single, animating desire for the Beautiful. The irony of erotic longing generates the appearance of duality, as the desiring subject’s failure to find satisfaction in the acquisition of the immediate object of his desire can inaugurate either a stepwise ascent to ever-higher realities or a spiraling descent into the realm of carnal addictions. Erōs “can ennoble and raise us to the loftiest contemplation,” writes Octavio Paz, but it can also “lead us astray, make us fall in the swamp of concupiscence.”23 The two possible outcomes of the erotic encounter give rise to the appearance of a basic duality in human erotic experience (and to Pausanias’s erroneous conceptual distinction in the Symposium between a uranian erōs directed toward heavenly Beauty and a pandemotic erōs directed toward beautiful objects).24 For Socrates, however, unipolarity is one of erōs’s essential properties, with the apparent duality of the erotic resulting from man’s ignorance of the irony of his desires. According to the Socratic conception of the erotic, every desire “has a definite tendency in one direction: Eros is love for the [B]eautiful.”25 The lover of wine (philoinos) and the lover of honor (philotimos), the addict in search of his next fix and the hero in search of immortalization in the history books—stand-ins for the two classes of men beneath that of the philosophers in Plato’s Republic—are simply mistaken in their understanding of the nature of the Beautiful, allowing the immediate objects of their desire to eclipse the ultimate aim of their longing.26 The fifth and final essential property of Socratic erōs is its metaxical, or in-between, character.27 According to Socrates, erōs is neither beautiful nor ugly, neither ignorant nor wise, and neither time-bound nor eternal, but in all things intermediate.28 The metaxical character of desire is not an accidental feature of the desiring subject’s experience but is instead intrinsic to human longing. Indeed, erōs necessarily mediates between temporality and timelessness insofar as the act of recollection essential to the erotic encounter unites an immediate object with a transcendent aim as two aspects of a single, seamless, though admittedly stereoscopic, experience.29 Erōs’s metaxical character is also intrinsically related to its transitivity. The desiring subject’s attainment of the object of his desire would collapse the tripartite structure of the erotic encounter, but the total absence of the object would equally foreclose the possibility of desire. Hence, erotic desire exists midway betwixt the poles of absolute possession and absolute deprivation—the offspring, in Socrates’s poetic imagery, of Poverty and Plenty.30 It is thus clear “that the state of being neither one thing nor the other, but in between,

24

Thomas R. Laehn

is fundamental to [Socrates’s] theory of love.”31 It must be emphasized, however, that erōs does not occupy a spatial position between objectified contraries, but rather constitutes the very “principle of relationship” uniting the sensible and intelligible realms of being and the immanent and transcendent poles of human experience.32 Moreover, insofar as man himself exists midway between the beasts and the gods, simultaneously participating in the immanent and transcendent strata of being, intermediacy is not simply a property of erōs, but also the distinguishing feature of the human condition. It is, therefore, unsurprising that Socrates’s image of Erōs in the Symposium as a shoeless, liminal figure bears an unmistakable resemblance to Socrates himself, the normally unshod philosopher standing transfixed beneath the lintel of an anonymous neighbor’s door.33 “Eros,” like man himself, “is in between.”34 THE SUBVERSIVENESS OF DESIRE The “destructive power” of sexual desire was a commonplace among the ancient Greeks.35 In his excellent survey of the “long Greek tradition of thinking about eros” as a force capable of “overthrowing the . . . orders of civilization,” Bruce Thornton notes that in the ancient Greek mind, sexual desire was analogous to fire: while sexual desire and fire are equally necessary for the perpetuation of human life, they are also “equally dangerous, equally liable to rage uncontrollably and destroy household and city.”36 The Greeks, writes Thornton, “saw sex and violence as two sides of the same irrational coin, each interpenetrating and intensifying the other, creating a violent sex and sexual violence that exploded into profound destruction and disorder, a double chaotic energy threatening the foundations of human culture and identity.”37 In his more recent reflections on the nature of sexual desire, Paz reached a strikingly similar conclusion, once again drawing our attention to the continuity of human experience across the ages: Without sex there can be no society, since there can be no procreation; but sex also threatens society. Like the god Pan, it is creation and destruction. It is instinct: tremors, panic, the explosion of life. It is a volcano and any one of its eruptions can bury society under a violent flow of blood and semen. Sex is subversive: it ignores classes and hierarchies, arts and sciences, day and night—it sleeps and awakens, only to fornicate and go back to sleep again.38

In sum, in the words of the itinerant, second-century geographer Pausanias, “It is characteristic of erōs to destroy the laws of men and to subvert the rites of the gods.”39

The Subversiveness of Desire

25

But what is the source of erōs’s destructive power? What explains the subversiveness of desire? According to Martha Nussbaum in The Fragility of Goodness, Socrates traces the fickle nature, and destructive potential, of human desire to two features of “unregenerate” erōs: the desiring subject’s “attribution of value to an unstable external object,” which necessarily “brings internal instability of activity,” and the incommensurability of the myriad objects of unreflective desire, which inevitably generates conflict between men and a clash of competing ends in the life of the individual.40 Hence, according to Nussbaum, the lability and destructiveness of desire are not intrinsic to erōs itself but are instead restricted to its untutored form. Political instability can therefore be attributed to a lack of self-knowledge on the part of the desiring subject, who fails to explore the experiential depths of his longing and thus to appreciate the irony of love and the quixotic, capricious, and conflictive character of his unregenerate desires. Without reference to that which is Beautiful in itself, there can be no common measure or standard of valuation by which to rank the diverse objects of human longing, making it impossible to order one’s pursuits rationally or to resolve peaceably the conflict of individual ends. There can be no question that Nussbaum’s analysis is both insightful and largely correct. Indeed, Nussbaum’s explanation of the unstable character of unregenerate desire provides the proper theoretical framework for understanding Socrates’s identification of the two most extreme political pathologies analyzed in Plato’s middle dialogues as erotic phenomena. First, the genesis of political tyranny in the union of erotic longing with the basest desires of the tyrant’s soul, a union mirrored in the polis in the alliance formed between the libido dominandi of the tyrant and the appetites of the demos, is one of the key political teachings of the Republic.41 Among the various types of men, the philosopher and the tyrant, Socrates asserts, have the lustiest souls, but whereas the philosopher’s erōs is self-consciously directed toward the highest realities, the tyrannical man seeks in vain to sate the longing of his soul with the food of illusions and is driven to ever greater iniquities in an increasingly depraved effort to quell his innate desire for that which is perfectly and eternally Beautiful in itself in the realm of imperfect and perishable objects.42 In sum, political tyranny is rooted in the tyrant’s failure to recognize the irony of his desires, the anamnestic quality of his longing, and his own metaxical existence within the hierarchy of being. The existential discontent manifest in the erotic encounter is occasionally perverted into a dissatisfaction with the order of being itself. Such dissatisfaction gives rise to the second political pathology Socrates identifies as having an erotic origin in Plato’s middle dialogues. In his careful examination of Plato’s Symposium, James Rhodes observes that all of the guests at Agathon’s party, with the notable exception of Socrates, are engaged in a form of

26

Thomas R. Laehn

political Titanism, or “metaphysical rebellion” against the gods, spurred by their discontent with the limits intrinsic to the human condition.43 A certain existential discontent is admittedly inseparable from the human condition as illumined in the erotic encounter. As Cooper notes, Socrates perceived within himself and within all “human beings a discontent not only with this or that limit but also with finitude itself.”44 Among the symposiasts assembled at Agathon’s house, however, such discontent has gained pathological expression as an irrational quest to overturn the hierarchy of being and to transcend the very conditions of human life. The encomium given by the comic poet Aristophanes, according to which erotic longing is experienced as the desire to be reunited with one’s missing half, calls attention to the dangerous potential for metaphysical revolt inherent in man’s dissatisfaction with the given conditions of his existence, for while erōs may be experienced as the desire for union with another person, according to Aristophanes, it in fact originates in a more fundamental, ontogenetically prior, desire to assault the heavens and to supplant the gods.45 In Aristophanes’s well-known myth, Zeus explicitly states that his purpose in dividing the ur-humans into two halves is to diminish their strength and to deter mankind from conspiring to overthrow divine rule.46 Each man’s consequent desire for his matching half must thus be interpreted as a salutary ruse meant to redirect and to tame man’s longing for apotheosis.47 Aristophanic erōs, no less than Socratic erōs, possesses an ironic character, but according to Aristophanes’ myth, the true aim of human longing is not the contemplation of that which is Beautiful in itself but rather the deification of man. Given the abiding order of the hierarchy of being, however, such longing is hubristic, irrational, and perverse. As Rhodes insightfully observes, Socrates’s attribution of his encomium to erōs to the prophetess Diotima, whose name indicates that she “honors Zeus,” distinguishes Socrates’s speech from the others delivered at Agathon’s party by suggesting that it alone respects the “given order of being.”48 Human erotic longing is thus a wellspring for futile political projects with potentially horrific consequences. If left untutored with regard to its true object, unregenerate erōs can be perverted into a desire to transform the polity into a platform for world conquest or into an instrument of human auto-deification. In both its tyrannical and Titanic modes—resulting, respectively, from man’s ignorance of, or rebellion against, the structure of reality itself—erōs represents a threat to the stability and order of the political community.49 Mankind’s disastrous experiments with salvific politics in the twentieth century, moreover, leave no room for doubt concerning the danger posed to the polity by a tyrannical or Titanic soul, especially in light of the permanent reservoir of existential discontent necessarily present in every human society.

The Subversiveness of Desire

27

While Nussbaum’s account of the instability of unregenerate desire explains Socrates’s identification of the political pathologies described in Plato’s middle dialogues as erotic phenomena, Nussbaum errs in suggesting that Socrates believed the sublimation of erotic desire in the philosopher’s quest for knowledge would eliminate its subversive tendencies. According to Nussbaum’s analysis, Socrates’s substitution of that which is eternally and immutably Beautiful for the inherently unstable objects of man’s untutored desires was meant to domesticate human longing by removing the source of its lability and destructive potential. In Nussbaum’s words, Socrates sought to harness the creative energy of the libido for the sake of philosophy while “purifying it of ambivalence and excess and making it more friendly to general social aims.”50 Nussbaum’s anachronistic, Freudian interpretation of Plato’s middle dialogues prevails across the disciplines. Thornton, for example, contends that the Socratic sublimation of sexual desire in the erotic quest for knowledge was “a tool for controlling nature’s force and directing it to ends beneficial for the citizen and state.”51 Similarly, in his exploration of the relationship between sexuality, erōs, and romantic love, Paz asserts that “one of the aims of eroticism is to take sex and make a place for it in society.”52 Such descriptions of Socratic love, however, owe far more to postmodern psychoanalytic theory than to Socratic philosophy. Indeed, for Socrates, the exploration of the experiential depths of the erotic encounter and the consequent search for the true aim of human longing exacerbate, rather than mitigate, the subversiveness of desire. The ultimate source of erōs’s subversiveness is not the instability and incommensurability of the objects of unregenerate desire, as Nussbaum suggests, but rather the essential properties of erōs itself, especially its ironic character. Due to the irony of love, the desiring subject’s acquisition of the immediate object of his desire inevitably fails to satisfy the desiring subject’s longing. Such dissatisfaction can cause erōs to degenerate into tyrannical lust or Titanic ambition in the manner described earlier, but it can also launch the desiring subject on a questioning search for the true object of his desire. In other words, precisely because the desiring subject’s desire outstrips its immediate object, the irony of love can spur the desiring subject to join the philosophical quest for knowledge.53 In short, as a result of the frustration experienced in the erotic encounter, the desire for beauty can give birth to the search for truth.54 Moreover, due to the anamnesticity of desire, a path to truth is opened through the erotic encounter itself. As Halperin notes, according to the Socratic account, erōs “anchors a mode of access to the truth in the existential condition of every human being.”55 The sublimation of sexual desire in the philosophical desire to replace unreflective opinion (concerning the objects of individual desire) with

28

Thomas R. Laehn

certain knowledge (concerning the true aim of human longing), however, threatens the stability of the regime. Indeed, Socrates’s description of the opposition between the philosopher and the rhetorician in the second half of the Phaedrus, which commentators have struggled to explain, follows logically from Socrates’s explication of the experience of erotic longing in the first half of the dialogue insofar as the juxtaposition of the philosopher and the rhetorician illumines the politically destabilizing effect of the philosopher’s erotic quest for knowledge.56 As Socrates’s description makes clear, the rhetorician and the philosopher both depend upon the principles underlying the political order in which they live for the practice of their respective arts, but while the rhetorician builds upon the regime’s purportedly “self-evident” foundational truths when constructing the arguments through which he persuades his auditors, the philosopher’s critical examination of his interlocutors’ beliefs calls these foundational truths into question.57 As Socrates admits in the Phaedrus, he is dependent upon the city and its inhabitants for the practice of the art of dialectic, for just as the philosopher’s quest for a vision of that which is Beautiful in itself begins as a quest to gain possession of the immediate object of his unregenerate desire, the inadequacy of which, when obtained, spurs the erotic ascent, so, too, must the search for knowledge proceed through the repudiation of false opinions, such as those supplied by the philosopher’s interlocutors.58 Insofar as these opinions are representative of public opinion more generally, the erotic search for truth entails the repudiation of popular beliefs. As Richard Weaver insightfully contends, the philosopher’s art of “dialectic . . . is subversive,” ultimately destroying “the matrix which provides the base for its operation.”59 The subversiveness of the philosopher’s erōs is revealed most clearly in Socrates’s subsequent assertion that “no written text” (oudena logon), and in particular, no “political document” (politikon graphon), “is worthy of being treated seriously,” since all written texts are necessarily based on undefined terms and unacknowledged premises, and thus on unreflective opinion rather than on certain knowledge.60 Hence, while the art of rhetoric reinforces the regime by taking the truth of its fundamental texts for granted, the art of dialectic necessarily destabilizes the regime by exposing and challenging its enthymematic foundations. As Leo Strauss famously observed, “Philosophy . . . is the attempt to replace opinion about ‘all things’ by knowledge of ‘all things’; but opinion is the element of society; philosophy . . . is therefore the attempt to dissolve the element in which society breathes, and thus it endangers society.”61 It has not escaped the notice of Plato’s readers that Socrates’s unequivocal condemnation of all written texts not only delegitimizes a nation’s laws and founding documents but also calls into question the seriousness of Plato’s

The Subversiveness of Desire

29

own philosophical writings, including his description of erotic desire in the Phaedrus. As Carson observes: The Phaedrus is a written dialogue that ends by discrediting written dialogues. This fact does not cease to charm its readers. Indeed, it is the fundamental erotic feature of this erōtikos logos. Each time you read it, you are conducted to a place where something paradoxical happens: the knowledge of Eros that Sokrates and Phaedrus have been unfolding word by word through the written text simply steps into a blind point and vanishes, pulling the logos in after it.62

The radically subversive character of the erotic is illustrated in the discrediting of the very text that takes erōs as its subject. The irony of love subverts and destroys, destabilizing political life and threatening the dissolution of the community by giving rise to a search for true knowledge that inevitably calls into question the truth of all written texts, including the texts upon which every regime is based.63 It is surely not a coincidence that the Phaedrus is the only Platonic dialogue in which Socrates is depicted engaging his interlocutor outside the walls of the city: such a change in setting, Plato suggests, was a necessary prophylactic against the subversiveness of desire.64 One lesson that might be drawn from Plato’s middle dialogues is that a secure political order requires a text that is somehow rendered immune to the destabilizing force of man’s erotic longing. The composition of just such a text would be the great undertaking of the political philosophers of the modern age. DESCARTES, HOBBES, AND THE SUPPRESSION OF THE EROTIC IN MODERN THOUGHT Alert to the subversive character of human longing, the political philosophers whose writings introduced the modern age sought to provide a secure foundation for political life through the composition of a text immune to the destabilizing effects of erotic desire. In particular, a careful examination of the writings of René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes reveals that both philosophers were attempting to compose a foundational text for a new age in the history of man, the adoption of which would suppress the erotic dimension of human experience and thereby protect both the modern state and the fundamental texts upon which it depends from the politically subversive search for the ultimate object of human longing. In short, a political foundation impervious to erotic subversion required a founding text immune to the irony of man’s desires.

30

Thomas R. Laehn

The Ego Cogitans and the Suppression of the Erotic in Descartes’s Meditations As the medieval synthesis of Christian theology and Aristotelian metaphysics grew increasingly incapable of explaining human experience, signaling the failure of the scholastic project, and as the inherited feudal order collapsed beneath the weight of a growing bourgeois class, the founders of the modern age sought a secure foundation on which to rebuild both the sciences and human society itself. As Descartes writes at the beginning of his First Meditation: Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last.65

Descartes famously discovers a secure foundation for the reconstruction of the sciences in the indubitability of his own existence as a res cogitans or a “thinking thing.” In Descartes’s words: But I have convinced myself that there is absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Does it now follow that I too do not exist? No: if I convinced myself of something then I certainly existed. But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind. . . . But what then am I? A thing that thinks.66

With these words, Descartes supplied the modern age with a new, and seemingly incontrovertible, foundation: the certainty of his own existence as a thinking thing.67 On the basis of this certainty, Descartes’s successors would reestablish the sciences and construct the modern liberal democratic state. Descartes’s founding proposition, however, was not original.68 Indeed, more than 1,200 years earlier, in the eleventh chapter of The City of God, Augustine had similarly declared: I am most certain that I am, and that I know and delight in this. In respect to these truths, I am not at all afraid of the arguments of the Academicians, who

The Subversiveness of Desire

31

say, What if you are deceived? For if I am deceived, I am. For he who is not, cannot be deceived; and if I am deceived, by this same token, I am. And since I am if I am deceived, how am I deceived in believing that I am? for it is certain that I am if I am deceived.69

While Descartes adamantly denied the charge of plagiarism, a comparison of the Cartesian and Augustinian conceptions of the ego is revealing regardless of the true extent of Descartes’s debt.70 For Augustine, the human ego contained an image of the Christian Trinity, uniting being, knowing, and loving as three, inextricable, and equally indubitable, features of human existence. In Augustine’s words: “For, as I know that I am, so I know this also, that I know. And when I love these two things, I add to them a certain third thing, namely, my love, which is of equal moment. For neither am I deceived in this, that I love, since in those things which I love I am not deceived.”71 In the construction of the Cartesian ego, on the other hand, the erotic dimension of man’s existence is suppressed. “At last I have discovered it,” writes Descartes: “thought; this alone is inseparable from me. I am, I exist— this is certain. But for how long? For as long as I am thinking. For it could be that were I totally to cease from thinking, I should totally cease to exist. At present I am not admitting anything except what is necessarily true. I am, then, in the strict sense only a thing that thinks.”72 Thinking and being define and exhaust the existence of the ego as a res cogitans. Loving is conspicuously absent. Indeed, Descartes’s twofold assertion that thought “alone” cannot be separated from the ego and that the ego is “in the strict sense” only a thinking thing belies his purported ignorance of Augustine’s triune conception of man and reveals his concern for the subversiveness of desire. In the words of Jean-Luc Marion, at the dawn of the modern age, “the ego cogitans establishes itself only in opposition to and by repressing the erotic instance.”73 According to Marion, the “proof of this repression” is contained in Descartes’s enumeration of the essential activities of the ego.74 After asserting that the “proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true” at the beginning of his Second Meditation, Descartes asks rhetorically, “But what then am I?” to which he immediately responds: “A thing that thinks.” “What is that?” Descartes then asks, deepening his meditative exegesis of his own existence. “A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions.”75 Descartes repeats this enumeration of the ego’s essential activities at the beginning of his Third Meditation: I am a thing that thinks: that is, a thing that doubts, affirms, denies, understands a few things, is ignorant of many things, is willing, is unwilling, and also which imagines and has sensory perceptions; for as I have noted before, even though the objects of my sensory experience and imagination may have no existence

32

Thomas R. Laehn

outside me, nonetheless the modes of thinking which I refer to as cases of sensory perception and imagination, in so far as they are simply modes of thinking, do exist within me—of that I am certain.76

“Fine,” responds Marion, except that it follows by omission that I am no longer supposed to love, nor to hate; or better: I am of such a sort that I have neither to love, nor to hate, at least in the first instance. To love would not belong to the first modes of thought and, therefore, would not determine the most original essence of the ego. Man, as ego cogito, thinks, but he does not love, at least from the outset.77

As Marion notes, the omission of loving from the original essence of the ego was so unprecedented at the time of the Meditations’ publication that Descartes’s first French translator, the Duc de Luynes, felt compelled to emend the text and to add, “which loves, which hates,” to Descartes’s enumeration of the ego’s basic modes of thinking.78 Of course, in reducing “loving” to a mode of thinking, the Duc de Luynes merely affirmed the success of the Cartesian project: the Augustinian Trinitarian conception of the human person was effaced, leaving the ego as “strict[ly]” nothing but a thing that thinks; erotic longing, as an ontological determination of man’s existence along with being and thinking, was suppressed; and the Cartesian metaphysical system was thereby secured from the subversiveness of desire.79 Hobbes’s Contracted Conception of Desire Hobbes, no less than Descartes, sought a secure foundation for both modern science and the modern state in the wake of the dissolution of the intellectual, political, and economic world of the Middle Ages. In the Epistle Dedicatory with which he opens The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, his first philosophical work, in 1640, Hobbes announces that the text of his treatise will provide “the true, and only foundation” for a new science of “justice and policy,” in the absence of which “government and peace” had previously “been nothing else . . . but mutual fear.”80 Hobbes would revise and tease out the implications of the ideas contained in incipient form in The Elements of Law in his subsequent works, including especially his Leviathan, but throughout his project remained identical to that of his French rival: the composition of a foundational text, impervious to the subversive force of erotic desire, capable of providing a secure basis for a new age in the history of man. In Leviathan, Hobbes reaffirms Socrates’s teaching concerning the innateness of human desire. “For as to have no desire,” writes Hobbes, “is to be dead.”81 Yet, in comparison with its Socratic antecedent, the Hobbesian

The Subversiveness of Desire

33

conception of desire is radically reductionistic. As Haig Patapan and Jeffrey Sikkenga have recently written, “Hobbes has a consistent and comprehensive teaching on love that directly repudiates what he regards as the Platonic teaching on eros.”82 Whereas Socrates discovered a hidden yearning for the infinite animating every human desire, adding a mystical dimension to even the basest forms of human longing, “what Hobbes wants is to reduce the power and scope of eros in the world, returning it to the limited, private sphere of sex, pleasure, and perhaps the family.”83 For Hobbes, such a contraction in the Socratic conception of desire was a necessary condition, and a small price to pay, for lasting political peace and stability. While the word erōs appears nowhere in Leviathan—an omission that is in itself significant—in the sixteenth section of chapter 9 of The Elements of Law, Hobbes defines erōs as lust “limited ad hanc,” that is, to “one person desired.”84 In the preceding section, Hobbes had defined lust as “indefinite desire of the different sex, as natural as hunger.”85 Hence, for Hobbes, the erotic encounter is made possible when the indiscriminate sexual desire naturally occurring in man is directed toward, and limited by, a definite object. Significantly, in section seventeen, Hobbes continues his analysis of the nature of erotic desire by distinguishing erōs from the “passion” of charity. At the conclusion of the preceding chapter, Hobbes had identified the pleasure or displeasure men experience “from the signs of honour or dishonour done unto them” as the source of the passions.86 Honor, moreover, arises from “the acknowledgement of power.”87 The passions are thus rooted in the pleasure a man experiences upon having his power acknowledged and in the displeasure he experiences when others either fail to acknowledge his power or recognize his relative lack of power. According to Hobbes, charitable acts, which consist in assisting others in the accomplishment of their desires, bestow honor on a man, and thus provide him with pleasure, insofar as there is “no greater argument to a man of his own power” than his ability to satisfy simultaneously his own desires and those of his acquaintances.88 In short, acts of charity expose the power differential between the benefactor and the beneficiary, guaranteeing the mutual recognition of the benefactor’s superiority and thereby providing the motivation for his beneficence. After unsentimentally identifying “the natural affection of parents to their children” and the “affection wherewith men seek to assist those who adhere unto them” as two species of charity, Hobbes turns to a critical examination of the “honorable love” described by Socrates in the Symposium, presenting it as an alternative to his own conception of charity.89 It should be noted that in provisionally identifying “honorable love” with “charity,” and in distinguishing both from sexual lust, Hobbes is dividing erotic desire, described by Socrates as a single, seamless experience, into two, conceptually distinct, passions. Collapsing that which he had just torn asunder, however, Hobbes

34

Thomas R. Laehn

immediately proceeds to unmask the honorable love described by Socrates as dissembled sexual lust, using Socrates’s own famed love for Alcibiades to prove his case. Honorable love, writes Hobbes, is exemplified in the love of Socrates wise and continent, to Alcibiades young and beautiful; in which love, is not sought the honour, but issue of his knowledge; contrary to common love, to which though issue sometimes follow, yet men seek not that, but to please, and to be pleased. It should therefore be this charity, or desire to assist and advance others. But why then should the wise seek the ignorant, or be more charitable to the beautiful than to others? There is something in it savouring of the use of that time: in which matter though Socrates be acknowledged for continent, yet continent men have the passion they contain, as much or more than they that satiate the appetite; which maketh me suspect this platonic love for merely sensual; but with an honourable pretence for the old to haunt the company of the young and the beautiful.90

Hobbes thus distinguishes Socratic love from natural lust only to deny the existence of the former as anything more than a “pretence” for the latter’s satisfaction. Whereas Hobbes simply reveals the true nature of erotic love as mere sexual lust in The Elements of Law, in Leviathan, he systematically strips away each of the essential properties of Socratic desire, with the sole exception of its transitivity, thereby neutralizing its subversive tendencies. First, at the very beginning of Leviathan, Hobbes rejects the existence of innate ideas, denying the possibility of the mystical anamnesis upon which Socratic erōs depends. The origin of all thoughts, writes Hobbes, “is that which we call SENSE, for there is no conception in a man’s mind, which hath not at first, totally, or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense.”91 While every desire, according to the Socratic conception of erotic love, has a transcendent aim, a memory of which grounds and pervades the erotic encounter, Hobbes’s epistemological empiricism precludes the Socratic equation of recollection and desire. Insofar as the anamnesticity of Socratic desire is inextricably intertwined with its unipolarity, its irony, and its metaxical character, each of which comprises an essential component of a single conceptual constellation, Hobbes’s repudiation of the anamnesticity of human longing necessarily destroyed the Socratic conception as a whole, reducing the erotic encounter to its basic, tripartite, elemental structure. Without access, via mystical anamnesis, to the divine realm of the forms, no single, transcendent aim could animate the disparate activities of the desiring subject. “There is no such finis ultimus,” or “utmost aim,” asserts Hobbes, “as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers.”92 Instead, depending on each man’s individual “constitution

The Subversiveness of Desire

35

. . . and particular education,” both of which are known to vary, “whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire; that is it, which he for his part calleth good . . . there being nothing simply and absolutely so.”93 Once the anamnesticity and unipolarity of desire were rejected, love’s irony was also necessarily eliminated. For Hobbes, desire has no transcendent aim beyond its immediate object, the acquisition of which fully meets the physiological lack experienced by the desiring subject. Consequently, human happiness consists solely in the “continual progress of the desire, from one [acquired] object to another.”94 In this constant oscillation between lack and satisfaction, the poles of man’s tensile existence between absolute nothingness and the divine plenum, as illumined in the erotic encounter, are severed, immanentized, and assigned separate moments in a temporal sequence. “Desire, and love, are the same thing,” writes Hobbes, assigning different names to the experience of human longing at these now distinct moments in time, “save that by desire, we always signify the absence of the object; by love, most commonly the presence of the same.”95 Immanentization brings the transcendent pole of the erotic encounter within the flux of time, dissolving the conceptual unity of erotic love, eliminating the metaxical character of human longing, and foreclosing the possibility of Socratic desire. In order to immunize the text of Leviathan from the subversiveness of desire, Hobbes’s contracted conception of the erotic is literally contracted by means of the covenant described in the text itself. According to Hobbesian nominalism, universal terms have no referents, existing solely as constructs of the human mind.96 Whereas particular trees exist in reality, the concept of a “tree” in the abstract exists only through human convention. Moreover, for Hobbes, reasoning consists in “nothing but reckoning (that is, adding and subtracting) of the consequences of general names agreed upon, for the marking and signifying of our thoughts.”97 Knowledge of such consequences, according to Hobbes, is the very definition of science, endowing the conclusions obtained through scientific reasoning with the certainty of a geometric proof, but also making science itself a “conventionalistic construction.”98 In Hobbes’s words By this it appears that reason is . . . attained by industry; first in apt imposing of names; and secondly by getting a good and orderly method in proceeding from the elements, which are names, to assertions made by connexion of one of them to another; and to syllogisms, which are the connexions of one assertion to another, till we come to a knowledge of all the consequences of names appertaining to the subject in hand; and that is it, men call SCIENCE.99

Hence, according to Hobbes’s own conception of science, the conclusion of Leviathan—namely, that a subject is obligated to obey, and never has a

36

Thomas R. Laehn

duty to disobey, the commands of his sovereign—follows necessarily from the definitions contained at the beginning of the text, but these definitions are themselves nothing more than arbitrary conventions. Indeed, as quoted earlier, for Hobbes, reasoning consists in the reckoning “of the consequences of general names agreed upon,” that is, established by convention, suggesting that philosophers might reach different conclusions in alternate, but no less legitimate, linguistic universes.100 As Hobbes plainly states in his fourth objection to Descartes’s Meditations, “the inferences in our reasoning tell us nothing at all about the nature of things, but merely tell us about the labels applied to them; that is, all we can infer is whether or not we are combining the names of things in accordance with the arbitrary conventions which we have laid down in respect of their meaning.”101 Thus, as Victoria Kahn contends, a more fundamental “verbal contract” necessarily precedes and underlies the “political contract” described in Leviathan.102 In expressing his hope that Leviathan would “fall into the hands of a sovereign, who will consider it himself . . . and by the exercise of entire sovereignty, in protecting the public teaching of it, convert this truth of speculation, into the utility of practice,” Hobbes sought to pull himself up by his bootstraps: in establishing the definitions contained in Hobbes’s text through an exercise of sovereign authority, the sovereign would establish the source and foundation of his own sovereign authority.103 There is thus a certain circularity in the Hobbesian project: the political contract at the foundation of the modern state originates in an antecedent verbal contract, the meanings of the terms of which depend upon the command of the (already existing) sovereign. In Hobbes’s circular argument, however, can be seen an image of a closed system of thought, hermetically sealed off from the subversive force of human desire. CONCLUSION In order to secure the modern state, and the fundamental texts upon which it depends, from erotic subversion, the founders of the modern age sought to compose a foundational text impervious to the destabilizing force of human desire. In his Meditations, Descartes offered the indubitability of the ego cogitans, stripped of all existential yearning and discontent, as a secure foundation for a new age in the history of man; alternatively, and perhaps more radically, in his Leviathan, Hobbes proposed a new verbal contract, the adoption of which would establish a linguistic universe in which the citizens of each state would have an absolute duty to obey their sovereign and in which Socratic desire, with all of its attendant dangers, would be left unnamed. Today, in light of the repudiation of the Cartesian ego following

The Subversiveness of Desire

37

the successive assaults of Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, and the uncertainties surrounding the future of the Westphalian system, the world once again appears to be entering a new age. While the repression of the erotic at the dawn of the modern era resulted in a much-lamented, if only recently noticed, diminishment in the full amplitude of human experience, a new era may bring about a renewed understanding of the true depths of human experience and a scientific vocabulary adequate to its description.104 As in the past, however, as mankind traverses this new epochal break in human history, there will be nothing to guide us but our desire.105

NOTES 1. Xenophanes DK34. Cf. Aristophanes, Clouds, 217–34; Plato, Theaetetus, 174a–175b. All translations, unless otherwise specified, are my own. 2. Augustine, Sermo, 34.2. 3. Laurence D. Cooper, Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche: The Politics of Infinity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 41. 4. The following is based on my article on “Eros” in The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, ed. Michael T. Gibbons (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014). 5. Plato, Phaedrus, 249e–250a. 6. Plato, Symposium, 200a–b. 7. Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998), 16, 26, 77; cf. Catherine Osborne, Eros Unveiled: Plato and the God of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 47–49. 8. Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 55. 9. Cooper, Eros in Plato, 28. 10. David M. Halperin, “Love’s Irony: Six Remarks on Platonic Eros,” in Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern, ed. Shadi Bartsch and Thomas Bartscherer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 52. 11. Compare 237d with 251c–e. 12. Compare 204d–206a with 210c–212a. Socrates’s contention that an investigation into human desire reveals its true nature as existential longing is foreshadowed in the eulogy given by Agathon, who refers to Erōs as the “father of yearning and longing.” Ibid., 197d. 13. Cooper, Eros in Plato, 89. Indeed, as one ascends Diotima’s ladder, the acquisitive character of unregenerate desire gives way to the procreative character of human existential yearning—a revision of Socrates’s initial account of the nature of erotic desire overlooked by Anders Nygren in his tendentious portrayal of the differences between Socratic (i.e., pagan) erōs and Pauline (i.e., Christian) agapē. Cf. Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953), 175–77, 210; Daniel Boyarin, “What Do We Talk about When We Talk about Platonic Love?” in Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the

38

Thomas R. Laehn

Limits of Discipline, ed. Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 3–22. 14. “I feel the need,” writes Susan Mitchell with studied ambiguity, “for something that does not exist.” Susan Mitchell, “Erotikon (A Commentary on ‘Amor and Psyche’),” in Erotikon (see note 10), 16. Although there is a certain tendency among scholars to treat the sublime heights reached by the desiring subject in his exploration of the nature of his longing as a revelation of the true character of Socratic erōs, it is important not to sever existential yearning from its origin in sexual lust. Erōs refers to the whole phenomenon of human longing, from its foundation in concrete, physiological desires to its most sublime expression in man’s longing to transcend the limits intrinsic to the human condition. An emphasis on the procreative character of erotic longing at its most refined heights (in the Symposium) and the use of sexual imagery at various points in the process of the desiring subject’s self-discovery (in both the Symposium and the Phaedrus) serve to unite all stages in the sublimation of desire as moments in a single, continuous process. This is reflected in the very syntax of Socrates’s lengthy description of the ascent up Diotima’s ladder, which forms a single, continuous sentence (cf. 210a–d; see also 211c). Moreover, it must always be remembered that the charioteer’s sudden recollection of “the true nature of beauty” in the Phaedrus is an experience made possible by the black horse, whose efforts to drag the unwilling charioteer into the presence of the beloved for the sake of sexual pleasure first permit the erotic encounter, making animalistic lust an integral element of the erotic experience and a necessary precondition for the lover’s subsequent ascent to the divine. 15. Raphael Demos, “Eros,” Journal of Philosophy 31 (1934), 340 (emphasis added). It is surely not a coincidence that the erotic teachings of the Symposium are recollected from earlier conversations, such that the dialogue itself has an anamnestic character. 16. “The direction of love towards the super-sensible,” writes Nygren, “is constitutive of the Platonic idea of Eros.” Nygren, Agape and Eros, 178. 17. Plato, Symposium, 210e–211b. 18. Plato, Republic, 505d–e; Plato, Symposium, 211d. 19. Gerasimos Santas, Plato and Freud: Two Theories of Love (New York: Basil Blackwood, 1988), 40–47. 20. G. R. F. Ferrari, “Platonic Love,” in The Cambridge Companion to Plato, ed. Richard Kraut (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 260. 21. Cooper, Eros in Plato, 32, 87. 22. Ferrari, “Platonic Love,” 250. 23. Octavio Paz, The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism, trans. Helen Lane (Orlando: Harcourt, 1995), 49. Paz here echoes Augustine: “All love either ascends or descends.” Augustine Enarratio in Psalmum CXXII 1. 24. Plato, Symposium, 180d–e. 25. Nygren, Agape and Eros, 175. 26. Plato, Republic, 475a. 27. “Eros,” writes Demos, “is a metaxu—a principle of betweenness.” Demos, “Eros,” 340; cf. Frisbee C. C. Sheffield, Plato’s Symposium: The Ethics of Desire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 41–46.

The Subversiveness of Desire

39

28. Plato, Symposium, 201e–204c. 29. Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis, trans. Gerhart Niemeyer (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978), 124–34. 30. Plato, Symposium, 203a–e. 31. Osborne, Eros Unveiled, 101. 32. Demos, “Eros,” 337; cf. Voegelin, Anamnesis, 132–33; Plato, Symposium, 202e. 33. Compare 174a and 175a with 203c–d. The image of Socrates standing at a neighbor’s door reflects the irony of Socratic erōs no less than its liminal (or metaxical) character. For the correspondence between Plato’s depictions of Socrates and Erōs, see: Elizabeth S. Belfiore, Socrates’ Daimonic Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 187–96; Osborne, Eros Unveiled, 93–101. 34. Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, 109. 35. Bruce S. Thornton, Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997), 217; cf. Claude Calame, The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 1–19. 36. Thornton, Eros, 12, 31–32. 37. Ibid., 23. 38. Paz, The Double Flame, 10. 39. Pausanias, Graeciae Descriptio, 7.19.3. 40. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 195–97. 41. Plato, Republic, 572e–575c. 42. Ibid., 491d–492a, 572e–575c; cf. Plato, Phaedrus, 248b. 43. James M. Rhodes, Eros, Wisdom, and Silence: Plato’s Erotic Dialogues (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 207–99. 44. Cooper, Eros in Plato, 4. 45. Cf. Paul W. Ludwig, Eros & Polis: Desire and Community in Greek Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–118. 46. Plato, Symposium, 190c–d. 47. According to the Aristophanic account, Zeus’s invention of human sexual intercourse following his decision to cut the ur-humans in half was a further contrivance meant to provide an outlet for human erotic longing that would temporarily provide men with the illusion of satisfaction so that they “might turn to their labors and direct their attention to other matters in their lives.” Ibid., 191c. 48. Rhodes, Eros, Wisdom, and Silence, 303–04. 49. Paul Ludwig suggests that according to Aristophanic account of the nature of desire, it is the very formation of political communities that reawakens man’s Titanic ambitions following the implementation of Zeus’s punishment, since it is “the political unity and the strength made possible by the combined might of the city [that] permit men to think high thoughts once again.” Ludwig, Eros & Polis, 108. 50. Martha C. Nussbaum, “People as Fictions: Proust and the Ladder of Love,” in Erotikon (see note 10), 227. 51. Thornton, Eros, 206. 52. Paz, The Double Flame, 10–11, 12; see also: Belfiore, Socrates’ Daimonic Art, 258–59, 270–71.

40

Thomas R. Laehn

53. “Loving,” writes Elizabeth Belfiore, “is a necessary condition for desiring and searching for wisdom about the objects one loves or likes. When we love something and recognize we do not possess it, we ask questions about this object and attempt to find out how to acquire it. That is, loving leads people to like wisdom: philo-sophein.” Belfiore, Socrates’ Daimonic Art, 154. 54. Frisbee Sheffield contends that it is not the inadequacy of the objects of the desiring subject’s unregenerate desire, but rather the inadequacy of the account (logos) he is capable of giving of his desire, that propels the desiring subject toward that which is Beautiful in itself at each stage of the ascent up Diotima’s ladder. Sheffield’s argument, however, assumes that Socrates had abandoned his theory of anamnesis, described in the Phaedrus, for a proto-Aristotelian potentiality/actuality model of human development in the Symposium. Given the inseparability of anamnesticity from the other properties of Socratic erōs, and the lack of scholarly consensus concerning the order in which the Phaedrus and the Symposium were written, the argumentum ex silentio “that anamnēsis is not mentioned in the ascent” provides a weak foundation for Sheffield’s conclusions. While Sheffield is right to call attention to the desiring subject’s inability to account adequately for his longing at each stage of the erotic ascent, in the end the inadequacy of these accounts cannot be understood apart from the more fundamental inadequacy of the objects in reference to which the desiring subject attempts to make sense of his experience. Cf. Sheffield, Plato’s Symposium, 121–33. 55. Halperin, “Plato and Erotic Reciprocity,” 76n49. 56. On the struggle to discover the dialogue’s unity, see: Daniel Werner, “Plato’s Phaedrus and the Problem of Unity,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 32 (2007), 91–137. 57. Cf. Richard M. Weaver, “The Cultural Role of Rhetoric,” in Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), 55–72. 58. Plato, Phaedrus, 230d. 59. Weaver, “Cultural Role of Rhetoric,” 58. 60. Plato, Phaedrus, 277d–e. 61. Leo Strauss, “On a Forgotten Kind of Writing,” in What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 221. 62. Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, 166. 63. It is worth noting that erotic desire is especially subversive in a pluralistic society such as that which exists in the United States, wherein a shared commitment to a foundational text positing a set of self-evident truths is ultimately all that binds the members of the society together as citizens with a common civic identity. 64. As David Levy notes, Plato also attempts to protect the city from the subversiveness of desire in the Symposium. As they ascend the ladder of love, Diotima leads Socrates from the beauty of souls to the beauty of the city’s “practices and laws,” but she then passes from the beauty of the city’s “practices” to the superior beauty of the sciences, omitting any further reference to the city’s laws. “This omission,” writes Levy, “is in keeping with the suggestion . . . that Diotima does not wish to draw too much attention to the critique of the law implied by her account.” David Levy, Eros

The Subversiveness of Desire

41

and Socratic Political Philosophy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 187n69; cf. Plato, Symposium, 210c, 211c. 65. René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985–91), 2:12 (AT VII, 17). 66. Ibid., 2:16–17, 19 (AT VII, 25, 28). 67. “I am certain,” declares Descartes, “that I am thinking thing.” Ibid., 2:24 (AT VII, 35). 68. Gareth B. Matthews, Thought’s Ego in Augustine and Descartes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 11–12. 69. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: The Modern Library, 1993), 370. 70. See Descartes’s Letter to Colvius, November 14, 1640, which can be found in Descartes, Philosophical Writings, 3:159–60 (AT III, 247–48). “Both the nature of Descartes’ Jesuit education at LaFlèche and the strong similarities between passages in Descartes and passages in both the Trinity and the City of God,” posits Gareth Matthews, “make such innocence unlikely.” Matthews, Thought’s Ego, 13. Taking a broader view of Descartes’s debt to Augustine, Stephen Menn persuasively argues that Descartes intentionally “buil[t] his new philosophy . . . on the old Augustinian metaphysics.” Stephen Menn, Descartes and Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 16. 71. Augustine, City of God, 370–71. 72. Descartes, Philosophical Writings, 2:18 (AT VII, 27). 73. Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 6. Such repression is also evident in The Passions of the Soul, in which Descartes offers an Aristophanic definition of love as an “emotion of the soul . . . which impels the soul to join itself willingly to objects . . . in such a manner that we imagine a whole, of which we take ourselves to be only one part, and the thing loved to be the other.” In contrast to Aristophanes, however, Descartes provides no hint of the irony of man’s desires. Indeed, Descartes is careful to block any ascent up Diotima’s ladder, asserting that “although we may see many persons of the opposite sex, yet we do not desire many at any one time, since nature does not make us imagine we need more than one other half.” Descartes, Philosophical Writings, 1:356, 360 (AT XI, 387, 396). 74. Such proof, however, is hardly necessary. Among the rules contained in the provisional moral code he adopted to guide his behavior while engaged in his project of hyperbolic doubt, Descartes included the maxim that he should “change [his] desires rather than the order of the world,” as necessary “to prevent [him] from desiring in the future something [he] could not get, and so to make [him] content.” Descartes, Philosophical Writings, 1:123–24 (AT VI, 25). In this willful suppression of his insatiable desires, the existence of which he indirectly admits, Descartes establishes himself as the first modern man. Insofar as Descartes’s provisional moral code remains in force throughout the Second Meditation, the construction of the Cartesian ego as a res cogitans is explicitly predicated on the repression of human existential longing.

42

Thomas R. Laehn

75. Descartes, Philosophical Writings, 2:17, 19 (AT VII, 25, 28). 76. Ibid., 2:24 (AT VII, 34–35). Importantly, according to the seventh rule contained in his Rules for the Direction of the Mind, such enumerations are exhaustive: “Enumeration . . . consists in a thorough investigation of all the points relating to a problem at hand, an investigation which is so careful and accurate that we may conclude with manifest certainty that we have not inadvertently overlooked anything.” Ibid., 1:25–26 (AT X, 388). 77. Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, 7. 78. Ibid., 8. 79. It remains only to note that Descartes was alert to erōs’s destructive power, thus providing evidence that the suppression of the erotic dimension of human experience in the construction of the Cartesian ego was not inadvertent. When Queen Christina of Sweden, through an intermediary, asked Descartes “whether love or hatred is worse if immoderate,” Descartes attributed greater destructive power to love than to hatred. “My argument for this,” explained Descartes, “is that the evil arising from hatred extends only to the hated object, whereas immoderate love spares nothing but its object, which is commonly very slight in comparison with all the other things which it is ready to abandon and destroy for its immoderate passion.” In short, whereas hatred aims at the destruction of its object, love is willing to destroy everything but its object for its object’s sake. To illustrate his point, Descartes quotes four lines of verse from Théophile de Viau, subtly alluding to the politically subversive character of human desire: “How fine, ye Gods, the deed of his desire/How fair his victim’s fame,/When noble Paris put all Troy to fire/To quench his own heart’s flame.” See Descartes’ Letter to Chanut, February 1, 1647, which can be found in Descartes, Philosophical Writings, 3:305–14 (AT IV, 600–17). 80. Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 19–20. 81. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 48. 82. Haig Patapan and Jeffrey Sikkenga, “Love and the Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes’s Critique of Platonic Eros,” Political Theory 36 (2008), 803. 83. Ibid., 805. 84. Hobbes, Human Nature, 56. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid., 50. 87. Ibid., 48. 88. Ibid., 56. 89. Ibid., 56–57. 90. Ibid., 57. 91. Hobbes, Leviathan, 9. 92. Ibid., 65. 93. Ibid., 8, 35. 94. Ibid., 65. 95. Ibid., 34. 96. There is “nothing in the world universal but names,” writes Hobbes, “for the things named are every one of them individual and singular.” Ibid., 22.

The Subversiveness of Desire

43

97. Ibid., 28. 98. Daniela Coli, “Hobbes’s Revolution,” in Politics and the Passions, 1500– 1850, ed. Victoria Kahn, Neil Saccamano, and Daniela Coli (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 78. 99. Hobbes, Leviathan, 31. 100. Cf. Michael Oakeshott, “Introduction to Leviathan,” in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991), 244–45. 101. Descartes, Philosophical Writings, 2:125–26 (AT VII, 178). 102. Victoria Kahn, “Hobbes, Romance, and the Contract of Mimesis,” Political Theory 29 (2001), 20. 103. Hobbes, Leviathan, 244–45. 104. Cf. Allan Bloom, Love and Friendship (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 13–35; Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, 1–10. 105. Cf. Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 180.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Augustine. The City of God. Translated by Marcus Dods. New York: The Modern Library, 1993. Belfiore, Elizabeth S. Socrates’ Daimonic Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Bloom, Allan. Love and Friendship. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. Boyarin, Daniel. “What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Platonic Love?” In Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline, edited by Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006. Calame, Claude. The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998. Coli, Daniela Coli. “Hobbes’s Revolution.” In Politics and the Passions, 1500–1850, edited by Victoria Kahn, Neil Saccamano, and Daniela Coli. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Cooper, Laurence D. Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche: The Politics of Infinity. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008. Demos, Raphael. “Eros.” Journal of Philosophy 31 (1934): 337–45. Descartes, René Descartes. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. 3 vols. Translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985–91. Ferrari, G. R. F. “Platonic Love.” In The Cambridge Companion to Plato, edited by Richard Kraut. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Halperin, David M. “Love’s Irony: Six Remarks on Platonic Eros.” In Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern, edited by Shadi Bartsch and Thomas Bartscherer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Hesse, Herman. Steppenwolf. London: Penguin Books, 2001.

44

Thomas R. Laehn

Hobbes, Thomas. Human Nature and De Corpore Politico. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. ———. Leviathan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Kahn, Victoria. “Hobbes, Romance, and the Contract of Mimesis.” Political Theory 29 (2001): 4–29. Laehn, Thomas R. “Eros.” In The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, edited by Michael T. Gibbons. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. Levy, David. Eros and Socratic Political Philosophy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Ludwig, Paul W. Ludwig. Eros & Polis: Desire and Community in Greek Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Erotic Phenomenon. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Matthews, Gareth B. Thought’s Ego in Augustine and Descartes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. Menn, Stephen. Descartes and Augustine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Mitchell, Susan. “Erotikon (A Commentary on ‘Amor and Psyche’).” In Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern, edited by Shadi Bartsch and Thomas Bartscherer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Nehamas, Alexander. The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Nussbaum, Martha. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. ———. “People as Fictions: Proust and the Ladder of Love.” In Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern, edited by Shadi Bartsch and Thomas Bartscherer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Nygren, Anders. Agape and Eros. Translated by Philip S. Watson. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953. Oakeshott, Michael. Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991. Osborne, Catherine. Eros Unveiled: Plato and the God of Love. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Patapan, Haig and Jeffrey Sikkenga. “Love and the Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes’s Critique of Platonic Eros.” Political Theory 36 (2008): 803–26. Paz, Octavio. The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism. Translated by Helen Lane. Orlando: Harcourt, 1995. Rhodes, James M. Eros, Wisdom, and Silence: Plato’s Erotic Dialogues. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. Santas, Gerasimos. Plato and Freud: Two Theories of Love. New York: Basil Blackwood, 1988. Sheffield, Frisbee C. C. Plato’s Symposium: The Ethics of Desire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Strauss, Leo. What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

The Subversiveness of Desire

45

Thornton, Bruce S. Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality. Boulder: Westview Press, 1997. Voegelin, Eric. Anamnesis. Translated by Gerhart Niemeyer. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978. Weaver, Richard M. Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964. Werner, Daniel. “Plato’s Phaedrus and the Problem of Unity.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 32 (2007): 91–137.

Chapter 2

Dorothy Day, Emmanuel Levinas, and the Transcendent Experience in the Political William P. Schulz, Jr.

One of the oft-overlooked aspects of Dorothy Day’s political thought is the importance she placed on the experience of the transcendent. Put very simply, Day believed that through shared political experiences, whether joyful, sorrowful, or otherwise, individuals could experience some aspect of the transcendent. These experiences could vary widely, but in them, Day found a shared, human experience that could unite highly diverse groups of people. In this, a relief from the atomization and self-centeredness of modernity, Day believed that she had located the foundation of a movement meant to achieve the restoration of society. Day’s life story is one shot through with both remarkable consistency and surprising change. As a teenage socialist and a suffragette, Day’s early life involved commitment to journalism and activism on behalf of the poor, women, and workers. Her college years were spent in a particularly rich intellectual milieu; her early adulthood was shaped by reading Dickens, Dostoevsky, Lenin, and Marx and by close personal association with Leon Trotsky (whom she interviewed and with whom she debated), Emma Gold, and Eugene O’Neill. Day, perhaps naively, felt that formally joining the Communist Party would compromise her journalistic independence, but nevertheless participated in many of its rallies. Despite being so steeped in socialist thought and activism, Day experienced a religious awakening in her late twenties that led her on a journey that resulted in her conversion to Roman Catholicism and her creation of the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933. A large part of her conversion may be traced to her experience of the

47

48

William P. Schulz, Jr.

transcendent in the political, a concept heavily rooted in philosophy and theology, but which Day sought out in real, lived human experience. PHENOMENOLOGY, THEOLOGY, AND TRANSCENDENCE What, then, is meant by transcendence and how can such a thing be experienced? This debate rages in the realm of phenomenological philosophy, with what might be called anti-metaphysicalists such as the late Dominique Janicaud objecting to thinkers introducing metaphysical concepts, such as the “Other” and transcendence, into phenomenological works.1 For Janicaud, phenomenology should be restricted to observable phenomena. Anything beyond the realm of the observable should be considered metaphysics (literally beyond physics) and thus not a part of the understanding of human experience. Essentially, Janicaud is revisiting Kant by placing a restriction on human knowledge.2 Janicaud then incorporates the ideas of the eighteenthcentury empiricists into his understanding of phenomena. To a certain extent, Janicaud is also reviving the old logical positivism of the early twentieth century in that he rejects metaphysics and chooses to embrace only that which science can observe and analyze. Certainly, Janicaud’s opponents have given him much ammunition with which to work. Emmanuel Levinas, a Talmudic scholar, frequently refers to the trace of the transcendent (or the Word of God) in the face of the Other. Levinas’s entire system of ethics is based on respect and responsibility for the Other human being who is created in God’s image (imago Dei) and, as such, contains a trace of the divine within him.3 Martin Heidegger, on the other hand, spoke of “the phenomenology of the unapparent” and the importance of place (which can be considered in a metaphysical sense).4 Additionally, the later Heidegger discusses the fourfold, which is loosely Buddhist in nature and certainly incorporates the metaphysical (earth and sky, divinities and mortals). Finally, Jean-Luc Marion, known as a consultant to the Vatican, openly introduces such notions as the gift, donation, and the experience of transcending the horizon of knowledge into his works.5 If we take Kant to be correct, in that phenomena are those things that we can observe, know, and study, then presumably phenomenology, the uncovering of those things, should restrict itself to Kantian phenomena. Against this view, Marion and others have argued that this restriction of knowledge is incorrect and that human experience includes the experience of the transcendent (or that which is not directly observable as sense data). Marion begins his counterargument against Janicaud by noting that phenomena may appear without conditions. “Can we not envision a type of

Dorothy Day, Emmanuel Levinas, and the Transcendent Experience

49

phenomenon that would reverse the condition of a horizon (by surpassing it, instead of being inscribed within it) and that would reverse the reduction (by leading the I back to itself, instead of being reduced to the I)?”6 To this, Marion adds the idea that intuition is the first step in human understanding. He discusses Kant’s view on this and notes that “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”7 However, Kant had prized the concept over intuition, which Marion considers an error. To be sure, the intuition remains empty, but blindness is worth more here than vacuity: for even blinded the intuition remains one that gives, whereas the concept, even if it alone can allow to be seen what would first be given to it, remains as such perfectly empty, and therefore just as well incapable of seeing anything at all. . . . In the realm of the phenomenon, the intuition, rather than the concept, is king.8

This is to say that intuition must be our guide in understanding phenomena. To limit ourselves to mere philosophical or scientific concepts is to miss much of that which phenomenology is capable of examining. For Marion, phenomenology is the experience of exceeding the horizon of possibility. In a Derridian sense, this would be an “event,” and thus Marion would be arguing here that phenomenology is the study of “events.”9 Day certainly never spells out any of this in her writing. Indeed, Day would likely have considered Levinas and Marion to be too ethereal or abstract in their thinking; there is very much something of the hardened Aristotelian in her, after all.10 Yet, in her sole novel, The Eleventh Virgin, there is a profound sense that Day grasps much of what Levinas and Marion are arguing, at least instinctually.11 She never shies away from the metaphysical, and refuses to reduce it to mere sentimentality or superstition. But where might one derive some sense of what a transcendent or metaphysical experience is? Perhaps it can be explained in terms of ethics. LEVINAS AND THE RESTORATION OF ETHICS Here, there is again some overlap between the thinking of Day and Levinas, in that both seek to restore a human dimension to the Other. Levinas emphasized the idea of ethics as “first philosophy” throughout his many works. In many ways, Levinas’s notions of ethics are intended as a direct criticism of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger in which ethics was, if not completely lacking, then certainly not central to his understanding of “being” and “Dasein.” One criticism of Heidegger’s understanding of being-in-theworld-with-others is that it does not personalize Dasein’s relationship with

50

William P. Schulz, Jr.

the Other. Levinas attacks this point in his works discussing the Other and Dasein’s relationship to the Other. Specifically, Heidegger has incorporated the experience of being-with-the-other into the overall existential structure of being-in-the-world; the Other exists in Dasein’s life, but Heidegger wants Dasein to overcome the Other and the implied estrangement from the Self.12 In other words, the Other is impersonal and our experience of the Other is simply one of any number of other experiences that revolve around the Self. The Self is still the center of Heidegger’s understanding of the universe and, as such, Levinas accuses him of failing to abandon Cartesian “egology.” For Levinas, the very embrace of the Other is not an estrangement, but an empowerment. Central to Levinas’s system of ethics is the concept of the “face” as the origin of ethics. Levinas discusses his idea of the “face” throughout many of his works, but most clearly in his last, Entre-Nous, a collection of articles and interviews explaining his views on philosophy and society. He refers to the face as “being the original locus of the meaningful.”13 Locating meaning itself in the face of the other is not only phenomenological but also indicative of a quite profound humanism. A key to Levinas’s ethics is his rejection of Heidegger’s ontology, according to which a being must be perceived within the horizon of Being. The problem here is that once we understand all beings (including both our own being and the being of the other) as subsumed under the category of Being, the radical otherness of the other is concealed and we are left only with the existential—letting our being alone (freely letting it be as a being). This is acceptable to Heidegger, but Levinas will build his critique around the notion that the Other is wholly different. We cannot simply let the Other be as a being; instead, we have a responsibility to him.14 Levinas believes that Heidegger has skipped a step in his explanation of being with the other person. To understand a person is to let him be, according to Heidegger, but Levinas objects that this understanding can come only after you speak to him. A dialogue must occur with the Other before we can understand him. Levinas is concerned that, in Heidegger, our speaking to the Other is merely a function of our understanding of him and this understanding is only possible by possessing and consuming him, as we would with an object.15 This is simply not possible with another person. Man is the only being whom we cannot meet without having some dialogue, even if it is only the act of refusing dialogue. This relationship between two beings who must speak to each other cannot be understood in simple ontological terms. We may try to understand the Other’s being, but this exercise comes only after we have spoken to him. Our relationship with the Other is actually based on a prayer, an invocation, and is thus religious in nature. When we call out to the Other, we are making an invocation to him; this forms a bond with him that is quite different from our relationship with things.16

Dorothy Day, Emmanuel Levinas, and the Transcendent Experience

51

Following this train of thought, Levinas indicates that to possess the Other would be to commit an act of violence against him. This is perhaps the greatest violation of Levinas’s ethics. We cannot partially possess him; we must either meet with him without possessing him or we must negate him entirely by murder. Murder is defined here as the total negation of another being. The Other is the only being that I can want to kill. However, in exercising our power to kill the Other, we lose that power, for we will then never understand (possess) the Other.17 Levinas believes that to interact with the Other face to face is to be unable to kill him, which again is a comment on the fact that murderers must make their victims “faceless.” To have a face is to be human, and for another to see that face, to have dialogue with that face (a relationship to the being itself), is to humanize the Other and to remove the ability to kill that Other.18 The face is naked and vulnerable, yet it is the source of our opposition to the will of another to murder us. To mask the face is to make dialogue impossible and murder possible. Levinas returns to this point over and over. Rather than seeing the horizon of Being as the key to understanding the Other, which is Heidegger’s argument, Levinas claims that the face, and all that it signifies, is the key to understanding.19 Levinas offers an additional critique of phenomenology and contemporary philosophy in this discussion. Phenomenology is limited; it explains only our own being, not our relationship and duty to others, because it does not, at least in Heidegger, include ethics. For Levinas, studying being and knowledge is important, but these things are secondary to ethics, which he defines as our responsibility to others. It is important to offer a brief explanation of Levinas’s view of religion in order to understand more clearly his objections to certain approaches to phenomenology (and the counter-critiques of him by some phenomenologists). Levinas’s understanding of the term “religion” is based on the idea that the relation between persons is not reducible to simple understanding (ontology) and the notion that this relation implies certain duties in the Kantian sense.20 Beings can only exist in relationships with other beings when they are invoked, and they can only be invoked through the face (face to face contact). This seems to imply that making a being faceless is the key to dehumanizing him. Here, Levinas might well be attacking the Nazis who made every effort to make their victims “faceless” and thus dehumanized.21 Following from this and drifting slightly into what Dominique Janicaud would call theology, Levinas maintains that in the face of the Other, we see a trace of the presence of God (or the Word of God). In this, I believe that Levinas is referring to the notion of imago Dei, that we are created in God’s image and that there is a spark of the divine in all of us. For Levinas, there is, in the Other, the real presence of God. He specifically calls out Matt 25: 31–46.22 Here Christ refers to the idea that whatsoever you do for the least

52

William P. Schulz, Jr.

of my brothers, you do for me. This statement defines ethics for Levinas, and he insists that the beginning of philosophy lies in the individual’s understanding that holiness is indisputable. By holiness, he means the notion that the only absolute value is our responsibility to the Other; there exists the possibility of putting the Other’s needs before our own. The face of the Other is the beginning of philosophy, or, in other words, ethics is first philosophy.23 Another central notion in Levinas’s philosophy (and part of his criticism of Heidegger) is the notion of a “humanism of the Other [person].” For an understanding of this notion, we must return to Levinas’s emphasis on the face. Each face is unique in some way, signifying the uniqueness of each person; speaking more theologically, this would be the uniqueness of each soul. In Heidegger’s philosophy, the self (or Dasein) is privileged over all other entities. The self is central and all other persons, things, and events revolve around the self as the planets revolve around the Sun. Levinas clearly has Heidegger’s Dasein in mind in “Humanism and Anarchy.” The unburied dead of wars and death camps accredit the idea of a death with no future, making tragi-comic the care for one’s self and illusory the pretensions of the rational animal to a privileged place in the cosmos, capable of dominating and integrating the totality of being in a consciousness of self.24

Additionally, Dasein should not and cannot be captive to the Other; this would be a loss of autonomy in the Kantian sense for Heidegger. Levinas disagrees, however, believing that true freedom and autonomy can only come from embracing the Other (or the “humanism of the Other [person]”) and our responsibility to him.25 Levinas is not afraid to introduce metaphysical concepts such as the trace of God (or the trace of the transcendent Word of God) into his explanation of the “humanism of the Other.” Remembering that the face of the Other bears the likeness of God (imago Dei), Levinas suggests that the encounter of each person with God comes in the face of the Other: “The face is, in and of itself, visitation and transcendence. . . . To be in the image of God does not signify being the icon of God, but finding oneself in his trace.”26 This encounter with God reminds us of our duty to the Other (and, through the Other, to God) and of the implicit worth of the Other person given that they contain a trace of the transcendent Word of God within them (seen in their face). This bond is humanism itself, the recognition of the Other as an equally valuable human person for whom we are responsible. A humanist phenomenology, then, would depend on Levinas’s metaphysical ethics (the trace of God in the face and the face as the starting point of ethics as first philosophy) and on the recognition of a shared experience (the experience of being human). These two

Dorothy Day, Emmanuel Levinas, and the Transcendent Experience

53

notions—the ethics of the face and the acknowledgment of shared experience and value—define the true “humanism of the Other.” DAY’S SEARCH FOR THE TRANSCENDENT This is a significant part of Dorothy Day’s project, in that she attempts to restore the humanism of the Other, be they poor, black, immigrants, the sick, the elderly, what have you. When the policeman’s club strikes the head of the nonviolent civil rights protester, there is the transcendent. When the bullets fired from the rifles of National Guardsmen strike the defenseless bodies of peaceful student antiwar protesters, there is the transcendent. When the guards in prisons ignore the agony of sometimes starving, injured, and drugaddled prisoners crammed into over-crowded cells, there is the transcendent. Day sought to experience as much of this as she could, first-hand, in order to meet God on his own terms—to glimpse a passing trace of the divine, as Moses felt God pass over him in Exodus.27 In order to explain that experience, Day turned to both novel and autobiography. The role of the novelist is, in essence, to capture human experience and commit it to prose that translates that experience into a form the reader can understand. This involves either experiencing the event (the phenomenon) personally as participant or observer, or drawing on one’s own experiences to create a new phenomenon (imagining how an event impacts participants). Day draws heavily on both the lessons of novelists such as Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, and on her own experiences of transcendent events to compose her autobiographies and her writings on the central themes of the Catholic Worker Movement. To a large extent, perhaps more so than has been recognized, Day was a product of the ideological conflict of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This conflict informed her youth and early adulthood, and her proposed resolution to it informed the remainder of her life. This literary journey, this deeply intimate personal novel, is very much the story of Day and her movement. Connecting historical experience with pneumatic revelation (encounter with the transcendent) is at the heart of Eric Voegelin’s corpus of works and is relevant to my analysis of Dorothy Day. Day consistently repeats stories of the poor, civil rights crusaders, laborers on strike, and others encountering hatred and violence. She does not do this simply to grab the reader’s attention, nor does she do it to effect social change à la Upton Sinclair. Indeed, although Day was influenced by Sinclair’s work, she was disgusted by headline-grabbing journalists and their hyperbolic news stories. She herself is analyzing these experiences and demonstrating to the reader an actual lived experience of transcendence.

54

William P. Schulz, Jr.

Day moved beyond the Marxist and Hegelian dialectic, and into the freedom offered by boundaries, by the order and the symbols of the Christian faith (in the institution of the Catholic Church). As an example of this, Day, then working for Commonweal magazine, was assigned to cover the 1932 Hunger March on Washington, D.C., mostly led by the Communist Party and the far-left Farmers’ Convention (the Farmers’ Union).28 As the marchers assembled, mostly peacefully, many of the major newspapers published sensationalist accounts of diabolical red revolutionaries raising armies of thugs to attack Washington. Day was disgusted by such coverage, noting that besides her own reporting, only the Scripps-Howard owned Daily News provided anything resembling a balanced story.29 On their way to Washington, militias, veterans, police, and firefighters turned out to meet them, armed with machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, revolvers, and rubber hoses. Desperate, starving protesters in close proximity to frightened, angry peacekeepers inevitably led to violence. There was no trouble for the marchers in any of the cities on the way until they reached Wilmington. There they were holding a meeting in a church and Ben Gold, one of the leaders, was making a speech, when suddenly windows were broken simultaneously on either side of the hall and tear gas bombs were thrown in. The meeting was in an uproar and milled out into the street in anything but orderly fashion, as was natural. There the police took the opportunity to club and beat the marchers. Ben Gold, after being badly beaten, was jailed, and the march went on without him.30

Later, as the March concluded by parading through the streets of Washington: I watched that ragged horde and thought to myself, “These are Christ’s poor. He was one of them. He was a man like other men, and He chose His friends amongst the ordinary workers. These men feel they have been betrayed by Christianity. Men are not Christian today. If they were, this sight would not be possible. Far dearer in the sight of God perhaps are these hungry ragged ones, than all those smug, well-fed Christians who sit in their homes, cowering in fear of the Communist menace.” I felt that they were my people, that I was part of them. I had worked for them and with them in the past, and now I was a Catholic and so could not be a Communist. I could not join this united front of protest and I wanted to.31

Here is the encounter of the immanent with the transcendent: the politics of the marchers are irrelevant, as are those of the police. What matters is that in the moment, there is the sublime suffering of starving men being beaten by police. There is the world turning its back on the poorest, neediest, and

Dorothy Day, Emmanuel Levinas, and the Transcendent Experience

55

sinless (for these are not criminals). Is not that the face of Christ? Does not Day comprehend, perfectly, the supreme moment of pneumatic revelation provided here to all those who witnessed it? Strip away the politics, the newspapermen and flashing cameras, the police lights and sirens, the screams, the chants. Strip it all away and see only the essential: Christ-like suffering laid bare for the entire world to see. Day is riveted; perhaps she is the only one who perceives this, perhaps her soul is the only one open to divine revelation. Of course, she must later ask, “What did I see? How can I understand this event?” Here, nous plays its part in helping to inform the contemplative (for that is surely what Day has become at this point). She has experienced the divine, but must now understand this rupture in the ordinary flow of history, for that is what any encounter of human and divine must be: a rupture, a metaphysically explosive event that cannot be understood by the observer at the time. Here, I borrow from Derrida’s explanation of the phenomenon of the event in which an event can only truly deserve the title if it is genuinely something that is beyond the horizon of expectation.32 UNDERSTANDING TRANSCENDENCE: DAY, LEVINAS, AND MAURIN Returning at this precise moment to the question of the political, and of hospitality and home, Day seeks to create something of a dialectic of transcendence in everyday life. By dialectic here is meant not a Hegelian or Marxist dialectic, but rather a theological dialectic of the sort employed by Karl Barth and Emil Brunner.33 Clearly here, the opposition is between the immanent Man and the transcendent divine (God). Can the barriers between the two oppositions ever be breached? Yes, as discussed earlier, but, if not permanent, can the barriers be breached more frequently? Day thought so. Specifically, she sought to create a physical location in which hospitality, a welcoming of the homeless (both physical and spiritual), might be found. Consider the words of her mentor, Peter Maurin: People who are in need and are not afraid to beg give to people not in need the occasion to do good for goodness’ sake. Modern society calls the beggar bum and panhandler and gives him the bum’s rush. But the Greeks used to say that people in need are the ambassadors of the gods. Although you may be called bums and panhandlers You are in fact the Ambassadors of God.

56

William P. Schulz, Jr.

As God’s Ambassadors you should be given food, clothing and shelter by those who are able to give it. Mahometan teachers tell us that God commands hospitality. And hospitality is still practiced in Mahometan countries. But the duty of hospitality is neither taught nor practiced in Christian countries.34

This short selection is merely one of many of the so-called Easy Essays written by Maurin. He, Levinas, and Day each sought to serve the neediest in one way or another, but despite their differences, they seem to appreciate the same search and the same ethic. Is there not something here of the absolute duty to the Other person that Levinas proposes in his works? This is not an I-Thou relationship as in Martin Buber, but a total acceptance of responsibility for the life of the Other.35 Maurin and Day sought to elevate the impoverished by restoring to them their rightful inheritance as children of God, or to use Levinas’s language, to recognize the trace of the Word of God in the naked, vulnerable face of the Other. Consider, for comparison to Day and Maurin, this passage from Levinas: The Desire for Others that we feel in the most common social experience is fundamental movement, pure transport, absolute orientation, sense. All analysis of language in contemporary philosophy emphasizes, and rightfully so, its hermeneutic structure and the cultural effort of the embodied being who expresses himself. . . . In other words before it is celebration of being, expression is a relation with the one to whom I express the expression and whose presence is already required so that my cultural gesture of expression can be produced. The Other who faces me is not included in the totality of being that is impressed. . . . He is neither a cultural signification nor a simple given. He is, primordially, sense.36

And for Levinas, critiquing the peculiarly atheistic Martin Heidegger, this experience of self and duty to the Other cannot occur in an atheistic framework in which God is dead and Dasein or the Being of beings (ontology of the ego) replaces God.37 Levinas writes: A god intervened in human history as a force, sovereign, of course, invisible to the eye and undemonstrable by reason, consequently supernatural, or transcendent, but his intervention took place in a system of reciprocities and exchanges. A system described on a basis of man preoccupied with himself. . . . His effects ended up among the effects of all the other forces and mixed with them, in the miracle. God of miracles, even in an era when no one expects miracles anymore;

Dorothy Day, Emmanuel Levinas, and the Transcendent Experience

57

a force in the world, magic despite all his morality, morality turning into magic, acquiring magical virtues; a god one comes to as a beggar.38

This God is greater than self-consciousness or ontology. It is a religion that Levinas believes Man should want to belong to, not a religion that Man feels he is a necessary part of (as in Heidegger’s ego cult). Only by recognition of this religion can sense (and the duty to the Other) have meaning: “We do not think that what makes sense can do without God, nor that the idea of Being, or the Being [l’être] of Beings [l’entrant], can substitute for God to lead signification to the unity of sense without which there is no sense.”39 And in a universal religion (the Christianity of Day and Maurin), every person has access to this God. This is a freeing God, a God of sense and structure, a God of duty not to oneself (this would be solipsistic egology) but to the Other Man. Returning to Day’s approach, here are more examples that she gives in The Catholic Worker of experiences of the transcendent: One young woman came in this morning who said she had seen a copy [of the Catholic Worker newspaper] in the square and wanted to find out about the House of Hospitality. She had been living down on the Bowery, paying 25 cents a night for a bed and, now her money was all gone and she had no place to go. She was telling me about her friend, who was also down and out, who went to take a room, or a bed up in Harlem, was seduced by a young Spanish American, and threw herself under a subway train a week later.40

This is suffering to the point of hopelessness. In the face of the homeless woman, in the face of her friend, the suicide, in the face of all these desperately poor, there is Christ, the transcendent, made immanent. These are the physically and spiritually homeless, for whom a home, a place for hospitality, must be provided. Again, from the same issue: A few weeks ago I went over to St. Zita’s to see a sister there and the woman who answered the door took it for granted that I came to beg for shelter. . . . It just shows how many girls, and women, who to the average eye, look as though they came from comfortable surroundings are really homeless and destitute. . . . You see them in the waiting rooms of all the department stores. To all appearances they are waiting to meet their friends, to go on a shopping tour—to a matinee, or to a nicely served lunch in the store restaurant. But in reality they are looking for work (you can see the worn newspapers they leave behind with the help wanted page well thumbed), and they have no place to go, no place to rest but in these public places—and no good hot lunch to look forward to. The stores are thronged with women buying dainty underwear which they could easily do without—compacts for a dollar, when the cosmetics in the five-and-ten are just

58

William P. Schulz, Jr.

as good—and mingling with these protected women and often indistinguishable from them, are these sad ones, these desolate ones, with no homes, no jobs, and never enough food in their stomachs.

And so, I suggest that Dorothy Day’s experiences with labor activism, civil rights, antiwar demonstrations, and the Catholic Worker Movement are part of the visionary tradition. What becomes interesting in Day’s case is not that she attempts to function solely as conduit; indeed, passivity is the last word that anyone would ever apply to her. No, Day is an active seeker of visions, and an even more active interpreter of them. She wants, needs, desperately to understand the disclosure of the transcendent in the immanent. All her life she sought God, not so much for the encounter with God, but for guidance from God. Consider her words to her brother on why she became a Catholic: You ask me how did it all come about, this turning toward religion, and you speak of it as though I were turning away from life when all the while it was so much a part of my life. “All my life I have been tormented by God,” a character in one of Dostoevsky’s books says. And that is the way it was with me. You will notice that I quote the Russian author a good deal, but that is because we both have read him. And I quote him often because he had a profound influence on my life, on my way of thinking.41

Day wants to understand God’s message to the world, and what God wants from Man. She understands some of the message from study of the Bible and the teachings of the Catholic Church, but this is theory. Day needs application. For that, she must, she felt, live the life of a saint, and see what only a saint could see: the transcendent, the trace of God in the immanent. It is through the participation in the political, in the shared experience of humanity, in the raw face of the physically and spiritually homeless that Day found the transcendent. Unlike Janicaud and others, Day does not understand phenomenology as detached observation any more than does Levinas. One cannot simply watch and abstract, while creating artificial limitations on human experience. Instead, for Day, direct experience of the transcendent is necessary to grasp it, however fleetingly. The search for this participation in moments of transcendence occupied much of her life. For her, experiencing shared human moments, perhaps moments of joy, but especially moments of sorrow and suffering, provided a glimpse into the soul of humanity itself, and in it the transcendent, the trace of the Word of God, is most visible. Here, her phenomenology of transcendent experience overcomes the truncated phenomenology of those who seek to remove any trace of the “theological”

Dorothy Day, Emmanuel Levinas, and the Transcendent Experience

59

or transcendent from phenomenological philosophy. This reappraisal of both Day and Levinas allows us a better understanding of an alternative phenomenology, one perhaps more “metaphysical,” but also one more open to the rich variety of lived human experience. NOTES 1. Dominique Janicaud, “The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology,” in Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, trans. Bernard G. Prusak (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 16–106. 2. Janicaud’s horizon is quite different from Kant’s, but both seem convinced that they are in a position to place a hard limit on the reach of human knowledge. 3. Especially in the series of interviews given by Levinas in Entre-Nous. Emmanuel Levinas, Entre-Nous: Thinking of the Other, trans. Michael Smith and Barbara Harshev (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 4. This is from Heidegger’s controversial “Zahringen seminars” given in 1973; see discussion of the “inapparent” or “unapparent” in Günter Figal, “Tautophasis: Heidegger and Parmenides,” in Paths in Heidegger’s Later Thought, trans. Margot Wielgus; eds. Günter Figal, Tobias Kelling, et. al. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2020), 185. 5. See, for example, Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). 6. Jean-Luc Marion, “The Saturated Phenomenon,” in Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, trans. Bernard G. Prusak (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 184. 7. Ibid., 190. 8. Ibid., 190–191. 9. Derrida defines and discusses his concept of the “event” in a number of places, though prominently displayed in Giovanni Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) and Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michal Naas (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). 10. And for all the theorizing of Marx as merely a Neo-Platonist (chiefly due to his role as a disciple of Hegel), there is very much as an aspect of Aristotelian common sense and empiricism in his works. As a former Socialist activist, Day had read Marx, and although he may have rubbed off on her, she disliked much of his work as being too difficult to follow. On the other hand, perhaps Aristotelian common sense was just instinctual for her. 11. Although Day, herself, considered The Eleventh Virgin to be her worst work, nonetheless she grapples consistently with metaphysical themes such as love, loneliness, right and wrong, existentialism and meaning, and the context of authentic meaning (for a woman in the 1920s). Dorothy Day, The Eleventh Virgin (Chicago: The Cottager Press, 2011).

60

William P. Schulz, Jr.

12. There is some support for this critique to be found elsewhere, see, for example, Martin Weatherson, Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant: Categories, Imagination, and Temporality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) and Robert Hanna’s review of Weatherston. Robert Hanna, review of Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant: Categories, Imagination, and Temporality, by Martin Watherson, The Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: An Electronic Journal. https​ :/​/nd​​pr​.nd​​.edu/​​news/​​heide​​gger-​​s​-int​​erpre​​tatio​​n​-of-​​kant-​​categ​​ories​​-imag​​inati​​on​-​an​​d​ -tem​​poral​​ity/. 13. Levinas, Entre-Nous, 145. 14. Ibid., 5–6. 15. Ibid., 6. 16. Ibid., 7. 17. Ibid., 9–10. 18. Ibid., 10. 19. Ibid., 10–11. 20. Ibid., 8. 21. Ibid., 9. 22. Ibid., 110. 23. Ibid., 11. 24. Emmanuel Levinas, “Humanism and Anarchy,” in Humanism of the Other, trans. Nidra Poller (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 45. 25. There is the question of solutions; for Heidegger, many of Dasein’s problems could be solved by a reconnection with homeland or place (Da in Dasein), whereas with Levinas, the concept of homeland is deeply disturbing and might well be part of the problem with Heideggerian ethics and ontology. For further discussion see, Cecil Eubanks and David Gauthier, “The Politics of the Homeless Spirit: Heidegger and Levinas on Dwelling and Hospitality,” History of Political Thought 32, no. 1 (2011): 125–146. 26. Levinas, Humanism, 44. 27. Exodus, 33: 21–23. 28. Although, as Day notes, most of the marchers were either unemployed or union members; the marchers did not belong to either the Communist Party or the Farmers’ Convention. 29. Dorothy Day, House of Hospitality (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor Press, 2015), 6. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 7. 32. Derrida, Rogues. See also Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 33. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: Study Edition, 31 vols. (New York: T&T Clark, 2009). Emil Brunner, The Divine-Human Encounter (London, UK: Hymns Ancient & Modern, LTD, 2012). 34. Peter Maurin, “The Duty of Hospitality,” in Easy Essays (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2010). The full version is available online at http:​/​/www​​.easy​​essay​​s​.org​​/

Dorothy Day, Emmanuel Levinas, and the Transcendent Experience

61

to​-t​​he​-bi​​shops​​-of​-t​​he​-us​​a​-a​-p​​lea​-f​​or​-ho​​use​s-​​of​-ho​​spita​​lity/​. The spacing is Maurin’s own, chosen to approximate the rhythm of his speech. 35. Levinas is notable for the remarkable inaccessibility of much of his work. Fortunately, he provided a very clear and frank explanation of his philosophy in a final interview given before his death in the aforementioned work, Entre Nous. Buber’s work is discussed throughout Entre Nous as a counter-point to Levinas’s own philosophy, see Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans.Walter Kaufmann (New York: Touchstone Press, 1971). 36. Levinas, Humanism, 30. Importantly, the sense of Levinas’s meaning when discussing the Other is lost in translation as the original French title of the work is Humanisme de l’autre homme, which more properly translates as the humanism of the other man (or person). Levinas wants to talk about concrete human beings here, not conceptual constructs. 37. Recall that Heidegger referred to Friedrich Nietzsche as the last metaphysician. The issue of God and metaphysical speculation was simply no longer relevant for Heidegger. Self and self-realization (self-consciousness) is all for Heidegger, to the point that Levinas believes that he elevates this to the place formerly held by God. 38. Levinas, Humanism, 24. 39. Ibid., 25. 40. Dorothy Day, “Day by Day,” The Catholic Worker, June, 1934. http:​/​/www​​ .cath​​olicw​​orker​​.org/​​dorot​​hyday​​/arti​​cles/​​​278​.h​​tml. Brackets are mine. 41. Dorothy Day, From Union Square to Rome (New York: Orbis Books, 2006), chapter 2; available online at http:​/​/www​​.cath​​olicw​​orker​​.org/​​dorot​​hyday​​/arti​​cles/​​​2​ .htm​​l.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Borradori, Giovanna. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Touchstone Press, 1971. Day, Dorothy. “Day by Day.” The Catholic Worker, June, 1934. http:​/​/www​​.cath​​ olicw​​orker​​.org/​​dorot​​hyday​​/arti​​cles/​​​278​.h​​tml. ———. From Union Square to Rome. New York: Orbis Books, 2006. ———. House of Hospitality. Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor Press, 2015. ———. The Eleventh Virgin. Chicago: The Cottager Press, 2011. Derrida, Jacques. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Eubanks, Cecil and David Gauthier. “The Politics of the Homeless Spirit: Heidegger and Levinas on Dwelling and Hospitality.” History of Political Thought 32, no. 1 (2011): 125–146. Günter Figal, “Tautophasis: Heidegger and Parmenides,” In Paths in Heidegger’s Later Thought, translated by Margot Wielgus and edited by Günter Figal, Tobias Kelling, et. al. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2020.

62

William P. Schulz, Jr.

Hanna, Robert. Review of Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant: Categories, Imagination, and Temporality, by Martin Watherson. The Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: An Electronic Journal. https​:/​/nd​​pr​.nd​​.edu/​​news/​​heide​​gger-​​s​-int​​erpre​​tatio​​n​-of-​​ kant-​​categ​​ories​​-imag​​inati​​on​-​an​​d​-tem​​poral​​ity/. Janicaud, Dominique. “The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology.” In Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, translated by Bernard G. Prusak, 16–106. New York: Fordham University Press, 2000. Levinas, Emmanuel. Entre-Nous: Thinking of the Other. Translated by Michael Smith and Barbara Harshev. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. ———. Humanism of the Other. Translated by Nidra Poller. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Marion, Jean-Luc. Being Given: Toward A Phenomenology of Givenness. Translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. ———. “The Saturated Phenomenon.” In Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, translated by Bernard G. Prusak, 176–216. New York: Fordham University Press, 2000. Maurin, Peter. “The Duty of Hospitality.” In Easy Essays. http://www​.easyessays​ .org/. Weatherson, Martin. Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant: Categories, Imagination, and Temporality. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Weatherston, Martin. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: An Electronic Journal. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University, 2003. https​:/​/nd​​pr​.nd​​.edu/​​news/​​heide​​ gger-​​s​-int​​erpre​​tatio​​n​-of-​​kant-​​categ​​ories​​-imag​​inati​​on​​-an​​d​-tem​​poral​​ity/ (accessed April, 2020).

Part II

POLITICS AND ETHICS

Chapter 3

Toward a Politics of Care Heidegger, Freedom, and the MoralPolitical Posture of Authentic Solicitude Andrea D. Conque

The world is in great need of a politics predicated on authentic care—perhaps now more so than ever. In American politics, for example, the phrase “public interest” is dead. Americans are accustomed to a language of rights, not of responsibility. This tendency to privilege individual rights over public interest seems to be a worldwide trend; and this trend is an outgrowth of the modern liberal tradition that has served much of the West well for a long time.1 It is time to consider ways to be authentically and properly responsible toward others in the world with whom we are co-present—without abandoning, but rather strengthening, our thinking of freedom, care, and responsibility through what I have here termed a “politics of care.” The “politics of care” presented here has been appropriated from a most unlikely source: the works of Martin Heidegger. While there is little doubt that Heidegger is one of the finest and most significant philosophers of the twentieth century, due perhaps to his works’ heavy influence on Western philosophy and contributions to postmodern thinking, his personal politics has rightly come under scrutiny due to his horrifying associations with National Socialism. His own politics have been laid bare.2 Since the publication of the Black Notebooks, there has been an even more forceful push to eliminate all discussion and scholarship related to Heidegger,3 as they both seem to have been corrupted by these newfound revelations. For others, however, it is clear that, despite these dismaying disclosures, there is still much to be gleaned from Heidegger’s massive corpus and, furthermore, to be appropriated from theories that he was not inclined, or neglected, to develop in his work. At least one of these opportunities for reclaiming something positive from Heidegger’s thought is what I have identified as a nascent political 65

66

Andrea D. Conque

theory in Being and Time, a radical and progressive, though unnoticed, theory of politics—a politics of co-being and intersubjectivity with foundations in Heidegger’s notions of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit), being-therewith (Mitdasein), and authentic solicitude (Fürsorge). This chapter seeks to advance a new interpretation of Heidegger’s understanding of authentic solicitude and being-with (Mitsein) to show the degree to which his work institutes the possibility of such a “politics of care,” of a moral-political posture of love and embedded existence. Such an analysis will involve first identifying the foundational elements necessary to a politics of care: Dasein, authenticity, Mitdasein, and care (Sorge). I will then offer an exegetical account of love as authentic solicitude in Heidegger’s Being and Time and in selected letters from Heidegger to Hannah Arendt. After that, I will show that there is an “originary” basis for ethics and responsibility toward one another and that we can rethink our ways of being together in communities in the face of these—and of love. I will then demonstrate that love, not war (polemos), ought to be privileged as an interpretation of Heidegger’s relationship to politics, especially in the light of modern liberalism. Finally, in a short section, I will offer some suggestions as to potential ontic applications of a “politics of care.” SOME FOUNDATIONAL ELEMENTS: DASEIN, AUTHENTICITY, MITDASEIN, AND CARE For the Heidegger of Being and Time, the original question—and, perhaps, the only question that must be the task of philosophy—is the question of the meaning of existence and the relationship between beings and their existence.4 As such, it is necessary that he discover what kind of being might be attuned to and interested in questioning that very relationship. Heidegger goes about this in a very specific way. First, he describes the kind of being that would be interested in the possibilities of its own existence (an explanation of Dasein). Second, he determines how beings relate to one another in the everyday world (Mitsein). Third, he describes how those who are authentically Dasein might relate to one another outside of the everyday and inauthentic world of the “they” (das Man). Dasein is most often translated as “being-there.” In choosing this particular term, Heidegger clearly points to the factical positioning of a certain kind of being in the world. Dasein, for example, already finds itself in a particular world that is populated with other beings, among other things. Authentic Dasein, however, has the potential to transcend the world of the “they” and its own, factical situation—this is what makes Dasein different than any other entity.

Toward a Politics of Care

67

It is also clear that Dasein is a being of possibilities. Some of these possibilities are determined by its “facticity” or the factical components of the world in which it finds itself. However, though Dasein understands itself through these possibilities, they also do not bind it; Dasein is a being that questions, interrogates, and investigates its own existence. In other words, Dasein is an entity (being) for which Being (existence) is “at issue.”5 For Heidegger, human beings are “thrown-in-the-world,” and it is this thrownness that must be dealt with. Dasein, the being that is there, is what human beings have the potential to authentically become. Being itself is what is initially concealed. In Being and Time, the first half of the text is concerned with thrownness and inauthenticity, while the second half is concerned with asking how a self, but not an ego, might emerge from this thrownness into authenticity. Dasein is essentially also a temporal being, bracketed by the certainties of birth and death; it is a being with infinite possibilities—including what I argue here, those of political and ethical postures. Authentic Dasein has the potential to escape the “they,” the nameless, faceless crowd. It is not bound by the possibilities of the external world into which it has been thrown. It is not ruled by factical considerations alone, yet facticity is one of its distinct possibilities. Let it be recalled that, in Being and Time, many notions are treated as having an authentic or inauthentic comportment or “mode.” For Heidegger, the world into which human beings are thrown is a world of inauthenticity. As Dasein reaches toward authenticity, it begins to understand that it may transcend the world of das Man and “be-there,” to determine its own possibilities in the present—to “be-itself.” Authentic existence affords Dasein an escape from the alienation of the “they”; upon realizing authenticity, Dasein can exist beyond the influence of inauthentic possibilities. Mitdasein (Dasein-with) is a structure of Mitsein (Being-with). Both of these modes of existence with others may also be authentic or inauthentic. There may be authentic Being-with and Dasein-with or inauthentic Beingwith and Dasein-with. Yet, authentic Dasein-with represents a specific interrelation between individual Dasein: Dasein has authentically opened itself up to its ownmost possibilities alongside other Dasein who have similarly become “themselves.” Care (Sorge), as another essential structure of existence, serves as the “condition” for which ontic (existentiell) existence is possible for Dasein. The call of care is what Heidegger has referred to as “conscience,” which summons Dasein in its uncanniness from itself and to itself. Care, importantly, is also treated both authentically and inauthentically in Being and Time. In Being and Time, we find a distinct difference between types of care, between simple “concern” (Besorgen) and solicitude (Fürsorge). Heidegger explains that, when we care for the others who are also in the world, it ought to be understood that the essence of Being-in-the-world, for Dasein, is care.

68

Andrea D. Conque

There are, in point of fact, two types of solicitous care—that of “leaping in” (Einspringen) for others and that of “leaping ahead” (Vorausspringen) of them. Leaping-in is treated in Being and Time as an inauthentic, and leapingahead as an authentic, means of giving another back their care. Dasein is always also a Being-with, a Being-with-others, and this is what threatens both to obscure Dasein and, later, to free it. Caring for others is only ontically possible because it can be described ontologically. Truly, the kind of solicitous care described in Being and Time is, I would argue, synonymous with Heidegger’s understanding of “love” in his early letters to Hannah Arendt.6 LOVE AS AUTHENTIC SOLICITUDE In Heidegger’s 1925 letters to Arendt, love is clearly defined in rich tones. He describes his love as a “sweet burden,” something that is joyous and lifeaffirming. The love Heidegger describes in these early letters seems to surpass romantic love; it is instead expressed in terms of watchful attentiveness, protection, and preservation: “I can take care that nothing in you shatters,” he writes. Heidegger also seems to speak of love as an outgrowth of the effect that one human existence (Sein) may have on another’s existence. He tells Arendt, “To be in one’s love = to be forced into one’s innermost existence.”7 Finally, citing Augustine, Heidegger offers this: “Amo means volo, ut sis . . . I love you—I want you to be what you are.”8 It is this desire for another being to be what they are, this “volo, ut sis,” that I would like to explore here. What I suggest is that this same Heideggerian understanding of love—and its eventual political implications—may be found in Being and Time and other portions of his corpus. We must understand authentic solicitude as presented in Being and Time as a rather specific kind of caring, namely, one that leads others to take up their ownmost possibilities. Authentic solicitude is an enterprise guided by caring for others, by a desire to assist others in becoming what it is possible for them to be: to be what they are. Simply put, authentic solicitude is love.9 Politically, such a Heideggerian treatment of love as authentic solicitude may serve as a key element for moral-political posturing in political communities wherein co-being is a specific “letting be” of others who are co-present. I argue that such a political community is not explicitly advanced, but is certainly implied in several of Heidegger’s works, and that love, as authentic and proper solicitude, ought to be considered its basis. Care, as we have discovered, is not only an essential structural component of Dasein but also what allows for the “authentic potentiality-for-being-awhole.” Being-with is initially an indifferent mode of existing with others. However, when authentic solicitude is taken into account, a different sort of

Toward a Politics of Care

69

Being-with takes shape and reveals itself. What care does for Dasein is allow it to choose to ignore deficient modes and relationships and to act consciously against the indifference of das Man. Thus, care and knowledge of one’s own Dasein occur first; then, there is a place for the genuine concern for others. What is left is the potential for a community of self-knowing Dasein who have chosen their care and knowledge of self and others freely—through the myriad possibilities that are open to Dasein. While simply “caring” for others seems to fall short, authentic care and concern are a “calling” that Dasein answers. Remember that, for the Heidegger of Being and Time, inauthentic solicitude is just this—a “leaping-in” for the Other, a relationship in which “the Other can become one who is dominated and dependent, even if this domination is a tacit one and remains hidden from him.”10 As has been shown, in Being and Time, solicitude may also be a “leaping ahead” of the Other. Thus, authentic solicitude is meant to indicate the humanity of human beings and to free them for themselves and for their care.11 As Heidegger writes, “Solicitude is guided by considerateness and forbearance.”12 Though Heidegger, unfortunately, does not provide any concrete, ontic, examples of solicitude, Hayim Gordon offers this lovely thought: The educational relationship that Fyodor Dostoyevsky describes in The Brothers Karamazov, between Father Zosima, the elder, and Alyosha Karamazov, is an example of solicitude in which Dasein leaps ahead of the Other. . . . Father Zosima relates with wisdom to Alyosha’s potentiality-for-being, carefully and lovingly instructing him what to do so that he can live what Heidegger would call an authentic life of care. Alyosha responds with deep love and strict obedience to Father Zosima’s solicitude.13

AN “ORIGINAL ETHICS,” AN “ORIGINAL POLITICS” The fundamental notions of authenticity, Mitdasein, and care allow us to develop what I term a “moral-political posture” out of Heidegger’s corpus. However, with Jacques Derrida, I aver that we must also, and foremost, look for an ethics.14 It is in Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” that we find the most eloquent expression of his view of the ethical. To be sure, as Jean-Luc Nancy points out: “There is no ‘morality’ in Heidegger if what is meant by that is a body of principles and aims for conduct, fixed by authority or choice.”15 So, we are not looking for an ethics that resembles any other, traditional ethical system; this ethics is a “radical rethinking”16 of ethics, wholly separate from metaphysical conceptions. From the outset, Heidegger makes it clear that the “Letter on Humanism” is devoted to the question of “action.” This “action” concerns the conduct

70

Andrea D. Conque

of man—as human. What is this conduct or action but to Be: “Being as such and within the truth of Being, preserving in such standing the essential nature of [one’s] Being.”17 Heidegger further asks, “Where does care tend but in the direction of bringing man back to his essence?”18 Man must eksist, that is, stand out into the “truth of Being.” How does man do this? It is through dwelling: There is a home for dwelling in the truth of Being. So, what is the “authentic,” or really “proper,” comportment of Dasein toward others and toward Being? It is “letting Being be,” to lassen. Furthermore, let us remember, with Nancy, that, “Letting be is not a passivity; it is precisely action itself. It is the essence of action insofar as action is the essence of Being.”19 What we find in the “Letter on Humanism” is that the ground of the “original ethics” to which Heidegger refers has radically altered our traditional conception of ethics. Here, ethics can no longer be founded in any fixed concept—anything determined a priori or regulated by anyone. Fixity of traditional ethical conceptions must be abandoned in favor of leaving signification of the same open. In this “original ethics,” properly or authentically Beingoneself is responsibility. Yet, as Nancy tells us, we should not understand this as solipsism or egoism, but contrariwise: it “contains the possibility and the necessity of Being-responsible toward others.”20 Traditional ethical systems fix the signification of values and norms; “original ethics” is quite different. In fact, “ ‘Original ethics’ is the more appropriate name for ‘fundamental ontology.’ ”21 If “original ethics” radically rethinks the site of the ethical, then what we might now call an “original politics” changes the essential ground of “law” and “rule.” Clearly, Heidegger’s original ethics springs forth from the very font of Being, unfixed as far as signification because it refuses to be kept closed to the “truth of Being.” So, too, it seems are the cases of “law” and “rule”: Only so far as man, ek-sisting into the truth of Being, belongs to Being can there come from Being itself the assignment of these directives that must become law and rule for man. In Greek, to assign is nemein. Nomos is not only law but more originally the assignment contained in the dispensation of Being. Only the assignment is capable of supporting and obligating. Otherwise all law remains merely something fabricated by human reason. More essentially than instituting rules is that man find the way to his abode in the truth of Being.22

In sum, in choosing the ancient Greek nemein, Heidegger posits that “dealing out,” “distributing,” and “managing” are key components of attempts to craft law and rule for men. To Heidegger, Being alone can confer the legitimacy of law and rule—not culture, tradition, or any other principles

Toward a Politics of Care

71

“merely fabricated by human reason.” Here, law and rule have a more original source—that of Being itself. RETHINKING TOGETHERNESS IN THE FACE OF LOVE: LETTING BEINGS BE We have seen that the proper, or authentic, comportment toward others issues forth from an “original” source—from an ethics that is not based upon a fixed foundation. So, too, have we intimated that concentrating on an “original” source for political ideas such as “law” and “rule” must now, similarly, be rethought in terms of man’s essence, open to and “standing” out in the truth of Being. Yet, how are we to view Heidegger’s position more practically— how accomplish an ethics and a politics, or a “political posture,” that can be properly applied to the ontic world? It is in Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay “The Being-With of the Being-There,” that we find a tantalizing clue as to how Heidegger’s thinking of love in his letters to Arendt could “fill the gap between the improper and proper of the with of Being and Time.” These letters show how love is indeed qualified as the genuine space of a “we” and of a world that can be “ours,” and represents the genuine “taking care” of the other, since its formulation . . . is volo ut sis: “I want you to be what you are.” Thus, love is a mitglauben, a shared faith in the “story of the other” and a mitergriefen, a shared grasp of the potential of the other.23

We may leave the question as to whether or not the “gap” between the proper and the improper in Being and Time can be filled by this Heideggerian explanation of love to be pursued at some other moment. What we are interested in here is the way in which Heidegger’s letters express proper solicitude— and help us to craft a moral-political posture based in love. To be sure, Heidegger’s letters to Arendt describe a way of being with her, with others, that is consistent with proper, authentic solicitude—of a faith in the other, of opening ourselves, of letting others be, of a world that is shared—that is “ours,” of a “genuine union,” a joyous closeness, a giving and a Being toward others. Further, it is in these letters that Heidegger also links this understanding of human togetherness with the political. The letters themselves seem to be expressions of pure, true love and care for another. It is clear that the love of which Heidegger writes is one that has affected his entire being and existence. He speaks of a faith in the other as “waiting and guarding”; he feels, also, a joy, a desire to “open” and “allow” their love to be as his connection with Arendt deepens. In their love, their world is now defined by the word “ours”:

72

Andrea D. Conque

But we could only say that the world is now no longer mine and yours—but ours—only that what we do and achieve belongs not to you and me, but to us . . . and only that kindness to others and every unforced authentic act is our life.24

Thus, it is not simply that the “world” belongs to these two; instead, their love will be found in their “kindness to others” and “every unforced authentic act.” It will cause them, as they proceed in their love, to develop into something more important, more essential, more “original.” In these early letters, faith is love, a love that accepts the Other as they are, accepts the Other’s story fully and allows them to be who they are—not an idealized version of another person, but as a recognition of the very authentic self of the Other, their true self. In this respect and recognition, there is deep acceptance, faith, and joy to be found. We must first, in love, accept the Other completely—not piecemeal or with an attitude toward changing them—and love their whole being, in faith. This faith and complete acceptance of the Other does not end with the beloved. Importantly, it extends beyond the beloved and into our relationship with all others. In love, the Heidegger of these 1925 letters tells us, love is a gift that we give, and this giving affects all others, not only another person who is the subject of our romantic love: “It is the depth with which I myself can seek my own Being [Sein] that determines the nature of my Being toward others.”25 What is most interesting here, and for our purposes, is that Heidegger’s description of love in the 1925 letters seems to suggest that in love, we affect others by our giving, whether or not they accept that gift of true care. In fact, their reception of our love is unimportant. Our very existence is described earlier as directly correlated to how much we care—ostensibly about others. In giving, we give what we ask of ourselves to give; I can only care about, affect, and give to others when I have preserved my Self through radically breaking with myself in order to properly comport myself toward others. Heidegger either remained true to this position of “infinite intention” in the intervening decades or rediscovered it when writing to Arendt in February of 1950. In this letter, not only is love clearly authentic, proper solicitude but part of a plan for the salvation of mankind—a political solution indeed: The good needs the heart’s kindness, which sees because it has already foreseen everything for man’s salvation into his essence: the inscrutable meaning of [heoraken hora], of the gaze maintained; sheer miracles of language, which thinks more than we do; the French Re-garder. “To save” means—and it is not only just—barely to break free of danger, but also to make free in advance, into essence. This infinite intention is the finitude of man. . . . One must experience the innermost hinge of Being so as to arrive at a point where one understands that justice is not a function of power, but rather a ray of goodness that is one’s

Toward a Politics of Care

73

salvation . . . the peoples of the world must first devote their strengths to the infinite intention of redeeming goodness if humanity, in its historical dignity, is to rise to the call of Being and save itself in it.26

This “infinite intention,” as the “finitude of man,” is the “original ethics” and “original politics” that allow man to ek-sist in the light of Being. If one experiences the “innermost hinge of Being,” one understands that justice does not, in fact, revolve around the idea of power, but is the “ray of goodness” of salvation. In this letter, it is “saving” that releases us from danger, yes, but it also frees us for ourselves, into our essence. What is this infinite intention, this explanation of the goodness at which we must clearly arrive? It consists in “redeeming goodness” as more than morality, more than rule of law; goodness itself will shine out of and upon those who seek the truth of their own Being, their own ek-sistence. Those who accomplish this will not only truly be free, but also serve to assist in saving the whole of humanity itself—perhaps from the problem of evil, possibly from justice as revenge. As in his descriptions of love and proper, authentic solicitude, what we find here is a thinking of these concepts that infinitely intend toward goodness itself— and toward caring relations with others. Only when we allow that goodness to shine forth from our own Being does it then reach out and reach forth into the lives of others, making their world ours, sharing the world in such a way that our care extends beyond our selves and toward others, allowing them to Be, ek-statically, in truth. LOVE, NOT WAR: A POLITICS OF CARE From the outset, I will admit that “love” is a precarious notion upon which to predicate a political theory. For one, the word “love” has as many interpretations as it has interpreters; it may be viewed as romantic, fraternal, familial, moral, divine, or reactive—just to list several meanings that immediately come to mind. Yet, “love” could also be critiqued as a moral-political solution to fractured societies—as a pathway to violence, domination, tribalism, and isolationism. In sum, “love” is an ambivalent and vague notion, resistant to static definition. More importantly, in the annals of political theory, philosophers and scholars have offered rather negative visions of “love” when it relates to politics. Augustine sees love as a connection between human beings and the divine— one that, not unimportantly, simultaneously severs them from worldly political communities and institutions. Even the recipient of Heidegger’s letters of love offered here, Arendt, views love as too “unworldly” and “worldless” for politics or political action: “Because of its inherent worldlessness, love can

74

Andrea D. Conque

only become false and perverted when it is used for political purposes such as the change and salvation of the world.”27 Further, she argues, “Love, by its very nature is unworldly and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of antipolitical forces.”28 Additionally, as has already been mentioned, there are many who believe that it is impossible to find anything that is positive and politically progressive in Heidegger’s work. I have said that my project is to appropriate a politics of care from Heidegger as it exists in nascent form in Being and Time and is revealed elsewhere in specific portions of his works. The existence of such a politics based on care is evident and, furthermore, some scholars have suggested that such a “community” of authentic Dasein might exist.29 These scholars agree that there is much that is positive to be found in the intersections between Heidegger and the political. Cecil L. Eubanks and David J. Gauthier, for example, focus on the Heideggerian response to the rise of subjectivism in modernity and how this, in a Hegelian sense, has given credence to the concept of the modern “homeless spirit,” including a critical evaluation of the idea of “homecoming” in Heidegger—his “homecoming project.”30 Yet, of the many scholars who have offered treatments of the subject of “Heidegger and Politics,” Gregory Fried stands out as one who has devoted many years to a study of how Heidegger’s understanding of polemos (usually translated as “war” or “struggle”) informs his thinking about politics.31 Whereas Fried has focused on “war” as the most important underlying component of Heidegger’s political thought, I argue that it is actually love as proper, authentic solicitude. Let us make judicious use of Fried’s understanding of Heidegger’s politics as “war.” Fried avers that the “key” passage to understanding Heidegger’s view of the political is his interpretation of a fragment from Heraclitus describing polemos as the force that divides humanity into gods, human beings, slaves, and free. From this, Fried insists that Heidegger’s politics must also be “our” politics, “For if we have one thing to learn from Heidegger, it is that the ‘I am’ is never divorced from the ‘We are.’ ”32 However, Fried does not view our embedded existence in Heidegger as positive. For him, Heidegger’s work is imbued with an excessively heavy critique of modern liberalism as the culmination of the history of nihilism. This is certainly true; Heidegger has a documented distaste for the American, democratic republic, but also, Fried extends, for any modern liberalism interpreted broadly as a philosophy calling for rights-based governmental institutions or regimes. Fried is quite rigid and precise: “We must recognize that Heidegger’s condemnation of the kind of liberal democracy that the United States represents is complete and uncompromising . . . one that Heidegger never retracts and from which he never retreats.”33 In thinking with Fried regarding34 a crucial piece of his

Toward a Politics of Care

75

argument about Heidegger and polemos (concerning a Heideggerian “misreading” of phronêsis), I would like to bring “love,” not war, to the forefront of Heidegger’s regard for the political. To do that, we must discover some of the connections between Heidegger and Aristotle, particularly when it comes to the notion of phronêsis, or “practical wisdom.” Phronêsis When Heidegger invokes Plato’s Sophist in the opening lines of Being and Time, he, in effect, alerts the reader that he will return to ancient Greek conceptions of existence in order to investigate Being phenomenologically. What is more, Heidegger’s return to these various ancient Greek conceptions in Being and Time is not limited to what has been referred to as his “Platonic bias,” but instead relies heavily on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. It is Franco Volpi’s contention, for example, that Hans-Georg Gadamer, Arendt, and other neo-Aristotelians are only able to confront this “Platonic bias” of Heidegger’s (like that of privileging the ontological over the ontic) through their exposure to Heidegger’s own investigations of Aristotle.35 Volpi, Jacques Tamineaux, and Walter Brogan have all found complex connections between Heidegger and Aristotle.36 Tamineaux, notably, reminds us that in ancient Greek, there is a distinction between actions involving “things” (poiein and poiesis) and actions involving persons (prattein and práxis). “For the Greeks of the city,” Tamineaux writes, “such an excellence, such an eu prattein [acting well] resided in the very activity of the citizen, in politeuein [political práxis].”37 In Tamineaux’s reading of Being and Time, authenticity amounts to práxis, while inauthenticity may be viewed as poiēsis, the realm of production. Práxis, thus linked in Heidegger’s master work to authentic existence, exists for itself, not for a product that is external. Furthermore, Tamineaux vitally observes: Phronêsis aims at a goal that intimately concerns the phronimos: the goal of acting well, eupraxia. . . . Phronêsis is a doxastic (deliberate) virtue. But because there is no doxa without a debate between varying and opposing views, phronêsis is not limited to what matters to the phronimos alone. One could not possibly be phronimos by being involved exclusively with oneself. This is why phronêsis is identical to political wisdom.38

Considering this view, phronēsis (practical wisdom) is the way in which Dasein becomes entirely and wholly itself, the means by which Dasein reaches its ownmost potentiality-for-being-a-whole, and the path that leads away from the inauthentic “publicness” of the “they” toward a different and authentic way for human beings to relate to one another. This is not solipsism,

76

Andrea D. Conque

but “the only genuine basis for human community.”39 Just as “love” is given in terms remarkably similar to those describing proper, authentic solicitude in Being and Time, Heidegger’s way of discussing phronēsis in conversation with Aristotle allows us to rethink human communities in new and important ways. Fried argues that it is Heidegger’s “radical historicism that prevents him from seeing the intersection with principled norms with life as we find it”40— and that “radical historicism” is often what is at stake in many discussions of the political. In this interpretation, found most notably in the student protocols of 1933–1934 entitled Nature, History, State, the German people are the only people who can form a genuine community and the Führer-state of National Socialism.41 Yet, in another view, we may take the thread of a politics of care that is woven into Being and Time and follow its natural course—even if it is one that Heidegger did not himself follow. The “politics of care” in nascent form in Being and Time intends to unify us, not through polemos, but through a genuine, proper, authentic care and love. A Politics of Care: Love Echoes Out For the Heidegger of Being and Time, life is fragile and fleeting. Immersion in the world of the they-self is presented as inauthentic because it prevents Dasein from seeing itself, and others, properly. In the background of this inauthentic life is “the nothing” (das Nichts), death, nonexistence. We distract ourselves with our everyday lives because it is comfortable. Yet, this also means that we do not see our own nature, the nature of others, or the nature of the world accurately. Only in emerging from inauthenticity to authenticity do we begin to become ourselves, to be happy, to live the good life, to pursue our ownmost possibilities. This takes a certain type of disclosure—that of the silent call of conscience. Dasein must “find itself,” must decide its own possibilities for itself. Human beings are indeed embedded. Dasein, being-there—this is an embedded form of existence. One is never alone (authentically or inauthentically), never separate from others, never a free-standing ego. Since the inception of the concept in the 1960s, there has existed a tension between “public interest” (defined as the shared interests of a particular society) and individual rights. A politics of care developed from Heidegger seeks to find a source for existence and for authentic political communities that is more original than the division between the shared interests of a given society and the rights of the individual, an origin tied more closely to the understanding of community as a “we” rather than as an assemblage of “Is.” Here, ethics and politics have a more originary source: human existence itself; authentically caring for others, ontologically speaking, then becomes, not holding power over them (as

Toward a Politics of Care

77

das Man does), but freeing them for themselves. Authentic solicitude requires that we allow others to define their own happiness in their own terms, to flourish without our “leaping-in” and disrupting their progress toward authentic life. It does not mean abandonment, nor does it mean a passive “letting be.” According to this, we cannot authentically dominate another’s care or take their care away from them. What this really means is that when we “take care” of others, it is not in abandoning them to their own struggle, but in assisting them to direct their efforts without overtaking their care for them. It preserves the human ability to become their own authentic Self—as defined by that person, tempered by true care. Furthermore, it suggests a watchfully attentive stance toward others in their effort to move toward their own possibilities, to flourish, and to be happy—to love one another in the sense that Father Zosima loves Alyosha: helpful, watchful, attentive, from the perspective of “teacher.” A particularly nice “ontic” example of this kind of care, of authentic solicitude, can be found in Irene McMullin’s Time and the Shared World: Heidegger on Social Relations: My nephew and I are going to the park. He is just learning to tie his shoes, and as I watch him struggle with the task, I find myself increasingly motivated to take the thick awkward laces from his little hands and do it myself. . . . But as I watch him struggle, I admire his sheer will to achieve this ability in spite of continued frustrating setbacks and I restrain myself from taking this opportunity to practice for him . . . because I recognize—and desire to nurture—his existence in its wholeness. I do not leap in and take over this careful struggle from him—I hold myself back in a type of restraint that is nevertheless characterized by a hovering attentiveness, an expressive encouragement and recognition of his struggle.42

There is struggle involved; yes, polemos is present. It is present when Heidegger speaks of the polis and recalls its agonal spirit fondly. It is present, in a way, each time we properly and authentically care for others. Yet, the kind of struggle we take from Heidegger here is not “war,” but the kind of “love” that allows someone else to determine their own life. The “war” of the nephew with his shoelaces is one that only he can enter into; it belongs to him. This does not mean that the aunt abandons the nephew to learn how to tie his shoes on his own or without her assistance. In resisting the urge to “leap-in,” the aunt respects the nephew as a being pursuing his ownmost possibilities. The effort is his own, yet he is not left to it alone; his aunt is watchful, attentive, and present. The butterfly cannot be assisted from its chrysalis. If help is given to the emerging creature, its wings will never grow strong enough for it to fly on its own. Here, struggle amounts to growth, but not passive abandonment; love is what allows another to “struggle” without fear

78

Andrea D. Conque

that they will be left alone in that struggle. “Care ethics” takes into account this kind of empathy that is required of the aunt and of the one who watches over the butterfly’s cocoon. When we look to studies of “care ethics” and their intersection with politics, what these share is the idea that “the center of moral action is shifted from interactions among citizens in the public forum and marketplace to personal relationships.”43 As a discipline, care ethics has relied heavily on feminist perspectives and a focus on a maternal, peaceful way of looking at politics, the environment, and our bodies—all connected in a complex web of relations. Usually, the most important aspect of care in care ethics is to make certain that we see others for who they uniquely are in order to meet them with the best “care” that is appropriate to them. Care ethics is about understanding how we are inextricably interconnected, but how we must also understand the inherent value of an individual person and how their “care” must be given on a personal level. As Michael Slote points out, such a relational and radical perspective on care, Heideggerian or otherwise, is at a distinct disadvantage in a world in which modern, liberal notions concerning rights are ascendant—especially when it comes to the modern liberal emphasis on autonomy to the degree that it edges out what care ethics seeks to accent: empathy. Empathy is here defined as being able to put oneself in another’s shoes, not merely feeling bad for someone and their situation (which would be better termed “sympathy”). From this view, there are certain, important limits to the modern liberal scheme—mainly that it cannot be appropriately and comfortably applied to a growing number of contemporary situations. Slote rightly points to the failure of liberalism to account for the Nazi marches at Skokie. What is often left out of the Skokie story is that the Nazi marchers had not chosen just any town for their demonstration; they chose a village in which there were a large number of Holocaust survivors. The right to free speech is something that seems worth preserving, but do we really want to protect it at the expense of psychologically damaging others? There remains a tension, thus, between the modern liberal understanding of Kantian “autonomy” and the more complex issue of truly achieving justice, if justice is to be properly tied to empathy. Additionally, I argue following Slote, liberalism requires that justice must involve equality of some sort. Indeed, why the focus on individual liberties if liberty is not meant for everyone equally? It is in instances such as Skokie that the very spirit of modern liberalism seems to be at cross-purposes with itself. Furthermore, it should not be surprising that those who value care ethics would also choose democracy as the preferred governmental form: “Empathetic respect for what the other wants is the key to justice.”44 Nevertheless, this is not how justice is framed in the mind of the average American. Instead, the concept of individual rights that is cemented in the

Toward a Politics of Care

79

American mind is rational, not emotional or empathetic. Modern liberalism appeals to our rational beliefs concerning equality and justice, not to our feelings about and for others. This is where modern liberalism could stand to shift its focus to a care-ethical approach, in which “the real source of what is just or unjust (and of corresponding rights) lies in a relation to human empathy.”45 This approach to politics and justice is wholly supported by my development of Heidegger’s notion of authentic solicitude. When Heidegger presents the “Myth of Care” in §42 of Being and Time, he seems to hearken back to the Roman understanding of “care” as having a double meaning—that of both anxious worry and solicitude (Fürsorge). In relaying this myth, Heidegger points out that care has a “double meaning”— that care/cura “signifies not only ‘anxious exertion,’ but also ‘carefulness’ and ‘devotedness’ [Sorgfalt,’ ‘Hingabe’].”46 In this “carefulness” and “devotedness” to others, love as authentic solicitude fosters a healthier comportment toward others who are co-present. It thus serves as a positive moral-political posture, one similar to care ethics. Dasein’s relationality with others is based in watchful, attentive care—not the kind that “takes away” anything from the other or abandons the other to their own struggle. Thinking of political strategies that serve multiplicity, inclusion, diversity, reciprocity, and the like, we begin to understand that they preclude the will to domination, mastery, oppression, and exclusion. Such preventions are the safeguards of modern liberalism—as is the spirit of true empathy and respect for others. The moral-political posture of authentic solicitude does not allow for any relationship between beings that disallows their individuality, freedom, or ownmost identity. In authentic solicitude, in love for the Other, “letting beings be” their true, authentic selves is the objective. There are many ways to craft a political theory. The shape of a community could be described with respect to power and authority: its institutional basis, its strategies for dealing with the presence of evil, the grounds of its popular legitimacy, its arrangements for allowing the coexistence of both liberty and law, or a catalogue of the freedoms or rights it protects could be set forth. Yet, the politics of care described herein is not necessarily a structure of power. It is closer to a policy or set of policies that make challenges to the problematic issues of modern liberalism, such as care ethics, possible. Heidegger’s anti-subjective stance and account of the embeddedness of human life allow us to shift, politically, to the personal and the interconnected. We need only identify a framework for building better communities—ones based on consideration, toleration, carefulness, and devotedness toward others. In an April 1950 letter to Arendt, Heidegger again cites Augustine saying, “Nulla est enim maior ad amorem invitation, quam praevenire amando (There is no greater invitation to love than to precede [the other] with loving). This praeventus is the silent echo of a concealed adventus; it approaches the

80

Andrea D. Conque

mystery of freedom; it is the font of the law that is taking shape.”47 In other terms, the “adventus,” the love of the other (not by the other) is an echo of the love by which it was preceded. If I love, it is because I am loved. Here, Heidegger does not suggest a mere reciprocity in love, in authentic and proper solicitude, but an “echo” of love—resounding and far-reaching, love begetting more love because of love first given. Love is responsive; the resulting love of the other is a response to being loved. Here, the preceding is part of what is arriving. The praeventus and the adventus are not opposites here; they are, instead, meant to be complementary to one another: the preceding complements the arrival. It is this “echoing” out that comprises the heart of a politics of care. As Virginia Held has said, “Good care needs to be respectful, to avoid being domineering.”48 As care ethicists have argued for decades, it is essential that we incorporate dependency and interrelationality into our understanding of politics—specifically the project of modern liberalism. This is also borne out in Heidegger’s notion of authentic solicitude. When Maxine Eichner contends that “respect for human dignity now demands more than the protection of individual rights and freedoms,” and that such respect “also requires that the state actively support individuals in receiving the caretaking and conditions for human development necessary for them to become responsible, self-directing citizens,” she could be referring to the politics of care described here.49 The Heideggerian model I present offers both ontological and ontic freedom to pursue one’s ownmost possibilities. As a way to avoid “leaping-in” for others and taking their care away, love as authentic solicitude is the key component of a politics of care. It involves allowing others to pursue their ownmost possibilities freely, to strive for themselves but also to be carefully watched over and offered attentive care. Here, love comes from a place of true empathy and desire for the other to “be what they are.” It is not, as some may argue, an attitude of abandonment (letting beings be as letting them be alone)—it is not passive in this way—but it is instead a posture of watchful attentiveness. This model also supports “love” as a remedy for oppression and domination of others. If modern liberal conceptions began to shift toward empathy and away from strict adherence to individual rights, if the language of this discussion were to be effectively changed, then an authentic community based on a politics of care could be the consequence. If we were to put “love,” as described by Heidegger as authentic solicitude, into practice, the basis of our moral-political posture toward others would foster the very things that care asks of us: trust, our sincerity with one another, our toleration of others (and by this is meant more than simply “tolerating” others, but accepting them fully), and consideration of others who ought to be supported in pursuing their ownmost possibilities. The consequences of

Toward a Politics of Care

81

such a politics of care include (1) the possibility for the active attainment of authentic human existence; (2) the possibility of an alternative to modern liberal tendencies toward privileging autonomy over empathy; (3) the provision of a space in which domination and oppression cannot exist; (4) the potential for a place of authentic human dwelling, of a true community; and (5) the freedom of each Dasein to pursue its ownmost possibilities and to free others for theirs. My hope is similar to that of care ethicists. It is that the recognition of the complexity of care will lead, even when we follow Heidegger’s philosophical path, not to war, but to love—to a recognition that the struggle of others requires something more than current liberalism affords, something above and beyond a language of rights and closer to a resurgence of public interest. Heidegger’s position, when we take proper and authentic care into consideration, need not be interpreted as a wholesale rejection of liberal democracy. Alternatively, and at least for me, it is rather a rejection of the flawed gap in modern liberalism created by the elevation of rights over feeling that stings. In order to truly care for one another, we must move beyond a discussion that solely involves individual rights to a place in which care is privileged politically. In that, we may also find our true home. Coda: Potential Ontic Political Applications of a Politics of Care Briefly, I would like to submit that the potential for real-world applications of the moral-political posture of authentic solicitude is boundless. How, you may be asking, does one legislate love? Is it not possible that Arendt was correct, that “love” is a useless concept upon which to predicate a politics? I argue that it is simply a matter of how “love” is perceived. If, as I have claimed, love should be identified as authentic solicitude, then this posture is what might inform policies that encourage the pursuit of one’s ownmost possibilities. On the back of such a politics of care, we would legislate policies that foster human flourishing, happiness, and protection—and eschew oppression, domination, and despair. In short, authentic care as described here is empowering, not disempowering. There are some who might be thinking, “But isn’t letting beings be a kind of abandonment?” To that, I offer a strong “no.” We are not talking about changing the portions of neoliberalism that work—mainly the idea of the welfare of society. Changes in policy would occur at the level of empowerment of others in the spirit of watchful, attentive, considerateness. It is not so strange, even for the most staunch supporter of individual rights, to imagine a situation in which an individual member of our community might need the kind of help (love) that lifts them up instead of leaving them powerless. The child who never learns to tie their

82

Andrea D. Conque

own shoe because someone else has tied it for them will not have truly been assisted (or “loved,” by this definition). But, this does not mean that a child who labors to tie their shoe under the watchful, attentive eye of someone who can teach them or allow them to make their own mistakes has been deserted and must take their care into their own hands. Neither is this kind of care meant to set up a power dynamic between (a powerful) giver of care and (a disempowered) receiver of care—watchful attentiveness is not here watchful criticism or disenfranchisement. These principles could apply to many political institutions. They bolster a democratic spirit and strengthen community ties. People must simply begin thinking of what we used to call “public interest” again, of the common good—bringing proper care to the table is a beginning.

NOTES 1. As I write, the COVID-19 pandemic rages on. Though safety and consideration for others ought to rule the day, there are those who protest governors’ “shelter in place”/“stay-at-home” orders. They protest because they believe their rights— rights that they cannot always articulate—are somehow being trodden upon because they cannot get a haircut or cannot open their personal business. There seems, indeed, to be little of the idea of “public interest” alive in those moments. 2. Even before the “Black Notebooks,” there were those who believed that National Socialism is inherent in Heidegger’s work (see, e.g., Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Dominique Janicaud, The Shadow of That Thought: Heidegger and the Question of Politics. Translated by Michael Gendre (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996); Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935. Translated by Michael B. Smith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, Heidegger et les Juifs. Hosted by Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Centre Culturel Irlandais (CCI). January 23–26, 2015 (often referred to as a “tribunal” on Heidegger); and Ingo Farin and Jeff Malpas, editors. Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016)); those who focused on Heidegger’s political musings and developed a critique of modern liberal democracy and capitalism (see, e.g., Fred Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993)); and those who argued that far too much priority has been given to the ontological over the ethical (see, e.g., Emmanuel Levinas, As if Consenting to Horror. Translated by Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993). This is a small sampling of the work that has been done concerning the subject of “Heidegger and politics.” 3. Sidonie Kellerer, “Rewording the Past: The Postwar Publication of a 1938 Lecture by Martin Heidegger,” Modern Intellectual History 11 (2014): 575–602. Of interest is the fact that Kellerer, a student of Faye, was granted a multiyear 700,000

Toward a Politics of Care

83

euro grant to prove that Heidegger’s thought, and thus by proxy all postmodern philosophy, is anti-Semitic. The grant was provided by Volkswagen, ironically. 4. The following is indebted to Andrea D. Conque and Cecil L. Eubanks, “Mitdasein, Authenticity, and Care: Heidegger’s Other Politics.” Presented at the Louisiana Political Science Convention, Baton Rouge, LA. February 2012. 5. GA 2: 4; L 10. Here, GA 2 refers to Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1962). It is customary, whether in English translation or in the original, to cite Heidegger’s texts in the following way: First, the “GA” refers to his self-directed “Collected Works” (or Gesaumtausgabe): section; line number(s). I have preserved this tradition here, as it is the most universal—and unambiguous—way to cite portions of Heidegger’s body of work. 6. Let us be clear that I am not here embarking on the task of describing how Heidegger views love in general. For that, one would need to look much further into Heidegger’s letters to his wife, Elfride, and to other women with whom he undertook love affairs. Instead, I would argue that Heidegger’s letters to Arendt take on a special meaning when we remember that she is the only woman with whom he communicated to whom he felt he could write more “philosophically.” Heidegger’s description of love in these letters, for me, thus falls into a different category than letters to his wife or to other women. Consequently, also, I treat them as more “philosophical” descriptions than mere expressions of romantic love. For a different treatment of Heidegger and love, see: Iain Thompson, “Thinking love: Heidegger and Arendt,” Continental Philosophy Review 50 (2017): 453–478. 7. Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Letters: 1925–1975, trans. Andrew Shields (New York: Harcourt, 2004), 5, 21. 8. Ibid., 21. Heidegger incorrectly attributes this citation to Augustine in his letter to Arendt. It is, in actuality, from De Primo Principo by Duns Scotus, about whom Heidegger wrote his doctoral work. 9. See GA 2: 42; L 199. 10. GA 2: 26, L 122. 11. GA 2:26; LL 122–123. 12. GA 2:26; LL 122–123. 13. Hayim Gordon, The Heidegger-Buber Affair: The Status of the I-Thou (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001), 17. In Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Father Zosima’s special relationship with Alyosha is one of great, and positive, influence. Instead of directly interfering in Alyosha’s life, Zosima seems to desire that Alyosha “be himself.” 14. Jacques Derrida has said: “No silence prevails on the necessity of a relation between ethics and politics, between ethics and justice or law. There must be this relation, it must exist, one must deduce a politics and a law from ethics.” Jacques Derrida, Adieu á Emmanuel Levinas (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1997), 198. Many scholars have attempted to adopt an ethics from the Heideggerian corpus. Some important examples are: Lawrence J. Hatab, Ethics and Finitude: Heideggerian Contributions to Moral Philosophy (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000); Frederick A. Olafson, Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics: A Study of Mitsein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); François Raffoul, The Origins of Responsibility

84

Andrea D. Conque

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); and Jean-Luc Nancy, “Heidegger’s Originary Ethics,” in Heidegger and Practical Philosophy, ed. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). 15. Nancy, “Heidegger’s Originary Ethics,” 66. 16. This phrase is owing to François Raffoul, Origins of Responsibility. 17. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 229–30. 18. Ibid., 223. 19. Nancy, “Heidegger’s Originary Ethics,” 69. 20. Ibid., 70. For more concerning an “originary ethics” and responsibility in Heidegger, see Raffoul, Origins of Responsibility. 21. Nancy, “Heidegger’s Originary Ethics,” 70. 22. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 262. 23. Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Being-With of the Being-There,” in Rethinking Facticity, ed. François Raffoul and Eric Sean Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 126. 24. Arendt and Heidegger, Letters: 1925–1975, 19. 25. Ibid., 26. 26. Ibid., 64. 27. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 52. 28. Ibid., 242. 29. “Being and Time suggests, but does not develop, the thesis that the politics of society are the politics of ‘the public’—alienating, uprooting, inauthentic—while the politics of a community are the politics of a people—historically rooted, caring, authentic.” Robert J. Dostal, “The Public and the People: Heidegger’s Illiberal Politics,” The Review of Metaphysics 47 (1994): 542. “To the extent that fostering a healthy human condition holds implications for social ontology, ethics, philosophy of liberation, and spiritual freedom, Heidegger’s deliberately suprapolitical corpus allows feminist theorists to engage and learn from his thought.” Patricia J. Huntington, “Introduction I—General Background. History of the Feminist Reception of Heidegger and a Guide to Heidegger’s Thought,” in Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger, ed. Patricia Huntington and Nancy J. Holland (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), i. “Genuine community is founded, not out of the public realm of the ‘they,’ a realm in which other existential Dasein are never encountered, but rather on the basis of a way of being together that itself creates the possibility for a public sharing of oneself that is authentic and existentiell.” Walter A. Brogan, Aristotle and Heidegger: The Twofoldness of Being (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 151. 30. Cecil L. Eubanks and David J. Gauthier, “The Politics of the Homeless Spirit: Heidegger and Levinas on Dwelling and Hospitality,” History of Political Thought 32 (2011): 125–146. 31. See Gregory Fried, Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Gregory Fried, “Heidegger, Politics, and Us: Towards a Polemical Ethics,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 39 (2013): 863–875; Gregory

Toward a Politics of Care

85

Fried, “Retrieving Phronêsis: Heidegger on the Essence of Politics,” Continental Philosophy Review (2014) DOI 10.1007/s1107-014-9305. 32. Fried, “Heidegger, Politics, and Us,” 864. 33. Ibid., 865–866. 34. Here, I mean not only “about,” but also a re-garding in the sense of the French regarder, to look again. 35. Specifically, Volpi mentions two lecture courses offered by Heidegger during his time at Marburg: Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research, Winter semester, 1921–1922, and Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, Summer semester, 1923. Volpi contends that the aforementioned former students of Heidegger who became neo-Aristotelians were intellectually forged by their efforts to incorporate Heidegger’s teachings while, at the same time, breaking free of his political influence. Franco Volpi, “In Whose Name? Heidegger and ‘Practical Philosophy,’ ” European Journal of Political Theory 6 (2007): 31–51. Volpi is also famous for calling Being and Time a “translation” of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, but I would argue that this is going a bit too far. 36. In addition to Brogan’s previously cited Heidegger and Aristotle, see: Jacques Tamineaux, Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991). 37. Ibid., 112. 38. Ibid., 124–125. 39. Brogan, Heidegger and Aristotle, 140. 40. Fried, “Retrieving Phronêsis.” 41. Martin Heidegger, Nature, History, State 1933–1934, trans. and ed. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). This is a controversial piece to mention because it comprises heretofore unpublished student “protocols” (basically student notes) from a course Heidegger taught during that winter semester entitled: “On the Essence and Concept of Nature, History, and State.” Listing Heidegger as the author is a bit misleading, as he did not write the piece. Student notes are notoriously unreliable; however, there could be some credence given to them as Heidegger (as was the usual thing) did read the notes and make corrections to them. In this way, they have been interpreted as informative about Heidegger’s personal thoughts. 42. Irene McMullin, Time and the Shared World: Heidegger on Social Relations (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 227. 43. Daniel Engster and Maurice Hamington, “Introduction,” in Care Ethics and Political Theory, ed. Daniel Engster and Maurice Hamington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1. 44. Ibid., 43. 45. Ibid. 46. GA 2: 42; L 199. 47. Arendt and Heidegger, Letters: 1925–1975, 74. 48. Virginia Held, “Care and Justice, Still,” in Care Ethics and Political Theory (see note 43), 20. 49. Maxine Eichner, “The Supportive State: Government, Dependency, and Responsibility for Caretaking,” in Care Ethics and Political Theory (see note 43), 91.

86

Andrea D. Conque

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958. ———. Love and Saint Augustine, Edited by J.V. Scott and J.C. Stark. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Arendt, Hannah and Martin Heidegger. Letters: 1925–1975. Translated by Andrew Shields. New York: Harcourt, 2004. Brogan, Walter A. Aristotle and Heidegger: The Twofoldness of Being. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Cohen, Joseph and Raphael Zagury-Orly. Heidegger et les Juifs. Hosted by Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Centre Culturel Irlandais (CCI). Organized by Joseph Cohen & Raphael Zagury-Orly. January 23–26, 2015. Dallmayr, Fred. The Other Heidegger. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. Adieu á Emmanuel Levinas. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1997. Dostal, Robert J. “The Public and the People: Heidegger’s Illiberal Politics.” The Review of Metaphysics 47 (1994): 517–555. Eichner, Maxine. “The Supportive State: Government, Dependency, and Responsibility for Caretaking.” In Care Ethics and Political Theory, edited by Daniel Engster and Maurice Hamington. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Engster, Daniel and Maurice Hamington. “Introduction.” In Care Ethics and Political Theory, edited by Daniel Engster and Maurice Hamington. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Eubanks, Cecil L. and David J. Gauthier. “The Politics of the Homeless Spirit: Heidegger and Levinas on Dwelling and Hospitality.” History of Political Thought 32 (2011): 125–146. Farin, Ingo and Jeff Malpas, eds. Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016. Faye, Emmanuel. Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935. Translated by Michael B. Smith. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Fried, Gregory. Heidegger’s Polemos: From Being to Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. ———. “Heidegger, Politics, and Us: Towards a Polemical Ethics.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 39 (2013): 863–875. ———. Retrieving Phronêsis: Heidegger on the Essence of Politics. Continental Philosophy Review (2014). Doi: 10.1007/s1107-014-9305-1. Gordon, Hayim. The Heidegger-Buber Affair: The Status of the I-Thou. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001. Hatab, Lawrence J. Ethics and Finitude: Heideggerian Contributions to Moral Philosophy. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1962. ———. “Letter on Humanism.” In Heidegger: Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993. ———. Nature, History, State 1933–1934. Translated and edited by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

Toward a Politics of Care

87

Held, Virginia. “Care and Justice, Still.” In Care Ethics and Political Theory, edited by Daniel Engster and Maurice Hamington. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Huntington, Patricia J. “Introduction I—General Background. History of the Feminist Reception of Heidegger and a Guide to Heidegger’s Thought.” In Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger, edited by Patricia Huntington and Nancy J. Holland. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. Janicaud, Dominique. The Shadow of That Thought: Heidegger and the Question of Politics. Translated by Michael Gendre. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996. Kellerer, Sidonie. “Rewording the Past: The Postwar Publication of a 1938 Lecture by Martin Heidegger,” Modern Intellectual History 11 (2014): 575–602. Levinas, Emmanuel. As if Consenting to Horror. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993. McMullin, Irene. Time and the Shared World: Heidegger on Social Relations. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Heidegger’s Originary Ethics.” In Heidegger and Practical Philosophy, edited by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. ———. “The Being-With of the Being-There.” In Rethinking Facticity, edited by François Raffoul and Eric Sean Nelson. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. Noddings, Nel. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Olafson, Frederick A. Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics: A Study of Mitsein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Raffoul, François. The Origins of Responsibility. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Ruddick, Sara. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. Slote, Michael. “Care Ethics and Liberalism.” In Care Ethics and Political Theory, edited by Daniel Engster and Maurice Hamington. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Smith, Daniel L. “Intensifying Phronesis: Heidegger, Aristotle, and Rhetorical Culture.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 3 (2003): 77–102. Tamineaux, Jacques. Heidegger and the Project of Fundamental Ontology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. Thompson, Iain. “Thinking love: Heidegger and Arendt.” Continental Philosophy Review 50 (2017): 453–478. Tronto, Joan. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge, 1993. Vogel, Lawrence. The Fragile We: Ethical Implications of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Evanston: Northwestern State University Press, 1994. Volpi, Franco. “In Whose Name? Heidegger and ‘Practical Philosophy.’” European Journal of Political Theory 6 (2007): 31–51. Wolin, Richard. The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

Chapter 4

Subjectivity in Crisis Emmanuel Levinas and Albert Camus on Exile and Hospitality N. Susan Laehn

At perhaps no time in history has the individual been more isolated than in our modern age. The project of modernity in Western political thought has been focused so keenly upon individual rights, and the goal of unencumbered self-creation, that it often neglects the role of duty and responsibility to others. If philosophy began as a humanizing search for meaning through rational inquiry, arising from an erotic longing for truth, then it culminated in radical individuation, a retreat to the certainty of the cogito, and the loss of a shared humanity. In the wake of Friedrich Nietzsche’s emphasis on individual selfcreation, and following the conflagration of two world wars, both Emmanuel Levinas and Albert Camus sought a new humanism—one that would regrow the roots of community via responsibility to others. The Levinasian project was firmly embedded in his understanding of the transcendent and its appearance in the world, while Camus sought a more secular humanism. Though they begin from different places, theologically, epistemologically, and methodologically, they end with the formulation of similar ideals. Both Levinas and Camus, in their quests to remedy some of the ailments of modernity, and in their efforts to find meaning in a world seemingly devoid of it, end with acts of hospitality. For each, it is not enough merely to theorize about one’s ethical responsibilities; one must also act to assist others. Despite their similarities, however, Levinas’s deep-rooted concern for the transcendent and Camus’s reluctance to admit of any meaning beyond the immanent realm, place them at a metaphysical crossroads. Indeed, Levinas’s writings are imbued with Judaic thought and Camus’s with pagan Greek symbols. “Meaning,” for Levinas, comes from welcoming the transcendent into the world via a confrontation with the face of the Other. For Camus, meaning 89

90

N. Susan Laehn

comes, in his early writings, from one’s perpetual struggle against the absurd, and in his later writings, from small acts of communitarian solidarity and hospitality. Notwithstanding these differences, the two thinkers arrive at similar conclusions regarding the relationship between the self and the other, between the solitary individual and the “solidary” individual. Simply finding meaning, theoretically, is insufficient; both thinkers determine that exile is remedied only through action on behalf of a suffering other—in shouldering the burden of others via a sense of common pathos. This chapter makes three contributions to the extant literature on Levinas and Camus. First, it makes the comparison between the two thinkers, which has hitherto been under-researched and undervalued among those who study philosophy and literature. Second, it draws primarily upon Camus’s literature, as opposed to his “philosophical” works, in elucidating his secular humanism. In doing so, it examines, primarily, Exile and the Kingdom as the most illustrative example of Camus’s quest for meaning via pathos. Third, it employs the Levinasian language of the phenomenology of ethics, and the radical responsibility of the individual to the Other, to elicit new meaning from Camus’s late writings. Both writers recognize that the modern subject is exiled from others. The confrontation with the Other teaches individuals that they cannot simply retreat into the certainty of the cogito, ignoring other human beings entirely, nor can they bring the other under their control as a mere object. The remedy for subjective exile comes through a recognition of the Other as radically deserving of both my moral concern and my actual assistance. On this point, Levinas, the phenomenologist, and Camus, the artist, agree. LEVINAS AND CAMUS IN CONTEXT There are few comparative analyses of Levinas and Camus. Although Levinas read Camus (he mentions his work obliquely in Time and the Other), it is unclear whether Camus was aware of Levinas’s work.1 Levinas died in 1995. Camus died tragically in 1960, and though he may have been exposed to Levinas’s ideas, he never mentions any Levinasian writings. Although Levinas was publishing before Camus died, most of his major works were published after Camus’s death (Totality and Infinity was published in French in 1961). However, Annette Aronowicz notes that Levinas published in French on the work of Edmund Husserl and was the first person to introduce Martin Heidegger into French intellectual circles in 1932, and that Camus wrestled with both philosophers in The Myth of Sisyphus.2 Aronowicz calls Levinas’s article on Heidegger “seminal,” and it is quite possible that Camus would have read it. Both thinkers were part of the same post-Heideggerian

Subjectivity in Crisis

91

lineage, wrestling with the existence or non-existence of the transcendent, examining the source of meaning (or lack thereof) for individuals, and illuminating the responsibilities incumbent upon individuals in communities. Yet, published comparisons between Levinas and Camus remain limited, and those that do exist are often limited in scope.3 The dearth of comparative work on the two writers is attributable, in part, to the difficulties of making such comparisons when the intellectual influence they had on one another is largely veiled. Another obstacle stems from the difficulties inherent in comparing a transcendental, Jewish phenomenologist with an atheistic, Graecophile novelist. Moreover, as Matthew Sharpe notes, in his comparative effort, the two authors differ in their methodological approach.4 Levinas asserted the primacy of ethics from the very beginning of his scholarly career. Camus “only arrives at his valorization of the redemptive potentials of intersubjectivity in the final parts of The Rebel by way of a series of reflections that originate in a consideration of the epistemic finitude of the solitary modern subject, passing through an extended genealogy of the history of revolt, and culminating in nothing like so detailed an analysis of the inter-subjective situation as one finds in Levinas’[s] work.”5 Sharpe’s comments on The Rebel highlight a limitation of the comparative inquiries that do exist. As is typical of philosophical inquiries into Camus’s work, his philosophical texts are, understandably, the primary sources of insight into his thought.6 Indeed, political philosophers who consider Camus’s work at all, almost always examine exclusively The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel. Occasionally, scholars cite Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, which is a collection of political essays hand-selected by Camus from a larger anthology called Actuelles, and republished, in English, under the aforementioned title.7 This preoccupation with his theoretical treatises is due, in part, to the difficulties of interpreting works of literature and gleaning from them a cohesive philosophical stance. In an effort to fill that lacuna, and given that Camus was, first and foremost, an artist, this chapter focuses on his literature as an additional, and appropriate, location from which to discern his philosophical stance on intersubjectivity and ethics. Moreover, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) was written early in Camus’s career, and is not representative of the body of his later work, which increasingly focused on community and hospitality. Camus underwent a change through the course of his scholarly and artistic life, which began with an emphasis on the struggle of the individual against the absurd, and developed into a search for humanism within the context of an absurd existence. Indeed, he stated in a letter to his friend, Roland Barthes, that his novel The Plague (1947) “does, beyond any possible discussion, represent the transition from an attitude of solitary revolt to the recognition of a community whose struggles must be shared. If there is an evolution from The Stranger to The Plague, it is in the direction

92

N. Susan Laehn

of solidarity and participation.”8 Here, Camus cites his novels, and admits of a transition in their purpose, lending support to this effort at examining his literature as a source of philosophical meaning, and especially his later literature for a better understanding of his views on community, solidarity, and pathos. This chapter pays particular attention to Exile and the Kingdom (1957), which depicts, in one book, a nuanced and developed discussion of the meaning found through pathos.9 Moreover, several historical and philosophical particulars lend credence to this comparative effort. Both Levinas and Camus were relative outsiders in France, and resisted totalitarianism practically and philosophically.10 The works of Tal Sessler and Matthew Sharpe emphasize each thinker’s resistance to the idea of totality, be it in the form totalizing political ideologies such as National Socialism and Communism, or totalizing ontologies in philosophical discourse.11 According to Sessler, each recognized, and fought against, the dehumanizing tendencies of the rightist and leftist totalitarian movements.12 However, Levinas and Camus also shared in common a fight against radical individualism, and the emergent sense of exile that stemmed from it, which allowed those totalizing ideologies to take hold in the first place.13 Both thinkers are responding, albeit differently, to the ailments of the twentieth century. When Nietzsche proclaimed “God is dead,” he tore down the last remaining edifice of metaphysical inquiry.14 Levinas rejected Nietzsche’s claim, and Camus sought to find meaning in its wake, but both authors fought against the aftershocks of Nietzsche’s emphasis on self-creation as the ultimate source of meaning.15 With regard to scholars working during their lifetimes, Levinas and Camus also rejected the work of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, though for decidedly different reasons. As Sessler notes, “Camus [came] to realize the dangers of nihilism in a Nietzschean sense, whereas Levinas [was] shocked by his former teacher’s (Heidegger’s) adherence to Hitlerism.”16 Levinas sought a place for the transcendent within the world, while Camus sought “within the limits of nihilism . . . to proceed beyond nihilism.”17 Levinas’s work is opposed to the Heideggerian preoccupation with a hermeneutic philosophy of Being and to Sartre’s reduction of the other person to a mere object to be manipulated. Camus states of Heidegger, and other phenomenologists, that they proclaim “nothing is clear, all is chaos, that all man has is his lucidity and his definite knowledge of the walls surrounding him.”18 But man longs for “happiness and reason,” and Camus, in his early works, finds that happiness in the absurd, in hope amid exile.19 Regarding Sartre, though they both engaged similar ideas, Camus refused to adhere to Sartre’s existentialist thought, and saw his willingness to support revolution at the expense of human lives as anathema.20 Thus, both authors recognize in the writings of Heidegger and Sartre a danger that other people are being reduced to mere

Subjectivity in Crisis

93

objects to be brought under one’s control—that there is no shared experience, no common humanity, no mutual suffering. So, what can be gleaned from the work of a philosopher and an artist who exercised only tangential influence on one another, and who, ostensibly, disagreed on such fundamental premises as the existence and relevance of transcendence? A great deal. The fact that two epistemologically and methodologically divergent thinkers both find the source of meaning in the other person suggests it as a viable philosophical stance. Both Levinas and Camus recognize pathos, or shared suffering, as a source of obligation. In their respective writings, both Levinas, the philosopher, and Camus, the artist, place great emphasis on the subject, but in a radically different way than most preceding thinkers. For both men, the subject experiences an existential crisis—a questioning of the self—that causes it to reject the certainty of the cogito and instead embrace that which is outside itself. For Levinas, the gazing upon the Other is the transformative event that causes an individual to welcome the transcendent into the world. For Camus’s tormented characters, there is often a moment of lucidity, in which the subject transitions from suffering in isolation toward a sense of pathos. For Levinas, this crisis is instigated by the confrontation with the face of the Other. When one gazes upon the Other, who cannot be brought under the control of the subject, the cogito can no longer retreat into itself; it is threatened. Camus’s short stories and novels illuminate what happens when individuals acknowledge the possibilities of shared pathos, rather than struggling alone against an absurd existence. MODERNITY, SUBJECTIVITY, AND THE EXPERIENCE OF EXILE For both Emmanuel Levinas and Albert Camus, the development of modern political thought, and the subsequent emphasis on subjective phenomenology in postmodern thought, represented a crisis for philosophy, and that crisis bled over into the ethico-political realm in Europe. Levinas recognized the problem as one stemming from the banishment of the transcendent from philosophical inquiry. Levinas sought to reestablish the transcendent as a proper and appropriate component of phenomenological inquiry, motivated in large part by his Jewish heritage. He was deeply concerned with translating his thought into the language of the occidental tradition, which he dubbed, the “Greek.” The melding of these two traditions implied, for Levinas, a common humanity. Yet, in his effort to find shared meaning and a common humanity, Levinas was careful not to allow his emphasis on universality to become a mere abstraction. Levinas spoke of universality as “universal insofar as it

94

N. Susan Laehn

unites persons without reducing them to an abstraction in which the oneness of their uniqueness is sacrificed to the genus; of the universal in which oneness has already been approached in love.”21 As Samuel Moyn notes, “While Levinas incorporated religious underpinnings in his project of developing a secular ethics, it is a mistake to understand those foundations as representing a simple reversion to the premises of a specifically Jewish religiosity—traditional or modern.”22 For Levinas, then, the manifestation of the transcendent through the Other is not necessarily synonymous with God. Moreover, it is the transcendent itself that contributes to the subject’s sense of exile. “Transcendence cannot, consequently, be felt otherwise than as a subjectivity in crisis, that finds itself facing the other, whom it can neither contain nor take up, and who nonetheless puts it in question.”23 The universality Levinas desires parallels Camus’s explanation of the human desire for unity, though Camus was an avowed atheist and would not search for it in the transcendent. Camus writes of two permanent, but irreconcilable, realities in the world: “my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle.”24 This contradiction gives rise to a struggle for unity in a world that is fragmented, particularly by the separation of the self from the other. Indeed, Exile and the Kingdom, upon which this chapter is focused, presents the reader with numerous examples of individual characters struggling for some sense of unity or solidarity. In “The Adulterous Woman,” a married woman suffers through a strained relationship with her husband, only finding a sort of primordial oneness in the desert night beneath the stars. “The Silent Men” details the estrangement between factory workers and their bosses following an unsuccessful strike; their attempts at solidarity failed to bring unity. The semi-autobiographical story, “The Artist at Work,” examines the difficulties faced by an artist who seeks true kinship and solidarity, and instead finds hangers-on and solitude. The desire by both thinkers to find a grounding for unity in the wake of the collapse of the modern project highlights the exilic character of the human condition. The recognition of exile in Camus is perhaps more literal than in Levinas’s writings, since Camus’s characters often find themselves alone or in alien environments. However, the crisis of the subject in Levinas’s writings may also be seen as exile, particularly through the crisis of the subject induced by the one’s confrontation with the Other. Man’s exile is, in the aggregate, self-created, and philosophical discourse has contributed to that sense of homelessness. Modern philosophy’s emphasis on the primacy of individual reason resulted in a retreat into the self. Levinas does not discount the self. For example, Levinas recognizes the initial primacy of the ego. As John Wild notes, Levinas’s phenomenology does not negate the ego; one’s experience of the world will always be biased in favor of the subject. Wild

Subjectivity in Crisis

95

writes, for Levinas, “I take precedence over the various objects I find around me, and in so far as my experience is normal, I learn to manipulate and control them to my advantage.”25 Heidegger and the other phenomenologists, and Sartre, champion this behavior even when that outside “object” is another person. As such, an ersatz unity is established, but only through the subordination of the other to the self—that is, through the elimination of the other qua other. But Levinas recognizes the desire for unity as a metaphysical desire for the “absolutely other”—for an absolutely other that cannot be absorbed into the ego or reduced to the same.26 He writes, The other metaphysically desired is not “other” like the bread I eat, the land in which I dwell. . . . I can “feed” on these realities and to a very great extent satisfy myself, as though I had simply been lacking them. Their alterity is thereby reabsorbed into my own identity as a thinker or possessor. The metaphysical desire tends toward something else entirely, toward the absolutely other.27

For Levinas, the metaphysical other is the transcendent, but it only becomes apparent and provides meaning via the relationship with an other. This is the source of Levinas’s humanism—the reason he emphasizes the importance of hospitality. However, hospitality can only occur after a crisis of the subject. This metaphysical alterity is the source of one’s sense of exile. All other objects can be brought under the subject’s power; their alterity is merely a mode of their deeper identity with the thinking subject. Whereas the self can feel confident in itself in the world of other objects, man’s metaphysical desire, his desire for unity and transcendence, is, simultaneously, what calls the “I” into question. He elaborates, “The metaphysical other is other with an alterity that is not formal, is not the simple reverse of identity, and is not formed out of resistance to the same, but is prior to every initiative, to all imperialism of the same.”28 The metaphysically other, with whom the “I” is confronted, is the Other. Levinas describes this recognition as a violent confrontation with the face of the Other—violent because it strips the self of its sense of power. “Neither possession nor the unity of number nor the unity of concepts link me to the Stranger [l’Etranger], the Stranger who disturbs the being at home with oneself [le chez soi]. But Stranger also means the free one. Over him I have no power.”29 The subjective self seemed to be the last refuge for the individual; the certainty of the cogito appeared to be the last refuge of philosophy. But the Levinasian confrontation with the face of the Other calls into question the certainty of the ego. One’s experience could no longer be grounded in the cogito since, “these egocentric views [cannot do] justice to our original experience of the other person.”30 Faced with the Other, the individual can no longer recede into the self to find a dwelling, because the Other calls even the

96

N. Susan Laehn

self into question. “In such a relation, the I does not put itself in question; it is put in question by the other.”31 In the face of the Other, the ego confronts a reality more fundamental than the ego itself. If meaning, or the Husserlian transcendence of the ego, is no longer established in the self, whence does one derive that meaning or transcendence? The initial exile experienced by the subject begins to give way as a relationship with another person is formed. “It is precisely in taking the other as one’s point of departure that transcendence can emerge. True transcendence is not born of the interiority of a being, of which it would be the prolongation or idealization, but exteriority.”32 Here, Pierre Hayat notes that Levinas directly contradicts those in the history of philosophy who have advocated individualistic meditative ascents to the Good, as well as those who have seen no place for the transcendent in their phenomenological inquiries. Exteriority, or alterity, is both the source of, and the remedy for, the feelings of exile experienced by the subject. In sum, as will be explained in greater detail in the following section, Levinas’s philosophy allows for the transcendent to become manifest in the curvature of space between individuals. Turning to Camus, one can identify many similar themes in both his literature and his philosophical work, though a concern for the transcendent is, obviously, absent. Not absent, however, is his implicit critique of modernity’s retreat into the certainty of the cogito. Notably, there is a difference of thought in the early and late Camus. Though he wrestled with the problem of exile and homeland as early as his days studying for his diplôme in Algeria, it was not until much later that he developed the themes in his literature and philosophical treatises.33 As Ronald Srigley notes, “The notions of exile and homeland later became important images in the iconography of Camus’s work and in his critical assessment of modernity.”34 The attentive reader will note a gradual shift in his writings as Camus searched for meaning, from the heroic, but solitary struggles of Sisyphus, to the foundations of community in “The Growing Stone.” This chapter focuses primarily upon Exile and the Kingdom, but briefly examines The Myth of Sisyphus for his attempt to find meaning in solitude, and The Fall as evidence of his critique of this same inward-looking egoism. As one of his last published works, Exile and the Kingdom (1958) demonstrates Camus’s rethinking of the source of meaning in an absurd world.35 The short stories it contains suggest that Camus was not satisfied with the answer he had given in The Myth of Sisyphus and that he ultimately sought meaning in shared, rather than solitary, suffering. The exile present in The Myth of Sisyphus and The Fall is apparent. First, the propensity to experience exile can be felt as an individual struggles alone against a possibly meaningless existence in which suffering is a constant condition of life. This is a form of philosophical exile, and finding meaning in response to it is the goal of his first published philosophical treatise. In this

Subjectivity in Crisis

97

effort, Sisyphus, punished by the gods for his deceit and trickery, is Camus’s tragic hero. Sisyphus, who is forced for all eternity to push a rock up a hill only to watch it roll back down again, is the epitome of suffering in exile. Camus states that “it is legitimate and necessary to wonder whether life has meaning,” and describes The Myth of Sisyphus, “as a lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the desert.”36 Camus, following Nietzsche, asserts that individuals attempt to explain the often-tragic world with unsatisfactory solutions. “A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land.”37 However, in the midst of this exile, the individual must embrace the absurd and find his own meaning. This was Camus’s effort to find the answer to nihilism within the conditions of nihilism itself. I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. The universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.38

Camus admits that Sisyphus’s exile is “without remedy,” and yet he describes the mountain upon which Sisyphus struggles as a home. There is no mention of others, but despite his physical exile, Sisyphus is able to create a new “home” by embracing his absurd existence and struggling against the punishment imposed upon him by the angry gods. Camus provides a more sinister depiction of exile in his novel The Fall.39 Reveling alone in the absurdity of the universe has become insufficient. The story of Sisyphus is no longer satisfactory, and Camus’s notebooks from the time indicate that he is wrestling with a critique of existentialism, which underlies The Fall.40 In this manifestation of exile, his character, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, suffers throughout the novel for his unwillingness to act. In particular, Jean-Baptiste’s plight occurs because of his unwillingness to sacrifice for another. His is the story of a successful Parisian lawyer and socialite with few concerns until he is confronted with the possibility of risking his life for a stranger. As he makes his way across the Pont Royal, he passes a woman staring over the edge of the bridge. He says nothing and, after he passes, hears her body strike the water. Jean-Baptiste considers, for a moment, the possibility of jumping in to save her, but instead, he simply walks away and informs no one of the incident. Jean-Baptiste spends the

98

N. Susan Laehn

entire story sharing his grief with an unnamed acquaintance. Even the prose screams of isolation, as Jean-Baptiste is the only character in the entire book who speaks, essentially making the book a monologue. Jean-Baptiste was unable to accept the responsibility for the other person that had been thrust upon him by chance and circumstance. Instead of accepting his decision or attempting to forget the episode, Jean-Baptiste moves to the concentric circles of Amsterdam and begins loitering at a bar in the center of those circles. The imagery of Dante’s concentric circles of hell provides the reader with the understanding that Jean-Baptiste is suffering for his unwillingness to act. Far from accepting suffering and struggling against it as Sisyphus might have done, Jean-Baptiste engages in a sort of confession with his acquaintance from the bar, pouring out his sins before his comrade. At the conclusion of the book, Jean-Baptiste speaks to the acquaintance, though he could just as easily be communicating directly with the reader. He professes, Are we not alike, constantly talking and to no one, forever up against the same questions although we know the answers in advance? Then please tell me what happened to you one night on the quays of the Seine and how you managed never to risk your life. You yourself utter the words that for years have never ceased echoing through my nights and that I shall at last say through your mouth: “O young woman, throw yourself into the water again so that I may a second time have the chance of saving both of us!” A second time, eh, what a risky suggestion! Just suppose, cher maitre, that we should be taken literally? We’d have to go through with it. Brr . . . ! The water’s so cold! But let’s not worry! It’s too late now. It will always be too late! Fortunately!41

An examination of the preceding excerpt indicates Jean-Baptiste’s recognition of his own weakness. His words seem to be an indictment of himself, his acquaintance, and his readers for never having the strength to make the ultimate sacrifice for another being. While he desires another chance to make the correct decision, to risk himself for another, he simultaneously understands the difficulty in actually choosing death as part of one’s responsibility for the other person.42 No longer is Camus’s character acting as a Sisyphean being, rejoicing in solitude and struggling alone against an absurd existence. Quite to the contrary, Jean-Baptiste, despite his confessions, cannot forgive himself for shunning the Other. He notes that throwing himself in the water after the young woman would save them both. Thus, sacrifice for-the-Other has the effect of salvation for both the Other and the self. Like Levinas, Camus provides the first inklings that meaning may begin with the other person. However, his last phrase, “Fortunately,” indicates Jean-Baptiste’s inner conflict and ultimate desire to avoid being confronted with such a choice. He prefers to remain exiled in the inferno rather than face the possibility of sacrifice.

Subjectivity in Crisis

99

Camus’s epigraph at the beginning of The Fall suggests that Jean-Baptiste is a symbol of modern man. Quoting Mikhail Lermontov, it states, “A Hero of Our Time, gentlemen, is in fact a portrait, but not of an individual; it is the aggregate of the vices of our whole generation in their fullest expression.”43 The book was a damning indictment of modernity, and of the exile it created. It depicted the resulting desire of modern man to find a source of meaning, and a new homeland. Jean-Baptiste recognized the consequences of his confrontation with the woman on the bridge as the source of his exile, and of the crisis of the self that he is experiencing. Just as Levinas notes that the “I” is put into question by the Other, Jean-Baptiste has undergone a complete metamorphosis and daily relives his transgression because of an encounter with the Other. However, it is through this confrontation and exile that the individual seeks redemption and the possibility for a home amid the ashes of modernity. FINDING MEANING: WELCOMING THE OTHER Both Levinas and Camus illuminate the crisis of the subject in the wake of modernity, and although they both arrive at similar remedies to subjective exile, their methods for reestablishing a meaningful humanism diverge. Levinas’s efforts are imbued with the transcendent, while Camus seeks a more secular remedy. Yet, both find, in the confrontation with the other person, a call to action. Levinas sees in this confrontation the primacy of ethics over ontology, and he repudiates Heidegger and his predecessors for establishing ontology as first philosophy. Camus recognizes a sort of primordial pathos in the confrontation with the other, and the experience of pathos prompts action on behalf of the other, something his existentialist circle of friends would not have condoned. For each thinker, the primacy of the relation to the other person, the pull of pathos, requires the subjective self to engage in an act of hospitality. And in small acts of hospitality, in showing kindness to strangers, the subject finds meaning beyond the self and cures the crisis of exile. Levinas and the Primacy of Ethics For Levinas, the transcendent has the ability to become apparent in the face-to-face encounter with the Other. However, the possibility for the manifestation of the transcendent is not enough to confer meaning on one’s existence. Such meaning is derived from acts of hospitality, and as such, Levinas argues for the primacy of ethics instead of ontology, which had been given priority throughout the development of Western thought. Levinas writes, “For Western philosophy, meaning or intelligibility coincides with the

100

N. Susan Laehn

manifestation of being.”44 In the history of philosophy, the transcendent has been forced to expose itself ontologically in order for it to possess any discernable significance for the individual human being. For Levinas, the transcendent does not manifest itself once individuals have sufficiently explored their psyches. “Philosophy,” Levinas explains, “finds in manifestation its matter and its form. Philosophy would thus remain in its attachment to being—to the existent or to the being of the existent—an intrigue of knowledge and truth, an adventure of experience between the clear and the obscure.”45 He states, “This is the sense in which philosophy carries the spirituality of the West, wherein spirit remained coextensive with knowledge.”46 Instead, Levinas contends that knowing is not an active introspection that allows the transcendent to become manifest ontologically, but, instead a “disinterestedness.” Levinas compares this disinterestedness to insomnia, in which an individual is not actively seeking to avoid sleep, but, nevertheless, experiences a sort of wakefulness.47 In place of an accruement of wisdom, which leads to the discovery of meaning, Levinas indicates that an “openness” to the trace of the infinite in the Other provides for meaning, rather than the meaning of being, specifically. In Levinas’s words, “The important idea, when I speak of the face of the other, the trace of Infinity, or the Word of God, is that of a signifying of meaning that, originally, is not a theme, is not an object of any field of knowledge, is not the being of a being, is not representation.”48 It is a sort of “attention to . . . and not an exposition to the other.”49 Any attempt at hospitality must first begin with a relationship, which, for Levinas, begins when we engage in conversation with the radically Other, through the pure presenting of oneself. According to Levinas, it is through this conversation that the transcendent becomes present. “Levinas . . . seeks to revive transcendence against the totalizing philosophies of the past two centuries. Instead of a direct relationship, either meditative or mystical, with the divine . . . Levinas finds transcendence in the face-to-face relationship with the other person, the Other.”50 Levinas describes the presence of the Other as one of radical separation from the self and yet a direct communication through a face-to-face manifestation. In his attempt to develop a new understanding of the Other and a different method for apprehending the transcendent, Levinas describes his philosophy as a mean between extremes. On one pole lies a philosophy of transcendence, which permits access to the divine only through brief mystical encounters or through death. At the other extreme is a philosophy of immanence in which all otherness would vanish when history reached its zenith. Instead, Levinas articulates the idea of infinity as a way to apprehend the transcendent, stating, “We propose to describe, within the unfolding of terrestrial existence, of economic existence (as we shall call it), a relationship with the other that does not result in a divine or human totality, that is not a totalization of history but the idea of infinity.”51

Subjectivity in Crisis

101

In rethinking the relationship between the self and the other, one that does not result in a divine or human totality, Levinas determines that the Other opens an avenue to the transcendent. Thus, transcendence, experienced through communion with the Other, stems first from a crisis for the individual. However, despite the face-to-face encounter, and potentially meaningful interaction, with the Other, it is the infinite space between the “I and Thou” that allows the transcendent to present itself. The separation between the subject and the Other cannot be fully breached. While the Other resists one’s own attempt to control it, at the same time, it begins the process that allows the transcendent to come forth. The resistance of the Other to my attempts at control generates a sense of exile. But through this exile, meaning is revealed. The face resists possession, resists my powers. The expression the face introduces into the world does not defy the feebleness of my powers, but my ability for power. The face, still a thing among things, breaks through the form that nevertheless delimits it. This means concretely: the face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation incommensurate with a power exercised, be it enjoyment or knowledge.52

Though the face is still outside the self, it opens the door for the experience of transcendence through its exteriority. Being is exteriority, but it does not call simply for us to denounce the subject in favor of that which is outside it as the only source of meaning. “Such a conception would in the end destroy exteriority, since subjectivity itself would be absorbed into exteriority, revealing itself to be a moment of a panoramic play. Exteriority would then no longer mean anything, since it would encompass the very interiority that justified this appellation.”53 However, neither is exteriority solely that which is outside the self. If this were the case, Levinas writes, “Exteriority, or if one prefers, alterity, would be converted into the same.”54 Thus, Levinas concludes, Exteriority is true not in a lateral view apperceiving it in its opposition to interiority; it is true in a face to face that is no longer entirely vision, but goes further than vision. The face to face is established starting with a point separated from exteriority so radically that it maintains itself of itself, is me; every other relation that would not part from this separated and therefore arbitrary point . . . would miss the—necessarily subjective—field of truth.55

In other words, being as exteriority does not destroy the self, nor does it exalt all things outside the self as the only basis for alterity. The subject and the other are connected. But individuals are not absorbed into a whole. Instead, “Levinasian responsibility is radically for-the-Other, but it does not annihilate

102

N. Susan Laehn

the ego. Without the ego, without separation, responsibility is meaningless. The self is two parts of a unicity. It is both for-itself and for-the-Other, but in Levinas’s formulation, the for-the-Other is primordial.”56 Levinasian responsibility begins with the conversation between the ego and the Other. So, while Levinas does not neglect the ego, he asserts that only the ego-in-relation-to-the-Other can come to understand the Other. “Conversation, from the very fact that it maintains the distance between me and the Other, the radical separation asserted in transcendence which prevents the reconstitution of totality, cannot renounce the egoism of its existence; but the very fact of being in a conversation consists in recognizing in the Other a right over this egoism, and hence in justifying oneself.”57 The right of the Other over the self seems to cause an awakening within the self that leads to one’s willingness to sacrifice for the Other, to the welcoming of the transcendent, and to the recognition of community. For Levinas, to be hospitable is “to give, to-be-for-another, despite oneself, but in interrupting the for-oneself, is to take the bread out of one’s mouth, to nourish the hunger of another with one’s own fasting.”58 This ethic, of hospitality to the Other, is instigated by the simple confrontation and conversation with the Other. It is derived from a recognition of the Other’s right over the self and the self’s duty toward the Other. “All encounter begins with a benediction, contained in the word ‘hello’; that ‘hello’ that all cogito, all reflection on oneself already presupposes and that would be a first transcendence.”59 And with the word “hello” comes a concern for the Other that precedes not only one’s understanding of that concern but also one’s understanding of the transcendent. Through this conversation and act of hospitality, space is created by the confrontation with the Other, and the transcendent is welcomed into the world. Levinas eloquently asserts, “The true essence of man is presented in his face, in which he is infinitely other than a violence like unto mine, opposed to mine and hostile, already at grips with mine in a historical world where we participate in the same system.”60 He continues, “The truth of being is not the image of being, the idea of its nature; it is the being situated in a subjective field which deforms vision, but precisely thus allows exteriority to state itself, entirely command and authority: entirely superiority. This curvature of the intersubjective space inflects distance into elevation; it does not falsify being, but makes its truth first possible.”61 Here Levinas clearly responds to Heidegger; only the priority of the intersubjective relationship, the priority of ethics, allows being to become manifest. Through the conversation with the Other, the responsibility inherent in that conversation, and the experience of the transcendent in the face of the Other, Levinas has elucidated his understanding of how subjective crisis leads to illumination. That which initially caused feelings of exile has become the means by which one can find meaning in a world that resists revealing it.

Subjectivity in Crisis

103

Camus, Pathos, and the Kingdom Camus’s humanism is decidedly secular, but he too ultimately finds meaning in the intersubjective relationship between self and other. Whereas The Myth of Sisyphus emphasized meaning through the struggle against the absurd, Exile and the Kingdom illuminates the inadequacy of solitary attempts to find meaning.62 Moreover, as the first five stories indicate, merely being in the presence of others is also inadequate. Meaning and fulfillment come through unsolicited acts of hospitality toward another, a sentiment expressed beautifully in “The Growing Stone,” the final story of the collection. “The Growing Stone” provides a method for overcoming the difficulties of exile through communion with others. That which begins as an individual attempt at selffulfillment, as represented in The Myth of Sisyphus, ends with the acceptance of responsibility toward strangers. Cecil L. Eubanks and Peter A. Petrakis note, “Authentic rebellion against the human condition begins in solitude and progresses into an act of solidarity in the name of all men and women.”63 While the preceding stories in Exile and the Kingdom all take place in arid climates and concern primarily a single character, the final story occurs in a small community in the midst of a moist tropical climate. It is so fertile that even the stones grow. Whereas the first five stories represent exile, “The Growing Stone” presents one man’s attempt to find a home, or kingdom, with strangers in a foreign land. The protagonist, a French engineer named D’Arrast, comes to a small community called Iguape, which needs a dam built to stop the floods that frequently devastate the more poverty-stricken areas of the town. While visiting the town, he learns of the growing stone that rests in the grotto. The townspeople claim that its growth is a miracle because they break pieces off each year for good luck, and yet it continues to grow larger. He also hears the story of a poor cook who had been in a shipwreck and who had begged Jesus to spare him. The cook had promised God that if He saved him from the shipwreck, he would carry the 100-pound stone to the church at Iguape. Because the cook did survive, he tells D’Arrast that he plans to carry the stone during the parade the following day. That evening D’Arrast spends time with some of the community members at a tribal dance of sorts. As he leaves he asks the cook to leave too so he will have the strength to carry his stone the following day. The cook ignores his advice. The next day, as the cook attempts to carry the boulder, he drops it several times and then can go no further. It is in this moment that a transformative event takes place. When the cook drops the stone for the final time, D’Arrast picks up the boulder, and the reader is reminded of Sisyphus in his eternal damnation. But D’Arrast is not Sisyphus. He has chosen, in the act of hospitality toward the cook, to complete the task for him. In the image of Simon of Cyrene,

104

N. Susan Laehn

D’Arrast lifts the boulder onto his own shoulder and carries it, not to the church, but instead transports it in solitude down empty streets into the house of the cook. There he half buries it and waits for the inhabitants to return. As the trickling sound of the nearby river reaches him, a symbol of rebirth in the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions, D’Arrast is asked to sit down with the family. His act of hospitality has been returned in kind. D’Arrast has rejected the traditional path by which meaning (and the transcendent) is sought, as symbolized by the church. Instead, he has found meaning and community inside a hut in the jungle. Camus writes of D’Arrast, “And there, straightening up until he was suddenly enormous, drinking in with desperate gulps the familiar smell of poverty and ashes, he felt rising within him a surge of obscure and panting joy that he was powerless to name.”64 Shortly thereafter, the cook and his family enter the hut and Camus continues: No sound but the murmur of the river reached them through the heavy air. Standing in the darkness, D’Arrast listened without seeing anything, and the sound of the waters filled him with a tumultuous happiness. With eyes closed, he joyfully acclaimed his own strength; he acclaimed, once again, a fresh beginning in life. At that moment, a firecracker went off that seemed very close. The brother moved a little away from the cook and, half turning toward D’Arrast but without looking at him, pointed to the empty place and said: “Sit down with us.”65

In these passages, D’Arrast recognizes that he has found joy in an unlikely place; he has found community with those whom it may have otherwise seemed he had little in common. Camus’s story illustrates that an act of hospitality can help an individual find a (literal) home in a world that often seems hopeless. Perhaps the most striking facet of the story comes when D’Arrast chooses to pick up the boulder that the cook has dropped. It places him in stark contrast to Jean-Baptiste, in The Fall, who cannot shoulder the burden thrust at him by another person. D’Arrast performs a duty of hospitality without ever being asked. In this instant, one can see the same type of hospitality of which Levinas writes. D’Arrast can hardly be said to be friends with the cook; he owes him nothing. Yet, the sight of the suffering man seems to move D’Arrast to action. Much as Levinas points out that simply encountering the Other awakens pathos and calls for action, Camus, the artist, paints a picture for the reader of what such awakening and action might look like. While Camus is not a philosopher and does not necessarily attempt to explore, systematically, through rational inquiry, the meaning of existence, he does look for clarity and lucidity. Finding inadequate his own solutions to the problems of modernity in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus, more than fifteen years later,

Subjectivity in Crisis

105

places the locus of meaning on the other person rather than the self. In the moments before D’Arrast lifts the stone onto his own shoulder, literally shouldering responsibility for the actions, and failings, of another person, he finds clarity. He does not speak to anyone, but simply approaches the cook and performs the act of hospitality that he feels called to undertake. Then, having accepted responsibility for the burden of a stranger, D’Arrast experiences joy, meaning, and a new beginning. Camus writes in The Myth of Sisyphus, “This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.”66 While D’Arrast does not come to any realizations about the reasonableness of the world, he does find meaning in it. Once inside the hut, among the poorest of the poor, he seems to find solace in the small community and tribal atmosphere of the cook’s meager home. Instead of resigning himself to solitude with Sisyphus and Jean-Baptiste, D’Arrast places himself around the hearth with a family not his own. The fact that D’Arrast scarcely knows the individuals with whom he is gathered speaks to the irreplaceable value of the Other, even one with whom the subject seems to have little in common. Here, joy does not come from struggling alone against an absurd existence, but instead from sharing unremarkable moments with strangers. “This hell of the present is his Kingdom at last.”67 CONCLUSION This chapter has shown the insight that can be gained through a comparison of the humanism of Emmanuel Levinas and that of Albert Camus. Both the Jewish humanist and the secular humanist, the philosopher and the artist, call for small acts of hospitality on behalf of the suffering other. Each writer was responding, through his own medium, to the ills of the twentieth century— both in politics and in philosophy. And herein lies the great strength of this comparative effort. The arrival at the same conclusion by two thinkers whose thought emerges from different traditions, and whose methods of inquiry diverge, provides validity to the experiences they describe. Both Levinas and Camus depict the crisis of the subject and the experience of pathos. Both authors outline a call to act hospitably toward another. For Levinas, this is done through a phenomenological inquiry of subjectivity in crisis and the beckoning of the face of the Other. Camus uses allegory and symbols to elucidate man’s experience of exile and of finding a home, literal and metaphorical, with strangers. The culmination of modern political philosophy led to an emphasis on the individual as the sole source of certainty and meaning. It also led to

106

N. Susan Laehn

the primacy of the individual as a rights-bearing and rights-asserting creature in the political realm. Neglected in this turn toward the cogito, toward the subjective self, in both philosophy and politics, is the role of duty and responsibility. Human rights scholars will argue that for every right, there is a correlative duty. And yet, in this line of argument, duty is only upheld, after a correlative right is claimed.68 Yet, the rights-based doctrine of moral obligation is an antagonistic one, in that it requires the Other to assert a claim and hope that claim is heard and addressed. Levinas and Camus ask us, indirectly, to rethink the role of duty. They ask us to question ourselves and to recognize our contingency. They ask us to be open to the experience of pathos. They ask us to take responsibility for the other, even before the other asks us to do so. Both men recognize that the other person beckons to me without ever asserting any claim against me. The individual experience of pathos draws one away from the certainty of the cogito and toward the Other. Duty, then, begins with introspection—a questioning of the self—instead of waiting for the other to recognize his or her own need and then claim his or her right to my assistance. One approaches this ethic from the Talmud, the other from a post-Catholic secularism. But this is part of the value of the comparative effort herein. The elevation of one’s duty to others is not tied to one metaphysical or ontological position. The engendering experience of the call of the other precedes and underlies all attempts at symbolization. Without a return to this engendering experience, modern man will remain in exile in a world devoid of meaning.

NOTES 1. In that sense, one might critique this chapter as a Levinasian reading of Camus. However, I contend that these two thinkers were wrestling, through their own mediums, and via their own methodologies, with the same basic concepts, namely, the crisis of the ego and the potential for pathos. For Levinas’s mention of Camus, see Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 50. Here he discusses suicide, and Cohen states unequivocally, in a footnote, that Levinas had in mind Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. 2. Aronowicz makes this observation in her introduction to Levinas’s Nine Talmudic Readings (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990). The article on Heidegger that she is referencing appeared in 1931, well before Jean-Paul Sartre published L’Être et le néant (1943), translated into English as Being and Nothingness (1956), which drew heavily from Heidegger’s Being and Time (published in German as Sein und Zeit in 1927). See Emmanuel Levinas, “Martin Heidegger et l’ontologie,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 113, no. 5–6 (1932): 395–431. Moreover, the friendship, and feud, between Camus and Sartre is well-documented, and Levinas once noted, in an interview, that Sartre admitted he was introduced to

Subjectivity in Crisis

107

phenomenology by Levinas. Given their intellectual kinship, it seems likely that Camus would have been familiar with Levinas, via Sartre, if by no other means. See Richard Kearny, “Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas,” in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 13–33. 3. See, for example, Susana Camacho Plascencia, “Camus and Levinas: Embracing the Absurd While Finding Meaning,” Res Cogitans 9, no. 1 (2018): 2–9, which deals almost exclusively with the idea of the absurd. See also Peter Roberts, “Education and the Face of the Other: Levinas, Camus and (mis)understanding,” Educational Philosophy and Theory 45, no. 11 (2013): 1133–49, which examines the thought of each in dealing with pedagogical issues and the role of pathos. 4. Matthew Sharpe, “Reading Camus “with,” or after, Levinas: Rebellion and the Primacy of Ethics,” Philosophy Today 55, no. 1 (2011): 82–95. 5. Ibid., 95n2. 6. Sharpe, for example, cites exclusively from Camus’s philosophical writings and his notebooks. His literature is entirely absent from Sharpe’s analysis. 7. See Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage International, 1960); Actuelles: Écrits politiques (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1950); Actuelles: Écrits politiques, 1948–1953 (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1953); Actuelles: Chronique Algériennes, 1939–1958 (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1958). 8. Albert Camus to Roland Barthes, Paris, January 11, 1955, in Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. Philip Thody, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Vintage International, 1970), 339. 9. Albert Camus, Exile and the Kingdom, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage International, 1957). 10. Levinas was a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant who fought for France during World War II before being captured as a prisoner of war and spending five years in a German POW camp. For an historical account of his detainment, and a philosophical interpretation of it, see Johanna Jacques, “Where Nothing Happened: The Experience of War Captivity and Levinas’s Concept of the ‘There Is,’ ” Social and Legal Studies 26, no. 2 (2017): 230–48. Camus was born in Algeria and was involved in the French resistance during Nazi occupation, and later called for the liberation of Algeria from France. Camus published the underground resistance newspaper Combat during the Nazi occupation. See Robert Zaretsky, A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 17ff, 68ff, 96ff, 107. 11. See, Tal Sessler, Levinas and Camus: Humanism for the Twenty-First Century (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008); Sharpe, “Camus after Levinas.” 12. Sessler, Humanism, 17ff. 13. For the link between individualism and authoritarianism, especially among democratic peoples, see Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), esp. Part 4; Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1968), esp. Part 3.

108

N. Susan Laehn

14. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, ed. Bernard Williams, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 119, aphorism 125. 15. Within Nietzsche’s writings, one discerns a shift from his desire to balance individual self-creation with the desire for unity, toward a focus solely on individuation in the form of the übermensch. For Nietzsche’s emphasis on unity, see Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, ed. Michael Tanner, trans. Shaun Whiteside (New York: Penguin Books, 1993); for his emphasis on individuation, see Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1961). Though he exhibited concern for community in his earliest writings, Nietzsche’s philosophical legacy stems primarily from his late writings, which demonstrate a preoccupation with the individual, over and above forms of community. 16. Sessler, Humanism, 1. 17. Albert Camus, preface to The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brian (New York: Vintage International, 1955), i. 18. Ibid., 27. 19. Ibid., 28. Camus uses both the words “hope” and “exile” throughout the Myth of Sisyphus. The emphasis on exile is important, since it is grounded in his critique of Heidegger and Sartre, and is referenced directly in Exile and the Kingdom, with the first five stories representing exile, and the final story, “The Growing Stone,” representing the kingdom—the meaning, or home, found in the immanent realm. 20. For a detailed comparative account of the two authors’ work and politics, see Germaine Brée, Camus and Sartre: Crisis and Commitment (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1972). For an examination of their personal friendship, and its demise, see Ronald Aronson, Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004). 21. Emmanuel Levinas, “De l’éthique a l’exégèse,” Les Nouveaux Cahiers 82 (1985): 29. 22. Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 15. 23. Pierre Hayat, preface to Alterity and Transcendence, by Emmanuel Levinas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), xiv. Italics added. 24. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage International, 1991), 51. 25. John Wild, introduction to Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, by Emmanuel Levinas (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 12. 26. Levinas, Totality, 33. The italics here are Levinas’s, and are throughout this chapter, unless otherwise noted. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 38–9. 29. Ibid., 39. 30. Wild, introduction to Totality, 12. 31. Hayat, preface to Alterity, xiii–xiv. 32. Ibid.

Subjectivity in Crisis

109

33. The diplôme is similar to a master’s degree in the North American or British system, and Camus received his upon successful submission of his dissertation in 1936. See, Ronald D. Srigley, introduction to Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism, by Albert Camus (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2007). 34. Camus, Christian Metaphysics, 106n65. 35. Although a few of Camus’s works were published posthumously, only a few of his stage productions were published between Exile and the Kingdom, and his untimely death in 1960. 36. Camus, Sisyphus, v. The desert imagery that Camus uses in the quotation and in Exile and the Kingdom certainly stems from his own childhood and adolescence in Algeria. However, the importance of the desert, in the Jewish tradition, as both the place of exile and the source of individual and collective growth cannot be underestimated. Having written on Judeo-Christian themes in his dissertation, Camus would have been aware of the connotations behind that imagery. See, Camus, Christian Metaphysics. 37. Camus, Sisyphus, 3. 38. Ibid., 123, emphasis added. 39. Albert Camus, The Fall, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage International, 1991). 40. See Albert Camus, Notebooks 1951–1959, trans. Ryan Bloom (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008), Notebook VIII. 41. Camus, The Fall, 147. 42. Again, though Camus called himself an atheist, his literature discloses a latent Christianity. The sacrificing of the self, through death, in order to save another must certainly call to mind a Christian ethic. 43. Camus, The Fall, np. The epigraph is on the first page following the copyright information and was included in the original French text. See La Chute (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1956). 44. Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 57. 45. Ibid., 58. 46. Ibid. 47. Perhaps we could consider Jean-Baptiste Clamence to be in this state of wakefulness. He is in a state of disinterestedness, which he seems to welcome, and accuses all of having. Yet, he does not seem particularly open to the other person, choosing instead to avoid taking responsibility. 48. Levinas, Alterity, 169. 49. Levinas, “Philosophy,” 60. 50. William Paul Simmons, “Voegelin and Levinas on the ‘Foundations’ of Ethics and Politics: Transcendence and Immanence Revisited,” in Eric Voegelin’s Dialogue with the Postmoderns: Searching for Foundations, eds. Peter A. Petrakis and Cecil L. Eubanks (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2004), 125. 51. Levinas, Totality, 52. 52. Ibid., 198.

110

N. Susan Laehn

53. Ibid., 290. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Simmons, 126. 57. Levinas, Totality, 40. 58. Levinas, Otherwise, 56. 59. Levinas, Alterity, 98. 60. Levinas, Totality, 290–91. 61. Ibid., 291. 62. The other obvious exploration of solidarity in Camus’s corpus is The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage International, 1991). In it Dr. Rieux fights the bubonic plague within the walls of Oran, in Algeria. He risks his own life to save strangers. However, Camus admitted that it was an allegorical treatment of contemporary political issues. In his Letter to Roland Barthes in 1955 (cited earlier), Camus notes that The Plague had “as its obvious content the struggle of the European resistance movements against Nazism” (Lyrical and Critical Essays, 339). Though Camus, in the same letter, outlines the importance of solidarity to the novel, this chapter focuses on Exile and the Kingdom for (a) its explicit emphasis on the concept of exile, (b) its linear transition, in one volume, from exile to solidarity, and (c) its chronological placement near the end of Camus’s life. 63. Cecil L. Eubanks and Peter A. Petrakis, “Reconstructing the World: Albert Camus and the Symbolization of Experience,” Journal of Politics 61 (1999): 293. 64. Albert Camus, “The Growing Stone,” in Exile and the Kingdom, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage International, 1991), 212. 65. Ibid., 212–13. 66. Camus, Sisyphus, 21. 67. Ibid., 52. 68. For a discussion of “recipience” in the rights discourse, and of individuals as rights-holders rather than bearers of responsibility for others, see Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: Free Press, 1991) and Onora O’Neill, Toward Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alford, C. Fred. “Levinas and Political Theory.” Political Theory 32 (2004): 146–71. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1968. Aronson, Ronald. Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. Brée, Germaine. Camus and Sartre: Crisis and Commitment. New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1972. Camus, Albert. Actuelles: Chronique Algériennes, 1939–1958. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1958.

Subjectivity in Crisis

111

Camus, Albert. Actuelles: Écrits politiques, 1948–1953. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1953. Camus, Albert. Actuelles: Écrits politiques. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1950. Camus, Albert. Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism. Translated by Ronald D. Srigley.Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2007. Camus, Albert. Exile and the Kingdom. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage International, 1991. Camus, Albert. La Chute. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1956. Camus, Albert. Lyrical and Critical Essays. Edited by Philip Thody. Translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy. New York: Vintage International, 1970. Camus, Albert. Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage International, 1960. Camus, Albert. The Fall. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage International, 1991. Camus, Albert. The Plague. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. New York: Vintage International, 1991. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage International, 1991. Camus, Albert. The Notebooks, 1951–1959. Translated by Ryan Bloom. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008. Eubanks, Cecil L. and Peter A. Petrakis. “Reconstructing the World: Albert Camus and the Symbolization of Experience.” Journal of Politics 61 (1999): 293–312. Glendon, Mary Ann. Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse. New York: Free Press, 1991. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1962. Jacques, Johanna. “Where Nothing Happened: The Experience of War Captivity and Levinas’s Concept of the ‘There Is.’ ” Social and Legal Studies 26, no. 2 (2017): 230–48. Kearny, Richard. “Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas.” In Face to Face with Levinas, edited by Richard A. Cohen, 13–33. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986. Levinas, Emmanuel. Alterity and Transcendence. Translated by Michael B. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Levinas, Emmanuel. “De l’éthique a l’exégèse.” Les Nouveaux Cahiers 82 (1985). Levinas, Emmanuel. “Martin Heidegger et l’ontologie.” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 113, no. 5–6 (1932): 395–431. Levinas, Emmanuel. Nine Talmudic Readings. Translated by Annette Aronowicz. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990. Levinas, Emmanuel. Of God Who Comes to Mind. Translated by Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Levinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998. Levinas, Emmanuel. Time and the Other. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987.

112

N. Susan Laehn

Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969. Moyn, Samuel. Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Edited by Michael Tanner. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Edited by Bernard Williams. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin Books, 1961. O’Neill, Onora. Toward Justice and Virtue: A Constructive Account of Practical Reasoning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Plato. The Republic in The Great Dialogues of Plato. Translated by W.H.D. Rouse. New York: Signet Classic, 1956. Roberts, Peter. “Education and the Face of the Other: Levinas, Camus and (mis) understanding.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 45, no. 11 (2013): 1133–49. Sartre, Jean-Paul. L’Être et le néant. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1943. Sessler, Tal. Levinas and Camus: Humanism for the Twenty-First Century. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008. Sharpe, Matthew. “Reading Camus “With,” or After, Levinas: Rebellion and the Primacy of Ethics.” Philosophy Today 55, no. 1 (2011): 82–95. Simmons, William Paul. “Voegelin and Levinas on the ‘Foundations’ of Ethics and Politics: Transcendence and Immanence Revisited.” In Eric Voegelin’s Dialogue with the Postmoderns: Searching for Foundations. Edited by Peter A. Petrakis and Cecil L. Eubanks. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2004. Susana Camacho Plascencia, “Camus and Levinas: Embracing the Absurd While Finding Meaning.” Res Cogitans 9, no. 1 (2018): 2–9, Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Zaretsky, Robert. A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013.

Part III

POLITICS AND LITERATURE

Chapter 5

The Poets and Professor Peter A. Petrakis

In the spring of 1995, I had finished my graduate coursework, passed my exams, and was busy researching and writing my dissertation, Albert Camus’s Reconstruction of Symbolic Reality: Exile, Judgment, and Kingdom. Nevertheless, Professor Cecil Eubanks asked if I were interested in “sitting in” on a new graduate class he was teaching—“Tragedy and Political Theory”—and of course I was intrigued. I always appreciated (too modest a word) that he went “beyond” the traditional canon(s) of political theory, embracing novelists, poets, and playwrights, in order to enhance the more traditional theorists. In contrast to Plato’s ideal city, Cecil wanted the poets and artists to be readmitted to the polis. Like Plato, Cecil knew art was dangerous. But he also knew that art, literature, music, and love are essential for a viable community. Cecil practiced more than he preached; he did not have an agenda but he introduced and explored, with his students, a more nuanced and artful approach to politics, which was profoundly influential. He taught me to be subtle—to use art, metaphor, and kindness to get important points across. When I got my job, like many political theorists, I was not hired to teach political theory but American politics—constitutional law, civil rights, the presidency, and so forth. However, the Honors Department asked me to teach “Ideas in Conflict,” and I immediately turned it into a theory course. In doing so, and adopting Cecil’s playbook, I started with Greek tragedy and then guided students through the rest of the canon armed with insights gathered from Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. As theorists, we must know our Machiavellis and Marxes, but how do we “hook” undergraduates? Cecil’s answer was as simple as it was brilliant—you must tell a story; you must get people invested. His love for, and use of, art and artists were the most 115

116

Peter A. Petrakis

important lessons he taught me. The following chapter is a small tribute to a great and inspirational man; a true scholar, a dear friend, and a mentor. THE TURN TO THE TRAGEDIANS The long debate about Plato expelling the poets from the ideal city in The Republic is well chronicled, and few political theorists took the poets and playwrights’ work seriously until some scholars, most notably Martha Nussbaum and J. Peter Euben, turned back to the tragedians.1 The return, and reimagining, of the notion that goodness was fleeting and fragile was enormously important to me personally, professionally, and for my subsequent teaching. Conventional approaches to political theory emphasized the emergence and dominance of reason, with Plato and Aristotle coupled with the fusion of Judeo-Christian refinements—especially Augustine and Aquinas—before moving on to successive “Western” theorists. It all originated, or so it was claimed, with Plato. But not so with Cecil, nor with his seminar. In political science more generally, challenges to orthodoxy are not uncommon. For example, there has been much written about the post-behavioral response in the 1960s and 1970s, especially with respect to the worth of value-free social science. The idea that reason was guiding our political leaders was strained in the past, and is under considerable questioning at the moment. But in the 1990s, the challenges of postmodernism and post-structuralism were especially serious, and many blamed foundationalist thinking for the murderous ideological regimes of the twentieth century. Despite the relativistic implications, some philosophers embraced nihilism, while others celebrated foundationalist traditions and defended the canon. Neither appealed to me. So, where to turn? The moment required innovative thinking and Cecil turned to tragedy and the playwrights. The course was well-structured and merged three interpretative approaches: (1) historicism; (2) textualism; and (3) literary criticism. After noting the strengths and weaknesses in all three of these approaches, Cecil suggested that combining insights from all three might allow the most fruitful and full interpretations of the tragedians.2 Such subtlety and inclusivity are characteristics of his teaching, and they yielded tremendous insights. Before engaging the plays, we turned to two excellent but very different secondary sources. Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness starts with an important question: What is involved in human excellence? She likens humans to plants and notes that care and nourishment are requisites. A life worth living must have contingency; it must pit self-sufficiency against vulnerability. We must accept

The Poets and Professor

117

that I am an agent, but also a plant; that much that I did not make goes towards making me whatever I shall be praised or blamed for being; that I must constantly choose among competing and apparently incommensurable goods and that circumstances may force me to a position in which I cannot help being false to something or doing some wrong; that an event that simply happens to me may, without my consent, alter my life; that it is equally problematic to entrust one’s good to friends, lovers, or country and to try to have a good life without them—all these I take not to be just the material of tragedy, but everyday facts of lived practical reason.3

She sees in tragedy a way to portray this condition by creating worlds where luck is intrinsically related to ethics and a good life. Nussbaum argues that Plato’s efforts to save us from contingency failed, but tragedy exemplifies the role of luck in politics and ethics. Self-sufficiency can only be established or understood according to the constraints of human beings. We cannot control our fate. J. Peter Euben’s The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken urged returning to Greek tragedy as both a preface to classical political theory and, in some ways more important at the time, a tool to critique much of the contemporary thinking. For Euben, tragedy disrupts the domineering nostalgia for ancient Greece by destabilizing the norms of order and control. One of his most successful ways of conveying this insight is through his subtitle: the imagery of roads and road building. “The language and imagery of paths and ways, of journeys and gaits, of boundaries and definitions is familiar in Greek poetry and philosophy.”4 It portrays men transforming the wilderness into order but with creation comes destruction and, therefore, roads are “mined.” Euben writes, “Humans are, at one and the same time, powerful and inventive beyond all other creatures, and destroyers of what they create, killers of what they love most, out of harmony with themselves and out of keeping with their surroundings. Awesome and terrifying, in control yet uncontrollable, they are masters of nature but unable to master themselves.”5 He argues that the continuous relationship between tragedy and political theory, if recognized, can allow political theory to confront the contemporary problems associated with nihilism. Assisted by these excellent secondary source insights and interpretative approaches, we turned to the plays themselves. EUBANKS’S PROVOCATIVE INSIGHTS Starting with Aeschylus’s Oresteia, we began our close and careful examinations and noted that from the beginning of the play it is clear that wisdom comes from suffering and is associated with violence: “Zeus who put men

118

Peter A. Petrakis

on wisdom’s road, who gave ‘Suffer and learn’ authority. Misery from pain remembered drips . . . good sense comes even to the unwilling. Where is the gods’ favour, seated in violence at their majestic helm?”6 For the most part, we followed a familiar path of interpretation, noting that early tragedy was a transitional phase from orality to literacy and that the works were celebratory of the transition from the fractious realities of tribalism to the potential community of the polis. But Cecil stressed that far from cramped readings of the plays, with a tight focus on catharsis and Aristotelian definitions, the key to Aeschylus involved soul suffering. Meaning is found in suffering, and it is the fate of the soul and its connection to political transformations that make Aeschylean tragedy profound. His tragedy is a Dionysian plunge into the depths of the soul. In short, it is an early form of political theology, but one must be careful not to recast such experiences via a modern or Christian lens. Early on, we were warned that such soul-searching must be understood in the Greek context. Cecil emphasized that the Greeks used the term “daemon” and did not bifurcate the psyche; good and evil are not discrete but rather must be understood as parts of a whole. Good is intimately related to evil. Many of us, steeped in the work of Eric Voegelin, immediately recognized such counsel. The search for order recognizes that human experience has the potential for various poles and right order is found in the in-between, or metaxy, when exploring consciousness. To exist in the metaxy is an attempt to sustain a balance and to experience an integrated reality. Thus, the reconciliation in the play can (should) be seen as a reconciliation of philosophy and politics. However, one must be careful not to rush to find applicable lessons from the tragedians to help solve contemporary philosophical and political quandaries. As noted, this was precisely what Euben hoped to achieve, and his many erudite interpretations are profound. Nevertheless, when Euben created a taxonomy for justice, he went too far. He contends that justice “has four attributes. First, it involves the reconciliation of diversities into a restored yet new city.” But reconciliation needs collaboration. “For justice requires the active complementarity of reciprocity . . . [and] although it does not posit equality of power, it does preclude domination. Third, justice requires recognition . . . in the sense of acknowledging the legitimacy” of others.7 “Finally, justice demands judgment rather than the mechanical cycle of vengeance. . . . Judgment is a question of balance and proportion.”8 The Oresteia reveals all of these elements substantively and structurally. Euben concludes that political theory, accompanied by the insights of the tragedians, can more effectively address contemporary problems. This may be sound advice for a modern audience, but Cecil warned that diversity, at least as we understand it, was not present in ancient Greece. Take, for example, the misogyny in Aeschylus. Could the gender roles be

The Poets and Professor

119

reversed? Probably not, especially to his ancient audience. This gentle correction of a very insightful scholar and his emphasis on the Greek conceptions of the psyche epitomize Cecil’s teaching. Do not be too harsh but retain a critical awareness, for scholarship is often misled by noble intentions. Cecil emphasized the optimism in Aeschylus and argued that it is the function of the tragic form to arouse pity and fear, and then, when pathos takes place between the audience and the drama, tragedy is elevated; familial conflicts and social taboos are recurring themes in tragedy because they strike so close to home and arouse deep-seated anxieties in order to evoke catharsis or purgation. Cecil transitioned to Sophocles by saying, “If you put the three artists on a continuum—Aeschylus is a tragedian of hope, Euripides a tragedian of despair, and Sophocles is somewhere in between.”9 And although Oedipus is often cast as the classic “tragic hero,” one must be careful not to bring JudeoChristian baggage to one’s interpretation. Oedipus was driven by pride, and he sought to cheat the gods. He struggled to avoid his horrific destiny and worked to change the world for the better. He searched for knowledge but, in the end, it was the removal of his ignorance that led to his pathos. Too often, however, interpretations emphasize his resolution and acceptance; but resignation to one’s fate is more Jewish and Christian than an ancient Greek theme. To prompt independent thinking, Cecil asked the class a provocative question: “In what sense, if any, does Oedipus Rex attempt to justify the ways of Gods to men?”10 He also cautioned that the Greeks did not embrace determinist notions of fate. We are all used by destiny, to some extent, but his characters demonstrate that they have choices and their actions are their own. Oedipus, pursuing the highest of ends, acts in various complicated ways that undo him. His altruism and his loyalty to Thebes and to the truth led to his demise. Why did Oedipus blind himself? It was an effort to cut himself off from his family and society. He was still running and trying to continue to cheat the gods. Sophocles was saying two things: (1) the gods are not just; and (2) the gods may or may not exist, but even if they do, we should not always listen. The play is about the blindness and desperate insecurity of human beings. We do not know what, who, or why we are. Unreflective happiness is based on illusions, and truth is often destructive. Far from establishing stable foundations for politics, the play is profoundly destabilizing. Oedipus at Colonus is especially important, for as Cecil stressed it was Oedipus’s birthplace and Sophocles’s final play. It is a story about an old man returning home, and Sophocles was quite old when he wrote it. It is highly unusual to have an old man as the “hero” in Greek tragedy, and this atypical approach has broader implications. Given that Athens was on the edge of defeat by Sparta, it would be a mistake not to recognize the play as an ode to the political achievements of Athens. Moreover, Oedipus is hardly heroic

120

Peter A. Petrakis

in appearance; he is disheveled and humbly awaiting death. Yet he comes to be redeemed; he seeks to “see” again, but that will require a transition from mortal to immortal hero. Once blind, he will now act out of knowledge; after years of contemplation and self-examination, he seeks to see. This is why his purification rites are undertaken on a holy spot, and his desire to be buried in Colonus is to avoid others using his body to settle political scores. He wants his death to transcend the banal politics of the day. Thus, Theseus’s cooperation reveals true generosity, understanding, and compassion. In a play where the backdrop is consumed by war and revolution, Theseus’s kindness is unconditional and a metaphor for Athens. And Oedipus is approaching a different kind of knowledge. Real knowledge is an awareness of how much we do not know and the capricious nature of fate; even the gods cannot control chance and circumstance. The play is both a celebration and a lamentation. Athens too will die, and then, but only then, will it achieve immortality. As the symbolic wanderer, Oedipus finds a home. But then events take place that displace him, and these external interventions are motivated by envy, competition, revolution, and patricide. These disruptions come with Creon’s entry into the play, but this is a different Creon; he is deceitful, cunning, and forceful. Confronted by Creon, Theseus tries to honor his pledge and is rebuked: “‘I thought that no one would ever feel such eager love’ . . . ‘for a man who is his father’s killer, unholy, nor one whose marriage is found accursed.’”11 Oedipus defends himself and argues that it was beyond his control; he then appeals to the gods, for he has made his rites. Polynices appears and tries to resolve the conflict. Oedipus does not want to see him, but Antigone and Ismene persuade him. But to no avail, for anger returns to Oedipus and he predicts Polynices’s death at the hand of his brother. Oedipus’s death is miraculous and beyond the scope of mortals; his death is more fitting of a god. Born into a cycle of death and conflict, in which he played an integral role, his death signals that he is home and is at peace with his fate and the gods. Antigone concludes the cycle and explores heroic actions taken for political and religious purposes. Antigone and Creon embody different values. Antigone exhibits loyalty to family, courageousness toward death, and acceptance of the gods and divine order. Creon is King and forbids the burial or even mourning of Polynices. Antigone, Polynices’s sister, is aware of this decree but chooses to disobey. Cecil instructed us to concentrate on her courage, familial loyalty, and appeal to divine law. Two significant facts shape the play. First, given the perils of the civil war, Creon is given absolute power. His powers are extraordinary, for he is supported by the people to protect the polis. Second, Antigone is a woman, and this is brought up time and time again. Sophocles emphasizes the low status of women and also highlights her

The Poets and Professor

121

physical weakness. But for all of her constraints it is she who takes the decisive act that ends up destroying Creon’s family—Haemon, his son, commits suicide because of his love for Antigone, and his mother, Queen Eurydice, also takes her life and curses her husband. Thus, despite his advantages, Creon lacks traditional heroic attributes. He vacillates with everyone and even the Chorus hints that Polynices’s burial is in accord with divine law. Initially, he ignored the counsel of his son to learn from these events as well as his pleas for clemency. Creon hesitates, refuses, and then acquiesces by changing Antigone’s sentence from being stoned to death before his son to being buried in a cave. His actions are not heroic but vengeful. But in the end, after all the death and wrongfulness, he admits that it is all his fault. And although he acted in accordance with positive law, he crossed the gods, and those transgressions sacrificed his family. Antigone is the tragic heroine, and her kinship claim not only is religious but also has political dimensions. It is not familial loyalty alone but a reversal back to an older and more basic political order. The demise of tribalism was celebrated in Aeschylus and the Oresteia, and thus her allegiance is a significant challenge. It is a regressive move back to a more “barbaric” form of politics. In many ways, this divides the tragedians’ approaches along gender lines—women are associated with kinship and tribalism, and men with civilization and the polis. At this point, Cecil asked, “Is there any truth to this or is it the capriciousness and repressiveness of social convention? Could it be both?”12 Antigone’s obsessive concern with the dead, and the rites of death, championed ancient rituals that preceded and, in many senses, went beyond her contemporary political context. Many commentators highlight how her “higher law” appears as a serious juxtaposition to Creon’s “positive law” arguments. This conflict, then, transcends politics and becomes religious. But Cecil pushed back against standard interpretations and pointed out that Antigone’s claims were specific and limited. Her concerns were for the upholding of the rites and rituals of the dead. It is a carefully chosen position, and it was not an appeal to abstract ideals, such as Platonic forms. Her obligations were to Hades—a religious order much older than the polis. Creon’s position was not irreligious but rather that the laws of the city must be revered; they are backed by the gods of the city. His allegiance was to the new religious and political order. Polynices’s challenge was not just a political threat but a religious one as well. Antigone’s recognition happens when she goes beyond justifying her actions; she examines herself and her motives. In the end, she abandons her claims of championing the netherworld; she is motivated solely by her familial love. Her acts are more personal than political or cosmological. Creon’s

122

Peter A. Petrakis

awareness takes more time as he continues to stress the dangers of anarchy. But slowly he recognizes that tyranny is also a great evil, and he eventually sees his true character. He is a tyrant, but his punishment is personal also. His plight is that he has to live without the people that mean the most to him; stripped of his family, he loses his identity. Antigone is not forsaken in the same way—but remember that the audience would not have absolved her; her actions revoked her citizenship. What of the gods? While they may have preferred Antigone to Creon, they neither praise nor save her. Creon’s motive was hatred whereas hers was love. Cecil pointed out that, in this sense, perhaps Hegel’s insight was the most apt—neither Antigone nor Creon were complete. We concluded our examination of the tragedians by turning to Euripides’s The Bacchae and the emergence of the Dionysiac cult in Hellas.13 Who was Dionysus? Cecil argued that he was the power in the trees, the abundance of life, and the liquid fire in the wine grape—the mysterious and uncontrollable force of nature. The play teaches that the purpose of participation in the Dionysiac cult is not to revel but to have a particular religious experience; a rite intended to commune with the gods and be transformed. And while wine was one way to proceed, dancing was another. Every two years, women would gather in the mountains to conduct this rite. It was done during the winter, which made it all the more dangerous. The proceedings were an effort to control the madness—to resist Dionysus—but this was doomed to fail. Efforts to deny elemental forces resulted in a disintegration of restraint; it repressed our very nature, and that posed great dangers. The ritual was horrific—the tearing apart and consumption of raw flesh—yet it was also wonderful and sacred. The gods, after all, often took animal forms and thus the dismemberment had religious overtones. The key insight from the play was that we ignore the vitality of the natural world and ourselves at our peril. If repressed, vitality becomes a violent and destructive force, and once evoked, it is too late for moderation. There is no “ought” in the natural world; Dionysus is beyond good and evil. The play pits sophia—wisdom, or practical and moral self-knowledge, awareness of one’s place in the world and the vicissitudes of fate—against amathia—ignorance, especially of one’s self and place as well as the role of the gods. Thus, the tragedians provide insights that sometimes support the more well-known teachings of the ancient Greeks, for example, that we must not put too much faith in, and emphasis on, human reason. There is much we do not know, and Socratic wisdom is, as the plays make clear, a pre-Socratic insight. However, most lessons from the tragedians run counter to Plato’s elevation of reason and the possibility of an ideal polis. Attempts to avoid suffering and contingency are not only doomed but often even more destructive. Goodness and political order are fragile indeed.

The Poets and Professor

123

FOUNDATIONS WITHOUT FOUNDATIONALISM The wisdom acquired from the close reading of the tragedians, along with Cecil’s careful guidance, coincided with my research on how to find a ground for politics and truths without resorting to essentialist foundations. I started with the works of Ernst Cassirer and his three-volume magnum opus The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Cassirer provided the groundwork for my appreciation of the power and significance of symbols. Aided by the writings of Eric Voegelin and, later, incorporating Paul Ricoeur’s writings on myths, symbols, metaphors, and narratives, I began to develop a philosophical approach that could establish foundations without foundationalism. It is precisely the ambiguity of art, its ability to provide a coherent story without asserting absolute truths, which provided a path for, or at least the possibility of, addressing the challenges of postmodernism. But one cannot just assert such things, there must be philosophic grounds as well, and Cassirer’s erudition proved helpful. Cassirer argues that all knowledge—artistic, linguistic, mythic, cultural, and even scientific and mathematical—is mediated through symbols. The form or structure of symbols is not fixed, but changes through time. Given this, and the fact that knowledge is shaped by the forms through which it is mediated, human perception also varies.14 Cassirer’s interest in “The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is not concerned exclusively or even primarily with the purely scientific, exact conceiving of the world; it is concerned with all the forms assumed by man’s understanding of the world. It seeks to apprehend these forms in their diversity, in their tonality, and in the inner distinctiveness of their several expressions.”15 In its elevation of rationality, philosophy fails to take into account these diverse forms of human understanding. By ignoring the fact that some humans perceive the world not through rational symbols but through mythic ones, modern philosophy has grossly misunderstood the nature of knowing, the importance of symbolic forms, and, ultimately, the human condition. Symbols, for Cassirer, were inspired by Kant’s transcendental schema but most have mistaken what he intended. Transcendental schemas do not escape human experience. For Kant, “transcendental” means those aspects or conditions of human knowledge that exist but cannot be perceived through direct experience. Kant is not, as is often charged, demeaning direct experience. He agrees we have experiences, and they are crucial to understanding; but Kant contends that certain conditions exist, prior to experience, which allow knowledge to happen. Charles W. Hendel contends, in his introduction to volume one of Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, that “it is only distinguishable as a moment or factor in the analysis of knowledge. Concretely we have appearances and experience, and in experience these elements and factors

124

Peter A. Petrakis

are already funded or, to use Kant’s expression, they are ‘constitutive.’”16 According to Kant, constitutive elements, or a priori conditions, can only be comprehended through transcendental deductions. Transcendental logic proposes to bridge the gap between form and content by revealing that form and content are, in fact, interwoven or already endowed with a priori structures. These a priori constituents are discerned by means of the transcendental schema. Kant asks: “Now it is clear that pure concepts of the understanding, as compared with empirical or sensuous impressions in general, are entirely heterogeneous, and can never be met within any intuition. How then can the latter be comprehended under the former?”17 He responds with the transcendental schema: In our case there must be some third thing homogeneous on the one side with the category, and on the other with the phenomenon, to render the application of the former to the latter. This intermediate representation must be pure (free from all that is empirical) and yet intelligible on the one side, and sensuous on the other. Such a representation is the transcendental schema.18

The transcendental schema, then, is the form through which the merger of the sensuous and the intellectual occurs; it allows for apprehension of the universal in the particular. In this way, the schema is more than the concept or category; it is more adequate and more complete because it allows what neither form nor content can accomplish on their own. The schema is that which allows thought to occur. It is the a priori condition of experience. The transcendental schema had enormous influence on Cassirer. Hendel remarks that “he might well have presented his own philosophy as an extension of the doctrine of Schema, for it is clearly a stage in his thinking toward the concept of ‘symbolic form.’”19 Cassirer admires the potency of the schema and intends by his symbolic forms a similar synthetic function. However, whereas Kant maintains that the transcendental schema is achieved by means of analysis and logic, Cassirer tries to find synthesis through symbols themselves. Donald Verene states: “Kant reaches this notion of a schema through a process of making distinctions within his transcendental analysis of the elements of experience. Cassirer wishes to find this schema in experience as a phenomenon. He does so in his discovery of the symbol as the medium through which all knowledge and culture occur.”20 Ultimately, Cassirer maintains that Kant’s solution suffers from a similar malady plaguing much of philosophy: it approaches experience backward. If the synthesis of form and content is only possible by means of analysis, through logical deduction, then humans who existed prior to the predominance of reason would have been incapable of perceiving synthesis. For the transcendental schema, as a mode or condition, to be the only way to achieve synthesis is, for Cassirer,

The Poets and Professor

125

an untenable position. For him, the site of the unity must occur in something that is phenomenally present—symbols. Verene observes: “Cassirer understands his philosophy as an idealism that he, in fact, traces back to the problem of form in Plato, but he insists that the object of which he speaks is truly ‘there.’ It is not a creation of the mind of the knower.”21 Cassirer redresses this seemingly paradoxical position through his notion of symbolic pregnance. Symbolic pregnance is the idea that a perceptual object can be both “there” and “not there,” and it can be traced back to the organicism of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and his praegnens futuri.22 Since Leibniz, “the concept of the whole has gained a different and deeper significance. For the universal whole which is to be grasped can no longer be reduced to a mere sum of its parts. The new whole is organic, not mechanical; its nature . . . is presupposed by its parts and constitutes the condition of the possibility of their nature and being.”23 John Michael Krois points out that much is lost in the translation of the term. The term “derives both from the German pragen (to mint or coin and give a sharp contour) and the Latin praegnens (laden or ready to give birth).”24 Symbolic pregnance, then, is intended to describe events that both give form, shape, and order, and provide productivity. He explains that the term depicts the way in which a perception as a sensory experience contains at the same time a certain nonintuitive meaning which it immediately and concretely represents. . . . We are not dealing with bare perceptive data . . . [for] the perception itself . . . takes on a kind of spiritual articulation—[that] belongs to a determinate order of meaning. It is this ideal interwovenness . . . that the term “pregnance” is meant to designate.25

Thus, the advantages of symbols over transcendental schemas are that they exist phenomenally and are accessible to emotional as well as rational deductions. In other words, symbols can account for pre-rational mediation, whereas transcendental schemas cannot. Ultimately, Cassirer’s reappraisal of pre-rational forms of understanding alters his philosophic project. In volume three of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer admits that his initial plans, as derived from Kant and the transcendental schema, had to be modified. He argues that while starting from the idea that true knowledge could only be attained through more advanced forms of thinking—mathematics and objective thinking—his final volume goes much further and expands the theory by show[ing] that there are formative factors . . . which govern the shaping not only of the scientific world view but also of the natural world view implicit in perception and intuition . . . beyond the natural world view of

126

Peter A. Petrakis

experience and observation, when the mythical world disclosed relationships which, though not reducible to the laws of empirical thinking, are by no means without their laws, and reveal a structure of specific and independent character.26

Finding Kant too formalistic, Cassirer turned to Hegel for a “phenomenology of knowledge.” Stressing that he intends phenomenology not in the Husserlian sense but in a Hegelian one, he argues that for Hegel phenomenology became the basis of all philosophical knowledge, since he insisted that philosophical knowledge must encompass the totality of cultural forms and since in his view this totality can be made visible only in the transitions from one form to another. The truth is the whole—yet the whole cannot be presented all at once but must be unfolded progressively by thought in its own autonomous movement and rhythm.27

Hegel’s phenomenology becomes Cassirer’s binding thread. Mirroring The Phenomenology of Spirit, Cassirer describes the progressive unfolding of symbolic forms and relates it to three basic functions of consciousness: (1) expressive; (2) representational; and (3) conceptional or significative. The expressive stage of consciousness is the stage where the symbol and the object are united. At this stage, no genuine distinction is made between the symbol and the object. Cassirer states: “Here the phenomenon as it is given in any moment never has a character of mere representation, it is one of authentic presence: here a reality is not ‘actualized’ through the mediation of the phenomenon but is present in full actuality in the phenomenon.”28 This unity means that in the mythic world, where expressive consciousness is dominant, “every phenomenon is always and essentially an incarnation.”29 Objects are not thought or analyzed, rather they are experienced as forces, either of good or ill, and the perception of any particular symbol is an emotional experience. Cassirer remarks that “when water is sprinkled in rain magic, it does not serve as a mere symbol or analogue of the ‘real’ rain; it is attached to the real rain by the bond of an original sympathy. The demon of the rain is tangibly and corporeally alive and present in every drop of water.”30 This early stage of consciousness, where every symbol denotes a vital force or agent, reveals a world drenched in feeling and strong emotional responses. The representational function of consciousness emerges when the object becomes separated from the subject. The object comes to be perceived as wholly other or discrete, and, as such, “a fundamentally new relation between subject and object [comes] into being.”31 The effect is that “only now do the objects [that] hitherto acted directly on the emotions . . . begin in a sense to recede into the distance: into a distance where they can be ‘looked at,’ ‘intuited,’ in which they can be actualized in their spatial outlines and independent

The Poets and Professor

127

qualitative determinations.”32 This level of consciousness, which enables the categorization of once disparate objects into various logical classifications, opens the way to increasing understanding and manipulation of the natural world. The third phase of consciousness is the conceptual or significative function. Here, separation is overcome as the object comes to be known as a construction of the symbol. It is at this level that the knower can freely construct systems of symbols, or, as Cassirer contends, this is the “transition to the realm of pure meaning.”33 Verene describes this phase, writing, “Here the thought of the knower constructs worlds of pure meaning that have their own coherence of form, and which the modelling, empirical, and experimental activities of science find loci in experience and provide consciousness with a formal articulation of what is there.”34 The ability to signify exists in all three levels of consciousness, but at the conceptual stage this power achieves a new height and purpose. Cassirer states, [In] the sphere of pure meaning that this . . . not only increases in scope but first clearly discloses its specific direction . . . there develops a . . . detachment . . . [and] Knowledge releases the pure relations from their involvement with the concrete and individually determined reality of things, in order to represent them purely as such in the universality of their form, in their relational character. It is not sufficient to construe being itself in the various directions of relational thinking, for knowledge also demands and creates a universal system of measurement for the procedure itself. As theoretical thinking progresses, this system is more and more firmly grounded and is made more and more inclusive. . . . All concept formation, regardless of the special problem with which it may start, is ultimately oriented toward one fundamental goal, toward determination of the “absolute truth.”35

Such statements reveal Cassirer’s proximity to Hegel; his phenomenology is virtually identical. The expressive stage mirrors consciousness; the representational stage mirrors self-consciousness; and the conceptual stage mirrors mind.36 Cassirer teaches the potency of symbols and how they can account for forms of thinking that go beyond the narrow confines of rationalism. This, coupled with Cecil’s recognition of the insights and powers of the tragedians, led me toward seeking answers for philosophic and political anomalies in art and literature rather than just relying on the traditional canon. CONCLUSIONS Eric Voegelin’s Order and History, Cassirer’s Symbolic Theory of Forms, and, later, Paul Ricoeur’s works on myths, symbols, metaphors, and the role

128

Peter A. Petrakis

of narratives were the inspiration for rethinking the role of art and symbols in the discovery of specific philosophical and political “solutions.”37 Art can allow for an experience of order as well as insight into the in-between reality of human experience. Cassirer provides much philosophic support but “Voegelin’s lifelong meditation on transcendence” was also critical, insofar as it showed that “appropriate symbolizations . . . can provide an understanding of the ground of being without resorting to rigid and dangerous concretizations.”38 Cecil and I subsequently referred to Voegelin’s search for such symbolizations as “a search for foundations without foundationalism.”39 The critical role art, especially narratives, plays in this process is detailed by Ricoeur. But it was Cecil’s course on tragedy, and the insights of the tragedians, which demonstrated that these searches began well before Plato and the constriction of philosophy to the narrow horizons of rationality and reason. Far from banishing the poets, artists and art must be at the center of a political and philosophical search for “foundations, for a grounding, or nomos, that will provide some value and guidance to a world marked by massive human destruction and the renewed passions of tribalism.”40 Cecil knew this well before 1995, but his mentorship and commitment to teaching and research motivated me and many others to try to continue and extend his dedication to the power of art and literature.

NOTES 1. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); J. Peter Euben, The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). 2. Obviously, this chapter cannot reconstruct that course. We spent time going through the intellectual history of schools of interpretation, delving into the specifics of New Criticism, the phenomenological nature of texts, Derrida and Of Grammatology, and so on. My brief summary is to indicate how well the course was structured. The depth and variety of approaches to interpreting texts shaped the way I conduct my research, writing, and teaching. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). 3. Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 5. 4. Euben, Tragedy, 32. 5. Ibid., 34. 6. Asechylus, Oresteia, trans. Christopher Collard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 7. 7. Euben, Tragedy, 81. 8. Ibid. 9. Paraphrase of lecture based on class notes, 2/20/95.

The Poets and Professor

129

10. Ibid. 11. Aeschylus, Sophocles I, trans. David Greene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 124. 12. Paraphrase of lecture based on class notes, March 13, 1995. These questions go to the heart of feminist politics and divide advocates into various camps—“sameness feminists,” “difference feminists,” and so forth. The question is not easily answered. 13. Euripides, The Bacchae, trans. William Arrowsmith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959). 14. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957). 15. Ibid., vol. 3, 13. 16. Charles W. Hendel, introduction to The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, 11. 17. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. F. Max Muller (New York: Dolphin Books, 1961), 104. 18. Ibid., 105. 19. Hendel, Introduction, 14–15. 20. Donald Phillip Verene, “Metaphysical Narration, Science, and Symbolic Form,” The Review of Metaphysics 47, no. 1 (1993): 116. 21. Ibid. 22. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. F.C.A. Koelin and James P. Pettegove (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 31. 23. Ibid. (quoting Leibniz). 24. John Michael Krois, Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 53. 25. Cassirer, Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, 202. 26. Ibid., 1. 27. Ibid., xiv. 28. Ibid., 68. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 113. It should be noted that Cassirer points to the well-known story of Hellen Keller’s experience at the water pump, as related by her teacher Anne Mansfield Sullivan, as an example of this sort of transition. The story is as follows: “We went out to the pump-house, and I made Helen hold her mug under the spout while I pumped. As the cold water gushed forth, filling the mug, I spelled ‘w-a-t-er’ in Helen’s free hand. The word coming so close upon the sensation of cold water rushing over her hand seemed to startle her. She dropped the mug and stood transfixed. A new light came into her face. She spelled ‘water’ several times. Then she dropped on the ground and asked for its name and pointed to the pump and the trellis, and turning round she asked for my name . . . [Keller] added thirty new words to her vocabulary.” Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (New York: Doubleday, 1903), 316. 32. Cassirer, Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, 113. 33. Ibid., 284. 34. Verene, “Metaphysical Narration,” 117. 35. Cassirer, Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, 284.

130

Peter A. Petrakis

36. Despite the obvious affinities, there are important differences. First, Cassirer contends that Hegel’s phenomenology does not go far enough back. Hegel’s initial stage, consciousness, consists of sensations and perceptions, and Cassirer believes that those functions are later developments—humans originally confront the world in emotional terms. The two agree that in the earliest stage human perception does not differentiate subject and object, but Cassirer argues that the notion of sensations and perceptions are transitional developments or steps on the way to the representational stage; one can see the shadow of rationality in such analytical functions as sensation and perception. But the most significant distinction between Cassirer and Hegel concerns the degree of finality or completion within their respective progressive systems. Verene states: “Cassirer’s phenomenology, unlike Hegel’s, does not terminate in a stage of philosophical knowledge.” Donald Phillip Verene, “Kant, Hegel, and Cassirer: The Origins of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,” The Journal of the History of Ideas 30, no. 1 (1969): 39 (emphasis added). 37. See Peter A. Petrakis and Cecil L. Eubanks, ed. Eric Voegelin’s Dialogue with the Postmoderns (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2005) in general, and my chapter “Voegelin and Ricoeur: Recovering Science and Subjectivity through Representation,” in particular. 38. Eubanks and Petrakis, Dialogue, 171. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 1.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aeschylus. Oresteia. Translated by Christopher Collard. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. ———. Sophocles I. Translated by David Greene. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Translated by Ralph Manheim. 3 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957. ———. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Translated by F.C.A. Koelin and James P. Pettegrove. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. Euben, J. Peter. The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road Not Taken. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Euripides V. The Bacchae. Edited by David Greene and Richmond Lattimore. Translated by William Arrowsmith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by F. Max Muller. New York: Dolphin Books, 1961. Keller, Helen. The Story of My Life. New York: Doubleday, 1903. Krois, John Michael. Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.

The Poets and Professor

131

Nussbaum, Martha. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Petrakis, Peter A. “Voegelin and Ricoeur: Recovery Science and Subjectivity through Representation.” In Eric Voegelin’s Dialogue with the Postmoderns, edited by Peter A. Petrakis and Cecil L. Eubanks, 23–56. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2005. Petrakis, Peter A. and Cecil L. Eubanks, ed. Eric Voegelin’s Dialogue with the Postmoderns. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2005. Verene, Donald Phillip. “Kant, Hegel, and Cassirer: The Origins of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.” The Journal of the History of Ideas 30, no. 1 (1969): 33–46. ———. “Metaphysical Narration, Science, and Symbolic Form.” The Review of Metaphysics 47, no. 1 (1993): 115–32.

Chapter 6

The Role of Care Structures in Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter Surrogacy, Memory, and Membership in Port William, Kentucky Drew Kennedy Thompson

Wendell Berry’s seventh novel Hannah Coulter assumes the form of a fictional memoir. Hannah, the novel’s main character and narrator, describes her life’s journey from the position of an old woman reflecting on the place and its people that have come to define her. Periodically throughout her narrative, Hannah breaks from her first-person address to speak directly to another character. In these asides, Hannah indicates that she is entrusting her story as a letter of gratitude and as a community’s document of witness to her nephew, Andy Catlett. In the introductory chapter, titled “A Story Continuing,” she refers to the story as her “giving of thanks.”1 Over the course of its twenty-four titled chapters, divided into three parts, Hannah expresses her appreciation for the relationships—both chosen and happenstantial—that have made the difference in her life. Her account is deeply personal and yet cannot be understood outside the context of the small farming community in which she lives the entirety of her adult years in the middle of the twentieth century. She was born Hannah Steadman in 1922. Her memoir chronicles the experience of the Homefront during the war years and the losses she endures, both personally and as a member of a tight-knit community caught in the flux of the postwar economic revolution. While the most significant familial relationship in Hannah’s childhood is with her “Grandmam” as a girl in the community of Shagbark, she later finds another in her guardian, Miss Ora Finley, when she moves to the county seat of Hargrave. The course of her life is changed most profoundly by her young romance and eventual marriage to Virgil Feltner. This leads to her relocation to his community of Port William, Kentucky, and their dream of beginning 133

134

Drew Kennedy Thompson

a home in that place as a young farming couple. Hannah and Virgil’s lives and the lives of those around them are interrupted by the breakout of World War II. After Virgil’s disappearance in the Battle of Okinawa, Hannah is left to raise their not-yet-born daughter, Margaret. Their love has a tragic beauty. Looking back, she states: “We were a courting couple, and then we were newlyweds in the shadow of war, and then the war separated us forever. We became only a pretty memory, and now I am the last of its rememberers.”2 Hannah does not have to undertake this grief nor this responsibility of remembering alone, however. In a later aside, Hannah reaffirms her hope that Andy Catlett will remember “at least a little” of his Uncle Virgil and the young lovers who were parted before their dreams could even begin to be realized.3 In Port William, Hannah comes to realize that she has been surrounded and accepted by the “family of families” that makes up what is known throughout the entirety of Berry’s fiction as the Port William Membership. Among her dead husband’s parents and their friends and neighbors, Hannah begins the next phase of her life even while her grief blinds her and those around her to the shape it begins to take.4 Her eventual second marriage to Nathan Coulter emerges out of the tempered expectations of adults stripped of their notions of security and permanence. And yet the home they build in Port William, working together on their small tobacco farm, takes on an unforeseen abundance and joy that, toward the end of her story, Hannah defines as a time in which she and Nathan “made a pretty good farm of a place that had been hard used and then almost forgotten: how we continued, making our life here day by day, after the children were gone; how we kept this place alive and plentiful, seeing it always as a place beyond the war.”5 The foretelling of Hannah’s hope, as she describes it, is that the work she and Nathan have undertaken will be seen by a future couple as something to invest in and continue. And yet, she acknowledges such a possibility as having a diminishing chance for success in the shifting cultural and economic landscape that has become dominant in the second half of the century. She continues: “The foretelling of my fear is that no such couple will ever come here again to live in this place and renew it and make their living from it. It could all end in fire, as everybody knows.”6 Hannah lives by a belief, common to many of Berry’s most prominent Port William characters, that the good life, the best life, is to be found rooted in a place, a specific and chosen place. “There is no ‘better place’ than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, this world is joined to Heaven.”7 The work of farming and homemaking demands a level of intimacy with the nature of the place in which she and her family make their home and livelihood. This familiarity is necessary, Berry argues, for the proper care of the land and the human communities that depend on it for their food, and it is only available through direct contact of

The Role of Care Structures in Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter

135

successive generations. In her own case, however, Hannah knows that none of her children will ever likely return to Port William and take over the farm. Though her children leave the Membership and go on to join the bigger world apart from it, her hope is renewed by the return of her grandson, Virgie, who makes a prodigal return to her home after years of searching for a way to find a lost sense of wholeness. Thus, even as she faces her twilight years, Hannah accepts a new role of obligation tempered by the wisdom of age and loss. “I must care for him as I care for a wildflower or a singing bird, no terms, no expectations, as finally I care for Port William and the ones who have been here with me.”8 Hannah’s story, then, is not simply one of loss, but of appreciation and memory. Over the course of her narrative Hannah comes to define herself as having consciously joined into the Port William Membership. She offers glimpses into what this means for herself and for the people around her in terms both practical and spiritual. This theme of care informs many of the novel’s most poignant insights into the meaning and possibility of community. Hannah’s memories seem at time to coalesce with the memories of others as she relates the interior life of the Membership and its informal ritual of narrating its history. In this project, she offers the following aside to her nephew: “What will be remembered, Andy Catlett, when we are gone? What will finally become of this lineage of people who have been members of one another? I don’t know. And yet their names and their faces, what they did and said, are not gone, are not ‘the past,’ but still are present to me, and I give thanks.”9 And at this point I, too, must turn aside to share a bit of my own history. I was introduced to the writing of Wendell Berry during my first semester of graduate school at Louisiana State University. This is somewhat surprising for two reasons. The first is that, while I am also from a fairly small farming town in Kentucky and very much a lifelong collector of the names and stories of my community’s history, I had never read a single word of Berry’s prior to my arrival in Baton Rouge in 2006. The second reason is that my introduction to Berry and Hannah Coulter came not in a course on literary criticism or interpretation, but in a seminar titled “Political Theology” taught by Professor Cecil Eubanks in the Political Science Department. In his introduction to the course, Dr. Eubanks pointed out that an important task for political theory is the examination of society in terms of what he called its “care structures.” He defined care structures as “the political form of the affections we hold in our hearts and how we give them life and meaning in our worlds.”10 He asked us to approach the list of readings for the semester from a position of locating and questioning these structures and their place in systems of political organization. Care structures take on numerous forms throughout Berry’s corpus, just as they do in the “real” world Berry uses to set his fiction and to give it local

136

Drew Kennedy Thompson

color. Their utility as a political concept can be difficult to discern at times because care structures are not formal political institutions. In a broad examination of Berry’s work, the care structures he seems to hold in the highest regard are the informal ones: neighborly obligation and stewardship of the land, for example, are ranked more fundamental than organized religion or formal education. This is due in no small part to the way Berry understands the formation and sustenance of community as having a transcendent character. He writes: The indispensable form that can intervene between public and private interests is that of community. The concerns of public and private, republic and citizen, necessary as they are, are not adequate for the shaping of human life. Community alone, as principle and as fact, can raise the standards of local health (ecological, economic, social, and spiritual) without which the other two interests will destroy each other.11

Berry’s vision of community is built on an ethic of personal responsibility and neighborly obligation that has been largely abandoned or forgotten within modern American political culture due to its preoccupation with individual rights and economic self-interest. And yet, Berry’s growing appreciation as a thinker and critic would indicate lingering doubts about the sustainability of this dominant trend. Berry’s agrarian critique asserts a more practical version of his fictional Port William Membership, but it is through his fiction, nevertheless, that Berry most poignantly dramatizes the interplay of the sacred and secular dimensions of local health. As an illustration of Berry’s vision of community, Hannah Coulter offers unique insights into the core principles of Berry’s political imagination. Rather than a system relying on the state or the market or the church, he asserts the power and durability of informal care structures due to their being freely chosen rather than formally dictated. He argues that too many important things will go uncared for. Through Hannah’s narrative, Berry dramatizes these care structures through examples of individuals assuming responsibility for another person’s well-being based on their needs and not on their kinship. Instances of surrogacy reveal that duty is an essential component of Berry’s ideal of community. The close bonds between those within the Membership cannot depend on formal or traditional roles for their survival. The recurring motif of the all-destroying war in the novel reinforces the very real problem of succession and generational replacement in America’s farming communities. The modern liberal state represents another bane for this ideal. Through its use of surrogates throughout Hannah’s life, the novel answers the criticism that his vision of community is closed to people not born into it. His vision of community teaches a doctrine of care, and Hannah Coulter adds a dimension

The Role of Care Structures in Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter

137

to it: gratitude. And so, as my own giving of thanks for a professor who stepped in and made a difference in my own life and professional journey, I would like to employ Eubanks’s care structures as a way to read the novel. The act of standing in, of becoming a surrogate, and the role of memory in the creation of community are informal care structures upon which Berry bases his conception of membership, his ideal of community life. For many of Berry’s most prominent characters, a pivotal moment occurs when someone makes the choice to fill in for someone else or simply creates a role for themselves that does not already exist in a typical family or community structure. His use of surrogacy reveals the manner in which his ideal community is able to respond to gaps in care or lapses in continuity. Nephews and neighbors become proxies for children, for example. Part of this is simply an extension of Berry’s insistence that in a membership everyone has a function, everyone holds a place of value and respect; a mutual acknowledgment affirming each individual’s place as a part of the body. His fiction reveals a loving regard for the informal and happenstance as an essential component of community. A clear example of Berry’s concern for care structures in Hannah Coulter can be glimpsed in the way in which Hannah’s Grandmam sets about to teach her the things she will need to know once she leaves their home and life together. Filling in for both Hannah’s dead mother and her father, who is distracted by her openly jealous and hostile stepmother, Hannah gets pushed into a two-pronged education: one academic and the other practical. “She was the decider of my fate,” Hannah states. Grandmam takes it upon herself to prepare Hannah for a life outside of what would be traditional for a woman of her time, anticipating that Hannah will have to fend for herself, though not knowing exactly how or to what end.12 Hannah’s life is changed again when her grandmother decides it is time to move Hannah into town for a job. “Miss Ora” is one of Grandmam’s childhood friends and the person into whose guidance and care she places Hannah. In spite of her apprehension at this major change in her life, leaving home and the security she has known there, Hannah appreciates what has effectively happened through her acquaintance with Miss Ora, who becomes, unofficially, Hannah’s adoptive grandmother. Hannah refers to Miss Ora as “conscientiously standing in” for Grandmam.13 One surrogate hands off the reigns of responsibility to another; responsibility is not tethered to the particular occupant of a familial or tribal role but can be assumed by anyone within the community. Hannah’s life is shaped by these stand-ins. Stand-ins offer something more than a simply utilitarian covering of the gaps in Berry’s universe. They bring with them a level of freedom and joy because their assumed role is not bound up in familial or tribal duty. For all Berry’s ascribed preference for the traditional, his most telling depictions of

138

Drew Kennedy Thompson

the Port William Membership revolve around people who are brought into a succession by a fortuitous combination of choice and circumstance, rather than birthright or tribal kinship. In Hannah Coulter, he refers to it as “having claim.” He describes the lawyer, Wheeler Catlett, as taking the care and time to visit with old farmers who drift into town on Saturdays: how he loves to hear their stories about their lives and their work. Hannah indicates that this is an act of joy but also of a certain duty, that Wheeler “allowed them to feel that they had a claim” on his time and attention.14 Having claim defines a sense of the level of respect required by community. It indicates that it is an obligation freely undertaken out of responsibility but also out of gratitude. As a form of political care structure, the act of standing in reveals the manner in which Berry’s vision of membership unites those within the community with a sense of obligation and common purpose. “Having in common,” as Berry states earlier, acknowledges but ultimately transcends the common liberal understanding of the basis of community affiliation stemming from the confluence of individual pursuits of self-interest. The inter-mixing of roles in the farming community is an explicit component of this “having in common.” Through Hannah’s voice, Berry elaborates how the Membership had an economic and social function. Through the exchange of work, freely offered and given on the basis of need, the Membership provides for the livelihood of the community: “Every account was paid in full by the understanding that when we were needed we would go, and when we had need the others, or enough of them, would come.”15 Further, this sense of having in common defines social roles in a sense that doing the things that need doing confers meaning, an idea that, for Berry, is firmly grounded in place. And the needs of place, as Hannah and others come to understand them, require the observance of yet other care structures. All of Berry’s writing contributes in some way to his ongoing elegy for lost ways and means of human community living harmoniously with the natural world. As a lifelong advocate for responsible land use, and as a lifelong farmer, Berry posits agriculture as a bridge between these spheres. Berry’s appreciation for older practices of farming and his critique of the industrialization of the food system emerge from a practical assessment of forgotten or abandoned values. Compounding the problem is a tendency toward abstraction Berry sees in both our thinking and our speech. To be able to care properly, whether in terms of the long-term health of the land or maintenance of a human community, we must know intimately what it is we care about and why this care is vulnerable if we are not vigilant. In other words, care works better in the particular than in the abstract, and keeping sight of this takes a level of intellectual rigor that is too easily brushed aside in our pursuit of systematic, comprehensive, and profit-driven solutions to complex problems stemming from our use of the land.16

The Role of Care Structures in Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter

139

The placed-ness of a community involves a web of needing and having claim on the affections of others, just as the land makes claims on each person. To acknowledge and fulfill one’s duty in such a complex interrelation of need and obligation is to honor a sacred commitment. And among the most serious claims placed on any one individual within the community are those made by those who have come before. Turning to examine the role and function of memory as a care structure in Hannah Coulter, it bears repeating that for the members of Berry’s ideal community membership is a bond that, once entered, does not conclude with an individual’s death. Reflecting on the Membership’s life and health, Hannah refers to a familiar trope in all of Berry’s fiction expressing the spiritual aspects of community: “The membership includes the dead. The members, I guess you could say, are born into it, they stay in it by choosing to stay, and they die in it. Or they leave it, as my children have done.”17 As indicated earlier, Hannah’s story of her life acknowledges that hers is but one chapter in a much larger narrative. Even its first chapter, “A Story Continuing,” indicates that her memoir belongs to an ongoing story, one that she appears to have joined toward the end. Thus, Hannah’s reflections serve the additional purpose of adding a woman’s perspective on the oral and literary history of the Port William Membership. This act of telling and retelling of the community’s memory becomes a care structure and serves an important function in Berry’s political imagination. Hannah’s voice is one of memories; she is one of Port William’s rememberers.18 She holds up the people and places and times as objects of her affection: these particular people in their particular place together. Hannah gives these impressions meaning by weaving the names and events into a narrative of gratitude. The significance of this, for Berry, is not merely personal. Though not all of the losses Hannah suffers over the course of the novel are her own, she seems to feel them all. Hannah’s accounting of her life offers future generations a glimpse into a very large world of experience. Her witness is an expression of her gratitude. Membership, an informally structured, voluntary, care-based form of association, is at the core of Berry’s political teaching. The linkage across generations is fundamental. Berry sprinkles numerous indications throughout his body of work that the membership is an association that necessarily includes the living, the dead, and the not-yet-born. This connection is sustained by the ordering powers of memory and hope. Hannah Coulter’s autobiography provides a beautiful example of the working out of the process of joining the Membership by one not born into it. Memory is essential to Berry’s idea of the ideal community, particularly in a political context. Indeed, while it might be possible to talk about Berry’s conception of community without engaging memory, it would certainly leave

140

Drew Kennedy Thompson

out something fundamental to it. For Berry, the public and private sharing of stories, the remembering of the names and the deeds of those who have come before and gone on serves a political function. It facilitates a deeply human need for belonging and some hope that we will not be forgotten. It also gives the community a story, a mythos, an intelligible web of meaning that is particular and rooted in a specific place. Berry writes: If we were lucky enough as children to be surrounded by grown-ups who loved us, then our sense of wholeness is not just the sense of completeness in ourselves but also is the sense of belonging to others and to our place; it is an unconscious awareness of community, of having in common.19

Berry’s essays offer the persistent critique that the modern liberal state does not provide this sense of having in common. He demonstrates his social vision in the form of a fictional little farming town in Kentucky and the intertwined stories of the people who live there over the generations. Most of the members of Berry’s stylized Port William Membership are in fact deceased. Furthermore, the lessons they learned are remembered also and passed on. The story is one of care, how people care for each other and for the place they live. Memory, for Berry, constitutes something that exists both within us and beyond us. Memory provides humans a sense of wholeness.20 But it is inherently social. Remembering one another and reciting this story to each other re-integrates the group, a ritualized action that bears witness and emplots a story. The binding force of this ritual forms a sense of common purpose. Berry describes how this shared sense of the common is more sustainable than the currently dominant mode of association attending the modern liberal state. His criticism of this prevailing tendency of individualism reveals his concern for limits and moderation: “Lacking the interest of or in such a community, private life becomes merely a sort of reserve in which individuals defend their ‘right’ to act as they please and attempt to limit or destroy the ‘rights’ of other individuals to act as they please.”21 Berry’s ideal community, then, embracing the ideals of “trust, goodwill, forbearance, self-restraint, compassion, and forgiveness,” challenges the idea of limitlessness in the sphere of personal freedom.22 It proscribes certain destructive or excessive patterns of behavior and fosters others more aligned with agrarian or communitarian values. And it is here again that the function of memory becomes indispensable. Berry insists that the community’s power over individual behavior is one of influence and modeling virtues for the next generation. “It exercises this power . . . by teaching the young and by preserving stories and songs that tell (among other things) what works and does not work in a given place.”23 But memory, in Berry’s world, is a difficult thing: nostalgia, sure, but also

The Role of Care Structures in Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter

141

the hard-won wisdom of mistakes, both personal and collective. Further, it invokes the sacred and sacramental function of community. Memory provides a framework for meaning, and thus purpose to the going and doing, the living and working, that grounds community and political life. Berry scholar Fritz Oeschlaeger highlights this facet of memory. Commenting that a community lives by its members held in mutual trust by “keeping faith with one another,” he notes that this act “requires a complex responsiveness to what is going on in one’s own and others’ histories. The only way to know those histories is by remembering them and telling them.”24 Toward the end of her narrative, Hannah expresses her worry about what will become of the community after she is gone. She recounts worrying about her children aloud to Andy Catlett in one passage, indicating that she is fearful “because I don’t know what is going to become of them.”25 He nods, indicating his understanding, and Hannah continues, “It used to be that we sort of knew, we could sort of guess, how the lives closest to us would end, what beds our dearest ones were likely to die in, and who would be with them at the last. Now, in this world of employees, of jobs and careers, there is no way to even imagine.”26 Leaving the Membership means that an individual has moved beyond the reach of the embedded, reliable care structures that reinforce and sustain the community, both in life and in death. Hannah sees the loss of the possibilities that have shaped her life and worries about how people who must live apart from the Membership will ultimately ever be able to feel at home in the world once they have left the body of the community. She sees how the modern education system, which she and Nathan had emphasized with their children, has contributed to the closing of this possibility. “The big idea of education, from first to last,” she writes, “is the idea of a better place. Not a better place where you are, because you want it to be better, and have been to school and learned to make it better, but a better place somewhere else.”27 Such an idea is antithetical to Berry’s ideal of community, in which one freely chooses to make one’s place among a specific group of people in a particular place and prioritizes this choice above all others. The return of Virgie, Hannah’s grandson, offers a glimpse of hope, however. Hannah decides that in order for him to regain his sense of whole and his confidence in himself, he should apprentice himself to Danny Branch, a cousin by marriage and the caretaker of Hannah’s farm after Nathan’s death. Hannah is inspired by Danny and his family and their informal way of simultaneously making a living and raising a family. Virgie, Hannah observes, has much to learn about what living in a tightly bound community both offers and demands, but she has hope that he might be able to learn by the example of the Branches.28 The Branches do not feel obligated to push their children in any particular direction, particularly a secondary education or a prestigious career. Their sense

142

Drew Kennedy Thompson

of education is much more practical, and they seem to be no less happy for it. Compared to nearly everybody else, the Branches have led a sort of futureless life. They have planned and provided as much as they needed to, but they take little thought for the morrow. They aren’t going any place, they aren’t getting ready to become anything but what they are, and so their lives are not full of fretful hankering. And they are all still here, still farming. They are here, and if the world lasts they are going to be here for quite a while. If I had “venture capital,” to invest, I think I would invest it in the Branches.29

Because they have been around and are equally committed to sticking it out, the Branch family embraces and exemplifies both the care structures of surrogacy and of memory. They are there to help, to do what needs doing, because they remember the examples of other members of the community who have done the same. The younger generation is born into this life, which is something Berry values. Nevertheless, membership in his ideal community is not available only to those born into it. Hannah Coulter is a Port William transplant: an outsider-become-insider, an incomer, an adoptee, a “benevolently naturalized” member of the community.30 She is a practical orphan—though she has not been totally without her own people, she brings nothing tangible with her to the Membership. And this is an interesting feature visible in Berry’s development of membership throughout his fiction: those who are not simply born into the membership tend to enter it from a state of near destitution. Hannah never describes herself as a suppliant, however, because she had no idea such a strong bond of community and purpose even existed. In her narrative, membership presents itself as an unforeseen expansiveness of belonging. Hannah implies in her own way that she never knew that her world could be so big. Which, of course, is at the heart of the great paradox found throughout all of Berry’s work: that smallness of place creates immensities of heart and spirit. But the state of neediness in which Hannah comes to the Port William Membership would appear to be a potential condition or qualification for a person’s willingness to trust another person not only with their life but also with their life story, that is, to remember them. In sum, we need someone else to affirm our place within the group. Our belonging is perpetual. The rituals of remembrance are sacred. Though we depart, we are not lost when we die. It is hard to imagine a Berry character moving into Port William and finding him or herself claimed by the Membership if it were obvious that they held competing affiliations. Berry is consistent and clear that membership is available for those who want it—anyone who wants it. Less obvious, perhaps, is the implication that membership is only available to those who really need it.

The Role of Care Structures in Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter

143

NOTES 1. Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter (Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004), 5. 2. Ibid., 62. 3. Ibid. 4. Seen in one way, Hannah’s story is a chronicle of losses: her mother to illness and death, her father through the competing loyalties following his remarriage to a cruel and jealous woman, her home to age and changing circumstances, her first love and new husband, Virgil, to war, her mentors to age and infirmity, her second husband, Nathan, to cancer, her children to a changing broader world that doesn’t have a way to understand her, much less include her. Hannah’s losses are offset by what she gains through living the way she does, and the precarious hope she places in her nephew, her neighbors, and providence. 5. Berry, Hannah Coulter, 5. 6. Ibid., 82. 7. Ibid., 83. 8. Ibid., 185. 9. Ibid., 94. 10. Cecil L. Eubanks, e-mail to the author, May 9, 2020. Eubanks included the following elaboration in his syllabus: “An immutable facet of human existence seems to be the desire for metaphysical solace, or a sense of being beyond oneself, in short, of transcendence. We call it by many names, construct myths about it, tell stories of its power and presence, and construct symbols that evoke it. Equally inevitable, it appears, is that this desire incudes a sense of the good, the ethical, which beckons us to a standard of conduct, both individual and social. As we construct our social institutions, we are motivated to shape them in a fashion that respects and resembles those ethical codes. Thus, our politics is shaped by a sense of transcendence (a God, the Gods, the Good, or Justice are just some of the names we give it), and we are in this fashion the creators and possessors of a political theology.” Used with permission. 11. Wendell Berry, “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community,” in Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays (New York: Random House, 2009), 119. 12. Berry, Hannah Coulter, 11. 13. Ibid. Italics added. 14. Ibid., 23. 15. Ibid., 94–5. 16. Berry’s Jefferson Lecture on affection provides a succinct way of expressing this idea, and in terms suitable for discussion by political theorists. Wendell Berry, “It All Turns on Affection” (Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, Washington, D.C., April 23, 2012). 17. Berry, Hannah Coulter, 94. 18. In his short story “The Wild Birds,” Berry terms these characters as “keepers of the names.” See “The Wild Birds,” in That Distant Land: Collected Stories (Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004), 349.

144

Drew Kennedy Thompson

19. Wendell Berry, “Health Is Membership” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, ed. Norman Wirzba (Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2002), 144. 20. In the short story “Making It Home,” Art Rowanberry experiences a turning toward home and a process of healing from a shrapnel wound. His dis-memberment becomes re-memberment through a process of purification toward restoration. See, Wendell Berry, “Making It Home,” in Fidelity: Five Stories (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 83–106. In his essay “Conservation and Local Economy,” Berry writes: “The health of nature is the primary ground of home—if we can find the humility and the wisdom to accept nature as our teacher. The pattern of land stewardship is set by nature. This is why we must have stable rural economies and communities; we must keep alive in every place the human knowledge of the nature of that place.” Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, 11. 21. Berry, “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community,” 119–20. 22. Ibid., 120. 23. Ibid. 24. Fritz Oeschlaeger, The Achievement of Wendell Berry: The Hard History of Love (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 118. The quote continues: “Those stories carry the history of the membership’s love and its gift to the future of a complex, only partially achieved charity, our best hope for deliverance from time within time itself.” 25. Berry, Hannah Coulter, 133. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 112. 28. Ibid., 146. 29. Ibid., 152. 30. Wendell Berry, “The Short Answer: An Exchange with Wendell Berry,” in Conversations with Wendell Berry, ed. Morris Allen Grubbs (Jackson, MS: The University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 178.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Berry, Wendell. Hannah Coulter: A Novel. Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004. ———. “Health is Membership.” In The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry, edited by Norman Wirzba, 144–58. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2002. ———. “It All Turns on Affection.” Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. Washington, D.C., April 23, 2012. ———. “Making It Home.” In Fidelity: Five Stories, 83–106. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992. ———. Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays. New York: Random House, 2009.

The Role of Care Structures in Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter

145

———. “The Short Answer: An Exchange with Wendell Berry.” In Conversations with Wendell Berry, edited by Morris Allen Grubbs, 178–80. Jackson, MS: The University Press of Mississippi, 2007. ———. “The Wild Birds.” In That Distant Land: The Collected Stories, 337–64. Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004. Oeschlaeger, Fritz. The Achievement of Wendell Berry: The Hard History of Love. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2011.

Chapter 7

Terror, Nihilism, and Joy Reconsidering Camus’s Confrontation with Political Violence John Randolph LeBlanc and William Paul Simmons

In early 2020, William Paul Simmons worked with Rohingya children in cramped refugee camps in Bangladesh. A session of participatory drawing and mapping had the children reflecting on the lives they had lived in Myanmar, before the ethnic cleansing by the Burmese military and Buddhist militias, and in juxtaposition to their current lives in the refugee camps. After the exercise, Simmons was approached by three adolescent Rohingya boys. Shyly, and in broken English, they said that they wanted to take up arms and return to Myanmar to fight the military and the militias. It was clear that they wanted revenge for what had happened to their families and villages, which included widespread killing, burning of villages, huge numbers of gang rapes, and the throwing of thousands of people into fires. Implicitly, they also wanted to stand up for themselves and to be persecuted no longer. They were seeking agency and had little hope for a better world for themselves and their people. Simmons, trained as an academic, stumbled through some awkward questions, but could not find out more about their motivations. Instead, he shifted the conversation to the possibility of nonviolent solutions. There are, he suggested, other ways to gain revenge and to fight the regime. He gave the example of Mahatma Gandhi, of whom they had not heard, and of a friend of his that had endured solitary confinement and torture but had escaped and now spoke out against his regime at every opportunity. He tried to communicate to the boys that their voices too could be weapons for standing up to oppression and for revenge. Unconvinced, the boys walked away, and Simmons comforted himself with the hope that something he said might resonate someday (possibly soon) when the boys had serious decisions to make.

147

148

John Randolph LeBlanc and William Paul Simmons

Simmons’s encounter with the Rohingya boys suggests the complex relationship among terror, nihilism, and joy, which is this chapter’s concern. Acts labeled “terror” are frequently associated with a notion of “nihilism,” that is, with a lack of concern for world and other that wishes only their destruction. Yet, this quick assumption too easily serves as cover for the violence of those in power who, now finding themselves targeted by nihilistic “terrorists,” feel free to use the labels and to “respond” in kind or, more often, with asymmetrical forms of violence. In this vein, one way to understand the interaction between Simmons and the young Rohingya boys is to consider the context in which it occurred: in a refugee camp created by this kind of asymmetrical violence. This “official” violence paid no heed to the Rohingya’s humanity, denying it in all the destructive forms that ethnic cleansing takes. Here, nihilism may well be found, but not where one might expect, that is, with boys bent on a counterviolence that likely would be labeled “terror.” Rather, nihilism is found in a violence that takes for itself the power to deem others outside the realm of moral concern—in this case, to declare the Rohingya stateless, which they have been since 1982. The violence of ethnic cleansing destroyed the Rohingya world, and ultimately creates another one—the refugee camp in which the boys find themselves. This new world is born of terror, a world-destroying violence that is a function of a nihilism unmitigated by labeling its victims “terrorists” or “would-be terrorists.” Perhaps the boys could not hear Simmons’s appeals to nonviolence because their previous lives were irredeemably destroyed by the nihilistic violence of ethnic cleansing. Nonviolence requires not only a position of privilege but a certain sense of self, as a human being. As Frantz Fanon1 reminded us, this self, the kind of self that could resist via nonviolence, would have to be recovered over time from violent origins. In this context, the tone and tenor of Simmons’s encounter with the boys so soon on the heels of the drawing exercise are not surprising. While the exercise was intended as a useful therapeutic step in redirecting the anger accompanying trauma, in this instance, it may well have served to reinforce the feeling of hopelessness and desire for revenge that color both the boys’ experiences and their new worldview. The boys responded to the exercise by “confessing” their aspirations to a man who was there to help them find a less (self-) destructive path. In that moment, however, the recollection of what was lost probably heightened that sense of loss—of self, of place tied to self, and the possibility of a life lived without reflection. In other words, lost was the possibility of a life lived with the joy that is appropriate to children—and not only children. Were the young Rohingya to act on their desires, violently, motivated by revenge, and without the cover of official sanction, they would most certainly

Terror, Nihilism, and Joy

149

be called “terrorists.” Such a label would block or obscure the need for careful consideration of their motivations and of the conditions that generated their actions. They would be held accountable for their actions even as their untenable conditions were ignored or minimized. ALBERT CAMUS, NIHILISM, AND TERROR This is the kind of moral complexity that Albert Camus confronted in his own political engagements. His experience in the French resistance, with the post-Liberation purges, and his struggle to balance his reason, emotion, and familial connections while navigating tumultuous events in Algeria taught him a healthy skepticism for the official use of terms like nihilism and terror to ideologically condemn acts of resistance. He consistently denounced nihilism, either in the form of an extreme skepticism as to the meaning of life or as a denial of the worth of the existing social order. At the same time, he thought the impulse to nihilism was an understandable, if ultimately wrongheaded, response to the unlivable, even untenable, politics of his world. Similarly, while he was generally skeptical of terror, of either the official or unofficial sort, he also was deeply suspicious of the use of the term to delegitimate necessary, or at least defensible, acts of political violence in resistance. As we will see, in his play The Just Assassins and in his gloss on these subjects in The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, Camus problematizes clear-cut denunciations of the use of terror by also deploying the label for acts of political violence that may be legitimate in their context.2 The just “terrorists” of the play are Camusian rebels, negotiating the line between nihilism on the one hand and necessary violent political acts labeled “terror” on the other. Camus’s oft-neglected ambivalence toward political violence, we argue, suggests what Achille Mbembe called the “necropolitical” character of modern politics.3 The culture of violence and death characterizing necropolitics depends upon a nihilistic indifference to questions of meaning, especially to questions of human being. Yet, for Camus, some meaning, some measure of redemption, remains possible for those who must act, who are compelled to resist. For Camus, a former member of the French Resistance, violent acts arbitrarily labeled by an authoritarian regime or a bureaucrat as “terror” are not necessarily incompatible with a commitment to humanist ideals. The rebel must say “no” to an unjust world before affirming “yes” to human being and its possibilities. That “no” may require violence, but Camus’s rebel remains obligated to find and to follow the Ariadne’s thread of his humanism. In The Just Assassins, we find that thread in the capacity of human beings to respond with some measure of joy, happiness, and even love, to a world oriented to death. In the play, Camus situates us in

150

John Randolph LeBlanc and William Paul Simmons

a world that suffocates childlike joy, a world not unlike that of the Rohingya. In this context, the project of reclaiming joy becomes essential, and Camus explores it as he depicts deep moments of solidarity between human beings in their related acts of individual and group resistance. The Just Assassins is set in 1905 when Russia is at the height of the anti-Jewish pogroms in which the military took part or which it did little to stop. Russia was also suffering from an almost unimaginable inequity in the distribution of wealth. In the face of calls for modernizing reforms, the Czar and his machinery violently cracked down on nearly all forms of protest. The historical Kaliayev, a main character in Camus’s play, in a fiery and lucid speech at his trial, captured the difference between revolutionaries and the imperial government: We are two warring camps. You—the representatives of the imperial government, the hired servants of capital and oppression. I—one of the avengers of the people, a socialist and revolutionist. Mountains of corpses divide us, hundreds of thousands of broken human lives and a whole sea of blood and tears covering the country in torrents of horror and resentment. You have declared war upon the people. We have accepted the challenge.4

Fortunately, Boris Savinkov, a revolutionary of the time and later a staunch critic of the Bolsheviks, penned the exceptional Memoirs of a Terrorist, providing intimate details about the thinking, strategizing, and emotions of the cells to which he belonged. These cells were responsible for the high-profile assassinations of the ruthless Minister of the Interior Vyacheslav von Plehve in 1904 and of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, the uncle of Czar Nicholas II and the governor of Moscow, in 1905. Both men were notorious for their ruthless crackdowns with massive roundups and executions. Savinkov’s book detailing these killings, including Kaliayev’s refusal to throw the bomb at a carriage containing the Grand Duke, his wife, and their young nephew and niece, serves as the main source material for Camus’s play. Four of the five members of the cell in Camus’s play are clearly modeled after the historical members of the terrorist cell that carried out the Grand Duke’s assassination in 1905. To this determined lot, Camus adds the character Stepan Fedorov, a hardened revolutionary who seems willing to use almost any means to accomplish the overthrow of the Czarist regime. Stepan is most likely modeled after Sergey Nechayev (1847–1882), the nihilist revolutionary known for his Catechism of a Revolutionary with its embrace of “by any means necessary.” As such, Stepan initially seems out of place among Camus’s just assassins. Most readings see Stepan as either a Nechaievist from the 1860s or a Stalinist from the mid-twentieth century who is opposed to Camus’s poet-rebel Kaliayev (hereinafter Yanek), who lucidly considered his

Terror, Nihilism, and Joy

151

actions before he acts. Stepan is the nihilistic revolutionary, acting to create a world-to-come without regard for the human cost. In this reading, he represents the state terror of the twentieth century, including its apologists, some of whom, like Merleau-Ponty, were in Camus’s intellectual circle. The text however invites us to push past ideological readings of these characters. Camus humanizes Stepan’s position by placing its origins in his experiences of having observed and been subject to utter dehumanization. Over the course of the play, there is also growth in Stepan that draws him much closer to Yanek’s position. For his part, Yanek moves back toward Stepan’s position as a hard-bitten revolutionary. They are both incomplete as rebels, but the seeds of lucid rebellion lie within each. It is our contention that when Camus, in The Rebel, praises the men of 1905, he praises both Stepan and Yanek. CHILDLIKE JOY AND REVOLUTION Camus’s Just Assassins exhibits an acute but fragile awareness that children without joy are mirrors on a broken, terrorized society. In the play, the untimely appearance of children both scuttles an early attempt at killing the Grand Duke and forces the would-be assassins to reflect on the nature of their undertaking. Yanek, in position to toss the fateful bomb, hesitates when he sees the children in the Grand Duke’s carriage. The ensuing debate among members of the group initially reveals fault lines in the group’s revolutionary commitment as they wrestle with the question of whether they are justified in killing children as collateral damage. Fellow revolutionaries Voinov and Dora both say they would not have thrown the bomb, but Stepan intervenes, sharply chastising them: “Are you all out of your minds?”5 Yanek, stung by the rebuke, is willing to go back out and wait by the theater to kill the Grand Duke after the play, presumably with the children and Grand Duchess. But before he leaves, Dora interrupts and takes the argument to a deeper level. She argues that if the assassination included the children, the act would turn the people against the revolution and the revolution would fail. Her pragmatic argument does not win the day, but it does lead to further reflection on the possibility of killing children in the name of rebellion. During the exchange that follows, it becomes clear that the Grand Duke’s niece and nephew represent different things for Yanek and Stepan. The presence of the children forces the small group of terrorists to confront the dilemma involved in confusing flesh with abstraction. In their revolutionary fervor, human beings have come to represent ideas. The Grand Duke represents the tyranny, oppression, and terror he and the regime have carried off against the Russian people. Killing him, they are convinced, is an answer to

152

John Randolph LeBlanc and William Paul Simmons

these atrocities. The children, however, also represent an idea. They represent human possibilities and potential. Killing them, Yanek seems to intuit in the moment, is counter to the aims of the revolution itself. In the aftermath of the failed attempt, an incensed Stepan angrily confronts Yanek with his failure. Yanek’s response reveals the complex character of his refusal to throw the bomb: To think, only a moment before I was so gloriously happy, standing at the corner of that little side street, in a patch of shadow. The moment I saw the carriage lamps twinkling in the distance, my heart began to race. With joy, I can assure you. . . . I’m almost sure that I was laughing, laughing for joy. And I kept on saying: “Yes. . . . Yes.”6

Yanek, whose own playful nature was introduced when his character appeared, here diagnoses a world in which joy is the province of the assassin and children’s faces can only be grave. When he sees it, he turns away because he harbors an idea of what a child’s life should be. Rather than grave and intent, children should be sites of a childlike joy, and engaged in the kind of play that finds them “laughing for joy.”7 Yet, it is Yanek who feels this way as he awaits the Grand Duke’s carriage and the opportunity to do his deadly deed. In the world of the play and in the world that spawns the just assassins, children, whose joyful lives Yanek takes quite seriously, are denied that joy. Only the revolutionary, the would-be “terrorist,” it seems, can approach the feeling of childlike abandon. Camus completes the displacement of joy away from children and onto the revolutionary in the conclusion of Yanek’s description of the failed assassination attempt. Confronted with the Grand Duke’s niece and nephew, Yanek experiences something quite visceral that he hadn’t expected. I saw the children. They weren’t laughing, not they! Just staring into emptiness and holding themselves up very straight. How sad they looked! If they had turned my way, I think I might have thrown the bomb—if only to extinguish that sad look of theirs.8

Yanek, giddy with anticipation, is confronted with real children and responds with what children represent for him. While children should be sites of joy, these children, children of privilege, prestige, and power, are sad. Presumably, it is a mark of the sorry state of things when any children are sad. It is not that Yanek won’t kill children. Rather, it is his first instinct not to kill his idea of children, as potential sites of joy and possibility. In the moment, he hesitates to kill the Grand Duke’s niece and nephew, not because of who they are, but because as children they embody an idea—human beings capable of

Terror, Nihilism, and Joy

153

joy and, perhaps, a brighter future of Russia. When the children appear in flesh and blood, they do so as a different set of ideas from those represented by the Grand Duke. They appear to him as Yanek’s idea of children, that is, as potential reflections of his own childlike joy. To kill them in the moment would be to kill that possibility, and it is this which accounts for his paralysis at their appearance. When he later confesses to the group in his confrontation with Stepan that he could kill them, it is not children per se he is willing to kill. Rather, the reality of these children’s sad faces supplants his ideal, turning them into abstractions, reminding him of the world against which the just assassins struggle—a world that denies children the possibility of joy. Focusing on the tension between abstraction and the flesh complicates standard readings of the play, which find its main tension embodied in the characters of Yanek the poet-revolutionary and Stepan “the nihilist.”9 To oppose Stepan and Yanek is to deny the very ambiguity in the latter’s initial encounter with the children. It also oversimplifies Camus’s theory of rebellion. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, Yanek and Stepan, as we will see, each act out of a commitment to principles involving human beings, as such. They are in the same room after all, plotting and ultimately carrying out the same assassination.10 For Camus, there is necessarily a fine line between a rebel and a nihilist. If there was not, being a rebel would be easy to the point of insignificance. For Camus, the aspiration to lucidity makes “just” action possible. Lucidity requires making a conscious decision to negotiate the sometimes fluid boundary between rebellion and revolutionary nihilism. It means creating one’s own path, mindful that it often leads to a tumbrel rumbling inexorably to the gallows. What makes these assassins “just” is that they negotiate that boundary, struggling to remain lucid in the face of the affective costs and physical consequences of their actions. Their path, Camus shows us, may lead to understanding, but it requires working in an impossible tension. The tension finds its limit and first embodiment in children and the possibility of childlike joy or, more accurately, its impossibility. OF BODIES AND ABSTRACTIONS While Stepan appears as “nihilist revolutionary,” welcoming the relatively easy juxtaposition with Yanek, his approach is not inborn. In fact, his beliefs are driven by two lived experiences that fundamentally shaped the character we encounter. The first of these reveals itself when he confronts Yanek for having not completed his mission. Unlike Yanek, Stepan, it turns out, has witnessed starving children. Zealously attacking his comrade, he runs Yanek’s failure out to the conclusion of a revolutionary’s feverish logic. Because Yanek saved those two children, Stepan asserts, “thousands of Russian

154

John Randolph LeBlanc and William Paul Simmons

children will go on dying of starvation for years to come. Have you ever seen children dying of starvation? I have. And to be killed by a bomb is a pleasant death compared with that.”11 Here Stepan reveals an essential site of his motivation, and it links him, however imperfectly, with Yanek: preventing the suffering of children. On its face, Stepan’s commitment differs from Yanek’s in scale and scope. On the one hand, Stepan is willing to kill two children so that thousands won’t starve. His fervency allows him to make this calculation, which Dora later rightly calls into question. On the other hand, however, his concern with starvation seems markedly more urgent than Yanek’s more general concern with children’s lives of sadness and gravity. Nonetheless, the two positions are linked, rather than in opposition. This link, preventing or mitigating the suffering of children, means that Stepan’s assertion that Yanek has not witnessed starving children, while true, is not dispositive. In fact, the two are joined in a campaign to prevent the suffering of children. It is the raison d’etre of their revolutionary activity. Rather, the difference between them is one of emphases: Yanek is mostly concerned with children’s spirits, while Stepan concerns himself mostly with their bodies. Taken together, spirit and body are necessary for a healthy human whole; tending to both at once is the rebel’s challenge. It is precisely Camus’s point that neither man, acting alone, is adequate to the task but both are necessary. Yanek’s preternatural joy links him with an idea he has of human life, especially that of children, and undergirds his revolutionary activity. Stepan’s concern with their suffering bodies derives not only from the deprivation of starvation but also from the lack of physical integrity and security that are required to live with childlike joy. The violation and denial of these bodily things brings us to the second of Stepan’s character-shaping experiences. As he appears on stage, he has just returned to his comrades after three years away, two of them spent in prison, where he was flogged alongside a fellow revolutionary, Vera. This experience, he reveals, is the only time he has felt shame. The site of that shame is obscure in the text. Presumably, it has to do with his physical vulnerability or, perhaps, an emotional attachment to his colleague. Vera, he explains, committed suicide to protest their treatment, “but l lived on . . . so why should I be ashamed of anything now?”12 Her death pushes him past his shame and seemingly past a concern with bodies, including his own. In this context, Stepan tries to convince himself that everything is permitted. Yet it is telling that he did not choose Vera’s route. Self-destruction as resistance must be a gesture that forces the issue. Vera’s act of defiance in killing herself and the flogging that marks his own body come to authorize Stepan to hate, and it is the physical violation of the body that distinguishes Stepan’s experience from Yanek’s. His hatred comes from the violation of

Terror, Nihilism, and Joy

155

intimacy we find in torture, in physical violence, and in the starvation of children. Dora recognizes the violation and the connection when he shows her his torture marks. She responds with love—loving him because of his suffering and even knowing he cannot reciprocate. Stepan admits that he cannot love, conceding that hating is better than feeling nothing at all. If Dora presses him to this self-understanding, his encounter with Yanek pushes it further. Yanek’s buoyancy and commitment suggest something to him that had been lacking. It comes to fruition later when Stepan admits that he envies Yanek. When Yanek leaves for the second time, Stepan offers himself: “Good-bye, Yanek . . . I am with you.”13 Stepan, pushed past a concern for his own body except as a site of someone else’s violence, entered a place of abstraction that is both dangerous and, also, potentially creative. The tension is obvious: he concerns himself with the bodily suffering of “thousands of children” and readily embraces the killing of two children. Stepan’s turn (or, is it a pose?) lends some credence to the standard reading of Stepan and would seem to distinguish him from Yanek. Yet, in a compelling twist, it mirrors rather than refutes Yanek’s abstract commitment to children’s joy. Yanek enters the play with the capacity to affiliate that childlike joy with revolutionary activity but falters when confronted with the flesh and blood of the Grand Duke’s niece and nephew. His commitment to the joy of children as both a way of being and as a justification for revolutionary violence, however, is negotiable. He volunteers to go back and kill the two children, but it must be at the behest of the revolution, itself an abstraction manifest in the concrete form of the group’s will. The problem of killing children, then, vexes both men, albeit differently, and reveals the shortcomings in their revolutionary stances. Both men will have to come to terms with the fact that revolution is abstraction made flesh. They will have to learn “rebellion.” ENTER DORA: PEDAGOGUE OF REBELLION The character of Dora, based on the real-world revolutionary Dora Brilliant,14 is little discussed in the secondary literature. In our reading of the play, however, she is central to Camus’s notions of joy and love in the time of terrorism. Camus’s Dora embodies the path away from nihilism and toward rebellion. It is she who teaches both Yanek and Stepan what it means to engage in revolution and how. She is their connection, their Ariadne’s cord, to the possible human world to which they all aspire. She loves, and is loved, in different ways by both. More to the point, she teaches each to see what the other sees and, therefore, empathy for what the other has experienced. As such, she is the link between them, but she is not merely a means to their ends. She is

156

John Randolph LeBlanc and William Paul Simmons

the core of the play and the mature embodiment of Camus’s notion of rebellion. Recall that for Camus, rebellion “says yes and no simultaneously.”15 The “yes” marks an affirmation of human worth, while the “no” recognizes that limit. Together they forbid transgressing the limit without accepting responsibility for that transgression. While Yanek and Stepan struggle with this idea, Dora knows that rebellion must embrace it, and she expresses one of the most well-known axioms of the play: “Even destruction has a right and wrong way,” she says, “and there are limits.”16 Camus signals that his Dora is not the historical Dora by giving her the family name of Doulebov while the historical Dora described in Savinkov’s memoirs was the well-known Dora Brilliant. Like Stepan, then, Dora is a fictionalized member of the crew. The historical Dora was a hardened revolutionary who by 1905 was in despair because of the accidental death of her lover Pokotilov, a fellow bomb maker in the Social Revolutionary Party. Savinkov, who was her superior, describes Dora Brilliant as a committed terrorist: “The silent, modest and shy Dora lived only by one thing—her faith in terror.”17 In contrast with Camus’s fictional character who reflected on joy, love, and happiness, Dora Brilliant’s “days passed in silence, in quiet, concentrated experience of that inner suffering of which she was full. She seldom laughed and when laughing her eyes, like those of the Grand Duke’s niece and nephew, remained stern and sad.”18 Both Doras are lucid about the possibility that the revolution could fail and that the group’s efforts, their assassinations, would wind up little more than murders. Camus’s Dora is even able to convince Yanek of the contingency of their actions. Early on, he could not countenance the idea that the revolution could possibly fail and if so, Yanek’s act, seeming so heroic, may amount to nothing. Moreover, honesty demands that they recognize that it may lead to worsened conditions. By Act II, after failing in the first assassination attempt, Yanek comes to agree with Dora that their success is not guaranteed. Dora brings those characteristics that Camus praised in The Rebel to her colleagues, drawing the line that distinguishes a nihilistic terrorist revolutionary from a rebel. It is little wonder that Camus regarded Dora as one of his favorite characters.19 In the play, Dora’s lucidity manifests itself in her role as Yanek’s teacher. It is she who presses the group to think more deeply about their actions. She embodies the type of reflection that Camus embraced as part of the rebel’s lucidity. For example, in the beginning of the play, she tempers Yanek’s childlike joy. He has a giddy enthusiasm as he cites poetry, calls Dora pretty, and worries whether the other revolutionaries love him. There is joy in his overt concern and struggle with love—in all its forms—and his capacity for laughter, each of which distinguishes him from his fellows. He lightheartedly admits that he loved playing the part of a peddler while

Terror, Nihilism, and Joy

157

engaged in reconnaissance on the Grand Duke’s daily routes. “The disguise, the new life . . . everything amused me.”20 This joy evidences his motivation and suggests the world he thinks his actions will bring into being: “I am still convinced that life is a glorious thing—love . . . beauty . . . and happiness.”21 Dora, however, reminds him that they are not giving life, but death. She tries to walk him back from his embrace of a future glorious brotherhood in Russia and to remind him of the bloody, bodily undertaking before them.22 At the same time, she is also careful not to quash his humane tendencies. In Act I, she measures what she can say to him, hesitantly explaining that the Grand Duke is more than an abstraction, more than an idea of evil; he is a man. She cautions him: “The Grand Duke may have gentle eyes. Perhaps you’ll see him smiling to himself or scratching his ear. Perhaps, who knows, you’ll see a little scar on his cheek where he cut himself shaving.”23 Yanek, however, naively resists the idea that he is destroying a man by shielding himself with the abstraction that he is destroying the Czarist regime. Intuitively, he knows that if he perceives the Grand Duke as an idea, as an abstraction, his hatred will blind him from seeing the flesh-and-blood human being. “I shall kill him,” Yanek insists, “with joy!”24 By Act III, however, Yanek must admit that hatred is an inadequate shield and that Dora was right. He confesses: “I thought it was easy to kill . . . and I now know that there is no happiness in hatred.”25 Flesh and blood, that is, the body, always threaten the comfort, or cause, to be found in abstraction. The fact that the body marks the transition point between living human being and lifeless thing is a persistent difficulty for the just assassins. Indeed, their struggle with it marks their worthiness as Camusian rebels. One member of the cell, Voinov, resigns from the terrorist brigade after the first failed assassination attempt because he cannot handle the bloody physicality, the embodied humanity, that is, both the target and the context of the assassination. He is undone by human presences, citing all the people milling about and the encounter with the man. In his own way, Stepan struggles with it as well. He closes his eyes when asked whether he could shoot children, and, despite his concern with starving bodies, he shields himself from the bodily reality of the Grand Duke’s niece and nephew with the idea of the thousands of Russian children who will die because Yanek hesitated. It is Dora who, from the very outset, understands that destroying the body means destroying possibilities for joy and creativity. Yet, even with this knowledge, she is still willing to destroy it. She tries to teach Yanek this lesson, but she knows he won’t really learn until after the deed, once he is in prison. At the same time, Dora is not immune from the magnetic tendency to abstract from the flesh. She too must be called back to its physicality. As she hears the sound of the explosion, it hits home that she also is culpable in

158

John Randolph LeBlanc and William Paul Simmons

the assassination, and she takes responsibility: “it’s we who have killed him! I have killed him.”26 Dora’s ability to move back-and-forth between her revolutionary ideas and her concern with the spirit and flesh of human beings is the stuff of her lucidity. Her facility with this fluid boundary fits her to be both rebel and teacher of rebellion. Yanek, because he is, from the outset, the most openly vulnerable everyday human of all the characters, is best suited to her instruction. Under Dora’s tutelage Yanek comes to face the truth that his task entails cold-blooded killing of a flesh-and-blood human. To be sure, Yanek is killing one who was responsible for the oppression of thousands, but the Grand Duke’s humanness remains. Yanek’s initial childlike illusion that his act will be decisive, that a successful assassination will bring happiness and joy, is not to be. With her guidance, however, Yanek lucidly comes to terms with the consequences of his actions, marking a profound maturation in his character. Dora shows him that the deed and the guilt are both owned by the rebel for whom “yes” is linked to “no” by “and” and not “or.” THE REBEL’S AFFIRMATION AND LIMITS For both Yanek and Stepan, “yes” and “no” affirm the worth of the human. Saying “no” is recognition of a limit. The first and most significant “no” is Yanek’s refusal to kill the children in the carriage, and this limit on action is a strong affirmation of life.27 This saying of “yes” through an original “no” is what Rancière will later call subjectification, the rising up and asserting of the human against oppressive circumstances.28 It is likely what the adolescent Rohingya boys were doing in conversation with Simmons. When Camus, in The Rebel, stresses the revolt of the slave as a paradigm for rebellion, he stresses the inner subjectification, the slave’s newfound feeling that he or she deserves and demands rights.29 Yanek refers to this affirmation of human dignity or subjectification as honor, and it is through honor that Yanek finally stands firm in the argument that killing children is wrong. In doing so, however, he is not rejecting the revolution or the necessity of its use of violence. Rather, he refuses to succumb to the nihilistic temptation to forget honor in carrying out his revolutionary work.30 Honor is the one possession that the peasants have, and it is at the forefront of the revolution. It gave Stepan the strength to endure his torture as Yanek reminds him.31 Stepan, in both pain and shame, seems unwilling to countenance the idea of human dignity as a motor for the revolution and shouts down Yanek. The force of his denial, however, cannot hide the place of honor or dignity in his own survival and as a justification for the revolution.

Terror, Nihilism, and Joy

159

Yanek’s realization of the rebel’s “yes” and “no” is not readily or clearly won. Though the initial “I cannot” affirms the worth of the innocents, it is not sufficient and must be supplemented by lucidly taking responsibility for one’s actions. This realization comes to Yanek in prison, through a sustained grappling with the physical consequences of his actions. It is typical of Camus that the realization is the product of encounters with agents of a system and society (Russia in 1905) built upon official violence rather than any humane conception of honor. Yet it is only Yanek who is being called to account for his violence, forcing him to try and defend himself through the idealistic fantasy that he was throwing the bomb at tyranny.32 His resort to abstraction is inadequate, but not crazy. After all, the Grand Duke was party to the oppression and deaths of thousands. Camus explores the inadequacy of Yanek’s abstraction in several encounters that reveal the violence of the hidden abstraction his bomb was intended to destroy. In the encounters, Camus adds to the constant self-interrogation undertaken by the delicate band of revolutionaries. In prison, Yanek is reproached by the Grand Duchess, the police chief, and a commoner named Foka, himself serving time for three murders. Each forces Yanek to confront his abstractions and the human consequences of violently acting upon them. Foka has agreed to serve the Tsarist regime as an executioner in exchange for a reduced sentence. Though Foka could serve as the common man for whom the revolutionaries were fighting, he is not the heroic peasant that the revolutionaries had painted as their abstract ideal. Such a character would again make rebellion too easy, or too easily justified. He doesn’t even understand or appreciate their efforts, believing that Yanek must have killed the Grand Duke out of some romantic entanglement. Foka even wonders whether Yanek is just an executioner like himself.33 With Foka, Camus has begun bursting any abstract justification that Yanek might hold for his assassination. The police chief Skuratov is an intelligent, even cunning, foil for Yanek’s revolutionary zeal. He visits Yanek seeking information on the assassin’s co-conspirators. The chief’s interrogation is carried out in humane, professional terms, but Camus reminds us of the array of violent mechanisms at Skuratov’s disposal and of the legal atrocities committed by the Grand Duke and those like him. “One begins by wanting justice,” Skuratov says, “and one ends by setting up a police force.”34 In this context, the chief reminds Yanek of his concrete culpability, that he “blew the Grand Duke’s head to pieces . . . you should not forget, or profess to forget, the Grand Duke’s head.”35 Apparently, remembering the consequences of violence is the responsibility of the “terrorist,” but forgetting the consequences of violence is the province of officials. The chief of police persists, against Yanek’s protests, with the concrete details, specifically, that they only found an arm and a leg, and there was blood everywhere. As the interrogation proceeds, the police chief tries

160

John Randolph LeBlanc and William Paul Simmons

to distinguish himself from the terrorist by claiming that he only focuses on concrete people, but also perhaps unwittingly further implicates his role in the state machinery. In the face of the bloody human remains, the police chief thinks that Yanek will begin to feel shame. Camus, however, does not allow the chief’s attempt to reduce Yanek’s actions to “mere ideal” or abstraction to work.36 Yanek is not holding on to the ideal as such; he is holding on to people, that is, his brothers. In this moment, Yanek implicitly takes responsibility for his violence and begins the process of liberation he will feel on the gallows. Skuratov’s violence, every bit as physical and even more destructive, remains hidden but implicit. The Grand Duchess strikes an interesting figure as she next meets with Yanek in his cell. Introduced by Skuratov as a Christian, she forces Yanek to feel remorse for his violence from a human, rather than official, direction.37 In the encounter with Skuratov, the Grand Duke was a body. In this encounter, he is a human being who is loved and can love in return. The Grand Duchess humanizes the Grand Duke, as was presaged by Dora’s earlier warnings, by relating details of his life and his last day to Yanek. In this way, and like Skuratov, she obscures the Grand Duke’s day job and the atrocities for which he was responsible. Again, Yanek protests against the physical details of his acts, especially the blood, struggling with the line between rebel and nihilist, between human being and the body’s destruction. The Grand Duchess says, “I picked up what I could . . . all that blood. . . . I was wearing a white dress.”38 Knowing that he is being manipulated and that it is having an effect, Yanek interjects, “Stop!” She continues, even goading Yanek for having spared the children. The Grand Duchess, with all of the charity she can muster in her grief, describes her niece and nephew as unjust and even refusing to help the poor.39 For the terrorists, the justice of killing children was at least a question. Yanek’s hesitation and the debate that followed had raised the issue of killing children. The Grand Duchess has already passed judgment on her niece and nephew, asking Yanek whether they were guilty, but he cannot assent.40 She judges the children without love, refusing to consider whether the question of justice should even be a child’s concern. She cannot see that creating a world of joyless children is a greater sin, nor can she embrace her responsibility for creating and perpetuating it. The encounter with the Grand Duchess has another dimension that furthers Yanek’s development. She appeals to his humanity in a way that does not occur to Skuratov. She takes a number of tacks. She tries to link his suffering in prison to her husband’s death. She asks him to pray with her and to repent, noting that they are connected through the death of her husband.41 Her efforts are not without some measure of success. Yanek comes to pity her. She has, he says, “touched my heart.” Their connection, however, is

Terror, Nihilism, and Joy

161

mediated by abstraction: hers, with a God whose presence is required for there to be love; his, with a generalized love for humankind. Yanek’s turn to love, here, is a return of sorts. It is a reclamation of the humanity that he demonstrates from his earliest appearance in the play. He asks the Grand Duchess whether there could be a love built on sorrow during such oppression. She questions the possibility that this is love. He replies that it is, speaking now as a Camusian rebel, “The only sort of love that you and your kind have ever allowed us.”42 The love of which he speaks is one of solidarity with his comrades. Fellowfeeling and commitment emerge here as essential elements of human being and link, once and for all, the human body to a necessary abstraction. A more mature, more humane Yanek is acknowledging that suffering, of the body, of the soul, to which the Grand Duchess had appealed early in their encounter, must be the handmaiden of that most powerful of human abstractions: love. In its way, this insight refutes Skuratov’s cynicism—the police chief set up the meeting with the Grand Duchess for the purpose of publicity, which, he proudly admits, will include the fiction that he repented.43 Yanek’s quiet reply to the chief of police’s perfidy reveals the power of the rebel’s linking of suffering and love, of body and abstraction: “They will not believe it.”44 He is prepared for what happens next. What Yanek learns in prison is brought home to his comrades through his execution. It is Dora who draws the connection between the ideal of the revolution and Yanek’s bodily sacrifice. She insists that Stepan, whose accomplice witnessed it, provide a comprehensive account of the execution. In fact, she insists on “every detail.”45 She wants every sensual detail of the execution, as if she needs to experience it herself. She wants to know what he was wearing, what the weather was like, whether he was shivering, the color of his coat, whether it was fur-lined, if he noticed mud on his shoe, what his voice was like, and, most pointedly, “Did he look happy?”46 Without affirmation from Stepan, she insists that he must have been happy. The moment of death by hanging is marked by: A horrible thud! That’s all it took . . . one thud and he was plunged back into the joys of childhood! Do you remember his laugh? He used to laugh sometimes . . . for no reason at all. How young he was! He’s laughing now. . . . I know he is, his face pressed to the earth.47

Dora understands what Yanek realized in prison. This moment of death, a moment of tragedy and sorrow, is a moment of triumph, of liberation, and of joy. In death, by leaving this world, there is hope for a rebirth in his execution. With that weighty thud, Yanek has come full circle back to joy and happiness, but this is a joy and happiness much less childlike. It

162

John Randolph LeBlanc and William Paul Simmons

is keenly aware of the forlorn look of the children, aware of the heaviness of his duty, and, above all, it is content with solidarity with his comrades. Camus is clear: the regime made a murderer of a man who was not one. Yanek tried to find love; he tried to find freedom. Under the Czarist regime he can only look forward to what the Grand Duchess calls a “terrible love,” but, what he finds ultimately is a type of love and redemption in his own execution. On the scaffold, “at last my heart will be filled with love!”48 In living, the assassins find separation, but in death they can find solidarity. Camus, in The Rebel, shares with the historic and fictional Dora and Kaliayev the idea that dying on the scaffold without giving up one’s comrades, the undying brotherhood of the terrorist cell, is a key ingredient to happiness. Indeed, it is Dora who broaches the idea that the scaffold can bring an “even greater happiness.”49 LOVE, BEAUTY, AND JOY Is more than solidarity possible for the rebel, especially in a world dominated by state terror? What is the place of happiness, joy, and love in a world full of hatred? There is the hatred of the Czar and his acolytes toward the people, the hatred of the people for the Czar and his machinery of death, and the hatred that Stepan feels. These questions make up the main battleground among the characters of Les Justes. Each character wrestles with feelings of love, whether for a universal brotherhood that can only be achieved in the future, or for concrete individuals in the present. Beyond the hatred, then, there is a feeling of love and it ranges from the more universal love for fellow humans to the feelings of love between individuals, at least in solidarity. It is this love that makes individuals happy, even rebels about to kill. The conversation between Dora and Yanek, for us the focal point of the play, centers on the place of joy, beauty, and love in rebellion. In their discussion, the love of fellow humans emerges as inadequate. This is the love that Yanek has difficulty separating from hatred and revolution. Despite Dora’s repeated pleas, Yanek cannot separate out his love for her from the love of justice and revenge that fills their hearts. She asks if he would love her if she were not part of the Organization, carefree and pretty as she was at university. This kind of love demands that he put all this revolutionary activity out of his mind. She implores him: “Forget the scaffold, the writhing children. . . . Men who are whipped to death!” But he cannot forget all that if he is not to flinch in his terrorist activity. For her part, Dora cannot commit to a love outside of their revolutionary activity, either: “We are not of this world. We are the just. There is a warmth in the world, but it is not for us. . . . Oh, pity the just!”50

Terror, Nihilism, and Joy

163

Yanek believes that there can be something more, and in the pivotal moment of the play,51 he and Dora try to figure out what that might be. They do so in the context of both their revolutionary ideas (their shared commitment to “abstractions”) as well as their previous lives as happier-go-lucky college students (their embodied selves, capable of the joy of children). They see the world much like Camus did in his younger days. Their discussion begins with assassination and the scaffold, but they both are searching for love in a world of hatred. Yanek believes that he can kill the Grand Duke and find a place “beyond hatred!”52 Dora replies “Beyond? There is nothing beyond.” He disagrees: “Yes, there is. . . . There’s love.” Dora, however, remains unconvinced: “Love? No that’s not what’s needed.” Her concern is that love will stop them from carrying out their action. What follows is a discussion and exploration of two different types of love. It shows how love inevitably links abstract human commitments to tangible human bodies and the modes and orders of human being. The first type of love is that of abstract individuals, in this case, the peasants and the workers for whom they are fighting and who never play an active role on stage. The reduction of human beings to the abstract categories of “peasants” and “workers” does not completely hide from Dora, Yanek, and their comrades the suffering of real human beings who live those lives. This kind of love, therefore, mixes the abstract with the physical but, in the end, it is not a reciprocated love. The masses know nothing of the group’s activities, as the revolutionaries are secured in their apartment in Moscow.53 Yanek links this love with the ideals of romantic love, absolute because unrequited. Dora remarks that this is “an unhappy love.”54 She wants to believe in another type of love. Their world, however, a world that won’t allow children the simple feeling of joy, won’t allow the peasants, the workers, Dora, Yanek, or their contemporaries this kind of love. Dora resigns herself and Les Justes to a loveless fate While Yanek can only find one kind of love in rebellion, it is Dora who seeks to hold true to the love that includes beauty, joy, and happiness.55 She tries to anchor the rebellion in what Bartlett calls the immanent, Camus’s “here and now,” or that which appears before and envelops us. Abstractions are our creations, but they are nonetheless derivative of things and experiences at large in the world. In other words, the ideal remains the sun and the beach that Camus writes of in his notebooks and lyrical essays. Despite the tangibility of such places, at best they represent a dream and can only be seen flittingly, especially when the government has declared war on its people. The dreamlike quality speaks to a reversal of “reality” that we can find in the way Camus reversed the historical roles of Dora and Yanek in the play. Historically, Dora was the hardened, joyless revolutionary, while the historical Kaliayev, in his last letter before the assassination, articulates the very dream that is necessary for both life and a meaningful death. In this passage,

164

John Randolph LeBlanc and William Paul Simmons

worth quoting at length, he writes of this love and joy in terms very reminiscent of Camus’s early lyrical essays, but near the end of the passage, he balances it with the lucidity, self-criticism, and suffering of Camus’s rebel: Around me, with me and within me I feel today the friendly brilliant sun. It is as if I have thawed out of a mass of snow and ice, out of cold despondency, humility, out of pang for what has not yet been accomplished and sorrow over what is taking place. Today I want only the calm shining sky, only a little warmth and joy for my emaciated soul. I am overjoyed—I know not at what—I wander lightly and aimlessly along the streets, I gaze at the sun, at people, and I marvel at myself, at how easily I have emerged from a sense of wintry anxiety to a feeling of most confident foretaste of spring. Only a few days ago I seemed to lose courage and felt on the very verge of collapse, but today I am hale and hearty. . . . Perhaps I have revealed to you one of the most painful aspects of what we have lived through? But enough of that. Today I want to be carelessly happy and joyful, like this sun which is calling me outside under the azure canopy of the tenderly gracious sky. Keep well, all of you, my dear friends, you who are so severe with us and yet so warm, who criticize us and suffer with us. I salute your kind, child-like eyes, smiling at me so naively, like these white rays of the sun upon the melting snow.56

This childlike joy is barely possible for the revolutionary. If anything, it is an asymptotic ideal that can be approached but never reached as long as the empire remains intact. Recollecting summer and attaching its warmth to human joy can still serve as motivation, but this can only manifest as a second-best love in an environment riven with terror. It is a love found only in solidarity. It may be a terrible love, a second-best love, but it is a love grounded in connection with fellow human beings and acting on behalf of an idea of human beings, fighting for their access to the warmth of a summer’s day. Like the perfect summer’s day at the beach, however, it is a love always fragile, always at risk of being overwhelmed by hate, by shortcuts, by efficiency (Skuratov’s police force), or by a simple lack of fellow-feeling. This fragility is why, for Camus, love must anchor rebellion. As Bartlett writes, “When acts of rebellion are forgetful of the sense of wonder and connection with nature, then nature becomes simply a resource to be used against itself for its own destruction. . . Rebellion that abandons immanence becomes desiccated, joyless, violent, and destructive.”57 While the rebel cannot lose herself in abstraction and thereby forget immanence, the powers-that-be cannot clothe themselves in immanence (“that-be”) and forget that they too hold their positions, power, and authority according to a set of abstractions they have the material power to enforce. In other words, the intertwining of immanence, understood as embodiedness

Terror, Nihilism, and Joy

165

and situatedness, and abstraction is inescapable. Losing oneself or, more to the point, losing others in either immanence or abstraction is what is to be avoided. Camus seems to be suggesting that under some circumstances, the love found in solidarity among rebels is perhaps the only love that one can muster. For his part, Camus understands that position. CONCLUSION We began our discussion of the play, as the scholarship tends to do, with the debate between Yanek and Stepan over the compatibility of killing children in the progress of revolution with the aims of revolution itself. Neither character, Yanek the romantic revolutionary or Stepan the “nihilist” revolutionary, is adequate to carry the argument. Instead, Camus’s Dora, who may well be his voice here, gently leads them to the real issue: the possibility of happiness, love, and joy in a world where children have none of these. In resisting a world where children are left either to starve or to be “unjust,” Dora embodies Camus’s recognition at the beginning of The Rebel: “Rebellion engenders exactly the actions it is asked to legitimate. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary that rebellion finds its reasons within itself, since it cannot find them elsewhere. It must consent to examine itself in order to learn how to act.”58 Her lucidity derives in part from the fact that she must teach as well as act. It is in the process of the first that she finds a road to the second. We end, however, where this chapter began, with Simmons’s encounter with the Rohingya boys. In so doing, we follow Camus’s lead and plop down an anachronistic figure into the difficult conversation about terror and nihilism, state-led and otherwise. What if Dora were to replace Simmons as the interlocutor with the adolescent Rohingya boys whose lives and homes had been destroyed and who now seemed set on seeking weapons and revenge? Both Doras, the historical one and Camus’s amalgamation, exist in the terrorized environments that are in dire need of transformation, but the two Doras offer very different possibilities. The historical one, Dora Vladimirovna Brilliant, so hardened by her trauma and her life, sees value only in dying and killing for the revolution. We suspect that she would have encouraged the young men to become active in a movement, most likely starting with distributing information/propaganda to expose them to the risks and to test them and their loyalty. For her, as little life as there was before terrorism, there is much less left after terrorism. When Savinkov explained to the historical Dora that the party had ordered the termination of all terrorist activities, she responded with “tears in her voice. . . . ‘[S]o it’s all over with terrorist work?’” When he responded yes, “she rose

166

John Randolph LeBlanc and William Paul Simmons

and walked out without uttering a single word.”59 Thus, the historical Dora, no longer able to ground her actions or justifications in any sort of joy, might offer the same pointed reply to the Rohingya boys that Algerian revolutionary Yacef Saadi did while instructing three women about a suicide-bombing mission in 1956. One of the women objected “that there are also civilians, that is, women and children, in the places they must bomb.” After acknowledging that this is indeed the case, but that the French have subjected them to violence for over a century, Saadi concludes: “OK! Let’s get back to serious matters now: in front of you are three bombs, one for each of you.”60 It would be easy to dismiss Saadi’s remarks as mere “nihilism.” However, the labels “nihilism” and “terrorist” miss the relationship of this attitude and this course of action with trauma experienced (see Stepan and Saadi’s personal experiences) and the accompanying obliteration of the possibility of happiness, joy, or love of any kind. The apparently callous disregard of the humanity of others abandons the limit at which the rebel must at least pause and lucidly consider before acting. As the place where the body and abstraction meet, it is the limit for which the rebel must be willing to sacrifice and to take responsibility. It is a limit that Camus’s Dora recognizes. Camus’s Dora is both a revolutionary and a teacher of humanity. As teacher, she would be patient, gently trying to lead the Rohingya boys back in the direction of joy, happiness, and love as she does with Yanek and Stepan. As someone sharing their reality, she would not anticipate quick, peaceful results. Perhaps, she would engage in participatory art projects as Simmons did. But she would also know the asymptotic nature of aspirations to joy, happiness, and love in a terrorized 1905 Russia and, in our thought experiment, in a contemporary Rohingya refugee camp. Consequently, as a revolutionary, she would likely recognize that the best she may be able to do is to lead the boys in the direction she found and ultimately embraced. She would teach and have them consider the rebel’s dilemma carefully. They may well have to do what must be done, just as she requests to throw the next bomb, but at least their actions would be grounded in the kind of love available to them. To be sure, it is a second-best love, but it may be a love pointing toward the possibility that others might one day love and know the possibility of a joy that plays and needn’t destroy. In any case, their actions would be grounded in love rather than mere revenge or hatred. Perhaps, this is the most tragic part of the rebel and Rohingya experience: pace Simmons’s writings on joy even among human rights “victims”61 that, to be honest, such childlike joy is likely unattainable for most. Camus knew that the rebel must say “no” before she can say “yes.”62 He knew that joy, happiness, and love, along with the abstract commitment to body and spirit, form the link between the human and human possibility. This link forms a boundary that the rebel must not cross. Acts that seemingly disregard this boundary, whether a result of state action or done for the mere sake of

Terror, Nihilism, and Joy

167

“terror,” have no direction or meaning. But he also knew the difficulty of negotiating that boundary between the body and the spirit, the pain and the possibility—especially in the absence of official sanction—and the unlikelihood of a satisfying ending. Consequently, his Dora, who moments before had imagined Yanek on the gallows “happy,” ends by demanding the next bomb. NOTES 1. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963). 2. Albert Camus, “The Just Assassins,” in Caligula and Three Other Plays, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Penguin Classics, 1984): 117–72; Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: VintageKnopf, 1956). 3. Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). 4. Boris Savinkov, Memoirs of a Terrorist, trans. Joseph Shaplen (Millwood, NY: Kraus Reprint, 1972): 112. 5. Camus, Just Assassins, 135. 6. Ibid., 134. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid. (our emphasis). 9. For example, see Patrick Hayden, Camus and the Challenge of Political Thought: Between Despair and Hope (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 76–8; Paul George Neiman, “Camus on Authenticity in Political Violence,” European Journal of Philosophy 25, no. 4 (2017): 1569–87. 10. Similar to our reading, Jeffrey Isaac also stresses the “complementarity” between the characters’ views and also finds redeeming characteristics in Stepan. See Jeffrey Isaac, “Albert Camus on Tragedy and the Ambiguities of Politics,” in Between Terror and Freedom: Politics, Philosophy, and Fiction Speaking of Modernity, ed. Simona Goi and Frederick Michael Dolan (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006): 77ff. 11. Camus, Just Assassins, 137. 12. Ibid., 136–7. 13. Ibid., 148. 14. We are adding to recent secondary literature that problematizes the role of Dora in this play and of women in Camus’s works on rebellion in general. For instance, Jeffner Allen contends that the female characters in Camus’s works are invisibilized, or worse, and have no place in rebellion: “There is no suggestion that ‘invisible’ women, the women who have been shut out, as well as those who have been embalmed, robotized, and battered, can ‘raise rocks’ and move mountains.” “An Introduction to Patriarchal Existentialism: Accompanied by a Proposal for a Way out of Existential Patriarchy,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 8, no. 4 (1981): 451. Similarly, Jeffrey Isaac holds that Camus’s “conception of politics seems to reserve little space for the participation of women and, more important, associates

168

John Randolph LeBlanc and William Paul Simmons

woman with the distinctively private and unpolitical sphere of the family and love.” Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992): 233. However, see also Isaac, “Camus on Tragedy,” 2006. Against this reading and for more nuanced considerations of Dora in “The Just Assassins,” see Elizabeth Ann Bartlett, Rebellious Feminism: Camus’s Ethic of Rebellion and Feminist Thought (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Danielle Marx-Scouras, “Portraits of Women, Visions of Algeria,” in The Cambridge Companion to Camus, ed. Edward J. Hughes, 131–44 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). As far as we know, no one goes as far as we do in suggesting that Dora is Camus’s voice, in part because few recognize that he signals that she has been fictionalized by providing her with a different last name. 15. Camus, The Rebel, 251. 16. Camus, Just Assassins, 137. 17. Savinkov, Memoirs of a Terrorist, 42. 18. Ibid., 42–3. 19. Barlett, Rebellious Feminism, 198: n23. 20. Camus, Just Assassins, 123. 21. Ibid., 127. 22. Dora’s pedagogical function is also mentioned by Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992); Marx-Scouras “Portraits of Women,” 133. 23. Camus, Just Assassins, 129. 24. Ibid., 130. 25. Ibid., 145. 26. Ibid., 149. 27. Both Ève Morisi and Blanchot place this “I cannot,” which occurs in the middle of the play as its climax. Ève Morisi, “Staging the Limit: Albert Camus’s Just Assassins and the Il/legitimacy of Terrorism,” in Terrorism and Literature, ed. Peter C. Herman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018): 265; Blanchot, Infinite Conversations, 186–7. For Blanchot (187), inspired by his good friend Emmanuel Levinas, the “I cannot” is a commandment that derives from the proximity of the naked visage, “the nakedness that is man in proximity with death’s revelation.” For us, in a similar reading to Bartlett, Camus’s an-archical foundation that is productive of limits is not necessarily the face of the mortal other but found in a combination of solidarity with others and the lyrical beauty or immanence of nature. 28. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 29. We note that Blanchot makes a relevant and critical distinction between Camus’s Sisyphus and the rebel. The rebel or the slave is in a privileged position because they have “already succeeded—an infinite progress—in encountering a master” while “all the truth of Sisyphus is bound to his rock; a beautiful image of the ‘elementary’ that is within him and outside him, the affirmation of a self that accepts being entirely outside itself, delivered over and boldly entrusted to the strangeness of the outside.” It is in existing as “the space of nudity and emptiness” that Sisyphus miraculously “can find some primordial affirmation and joy.” In our Rohingya

Terror, Nihilism, and Joy

169

example, the boys who approached Simmons were saying no to their conditions and had a good idea of who their master was. This is a privileged position to the more marginalized Rohingya, including women, Hindus, and LGBT folks, who do not have the privilege of taking up weapons against their oppressor and would not be liberated by an armed struggle against the Myanmar military. Blanchot takes this one step further and argues that most of us would not try to communicate with someone lost in an infinite desert like Sisyphus. Blanchot references Marx’s ignorance of the lumpenproletariat here, because he is speaking from “an absolute distance—the loss of all relation” and thus would be “justified in once again raising a wall, thus avoiding the mirage and returning to a more stable and clearly defined form of communication?” (1993, 176). 30. Camus, Just Assassins, 139. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 155. 33. Ibid., 154; cf. Morisi, “Staging the Limit,” 277. 34. Camus, Just Assassins, 155. 35. Ibid., 156. 36. Abstraction versus immanence is a delicate balancing act that a rebel must walk. He does not provide the reader or audience member an easy solution. For example, the Grand Duchess begs Yanek to consider whether, by holding on to an abstract form of justice, he is speaking with the same voice as the Grand Duke. Camus, Just Assassins, 159. 37. Camus, Just Assassins, 158. 38. Ibid., 159. 39. Ibid., 160. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 161. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 169. 46. Ibid., 170 47. Ibid., 171. 48. Ibid., 161. 49. Ibid., 128. 50. Ibid., 147–8. 51. Eugène Kouchkine is one of the few commentators who sees this conversation as the cornerstone of the play. “Les justes: le tragique de l’amour et du renoncement,” in Camus et le lyrisme, ed. Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi and Agnès Spiquel, 161–71 (Paris: Editions SEDES, 1997). 52. Camus, The Just Assassins, 146. 53. Ibid.; cf. Morisi, “Staging the Limit,” 265. 54. Camus, Just Assassins, 146. 55. Cf. Bartlett, Rebellious Feminism, ch. 1. 56. Savinkov, Memoirs, 97–8.

170

John Randolph LeBlanc and William Paul Simmons

57. Bartlett, Rebellious Feminism, 9; cf. 115 and David Sprintzen, Camus: A Critical Examination (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998). 58. Camus, The Rebel, 10. 59. Savinkov, Memoirs, 178. 60. Marx-Scouras, “Portraits of Women,” 133. 61. William Paul Simmons, Joyful Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). 62. Camus, The Rebel, 14.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Allen, Jeffner. “An Introduction to Patriarchal Existentialism: Accompanied by a Proposal for a Way Out of Existential Patriarchy.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 8, no. 4 (1981): 450–65. Aronson, Ronald. Camus & Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Bartlett, Elizabeth Ann. Rebellious Feminism: Camus’s Ethic of Rebellion and Feminist Thought. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. de Beauvoir, Simone. Force of Circumstance. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966. Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation. Translated by Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Camus, Albert. “The Just Assassins.” In Caligula and Three Other Plays, translated by Stuart Gilbert, 117–72. New York: Penguin Classics, 1984. ———. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. Translated by Anthony Bower. New York: Vintage-Knopf, 1956. ———. Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage-Knopf, 1974. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Constance Garnett. Minneapolis: Lerner Publishing, 2015. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Hayden, Patrick. Camus and the Challenge of Political Thought: Between Despair and Hope. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Isaac, Jeffrey C. Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. ———. “Albert Camus on Tragedy and the Ambiguities of Politics.” In Between Terror and Freedom: Politics, Philosophy, and Fiction Speaking of Modernity, edited by Simona Goi and Frederick Michael Dolan, 71–86. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006. Kouchkine, Eugène. “Les justes: le tragique de l’amour et du renoncement.” In Camus et le lyrisme, edited by Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi and Agnès Spiquel, 161–71. Paris: Editions SEDES, 1997.

Terror, Nihilism, and Joy

171

The Last Czars. “The Boy.” Episode 2. Netflix, 45:00. July 3, 2019. Marx-Scouras, Danielle. “Portraits of Women, Visions of Algeria.” In The Cambridge Companion to Camus, edited by Edward J. Hughes, 131–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Matich, Olga. “Mapping St. Petersburgh.” UC-Berkeley. http:​/​/stp​​eters​​burg.​​berke​​ley​ .e​​du​/in​​dex​​-2​​.html​. Accessed June 20, 2020. Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. Montgomery, Geraldine. F. Noces pour femme seule: le féminin et le sacré dans l’oeuvre d’Albert Camus. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. Morisi, Ève. “Staging the Limit: Albert Camus’s Just Assassins and the Il/legitimacy of Terrorism.” In Terrorism and Literature, edited by Peter C. Herman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Neiman, Paul George. “Camus on Authenticity in Political Violence.” European Journal of Philosophy 25, no. 4 (2017): 1569–87. Rancière , Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Translated by Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Savinkov, Boris. Memoirs of a Terrorist. Translated by Joseph Shaplen. Millwood, NY: Kraus Reprint, 1972. Simmons, William Paul. Joyful Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Sprintzen, David. Camus: A Critical Examination. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.

Part IV

PEDAGOGY AND THE POLIS

Chapter 8

The Birth of Tragedy Political Theory and the Classroom W. King Mott

Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy depicts a struggle between the Apollonian desire for order and the Dionysian energy that profoundly disturbs. Within this tension, Nietzsche found beauty and the surest source for authenticity. Living in both places is the secret to living an authentic life, for “wherever the Dionysian prevailed, the Apollonian was checked and destroyed . . . [and] wherever the first Dionysian onslaught was successfully withstood, the authority and majesty of the Delphic god Apollo exhibited itself as more rigid and menacing than ever.”1 Moving that possibility into contemporary classrooms in American universities presents copious challenges, and few university professors make efforts to consider what may be at stake. And while Nietzsche offers tantalizing prospects for what will be birthed, professors, in large measure, do not. Enter Cecil Eubanks. This particular university professor has made a life engaging suffering so as to challenge anti-intellectualism and banality. Perhaps as important is his internal confrontation that operates concurrent to a struggle in the visible world. Professor Eubanks has long heralded the notion that the prophetic and the priestly, the Dionysian and the Apollonian, provide access into a life of the mind and spirit that is far from intellectual safety. Undergraduates and graduate students deserve this freedom as they refine themselves and their ideas. So where does this pedagogy originate? As a former student of Eubanks, I have specific memories of certain stories that remain linked to political theory. Those included here exemplify Professor Eubanks’s method of contextualizing Marxian and Hegelian philosophy during a graduate seminar given during the fall of 1988. It is very likely that they are replete with error as the hearing of a story and the retelling of a story are distinct experiences. But what remains after the note-taking and the examinations are done is the effect 175

176

W. King Mott

of this kind of pedagogy. It is the narrative voice that becomes, over time, one’s own voice. Eubanks’s pedagogy is informed by personal experience and vulnerability. That is the characteristic that makes him a master teacher. Reflection upon these philosophical ideas, and teaching them myself for thirty years, has expanded the meaning and adulterated the original tale even more but the authority of the voice has not wavered. What remains is the same tension that Nietzsche so wildly proclaimed. Others, too, have stumbled upon this tension. This examination into Professor Eubanks’s pedagogy links his stories to poetry, theology, and essays written by others who also choose to reveal their heart along with their mind. Did these poets, theologians, writers, and teachers seek this voice or did circumstances necessitate it? Regardless, they share the experience of conscious suffering, of pathos, and the concurrent liberation of their respective creative voices. Cecil Eubanks, Paul Monette, Mary Daly, and Audre Lorde find their inspiration in brilliant anxious wildness connected to a discipline of rigorous study and reflection. A pattern of intellectual consciousness emerges as they struggle to merge intellectual rigor and existential suffering. And they all take the next crucial step: exposing themselves in telling about that process. What each produces is evidence of Nietzsche’s thesis in The Birth of Tragedy, and it is also one way to understand Eubanks’s pedagogical philosophy. Toni Morrison writes in the same way, and she uses her first novel to illustrate how challenging it can be to accept a life mired in tension and pain. Again, it is even more difficult to put that discovery into public view. There are circumstances, places, and communities where tension and anxiety are constant; after all, survival demands attention to what is, and quite often what is not, present. Morrison in The Bluest Eye depicts a loneliness and hurt exaggerated to illustrate the connection between the interior struggle for survival and the equally demanding external experience of being black in racist American society. One of the most memorable characters, Pecola Breedlove, reels through the town. “The damage was total. She spent her days, her tendril sap-green days, walking up and down, up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear.”2 Even more revealing is the contortion of the black body that Morrison details. “Elbows bent, hands on her shoulder, she flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly.”3 Pecola lives in the awful beauty revealed in between a world that despises her and her own self-loathing that is born in systemic discrimination. The place Morrison creates in this character, once sounded out, is also a potential source for her unique expression. It is difficult to accept suffering as a gift. Many have tried it; the ones who cannot escape it, like Pecola, have a unique tragic opportunity. Where there is dissonance set in culture and lived experience there may be advantageous moments for the ideal that Nietzsche

The Birth of Tragedy

177

so dearly desired. In a Western world that is heteronormative, Christocentric, raced, and male-centric, “outsiders” experience incongruence all the time. The hegemony of Western culture makes this experience acute. It is argued here that the circumstances of oppression (external and internal) surely result in suffering, and they also can force creativity and imagination that are not mainstream friendly. What follows is a recollection of stories told by Eubanks. The stories are expanded by illustrating like-minded individuals who experiment with combining suffering and joy. Paul Monette, Mary Daly, and Audre Lorde each tell of hardship and the effect of pain influencing creative work. Monette rails against those who sentence him to a lonely death separate from the world. Daly confronts institutions claiming ownership of God, and Lorde literally gives it back to those who want her erased. Professor Eubanks told this story while his students were reading from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. The conversation turned into one about Marxian alienation. This story also provides an introduction into Paul Monette’s Elegies. I was a freshman at the University of Michigan on a full scholarship. I had no knowledge of college or education as my family was not part of that world, perhaps they were even hostile to it. The first semester ended, I had done well, and I heard talk of the upcoming break. The kids around spoke of going home and holiday plans and all sorts of things that sounded completely foreign. I had no way to go home, perhaps not even a home at that point in my life. So I planned to stay in a dorm with thousands of rooms. Collecting food and water and such, I began my month-long sojourn. My mother, unaware of college breaks and semesters, herself grew concerned and phoned the president of the University of Michigan to ensure that her son was well. The president, of course, knew that the dorms were closed and students gone . . . young Cecil however was holed up in that maze somewhere. The President sent campus police to fetch me, the chase and fear were mind blowing. The officers took me to the President’s mansion which is where I spent breaks between semesters thereafter.4

Monette found himself locked outside of mainstream society in the blur of HIV death where most considered the sort of suffering unique to AIDS, the mark of Kaposi’s sarcoma, as God’s punishment upon a debased and profoundly evil human person. There can be no dispute that the medical establishment and the Reagan White House not only ignored an epidemic but also participated in its advancement through benign neglect.5 Monette reacts and writes as a targeted enraged outsider, and as a trained writer and poet. AIDS was systematically devastating to gay men in America, and it was used to prove depravity and moral corruption. Monette found creative space inside

178

W. King Mott

oppression as the target of hate and willful ignorance. Alienated by force and death, Monette composed Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog.6 Love Alone is Monette’s life revealed to the world. And this beautiful act is inextricably bound to suffering. How can such expression manifest under the circumstances of Rog’s death? Roger was the one great companion who expanded Monette’s ability to believe in love. All humans know their great loves; they are complicated. As Rog was taken by the agonizing sickness of AIDS, Monette nursed and waited for death. He lived without attending to time toward the end and by his own remarks acknowledged separation from the “normal” world. The Elegies lacks grammatical guides. It is impossible to rely upon established patterns of reading that enable the eye and the breath to normalize text and meaning. To “read” these elegies the reader must actually speak them aloud. Only in active participation with the tragedy, when an elegy transforms into a story, can a reader, now speaker, find Monette. There were early critics who actually complained about inaccessibility. That is the point. There is no political, social, economic, or moral explanation for what is happening to Monette and Rog and the gay community. Alienation is complete. Monette turns toward that source of tragedy steeled by passion and intellect. He uses a piece from Edna St. Vincent Millay to stoke the fires: “Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath, nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone; yet many a man is making friends with death even as I speak, for the lack of love alone.”7 The space where irrational death crashes into intellectual insight is where Monette is most effective. Within Gardenias, Monette uses a shared gardenia plant and the last bloom of the season to insist that it is possible to live when the beloved is dead. He implores Rog and the reader/speaker to smell it good now Rog it’s the last one . . . pain is not a flower pain is a root and its work is underground where the moldering proceeds the bones of all our joy winded and rained and nothing grows a whole life’s love that longed to be an orchard forced to lie like an onion secret sour in the mine of pain the ore veined out there’s just these tunnels shot with roots but then we were never gardeners.8

What comes from Monette’s forced exile is magnanimous and capacious. The elegies are weaponized to force readers/speakers to open themselves to suffering as a means to creativity and communication. The wild insight into the world of AIDS deaths provides readers and seekers a path that can be used to educate and to inform people outside the gay community about this particular disease. “I promise you all the last gardenias Rog but they can’t go on like this they’ve stopped they know the only garden we’ll ever be is us and it’s all winter they tried but oh the ice of my empty arms my poor potato

The Birth of Tragedy

179

dreams.”9 Monette experiences Rog’s death as a stigmatized person, and, yet, the death of a loved one is universal. So, while there is no public outcry coming from religious or political elites, Monette confronts this alienation and also manages to create through it. In fact, his voice becomes fierce. There is burgeoning solidarity coming from within the gay community, and the unique isolation of queer death magnifies alienation. Yes, Monette is utterly alone with his mind and Rog’s corpse, but the impact of his voice transcends this particular moment. What comes to Monette in this whirlwind of chaos is a unique voice and manner of expression. The source of this intellectual and emotional expression is both chosen and a condition of oppression, but the effect is a unique sound that can communicate pathos to a mourning community and the greater world. It is possible that mainstream individuals will also have access to the epidemic and the people at the epicenter of that disease. As the voice comes from inside the suffering, it is trustworthy, and as such the Elegies transfers his experience into worlds untouched by the plague. Monette captures the imagination of gay people and transforms their experience into one infused with dignity. He likewise manages to link the suffering with the straight world. This is something that “outsiders” have always accomplished for the mainstream. The acute alienation of Paul Monette assists in bringing AIDS activism into the world. The pathos of vulnerability carries Monette, similar to Eubanks, into a relationship with readers and students. Exposure at this level ensures a powerful connection to others. Eubanks told another story to the graduate seminar in 1988, and on this occasion, it was during a time when the students struggled with the Marxian notion of homo faber and the argument that tools formed the human. He used this story to elevate and to provide access to this idea. The story introduces Mary Daly and her monumental work to change the tools of Christian theology. I had accepted a job at General Motors in a production line during one summer following my first year at the University of Michigan. The job details are not important, but the experience of walking into that space and finding my workstation in a massive line of machines and people is hard to explain. It was a huge building with an assembly line that extended far beyond what I could see. Mass production on an industrial scale is bewildering. It took me a few hours to learn the immediate logistical process and the physical movements that defined my job. Once that learning curve was mastered my mind began to consider larger circles of the process. I would watch others and other machines so to avoid the fatigue and boredom brought by the repetition of a task. Within a few days it occurred to me to speak to my supervisor about an ingenuous plan that would shorten the process and enable just a few folks to accomplish the same work. I rushed to meet him during the prescribed break. Informing him of my thinking

180

W. King Mott

brought a harsh and powerful response. I don’t recall exactly what he said, but I learned that these other people had lives and families that depended upon these jobs and that I should mind myself and do what is expected and no harm would come to me. The system created a kind of thinking that was linked to economic uncertainty. I returned to my spot more fearful than before.10

Mary Daly entered Boston College, a Jesuit institution confident in a particular creation story and a white male Jesus, as a member of the faculty in 1966. She would eventually refuse to admit men into her upper division theology courses as they altered the power dynamics in the discussion of radical feminist theology. Professor Daly was charged with violating Title IX of the American Civil Rights Act, and the institution attempted to de-tenure and fire her. Daly argued that Christian theology was harmful to women. She chose formation over deformation and fought an oppressive system of theological control. Daly lived in a space where everything that she experienced was an enemy. She found that prayer itself was debilitating and constructed as a colonizing force. She encountered a patriarchy that sought not only to silence her investigation into the male-centrism of Christian theology, a theology that obscured her from Her, but also to imprison her into a form that satisfied the established theological canon. Catholic Christianity is not an abstract idea; it is a tangible political, economic, and social construction. Roman Catholicism has sculpted human life into a form obedient to priests and worldly authority for millennia. Challenging that institutionalized power required that Daly first encounter herself. Daly’s Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism links the female body to the female spirit.11 The possibility that a female person could have a unique link to Jesus had been obliterated and punished by those who sought to bind women to a limited and controlled role in society. It is this condition that creates a constant tension for Daly, provoking her to use the systematic tools of theology to deconstruct and expose the swindle. The result of this experience and intellectual creativity is a blinding revision of Christian theology. It is not only an intellectual deconstruction; Daly speaks to the living who may be numb to oppression having survived it for long. “In the Sado-Ritual we find, first, an obsession with purity. This obsession legitimates the fact that the women who are the primary victims of the original rites are erased physically as well as spiritually.”12 Revealing the personal experience that every female understands regarding her body is the step that brings vulnerability into the debate. Every single woman will know the narrative of virginity. Perhaps, using this outsider perspective, Daly helps women to learn who controls it. Daly tells of a systemic effort enforced over millennia that is singularly purposed to de-legitimize women. She speaks to Hags/Spinsters as a potential

The Birth of Tragedy

181

force for change who can alter the way power is expressed in contemporary society. Daly refers to herself as a radical feminist and discovers in that condition a voice similar to the one heard in Monette’s lament. Gyn/Ecology is heavy with flaming revision and the sort of claims that can be made only by those living the recovery experience. “This triune god is one act of eternal self-absorption/self-love. . . . The Processions of Divine Persons is the most sensational one-act play of the centuries, the original Love Story, performed by the Supreme All Male Cast.”13 Like young Cecil Eubanks on the assembly line, Daly awakens to a contradiction that causes her to understand that she is actually an abused sacrifice. Her life has already been offered to the male god as something necessary to undo the harm of her sex. The web of deceit and violence is so profound that women themselves are often brought into the role of enforcing the rules. It is a bitter moment when she sees and understands the cost of reclamation. Perhaps this act, too, brings the voice and drive for telling the stories that, in turn, ignite the conflagration for others. Daly writes, “Women who are willing to make the Journey of becoming must indeed recognize the fact of possession by the structures of evil and by the controllers and legitimators of these structures.”14 The reclamation of self is a common experience for those who choose to engage the source of personal suffering and anxiety. It is the process of liberation. Oppression by social structures and systems imposes economic, religious, gender, and sexual boundaries with severe penalties for those who transgress. Daly withstood those penalties and developed a stronger critical voice. Daly and Eubanks channeled the results of their respective encounters with suffering into reformed theology and teaching. What is created stands apart from ordinary experience and tradition. Make no mistake, this is an awful process; few choose it, and some have no choice. Daly writes, “However possessed males may be within patriarchy, it is their order; it is they who feed on women’s stolen energy. . . . It is women ourselves who will have to expel the Father from ourselves, becoming our own exorcists.”15 The same could be said of all under consideration in this essay. Eubanks shared this story when speaking of revolution and the choices that humans make to act contrary to law or traditional structures of political order. Civil disobedience requires courage. Audre Lorde certainly found courage as she learned to thrive in the small spaces permitted by privileged individuals. Lorde introduced the notion that would come to be known as code-switching. She would begin to flesh out intersectionality as a result of her inability to find satisfaction and connection in any one place. First, the story. There was at the end of every workday at the General Motors Plant a liminal time when men and women transitioning across the lines of “on” or “off” could

182

W. King Mott

find themselves in altered space. One of those moments came most afternoons at shift change when the western sun was setting over the top of the huge buildings and even larger spaces of parked trucks and cars. The sun would gleam into the eyes of those leaving and coming in alike, but the real glow wasn’t the brightness of the sun. There was a certain man, the sort of man that everyone believed that they knew, but I’m not sure anyone really did. He would jump up on top of a parked car or stand in the bed of a pick-up and turning toward the sun so that his silhouette was outlined with red and orange light would shout at the top of his lungs while shooting the bone with both hands: “Fuck you General Motors; fuck you General Motors.” It was delirious and a haunted moment felt by all and understood fully by very few. The shop would soon start to buzz again and the boilermakers were drunk on the other side with great gusto.16

Audre Lorde became radical so that she could survive. It was impossible to live inside the crevices of so many different intersections without changing the limitations of identity politics. Awakening to an existential threat moved her into the category of radical reformer, and even social pariah. But she withstood that attack and turned her life’s work toward exposing anyone who used privilege to quiet dissent. “Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is not an academic skill.”17 Boldness was necessary, and that is exactly what Lorde accomplished. Lorde relates in critical essays, poetry, and video her discomfort with standard interpretations of the marginalized. Choosing to identify as a radical black lesbian, Lorde certainly fought along the established lines of marginalized and stigmatized groups. She adds another layer to the activism, however, by directing attention toward the division operating unnoticed within each of these political communities. The apparent lack of awareness provoked Lorde into understanding that “difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.”18 Consequences for dissent among the dissenters would include a kind of outsider status that many have experienced, but Lorde was the first to deconstruct, to write about, and to use as a basis for action. One of Lorde’s most memorable poems, “There Is No Hierarchy of Oppressions,” provides the clearest evidence of her internal struggle meeting the “internal” struggle of outsiders.19 The extension of her critique to the radical groups themselves is evidence of a kind of insight brought about in the vulnerable space of honest anxiety. Black, lesbian, mother, woman, poor—all of these realities constitute an identity that can easily coalesce into another set of rules and guidelines for behavior. Lorde objected loudly to “being” any of these things without also “being” all of them. Calling things as they are

The Birth of Tragedy

183

experienced and as they are felt requires courage. This is the civil disobedience for the civilly disobedient: “I simply do not believe that one aspect of myself can possibly profit from the oppression of any other part of my identity. I know that my people cannot possibly profit from the oppression of any other group which seeks the right to peaceful existence.”20 Similar to the disgruntled worker from the General Motors Plant, Lorde turned toward an interior intuition and turned away from the crowd that could champion only a part of her. Those in the groups already fighting the establishment took umbrage with the argument that the women’s movement or the civil rights movement was not enough. Lorde disagreed. She would find herself not queer enough in lesbian circles and not Black enough in the Black community. It is easy to imagine yielding to an oppressed group’s call for solidarity. Clearly Black power, women’s rights, and LGBT rights needed loyalty from their respective activists, and the accomplishments that were beginning to happen provided further reason to retreat into the cover of a monolithic group. But Lorde would not give up this new ground: “Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being.”21 Eubanks, like Lorde, teaches action in the world through the many illustrations that political theory provides for personal reflection. He introduces ideas not only from the canon but also from those outside sanctioned social conduct. Even those who are now part of Western Political Theory (Marx, in this particular example) were considered radicals in their lifetimes, and remain so today. Eubanks has mastered many of the qualities that mark an accomplished academic career. But he also has chosen to allow his experiences to move his pedagogy into places where he reveals how vulnerable reality can be when attentive to tragedy: expulsion, exploitation, manipulation, and survival. Eubanks’s pedagogy is similar to what moved Nietzsche to consider the “transvaluation of all values,” written about in the deeply controversial The Antichrist. Professor Eubanks’s artful pedagogy comes from a refined mind that is trained and nimble. It is equally sourced from the places of insecurity and vulnerability. It is this combined possibility that evades so many professors. The academy claims disinterest and reliance upon a canon. There is no error in that posture, but there is precious little life either. Certainly, Professor Eubanks learned about the limitations of reason through his experiences; that he would subsequently attach the same dynamic to a classroom is quite amazing. So, Eubanks tells stories to students that reveal aspects of his moments of great indecision and uncertainty. He also illustrates the great risks made by

184

W. King Mott

most philosophers. The stories are experienced by students as a reprieve from the focused attention and note-taking at first, but it is soon clear that something else is happening. It is certain that these stories are much more than a distraction or a technique used to relieve tension. The good life presents itself as an idea, and this possibility is real because Eubanks and his students actually begin to experience an integration of body, mind, and spirit. Paul Monette writes about a time when all reality was torn open and Kaposi sores grew on young skin. There are facts in the Elegies that bring each reader to a level a pathos that inscribes the messages upon the human soul. Mary Daly could barely stand upright, much less bow her head and pray, while the god of power and might was scripted by legions of manipulative men. The priest class wanted to own all of her and to control not only her mind but her body. The stories that she told about a recovery and decolonization shatter the most obstinate believer. In fact, few “believers” will dare read her work. Audre Lorde moved a critical distance away from the experience of being ripped into bits so as to please the groups advocating on her behalf. Insisting upon wholeness and integration Lorde pleads for us all to examine our claims of privilege. Each of these fierce individuals provides insight into Eubanks’s methods for teaching which are also the way that he lives his life. Monette, Daly, Lorde, and Eubanks come from different life experiences and forms of expression, but all are linked to a sacred humility that originates from a genuine reconciliation of one’s own life. Recognizing what is true for each results in a diaspora for the human soul. When this pathos is combined with the hard-earned lessons of discipline something mysterious happens. Without these two agents working together the easiest path for Monette was victim; Daly, obedience; Lorde, singular advocacy; Eubanks, intellectual elitism. None chose that way, and now generations of individuals unfamiliar with what can happen when passion and reason comingle have teachers who can be midwife to their hidden and unexamined souls.

NOTES 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (Chicago: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform, 2018), 12. 2. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Vintage Press, 2007), 27. 3. Ibid., 28. 4. Cecil Eubanks, Unpublished Lecture (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University, Fall 1988). 5. Michael Spector, The New Yorker Magazine, “The Benevolent Rage of Larry Kramer” (May 28, 2020).

The Birth of Tragedy

185

6. Paul Monette, Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988). 7. Ibid., preface. 8. Ibid., 8. 9. Ibid., 9. 10. Cecil Eubanks, Lecture, Fall 1988. 11. Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978). 12. Ibid., 109. 13. Ibid., 39. 14. Ibid., 38. 15. Ibid., 2. 16. Cecil Eubanks, Lecture, Fall 1988. 17. Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House (New York: Penguin Books, 2018), 217. 18. Ibid. 19. Audre Lorde, I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lord (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 20. Ibid., 212. 21. Lorde, The Master’s Tools, 217.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978. Eubanks, Cecil. Unpublished Lectures on Hegel and Marx. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University, 1988. Lorde, Audre. I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writing of Audre Lorde. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Lorde, Audre. The Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle The Master’s House. New York: Penguin Books, 2018. Monette, Paul. Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Vintage Press, 2007. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Antichrist. New York: Alba & Tromm Publishing, 2010. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Chicago: Createspace Independent Publishing Program, 2018.

Chapter 9

Political Philosophy as Apprenticeship and Practice David D. Corey

Political philosophy seems to have fallen on hard times. Though plenty of academics in philosophy and political science departments still lay claim to the field, those who actually have something illuminating to say about our political world are few and far between. We have no modern-day Plato or Aristotle, no Hobbes or Hegel, not even a Hannah Arendt or a Michael Oakeshott to offer us much-needed perspective. Why is this? Why are we more likely to learn something fresh about politics today from elite journalists, sociologists, and psychologists than from political philosophers? What is going on in our undergraduate and graduate curricula that stunt the development of political philosophy? Why are our professional journals filled more with articles about the history of political philosophy than with political philosophy itself? These are hard questions to answer, but they nevertheless deserve attention. In my view, something has gone wrong—or rather many things have gone wrong—with the kind of pedagogy that is likely to make political philosophy possible. Our pedagogy has been corrupted by those who undervalue as well as those who overvalue the great texts of the discipline. It has been undercut by the overly cynical and suspicious. And it has too often been shaped by apologists, activists, and ideologues rather than those who take the fundamental questions of politics seriously. In this chapter, I want to describe a solid political-philosophical pedagogy and to respond to some of the distracting ideas and practices that now get in its way. In so doing, I hope to show how political philosophy might once again become valued and practiced.

187

188

David D. Corey

THE IDEA OF APPRENTICESHIP By far the best way to begin the practice of political philosophy is to apprentice oneself to the tradition. Why? Why look to the past instead of starting fresh, seeking insights of one’s own? The answer will be obvious to anyone who understands what traditions actually are and how they function pedagogically. Traditions are literally a “handing down,” an inheritance from one generation to the next (trans—“cross” + dare—“to give” → tradere—“to deliver”). In them, we find recorded ideas, diverse ways of seeing and knowing, and also practices that have been found repeatedly to yield desirable results. Traditions thus save us from error in profligate experimentation and set us on a promising path from the start. An example will crystallize the point. In the domain of philosophical reflection on war there is a body of thought known as the “just war tradition,” which stretches as far back as St. Augustine of Hippo and forward to numerous writers today who self-consciously analyze war in its terms and categories. The value of this tradition not only as a body of doctrine but also (and more importantly) as a pedagogy for the novice inquirer will become clear if we imagine putting an identical question to someone schooled in, and someone not schooled in, its ways. To the unschooled novice, we might ask the simple question, “Was World War II a just war?” How will the novice go about arriving at an answer? What is likely to be the response? Probably the causes of the war will be considered—the evil of the enemy and the terrible costs of doing nothing—and the novice will pronounce the war just. But now imagine putting the same question to someone schooled in the just war tradition, and what kind of answer is likely? A war can be just or unjust in three major senses: the justice (or not) of entering the war (“jus ad bellum”), the justice of one’s conduct in the war (“jus in bello”), and the justice of conduct after the war (“jus post bellum”). Moreover, these diverse considerations of justice do not always line up. For instance, a war might be just ad bellum, but not in bello—as was arguably the case with World War II. It may be just post bellum but not in the initial going to war. Further still, each of these three dimensions of justice houses numerous subdimensions, which all bear directly on the question of justice. The question of jus ad bellum, for instance, contains sub-questions about “just cause,” “legitimate authority,” “last resort,” and the “likelihood of success.” Thus, the student who reflects on war in light of the tradition of just war thinking has, ready to hand, a highly differentiated, expertly articulated sense of the conceptual terrain. He or she learns to pursue his or her questions in a far more penetrating way than a novice ever could. A number of quick points about traditions are here worth stressing. One is that traditions are not—or not necessarily—constraining. Students often act

Political Philosophy as Apprenticeship and Practice

189

today as if traditions are but a body of rules (usually prohibitions), made up by someone else, in order to limit what can be said or done. But this is a woefully inadequate understanding of traditions. In the aforementioned example, the student equipped with the just war tradition is in a real sense freer than the student without it. He is free from ignorance, free to inquire fruitfully into profoundly important questions of concern to himself and society. Second, traditions are not simply somebody else’s creation. They are almost always the work of many hands and frequently are composed of conflicting ideas and possibilities. Moreover, traditions come alive only when they are appropriated and applied by us to ever-changing historical realities. Traditions are thus ours as much as they are someone else’s. Like a piece of property handed down through generations, they fall to us to use or not use as we think best. This leads to a final point about traditions: there is nothing inherent in traditions that requires them to be static. Rather they welcome improvement as those who take them up adapt them to their needs. Traditions do not, in other words, declare apodictically what is true or right in any given domain, but rather engage the apprentice in a kind of pedagogy that is fluid and evolving. The apprentice listens and learns. A high degree of deference is no doubt appropriate toward well-tested ideas and practices. And yet change is always possible within traditions, and it is we who get to be the agents of change. ANTI-APPRENTICESHIP Students who miss out on the benefits of apprenticeship generally fall into three basic groups: the logicians, the compulsively hygienic, and the wouldbe masters of suspicion. To the first group belong those whose initial exposure to philosophy typically occurs in an “analytic” environment. They take classes where they receive not an apprenticeship to their teachers or to the great masters so much as a basic set of analytical tools centering on logic. Their goal as students and later as practitioners is to apply their tools, like so many instruments of torture, to contemporary political beliefs and practices. Typically, they enjoy tearing down and debunking more than building up or maintaining. The word “fallacy” is ever on their lips. One can often spot these students by the wildly outlandish examples they invent in order to press a point—a train, a switch in the tracks, the death of an innocent child versus the obliteration of a densely populated city. They invent examples in part because they have little relevant experience to consult either firsthand or through texts. They invent also because they lack an appropriate reverence for reality; ideas are like so many chess pieces to be moved around according to rules of logic; and “wisdom” consists merely in making interesting moves. For these students, the idea of apprenticeship to tradition, one that stretches

190

David D. Corey

back beyond Russell, Wittgenstein, and Moore, seems an absurd waste of time. What they want is not an education in ways of understanding political life, but a training, a crash course in the latest tools of the trade. Quite different are the compulsively hygienic. They know about the tradition of political philosophy but refuse to come into close contact with it, because they fear contamination. These are the students who assume that traditional ideas and practices must be somehow imperfect or outmoded. And yet it is difficult to determine precisely where error lies. Thus, fearing that past misconceptions may somehow insinuate themselves into their minds, they deem it best to jettison tradition altogether (as if this were possible) and to do all their thinking on their own, reasoning from the ground up, as it were. As I see it, the “compulsively hygienic” come in two varieties, one Cartesian, the other Millian. The first regards tradition as little more than a body of unexamined opinions standing in the way of a proper quest for certainty: “As regards all the opinions to which I had until now given credence, I could not do better than to try to get rid of them once and for all, in order to replace them later on, either with other ones that are better, or even with the same ones once I had reconciled them to the norms of reason.”1 Thus writes Descartes. The Millian variety is similar, but in addition to the search for truth, there is also deep anxiety about authenticity. “Human nature is not a machine,” writes Mill, “to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.”2 Again, the hygienic concern is that a sustained apprenticeship to tradition might stifle one’s authentic self, one’s inward genius and originality. In terms of political philosophy, the concern would be that one’s original “take” on politics, one’s unique perspective, might be crowded out by the effort to conform to tradition. Finally, the would-be “masters of suspicion.” This is a phrase coined by Paul Ricoeur to describe the thought of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. But I use it here in a looser sense. Would-be masters of suspicion are students who refuse to apprentice themselves to tradition because they suppose they already know the single most important thing about tradition, namely, that it tells lies about man’s real nature and motives, usually for self-interested reasons. Of course, the tradition of political philosophy contains much salutary and edifying talk about the summum bonum and the common good, about the mastery of virtues both moral and intellectual, and about natural law and divine providence. But what really motivates human beings is nothing so exalted. It is more like the desire for material well-being (Marx), or power (Nietzsche), or sex and pleasure (Freud and Bentham). Because the tradition thus traffics in lies, apprenticing oneself to it necessarily signals a disposition fundamentally opposed to genuine philosophy. Interestingly, the would-be

Political Philosophy as Apprenticeship and Practice

191

masters of suspicion do not typically abandon the tradition of political philosophy as their hygienic counterparts do. Rather, they devote considerable energy to “unmasking” it and “deconstructing” it in order to reveal its many “illusions.” They therefore know the tradition both inside and out (or suppose they do), yet their disposition toward it is markedly different from the spirit of apprenticeship. Anti-apprenticeship in all its varieties involves a prodigious arrogance, a vast overestimation of the powers of the individual to see and to understand here and now without the aid of past discoveries or practices of learning. Of course, there is often something good behind the anti-traditional spirit, which explains its enduring attraction to young minds. Many errors have indeed sprung from flawed logic and a lack of rigor in argumentation; thus, analytic philosophy has its place. There are indeed dangers of intellectual contamination, as when we assent to commonly held beliefs that turn out to be false. And a certain degree of suspicion is, no doubt, appropriate when studying human beings, especially in their political aspect. But as reasonable as these justifications may seem, anti-apprenticeship remains an ill-bargain for the student of political philosophy, because it tends to throw out the essential with the nonessential, the true with the false, the useful with the useless. The problem is that the tradition of political philosophy is not simply (or even mostly) a tradition of errors. It is more like a tradition of luminous insights and truths interspersed, no doubt, with errors, exaggerations, and omissions. The challenge, therefore, is not to escape from tradition, but rather to engage it in a way that is productive, to learn from it what one can while trying to be clear-minded about its defects. The advantages of doing this are immeasurable, as the example from the just war tradition already demonstrates. Just as one cannot write without words and genres, and one cannot sing without notes and melodic patterns, so one cannot think without engaging in the ideas and structures of traditions of thought. To engage in political philosophy is thus to engage a tradition of political philosophy whether one likes it or not. The question then becomes how to do this well. A CLOSER LOOK AT APPRENTICESHIP: IMAGES, TEACHINGS, AND METHOD Having considered some of the intellectual obstacles to apprenticeship, I want to take a closer look at its substance. What does apprenticeship involve? A valued teacher once told me I could spend my time with the tradition of political philosophy either searching out things to “problematize” or searching for beauty and truth wherever they may appear. So too with academic writing: I could either focus on the negative—pointing out other people’s mistakes—or

192

David D. Corey

engage positively with the tradition in such a way as to tease out and illuminate the best insights it has to offer. For the most part I have taken the second path, and I have never regretted it, largely because of the cumulative effect this has had on my disposition as a scholar, but also, frankly, because of the effect it has had on my day-to-day experience with the world. When one apprentices oneself to political philosophy in a spirit of charity and gratefulness rather than suspicion, one of the first things one sees are the lush and fecund images handed down to us from the past. In Plato’s Republic alone: the image of the “tripartite soul,” the “allegory of the cave,” the “divided line,” the five distinct soul-types with their unique psychological traits. One could go on and on. Beyond Plato: the image of the “City of God” and the “City of Man”; of “inferno,” “purgatorio,” and “paradiso”; of a “state of nature” and a “body politic”; and the image—much more recently—of a “veil of ignorance.” Images do tremendous work in political philosophy, and none of these images is merely flat or static. On the contrary, each is profoundly generative, designed to encourage and facilitate sustained reflection, even as we come to appreciate the ultimate inadequacy of the images themselves. Images in political philosophy are, in short, powerfully pedagogical. But political philosophy is much more than mere images; it is also a body of teachings, more or less plainly articulated, about the nature of politics as a perennial yet variable phenomenon, and about the possibilities and limits of political association under different historical conditions. Sometimes the teachings of political philosophers seem difficult to grasp. One has to strain to make sense of them. But this “straining” is often synonymous with learning itself. The late British philosopher R. G. Collingwood captured this aspect of apprenticeship nicely: The reader, on his side, must approach his philosophical author precisely as if he were a poet, in the sense that he must seek in his work the expression of an individual experience, something which the writer has actually lived through, and something which the reader must live through in his turn by entering into the writer’s mind with his own. To the basic and ultimate task of following or understanding his author, coming to see what he means by sharing his experience, the task of criticizing his doctrine, or determining how far it is true and how far false, is altogether secondary. A good reader, like a good listener, must be quiet in order to be attentive; able to refrain from obtruding his own thoughts, the better to apprehend those of the writer; not passive, but using his activity to follow where he is led, not to find a path of his own. A writer who does not deserve this silent, uninterrupting attention does not deserve to be read at all.3

Apprenticeship, then, does not mean racing through a list of texts in order to approve or disapprove of their teachings. Nor is it “critical thinking,” as this

Political Philosophy as Apprenticeship and Practice

193

phrase is bandied about in our universities today. Instead, it must proceed from the initial assumption that the greatest authors actually have something insightful to teach us, that if they were alive today, they would probably understand us better than we would understand them. Still, even when one strains in earnest to grasp the teachings of great texts, there will be times when one simply cannot understand. The teachings seem ultimately too obscure or complicated to follow. This feeling of discomfiture is also captured well in Collingwood’s account: What we can get by reading any book is conditioned by what we bring to it; and in philosophy no one can get much good by reading the works of a writer whose problems have not already arisen spontaneously in the reader’s mind. Admitted to the intimacy of such a man’s thought, he cannot follow it in its movement, and soon loses sight of it altogether and may fall to condemning it as illogical or unintelligible, when the fault lies neither in the writer’s thought nor in his expression, nor even in the reader’s capacities, but only in the reader’s preparation. If he lays down the book, and comes back to it ripened by several years of philosophical labour, he may find it both intelligible and convincing.4

How often have students had this experience of finding an author’s conclusions unintelligible only to return years later to find them perfectly clear? As a colleague of mine recently remarked: “I used to be highly critical of John Stuart Mill, but the older I get the wiser Mill becomes!” Apprenticeship, therefore, necessarily takes time. But gradually something exciting occurs. Little by little, the pieces of the tradition start to converge into something like a holistic view, a more or less full understanding of the fundamental, alternative ways of thinking about and practicing politics. This is exciting, of course, because it gives one a sense of impending “wisdom,” the attainment of a “knowledge of the whole.” And this, in turn, allows one to analyze contemporary political beliefs into their paradigmatic “types.” We learn what it means to be “Rousseauian,” “Kantian,” “Thomistic,” or “Hobbesian” in politics; or to approach political problems in a “deontological” or “consequentialist” manner. Of course, to suppose that all or even most contemporary beliefs derive directly from great texts would be vastly oversimplistic. More likely is that contemporary beliefs derive from experiences similar to those that engendered the thoughts expressed in great texts. But, be that as it may, apprenticeship now begins to reveal the horizon of possible political outlooks, along with the paradigmatic expressions of these outlooks, and how they tend or tend not to fit together into coherent wholes. The patient apprentice is rewarded with a newborn power to see contemporary politics in historical and philosophical terms. He appreciates the direct relevance of the

194

David D. Corey

tradition for thinking through the clashing opinions expressed by contemporary political elites. More could be said about the apprentice’s encounter with various “teachings” from the tradition—including the fact that these teachings themselves turn out to be clashing, and that, therefore, one stands in need of some higher form of reflection than awe-inspired receptivity. But now I want to draw attention to a third dimension of apprenticeship beyond images and teachings. There is also the matter of method. By method, I mean the way master thinkers move from point A to point B, from a puzzle to be solved to a solution of some kind. This aspect of apprenticeship is often neglected by teachers and students alike. We tend to focus first on a book’s teachings and on isolating the exact problem a thinker was trying to work out. Almost never do we focus on the matter of how. Yet this is in a sense the question that matters most if one hopes to move someday from apprenticeship to practice. If the apprentice can somehow master the various methods of political philosophy then perhaps he can practice it himself. Many students of political philosophy never become “methodologically conscious.” I once knew a prominent political theorist who told me in a disdainful tone that he did not have a method! He was a “theorist” not an “empiricist.” No doubt, he was thinking of those courses on “methodology” offered in political science departments today, which apply only to a narrow range of (often dull) questions. But, in any event, he was wrong. In political philosophy, one can employ sound and rigorous methods or flawed and careless ones; one can be methodologically conscious or unconscious, brilliant or naïve. But one cannot do political philosophy without a method. Method is simply the “way” one attempts to move from question to answer, the path one chooses to follow (from the Greek meta-hodos, a way through). With methodological consciousness comes a host of exhilarating insights. It is one thing to learn the teaching of Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, but something else to learn how he arrived at it. Often, by studying method one reaches unprecedented clarity about the exact problem an author was trying to solve, or the limiting features of his solution. But this is a secondary benefit. The primary benefit of studying method is discovering the appropriate way to make progress on different sorts of problems. Sometimes the best thing to do is to dissect phenomena into their component parts in the way that Hobbes dissects a “Christian Commonwealth” into a commonwealth per se, then into the material that makes it up (namely, “man”), then into the various sources of motion within man, until, at last, he finds himself describing perception and the motions that press upon the organs of sense. At other times, insight is profitably gained not by taking things apart but by grouping them together into kinds, the way Plato in the Socratic dialogues moves from

Political Philosophy as Apprenticeship and Practice

195

individual instances of a thing (say, acts of justice) to the idea that makes them recognizable (“justice” as an abstract concept), to the still-more abstract concepts in which justice is said to participate (“virtue” and “the good”). The number of methods available to political philosophy is quite staggering. From working deductively through a practical syllogism to working noetically through intuitive leaps; from illuminating via historical contextualization to illuminating via psychological exegesis; from phenomenology to ideal typology to recovering a narrative context. Probably, the number of methods is finite, not infinite, and yet there always seems to be a fresh approach or a fresh twist to an old approach that lends genius to a particular author’s work. Methodological genius and creativity are among the finest fruits of serious apprenticeship. And they are tremendously liberating. For they allow one to pursue questions, even when there is no known method to address them. Typically, students in philosophy and political science departments learn a method, or a handful of methods, and then seek out problems for which their methods are appropriate. For instance, one learns how to run regressions and then asks: “What research questions can I solve with regression analysis?” Or in political philosophy one learns an analytic method or a method of esoteric interpretation and then asks: what can I explore using this method? But, of course, this approach is disappointingly limited. A freer approach would put “wonder” not “method” in the driver’s seat. It would allow puzzles and questions to determine what methods we require rather than the other way around. The philosopher Eric Voegelin was good on this point: “The subordination of theoretical relevance to method perverts the meaning of science on principle. Perversion will result whatever method should happen to be chosen as the model method. Hence, the principle must be carefully distinguished from its special manifestation.”5 Methodological genius and creativity are crucial for the practice of political philosophy, and its future. For if political philosophy is a quest for political wisdom (which it is), then there can be no artificial restrictions of the horizon. We must do our best to develop the necessary tools for the pursuit of questions that naturally arise. WHEN IS APPRENTICESHIP COMPLETE? It seems appropriate to say a word about when apprenticeship is complete, even though no firm or universal conclusions can be drawn on this topic. Some students choose to remain students forever. By this I mean that in their writing and teaching they focus primarily on major, or sometimes minor, figures in the tradition of political philosophy rather than on politics itself. To this kind of activity, I give the name “scholarship,” which is neither to

196

David D. Corey

diminish its value nor to bestow upon it any special dignity; it is merely to describe what is going on. Of course, the distinction between political philosophy and scholarship cannot be pressed too far, since to engage in one is, to some extent, to engage in the other. But to deny the distinction entirely would be to go too far in the other direction. There must be a way of doing political philosophy that focuses less on past masters and more on political phenomena themselves, less on texts and more on events or ideas as they occur in political reality. It is this kind of activity that I designate the practice of political philosophy, as opposed to apprenticeship. For students who make this turn, I imagine something like the following occurring. The prospect of rereading a canonical text for the twelfth or twentieth time ceases to deliver the same degree of excitement as earlier readings and re-readings did. The hope of fresh illumination from the text and into the text gradually fades. At the same time, the extent to which actual political life—either contemporary or historical, domestic or foreign—seems startlingly puzzling begins gradually to increase. One starts to sense that the tradition of political philosophy, while invaluable and precious, simply does not answer all the questions about politics or throw sufficient light onto phenomena that seem not yet well understood. At this point, the student may reflect on the fact that, for the most part, the major figures in the tradition of political philosophy were not themselves scholars of the tradition that preceded them, or that this is not all they did. To be sure, Hobbes translated Thucydides, and Isaiah Berlin wrote essays on Vico and Herder. But for neither was this his major contribution to political philosophy. Rather (again, for the most part), the great writers of the past wrote books about politics, not about other books. In my own case, the desire to make this turn—to decrease my scholarship on books and authors, and to increase my exploration of political reality—did not occur at any of those junctures one might typically associate with an end to apprenticeship. It did not occur after my comprehensive exams or when I received the PhD. It did not occur with tenure or with promotion to the rank of full professor. Instead, it occurred after about twelve solid years of teaching the history of political philosophy to students at the graduate and undergraduate level. And, looking back, nothing seems more natural than that the gradual development of one’s philosophical attention and energy should move away from the masterworks of the tradition toward political life itself. In retrospect, I faintly recall one of my graduate-school professors (Cecil Eubanks) telling me in my first days in the program that to do political philosophy in its truest, most genuine sense means to engage philosophically with one’s current regime. It takes time and practice, he said, but that is the goal. This thought has stayed with me, and now it seems perfectly reasonable and true.

Political Philosophy as Apprenticeship and Practice

197

ANTI-PRACTICE: DOGMATISTS, EXEGETES, AND ERISTIKOI Just as there are intellectual voices that discourage apprenticeship, so there are those that discourage the practice of political philosophy. Below I’ll say a bit more about the nature of political philosophy and the different ways it can be practiced. But for now let me describe it simply as an effort to shed light on puzzles and problems that emerge from political reality, not so much the “how-to” puzzles that typically occupy the minds of policy makers and strategists, as the “what-is” and “what-should-be” puzzles that have always marked philosophy as a genre of thought. There are indeed many who actively discourage political philosophy understood in these terms; and the novice practitioner will do well to recognize them along with their characteristic postures. First, the “dogmatists” are those who are constitutionally incapable of political philosophy because they believe they are already wise. They do not experience that pregnant anxiety of not knowing. And yet not knowing is the very precondition for wonder, which, in turn, drives the philosophical search. In contrast to the philosophical disposition of searching for wisdom, the dogmatists are self-appointed “answer-keys.” As such, they appear in a number of guises. The most commonly encountered are what I like to call the “zeitgeist dogmatists” who believe adamantly that whatever just happens to be morally fashionable is also absolutely true. These can be found on the right or left of the political spectrum, depending on the leanings of any given culture or subculture. In America today at the national level, most zeitgeist dogmatists are leftists, easily recognizable by their campaign for moral absolutes in such areas as sexual liberation, gender fluidity, environmentalism, universal healthcare (with the right to abortion!), and gun control. These are, of course, weighty political matters, which a less confident temperament might approach with a degree of circumspection (not to say fear and trembling). But for the zeitgeist dogmatist, they are punctuated with exclamation points, not question marks. And the “correct” positions are too clear and urgently in need of advocacy to admit any space for philosophical wonder. Dogmatists also appear in the form of religious apologists, young men (they’re almost always men) with a catechism in their pocket and a pertinent bible verse on their tongue. Like the zeitgeist dogmatist, the apologist has a ready answer for everything. But unlike his worldly counterpart, the apologist’s inscrutable wisdom hails from a transcendent beyond, and it is nothing if not timeless as well as absolute. There are, of course, many ways of being religious without absolutizing and dogmatizing the intimations of divine truth. But the “apologists” are especially noteworthy for their dogged resistance to political philosophy. For to engage in political philosophy is, on the face of it, to suppose that all the answers about politics are not given, that

198

David D. Corey

the domain of politics houses problems and puzzles that need to be worked out on their own terms. This the apologists, with their almost neurotic need for certainty and closure, cannot allow. If God has spoken at all, he has given us all we need to know. Political philosophy is at best unnecessary, at worst pernicious. A much different sort of threat comes to political philosophy from those who cannot put down their books, those I call the “exegetes.” Like the dogmatists, they believe that the most important questions have already been answered, but they do not necessarily know the answers themselves, and they habitually look for them in the traditional books they have grown to love and admire. It is difficult to blame them. After all, the great texts of political philosophy are teeming with insights, many of which still throw light on contemporary conditions and problems. But when the habit of reaching for a supposedly authoritative book becomes too engrained, when it supplants wonder, when, instead of thinking through a problem on one’s own, one rather doubles down with a “deeper exegesis” of some classic text, forcing it to address problems it does not in fact address, the practice of political philosophy becomes well-nigh impossible. The twentieth-century Thomist, Frederick Wilhelmsen described this problem well: The understanding of the meaning of a text is not equivalent to the . . . “Philosophical Act.” Quite evidently nobody can become a professional philosopher who has not mastered the skills involved in reading a text. They have to do with disengaging a meaning which is not always evident on a first reading. But . . . philosophical reasoning, on the contrary, consists in forming propositions into premises yielding conclusions. The habit is by no means reducible to the first set of skills. The philosophical act, therefore, can be exercised upon a text, but it does not have to be: It might be exercised on the report of a text, on a problem presented in isolation of texts, or on any issue which demands philosophical penetration. The explication des textes hunts for “meaning,” not “truth.” Philosophical reasoning looks to concluding truths.6

Even though I do not agree with Wilhelmsen in limiting philosophy to “forming propositions into premises yielding conclusions,” I do agree with his basic critique of exegesis as a substitute for philosophy. Regrettably, his point is likely to be lost on those who have come to worship great texts, who treat them “with the reverence and awe properly restricted to the Sacrament on the Altar.”7 For them, the art of unearthing the genuine (often esoteric) meaning of the text is synonymous with the search for truth itself; it points the way and discloses the truth. Probably, this is because the exegete has no other method

Political Philosophy as Apprenticeship and Practice

199

to fall back on. This is the point that Wilhelmsen took pains to stress (and it is one I have already stressed earlier): when one allows method to determine the questions that can be asked and how to pursue them, one perverts the search for truth in principle. A final obstacle to political philosophy: the eristikoi. I borrow this term from ancient Greek and regret that we have no equivalent in English. (We certainly have the characters!) The eristikoi are verbal wranglers, the word deriving from the Greek eris, which means “strife.” They approach all conversations as contests in which one side must win and the other lose. Their goal is always victory, not enlightenment. In this way, the eristikoi differ markedly from dogmatists and exegetes alike, since dogmatists and exegetes are both deeply concerned for truth. Their weaknesses stem rather from believing they already possess it (dogmatists) or from artificially restricting the medium through which they seek it (exegetes). The eristikoi by contrast are willing to play fast and loose with truth, because truth is not ultimately what they are after. What they want is victory; and the reason they want it is that they are, at bottom, in love with power. It should come as no surprise that the eristikoi are frequently found in politics. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the practice of political philosophy. And yet, insofar as political philosophy comes into contact, or near contact, with politics itself, the eristikoi will frequently be there to attack it. Their techniques include mockery, pandering to the crowd, exaggeration and caricature, fast-talking (so one cannot get a word in edgewise), and many a dirty trick besides. Because their skills are so finely honed, and because the political philosopher is not accustomed to thinking in such a manner, the eristikoi usually win the day. Though their victories are rarely more than “apparent,” they nevertheless do great damage to the practice of political philosophy. And the more a culture grows to admire them the less capable it becomes of serious philosophical reflection, theoretical or practical. THE PRACTICE OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY By “practice,” I hope it will be clear that I do not mean the practice of politics but of political philosophy. I am discussing acts of reflection, not activism or advocacy. Much could be said about the practice of political philosophy that I do not have room here to explore: where do one’s puzzles come from? How does one know what questions are likely to bear fruit and which are barren? What counts as illumination? Where does one find philosophical conversation partners and constructive critics? Where can one publish one’s work when it is not at all conventional and falls outside the usual genres? To what extent

200

David D. Corey

should one engage with other contemporary authors versus setting out one’s thoughts in a freestanding form? These and other questions would deserve attention if time and space allowed. But here I am going to limit myself to one simple reflection on the nature of political philosophy as it can and has been practiced. I want to distinguish between political philosophy in the theoretical mode and political philosophy in the pragmatic mode. Theoretical political philosophy is not as widely known in the United States as in those parts of Europe where German “idealism” has left its mark. Americans are indeed too pragmatic to see much use in it. But it is a rewarding and oftentimes exhilarating activity nonetheless. In this mode, political philosophy aims not at all at improving the world but only at understanding it. It is, in this sense, a flat rejection of Marx’s final thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”8 It is, in other words, a deliberate siding with idealism over Marxist materialism. Why would anybody want to do this? One reason—the primary one—is that understanding is itself a human good, independent of anything one might do with an understanding. Aristotle was thus right when he wrote that “all human beings by nature desire to know [eidenai].”9 To test this, one might recollect those moments in one’s life, usually lightning-fast and fleeting, when one suddenly came to understand something that was previously opaque. Revelation strikes, and the insights that attend it are “complete in themselves,” needing nothing in order to have more value. In fact, a moment’s reflection on these wonderful flashes of intellectual enlightenment reveals that nothing in our day-to-day experience presents itself as more valuable than this. The insights come to us as effortless, an unmitigated pleasure—a gift, as Heidegger once observed, from some transcendent beyond. Secondly, theoretical philosophy is, in important respects, a guard against misapplication. After all, the application of philosophical understandings to political life is fraught with danger. For in philosophy things are rarely, if ever, as they really are. Rather they are understood abstractly, polished up, freed from the accidental and contingent. Thus, even to consider “applying” genuinely philosophical ideas to embodied political life seems somehow to entail a category mistake. And rarely are there no consequences for the misapplication of philosophy to political life. To what extent was the chaos of twentieth-century European politics the effect of political leaders attempting to apply their philosophically airtight “systems” of thought to the vexingly intractable material of human nature? Against this temptation, Hegel helpfully reminds the would-be political philosopher that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at dusk,” which is one way of saying that by the time one comes adequately to understand historical phenomena, the window for intervention is usually closed.10

Political Philosophy as Apprenticeship and Practice

201

If one seeks an example of what I am here calling theoretical political philosophy, I would point to the work of the late British Idealist, Michael Oakeshott—not so much to the witty essays in his famous collection, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, but rather to his magisterial booklength studies, Experience and Its Modes (1933) and On Human Conduct (1975). And for profound reflections on the method of theoretical political philosophy, see his essay “Political Philosophy” (1946–1950). Pragmatic political philosophy is quite different, because its goal is not mere understanding, but improvement; and this requires simultaneously an expansion and a contraction of the philosophical horizon. The horizon expands because the project of improvement demands phronesis, “practical wisdom” or what the Latins called prudentia. And phronesis is hard to come by. Causes and effects have to be considered; a million variables must be taken into account; and one must always be prepared to sacrifice the perfect for the good enough. At the same time, the horizon contracts, because thinking itself is dramatically limited by what is “useful” and “likely to succeed.” Practical political philosophy has no time for imaginary worlds. Nor does it enjoy the incredible surfeit of potentiality that theoretical philosophy enjoys—the fact that one can illuminate phenomena from multiple different perspectives without having to choose which one perspective is best. An example of pragmatic political philosophy in action is the work of John Rawls, whose A Theory of Justice, for instance, is clearly aimed at improving American political life by tidying up the way we think about justice. Of this mode of political philosophy, it is a valid criticism to say, “but this will never work!” or “there is an easier way to achieve the same results.” It is also valid to complain if the conclusions do not follow necessarily from the premises. This is because pragmatic political philosophy almost always takes a deductive form. Initial premises are set out that seem philosophically attractive (e.g., Rawls’s two principles of justice); then conclusions are drawn about what these principles imply for the practice of politics. More often than not, the conclusions demand social and political change; they reveal the need to reform our cultural practices in order to bring them more in line with “reason.” Yet, as I have already intimated, the effort to apply what is sometimes called “ideal theory” to actual political life is always hazardous. Not only must one be sure that the starting points are correct—those “initial premises” that were derived from who-knows-where, but also one must be confident that in making deductions, one includes all the relevant qualifications and conditions that make political life so difficult to manage. Still, the United States has enjoyed a long and illustrious tradition of pragmatic political philosophy, and there can be little doubt that it has contributed significantly to the character of our regime. The question is whether it will continue to do so.

202

David D. Corey

CONCLUSION At the beginning of this chapter, I suggested that something has gone wrong with the way we teach political philosophy today and that, consequently, its practice has fallen on hard times. We have now considered several reasons for the current state of affairs. First, the practice of political philosophy requires a lengthy apprenticeship, and there are seductive voices all around that actively discourage this. The “logicians,” the “compulsively hygienic,” and the “would-be masters of suspicion” undermine confidence in the tradition of political philosophy. In terms of its pedagogical power as well as its substance, the tradition tends to be viewed as useless, obsolete, or unsound. And yet, as we have seen, there is no better way to become expert in a domain such as political philosophy than to benefit from what has been handed down. “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” wrote Newton in 1675, and he was undoubtedly correct.11 He was correct also in recognizing that apprenticeship to the masters does not impede amazing feats of discovery, but rather facilitates them. Next, there are obstacles placed in the way of the turn from apprenticeship to practice. It is a precarious turn indeed; and, too often, the teachers of political philosophy do nothing to encourage it. They act as if the exegesis of great texts is itself the practice of political philosophy. To be sure, the art of exegesis is related to, and prepares one for, the practice of political philosophy. And yet Wilhelmsen was right to stress the degree to which a habitual recourse to texts regarded as authoritative, talisman-like in their powers of illumination, can obstruct the practice of political philosophy, discouraging it before it even begins. Dogmatism is another dangerous obstacle to political philosophy because it looks so similar on their surface, at least to the uninitiated. If dogmatists have one thing, they have answers; and answers are a response to questions. Yet the apologists never really have questions in mind. Their need for answers borders on the neurotic. They have answers to questions they have never personally asked, and they are unwilling to have their answers come under close philosophical scrutiny. This is because they typically rank closure higher than truth, whether their motivations for doing so are ideological or religious. A final hindrance to political philosophy is the seductive practice of eristics, according to which the goal of verbal exchange is neither the search for truth nor even clear communication. The goal is political victory. And this seems to become ever more popular as our culture becomes more polarized and the stakes of political battle increase. Even political philosophers might be forgiven an occasional slip into eristics, given the present cultural milieu. And yet philosophy and eristics are in no way compatible practices. Perhaps

Political Philosophy as Apprenticeship and Practice

203

one could, in theory, engage in the search for truth while striving for victory over one’s opponents at the same time. But eventually the problem of corruption will set in. There will come a point at which one must ultimately decide whether truth or victory is the more important goal. And when that point is reached, one will not have been well served by feeding one’s appetite for victory. As a closing thought, let me suggest that it is not good for our political culture, the political culture of the West, that the voice of political philosophy should fall silent. Political philosophy has never been a dominant voice in western culture, but it has always been a vital one. It has allowed those who will but listen to it, however briefly, to suspend momentarily their confident political aspirations in order to ask those most humbling philosophical questions: What is politics? And how should we go about practicing it together? These have always been civilizing questions, and they are, I believe, powerfully unifying questions despite the fact that they have never been adequately answered. Indeed, it is precisely because they have never been adequately answered that they represent something we have in common. We are all co-sufferers of the mystery of political life. The greatest danger to political community is, then, not that political philosophy should be allowed to explore its characteristic puzzles. The danger is rather when citizens all believe they possess certain answers to those puzzles, answers that are deemed unquestionably correct, and yet are not compatible with one another. It is dogmatism and the fierce struggle for power that attends it (what I have elsewhere called dogmatomachy) that is the real enemy of political life.12 Political philosophy is its antidote.

NOTES 1. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 8. 2. Stefan Collini, ed., J.S. Mill: On Liberty and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 60. 3. R.G. Collingwood, An Essay on Philosophical Method, ed. James Connelly and Giuseppina D’Oro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 215. 4. Ibid., 216. 5. Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 6. 6. Frederick Wilhelmsen, “Great Texts: Enemies of Wisdom?” Modern Age 31 (Summer/Fall 1987), 327. 7. Ibid. 8. Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 145.

204

David D. Corey

9. Aristotle, Metaphysics 980a25, in Jonathan Barnes, ed. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2:1552. 10. G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 13. 11. Isaac Newton, “Letter to Robert Hooke,” February 5, 1675, quoted and contextualized in Robert Merton, On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 31. 12. See David D. Corey, “Dogmatomachy: Ideological Warfare,” Cosmos and Taxis 1, no. 3 (2014), 60–71. The term was coined by Eric Voegelin.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barnes, Jonathan, ed. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. Vol. 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Collingwood, R.G. An Essay on Philosophical Method. Edited by James Connelly and Giuseppina D’Oro. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Collini, Stefan ed. J. S. Mill: On Liberty and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Corey, David. “Dogmatomachy: Ideological Warfare.” Cosmos and Taxis 1, no. 3 (2014): 60–71. Descartes, René. Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Translated by Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998. Hegel, G.W.F. The Philosophy of Right. Translated by T.M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. Merton, Robert. On the Shoulders of Giants: A Shandean Postscript. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985. Tucker, Robert C., ed. The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1978. Voegelin, Eric. The New Science of Politics: An Introduction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952. Wilhelmsen, Frederick. “Great Texts: Enemies of Wisdom?” Modern Age 31 (Summer/Fall, 1987): 323–331.

Afterword Cecil, Nikos, and Me James F. Lea

It’s fitting my piece is last, given I’m the oldest among this volume’s contributors, all of whom speak for the many thousands of Cecil’s grateful former students. Everyone who passed through his classes knows he loved the genius of the ancient Greeks. Thus, in his honor, I’m going to do homage to them. The Moirae were and are the three goddesses of the destiny of man. They assign our fate. Clotho, “the Spinner,” spins the thread of life. Lachesis, “the Apportioner,” determines and measures our lots in life. And Aisa can cut it short. (Fortunately, the latter one hasn’t acted.) As goddesses of fate, they must necessarily know the future, which at times they reveal, and are therefore prophetic deities. At a person’s birth, the Moirae spin out the thread of his or her future life, follow one’s steps, and in keeping with the counsel of the gods, direct the consequences of said actions. It is not an inflexible destiny, as the Fates do not suddenly interfere in human experiences but avail themselves of intermediate causes. They determine the lot of mortals not absolutely, but only conditionally. Every person, in his or her freedom, is allowed to exercise a certain influence. Here’s how the Moirae’s cutting and spinning my life led me to Cecil from my out-of-the-way rural world. And how, through their and his influences, I was to go to the Acropolis and beyond. This was the home of my family (first-rate, if poor) in our rural, southern Louisiana community when I graduated seventh of my eleven-member class at our local school in 1963.

205

206

Afterword

I had no intellectual interests, although I read every novel I could get my hands on. Little did I know when I was swimming in our creek, smoking possum grapevines in the swamp, drinking my great-uncle’s moonshine, chasing the beautiful local girls, and doing other marvelous things, that Clotho and Lachesis had assigned my fate to Cecil to bring me fourteen years later to the Parthenon where I would get a personal tour by a wonderful lady whose dad had once been the royal forester! And from there the terrific pair of goddesses would move me on to other marvelous experiences. Here’s how they did it through Cecil and their spinning and allotting and directing and measuring. Well, of course none of us can claim to understand all they do in our lives. I can and will tell you of five things which are without doubt their doings—indisputably! ONE. In the summer of 1969, I enrolled in LSU’s graduate program to study international relations, which I thought I liked a great deal. I was put in, among other courses, ancient political theory. It was to be taught by Dr. Williamson, a senior professor. However, he was suddenly called away for the summer, so at the last minute, another teacher, relatively new, was assigned to it: Cecil. See how it starts! I loved, studied, taught, and wrote of political theory ever after. TWO. In the spring of 1972, I was teaching with my master’s, having completed my doctoral coursework, at Livingston University in west Alabama.

Afterword

207

I applied for one of their two U.S. Department of Education grants to go back to LSU for a year and finish. I was told they would go to faculty with more years in at Livingston, although I had completed more coursework than anyone. An inspector for the Department of Education came, told the University’s administrators they were going to lose the programs because they had been giving them to one another, taking a year off, and hanging out. So, I was called back in and awarded one of the grants, which paid my full salary for a year. Got it? My wife, Cindy, and I moved to Hammond with our son so she could finish her math degree at Southeastern Louisiana University. It allowed me a full fifteen months to write my dissertation. THREE. Cecil and I both love literature. He works it into what can be a dismal, boring discipline. And he knew I was fascinated with Nietzsche, so he suggested a study of the greatest of twentieth-century Greek novelists, Nikos Kazantzakis, who loved Nietzsche and often used his themes in works such as Zorba and The Last Temptation of Christ. From the early summer of 1972 until nearly fall of 1973, I met with Cecil repeatedly, and he did anything and everything to enable me to have a successful dissertation. Conferences. Editing. Suggestions. Critiques. You name it. Everything. His suggestion and his work with me are at the center of this discussion. FOUR. In the fall of 1975, my Livingston position was eliminated, and I had been offered the perfect job for me at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg by assuring them my Kazantzakis book was being published by the University of Alabama Press. I had no such deal, although they were considering it, so I lied out of desperation. That fall their anonymous reader was in Paris. Seated one night in a café with an elderly couple, he mentioned in the conversation he was reading a study of Kazantzakis. The lady quickly said their neighbor back in Geneva must read it, for she was Eleni Kazantzakis, Nikos’s widow. What are the odds on that??? Great work, Clotho and Lachesis. FIVE. Eleni not only read my work, she wrote a detailed four-page critique, agreed to provide the Foreword, and sent the manuscript on to Athens to her close friend, the foremost scholar and translator into English of Greek works, Kimon Friar, who lived back and forth in the United States and Greece. He loved it (see what Cecil helped me create!) and had the United States Information Agency bring me over in 1976 for lectures in Athens and Cyprus. Eleni flew down for my visit. Among other things, she took me to the Acropolis from where she pointed out the sights of Athens and said with a laugh her dad had been the royal forester and she was a socialist.

208

Afterword

I have fifty pages of letters from her, Friar, and Nikos’s godchild, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, who is the premier poet of Greece. Princeton University’s Seeger Institute of Hellenic Studies and other groups have expressed interest in my collection of materials for their holdings. What Cecil and the goddesses did led to lots of other things. A two-week seminar with young scholars from all over the world in the eighteenth-century Schloss Leopoldskron in Salzburg, more State Department lectures abroad from Italy to Nigeria, a trip to Paris and the Loire Valley, selection for setting up international programs in Edinburgh and Wales, and so forth. If any of you are still dubious as to the goddesses using Cecil as part of their directing my life and think all I’ve described mere coincidence, then here’s indisputable proof of their power in running things. Nikos’s Cretan birthplace of Barbari is only a few miles from the most recently discovered palace of the Minoan civilization. Its name is the Galatas Palace. If not for Clotho and Lachesis not only would I never have had my backcountry Louisiana life transformed by Cecil and Nikos but—more importantly—I would have never met and married fifty-one years ago a beautiful New Orleans girl of Greek ancestry whose family name, Galatas, is the same as the Palace close by his birthplace! Now do you believe me? For Cindy and Cecil, my deepest thanks to both you wonderful goddesses—and keep the other one away if you will.

Index

abstraction, 10, 14n2, 93–94, 138, 151, 153, 155, 157, 159–61, 163–65, 169n36 absurd, the, 9–10, 90–93, 96–98, 103, 105 Aeschylus, 115, 117–19, 121 agapē, 20, 37n13 alienation, 67, 94, 97, 177–79 alterity, 95–96, 101 America. See United States American politics, 65, 115, 136, 201 Apollo, 11, 175 apprenticeship, 11–12, 14, 141, 187–99, 202–3 Arendt, Hannah, 9, 66, 72, 75, 81, 187; Heidegger’s letters to, 68, 71–72, 79, 83n6; on love, 73–74 Aristophanes, 26, 41n73 Aristotle, 3, 4, 20, 40, 49, 75–76, 116, 118, 187, 200; metaphysics, 4, 30 assassination, 9, 150, 151, 153, 156–59, 163 Augustine, 19, 30–32, 68, 73, 79, 116, 188 authenticity, 66–70, 72, 75, 76, 175, 183, 190 authentic solicitude, 9, 11, 12, 66–74, 76–77, 79–81. See also solicitude autonomy, 1, 5, 7, 52, 78, 81

Barth, Karl, 55 beauty, 19–23, 25–28, 34, 38n14, 40n64, 134, 157, 162, 163, 175, 176, 178, 191 being-there-with, 66, 67, 69 being-with, 50, 66–69, 71 Bentham, Jeremy, 190 Berlin, Isaiah, 196 Berry, Wendell, 10, 11, 133–45 Bible, 58, 197 Brunner, Emil, 55 Buber, Martin, 56 Camus, Albert, 9–10, 13, 89–94, 96–99, 103–12, 115, 149–67 care, 9–11, 13, 66, 67, 69, 71–82, 116; authentic, 65, 81; as essence of Dasein, 67; ethics, 78–79, 81; as a gift, 72; for others, 13, 67–68, 71; politics of, 65–66, 74, 76, 79–80, 81–82; Roman meaning of, 79; structures, 135–42 Carson, Anne, 20, 29 Cassirer, Ernst, 123–28 Catholic Church, 4–5, 47, 54, 58, 180 Catholicism. See Catholic Church Catholic Worker Movement, 13, 47, 53, 57–58

209

210

Index

Christianity, 30, 31, 50, 56, 57, 118–19, 160, 179–80, 194. See also JudeoChristian civil rights, 53, 58, 115, 180, 183 cogito, 13, 32, 89, 90, 93, 95–96, 102, 106 Collingwood, Robin George, 192–93 communism, 47, 54, 92 community, 7, 11, 66, 76, 82, 84n29, 89–92, 102–3, 115, 133–42, 176, 205; authentic, 76, 79–80, 81; basis of, 76, 89, 96, 138, 141; Black, 183; creation of, 1, 2, 104, 137; dissolution of, 1, 2, 29; ethical, 13; gay, 178–79; ideal, 136, 137, 139–42; individual as prior to, 1, 7, 108n15; maintenance of, 136, 141; membership in, 11, 66, 81, 103–5, 142; with others, 14, 76; political, 14, 26, 68, 73, 118, 182, 203; prior to individuals, 4; of self-knowing Dasein, 69, 74 Daly, Mary, 11, 176, 177, 179–81, 184 Dasein, 49–50, 52, 56, 66–70, 74–76, 79, 81; authentic, 66, 67, 74 das Man. See they, the Day, Dorothy, 13–14, 47–49, 53–59 democracy, 74, 78, 81 Derrida, Jacques, 49, 55, 69, 128n2 Descartes, René, 1, 5, 6, 8–9, 20, 29–32, 36, 50, 190 desire. See erōs Dionysus, 11, 118, 122, 175 divine, 2, 5, 20, 26, 34–35, 48, 51, 53, 55, 73, 100–101, 181, 190, 197; law, 120–21 dogmatism, 12, 197, 199, 202, 203 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 47, 53, 58, 69 duty, 7, 13, 36, 51–52, 56–57, 89, 102, 104, 106, 136–39, 162 education, 3, 14, 35, 69, 136, 137, 141– 42, 177, 178, 190, 207

ego, 5–9, 30–32, 36, 56–57, 67, 76, 94–96, 102 empathy, 9, 13, 78–81, 155. See also pathos equality, 78–79, 118 erōs, 20–29, 33–34, 95; anamnesticity of, 21–22, 25, 27, 34–35, 40n54; irony of, 21–23, 25, 27, 29, 34, 35; as lust, 33; metaxical character of, 23, 25, 34, 35; subversiveness of, 24–29, 31–32, 35, 36; transitivity of, 20, 22, 23, 34; unipolarity of, 22–23, 34–35. See also erotic longing; love erotic longing, 19–29, 31–35, 89; sublimation of, 8, 27, 32 ethics, 48–53, 66, 69, 71, 76, 91, 94, 117, 143n10; care, 78–79; as first philosophy, 52; Heidegger’s “original,” 70, 73; phenomenology of, 90; politics and, 3, 8, 67, 117; primacy of, 51, 99, 102; as responsibility to others, 51, 89; traditional conception of, 69–70 Eubanks, Cecil L., 2, 3, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 74, 103, 115, 135, 137, 175–77, 179, 181, 183–84, 196 Euripides, 115, 119, 122 exile, 2, 13, 90, 92, 94–99, 101–3, 105– 6, 108n19, 110n62, 115, 177–78. See also homelessness exteriority, 96, 101, 102 face, the, 13, 48, 50–53, 57, 89, 93, 95–96, 99–102, 105, 168n27 fate, 117–20, 122, 137, 161, 163, 205, 206. See also Moirae feminism, 78, 84n29, 129n12, 180–81 feudalism, 4, 30 freedom, 7, 9, 11, 12, 52, 65, 79–81, 137, 140, 162, 175, 205 Freud, Sigmund, 6, 19, 27, 37, 190 Fried, Gregory, 74–76 God, 20, 30, 51–59, 61n37, 94, 103, 143n10, 161, 177, 192, 198; is dead,

Index

56, 92; encounter with, 58; image of, 48, 51–52; relationship with, 5; trace of, 52, 58; word of, 48, 51, 52, 56, 58, 100 gods, 19, 24, 26, 55, 57, 74, 97, 118–22, 175, 181, 184, 205–8 gratitude, 11, 133, 137–39 happiness, 10, 35, 77, 81, 92, 104, 119, 149, 156–58, 161–63, 165–66. See also joy Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 54, 55, 74, 122, 126, 127, 175, 187, 200 Heidegger, Martin, 3, 6, 9, 13, 37, 48–52, 56–57, 65–85, 90, 92, 95, 99, 102, 200; and authentic solicitude, 66, 69, 75, 76, 79–80; on care, 67, 70, 76, 79, 81; on love, 68, 71, 72–73, 77, 79–80; and meaning of existence, 66–69; understanding of ethics, 69–71 Hobbes, Thomas, 5, 8–9, 15n9, 20, 29, 32–36, 187, 193, 194, 196 holiness, 52, 120 home, 2, 55, 57, 70, 81, 95, 97, 99, 103–5, 120, 134, 137, 141, 205. See also place homelessness, 11, 55, 57, 58, 74, 94. See also exile honor, 22, 23, 33, 34, 120, 139, 158–59, 205 hospitality, 13, 55–57, 89–91, 95, 99– 100, 102–5 humanism, 13, 50, 52–53, 89–90, 91, 95, 99, 105, 149; Heidegger’s “Letter on”, 69–70 Husserl, Edmund, 90, 96, 126

211

joy, 9–10, 11, 47, 58, 68, 71–72, 104–5, 134, 137–38, 148, 150–58, 160–66, 177, 178. See also happiness Judaism, 13, 89, 91, 93, 94, 105, 109n36, 119, 150 Judeo-Christian, 104, 116, 119 justice, 19, 32, 72, 73, 78–79, 95, 118, 159–60, 162, 188, 195, 201 Kant, Immanuel, 5, 48–49, 51, 124, 126, 193; on autonomy, 52, 78; transcendental schema, 123–25

individualism, 4, 6, 14n2, 92, 96, 107n13, 140 individuation, 2, 89 interrelationality, 80, 139 intersubjectivity, 68, 91, 102–3

law, 1, 24, 28, 32–34, 40n64, 70–71, 73, 79–80, 115, 126, 181; divine, 120–21; natural, 1, 190 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 125 letting be, 50, 68, 70, 71, 77, 80, 81 Levinas, Emmanuel, 3, 13–14, 48–53, 56–59, 89–96, 98–102, 104–6; critique of Heidegger, 50, 56, 90, 92, 102; as humanist, 52–53, 89, 95, 105 liberalism, 1, 9–11, 30, 65, 74, 78–81, 136, 138, 140 liberal state. See liberalism limits, 2, 7, 10, 12, 13, 26, 78, 92, 101, 122, 140, 156, 158, 192 Locke, John, 5, 194 Lorde, Audrey, 11, 176–77, 181–84 love, 9, 10, 12, 14, 19–25, 31–35, 66, 68–77, 80–82, 83n6, 94, 115, 117, 120–22, 134, 149, 155–57, 160–66, 178, 181, 205–7; as authentic solicitude, 9, 12, 68, 72–74, 76, 79, 80, 81; erotic, 21–22, 34–35; Heidegger’s understanding of, 68–69, 71; Hobbes on, 32–35; irony of, 21, 25, 27, 29; and rebellion, 162–64, 166; Socratic theory of, 24, 27; and solidarity, 10, 162, 164; types of, 20, 23, 73, 77, 156, 162–63. See also eros Luther, Martin, 4–5

Janicaud, Dominique, 48, 51, 58

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 15n9, 115

212

Index

Marion, Jean-Luc, 31–32, 48–49 Marx, Karl, 1, 47, 54, 55, 115, 175, 177, 179, 183, 190, 200 Maurin, Peter, 55–57 medieval. See Middle Ages memory, 10–11, 22, 34, 97, 134–35, 137, 139–42 metaxy, 23, 25, 34, 35, 118 Middle Ages, 4, 5, 30, 32 Mill, John Stuart, 190, 193 Mitdasein. See being-there-with Mitsein. See being-with moderation. See limits modernity, 1–2, 4–5, 7–8, 13–14, 20, 29–32, 36–37, 47, 55, 74, 89–90, 106, 118; Camus’s indictment of, 96, 99, 104; failure of, 12–14, 89, 94, 99; in political philosophy/theory, 1, 2, 7–8, 93, 94, 105, 123; politics, 136, 149 modern liberalism. See liberalism modern state. See modernity Moirae, 205 Monette, Paul, 11, 176–79, 181, 184 moral-political posture, 66, 68, 69, 71, 73, 79, 80, 81 Morrison, Toni, 176 murder, 51, 116, 156, 159, 162. See also assassination Nancy, Jean-Luc, 69–71 National Socialism, 51, 65, 78, 82n2, 92, 107n10 Nazism. See National Socialism Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2, 5–6, 8, 11, 37, 89, 92, 97, 108n15, 175–76, 183, 190, 207 nihilism, 9–10, 12–13, 74, 92, 97, 116–17, 148–51, 153, 155, 156, 158, 160, 165–66 nominalism, 4, 35 Nussbaum, Martha, 25, 27, 116–17 Oakeshott, Michael, 187, 201

Ockham, William of, 4 ontology, 1, 4–5, 7, 13, 32, 50–51, 56–57, 68, 70, 75, 76, 80, 92, 99, 100, 106 Other/other, the, 13, 48, 49–53, 56, 69, 71, 72, 78–80, 90, 92–96, 98–102, 105–6, 155; dialogue with, 50; duty to, 56–57, 90, 98, 102, 106; face of, 13, 48, 56, 89, 99, 100, 102, 105; in Heidegger’s letters to Arendt, 72; humanism of, 53; suffering of, 3 pathos, 3, 13–14, 90, 92–93, 99, 104–6, 119, 176, 179, 184. See also empathy Pausanias, 23–24 Paz, Octavio, 23, 24, 27 pedagogy, 2, 8, 9, 11, 175, 176, 183, 187–89. See also teacher; teaching phenomenology, 13, 48–52, 58–59, 75, 90, 91, 93, 94, 96, 105, 126, 127, 195 philia, 20 phronēsis, 75–76, 201 pity, 119, 160, 162 place, 48, 57, 60n25, 81, 92, 104, 109n36, 122, 133–35, 137–42, 148, 181. See also home Plato, 3, 19, 20–25, 27–29, 33, 34, 75, 115–17, 121, 122, 125, 128, 187, 192, 194; on eros, 8, 20, 21; The Republic, 15, 23, 25, 116, 192 pneumatic revelation, 53, 55 polemos, 9, 66, 74–76, 77. See also war possibility, 2, 9, 49, 52, 66, 70, 76, 77, 80, 93, 99, 125, 141, 149, 152, 165, 166, 184, 189; Dasein as, 66–67; of desire, 9, 23, 35; of joy, 148, 152–53, 157, 166; ownmost, 9, 12, 67, 68, 75–77, 80–81; in a politics of care, 66, 81 postmodernity, 2, 6–12, 14, 27, 65, 93, 116, 123 public interest, 65, 76, 81, 82, 136

Index

Rawls, John, 201 rebellion, 10, 26, 91, 151, 153, 155–56, 158, 159, 165, 167n14; authentic, 10, 103; love in, 162–64; metaphysical, 26; teaching of, 10, 155, 158. See also revolt religion, 51, 57, 58, 136. See also Catholic Church; Christian; Judaism; Judeo-Christian res cogitans, 30–31. See also cogito responsibility, 10, 13, 50, 51, 52, 56, 65, 89, 91, 102–3, 134, 136–38, 156, 158–60, 166; in Heidegger’s “original ethics,” 70–71; to/for others, 3, 51, 66, 89, 98, 105–6; to/ for the Other, 48, 50, 52, 90, 101; in a politics of care, 65 revolt, 26, 91, 149, 158. See also rebellion revolution, 10, 54, 92, 120, 123, 150– 67, 181 Ricoeur, Paul, 123, 127, 128, 190 rights, 1, 5, 7, 15n20, 74, 78–79, 81, 82n1, 106, 110n68, 158, 166, 183; civil, 53, 58, 115, 180, 183; of the individual, 9, 10, 65, 76, 78, 80, 81, 89, 106, 136, 140; language of, 65, 81 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 3, 193 sacrifice, 94, 97, 98, 102, 121, 161, 166, 181, 201 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 92, 95, 106n2 Second World War. See World War II self, the, 50, 52, 56, 67, 69, 72, 77, 90, 98–103, 105–6, 122, 148, 168n29, 181, 190; questioning of, 93–96, 99, 106 self-creation, 2, 6–7, 89, 92, 94, 108n15 Socrates, 3, 19–29, 32–34, 122, 194 solicitude, 9, 11, 67–69, 71, 79. See also authentic solicitude solidarity, 9, 10, 13, 90, 92, 94, 103, 110n62, 150, 161–62, 164, 165, 179, 183

213

Sophocles, 115, 119, 120 Strauss, Leo, 15n9, 28 subjectivity, 7, 13, 74, 79, 90, 91, 93– 95, 99, 101–2, 105–6 sublimation, 19, 27, 38n14 subversiveness, 8, 20, 25, 27–29, 31–32, 34–36 suffering, 3, 13, 54–55, 57, 58, 94, 98, 104, 122, 139, 156, 161, 164, 175–79, 181, 203; alone, 93, 96, 97; of children, 154, 155; existential, 11, 96, 176; of others, 3, 13, 90, 105; shared, 93, 96, 176; wisdom/meaning from, 117–18 surrogacy, 10–11, 14, 136–37 teacher, 2–3, 10, 11, 12, 56, 77, 92, 156, 166, 176, 184, 189, 191, 194, 202; Eubanks as, 3, 11, 176, 206; of rebellion, 10, 158 teaching, 11, 19, 20, 23, 25, 32–33, 36, 58, 116, 122, 140, 176, 192–96, 206; of Eubanks, 2–3, 7–8, 115–16, 119, 128, 181, 184; political, 25, 139 they, the, 66, 67, 69, 75–77 thrownness, 67 Titanism, 26 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1, 5, 6, 14n2, 15n10, 107n13 tradition, 4, 12, 58, 65, 70, 104, 105, 116, 136, 137, 181, 188–98, 202; ecclesiastical authorities, 4, 5, 104; Greek, 24, 93; just war, 188–89, 191; of Western political philosophy, 3, 9, 11–12, 93, 115, 127, 188–98, 202 tragedians, 11, 12, 115–19, 121–23, 127–28, 175, 178. See also Aeschylus; Euripides; Sophocles transcendent, 2, 6, 14, 21, 35, 52–55, 58–59, 89, 94–96, 99–102, 104, 136, 197, 200; as aim of desire, 22–24, 34, 35; existence of, 91; experience of, 13, 47–49, 53, 57–58; immanent and, 24, 54, 57–58; trace of in the

214

Index

Other, 2, 13, 48, 52, 53; in the world, 13–14, 57–58, 89, 92, 93 tyranny, 25, 26, 27, 122, 151, 159 United States, 5–7, 10, 40n63, 65, 74, 78–79, 115, 136, 175–77, 197, 200, 201, 207 unity, 35, 57, 94–95, 108n15, 125, 128

Voegelin, Eric, 53, 118, 123, 128, 195 war, 9, 66, 74, 75, 77, 81, 120, 133–34, 136, 150, 163, 188–89, 191. See also polemos Weaver, Richard, 28 Wilhelmsen, Frederick, 198, 202 World War II, 7, 107n10, 134, 188

About the Contributors

N. Susan Laehn is an adjunct professor of political science at Iowa State University and a non-resident research fellow with the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville. She previously served as an assistant professor of politics at the University of Leeds from 2013 to 2017 and also held positions at University College London. Her research and teaching interests include ancient and early modern political thought, particularly the works of Niccolò Machiavelli, moral and ethical theory, applied political theory, and politics and literature. She has published in Political Research Quarterly and Social Science Quarterly. Thomas R. Laehn is the County District Attorney for Greene County, Iowa. He earned his PhD at LSU in 2010. While completing his dissertation, he held a one-year appointment as a visiting research fellow at Hebrew University. He then accepted a position as an assistant professor of political science at McNeese State University, where he taught courses in ancient and modern political thought, American politics, and constitutional law. In 2017, he earned his law degree and became a prosecuting attorney. He has published a book on the political philosophy of the Elder Pliny and articles on a variety of topics, including the concept of love in ancient Greek thought, the Louisiana political system, and constitutional interpretation. Andrea D. Conque holds a PhD in political theory from LSU and is currently a full-time instructor in philosophy at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her research investigates, in the main, the intersections between the philosophical and the political—especially concerning the works of Martin Heidegger. She is the author of Heidegger, Levinas, and the Feminine (2009). 215

216

About the Contributors

David D. Corey is a professor of political philosophy in the Honors College at Baylor University and an affiliated faculty member in the departments of political science and philosophy. He is the author of numerous scholarly articles and book chapters, as well as two books, The Just War Tradition (with J. Daryl Charles, 2012) and The Sophists in Plato’s Dialogues (2015). He is currently at work on a book about how Americans understand the meaning of politics and how “liberalism” has simultaneously formed and deformed the American mind. Dr. Corey received Baylor’s Outstanding Teaching Award in 2008 and again in 2018; and he has twice been named Faculty Member of the Year by Baylor’s Student Government. James F. Lea taught at the University of Southern Mississippi from 1975 until his retirement as professor of political science in 2004. He has lectured in Scotland, Wales, Italy, Greece, Cyprus, and Nigeria, and served as a visiting research professor at the University of Wales at Swansea. His research and teaching emphasis is in the intellectual history of the European world since the Renaissance. He is the author of three books, including Kazantzakis: The Politics of Salvation and Political Consciousness and American Democracy, several chapters in edited collections, and numerous essays and articles. John Randolph LeBlanc is a professor of political science at the University of Texas at Tyler, where he teaches political theory/philosophy. He is the author of Edward Said on the Possibilities of Peace in Palestine and Israel (2013) and Ethics and Creativity in the Political Thought of Simone Weil and Albert Camus (2004). He is also coauthor, with Carolyn M. Jones Medine, of Ancient and Modern Religion and Politics: Negotiating Transitive Spaces and Hybrid Identities (2012). His scholarly work has appeared in such journals as Contemporary Political Theory, Philosophy and Literature, and Literature and Theology. W. King Mott is an associate professor of political science and women and gender studies at Seton Hall University. He currently serves as chairperson of the department. Dr. Mott’s research interests include gender/queer theory, western political theory, contemporary social and political movements, and modern ideology. Professor Mott has published in queer theory and economic/social justice. He is a member of Mankind Project International, American Association of University Professors, Lambda Legal, Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS), and the NAACP. He also served formerly as the chairperson of the Seton Hall Faculty Senate. T. Wayne Parent retired from LSU in 2019 as the Russell B. Long Professor of political science and chair of the department. After receiving an Indiana

About the Contributors

217

University PhD, he joined the faculty at LSU in August 1983. His works on Louisiana politics, southern politics, and race politics have appeared in dozens of journal articles and several edited books. He has published a book on Louisiana politics and edited and coedited three others. Peter A. Petrakis is an associate professor of political science at Southeastern Louisiana University, where he teaches a myriad of courses, from Constitutional Law and Southern Politics, to the Capstone Seminar. His publications include his coedited book Eric Voegelin’s Dialogue with the Postmoderns; the paper “Reconstructing the World: Albert Camus and the Symbolization of Experience,” with Cecil L. Eubanks, in the Journal of Politics; as well as a variety of essays and chapters on Southern politics. William P. Schulz, Jr. is a proud graduate of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Dr. Schulz currently serves as an associate professor of political science at Lone Star College located in northwest Houston. His research interests include political theology, the history and evolution of republican governments around the world, and comparative politico-economy theory. Dr. Schulz teaches courses on the U.S. federal government with an emphasis on constitutional law, philosophy, cybersecurity, and data privacy law, as well as part of a research seminar on coalition building and joint military strategy during World War II. William Paul Simmons is a professor of gender and women’s studies and director of the online Human Rights Practice graduate program at the University of Arizona. His research is highly interdisciplinary, using theoretical, legal, and empirical approaches to advance human rights for marginalized populations around the globe. His books include Joyful Human Rights (2019), Human Rights Law and the Marginalized Other (2011), and An-archy and Justice: An Introduction to Emmanuel Levinas’ Political Thought (2003). His articles have appeared in such journals as International Journal of Feminist Politics, The Journal of International Human Rights, and Social Science Quarterly. He has served as a human rights and social justice consultant in the Gambia, Niger, Nigeria, China, Mexico, and the United States. Drew Kennedy Thompson is an instructor at Murray State University. He received his PhD in political theory, with a concentration in politics and literature, at Louisiana State University in May 2017. His research interests include the exploration of liminal spaces in the works of authors such as Cormac McCarthy, as well as the investigation of the politics of place in the literary works of Kentucky author Wendell Berry. In 2018,

218

About the Contributors

he served as a featured discussant in Western Kentucky in the statewide literacy project Kentucky Reads: “All the King’s Men.” His most recent publication, “Kinship, Community, and the Bureaucratic State: A Study of Wendell Berry’s Fidelity” in the collected volume Short Stories and Political Philosophy: Prose, Power, and Persuasion, was published in 2019.