Sundry Notes On Wallace Stevens

As heir to Emerson and Whitman (see, e.g., Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate, 214), Stevens voiced the distinctive American genius that emerged from the country's brief republican interlude between colony and empire.

In terms of political chronology, I trust Robinson Jeffers: he wrote the poem "Shine, Perishing Republic" on the eve of the First World (European) War. Stevens and Jeffers were contemporaries: Stevens the humanist, Jeffers the "inhumanist" (see Arthur B. Coffin, Robinson Jeffers: Poet of Inhumanism, U. of Wisconsin, 1971). Stevens wrote comedy, Jeffers tragedy. Both suffered intensely for their art, but in remarkably different ways. Jeffers's relative independence from the bourgeoisie left him less compromised politically. Stevens in correspondence referred to himself as a "man of the left" and in his poetry his sympathies with the common life are evident--but his position in the rising corporatocracy meant that he would always be guarded in his political expression. He was careful to cultivate an image of apolitical insouciance.

With intellectual roots that ran deep into the brief republican interlude, Stevens, who lived during the rise of American empire, was a man out of time. Subliminally, he understood this. Instinctively, he struggled to translate 19th century British, French, and American Romanticism into his 20th century reality. He was not unaware of Romanticism's revolutionary credentials. But living as he did on the wrong end of the political revolution, he set his sights on completing the Romantic project of cultural revolution: what M. H. Abrams rightly called "natural supernaturalism" or the conversion of theological vocabularies and concepts into humanistic ones.

In 2008, Leon Surette published a study of Stevens and T. S. Eliot (The Modern Dilemma) in which he argues that pre-Anglo-Catholic Eliot was more of a humanist than scholars credit and Stevens, throughout his life, was less of a humanist than scholars credit. It is a perfectly reasonable thesis, but the book as a whole suffers from an inadequate definition of humanism: for Surette limits that definition to the militantly "secular" or anti-clerical and most often atheistic version of humanism that emerged in late 19th century Europe as an alternative to traditional religion. This leads Surette to make absurdly sweeping and historically inaccurate claims such as "Humanism is not a philosophical position, but an ethical and social one [one wonders what such a statement can possibly mean--ethics are not philosophical? There is no such thing as "social philosophy"?], and is compatible with a range of philosophical positions [including ethical and social ones?]--except for theism" (p. 78).

In the case of Eliot, this definition seems plausible for, as everyone familiar with that poet's biography knows, Eliot became a traditional believer after he was already a renowned poet. That said, historically speaking, one may be a traditional believer and a humanist (witness Erasmus and More).

Stevens, on the other hand, was never a traditional believer as Surette admits--unless one accepts the rumor of his deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism and interprets that "conversion" in traditionalist terms. Surette rightly points out, however, that, even if we are persuaded by the rumor, it is irrelevant for understanding Stevens's poetry for it came too late to have had any effect on Stevens's poems. This would seem to contradict Surette's contention that Stevens was less of a humanist than scholars have credited--especially in light of Surette's own definition of humanism.

It is true that, in correspondence, Stevens expresses a dislike of humanism and it seems obvious that the version of humanism that Stevens rejected is, in fact, the atheistic sort that Surette's definition describes (see Surette, 222). But that does not mean that Stevens was not himself a humanist--of a competing variety.

Stevens was also known to protest that he was not a Romantic (see Surette, 263). Be that as it may, anyone who reads Stevens's poetry recognizes it as Romantic and, as Harold Bloom has sagely observed, "Romanticism, even in its most remorseless protagonists, is centrally a humanism..." (Bloom, Figures of Capable Imagination, 57). In order to make his argument stick, Surette is obligated to take many of Stevens's own statements about his work at face value--a signal critical failure on Surette's part.

On page 286, Surette comes very close to admitting that Stevens represents a genuine humanistic alternative to the version of humanism that conforms to his overly-narrow definition, but he seems to be far too invested in that definition to be able to modify it. His procedure reveals itself here to be peculiarly deductive precisely where induction is called for.

On page 318, Surette finds that Stevens "twists himself into knots" in an effort to "retain the sense of sanctity" while yet "abandoning belief in the transcendent." If anyone twists himself into knots, however, it is Surette: for he must maintain that Stevens is not a humanist in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Perhaps most damaging to Surette's case, if not his credibility as a critic, is the fact that his book relies heavily on Stevens's correspondence with Hi Simons, makes use of Simons's essay on Stevens's poem "The Comedian as the Letter C," but omits any mention of Simons's 1942 review of Parts of a World in the journal Poetry. Entitled "The Humanism of Wallace Stevens," Simons's review identifies the foundation of Stevensian humanism as a "conviction that life must be nobly lived to be worth living." According to Simons, this conviction "gives its tone to Stevens' humanism, a humanism with an aesthetic instead of a moralistic basis" (Simons, 452).

Unlike Surette, Simons recognized that humanism comes in a variety of philosophical flavors. This view is consistent with the known history of humanisms that have arisen throughout history in many parts of the globe. Surette's study is an object lesson in how to write an erudite and yet disappointing book. Let future authors take note.

Why Nietzsche Matters

Nietzsche matters because, at the close of the 19th century, he saw with unflinching clarity the intellectual and, lacking a better term, spiritual exhaustion of Europe.

He matters because, in his own way, he wagered his intellectual life on offering Western civilization (so-called) a new way forward. Understanding, of course, that, ex nihilo nihil fit, Nietzsche ransacked European intellectual and religious history for sources of inspiration. He found it in Montaigne and Schopenhauer--in many ways as unlikely a pair of bedfellows as one could hope to meet; but that was yet another example of Nietzsche's genius.

Montaigne's uncommon common sense and clear-eyed acceptance of humankind with all of its faults and foibles reflects to an uncomfortable degree the 16th century gentleman's retirement to his country estate; on the cusp of the 20th century, his meditations seemed to Nietzsche to lack something--a je ne sais quoi. The missing ingredient was supplied by the acerbic punch of Schopenhauer's blindly self-assertive Wille.

One can certainly quarrel with the proportions Nietzsche chose for his recipe--Schopenhauer is a stiff drink and a little bit of him goes a long way. But the powerful mixture certainly caught the attention of the most important thinkers to follow in Nietzsche's wake--Heidegger, Sartre, and Marcel among them. Indeed, one might say that this Nietzschean cocktail determined the direction of European philosophy throughout the 20th century and remains, to this day, the narrow gate through which one must pass to productive thinking.

Marcel and Montaigne

Had Montaigne not been Montaigne, Marcel would not have been Marcel. Nor Nietzsche, Nietzsche; Emerson, Emerson. And although it is a matter of dispute among Shakespeare scholars, without Montaigne, Shakespeare might have been less than the Shakespeare we know.

In his essay on "Montaigne and Francis Bacon," Harold Bloom writes: "What Montaigne gives you goes beyond wisdom, if so secular a transcendence is acceptable to you" (Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?, 120).

Montaigne re-invented humanism for the Modern Age.

Why Marcel Matters

In Alexandria, it has been said that the only persons incapable of a sin are those who have already committed it and repented; to be free of an error, let us add, it is well to have professed it.--Jorge Luis Borges, Averroes' Search

Marcel matters, first, because of his unflinching intellectual honesty; the sort of intellectual honesty and transparency that characterizes the very best humanistic scholarship.

Marcel referred to this intellectual honesty as "philosophy," and therefore characterized his philosophy as "neo-Socratic."

Intrinsic to intellectual candor is the "refusal, at any price, to have the free movement of our thinking blocked" (Mystery of Being, p. 15). This means that thinking must be permitted to find its own way through the dark wood of avoidable prejudice. I qualify "prejudice" in this way because, since Kant, we know that there are unavoidable prejudices: a priori forms of thinking that, for better or worse, make thinking possible. These are prejudices of the first order; we are stuck with them. If there is any consolation to be had, it is that these prejudices are universal: they do not reflect racial, ethnic, gender, or socio-economic class distinctions (although some will dispute this claim). If they reflect history at all, it is the evolutionary history of our species: again, a history universally shared by human beings.

It is second order prejudices with which we have to deal: those enumerated above and, as Marcel insisted, others--even prejudices that many presume endemic to philosophy itself:

I would not hesitate to say, for instance, that philosophical idealism, as that doctrine has long been expounded, first in Germany, then in England and France, rests very largely on prejudices of this sort...(MOB, 15-16).

Marcel then adds a personal note that I find very revealing:

I remember very well the periods of anguish through which I passed, more than thirty years ago now [he was writing around 1950], when I was waging, in utter obscurity, this sort of war against myself, in the name of something which I felt sticking in me as sharply as a needle, but upon which I could not yet see any recognizable face (Ibid).

Marcel's determination to "do" philosophy in a way that eludes the grip of the dead hand of the philosophical past is why he matters; it is also probably one reason why he is, today, so neglected.

Today, the battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of the language of philosophical idealism is not the monumental struggle it was for someone like Marcel in the middle of the 20th century. Today, we have new sets of demons to try to dispatch. Many of them, however, produce the same (or similar) effect upon the discursive intellect that philosophical idealism did. Marcel called this effect the "spirit of abstraction."

It is with his analysis of the spirit of abstraction that I always begin to read Marcel; and from there, I inevitably become distracted. In the past, it had always seemed to me that he fell victim to this spirit and, therefore, I found him to be of little help as a guide through it. But he was really very much like Wittgenstein in this regard: his understanding of the effects of the snake's venom was not second-hand. He himself had been bitten. What I failed to recognize when I tried reading him (in the 1970's, then the 1980's, then again in the first decade of the present century) was how he had managed to recover.

Here is where one has to pay very close attention to the moves he makes: he counters the "spirit of abstraction" with a kind of radical immanence: focusing his attention upon subjective responses to phenomena taken, always, in the individual case. At the same time, however--and this is where one must hold on tight or risk losing the Marcellian difference--he insists upon a notion of transcendence. With the impatience of youth, I repeatedly reached this point in Marcel's discourse and said, "Look! We have reached my stop ... Farewell!" I would then put the book down and turn to other things. For it is in Marcel's insistence upon transcendence that I saw his thought turn back upon itself and undermine his stated project. I did not stick around to see how he managed to extricate his thought from self-contradiction. This is why philosophy worthy of the name is not for the young.

Radical immanence need not be set in opposition to transcendence like matter and anti-matter. Marcel had achieved (as I had not) the Heraclitean way of thinking that was capable of perceiving a harmony of opposed tensions, as in the bow and the lyre.

For Marcel, the "true" opposite of transcendence, i.e., the opposite that interrupts harmonies, that makes them untenable, is not radical immanence, but reductive immanence. It is the latter which is best represented in Western philosophy by scientific materialism and the like; ironically, scientific materialism is a mode of the "spirit of abstraction" for it objectifies phenomena to the point where all subjectivity is banished from consideration. But "purely" objective phenomena do not exist for human beings; they are, in fact, abstractions.

Radical immanence, on the other hand, contains within itself a transcendental dimension: the sort one finds in the sober Romanticism of a William Wordsworth and, especially, Wordsworth's American heir, Wallace Stevens.

Gabriel Marcel

Gabriel Marcel demonstrated that one can be an honest heir to the post-Kantian tradition of critical philosophy and still be a convinced theist.

I tried to read him without success in high school, then in college, then in graduate school. One would have thought him a natural resource for someone who cut his intellectual teeth on Kierkegaard and other so-called "Existentialists." I will confess that his conversion to Catholicism around age 40 made me uneasy; perhaps some residual Protestant distrust of Catholic intellectuals has deprived me of his stimulating companionship through the decades. This is just a guess; an attempt at humility and candor.

Nowadays I find reading him as bracing as reading Pascal and more satisfying since, in his major works at least, he appears to have avoided the apologia that often muddles the Pensees.

Marcel was a Christian humanist in the grand Erasmian manner. I am thankful to have finally found my way to his simple, cheerful, and gracious table.

Heidegger

One moves easily from Herder to Heidegger (here pictured as he liked to see himself, a simple German peasant), although one may also reach Heidegger through the Neo-Kantians with which he early associated himself as well.

Part genius, part snake-oil salesman, Heidegger was, in many respects, a major figure in the Romantic project by which "inherited theological ideas and ways of thinking" were secularized (see M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 12).

Heidegger's body of work is as vast as it is confused and confusing; I have known gifted intellects to wander into the Black Forest of MH never to return. My impression is that Heidegger's greatest charm is for those who, like him, are obsessed with justifying the failures of their lives rather than accept such failures for what they are--milestones along the way--and move on.

Sartre is Heidegger's greatest disciple and the only reason to return to Heidegger is to better understand what Sartre did with him. Like Jacob wrestling the angel at Jabbock's ford, Sartre grasped Heidegger's genius early, felt his grip slipping as Heidegger oozed his trademark snake-oil, and yet managed to hang on long enough to be transformed from a minor French novelist and playwright to a major 20th century intellectual.

Had there been no Heidegger, there would be no Sartre--not as we have come to know him. When we recognize Romanticism in Sartre, it is often a residue of Heidegger's impact upon him.

From Kant To Herder

Gottfried Herder was one of Kant's most perceptive students. He learned much from Kant though it is fashionable to regard Herder as a kind of anti-Kant (in the same way that Aristotle is no longer remembered as the Platonist that late ancient and medieval philosophers understood him to be). Kant's relative obtuseness to history helped to spur Herder on to his great intellectual achievements--in history and historicism.

Romanticism follows the line from Kant to Herder just a surely as it follows the line from Kant to Fichte and on to Hegel.

The Enlightenment gave birth not to a single or monolithic Romanticism but to an unruly brood of Romanticisms. Had Kant not been Kant, Herder would not have been Herder. Let us give credit where (and how) it is due.