From the Archive: Contemplative Communication

Love as the Redemption of Suffering

You stand in a clearing whose cost

you know in tendon and bone.

- Wendell Berry, “Clearing”

In the poem “Clearing” Wendell Berry describes work as the curator of value, against neglect, false vision, and weariness. Without labor trees grow over, the farm is sold off piecemeal, the bottom land covered with weeds, and cattle roam around hungry. The passage quoted above highlights not only the title of the poem but the title of the book of poems, indicating by the trope “clearing” a kind of total victory or triumph, a resting place, and I think, the sound of the word “clearing” is not too far off, nor is the meaning, from the word “clarity.” Clarity has long been recognized as a rhetorical virtue, and has also been used to rule out other types of thought as “vague” or “obscure.” Often the complaint for a failure in communication is lack of clarity on one side or the other. Clear thought, vision, language, is regarded the best for communication. A clearing is open and empty, but as Berry's poem implies the result of effort, and the emptiness or openness achieved, is remembered perhaps even painfully in the tendon—those flexible parts of our anatomy which make for flexibility—and bone—the rigid structure or frame.

Argument: 1) Contemplation originates as a mode of solitude, when care is taken to open the self to an outside influence, where “influence” refers to the self's own inner capacity to receive, as well as the process and effects of reception. 2) Four modes of influence are considered which treat “outside” and “inside,” “self” and “other” as unequal in the distribution of power, or ability to influence and be influenced. 3) Then, solitude is imagined as a result of withdrawal from influence into a position of power and contemplation. Weakness, having been influenced and withdrawn into contemplation, renews itself in the problematic of the “other.” Communication that may be said to rest on “equality,” involves negotiation of solitude and otherness. 4) Institutional ideologies proclaim equality without suffering, therefore blindly enforce hierarchies upon false assumptions and obstruct communication. Experience of solitude through the suffering of influence and the problem of the other, must act institutionally if the conditions of communication are to be improved. 5) The study of Freud as Post-Romantic, in an institutional setting, can improve these conditions. Freud offers a paradigm of recovery from weakness in which the trace or experience of illness confirms both knowledge and solitude.

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1) introduction

scholem

2) models of influence

nietzsche, kierkegaard, kafka, harold bloom

3) romanticism

bloom, coleridge, emerson, stevens

4) solitude and the other

buber, levinas, chretien, hadot, plotinus, merton, bergson, kenneth burke, descartes, feuerbach

5) institutional critique

veblen, henry

6) freud

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1) Introduction

One of the “unhistorical aphorisms on Kabbalah” offered by Gershom Scholem is, “Secrets are better protected by speech and writing than by silence” (207). That is, a secret has a way of combining silence and speech while containing both. A secret is that in speech kept silent, while silence pure indicates nothing. A secret, close in sound and meaning to the “sacred,” requires further speech, even perhaps a research agenda, to be protected. It is worthwhile to understand how this secret can become construed, and even communicated.

Several preparations can assure us of the complexity of this task. A secret at the beginning has two simultaneous meanings. For the person who knows, “in on” the secret, silence has determinate meaning, the deliberately referred converse or absence determined by positive speech. At the same time positive speech conceals from the person who does not know, so that a secret establishes hierarchy, or perhaps demonstrates hierarchy, of inequality between persons.

The first task is to approach the situation of communication, assuming a minimum two people, from the point of view of radical incommensurability, the distance between knowledge and ignorance which may be clarified by the trope of the secret. In the ratio of imbalance, we have one term of power and the other of dependence. For the sake of argument I will call this ratio of power and dependence by the name influence.

The primal, abstract speech which contains a primal, abstract secret divides the world into a source of power and an “other” which suffers influence from the power. A secret wields no power, i.e., is not a secret, if it illuminates all with perfect equality. Therefore the origin of the power of silence lies in the act of “keeping secrets,” discriminating between those worthy and unworthy. The investigator into this problem must adopt the point of view of unworthiness for the following reason. Although the secret comprehends both knowledge and ignorance, knowledge does not experience the condition of ignorance, in fact rests free from ignorance. Ignorance, on the other hand, experiences knowledge as its opposite, ignorance experiences itself on the outside for reasons it knows not. And since all communication includes multiple dialectics between ignorance and knowledge at any one time, to start from the side of knowledge would be to ignore ignorance, fail to understand the unworthy, and so, ironically, fall short of knowledge. Therefore, in the end, we speak of a secret we keep from ourselves.

Now, the power of the secret in the self, I believe expresses itself in Romanticism. Romanticism, let's crudely say here in the British poets and American transcendentalists, communicates a form of unworthiness against the secret. It may be the secret of a father, lover, nature, one's own body, a heroic past, or a vanishing possibility into the future. It can be represented in an image. Romanticism usually gets knocked for solipsism, but, as Kenneth Burke shows, such an accusation must always be false if it refers to a product of written language. Wordsworth's poetry is as ravishingly public as any political deed. Romanticism is useful for studying the problematics of communication in light of the secret, a displaced problem of religion, precisely because Romanticism suffers and in effect wills its own suffering simply in order to represent it. So romantics tell the suffering tale of ignorance.

Romanticism ends if the power remains withdrawn. If we never get to know, we die. That is what people feared of Romanticism, and what they should continue to fear. However, the position of the unworthy, weak and jealous ignorance, is the starting point for rounding the circle, and we begin to suspect the secret itself lies in ignorant suffering.

From the position of weakness, we finally can observe the weakness in others. We experience some blend of jealousy and power as we realize that others know what we do not; and we possess secrets unknown to them. If the study of communication and the “other,” whether that be called by “audience” or any other trope, does not begin in the stance of ignorant unworthiness, it has not yet entered the portal of study.

We begin by the evaluation of weakness. Only when value transfigures weakness can the secret begin to grow within, only then do we find ourselves in the clear.

2) Models of Influence

Nietzsche perhaps has the bluntest genealogy of morals. He famously regards the ideas of “good and evil” to result from a jealous rejection of the strong by the weak. The strong, far from rejecting the weak, are free to disregard them. Here the possibilities for communication are severed. Whatever the weak call “good,” the strong can smile and think of as “less good,” a good “for them.” They wield the power of greater life, recognize themselves the object of envy, and may respond to that envy however they choose. The problem of “freedom” does not occur to them because they suffer no constraint. Only with the advent of evil do we first encounter a negative proper, a rejection of kind, or, the creation of a kind to reject.

This interprets true hostility as a mode of weakness. Therefore at the beginning we may configure the problem of communication in two ways. The first, simple neglect or disregard, I would argue is the most grievous. We should not think that because people are “pleasant” they aid communication! This is the polite bourgeois fallacy. It may result from a morality of the “strong” which does not like its peace disturbed, but it is also a resentful and disingenuous morality imitating the indifference of the strong. Because why should impoliteness bother you? We have a right to ask. Open hostility also signifies a condition of weakness, but it proclaims its weakness openly. Resentful politeness conceals from itself its true perception of things, i.e., that it suffers. A cry of pain is always hostile, and the weakest cry loudest.

Kierkegaard also assumes a primal difference between strength and weakness, knowledge and ignorance, commensurate with the possibility of the “secret,” or sacred. Perhaps Nietzsche would say there are warrior gods for the strong, and meek gods for the resentful. But Kierkegaard views the relationship between strength and weakness differently. He assumes original inequality, but desires equality. In fact, the desire of the strong for equality with the weak he calls love. Now, again, Nietzsche would surely dismiss Kierkegaard's loving “god,” the strong bending to the weak, as a fabrication of the slave morality, but their metaphysics can be blended even if their attitudes differ.

The “god” in Kierkegaard is a term for the dialectical blend of strength and weakness, or, weakness-aware-of-strength, or, strength-manifest-in-weakness. This is the humbling of the god as servant. Here the god, or Christ, experiences love and suffering even greater than the weak recipient of His love, but as an image for human “godliness” or Christian holiness, Christ represents a possibility for communication, a holy communion. He promises in advance the potential striving of a Christian kingdom on earth.

At any rate, not being ourselves Christ, we are in the position of unworthiness, or weakness-without-knowledge, in Kierkegaard. Here is how he depicts the painful discovery of one's own weakness, neither in polite hypocrisy nor open rancor. Confronted with the god, loved by the superior being and aware of one's ignorance, one asks,

What, then, is the difference? Indeed, what else but sin, since the difference, the absolute difference, must have been caused by the individual himself. … What did he lack, then? The consciousness of sin, which he could no more teach to any other person than any other person could teach it to him. Only the god could teach it—if he wanted to be teacher. But this he did indeed want to be, as we have composed the story, and in order to be that he wanted to be on the basis of equality with the single individual so that he could completely understand him. (47)

“Sin” can be taken as the Kierkegaardian equivalent of Nietzsche's “evil,” except directed at oneself as opposed to another. Sin withdraws from the god's influence in horror at itself. The god's superior understanding, attempting equality with ignorance or weakness, reveals to weakness only sin, experienced as a failure of equality with the stronger influence, or knowledge. The indifference of knowledge and power, communicates to weakness its own futility and sin. Sin, again, should be interpreted here as self-reproach rather than in any theological sense.

Let us imagine a scenario to get a clearer idea of how this might occur in “ordinary” communication. Someone with greater knowledge and power invites equality with someone of comparative ignorance and weakness. Far from a Nietzschean indifference, the greater power actively seeks communication through love. However, the very discrepancy in power between the two interlocutors manifests a failure to communicate, caused by the weaker party. As we have seen, some tactics of the weak include polite hypocrisy and open rudeness. These do not so much “offend” the stronger party as provoke pity and re-emphasize the degree of inequality pertaining between the two.

Consider the child who grudgingly stifles his anger or blasts out insults to figures of authority. Consider the lover who aggressively seeks attention or makes a show of false confidence. Consider the citizen or employee who mocks his boss after work or yells at the president on TV. The president, boss, beloved, and parent need not express concern if they do not feel love. If they do feel love, and express love in spite of harassment and slander, this may suffice to convert the communicative “sins” of the weak into self-reproach and, eventually, restorative solitude, but it may not. It may be that one feeling resentment, however expressed, requires the expression of love from the superior who has made one feel one's own “sin,” but then again maybe not.

Let us take the example of a parent and child. Let us further assume for the parent a “god-like” quality in the good sense. When I communicate with my father, I feel my own lack of knowledge and experience. I perceive that I have done wrong things which prevent my equality with him. This is all the more painful as I perceive every attempt by my father to achieve equality with me. He never slights me or undermines me or makes me feel bad about myself. Yet, his very benevolence reminds me of my failure to embody the same quality to such a degree. This need not engender a morbid piety, but may serve as a positive model for me to emulate. In Kierkegaard, for me to oppose my own sin can be the only true learning. I will never achieve equality with the god, but the lesson has done as much good for me as I am capable of doing.

Nietzsche's mode of influence, or strength, may provoke to hostility or repressed bitterness. Kierkegaard's may slant on the opposite side of a wholly benevolent “grace.” In our everyday lives, we encounter those souls who appear greater than we, who have more, live more, know more, and the test of this power is registered in our own painful self-reflections.

“I failed to honor her invitation.”

“I missed an opportunity to listen.”

“I cut off the chance to know more.”

If these leave behind a lingering regret we have learned something of our communicative sins. If we do not feel these regrets, we are not in a position of weakness, we have never been influenced by another, we have never been provoked to greater things than we had thought possible.

The question now arises, where does the feeling of love come from, and how does it lead to restoration? I would argue, love emerges as the redemption of suffering, or is the psychological mode we use to convert weakness to strength. Love is different from primal strength (which is more likely detached and indifferent), but captures a return of strength, a return which signifies the capacity to give.

By this argument to give, one must have suffered. But should we expect a god who loves us? Is it possible to love a god that does not suffer? The question is brought to a narrative point in Franz Kafka's tale “The Judgment.” It may contain the darkest vision of religious instruction I know. A father, sick and buried in rags, one day springs up and accosts his outwardly successful son:

So now you know what else there was in the world besides yourself, till now you've known only about yourself! An innocent child, yes, that you were, truly, but still more truly have you been a devilish human being!—And therefore take note: I sentence you now to death by drowning!” (87)

The son takes off and throws himself in the river. The term for the father's accusation and the son's obedience may or may not be “love,” but it illustrates the same dynamic of influence.

Whether the god, the father, the beloved, the stronger, whatever is superior, loves us or not, the experience of influence inheres only in the weaker, and is only made possible by inequality or relative weakness. Regret, envy, longing, aggression, admiration, guilt, these are all modes of “reaction” or self-consciousness, as we learn “what else there was in the world besides” ourselves. They begin in the encounter, and so give a charge to the scene of communication. Valuative claims may mislead us as to the nature of communication. Dare we call a command, a lover's snub, a condemnation, acts of communication? Can we morally sanction the execution of power as a positive form? We envision a Christian or post-Christian ideal of equal communication, an equality based on love and virtue, but if we underestimate its complexity or difficulty we are sure to do it violence.

I do not propose an answer but a way to study it further. Through the study of poetic “influence” Harold Bloom has given us a type of response. John Milton, or better yet Shakespeare, has been the model of literary strength, analogous to the Hebrew Bible and Homer in different cultural contexts. The Romantic poets, including Blake and continuing up to the present, have occupied Milton's increasingly long shadow. Romantic poetry gets refigured as a pathos of poetic influence, and the strong Romantic poem an articulation of suffering.

3) Romanticism

Crucial to Romantic suffering is the tactic of substitution. William Wordsworth cannot be John Milton, but he can imagine himself as free, even more free, than Milton's Adam. Percy Shelley wants to redeem the natural world through his Imagination, the marriage of Prometheus and Asia, but he finds the heart divided from the head, love irreconcilable with the means of love. Harold Bloom sums up William Blake's revolutionary epic America with the following statement: “Desire shall fail, but the gates are consumed, and man is opened to infinity if he will but see his own freedom” (128). William Butler Yeats worshiped the void. Romanticism in the 19th century took a steady trend toward the death instinct.

Coleridge was famous for an abstract horror which eventually became associated with his opium addiction. His poem Christabel terrified Shelley and drew interest from Camille Paglia for its vampiric treatment of lesbian sexuality. Horror, deviance, brooding upon nature, forlorn or lost love, decay of the body, desire, and the relentless pursuit of revolution in the body, psyche, nature, and society—all these mark Romanticism and they are with us still. Harold Bloom's first book on Shelley begins with Martin Buber's I and Thou, the relational aspect of mythopoetic creation. All of Romantic poetry thrives upon an absent relation, an absence Bloom can eventually argue stands for Miltonic fullness in some respect. The mark of strength in a post-Enlightenment poet writing in English is to some extent the degree of freedom won from Milton. The “clearing,” if you will.

Emerson argues somewhere there are two or three steps between every thinking person and the abyss, maybe no steps at all. Emerson's essays, letters, and journals are too famous to dwell upon each individually, but here I should emphasize his apparent coldness, his understated reaction to his son's death, his willingness to part with a friend if need be. He is both the origin of pragmatism and a prophet of contemplation. It is impossible to call him anti-social but he is neither Christ nor communist. What he is, I think, is the American norm, our image of strength, the teacher, the god who may not love us, but teaches us a secret, and so teaches us the sacred.

Emerson is also the foundation and difference of American literature, containing all the problems of “solitude and other” well before our twentieth century. He writes, in “The Over-Soul,” that

Man is a stream whose source is hidden. … The Supreme Critic on all the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other; that common heart of which all sincere conversation is the worship, to which all right action is submission; that overpowering reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into our thought and hand and become wisdom and virtue and power and beauty. (189)

Emerson here gives us both the secret and poverty, foresees the possibility of equal, common, or “sincere” conversation, and from this deduces right action, reality, character, and builds unrelenting to “wisdom and virtue and power and beauty,” as if it cannot stop in Emerson.

Notice also the focus on conversation, following the metaphysical transformation of “every man's particular being … made one with all other.” Emerson did not write an other or determine it in any other way, but intended particular being to be “made one with all other.” I suggest this is the act of contemplation. Romantic contemplation, in Emerson, dissolves error and commences a definite pattern or sequence of redemption. The “other,” more than anything, is hidden. Within this process the term “worship” is not out of place. Sincere conversation is worship of the secret, the silent sacred of which Emerson says we can all be “in the know.”

Andrew J. George emphasizes Emerson's poverty: “Early sorrow may have been an important element in the forming of his character” (xiii). He quotes Emerson on “the iron band of poverty, of necessity, of austerity … excluding them from the sensual enjoyments which make other boys too early old” (xiv). As I have suggested, these elements of weakness necessarily prepare the way for contemplation. One hesitates to leave Emerson, because one feels he contains everything and we can have no greater teacher. He defines influence in the United States of America, and while not Christ, he more than fulfills the role assigned to Kierkegaard's “the god.” Emerson makes us only too sharply aware of the failure or absence of “sincere conversation.” He prods us to right action and teaches us, better than most, what power and beauty can be.

Emerson may also represent a culmination of Romanticism, doing for English prose what Wordsworth did to poetry. Emerson worships the hidden source, explicitly sacred although no different from “nature” or any other cosmic influence. The “other” is most literally “all” in Emerson. Soon we shall examine various attempts in the twentieth century to articulate the Other, with a glance at some older classics (Plotinus, Descartes, Feuerbach), but it is fitting to end here, the section on Romanticism proper—before we get to belated Romanticism in our era—with the poetry of Wallace Stevens:

… an Italy of the mind, a place

Of fear before the disorder of the strange,

A time in which the poets' politics

Will rule in a poets' world. Yet that will be

A world impossible for poets, who

Complain and prophesy, in their complaints,

And are never of the world in which they live. (121)

With Emerson we are interested in sincere conversation, where “sincere” means the opposite of naïve and callous. Romanticism may represent poetry's shrinking from Milton, but its poets deliberately also articulate its limit, and as Harold Bloom reminds us, those poems will never be written again.

So we return to the problem of contemplation and communication, now that we are equipped with solitude and the secret which Emerson has given to us permanently. Call the Over-soul what you will, by any other name, Stevens gives a further clue to its application to speech, in the poem, “Add This to Rhetoric”:

… In the way you speak

You arrange, the thing is posed,

What in nature merely grows. (161)

4) Solitude and the Other

Let us think again of the clearing as we begin. Is it the clearing of solitude? Upon reading the opening argument of this essay, a friend of mine replied, “For me, contemplation is a mode of society. You think you're alone, but you're not alone.” I was taken aback by this, and yes, the sincere conversation. I told him defensively, stubbornly from weakness, “I'm not going to change the beginning of my paper.” He said, “No, you shouldn't! But I don't agree with your premise.” Disarmed, we had been discussing my claims about inequality in relationships, and I was unsure who held the power in what dimensions. In general he and his wife, who was also present agreed with my premises regarding the importance of suffering. Through our conversation I developed the title for this paper, “Love is the redemption of suffering,” to which they both agreed. We also talked a little about secrets.

Romanticism makes a one-to-many transition which characterizes the nineteenth century. A good way to view this is through Ludwig Feuerbach's critique of Hegel in 1839, surely an early document of modernism (Nietzsche was born in 1844): “To Hegel, the thinker, the Absolute Idea was absolute certainty, but to Hegel, the author, it was a formal uncertainty” (9). The doomed, self-aware passion of the poets finds its like in the complete a priori certainty of the Romantic philosopher. Those who came after, such as Feuerbach, fragmented the powerful totalities by shifting the context. The very fact of Hegel's writing belies the contradiction in his claim to speak in the name of truth or the Absolute Idea. “Only love, admiration, veneration, in short only passion makes the individual into the species,” cries Feuerbach, following Goethe (3). Therefore truth cannot be the exclusive possession of one philosopher or poet, but amounts to “the urge to communicate … We become conscious and certain of truth only through the other, even if not through this or that accidental other. That which is true belongs neither to me nor exclusively to you, but is common to all” (8). Fragmentation into the many, the author's task of writing, the audience, the passion (suffering), and most abstractly, the other, creates a new realism free from dogmatic totalities.

The step away from Romanticism into Modern (post-Romantic) modes of contemplation takes into account this post-Emersonian society, proliferating with secrets, each individual the bearer of a hidden sacred. Communication becomes more difficult to theorize. We are gone from the citizen-model of ancient Greece and Rome. No more Christian society and holy righteousness. Now we have had enough of individual passion, we have entered the Romantic ideology of suffering, understand well our possibilities of redemption. The new problematic, the grasping after each other in private conditions of alienation, is Modern. It turns on the fulcrum of the “Other.”

I have to warn the reader, the “Other” may often take the form of “God” in the following discourse, and not to shy away from a variety of interpretations of the term, based on the context of the usage, and the author who employs it. Let us take as a prototype for modern thought Descartes, in his proof of God. He says that for things outside of him, he never wondered much at their source, “But this could not apply to the idea of a Being more perfect than my own, for to hold it from nought would be manifestly impossible” (93). Only when we regard ourselves as imperfect, through doubt, do we then perceive a “more perfect,” which for Descartes testifies to the fact that something “more perfect” (God) does in fact exist. If God did not exist, we could never get any better.

Something like this underlies the investment of the self in the “other,” the entelechial principle of perfection. The mood of contemplation encounters this “other” in some form. It need not be in the forest, or before a painting or grand monument, or even in religious discipline, although it may be in those. Modern contemplation can live in society, but it holds onto its secret and enters a new dynamic by no means entirely secure. What we call “society” has rules of its own. Part of solitude in the big city, let us say, part of the contemplation which can be social consists in the formulation of counter-rules. One provides a clearing in the social wilderness, in other words.

Thus you have typically Modern arguments against modernity, against the “society” which has killed our religion, our passion, our love, our freedom. Henri Bergson argues against the reason of classification and analysis. These modes were most characteristic of Modern society, the compartment, what Kenneth Burke called the “philosophy of the bin.” The term George Lukacs used was “reification.” At least the Romantic self was authentic in its suffering. Modern suffering lies muted under anonymous uniformity. In a later section I shall turn attention to this social apparatus which exists with us to this day, but here I focus on the modes of response taken by contemplation.

For Bergson the entire problematic hinges, as for Feuerbach, on the distinction between “knowing” and “explaining” or communicating. We really “know” much more than we explain or can explain. But then how can language do the good work of communication, without unduly clamping our possibilities for knowledge into limited analyses? One cue can be found in memory. We remember far more than we “know,” or through memory we “know” more than we can “explain.” Here the past of suffering revives in the Modern subject, and so memory itself can become a form of contemplation, as in Proust, among the best novels of the era.

But it also requires engagement with the “practical,” named as a new mode of social engagement (contra, e.g., the “faithful” or “virtuous”). Bergson wanted to study “the general laws according to which facts occur” (ch. 1). One mode is abstraction, but the other is metaphor. A new Modern poetics emerges, no longer a rhetoric of desire but instead a logic of metaphor. Contemplative perception of reality occurs through metaphor. Metaphor and the “virtual knowledge” of memory synthesize in Bergson's trope of “duration,” “a process of becoming which does not contain parts nor admit of repetitions” (ch. 3). The durable metaphor forms an ongoing basis of reality, not the fullness of the virtual, but greater than can be accessed by mere abstraction. The metaphor for Kenneth Burke likewise became a psychological vehicle for acceptance and rejection.

“Duration” is also a trope for contemplation. To claim that a secret or the sacred endures is to exempt it from the charge of Absolutism (of which Feuerbach accused Hegel), and refute Feuerbach's skepticism, “time betrays all secrets” (3). What prevents an “other” in communication from being an “accidental” other? How do we choose? Who chooses us? The specifically modern trope of memory comes, in Proust and Freud, more and more to overdetermine these questions in each of our lives. The lengthening shadow of memory is another form of our post-Enlightenment, post-Romantic influence which does not go away but only grows in prominence.

Modern life is shadowed by the past and we are haunted by memory. The other filters in our psyche through memories of others, internalized into our own intrapsychic battles as soon as encountered. Our interactions with each other become shadow plays with the figures far removed, projected, from our deepest recesses. The secret no longer takes the form of the clear stream taken in Emerson; it wears a disguise.

Two contrasting and ingenious responses to this dilemma in the mid-twentieth century came from Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, the former from the Hebrew tradition and the latter from Heidegger. Buber shares a similar dichotomy to Bergson, where the latter's metaphorical duration corresponds to the former's I-Thou relationship. We presume this has a theological origin. It is interesting to reflect that for Bergson the “Thou” component was “virtual knowledge,” still on the level of “fact” or knowledge itself. Just as the poet needs a poetic “world apart,” and the philosopher needs the “Absolute Idea,” the practical modern needs “the facts.”

Buber explicitly humanizes “the facts” into the “other,” and rhetoricizes the dynamic into one of address. This word, “You,” becomes a miracle for contemplation and the origin of social redemption. Levinas's version of I-Thou is “the face-to-face relationship, where each contributes everything, except the private fact of one's existence” (41), and so gives us an Emersonian possibility of interaction. The Levinasian “I” is a “hypostasis,” a present “above” what really is, or existence (54). Buber's “You” opens up the fullness of relationship; Levinas draws attention to the “I” which has taken possession of its existence and identified this act with solitude. Only upon this ground could the Modern hope to negotiate work, eros, parenthood, and so the condition of time, dependent on the freedom of the “I,” manifests as relationship or “intersubjectivity.” Levinas in this regard socializes Bergson's theory of knowledge. Levinas keeps the border of the subject at death, and uses this border to determine its relationship to the other. Death closely proximates the mystery or hidden secret of private existence, for which suffering is also an expression.

Jean-Louis Chrétien takes us through the voice which is ontologically provoked by the call or influence. In this way he is similar to Levinas, both descended from Heidegger. Chrétien explores what we have called the “secret,” or the hidden silence in speech which constitutes meaning: “our voice, in order to be a voice, must always already be open, at its most intimate core, to the speech of others, which calls it to be its shelter” (45). That last element I think is the most important. The words we utter shelter, conceal, protect, “respond,” to what has called us. Words are then determined by the call, not by our “minds,” or anything else. Such a mode of openness, as related to aesthetics as it is to religious modes of prayer, conscience, or revelation, extends to all the senses including most fundamentally, touch. Contemplation creates an echo chamber of the soul, words merely its highest-level capacity. This alters the sense of “having a conversation” and directs our attention to the completely new (old) reality in the experience of language. Our soul shelters the speech of others and the Other, which in turn provides a shelter for own secret.

Starting from Bergson, and even anticipated in Feuerbach, the learned modes of contemplation charted above point to an entire mode of living beyond mere abstraction and analysis. I would aver this even for Descartes with his emphasis on the “soul” and his Meditations resulting therefrom. It is neither fair nor intellectually advantageous to scapegoat Descartes for some epistemological sin of “modernity,” when any of us are free to read Descartes however we choose. I myself, have clearly lifted him out of historical sequence so as to compare him with twentieth-century thinkers. The common theme in Modernism is a redemption of Life or Living through memory, virtual knowledge, the soul, solitude, the “I,” the “You,” the voice containing silence, or other enduring metaphors. Pierre Hadot in true scholar's fashion directs our attention to the ancient world for the trope of “life” as spiritual exercise.

I won't slander the concept of “exercise” by attempting to summarize its content, but a few things are clear. First, we are not talking about contemplation as a periodic or “vacational” activity. It is not “rest and relaxation” to “recharge the battery” amidst all the hubbub of life. No, emphatically not. It is a way of life which disregards the division between work and play, “on the clock” and “off the clock.” If it is truly a different kind of truth it must not fit into the “philosophy of the bin.” That is what Feuerbach said of Hegel: if one system was the complete truth in fact, it must “be for all men in all times an absolute, omnipresent, and immediate manifestation” (4). We can say truth is that way, and we can say life is that way. The examples Hadot gives us—Greek, Stoic, Christian, Postmodern (Foucault)—illustrate to us,

It is not that they are difficult; on the contrary, they are often extremely simple. Often, they even appear to be banal. Yet for their meaning to be understood, these truths must be lived, and constantly re-experienced. (108)

This mentality precedes authentic contemplative communication, Emerson's “sincere conversation.” To round out this section I will point to two contemporary American sages who lived their truths, and one ancient.

In Plotinus “Nature does not lack; it creates because it possesses. … for creation is the outcome of a contemplation which never becomes anything else, which never does anything else, but creates by simply being a contemplation” (236). “Action” is a weak form chased by those unfit for contemplation: “Given the power to contemplate the Authentic, who would run, of choice, after its image?” (237). This power rises up through Nature to the Soul and the Intellectual Principle. At its height, in pure unity, the object of the Intellect is Life Absolute: “[T]hey do not seek to establish what Life is. … Contemplation and its object constitute a living thing, a Life, two inextricably one” (242). The question of how to apply this to communication is difficult indeed, but it does highlight a telos of contemplative communication: “two inextricably one.” To our notions of “dialogue” and conversation, it sounds dangerously idealist.

But I think Plotinian contemplation is more like the secret we possess. A secret can be on the “outside” or “inside.” Here I think we have, remarkably, a continuity between the “other,” nature's process, and the soul, notice I do not say the “self”: “which never becomes anything else, which never does anything else, but creates by simply being a contemplation.” Thinking and reason are the same, they are the same process, we cannot relegate it to the “mind.” While not limited to the body, the soul never leaves the body, matter, or nature. Our contemplation does not so much “imitate” nature as it performs the same ennobling task to the height of a Life. This power is our secret.

Keeping in mind Chrétien's culmination with the sense of touch—and may we also recall Shelley's opposition of the heart and head, or Descartes's naturalistic depiction of the blood's circulation—I quote the following aphorism from Thomas Merton:

4. If you go into solitude with a silent tongue, the silence of mute beings will share with you their rest.

But if you go into solitude with a silent heart, the silence of creation will speak louder than the tongues of men or angels. (“No Man” 256)

Merton writes in a tone of more conventional religious discourse (rather than post-Heideggerian), but the “wisdom,” shall we call it, and insights of many—Plotinus, Descartes, Bergson, Chrétien, the Romantic poets—consolidate in these two lines. Speech as “tongue” reduces to “mere being” and the heart which pumps the blood opens up to the full force. I cannot help but think of the last line in Kenneth Burke's novel: “Henceforth silence, that the torrent may be heard in all its fullness” (219). However you contemplate, the silence deepens. It is an ontological experience, reality, no doubt.

5) Institutional Critique

I don't want to waste many words or engage in long social polemics. I do find it necessary, however, for the project's rounding out, that I discuss “practical” issues. The issue is “practicality” exactly. Now I find assistance in the tactics of Bergson, whose attention to the “other” trained in on “the facts” as constitutive of reality. I don't know if the university is run any longer by the “philosophy of the bin” but it should be understood very well that contemplation is perfectly useless. Remember Modern alienation? We revisit that scene.

Veblen alerts us to such a thing as “business principles” which have become the new “principle of sufficient reason” after the collapse of the Church, the rise of petty industry, etc. The top concern for a university is “publicity,” keeping up the good will or prestige in a world of competitive business. Recall what we said much earlier, almost at the beginning of this sojourn, on the necessity of suffering and a feeling of inferiority requisite to the ascent of contemplation we find in Plotinus. “Publicity” is manifestly different from “sincere conversation” insofar as it has a tactical interest in suppressing the “bad news” while keeping up the “good work.”

In this interest universities like to keep purchasing material equipment because it “strikes the lay attention directly and convincingly; while the pursuit of learning is a relatively obscure matter, the motions of which can not well be followed by the unlettered” (101). This magnitude-for-effect replicates itself in the buildings, ceremonies, and primary concern of the executives and governing boards. What can be easily printed in advertisements, understood quickly and bluntly like statistical numbers, determines the urgency of policy. I do not say our university is like that, but I invite the comparison.

Secondly, as Chrétien shows, contemplative communication is a larger vocation than any mere so-called “job training.” Michel Henry reminds us that the university at its birth in Europe was set apart. Most of the people did not require learning, but they could gain the benefit of a small segment's learning, in the condition of poverty, once a week at Church. Now we say with Emerson we all have a secret, we are all sacred, we know the modern disguises and have sought the Other, but something different is now in the way. The mass education policy, “No Child Left Behind” or any other variety, is disingenuous or morally insincere, hypocritical in fact, if it thinks the point of education is to get a job. Such an ideology merely exposes the bad faith on which educators operate. Attend our school for the sake of our prestige, they say, and you will be rewarded with the same miserable experience I have.

6) Freud

My mentor and influence is Kenneth Burke, while my primary difference from most other people who study Burke is the mode of influence-thinking learned from Harold Bloom. I make no contentions about myself as a learner. In fact, so many documents required by the academic system are disingenuous, “personal teaching philosophies” or statements included. We constantly have to answer for ourselves to a “mute being,” the university proper, deprived of all secrets. Yet these institutions do breathe and we are part of them. Kenneth Burke more than anyone else helps me to “accept” the university as I find it, knowing that acceptance involves some ingredient of rejection. For a long time, Thorstein Veblen's irony and brilliance allow me to feel actively critical of the university, as far as his irony goes. But I see possibilities greater than those conceived by Veblen or Kenneth Burke in Freud.

I am just starting to climb Mt. Sigismund, but let me finish this essay with an argument for Freud in the study of contemplative communication, and to whatever practical channels it might be applied. I advocate Freud primarily and precisely on the factor of institutional acceptance.

How do you convert a disingenuous publicity machine into a temple of learning? Many current students at the university feel anxious if not outright cheated, and they are forced to grub for grades the way their administrations grub for enrollment. Their irritation comes from some intelligence in their Being, their solitude, that no one takes them seriously, they're out for money, and yet the only reason for putting up with this deal is a quid pro quo, the promise of social and financial capital in return.

An institution is a model of psyche, I think as Freud can uniquely show us. Most European vocabularies, Feuerbach and Heidegger included, while subtle and ingenious, are shallow. Even Bergson is guilty of this to some extent. Freud takes us to the depths, more than Thomas Merton or Martin Buber. Just as with Descartes, you can choose to read him however you want. Freud gives you a theory and model of composition in his essays. His case studies invite dramatistic identification as both doctor and patient. Dream analysis provokes dreaming. The private notes and diagrams, the forays into social criticism, the study of religion; above all, the economic model of the psyche, provide discursive examples of how to recover one's integrity in a modernist chaos.

Repression, introjection, defense, negation, the id, sublimity, misdirection, and jokes. These are forms of Kierkegaard's “indirect communication” and they allow us to be at home in the wilderness. They fit right in with irony, synecdoche, and hyperbole. These do not have to be dead bones, but are living Reason-Principles, the contemplation of which is Life. Freud allows for holiness if you want to read it into him. Heidegger is no substitute for Freud, as compelling as Heidegger may be, which constrains both Levinas and Chrétien. The silence of the psychoanalytic couch roars. It fits the temper of our modern disguise.

I am not saying we should teach the freshmen Freud 101, but right now our fundamental assumptions are based on John Locke. You can easily make a transition from Locke to Freud. Freud has an easy empiricism.

But Freud would be hostile to religion and very insistent about sex. We don't want that, we are not prepared to go to the depths in our curriculum, because sex is a taboo and it should be in certain respects. We just haven't gotten there yet. Freud is more than sex though, it's actually a “realistic” depiction you can find of human action. Perhaps integrate with the study of literature. Well, symbolic action! You know I haven't neglected my Kenneth Burke, but Burke is easier to institutionalize. Freud has some work yet to do on civilization.

The “ego” may be the central problematic. A lot of people want to give it up. Harold Bloom relates Freud to the Jewish tradition. In Freud's dualism (ego-id) we have something like a twisted relationship to God. The normative God is Freud's superego, but the id is closer to the preternatural imp who creates the world in Genesis. I use Bloom's language in the Book of J, not my own. Yahweh from the original strand of the Hebrew Bible has not gone away and I only say it to bring up the possibility that when God created “Adam” he created “Ego.” This, creation by Yahweh from clay, is the secret of our secret. This we know, and glance at each other with some modernist confusion. It is a condition of suffering, for no joyful warrior ever supplicated the heavens.

The “ego” is a model of sickness, true, but so are God's children. We do not find the same relationship of wounded piety in Oedipus Rex as we find in Jacob and Esau, and Christian drama might as well be an oxymoron. Thomas Merton uses the language of creation, as do Kenneth Burke and Plotinus. The “ego” gives us an institution, builds the temple in solitude. The ego is the creation of the self. It can absorb the work of the soul as well as the “virtual knowledge” of reality. It is artificial life, and so itself a product of contemplation. “I'll have my ego call your ego.”

Going into the city, coming

home again, I keep you

always in my mind.

- Wendell Berry, “From the Crest”

(2/9/2015)