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Being-in-the-world/Being-in-love: Geworfenheit and Grace in “Love’sKnowledge”

We shall call this character of being of Da-sein which is veiled in whence and whither, but in itself all the more openly disclosed, this “that it is,” thethrownness of this being into its there; it is thrown in such a way that it is the there as being-in-the-world. The expression thrownness is meant to suggest the facticity of its being delivered over.

Martin Heidegger, Being And Timei

The Scriptures contain many allusions and faint echoes to delight hearts and ears made sensitive by love…[They] spell out the tender teaching of Grace line by line. To tell us to love God and to explain the reason is not enough; they teach us how….the Bible is a love story.

Paul Claudel, The Essence of the Bibleii

In certain contexts, it is above all the philosopher who does in fact say, “Look and see; observe the many-sidedness....” Who, dismantling simplifications, knocking down certainties, clears a space in which love stories can exist and have their force….But perhaps in the attentive—or I might even (too naively?) say loving conversation of philosophy and literature with one another we could hope to find, occasionally, mysterious and incomplete, in some moments not governed by the watch, some analogue of the deliberate fall, the aim for grace.

Martha Nussbaum, “Love’s Knowledge”iii

After reading Martha Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge, I could

summarize her argument, abstractly delineating my criticisms and

correspondences. But it seems more suitable to her content that I

acknowledge the following: despite all my attempts to practice

“perceptive equilibrium,” any analysis of this volume would fall

back into reflection—proving illuminating at best, but

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necessarily insufficient. So I will make a few words by way of

preface, and enter rather into a story. This story—shirking

neither narrative or philosophical presentation—will recount

particular glimpses of my semester pursuit toward Nussbaum’s

ethical refrain: “How then shall we live?” My paper’s content and

form, like Nussbaum’s compilation, will aim to maintain a

dialogue between being “finely aware and richly responsible.”iv

As she develops this question, in patient probing across

fifteen essays, it begins to sound like, “How then shall we love?” By

the time I came to both of these questions, hearing in one the

echoes of the other, I found their deepest resonance in her

titular essay. It is this essay that will serve as my launching

point and lens for Nussbaum’s creative work, and my own

discoveries.v

First, a brief disclaimer: yes, it is true that Martha

Nussbaum frequently reuses texts within this compilation of

essays. She remains largely within the same characters and

writers, thinkers and themes.vi She even recycles the quotations,

using them fresh but similarly each essay. While many accuse this

work as incomplete as a system of thought and repetitive: this

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would seem to be her point. We must not look upon Nussbaum’s text

without her recalling assertion: “form [is] itself a statement, a

content.”vii These essays are a series of dates, if you will, in

her long and developing courtship with Aristotle (this is no

secret), Henry James, and Marcel Proust. Her work is more an act

of fidelity—representing each figure anew in love for their

distinct voices—than it is a lazy repetition. Though I wish some

of the essays would follow through in their proposed agendas and

flirtatious intimations, viii I respect the way Nussbaum both

tackles and sensitively tends her textual companions.

1) Once Upon A Time: Approaching the Irreducible

I had spent the Spring 2010 semester exploring my own

tumultuous relationship with theatrical texts. For reasons

Nussbaum has enumerated, I found in Plato a troubling

conversation partner.ix Augustine and Tertullian were still less

settling.x When I finally arrived at the plays of Pope John Paul

II (Karol Wojtyla) and Gabriel Marcel, I found some consolation.

Marcel believed that his plays could represent

philosophical/theological propositions better than any of his

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lectures on the mystery of being; and Wojtyla wagered that drama

could bear the weight of his theological/political inquiry.xi

However, despite my discovery of these examples, there was

something yet unresolved. Though storytelling may account for the

i Martin Heidegger. Being And Time. Trans. By John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 127.ii Paul Claudel. “My First Love.” The Essence of the Bible. (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1957), 14,18.iii Martha Nussbaum. “Love’s Knowledge.” Love’s Knowledge. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 284.iv This phrase permeates Nussbaum’s text. It comes to us from Henry James’ preface to The Princess Casamassima, where James describes Hyacinth Robinson as a “‘person on whom nothing was lost’…a fine sensitive intelligence, with the power to feel intensely everything that befalls him, with, in short, ‘the power to be finely aware and richly responsible’ (I.viii). In contrast to the coarse and the blind’ (viii), for whom what befalls has little import, Robinson will be among ‘the more deeply wondering,…the really sentient.” Martha Nussbaum quotes James in “The Princess Casamassima and the Political Imagination” in Love’s Knowledge, 199.v I particularly noticed Martha Nussabaum’s phrasing of epistemology as part discovery and part creation (Love’s Knowledge, 267-269). This seemed central to her argument of why literature, the arts, ethics, and philosophy should remainin conversation. They are all getting at, in their unique ways, the process ofmaking meaning and making peace between incommensurable phenomena and invaluable persons. Her phrasing of creation and discovery seems a direct (though unacknowledged) link to Paul Claudel. For Claudel, our existence necessitates a collaboration of known and unknown. Part creativity (naître, to be born) and part discovery (connaître, to know), our presence in the world demands the translation of what calls, answers and ultimately exceeds us. PaulClaudel, Poetic Art (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1948).vi If you desire an account of this, I would recommend reading her introductory chapter “Form and Content, Philosophy and Literature” or JenniferL Rike’s review in The Journal of the American Academy of Religion. 61.4 (1993): 843-845.vii “Form and Content, Philosophy and Literature,” 15.viii For example, I wish that her essay, “Perceptive Equilibrium: Literary Theory and Ethical Theory” would have better engaged the Continental philosophers/deconstructionist theories she flirtatiously mentions. Or even, it would be fruitful if she spent time developing in “Fictions of the Soul” the questions at which she arrives—questions that earlier in the essay she

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dimensionality of ethical, theological, and political inquiry,

where does their “perceptive equilibrium” leave us? The literary

and visual arts have the capacity to reflect and re-imagine

reality, to enunciate and gesture toward the needs of human

flourishing. Theatre especially—as a movement and counter-

movementxii of drives and choices—embodies these needs that we

promised to unpack and not simply beckon.ix Namely, his claims as they aligned with the theological tradition of my upbringing (Churches of Christ, a Lockean, Reformed strain). that we can come to the know the truth as the intellect goes off “itself by itself” and that needs and desires (especially voiced in the arts) distort and distract. (“Fictions of the Soul,” 248-251). The idealism of unmediated truth (as if we could elude the finitudes of form—sorry, Plato, your supposition that “nothingimperfect if every good measure of anything” leave us with very little measuring devices), and the attack on the theatre as irrational struck me as particularly problematic. Not only do I admit my being-in-the-world of contingencies (and mediating forms/sensorial mediation), I also share Nussbaum’s beliefs about the theatre’s capacity to make us more capable of decision-making and ethical action (in its use of imagination and emotion within rationality). x See “Philosophical Attitudes toward Theatre within and without the Church” in Performing the Sacred (31-40) and “The Enmity Between Religion and Theater” in Sacred and Profane Beauty (97-103). For an even more exact reproduction of representative texts, see Schnusenberg’s section entitled “Religious Aspects of Roman Culture” in The Relationship Between the Church and the Theatre (1-41).xi Before becoming Pope John Paul II, Karol Wojtyla wrote the play “Our God’s Brother.” Through the play’s main character, Adam Chmielowski, Wojtyla stages the internal struggle between the vocations of art and religious life. Adam Chmielowski, a famed painter later beatified by Wojtyla, decided to leave behind his art for the more “difficult beauty” of charity. As he self-critically destroyed most of his paintings, his legacy mostly survives in the accounts of his work as a freedom fighter, especially as documented in Wojtyla’s play. Written during Wojtyla’s own period of vocational discernment,this play expresses a tension felt through the ages: the call of art and the claim of the church. Karol Wojtyla. “Our God’s Brother,” in The Collected Plays and Writings on Theater, trans. Boleslaw Taborski. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 227.

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might, through the story, stand simultaneously inside (to

perceive) and outside (to reflect).

And yet, awareness stirred by drama and literature is itself

a call, not an answer. For all of Nussbaum’s skillful suggestions

of how literature makes us fully “finely aware,” I do not know

how to translate her gesture toward being “richly responsible.”

It would seem that the more we perceive the irreducible factors

of ethical decision, the more paralyzed we may become as to how

our responsibility ‘factors in.’ Though “novels are shaped by,

and constitute in their reader, a consciousness that is always

aware of the bearing of everything…on the question about human

life and how to live it,” how does this awareness translate into

action?xiii (This would prove an enriching follow-up study: to

examine how narratives have thwarted or motivated political

agendas or ethical actions). While we grant, with Nussbaum, that

our ethical decisions cannot simply be made in abstract

generalizations (techne, episteme), we nevertheless return from the

xii This helpful phrase “movement and counter-movement” comes from Gerard van der Leeuw’s exploration of sacred drama and dance. Gerard van der Leeuw. Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 77 -112.xiii “Form and Content, Philosophy and Literature,” 51.

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ekstasis permitted by art, asked to make a particular movement in

our time, our place. Yes, ethical discernment must account for

the plurality of particulars; but at the moment of decision and

application, we must choose.xiv

This tension I felt anew in reading Nussbaum’s compelling—

but incomplete—appeal: “[The picture of the internal person] must

be responded to in all of its painful violent mystery.”xv How to

respond to human suffering and enable human flourishing, if

individuals are perceived as mysteries? Will perceptive equilibrium

make us ethically equivocal? How does the “strange ransom” of

Wojtyla’s artist/freedom-fighter, Adam Chmielowski, not settle

for the “dual consciousness” of Henry James’ character,

Strether?xvi Though Nussbaum claims that generalized abstractions

abstract us, Strether’s “clarity of vision” no less threatens his

involvement. Revealing this paradox, Nussbaum writes, “And in his

‘indifference’—his perceiver’s impartiality, the equipoise of the

xiv See her essay, “Plato on Commensurability and Desire,” 107-113.

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body drawn strongly to no extreme—there is an almost voyeuristic

‘curiosity,’ the curiosity of the uninvolved gaze.”xvii

At the moment of action, we cannot simultaneously occupy

multiple realities. At the moment of embodied ethical choice, we

are asked to pick a particularity. It is not Nussbaum’s intention

to answer this question—the question of parameters. She is most

concerned with restoring the plurality of Aristotelian

contextualization to the often too rigid parameters of

philosophy.xviii But, while admiring her endeavor, I yet found

myself raising the “little girl’s questions…‘What boundaries are

we to draw? What priorities can we fix?’”xix Though Nussbaum does

well to trace how literature can de-center us, open us to

surprise, and make pliant our parameters through sensitivity, we

must not neglect that even the freedom of improvisation is a

xv “Fictions of the Soul,” 258.xvi “Perceptive Equilibrium: Literary Theory and Ethical Theory,” 179, 187. Compare this to the “strange ransom” that Adam Chmielowski expresses. Karol Wojtyla, “Our God’s Brother” in The Collected Plays and Writings on Theater, 184-185.xvii “Perceptive Equilibrium: Literary Theory and Ethical Theory,” 187.xviii See “Reading for Life,” especially her assessment of Booth’s pluralism and Aristotelian contextualism, 242-243.xix “Flawed Crystals: James’s The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral Imagination,” 138.

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testament to fidelity--to listening, attending, and making with

others.

Where our arts, our minds, might allow simultaneous

plurality, our ethical response requires decision as a ‘self’

asserted with and among ‘others.’ Just because a human being is

irreducibly mysterious, at the moment of human actions a sort of

clarity must arise in order to commit to a response to another’s

call. Violence may be “mysterious,” but it is no less striking;

even suffering’s wounds are somehow cataleptic.xx Though Nussbaum

demonstrates how philosophy and literature can be cataleptic

while preserving the mysterious, can ethics (let alone theology)

possibly approach the depth of mystery, the incommensurability of

options, without waiting too long or altogether ignoring the

benefit of some assertion (be it a belief, an action, statement,

artistic rendering, etc)?xxi

At another level, my unease with Nussbaum’s nuanced

exposition was its neglect of time. We make ethical decisions

within time. The wide-open insight of a reader is the advantage

xx As Nussbaum explores in “Love’s Knowledge,” 281-284.xxi See Nussbaum’s discussion of the difference between language of optionality and depth, “Sophistry About Conventions,” 224-225.

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of an extra-temporal vantage point. The reader stands outside the

world and timeline of the story. Our intrusion upon the textual

world does not require our inclusion in it. So how can we act in

our world in such a way as to have the eyes of time: seeing all,

sensing all, a part of all? The possibilities of time at some

moment must give way to action. This is the foundation of

Aristotle’s concept of kinesis (the possible becoming actual). Our

possibilities, in order to be mobile (in our words and actions),

are pared down into constraints. But how to view ethical

decisions and philosophical delineations as constraints that

free, choices that lead to flourishing—as opposed to an

abstraction that limits?

2) Being And Time:

When can a word or action be considered final since grace,

like time, keeps permitting more? Asked another way, will a

story’s world actually halt time, grant grace, on critical issues

in the actual world?—And how is this different than

(counteracting even) the way a sentence might end a life? A

story’s timeline and topos is self-contained; Aristotle’s tragic

theory pushed for this coherence of time and space. We are

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privileged the mobility of irreducibility when granted parameters

—and a position outside them. We have the benefit of occupying

another dimension. Like gods hovering above our created, literary

worlds, we can suspend judgment standing outside of its time-

space. But as beings-in-the-world, we do not have the blessing of

foresight, of sitting outside our ethical choices as if they were

stories we could eye, as if people were paintings. Nussbaum knows

this.xxii

Yet, Nussbaum suggests that mystery preserves our

vulnerability, a sense of incompletion that makes us open and

empathetic to human need; as if we are gods that can yet benefit

from entering the worlds we do not occupy, in order to better

attend the world we do.xxiii Literature and aesthetics seem fitting

vessels for the inexplicable yet palpable aspects of human

experience. Literary and visual art objects carry both

plausibility and surprise, while conveying a coherence of

particularities and an incommensurable range of interpretations.

However, the worlds of literary and aesthetic pieces are somehow

xxii See her exploration of Maggie’s troubling aestheticism as compared to the improvisation model in “Flawed Crystals: James’s The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral Philosophy,” 125-147.xxiii “Fictions of the Soul,” 258.

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exempt (less answerable than their creators/audiences) to the

here-and-now. Literary works are perhaps accountable to critics,

to scholars—but to ethical decisions, to people who can be put on

trial and killed in battle?

Textual bodies—if truly irreducible—are excused somehow from

action, from the claims of direct application, from committing

crimes, from saving lives. Can we really prescribe to a starving

family or a wounded soldier a story as salve? Some suffering, in

all its mystery, is well-conveyed by literature; but the mystery

is of a voice that speaks and cannot be located.xxiv The voices of

literature are present but not participating, evocative and

disembodied. This was perhaps the source of Plato’s distrust; the

literary, visual, and dramatic arts are a sort of frustrating

flirtation (as is theological revelation). They operate in veiled

concealing, apprehension and release, with irreducibilities that

engage us in alibis just as easily as they can re-engage us in

the world.

xxiv Though she sites W.H. Auden’s admiration for Henry James’ imaginative re-envisioning of political dilemmas, she does not enter into Auden’s complicatedartistic explorations, such as his poem, “Musee des beaux arts.”

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I acknowledge the gifts of disembodied voices; I am after

all a lover of history, the arts, and theological tradition.

Insofar as these disciplines (in content and in form) preserve

the irreducible quality of life within the finitudes of traditio

(“real presences” handed down that we might engage and be

touched), they provide a necessary chastening to heedless

certainty. (Or as Nussbaum would have it, a necessary

partnership: the philosophical allied to literature, joining

abstraction and imagination). Because literature deals in the

unquantifiable, its results are somehow beyond scientific

calculation of results; but the measurable categories of analytic

philosophy and scientific inquiry are tools nevertheless. In the

very least, abstractions mark what exceeds them that we might

note the asymmetry of hope, love, joy, grace.xxv

But just as we cannot answer how many lives were ended by a

text, we cannot sum how many lives were aided. This is the danger

and delight of ambiguity. This is the freedom and striving that

makes possible art, theology, literature, even philosophical

xxv The combination of presence and paramaters reminds that the greatest (and worst) aspect of human experience are powerful both in their ambiguous inexplicability and in their evidentiary quality.

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inquiry and political vision: the impossible hovering over every

reach of the possible, the actual pushing against the imagined.

But can our lives be so constructed? If the irreducibility of

narrative cannot be ultimately accountable for what it produces,

are we (if considered storied beings) any less culpable for the

ways our lives fall short, the ways our imaginations distort or

distract?

Nussbaum claims with James the resilient purpose of

literature in the face of such questioning: “to create the record,

in default of any other enjoyment of it; to imagine, in a word,

the honourable, the producible case. What better example than

this of the high and the helpful public and, as it were, civic

use of the imagination?”xxvi While this may be a laudable aim,

what factors impede the imagination’s boon from being

accessible,xxvii or even evaluated as fruitful?xxviii What keeps us

from not only knowing through love, but acting in love? In the

xxvi This is a quote that Nussbaum consistently employs, Love’s Knowledge, 165, 193, 198, 217.xxvii “The Princess Casamassima and the Political Imagination,” 195-219.xxviii “…that heroine’s evident absorption in the face and form of a particularindividual is shown there as incompatible with broader ethical concern, even though she talks a lot about ethical concern.” Nussbaum on her essay, 51. (“Love and the Individual: Romantic Rightness and Platonic Aspiration,” 314-334.)

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course of action, response, what steps might be taken? Forgive me

for sounding utilitarian or pragmatic, but I found that

“imagination” must yet answer to the mysteries it purports to

engage.

Prompting these concerns is my own story. I am implicated in

my reading, sifting through Nussbaum’s exposition as if a “mine”

for my own understanding.xxix My theological upbringing was a sort

of iconoclastic thwarting of the imaginative capacities in art

and in faith (in vision, in prophecy, in belief’s redemptive

potency). In the church of my youth, scripture read less as

Divine love story, more like unequivocal mandate. To establish

unity, leaders adjured: “Speak where the Bible speaks; be silent

where it is silent.” Revelation supplied security; no one missed

mystery. But life often erupts in the interstices between

certainties; baffling gray areas give birth to dimension (as

Nussbaum accounts in her comparison of Plato and Aristotle). And

what then? If religion hinges on axioms, when uncertainty arises

there are only two options: true or false. But what of the God

that risks a Word to be heard (Rahner)—not simply as posited xxix See Nussbaum’s appropriation of Proust’s suggestion, “Literature and the Moral Imagination,” 166.

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axiom but encountered experience (Von Balthasar)? What of the God

whose enunciation is annunciation: that trembling, terrible

beauty within the leeways of our forgetting, our denial, our

questions?

Here we meet the tension of existence: functioning as beings

in time. This is the simultaneous pull of finite beings (the

limitations of our bodies, the constraints of form, the

definition of expressions) within ongoing time. Though we mark

time down to the nano-second--dissecting it as if it were a

body--time is what grants us the grace and the erasure, as well

as an acknowledgment of what exceeds and precedes. It is

therefore central to consider both being and time within ethics,

since ethics marks the translation of incommensurable

possibilities (felt as infinite) into the committed actuality

(felt as definitive act or word in the moment).

Under all these quest-ions and desires—toward preserving

theological mystery, human irreducibility, and literary

imagination—I came to Nussbaum’s text. But I was not alone.

Rising: that whispering specter that not only hovers over

contemporary philosophy of religion, but also ethical debate. As

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it turns out, my concerns regarding Nussbaum, arrive in the

shadow of this figure. He too had an attentive concern for

particulars (defining phenomenology as: “to let that which shows

itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows

itself from itself.”);xxx a distaste for the detached attunement

of science (pushing Husserl’s phenomenology toward hermeneutics);

and the universal question of existence accompanied by a desire

to preserve its irreducibility. But in place of “How then shall

we live or love?” he asked, “What is being?” The scandal is that

so spacious an inquiry, so capacious an intellect, so meticulous

a perception, could so neglect ethical concerns—not only in his

writings, but in his politics.

It was Heidegger that began my semester’s entry into ethics

and philosophy; it is Heidegger whom I brought to Nussbaum’s

question of “Love’s Knowledge.” And it is love’s knowledge that

has helped me articulate my concerns regarding Heidegger: his

problematic association with the Nazi party, his critique of

onto-theology, his perception of the fundamental ambiguity of

Being, and the irreducible relation of beings. By reframing

xxx Being and Time, section 68.

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Heidegger’s Being and Time within the discourse of love and grace,

I aim now to expose the useful deficiencies of hermeneutical

phenomenology, especially within his suspicious silence in terms

of ethics. Here, Heidegger’s concept of thrownness into

contingency meets with Beattie’s suggestion: “What will happen

can’t be stopped. Aim for grace.”xxxi Will we land on Love? To

answer this, we must further explore Nussbaum’s model of

improvisation within Heidegger’s own construction of daseins

existing freely in spatiotemporal parameters.

The model of improvisation that Nussbaum intimates is

profound. But unlike Maggie’s turn from the remove of aesthetic

admiration to the discovery of theatrical acting, human

improvisation is not simply a matter of authoring one’s life,

casting the self as protagonist and narrator. This would

dangerously lead to another lapse into closure; we would not

treat mystery and surprise as wholly other, but as meaning-

material for our stories. If our world, our actions, are merely

the making of selves among other selves, how can this keep us

xxxi Ann Beattie. “Learning to Fall.” The Burning House. (New York: Random House, 1979), 14.

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open to otherness, to the asymmetry of love which asks us to risk

more, empty more, give more?

There is something disquieting in Nussbaum’s tacit

affirmation of Maggie’s shift: “Preparation and practice had come

but a short way; her part opened out and she invented from moment

to moment what to say and to do.”xxxii While we admire the freedom

of the improvisation model, where is its fidelity—its sense of

relation to my choices and others’ flourishing? We approach here

the Heideggerian model of authentic self—of a dasein taking hold

of its mineness in confrontational contrast to the “They.”

Heidegger, as another philosopher influenced by Aristotelian

ethics, did not publish much in terms of ethical discourse. But

like Nussbaum, he too critiqued the abstractions of Platonic

thought, appealing to Aristotle’s openness in perception

alongside Eckhart’s appeal to mystery. But how to join an eye

that perceives widely, with a body that must choose certain

actions, a voice that constrains thought to elected words? Though

he saw Aristotle’s ethic as an exploration of kinesis (the movement

made in the possible coming into actuality), Heidegger’s

xxxii “James’ The Golden Bowl: Literature as Moral Philosophy,” 138.

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admiration for the concept of kinesis is overshadowed by

critiques of his own ethical ambivalence.xxxiii Again, we run up

against the beauty and burden of Nussbaum’s appeal to perceptive

equilibrium.

Heidegger did lecture a thesis like Nussbaum’s, recommending

“that ethics be rethought out of the differentiated and

situational character of factical life, which had been stressed

by Aristotle, Kierkegaard, and others: ‘Prior to all comfortable

calculations in advance about validity and objectivity for

humanity stands the reflection on what we actually have and can

have before us, on the available ways of enacting this.”xxxiv

Nussbaum’s essay on perceptive equilibrium in fact seems a re-

appropriation of Heidegger, even surfacing—for the first time in

her compilation—his word, “attunement.”xxxv By appealing to a

theory rooted in praxis, empirical attention grounded in

practical existence, she most resonates with the wishes of

xxxiii See John van Buren’s chapter, “Indications of Ethics,” in The young Heidegger: rumor of the hidden king. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 319.xxxiv Van Buren, 351.xxxv “And inquiry is valuable because it contributes to practice in two ways: by promoting individual clarification and self-understanding, and by moving individuals toward communal attunement,” in “Perceptive Equilibrium: Literary Theory and Ethical Theory,” 173.

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Heidegger. We might consider her literary critique of philosophy

as a variation of his phenomenological critique of

metaphysics.xxxvi Both aim to dismantle the disinterested nature of

abstractions, but neither has achieved a departure from theory.

Theory, in its etymological origin (philologist Nussbaum knows as

well as Heidegger) derives from the theoros: “the visitor who goes

to the festival and is all eyes.” As Van Buren describes,

Heidegger’s Aristotelian appropriation focused on the fact that

“Theoria meant not only this sight-seeing, but also the sight of

the artisan in poiesis, making; eidos meant the artist’s vision or

plan, and logos meant ‘discourse, conversation’ (relational

sense).”xxxvii Heidegger pointed to these definitions in his 1924

lecture, “Dasein und Wahrsein,” returning to the Aristotelian use

of ousia as one whose essence or being is “household, property,

that which is environmentally available for use.”xxxviii

I recount this to expose two key points. First: Nussbaum and

Heidegger’s shared appeal to perceptive engagement in worldly

phenomena and practical engagement through particularities. xxxvi Compare Heidegger’s aims (Van Buren, 223-224) with Nussbaum’s statements on 173.xxxvii Van Buren, 225.xxxviii Van Buren, 225.

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Second: Nussbaum and Heidegger are able to move beyond abstract

theory (be it the metaphysics of Plato or the deontological

constrictions of Kant). However, their appeals to perceptual

equilibrium or hermeneutic phenomenology remain theory insofar as

they suggest that we must be “all eyes” to the festival of life.

We are not simply eyes reading our world as we would a text. We

are summoned with our bodies, our words, to call, respond. Here,

ethics exceeds mere sight-seeing (theoria). Ethics even exceeds

our capacity to craft our lives as if a story or art piece made

as our own doing (poiesis). This does not mean that we must fall

back into an abstract ideology, as if ethical action were a

blueprint plan (eidos) with no room for improvisation.

The best contribution of Nussbaum’s compilation is its

approach toward what Heidegger or Aristotle might summon in the

term, logos. Ethics, if it strives for the eyes of time and space,

an awareness of possibility and actuality, must fundamentally

invigorate dialogue. And this dialogue, this give and take,

freedom and fidelity, mobility and constraint, a wagered call and

response risked, is what love properly knows. Nussbaum approaches

this through Bob and Fanny’s conversation in The Golden Bowl:

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The dialogue between his rules and her perceptions is motivated and sustained by a love that is itself in thesphere of perception, that antecedes any moral judgment. James suggests that if, as members of moral communities, we are to achieve shared perceptions of the actual, we had better love one another first, in all out disagreements and our qualitative differences. Like Aristotle, he seems to say that civic love comes before, and nourishes, civic justice.xxxix

For Aristotle and Nussbaum, the dialogue between rule and

perception is founded upon love. But this love is somehow what

grounds, precedes, and secures the dialogue underwriting human

flourishing. Behind, beneath, beyond is one whose Love begs our

hospitality as human beings (again, ousia, in its true etymological

sense). Our ability to be both a home to others and property of

our selves is predicated upon being available not only to our

environment, but to a foundational “love [that] comes before, and

nourishes.” This love requires not only an attunement to

phenomenal particularities (Heidegger), or a perceptive

equilibrium that preserves incommensurability (Nussbaum). Though

these positions make room for mystery in assessment of human

beings (for which we are grateful), there is yet a mysterious

xxxix “Literature and the Moral Imagination,” 161.

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love that creates the dialogue between rule and perception,

ethical response and attentive hearing.

3) Perceiver and Place:

No matter how fragmented our everyday existence may appear to be, however, it always deals with beings in aunity of the “whole,” if only in a shadowy way. Even and precisely when we are not actually busy with thingsor ourselves, this “as a whole” comes over us….such manifestation is concealed in our joy in the presence of the Dasein…of a human being whom we love.

Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”xl

In one of his few published philosophical references to

love, Heidegger speaks of the unity behind being. This thesis on

metaphysics was published just four years before his

controversial speech, “German Students.” Given these words from

“What is Metaphysics?,” and his early lectures approving

Aristotelian ethics, it seems strange that Heidegger would

declare in 1933, “Let not propositions and ‘ideas’ be the rules

of your being (Sein). The Fuhrer alone is the present and future

German reality and its law. Learn to know ever more deeply: that

xl Martin Heidegger. “What is Metaphysics?” Martin Heidegger: Pathmarks. (New York:Cambridge University Press, 1998), 87. See also Paul Claudel’s words: “Experience supplies us only with paper and ink, so to say, that is the means of representing these ideas, the field on which to project the shadow of our unity.” Paul Claudel, Poetic Art, (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1948), 45.

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from now on every single thing demands decision, and every action

responsibility. Heil Hitler!”xli

The first part of his statement calls for a perception of

reality beyond propositions and rules (Nussbaum, Aristotle); but

the second part then presents an ethic that swears allegiance to

Hitler. What in perceptive equilibrium leaves one open to

destructive ethics? It should be noted that Heidegger eventually

stripped Aristotle’s ethics of his metaphysics. This I would

claim, is the beginning of the phenomenological misappropriation

of an Aristotelian model. When phenomenology fails to account for

an asymmetrical (vertical) dimension—when the only shared plane

is spatio-temporal—the ensuing ethic of ‘equality’ becomes a

closed system, a false heterogeneity.xlii Competing claims between

daseins asserting their mineness are difficult to mitigate. Even

the supposed equality, at this level of immanent vision,

conflates and con-fuses distinct identities. The Absolute does in

fact become Nothing and give way to anxiety if daseins are

xli Martin Heidegger. "German Students," a speech delivered on 3 November 1933at Freiburg University. English translation in The Heidegger Controversy (MIT Press, 1993)—see chapter two.xlii “The Discernment of Perception: An Aristotelian Conception of Private and Public Rationality,” 67.

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considered only in their horizontal relation (without vertical

relation).

Martha Nussbaum intimates what dangerously occurs when a

claim for equality actually becomes (in Plato’s view) a de-

valuing of the particular instead of its enhancement.xliii The

Aristotelian understanding of love and commitment to particulars

actually creates a greater sense of the whole if in relation to

one who cares deeply about the constituents. It would seem our

very concept of eudaimonia rests on who or what we let establish

the answer to “How then shall we live?” If we let, “to each his

own” handle this question, the shared standard collapses under

the false heterogeneity, converging with a homogeneous end (where

no one is special because everyone is independently special). It

would seem that the only standard that can adequately answer the

question of human flourishing is one attuned to beauty—which

values both the particular means and mediums, and the

accomplished work. Or more importantly, since people (unlike some

art objects) are not ever without erasure, revision or growth,

the standard goes to the committed Lover who: values the

xliii “Plato on Commensurability and Desire,” 113-116.

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particular traits and irreducible wonder of a person; calls the

beloved (through love) to live into the vision of the Lover; and

who (as Heidegger wrote in the style of Augustinian love to

Hannah Arendt) ultimately, “wants you to be.”

Who could both read the story of existence we write, could

see us with the eyes of time’s grace, and spacious love, enough

to know beings and wish for our Being? And is this Reader, Lover,

essential to our ethical understanding of how to live? This is a

large question, but I can approach it inchoately from another

angle. Heidegger brilliantly created a philosophical system with

little explanation of ethics; and in part, this is because his

hermeneutic-phenomenologist replaced the need for metaphysicians.

This replacement had its gifts; a space was cleared and left open

for us to become our authentic selves in the face of anxiety, the

Nothing of Being. But into this open space, this homogenous

Nothing grounding the heterogeneity of Being, what would be

permissible and what would be denied? Ethics? Love? A viewer-

judge-lover asymmetrical to the horizontal plane of competing

subjects? Who could “adjudicate between the competing principles,

asking in each case what the cost would be of giving each up”?xliv

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Individuals are “qualitatively special” when viewed from

certain vantage points. Nussbaum suggests a meta-view within the

world (provided by literature, art, religious revelation). This

meta-view is not one of sustained abstraction, but a drawing back

in order to know deeply—like a lover or artist might do in

imagining what a world or work would be like without a particular

person or element.xlv Hence the centrality of the reader’s

attention to the details within the whole of a story, or even the

original meta-view of literary artists, as means of reinstating

particularities within ethical and philosophical systems.

But because Heidegger has stripped beings-in-the-world of a

concerned reader, a concerned viewer or co-creator of the world’s

story, he has left a vacancy in the asymmetrical element—the very

position of meta-view that will determine the value (in love and

grace, as with the measure of God) or disposability (in hatred

and racism, as with the edicts of Hitler) of human flourishing.

Legal structures, political leaders, corporations, and academic

xliv “Sophistry About Conventions,” 225.xlv Martha Nussbaum suggests that we can know are commitment to a principle orbelief based on whether we are willing to live without it. By imagining its absence, we can somewhat comprehend the value of its presence. “Sophistry About Conventions,” 224.

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institutions have stepped into provide answers; but on what

authority will they continue to hold their asymmetrical leverage

against the rising claims for balance?

4) Love and Grace

Heidegger not only stripped Aristotle of the

asymmetrical/metaphysical component; by degree he also did this

with Kierkegaard’s concept of angst. Heidegger appropriates

Kierkegaard’s anxiety without its corollaries of faith and love.

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard claims that the authentic

individual makes absurd, supra-universal (beyond “ethical”),

supra-particular (beyond “esthetic”) moves in faithfulness to

God. Because these choices (his example is Abraham binding Isaac)

require one to uphold contradictory claims (I must sacrifice/must not kill,

God can/cannot ask me sacrifice one I love), the person acting in faith

experiences anxiety as a being-before-God. The distress of indeterminacy

is the paradox of faith. But in Kierkegaard’s model, this anxiety

is not the final word; the final view and verdict is given to

God. Abraham’s perceptive equilibrium--his ability to feel and

hold every truth and its opposite in faithful absurdity—remains

in conversation with a God who arrives to intervene. The

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indeterminacy is in the suspension, Abraham’s vigilant

preparation for obedience (the “teleological suspension of the

ethical”). But Kierkegaard does not sheer this model of

metaphysics. He still has a place for the kairos to transgress

chronos in order to snap the suspension in love. Therefore, the

being-before-God, the true person of faith, perceives deeply the

infinite irreducibility of choices within the paradox; however,

this individual can also therefore choose any action and be able

to live with it. The being-before-God is not ambivalent to the

choice—as if the indeterminacy or anxiety of paradox hampered

decision—but rather trusting of the outcome, and living riskily

into it, fully within it. In a system where God does not arrive

to “bring the sacrifice,” this testing of love, of “infinite

resignation,” goes unanswered and continues to be a chaotic

openness (Heidegger’s abyss of Being/Nothing). But Kierkegaard’s

anxiety is not without parameters or an eradication of

distinctions. As he summarizes:

The absolute duty can lead one to do what ethics would forbid, but it can never lead the knight of faith to stop loving. Abraham demonstrates this. In the moment he is about to sacrifice Isaac, the ethical expression for what he is doing is: he hates Isaac. But if he

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actually hates Isaac, he can rest assured that God doesnot demand this of him, for Cain and Abraham are not identical.xlvi

However, without a standard of relationship to a meta-

standard of love, phenomenology (“finely aware”) can be easily

divorced from ethics (“richly responsible”). One’s ability to

attend the particularities of being (Heidegger) can necessarily

lead to the revelation of Being as angst ad infinitum—the anxiety

that deprives us of speech, of ethical action even. What can keep

us from a perceptive equilibrium that feels incommensurability as

chaos? I suggest that the incommensurability must be viewed as

such only by the Reader of Being’s story. What gives Nussbaum the

right to suggest incommensurability is her appeal to the author

or reader who, because he stands outside of the timeline and

topos of the story, can perceive its intricacies. But what can

give us these eyes? It will require, as Aristotle suggests, a

dialogue between rule and perception which can only be

illuminated by a “good judge” and “a love that antecedes any

judgment.”xlvii Perhaps Hitler was, for Heidegger, a good judge of

the present and future Germany. But insofar as Hitler’s judgment xlvi Soren Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 73-74.

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perpetuated hatred, we must wonder, is there a judge who

perceives with the eyes of time, while uniting beings in the

particularities of a foundational love? It would seem that

appeals to an equalizing perception, if not in dialogue with a

Judge outside our story (though writing Himself there in love),

can converge into blindness, even devaluation of human life.

Despite all attempts at perceptive equilibrium, what brings true

equality (respect for incommensurable human beings, irreducible

stories) requires an outside eye, an asymmetrical element that

perceives the difference and wholeness of Being as grounded in

love—not chaotic openness or hatred.

Though we cannot know the fullness of Heidegger’s connection

to the Nazi party, nor the complex motives of his involvement

(this is a story that only the eyes of one in and outside of time

can fully read)—we must at least intimate the ways that

Heidegger’s Being And Time phenomenologically appropriates the

concerns of Nussbaum and Aristotle’s appeal to perceptive

xlvii This assertion enjoins the Aristotelian view present on page 161 in lightof page 100 (Love’s Knowledge). Nussbaum’s comments on the good judge as an appropriation of Aristotelian morality, “a good judge, who must bring to bear,in the concrete situation, her knowledge of law, the history of precedent, herown sense of the moral convictions embodied in the law, and her understanding of the case before her” (100).

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equilibrium. Then, we might be able to address how his later

ethics exposes the complications of a perceptive equilibrium that

neglects its dialogue with the law of love. This is where

Nussbaum’s essay, “Love’s Knowledge,” addresses: my unease with

her other essays, Heidegger’s reticence on ethics (at least in

his published philosophical works), and the law as logos of love

as opposed to the law as fidelity to the Fuhrer. Ethics will

necessarily involve a dialogue between prescription and

description; but at stake is not only our ability to be “finely

aware” (Nussbaum, Heidegger), but also our ability to remain

fundamentally attuned (“richly responsible”) to love. The

ethical, existential being cannot shirk telos; but will that telos

be death (being-toward-death) or a love that risks despite every

finitude (as in Rahner’s being-toward-God,xlviii Lacoste’s being-

in-vocation,xlix and my own suggestion—being-in-love).

This task would require a larger project and highly detailed

explication. As a marker for future investigation, I will at

least sketch here the discovery I had in reading Nussbaum’s

xlviii Karl Rahner. Hearer of the Word. (New York: Continuum, 1994).xlix Jean-Yves Lacoste. Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man.(New York: Fordham University Press, 2004).

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contrast of Marcel (from Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past) and the

narrator (in Beattie’s “Learning to Fall.”) It is my sense that

Nussbaum’s critique of Marcel (experiencing love through its

deprivation, the catalepsies of suffering) is akin to my unease

with Heidegger’s thesis (experiencing Being as Nothing, the

fundamental attunement of angst). Both Marcel’s and Heidgegger’s

stances are illumined by the contrasting narrator in Beattie’s

short story—who does not accept her Heideggerian sense of being-

in-the-world (thrown into the finitudes of contingencies, marked

by temporality), but rather accepts being as a fall that “aim[s]

for grace”—risking herself in spite of suffering as a being-in-

love. For the purpose of efficiency and space (opening, I hope,

future dialogue), I will enumerate some observations of overlap:

To begin: Sextus Empricus (as quoted in the beginning of the

Nussbaum’s essay, “Love’s Knowledge”) was another early influence

upon Heidegger. He scheduled to teach “Skepticism in Ancient

Philosophy [Phenomenological Interpretations with respect to

Sextus Empiricus].” He did not hold the course, but instead spoke

on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Metaphysics (and tellingly, he

then taught, “Heremeneutics of Facticity.”)l What makes this

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mutual point of contact remarkable is Nussbaum’s use of Sextus

Empiricus in critiquing Marcel’s insufficient “knowledge of

love.”li Marcel comes to know love by his suffering in its

absence, but this

project has about it an odd air of circularity. How do we know love? By a cataleptic impression. But what is this thing, love, that gets known? It is understood to be, is more or less defined as the very thing that is revealed to us in cataleptic impressions. We privilege the impression of suffering as the criterion, and then we adopt an account of love (hardly the only possible account) according to which love is exactly what this criterion reveals to us.lii

In Marcel’s system of knowing, the impression is “‘the only

criterion of truth’…all our understanding of our life is built up

on the basis of the text ‘that reality has dictated to us, whose

impression in us has been made by reality itself.”liii The

cataleptic impression at issue here, for Marcel, is suffering as

it relates to knowing love. He is able to move beyond an

intellectual apprehension of his love into a cataleptic wounding

that, in its sheer force and surprise, eradicates instrumental

means of knowing. He comes to know his love for Albertine by her l Van Buren, 221.li “Love’s Knowledge,” 270.lii “Love’s Knowledge,” 270.liii “Love’s Knowledge,” 266.

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absence. This would seem to satisfy the Aristotelian means of

evaluation. So, too would it approach Heidegger’s notion that we

come to know Being through the wounding of anxiety—our experience

of the Nothing that “robs us of speech.”liv This nothing

annihilates our determinations, until all we know is the No-thing

of Being. Again, we sense an odd circularity here. In Heidegger’s

desperate aversion of metaphysics as intellectual attainment, he

in no way eludes determinacy by creating a philosophical system

of indeterminacy, of irreducibility. He must know this irony, but

just so we can see it…

If we simply rephrase Nussbaum’s critique, exchanging being

for “love” and anxiety for the “cataleptic impression of anxiety”

her essay cuts to the heart of both deficiencies. As in the

paragraph above, my transposing Marcel/Nussbaum into the key of

Heideggerian rhetoric:

“How do we know what it is to be? By anxiety’s revealing the

nothing….Then how is Being known? As what is revealed by

liv “Anxiety reveals the nothing…Anxiety robs us of speech.” Martin Heidegger.“What is Metaphysics?” Martin Heidegger: Pathmarks. (New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1998), 89. See this in conversation with Nussbaum’s footnotes on pages 265-266 (glimpses of anxiety and cataleptic knowing in Ancient Greek philosophy).

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anxiety?” Are we any closer here? There is only the circle around

the chaotic abyss—to which we cannot relate, and does not relate

to us. We adopt anxiety as the criterion, a criterion we cannot

critique but only accept. If we adopt an account of Being as

known through anxiety; this will be our cataleptic knowing. But

as such it is a wound, an open sore given by Being that no less

brings us closer to an understanding, or a relational framework.

Heidegger can let phenomena speak insofar as we are robbed of an

intimation of a relational creator, for whom these phenomena

might be a mouthpiece. And what is to keep us from regarding

other daseins as presences we can cataleptically know, but have no

need to relate or love? As Nussbaum summarizes, skepticism is the

underlying motivation that leads to self-relation, an inability

to love, a flight from vulnerability through acknowledged

incompleteness.

For the sake of another double reading, resonating not only

for Marcel but for Heidegger, I will place in bracket the

translated parallels:

But isn’t the whole idea of basing love [being] and itsknowledge on cataleptic impressions [anxiety] itself a form of flight—from openness to the other [God, human

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beings], from all those things in love for which there is in fact no certain criterion?...It is because this is a suspicious man who can be content with nothing less than full control [philosophical framework of ontology], who cannot tolerate the other’s [God, Being,or another dasein] separate life, that he demands cataleptic impressions and certainty that the other cannever give him. It is because he wishes not to be tormented by the ungovernable inner life of the other that he adopts a position that allows him to conclude that the other’s inner life is nothing more than the constructive inner workings of his own mind. The skeptical conclusion consoles far more than it agonizes.

In Heidegger’s acknowledgment of onto-theology’s

incompleteness, he asserts that metaphysics is really about No-

thing. This could be construed as radical skepticism; or perhaps

a preserving of mystery. But as Nussbaum exposes, a system whose

claims to irreducibility are founded on anxiety (or cataleptic

impressions via absence and suffering) does not go far enough in

preserving mystery, does not go far enough in risking. It settles

for anxiety where love might lie open, waiting. It settles for

skepticism where prayer might be the only mode of knowing.

For one matter, Heidegger’s philosophy proves another mode

of abstraction, of flight from the very beings that it claims to

perceive. Heidegger’s appeal to let phenomena speak their truths,

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without our own over-intellectualization (metaphysics/abstract

claims) or mere scientific instrumentation (unhampered scientific

attunement) is apt. However, where he perhaps does not go far

enough is when he grounds beings in Being/Nothing as revealed by

anxiety. Anxiety, though a felt indeterminacy, is not risky

enough. And it certainly destroys the relation between beings,

between phenomena, between dasein, with its chaotic openness.

Chaotic openness takes on all incompleteness, without calling

daseins to a vulnerability to others—the openness that belongs

rightly to love’s knowledge. Love’s knowledge, as opposed to “our

rationalizations false and delusive” knows it cannot grasp “its

limits and boundaries.” Rather, instead of anxiety’s oscillation

between being and nothing, its paradoxical indeterminacy, we

sense the “intermittences of the heart—the alternations between

love and its denial, suffering and denial of suffering, that

constitute the most essential and ubiquitous structural feature

of the human heart.”lv Heidegger knew this before writing Being And

Time. In his lecture, “Der Begriff der Zeit,” Heidegger quoted

Augustine’s belief that “the only way to truth is through love.”

lv “Love’s Knowledge,” 273.

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Similarly, in the endnotes of Being and Time, he quotes Pascal’s

assertion that, “while, in human matters, we are accustomed to

inculcate the ‘we must know before we can love,’…divine wisdom

teaches that, in regard to spiritual things, we must ‘love in

order to know them.’”lvi

Here, Nussbaum’s foil for Marcel arises: a young,

Connecticut housewife caught between her marriage to “a dry and

successful professional man” and her lover, Ray, whom she visits

in New York. She discovers that “loving Ray made [her] as

confused as disliking [her husband] Arthur, and that he had too

much power over [her] and that she could not be his lover

anymore.” Arthur enables her sense of control, even gives her a

watch that seems to symbolize her dominance over time and her

very segmenting of self.lvii But Ray she sees while disinherited

of home (she can only see him New York) and her own internal

locus of control (she sees him while babysitting Ruth’s slightly

unpredictable, brain-damaged son, Andrew).

lvi Accounted by Van Buren, 172.lvii “The watch is impersonal time, time scrutinized, controlled, and intellectualized: the time of the skeptic. (Ruth just takes the time, feeling there’s “plenty of” it, hand on your back, not on her watch.)” “Love’s Knowledge,” 276.

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As if caught between a God she thoroughly knows--a God who

has proven successful but dry (through metaphysical mastery)—and

a God who would de-center her with His love, the woman is stuck

in indecision. This indecision would seem to lie beyond ethics;

love complicates and confounds commensurability. When she tries

to compare, she finds herself inexplicably drawn to the risky

love of Ray—his incomprehensibility and spontaneity, his

tenderness and intimate intrusion. Over time she observes Ruth’s

trusting and hospitable nature in conversation with Andrew’s

playfulness. She discovers in their interaction a knowing that is

all love, all risk, and can do so because a space has been

created and discovered, preserved by a mutual game of grace. In

the ending scene, Andrew explains to the narrator and Ray about

his mother’s “learning to fall.” Nussbaum unpacks this metaphor,

as Beattie intends it, into the letting of love: “Like Ruth’s

bodily fall and, as she sees, like prayer, it’s something done

yet, once you do it, fundamentally uncontrolled; no accident, yet

a yielding; an aiming, but for grace.”lviii

lviii “Love’s Knowledge,” 278.

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Nussbaum goes on to characterize the slow fall--the steady

removal of self-deception, the simultaneous discovery and

creation--at the root of love, and in fact ethical improvisation.

This is not to say that loving is the fall, or that the feeling

surrounding the beloved is the cataleptic impression felt as

dizziness. Rather, the fall is the precondition, the perpetual

opening, toward the beloved—“as a prayer…would be an opening

toward God.” As it turns out, the desire to prove love by its

evidences, or prove/disprove God as present or absent, would be

too easy. It would be closing a part of one’s household (ousia,

essence) to the kairotic intruder, the true love, the life-

altering story, that calls us to come and holds us somehow as we

fall into its opening.

Faith is never beyond doubt, grace can never be assured. The enterprise of proving God’s existence has little to do with it. You aim for it by not asking to prove it. What puts her beyond doubt is the absence of the demand for proof, the simple fact that she allows his arm to stay around her back. (We must add: in this [the narrator] allows herself to be tender and attentive toward him, to notice and respond to what he is doing, in a way that she hadn’t before, caught up asshe was in her own anxiety.)lix

lix “Love’s Knowledge,” 279.

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At this point Nussbaum takes a turn, revealing precisely—in

the particulars of Beattie’s “Learning to Fall”—how we might

simultaneously become more open to perceive, more willing to

respond, more desirous to move beyond anxiety. She clears a way

between faith and doubt—a space where love in all its mystery and

irreducibility is both action and reception. A fall that aims for

grace, a trust that aims for flourishing. This freedom that

binds, love as grace and gravity, de-center us toward another in

care. This care, anxiety alone could not provide. The ground of

being as a loving Being, not only reads our stories, but enters

them profoundly in His own falling.

It remains difficult to trace how this riskily attentive

love can unravel into the dangerous blindness of hatred. At what

point did Heidegger’s approach so predicated on phenomenological

perception (“perceptive equilibrium”) and hermeneutical

reflection provide enough spaciousness to simultaneously attend

Hitler and ignore an entire race? Stranger still that his

particular loves (affairs with two Jewish women: Hannah Arendt

and Elisabeth Blochmann) did not alter his political stance.

These questions will not only haunt our present with its stories,

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but also its reductions. No doubt, I have reduced my impressions

of Heidegger in some way by mirroring him to Proust’s Marcel.

Though, I imagine, whatever the reduction, it may not be too

simplistic to suggest that we could all learn from Ruth and

Andrew.

To understand the complexities further, I attended a

conference at Boston College, where Francoise Dastur asked that

we regard Heidegger’s problematic politics as story without

definitive resolution or assessment. Is it true that every human

being’s choices can be viewed in such a way, even after their

life has ended, and we have presumed to close their book?

5) Afterward/After-words: Eyes of Time

The eyes of time, like beauty or love, patiently envision a

unity of particularities, of distinct bodies and souls (in the

case of love), of unique pigments, shapes, sounds (in terms of

literature, art, and music). The spatio-temporal topos of love

and beauty is inclusive without excluding the capacity of the

kairos to take shape within chronos, the fullness of form to limit

itself to the constraints of chosen mediums, chosen loves.

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The paradox of Pauline ethics enters here, “Owe nothing to

one another, except love.”lx Love, like ethical action, cannot be

a matter of inner compulsion, subscription to deontological

appeals. Nussbaum has revealed the deficiency here. However,

there is some measure of fidelity in love’s freedom. There is a

risk. And time is the flexibility that permits that risk. Insofar

as literature and love play with our sense of time—making us feel

its gracious unfolding in the midst of its marked march—ethical

action is illuminated by this play. This may be the lie of

existence that love and beauty expose: that we must make

decisions under pressure of compulsion. Literature and love both

reveal that minutes, unlike knives, need not cut away at what we

leave open. Time both asks us to act in the moment, and allows us

the grace to change. It is freedom and fidelity. If literature

can expose this as a model: superb. But when we arise from the

time of the story, or perceiving the others in our lives in their

storied complexity, we are yet called to define ourselves, our

choices, while remaining open to redefinition.

lx Romans 3:18.

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Though it may be, that a literature without theology (as in

a phenomenology non-conversant with theology), cannot speak fully

to the rebirth that not only turns pages, but rolls away the

tombs of our tongues with its Word.lxi This Story asks not only

our readership, but also our enfleshing, our carrying it in our

bodies, our actions, our words, consuming us as it “teaches Grace

line by line.” This it does by creating within us a desire to

press the edges and be pressed, a true reaching out to know and

be known. As Anne Carson summarizes, “Both the experience of

desire and experience of reading have something to teach us about

edges…what the reader wants from reading and what the lover wants

from love are experience of very similar design. It is a

necessarily triangular design, and it embodies a reach for the

unknown….The unknown must remain unknown or the novel ends.”lxii

But in this space between known and unknown, between rule and

perception, how will we live? And can our desire to ask this

question be at all separate from the question, “How then shall we

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love?” Time, like grace, and beings like lovers, will meet in

shared and conflicting desires. But how will our desires align

such that we practice grace in the space of our shared falling?

Ethics must risk love. …And aim for grace.

lxi Others have critiqued Nussbaum’s reductive view of Christianity. Nussbaum’s few allusions to Christianity fail to capture imaginative readings of scripture and non-Platonic manifestations within the Christian tradition.lxii Anne Carson. “Realist.” Eros the Bittersweet. (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998), 109.