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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.
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