Colorado College Philosophy professor Rick Furtak examines Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s role in establishing a philosophical framework dealing with aspects of the human experience that defy quantification and the importance of scrutinizing the emotional response in search of existential truth.
From Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (translated by R. J. Hollingdale)
241
A good friendship. — A good friendship originates when one party has a great respect for the other, more indeed than for himself, when one party likewise loves the other, though not so much as he does himself, and when, finally, one party knows how to facilitate the association by adding to it a delicate tinge of intimacy while at the same time prudently withholding actual and genuine intimacy and the confounding of I and Thou.
376
Of friends. — Only reflect to yourself how various are the feelings, how divided the opinions, even among your closest acquaintances, how even the same opinions are of a quite different rank or intensity in the heads of your friends than they are in yours; how manifold are the occasions for misunderstanding, for hostility and rupture. After reflecting on all this you must tell yourself: how uncertain is the ground upon which all our alliances and friendships rest, how close at hand are icy downpours or stormy weather, how isolated each man is! When one realizes this, and realizes in addition that all the opinions of one’s fellow men, of whatever kind they are and with whatever intensity they are held, are just as necessary and unaccountable as their actions; if one comes to understand this inner necessity of opinions originating in the inextricable interweaving of character, occupation, talent, environment — perhaps one will then get free of the bitterness of feeling with which the sage cried: ‘Friends, there are no friends!’ One will, rather, avow to oneself: yes, there are friends, but it is error and deception regarding yourself that led them to you; and they must have learned how to keep silent in order to remain your friend; for such human relationships almost always depend upon the fact that two or three things are never said or even so much as touched upon: if these little boulders do start to roll, however, friendship follows after them and shatters. Are there not people who would be mortally wounded if they discovered what their dearest friends actually know about them? — Through knowing ourselves, and regarding our own nature as a moving sphere of moods and opinions, and thus learning to despise ourselves a little, we restore our proper equilibrium with others. It is true we have good reason to think little of each of our acquaintances, even the greatest of them; but equally good reason to direct this feeling back on to ourself. — And so, since we can endure ourself, let us also endure other people; and perhaps to each of us there will come the more joyful hour when we exclaim:
‘Friends, there are no friends!’ thus said the dying sage;
‘Foes, there are no foes!’ say I, the living fool.
My students are reading Virginia Woolf’s novel To The Lighthouse (1927), a landmark of modernist fiction that the author regarded as “easily the best of my books.” It is a difficult work to read. Woolf re-forms the conventions of the novel through her experimental use of nonlinear plot, stream-of-consciousness, and multiple narrators. To acclimate, I am turning to Woolf’s advice in a 1925 essay entitled “How Should One Read a Book?”, found in The Second Common Reader.
A disclaimer on subjectivity:
The only advice … that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at the liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions — there we have none.
A caution against preconceptions:
[F]ew people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this and soon you will find that your author is giving you, or attempting to give you, something far more definite.
On the osmotic skills of reading and writing:
Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novelist is doing is not to read, but to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties with words.
On the special skill of exercising the imagination:
To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination if you are going to make use of all that the novelist — the great artist — gives you.
On the incubation period of reading:
The first process, to receive impressions with the utmost understanding, is only half the process of reading; it must be completed, if we are to get the whole pleasure from a book, by another. We must pass judgement upon those multitudinous impressions; we must make of these fleeting shapes one that is hard and lasting. But not directly. Wait for the dust of reading to settle; for the conflict and the questioning to die down; walk, talk, pull the dead petals from a rose, or fall asleep. Then suddenly without our willing it, for it is thus that Nature undertakes these transitions, the book will return, but differently. It will float to the top of the mind as a whole.
On the cultivation of taste:
It would be foolish … to pretend that the second part of reading, to judge, to compare, is as simple as the first — to open the mind wide to the fast flocking of innumerable impressions. To continue reading without the book before you, to hold one shadow-shape against another, to have read widely enough and with enough understanding to make such comparisons alive and illuminating — that is difficult; it is still more difficult to press further and to say, ‘Not only is the book of this sort, but it is of this value; here it fails; here it succeeds; this is bad; that is good.’ To carry out this part of a reader’s duty needs such imagination, insight, and learning that it is hard to conceive any one mind sufficiently endowed; impossible for the most self-confident to find more than the seeds of such powers in himself. Would it not be wiser, then, to remit this part of reading and to allow the critics, the gowned and furred authorities of the library, to decide the question of the book’s absolute value for us? Yet how impossible! We may stress the value of sympathy; we may try to sink our won identity as we read. But we know that we cannot sympathize wholly or immerse ourselves wholly; there is always a demon in us who whispers, ‘I hate, I love,’ and we cannot silence him. Indeed, it is precisely because we hate and we love that our relation with the poets and novelists is so intimate that we find the presence of another person intolerable. And even if the results are abhorrent and our judgments are wrong, still our taste, the nerve of sensation that sends shocks through us, is our chief illuminant; we learn through feeling; we cannot suppress our own idiosyncrasy without impoverishing it. But as time goes on perhaps we can train our taste; perhaps we can make it submit to some control. When it has fed greedily and lavishly upon books of all sorts — poetry, fiction, history, biography — and has stopped reading and looked for long spaces upon the variety, the incongruity of the living world, we shall find that it is changing a little; it is not so greedy, it is more reflective.
On how a reader influences the author:
[I]f to read a book as it should be read calls for the rarest qualities of imagination, insight, and judgment, you may perhaps conclude that literature is a very complex art and that it is unlikely that we shall be able, even after a lifetime of reading, to make any valuable contribution to its criticism. We must remain readers; we shall not put on the further glory that belongs to those rare beings who are also critics. But still we have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print.
On how reading is an intellectual and creative reward in itself:
I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards — their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble — the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, ‘Look, those need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.’
In The Lord, Catholic priest and author Romano Guardini (1885-1968) writes:
If anyone should ask: What is certain in life and death — so certain that everything else may be anchored in it? The answer is: The love of Christ. Life teaches us that this is the only true reply. Not people — not even the best and dearest; not science, or philosophy, or art or any other product of human genius. Also not nature, which is so full of profound deception; neither time nor fate. . . . Not even simply “God”; for his wrath has been roused by sin, and how without Christ would we know what to expect from him? Only Christ’s love is certain. We cannot even say God’s love; for that God loves us we also know, ultimately, only through Christ. And even if we did know without Christ that God loved us — love can also be inexorable, and the more noble it is, the more demanding. Only through Christ do we know that God’s love is forgiving. Certain is only that which manifested itself on the cross. What has been said so often and so inadequately is true: The heart of Jesus Christ is the beginning and end of all things.
In The Chronicle Review, Jay Parini, a novelist, poet, and professor of English at Middlebury College, reviews Christian Wiman’s autobiography, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, which he expects will become “a kind of spiritual classic.” The opening articulates my inchoate grievance against most contemporary criticism :
It’s often difficult to hear poetry, to appreciate the “still, small voice” that spoke to the prophet Elijah, a voice that grows larger in memory or subsequent readings. In a confessional line toward the end of The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot reflected on the blizzard of quotations that make up his poem: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” These are the fragments that, assembled over a lifetime of reading, provide something to rely on in hard times. These are the memorable passages that, in his poetry and his criticism, Eliot drew the reader’s eye and ear to with an affectionate insistence.
It strikes me that criticism—systemic reflection on texts, even on life itself—has lost its urgency during the past 30 years or more, having complicated (and deadened) reading in ways nobody could have foreseen. It’s not simply that teachers of literature don’t often read for pleasure nowadays, or don’t believe in the transforming powers of art, or no longer value any statement that hasn’t bounced off many walls of irony and landed, like a squash ball, in some distant corner of the court. It’s the loss of pressure that stands out, a sense that literature matters because it informs, quite literally, our consciousness as well as our actions.
One turns gratefully to instances of urgent critical writing when they do arise in Terry Eagleton, Daniel Mendelsohn, Martha Nussbaum, or James Wood. Such critics search out, and find, connections between writing and pressing life questions—aesthetic, political, moral, and philosophical. Nussbaum, a philosopher and a classicist by training, put her finger on the problem years ago: “For the Greeks of the fifth and early fourth centuries BC, there were not two separate sets of questions in the area of human choice and action, aesthetic questions and moral-philosophical questions, to be studied and written about by mutually detached colleagues in different departments,” she wrote. “Instead, dramatic poetry and what we now call philosophical inquiry in ethics were both typically framed by, seen as ways of pursuing, a single and general question: namely, how human beings should live.”
What stands out among earlier poet-critics such as Matthew Arnold, Eliot, and Adrienne Rich was the immediacy of their concerns as readers. Their poetry criticism felt deeply unified, emerging from primal concerns, a belief that language—especially the language of poetry—mattered because it addressed ultimate concerns.
* * *
Poetry is the art of transformation, and we value critics who make us see freshly what transformations lie before us and help us to make the necessary connections between poetry and life without destroying the ineffability of the poem itself.
One looks around, half in desperation, for those critics today who direct us not beyond the text before us, but through it, to the life beyond its linguistic boundaries. These are the critics who understand the incarnational aspects of poetry, its way of refreshing the currency of feeling by how it makes life itself visible, palpable, creating what Roman Catholics refer to as “real presence,” the embodiment of spirit in matter, as in the Eucharist—the ultimate transformation.
The closing addresses how Christian Wiman’s faith influences his literary criticism:
What I love in Wiman is the way he reads poems as urgent messages in a bottle, weaving their texts into his evolving consciousness, his sad personal story, linking his language with theirs, showing us clearly and definitively what Dr. Johnson, the great English critic, meant when he said: “The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
Yet Wiman does much more. He shows us what happens to a man when his relation to the divine is reawakened, his mind becoming alert in ways previously unimaginable. That alertness carries over into his readings of poetry, which occur in a pressured context, as the language of the poems becomes part of his evolving mental landscape, part of his recovery, his spiritual (as well as physical) survival.
Not surprisingly, a fair portion of the most useful criticism has come in the form of spiritual autobiography, in which writers rely on scripture, or lectio divina—the practice of close, even reverential, reading—to concentrate the mind and kindle the affections. In recent times, examples of this genre abound, as in Marilynne Robinson’s The Death of Adam (1998) and Absence of Mind (2010), where the novelist’s thoughts range widely over sacred and secular writing, or Patricia Hampl’s I Could Tell You Stories (1999), which includes intense and memorable readings of Whitman, Plath, and Anne Frank. In such writing, the authors’ faith bolsters their reading, allowing for a kind of focus rarely seen in more conventional criticism, where “objectivity” becomes a relevant concern.
In My Bright Abyss, Wiman offers a demonstration of what faith means to a critic: not a new way of life but, more mysteriously, the old life freshly understood, filtered through a range of texts. He reminds us that revelation comes not in a whirlwind or fire, but in that “still, small voice” that came to Elijah in the desert.
“The voice is always there, for everyone,” writes Wiman. “For some of us, unfortunately, it takes terror and pain to make us capable of hearing it.” It is this urgency that separates the wheat from the chaff among critics.
Essays by Christian Wiman
Reviews of My Bright Abyss
History Today features an overview of Michael Oakeshott (1901-90), one of the greatest English political philosophers. “While there has been growing interest in some aspects of his philosophy,” says the author, “he still remains in the shadows.” Here is a much-quoted passage from Oakeshott’s lecture, “Political Education.”
In political activity, then, men sail a boundless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy; and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every inimical occasion.
I welcome this “traditional manner of behaviour” in our political life, although it seems rare, even among so-called “conservatives.”
