The Erotic Bird

Phenomenology in Literature

Maurice Natanson

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781400822430
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

How does literature illuminate the way we live? Maurice Natanson, a prominent champion of phenomenology, draws upon this method's unique power to show how fiction can highlight aspects of experience that are normally left unexamined. By exploring the structure of the everyday world, Natanson reveals the "uncanny" that lies at the core of the ordinary. Phenomenology--which involves the questioning of that which we usually take for granted--is for Natanson the essence of philosophy.Drawing upon his philosophical predecessors Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schutz, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Natanson paves his own way with stories and examples that themselves bear witness to how phenomenology occurs in literature. In considering such works as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Natanson shows how literature opens us to the domain of possibility and how metaphor offers philosophical power when we think about freedom and change.This book, written by one of the twentieth century's leading phenomenologists, will interest students in philosophy and in literature. They will value the work particularly for its clarification of concepts and terms that frequently emerge in the contemporary intellectual climate.

One

Phenomenology in Literature I

Plato, the reddened flower, the erotic bird

(Wallace Stevens)

IN AN ENTERPRISING and provocative essay entitled “Philosophy as/ and/of Literature,”¹ Arthur C. Danto explores a number of questions concerning the relationship between philosophy and literature. Among other matters, he is interested in the attempt to turn philosophy into a text, to “read” philosophical works as though they were, indeed, literary texts. The result of Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive ferment, as I would put it, is to activate from the text an unlimited number of readings, to announce the impossibility of restraining the signification of a poem or a story or a philosophical meditation. To place Derrida among his texts in America, one might declare that it is always July 4th being celebrated with the total inventory of all fireworks as well as with unending night. Danto has his critical comment to make about deconstruction but he also has larger themes to examine. Is philosophy part of the family of literature? Or is there a distinctive responsibility to truth which the philosopher must recognize as his privileged shackle? If so, how is “truth” to be taken here? For Danto, truth leads to the reality of the reader of, say, a literary work; truth proves ultimately to be a metaphor of consciousness: the metaphor of the “I” of the consciousness of the reader. Perhaps we are delivered from representationalism to the ontology of the metaphor, denoting a sovereign consciousness. Hegel is invoked as the genius of the occasion. However, we are given not idealism but metaphoric autonomy as the locus of truth. Thus literature is liberated from the captivity of philosophy at the same time that philosophy is returned to the bosom of its history in the embrace of the reader, the metaphoric “I.”

In the course of his essay, Danto provides a clue to a rather different aspect of the philosophy/literature debate, a clue which he leaves hanging. Danto writes:

Responding to a review of The Realm of Truth by his amanuensis, Santayana wrote: “It is as well that now you can take a holiday; which doesn’t exclude the possibility of some day returning to them [the pages of the book] with freshness of judgment and apperception. Perhaps then you might not deprecate my purple passages, and might see, (what is the historical fact) that they are not applied ornaments but natural growths and realizations of the thought previously moving, in a limbo of verbal abstractions.”²

Santayana is suggesting that rather than style or rhetoric being a dispensable addition to philosophical discourse, the kind of language in which argument is embedded serves a function different from that of linguistic adornment—the verbal foam of tossing seas. Santayana’s “style” clarifies fugitive abstraction, makes evident the encirclements (the “fringes” of meaning, as William James called them) of reference and possibility which otherwise would be lost to consciousness. We come to one of those little words which Danto does not include in his title: philosophy in literature. Consider a passage from Santayana’s The Realm of Truth:

A faith founded on logic is an acrobatic and insane faith. It was not logical necessity, but hard practical evidence, that first suggested mathematical ideas to the mind and afterwards confirmed and imposed them. Animal faith honours mathematical science—a fantastic construction in itself—for measuring reliably the footsteps of that stealthy material power that pervades the world. If mathematics measures these footsteps perfectly, mathematics is perfectly true. The reality of psychologists—subjective presence, whether sensuous or conceptual—belongs to a different moral or aesthetic sphere, not mediated by animal faith and not itself conveying knowledge of truth, true as the account of such experience may be which is conveyed later by memory or sympathetic fancy: for often the art of fiction may tell us the truth about the fictions natural to the mind.³

“An acrobatic and insane faith”: a faith founded on logic makes not only deductions but demands. A Being which is Perfection must exist if to lack existence is to mean anything less than Perfection. An attribute must know how to tumble if gymnastics demands tumbling and if theology demands the attribute. But an acrobatic faith is a different affair. The logic of faith has its requirements, but the acrobatics of faith point to the ceremony which the believer enacts rather than describes or portrays. If the Ontological Argument for the existence of God is an example of a faith founded on logic, then the acrobat is a performer who makes of necessity reality, and therein, for Santayana, lies the insanity of such a faith. It may well be that some individuals have come to believe in a supreme Being as a result of the invincibility of the Ontological Argument. I cannot imagine a more tedious faith. But whether tedious or not, such a road to God must be taken most seriously by those in search of faith or by those who proclaim that faith is grounded in logic. The last claim underlies Santayana’s notion of an “insane faith.” Not implausible, not less than convincing, not irresponsible, but insane. We are reminded of the “holy fool.” But insanity is quite another matter. Simple faith, naive faith, childlike faith—these are all modes of sane faith; they are in the manner of faith, not its substance. Insane faith, however, signifies the leap of the acrobat, his ultimate tumble, from the concept of necessity to the ontological splendor of a divine Being.

The point of this brief Anselmnian adventure is that the language which Santayana uses—the language of “an acrobatic and insane faith”—is not a patch of purple prose but a way of making evident, of exposing, the way in which philosophy is in literature, in the text of a philosopher whose magnificence of “style” is sometimes derided as poetry (or at least poetic), not philosophy. What do we have then, an accident on the information highway? If much of Santayana’s writing is to be taken as literature, then the philosophy in it is not to be understood as royal language but as an elucidation of certain states of affairs, as a close viewing of the inwardness of language. We are driven, indeed, to an inspection of how philosophy is to be understood when it is in the precincts of literature. Before that, however, a word is owing to the Ontological Argument. I spoke of a tedious faith. Coming to faith by way of the Ontological Argument may or may not be tedious, but the Argument itself is far from dull. In fact, I think it is the most exciting of the traditional rational arguments for the existence of God. It is the most elegant and the most sophisticated of the traditional arguments. Still, it is my limitation that I cannot imagine a bedazzled believer in God, newly come from the Ontological Argument. I see the Argument, rather, as providing a scaffolding through which the meaning of Divinity may be grasped. Perhaps, once the edifice is erected, the scaffolding may be removed so that the believer may behold the object of his faith. For my part, it is the scaffolding which illuminates the object and reveals its splendor. The genius of the Ontological Argument lies in its heuristic power.

How, once more, is philosophy to be understood with regard to literature? The first step toward appreciating that question requires some satisfaction in attending to a related question: Are there concepts in philosophy which may be said to be poetic, intrinsically poetic? Wallace Stevens wrote “A Collect of Philosophy”⁴ in response to that intriguing unsettler. Stevens says:

the idea of the infinity of the world, which is the same thing as a sense of the universe of space, is an idea that we are willing to accept as inherently poetic even at moments when it means nothing at all, just as we are willing to assume that the rising and the setting of the sun are inherently poetic, even at moments when we are indifferent to them. The idea of the infinity of the world is a poetic idea because it gives the imagination sudden life.⁵

It might be thought that at least some philosophers have poetic ideas. Leibniz comes to mind.⁶ Stevens was not secure enough in his grasp of philosophy to rely completely on his own discoveries. He wrote to a number of personal friends or acquaintances who might provide him with instances of poetic ideas; he heard from Jean Wahl, Paul Weiss, Jean Paulhan. But mostly, they did not aid Stevens greatly because they did not fully grasp what he had in mind for his “Collect.” In fact, Stevens was not at ease with his project, as is indicated in the volume of his Letters.⁷ I do not think that Stevens regarded the “Collect” as a successful fulfillment of his plan; nor do I think that it “works.” Still, it includes some extremely insightful passages. It is a pity that Stevens did not trust his own instincts, for the results are often valuable. Jean Wahl, both a poet and a philosopher wrote to Stevens:

I am just now reading the Méditations Cartesiennes by Husserl. Very dry. But he affirms that there is an enormous (ungeheueres) a priori in our minds, an inexhaustible infinity of a priori. He speaks of the approach to the unapproachable.⁸

Neither Wahl nor Stevens mentions as qualifying poetic ideas in philosophy Husserl’s “phenomenological reduction” or his concept of the “transcendental ego.” As with Santayana, we will see later what was missed. The language Wahl uses resonates oddly in my memory: “an enormous (ungeheueres) a priori in our minds” recalls to me the opening line in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (“Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt.”)⁹ We have a rendezvous with Gregor.

It should be clear that the issue for Stevens in “A Collect” was not style, nor was it philosophers noted for their style: say, Nietzsche or Bergson. Rather, Stevens is concerned with two supremacies, that of philosophy and that of poetry. He writes:

The most significant deduction possible relates to the question of supremacy as between philosophy and poetry. If we say that philosophy is supreme, this means that the reason is supreme over the imagination. But is it? Does not philosophy carry us to a point at which there is nothing left except the imagination? If we rely on the imagination (or, say, intuition), to carry us beyond that point (as in respect to the idea of God, if we conceive of the idea of God as this world’s capital idea), then the imagination is supreme, because its powers have shown themselves to be greater than the powers of the reason. Philosophers, however, are not limited to the reason and, as the concepts, to which I have referred, show, their ideas are often triumphs of the imagination.¹⁰

For Stevens, ultimately, philosophy and poetry acting together in the integration of reason and imagination constitute the supreme creation. It is worth noting that, for Stevens, “intuition” may be substituted for “reason,” or at least that reason is not blind to the possibility of intuition. We are back, in fact, to the vocabulary of Santayana as well as that of Husserl. What is meant by intuition in both thinkers is the unmediated apprehension—the seizure—of the given in experience. “Experience” in the sense of Erlebnis, not Erfahrung. We mean a given caught up in the stream of lived experience rather than being part of the spectacle of public awareness. Erlebnis includes affection between human beings; Erfahrung includes SMOKING FORBIDDEN ANYWHERE IN THIS BUILDING. That which intuition apprehends in immediacy is what is denoted by essence. Intuition is the agency of essence, the agency which makes it possible for the quality of redness, say, of this particular red gown to be distinguished from the red of the cloth from which it had been cut. It would make sense to say that the patch of that cloth was red in the same way the gown was red; it would not make sense to say that the quality of redness of that patch was red in the same way that the gown was red. The quality has a fictive being; the patch has a substantial being. A patch of the quality of redness would be a contradiction in philosophical terms. The fictive and the substantial lead separate ontological lives.

We have come to the end of our detour. In quest of “philosophy,” we have considered, through Wallace Stevens, the significance of a “poetic idea.” Style led us to take that detour. But it must be said that humility did not serve Stevens well in his “Collect.” He might have realized that he was the originator of a classic poetic idea: “The poem is the cry of its occasion.” There was no need to write to Jean Wahl; nor, indeed, did Wahl serve him well in the case of Husserl. “Dry” the Cartesian Meditations might be, so dry in fact that not much is needed to set them crackling into flame. Wahl was a careful and knowledgeable reader of Husserl; he might have encouraged Stevens to read him. At the time of their correspondence, the Cartesian Meditations was available only in a (very good) French translation (the original German would not arrive on the scene until years later). Meanwhile, Stevens read French with ease; he should have had an opportunity to discover phenomenology. As it was, he hovered at its edges, as his Letters shows. I believe that the poetry of Wallace Stevens is surely philosophical; it should be suggested, however, that it is philosophical—without self-consciousness or deliberation—in a phenomenological way. In fact, the search here is not for philosophy but for what I take to be its poetic essence: phenomenology. Philosophy in literature will prove to be, at least in my interpretation, phenomenology in literature. Thus, our task is not to define philosophy once more but to clarify the particular manner in which phenomenology may be said to be “in” literature. And this clarification must avoid the repetition of being still another introduction to phenomenology.

Husserl’s phenomenology implies a “philosophy,” a methodology, a descriptive enterprise, a vast logic, an incursion into the realm of everyday life, into what the founder of phenomenology called the Lebenswelt. That life-world embraces, let alone “contains” the most trivial gesture no less than the grandest conceptual scheme. No wonder Jean-Paul Sartre was captivated by the first serious mention of phenomenology he had heard, which came from Raymond Aron. We are given the account by Simone de Beauvoir:

Sartre was greatly attracted by what he heard of German phenomenology. Raymond Aron . . . in preparing a thesis on history was studying Husserl. When he came to Paris [in 1932], we spent an evening together at the Bec de gaz, rue Parnasse; we ordered the specialty of the house: apricot cocktails. Aron pointed at his glass: “You see, my little comrade, if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail, and that is philosophy.” Sartre grew pale with excitement, or nearly so. This was precisely what he had wished for years: to talk of the things as he touched them and that this was philosophy.¹¹

Fortunate as we are in not having to define philosophy, still more fortunate are we in not having to go around the mulberry bush of phenomenology. There is a plentiful supply of introductions to Husserlian phenomenology available. But it is not merely the convenience of such a richness of rehearsals of the terms and tenets of phenomenology which absolves us from having to add another account to the archive; the point is that our interest in phenomenology, for the moment, lies in quite a different direction. If it is phenomenology in literature which concerns us, then we can bypass definitions of phenomenology with a clear conscience because the phenomenology which is in literature is not the same creature as the phenomenology which is properly understood in work on phenomenology of literature, a paradigmatic example of which is Roman Ingarden’s The Literary Work of Art. I am not in competition with Ingarden. Rather, my interest lies in the manner in which a literary work, in some instances, may reveal a phenomenological structure which has been formed or shaped by the literary work in which it has been confined or in which it has lain immanent. The revealing of the phenomenological character of the literary work does not bring into being a new phenomenology, to be distinguished from Husserl’s version. Quite to the contrary, phenomenology in literature presents a different perspective or profile (Husserl’s term was “Abschattung”) of classical phenomenology. There are not two different phenomenologies here, nor are there two different versions of phenomenology. What I have called phenomenology in literature is isomorphic with the phenomenology created by Edmund Husserl. What is different requires a longer explanation.

My own approach to and utilization of phenomenology might be called “existential phenomenology.” In a field of philosophical thickets, “existential phenomenology” proves to be an especially spiky thorn. In a way, as soon as one has to go into explanations, distinctions, adjustments, the case is already lost. Let me say what “existential phenomenology” is not. I am not interested in a marriage between “existentialism” and phenomenology. They would prove to be disagreeable partners. Before the honeymoon was over, there would be threats of divorce and separation heard from both sides. Nor would group therapy help. There is some justification to the charge that “existential phenomenology” is a contradiction in terms. There is a simple way out of these troubles (though it is not the path I will choose to take): to understand by “existential phenomenology” the application of traditional Husserlian method to such thematic subjects as “anguish,” “obsession,” and “dread.” After all, the psychiatrist, if not the phenomenologist, is confronted with such phenomena as “disgust” and “filth.” Or, we should say more cautiously, the psychiatrist is confronted with his patient’s report of disgust, for example, “finding a dead mouse in a tub of butter.”¹² We are all, as members of the life-world, faced with occasions when shame, the odor of vomit, the smell of death assails us. There are phenomena of dirt and decay in our daily lives. How could the phenomenologist ignore what every person living his life cannot help but notice? Yes, a phenomenology of clinical obsession, as Erwin Straus has shown,¹³ is not only possible but necessary as a propaedeutic to a comprehensive understanding of our own being-in-the-world. But if we choose not to understand “existential phenomenology” as the application of Husserlian method to what are usually called “existential categories” or to the noxious or the disgusting, then what do we mean by our language?

By “existential phenomenology” I understand a way of attending to the “things themselves,” as Husserl calls them, which emphasizes their emotive coloration and “boundary” character (a phenomenological counterpart to what William James calls the “fringes” of meaning). And by “emotive coloration” I mean the felt...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword, by Judith Butler
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Phenomenology in Literature I
• Chapter Two: Phenomenology in Literature II
• Chapter Three: Phenomenology in Literature III
• Chapter Four: Waiting for Godot
• Chapter Five: The Magic Mountain
• Chapter Six: The Metamorphosis
• Chapter Seven: Action
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index