Abstract
A scan of the social landscape suggests that Calvin’s formulation of faith is out of keeping with many Americans’ popular understanding and political use of faith, regardless of their liberal or conservative bent. When Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) makes reference to the book of Isaiah in her defense of the Endangered Species Act, reminding us that it is “an act of worship” to “minister to the needs of God’s creation, and that includes our beautiful environment,” and moreover, “To ignore those needs is to dishonor the God who made us,” she makes believing in God synonymous with supporting her environmental policy.1 A political, or at least a social, agenda that might otherwise be up for question is located inside a sphere that cannot be reasonably contested, namely, the divine. (And she demonstrates as well that conservatives are not the only ones who attempt to marry their legislation to righteousness.)2 For secular humanists who equally take faith to stand in stark contrast to thoughtful debate, this use of religious conviction is not surprising. As Stanley Fish explains, “For the modern liberal, beliefs are what the mind scrutinizes and judges by rational criteria that are themselves hostage to no belief in particular,” although Fish is quick to dismiss the possibility of such a vantage point.3 In a secular-liberal worldview, any conviction that does not put itself into doubt is antithetical to intellectual investigation.
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Notes
Stanley Fish, “Why We Can’t All Just Get Along,” in The Trouble With Principle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 247.
Charles Bernstein, “Optimism and Critical Excess,” in A Poetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 160.
Bernstein’s reference to Emerson in this quote is important enough to warrant a brief discussion, for Bernstein’s relationship to Emerson stands at the very heart of his poetics. Or, to be more precise, Emersonian perfectionism, for Bernstein, is an engine of secular faith; it recognizes our places in the world as precarious, but gives us confidence to take the steps we do even as we know our ground to be temporary and discrepant. Arguably though placing any American poet in Emerson’s company only goes so far—from different vantage points most American writers look a little Emersonian. But Bernstein’s relationship to Emerson goes through Stanley Cavell, his onetime teacher; the perpetual debate over which Emerson we are talking about, the philosophical and academic argument that strains the link between him and any other writer, plays little role here. Bernstein’s Emerson is Cavell’s, and taking his literary heritage as such gives us the philosophical context we need to read Bernstein’s use of his predecessor. As Cavell observes, we are in the field of American letters often handed back Emerson’s ideas by thinkers like Nietzsche and Heidegger, but without, unfortunately on our part, knowing it. Repeating this tendency, critics who discuss Bernstein’s work tend to mention Emerson in passing, if at all, and more often than not quickly move to consider Bernstein’s relationship to continental thought. For his part, Bernstein has not encourage this exclusive Europhilia, choosing instead to persistently foreground his thinking’s connection to Cavell, and through him to Wittgenstein and Emerson. In “The Objects of Meaning: Reading Cavell Reading Wittgenstein,” Bernstein writes “What Derrida ends up transforming to houses of cards—shimmering traces of life insubstantial as elusive—Wittgenstein locates as meaning, with the full range of intention, responsibility, coherence, and possibility for revolt against or madness without. In Wittgenstein’s accounting, one is not left sealed off from the world with only ‘markings’ to ‘decipher’ but rather located in a world with meanings to respond to” (“The Objects of Meaning: Reading Cavell Reading Wittgenstein,” in Content’s Dream [Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1986], 181). First published in boundary 2 in. 1981, Bernstein’s essay draws largely on Cavell s The Senses of Waiden, the book initiating Cavell’s move to draw Wittgenstein and American transcendentalism together. (The reprinted edition ofThe Senses of Waiden put out by North Point Press in 1981 appeared with two essays on Emerson, essays signaling Cavell’s major shift toward Emerson’s writings. The first essay, “Thinking of Emerson,” was originally given as a talk at the 1978 Modern Language Association convention in New York.) And the roots of Bernstein’s faithfulness lie here—his desire to trust language’s uncertainty as that which makes words meaningful comes by way of Cavell, who inherits it from Wittgenstein and Emerson. Eleven years later, after Cavell develops his thinking about Emerson more completely in This New Yet Unapproachable America, Bernstein turns again to Emerson (and Cavell’s reading of him) in “Optimism and Critical Excess,” the essay that grounded the opening of the current chapter. In an Emerson-like interruption Bernstein writes several paragraphs after the quote I cited previously, “(Why do I mention Emerson here? Is it purely a rhetorical gesture to try to pull someone with that kind of legitimating authority into an otherwise... )” (“Optimism,” in A Poetics, 161). The ellipsis is Bernstein’s. In “Revenge of the Poetic-Critic” Bernstein proposes “a modular essay form,” which provides a near exact description of Emerson’s essay style; it is a “form that allows for bigjumps from paragraph to paragraph and section to section. In such essays, it becomes possible to recom-bine the paragraphs to get another version of the essay—since the ‘argument’ is not dependent on the linear sequence” (“Revenge,” in My Way, 7). In a recent interview with David Caplan, Bernstein says “I share that Emersonian concept of moral perfectionism in which prosody, like poetry, is a process where we don’t know where we’re going to end up. It’s all about being attentive to what is happening along the way” (“A Conversation with Charles Bernstein,” interviewed by David Caplan, The Antioch Review 62, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 141).
John Calvin, Calvin: Commentaries, vol. 23 of The Library of Christian Classics, ed. and trans. Joseph Haroutunian and Louise Pettibone Smith (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1958), 23: 238.
Even though Vincent Pecora, in Secularization and Cultural Criticism, argues that secular modernity’s move toward “universally acceptable moral truths... may provide the only ethical ground we possess wiuiin a nontheological (and nonteleological) intellectual framework,” his discussion of a secular, or political faith is particularly relevant to my account of Bernstein’s intersection with Calvin and Aquinas (Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006], 23).
Charles Bernstein, Shadowtime (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2005), 13.
Patrick J Smith, The Tenth Muse: A Historical Study of the Opera Libretto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 400.
Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 179.
Heinrich Heine, Almansor (1821), quoted in Michael Berenbaum, The World Must Know. The History of the Holocaust as Told in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Boston: Little, Brown 1993), 25.
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© 2009 Joel Bettridge
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Bettridge, J. (2009). Ghosts, Jokes, Shadowtime, and Faithful Interpretation. In: Reading as Belief. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101265_5
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