There is little doubt that contemporary literature and philosophy can be an alienating exercise in cynicism and apparent detachment. I think most of us have experienced it. I sometimes think of Milan Kundera's book The Unbearable Lightness of Being as the representative post-modern novel, and few books have given me a more overwhelming sense of emptiness. In the opening sequence of that novel, Kundera writes "in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted." Looking around today at the bizarre culture war of the rightwing which is reminiscent of the ethnic purity tropes of the 1930s, Kundera's words, written now nearly forty years ago, are chilling. They are frightening because the permissiveness that Kundera seems to be talking about here is the forgetfulness of history. He makes this remark in the context of taking up a book about Hitler and the way in which, for many, our perverse past is a whitewash, a phantom that never returns. But, of course, Kundera knows, as many of us do, that the past does return, almost as though on a zoetrope loop, and we are compelled to live through what others have lived through before, only with a greater sense of history and, therefore, a greater sense of failure and shame.
Literature was, once upon a time, one of the great sanctuaries from this sense of failure and shame. And I am not just talking here about novels and poetry - but about the whole gamut of literary work from philosophy to the occasional essay. This is not to imply that literature was, of should be, simply an exercise of escape. Rather, it means it can be a realm not only of honesty and pain, but of aspiration and hope, and that it can satisfy a deep existential need for connection. It can, of course, still be exactly this. But I think its status is now on much shakier ground than it once was. I cannot provide a rigorous statistical argument that proves this cultural shift. Such arguments, when in the midst of the tornado of history, are only reflections of one's sense of what is really going on. Future historians and commentators will make more straightforward arguments with the advantage of distance and evidence.
Another book that has meant a lot to me is Peter Sloterdijk's 1983 study - Critique of Cynical Reason. In this remarkable book, Sloterdijk traces the rise of modern cynical reason which has gradually reduced everything to a level of pure transactionalism. He adapts the Marxist notion of 'false consciousness' to its modern manifestation - 'enlightened false consciousness,' a state in which people are increasingly aware of the injustice and exploitation of which they are a victim, but they have so little faith that it can change that they just don't bother to do anything about it.
It is with all of these issues in mind that I find myself continually returning to the great poets of Romanticism and philosophers like Emerson. This is because, despite being part of the cynicism of my age, I, like many people, hunger for a sense of universal connection, but one that doesn't rely on the deep problems of revealed religion. In the face of the isolation of bourgeois individualism and the profound opportunity of a society of transactionalism, it is no surprise that the poems of Shelley and Blake and Dickinson and Whitman, or the essays of Emerson and Thoreau can be a source of genuine edification.
In his now famous 1838 Divinity College Address, Emerson talks of poets occupying a "holy office" and likens them to priests in their ability to offer revelation, teach, and give. In Emerson's version of transcendentalism, the poet is a kind of priest, only better than most because she is in touch with something more direct. "The true preacher can be known by this," Emerson writes, "that he deals out to the people his life, - life passed through the fire of thought." And what better preacher, therefore, than the poet? Being an advocate for natural rather than revealed religion, Emerson seemed to be much more interested in the revelation of poets than priests. "For the experience of each new age," Emerson tells us in his essay "The Poet, "requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet." And indeed, this idea of poet as revealer of our world and expresser of our experience, is one that I think many of us look for, particularly in an age when the zoetrope loop of dangerous history seems to be circling back to a terrible moment. The waters of art are so deep, Emerson reminds us, "that we hover over them with religious regard."
One can find this transcendental spirit in a great deal of 19th century poetry. One of my very favorite of Shelley's poems is his 1816 "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." In that poem Shelley tells us that "some unseen Power // Floats tho' unseen among us." And it is this mysterious power to which the sages and poets respond, as well as Shelley himself. "I vowed that I would dedicate my powers," Shelley tells us, "to thee and thine." And indeed this unseen power (we can call it beauty or poetry or aesthetic experience) was, indeed, the thing to which Shelley devoted himself. Shelley tells us that in his childhood he looked for spirits as well as God, but it wasn't until the shadow of this mysterious power fell on him that he "shrieked & clasped" his "hands in extasy." [sic] Though I still struggle with the cynicism of our age, I admire Shelley's experience and faith here. And though this is one of Shelley's more explicit poems concerning this subject, you can find such sentiments throughout his work where he looks to a better world, informed by beauty, where reason and passion are no longer enemies.
In one of his greatest poems, Queen Mab, Shelley described the world's pain -
All things are sold: the very light of heaven
Is venal; earth's unsparing gifts of love,
The smallest and most despicable things
That lurk in the abysses of the deep,
All objects of our life, even life itself,
And the poor pittance which the law allow
Of liberty, the fellowship of man,
Those duties which his heart of human love
Should urge him to perform instinctively,
Are bought and sold as in a public mart.
But for Shelley, as for Emerson, our secret weapon is poetry, the activity that steps beyond the venal world that Shelley describes in Queen Mab, and looks toward and "indestructible order" beneath. Can we escape the eternal reoccurrence of violence and hate that Milan Kundera talks about through a poetic accesses to an indestructible order? I cannot be sure, but I have continued all my adult life in such a pursuit.
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