Anti-Climacus

“For the development of genuine taste, founded on genuine feeling, is inextricable from the development of personality an character. Genuine taste is always imperfect taste—but we are all, as a matter of fact, imperfect people; and the man whose taste in poetry does not bear the stamp of his particular personality, so that there are differences in what he likes from what we like, as well as resemblances, and differences in the way of liking the same things, is apt to be a very uninteresting person with whom to discuss poetry.”

T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism

One of my favorite riffs (distinctly Nozickian in character, I think, though not quite as good as anything he himself did) to bring up in conversation with other political theorists is the idea that you end up studying the people you deserve. That is, the process of finding figures who are worth spending time on is its own sort of Dantean contrapasso. The riff emerged when I noticed, in the reading I was doing in contemporary political philosophy, that there were some people who I returned to over and over on a variety of topics. My own little group includes Jeremy Waldron, Robert Nozick, and John Finnis amongst political philosophers. Hugo Grotius dominates amongst the political theorists (not surprisingly, dissertation topic and all), and is joined by the sort of figures one might expect to crop up on a list of a conservative’s favored theorists: Locke, Burke, Montesquieu, Augustine. Three things seem to apply to most of the members of the list: 1. They have some concern for issues of analytic specificity, but do not let the concern for perfect definitions overwhelm their usefulness. 2. On the whole, they are wildly discursive, and of the style of run-on sentences I have tried for many years to overcome, without success. 3. Most of them adhere to some form of Protestant religiosity (or are consistent with such religiosity), but none of them are Calvinists.

I bring this up because the ‘getting what you deserve’ part touches on, I think, what Eliot talks about in the introduction to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. The process by which things stick with you is, necessarily, idiosyncratic. But it is often the case that something appeals to you long before you know why. I knew that I wanted to write on Grotius long before I knew he was a major figure in Arminian theology (some people, and by some people I mean me, might think this is a major shortcoming of the literature on Grotius, but that’s a section of the dissertation waiting to be written), which seems oddly appropriate for the man who struggles over whether or not he can be a Calvinist. You find intellectual figures to work with in part because they appeal to you, and might be useful for your project. Ideally, in the process of working with them you come to be changed as well, so you don’t simply appropriate them for your own ends, but recognize them as interlocutors no less real than the ones who sit across from you at breakfast tables or coffee shops.

It occurs to me that the same thing is true with respect to literature. I flatter myself to think that I’ve reached the point of critical capacity at which I can distinguish good from bad (a more sophisticated exercise, for Eliot, than ‘thing I liked’ or ‘thing I didn’t like’). Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth was, I think, probably the best book I read in college (I vaguely recall making several other people I know read it, no small feat for a 750-page memoir that ends with the author at 25 or so); I have similarly warm feelings about Balzac’s Pere Goriot, or Fathers and Sons, or Great Expectations. But I’ve not looked at any of those books since I read them, don’t think about them all that frequently, and probably will never read any of them again. Now, T.S. Eliot, Dante, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, A Hero of Our Time, Crime and Punishment, etc (I could go on, but won’t) have stuck with me—become a part of my consciousness—in a way those other books haven’t, even when, strictly speaking, the books on the first list are better (I can only imagine that my mother, should she have made it this far through the post, is thinking that my placement of Fitzgerald and Hemingway on the list means she failed in the task of raising me). Part of this is the change that’s happened to me as I’ve gone on. The end of The Great Gatsby looked like a number of oddly unconnected anecdotes when I first read it. I now can see why Nick digresses into the memory of what it was like to return home from college for the Christmas holidays.

Some of these have been with me a long time now (or a long time for me): Dante and Eliot I first read about ten years ago. And still I can think about whether a Calvinist doctrine of total depravity requires giving up on making the world better, and:

“For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

Or be walking along, and turn

“Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee”

or:

“Phlebas the Phonecian, a fortnight dead”

over in my head. (Or remember the poster in the room the section of my 17th and 18th Century philosophy class met in: “O O O O That Shakespearean rag”).

Anyway, this was going to be a brief explanation of why I enjoy Eliot as much as I do, but this post is waaaaaay too long, so maybe later.