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Ethical Thought and the Problem of CommunicationA STRATEGY FOR READING DIARY OF A BAD YEARJonathan Lear |
What is ethical thought? For starters, let us say that thought is ethical when it facilitates or promotes the living of ethical life. It would seem then that ethical thought cannot be captured by its subject matter. It is easy enough, for example, to imagine a run-down social practice that consists in discussing ethical topics in empty ways. Imagine someone who devotes his professional life writing articles about, say, the difference between just and unjust wars—but whose soul is made coarser in the process. There might be a journal, let us fictionally call it Ethics and Politics, in which professors from different universities vie to place their articles—none of which make any difference in how countries go to war. It is, of course, possible that the reflection that went into those articles help authors, readers, and students become more ethically sensitive—and this possibility should not be diminished. However, it is easy to imagine a different scenario: one in which the journal functioned mainly as a credentialing agency for university jobs. People who published there would write “outside letters” for other people who published there so that deans, who care nothing about the field—other than that their university should be “ranked high”—would approve appointments and promotions.
To make the problem more vivid, imagine a moral or political issue that matters to you (racism, gerrymandering, campaign finance, gay rights, the Middle East, Islamic extremism, mistreatment of animals, destruction of indigenous cultures). Then imagine that the social circumstances surrounding you shift in such a way that this problem becomes fashionable: clever articles about it appear in the best op-ed pages and book reviews; it is discussed over dinner and at cocktail parties; certain individuals attain celebrity for advocating the cause—and yet the whole social whirl is somehow cut off from making a difference. In such circumstances we have the appearance of ethical thought, and it is this very appearance that can mislead participants. In such a situation, we would most likely take ourselves to be thinking about ethical issues—after all, we have just read, discussed, or even contributed the latest article on X. Ersatz ethical thought would give us the sense that the space for ethical thought was already filled.
The situation is even worse with novelists. No one is better positioned to profit—in the mundane, literal sense of earning large sums of money or winning distinguished literary prizes—from a “sensitive” portrayal of an ethically charged topic, such as torture or war. Let us leave to one side the cynical author who uses an ethically charged topic like torture to seek fame and fortune. The problem is more pressing if we imagine a sincere, morally engaged author who would like her writing to correct an injustice. How might that work? Is there not a vivid possibility that, precisely with the author’s success as a writer, he will be taken up as a celebrity, that being “against torture” becomes a fashion item among the “intelligentsia,” and so on. Perhaps philosophers will take him up and write a book of essays with titles like, “Ethical Thought and the Problem of Communication.” It is not impossible that something good should come of this. But it is easy enough for the whole public event to serve as a fashionable substitute for ethical thought, rather than an instance of it. (Imagine the publication party for a book against global warming that needs to end early so that the guests can catch a plane.)
John Coetzee’s literary style is, I think, an attempt to defeat this possibility. And I think we can understand the complexity of his literary form if we see him as trying to communicate ethical thought. In this essay I want to give at least a preliminary indication of how this might work. In the first instance, I want to give a broad overview about how Coetzee’s literary form fits in to a philosophical tradition concerned with the contribution of form to ethical thought. Then I will examine one of the central arguments of Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year—concerned with the shame of torture—and I will try to show how the form of the book facilitates a reader’s relation to that shame.
There has been speculation in reviews about the relation between JC, the protagonist of Diary of a Bad Year, and John Coetzee, its author. JC is, after all, a South African novelist who has recently emigrated to Australia; he is the author of Waiting for the Barbarians; and hanging on the wall of his bedroom (as seen by his Filipina secretary) is “a framed scroll in some foreign language (Latin?) with his name in fancy lettering with lots of curlicues and a big red wax seal in the corner.”1 We know he is JC because that is how he signs two letters—one imploring Anya to come back to his employ after they have had a blow-up, the other inviting her and her lover Alan to dinner to celebrate the completion of the book. In private discussions between Anya and Alan, Anya refers to JC as “Señor C” and “El Señor,” and Alan refers to him as Mr. C. At the dinner party, when Alan gets drunk, he calls him “Juan” to his face. As anyone who has read the book, or even just reviews, knows, each page is divided into two or three sections, each section written in (and representing) a different voice. The top section is the official voice of the author, the exposition of moral opinions that will eventually find their way into the German book. Many of them sound as though they could be taken for the voice of John Coetzee.
But there is this crucial difference between JC and John Coetzee: JC is willing to publish his “Strong Opinions” as a free-standing book; John Coetzee is not. Coetzee is only willing to publish the opinions as authored by JC in the context of a novel in which those very opinions, as well as the act of writing them down and publishing them, are questioned by JC himself and by Anya and are mocked by Alan. Not only that: JC and his book are embedded in a larger book (by Coetzee) that includes JC’s personal musings (from a diary?) about his attraction to Anya and his growing sense of infirmity. What is the meaning of this difference? It is, I think, a mistake to treat this simply as a display of literary virtuosity. The reviewer in the New York Times Book Review said that we readers “are manipulated by a form that is coy as well as playful.”2 This claim is, I think, importantly wrong. The aim of the style is not for John Coetzee to show off—to demonstrate that he, unlike the melancholy, infirm, single-voiced JC, can do postmodern hip. Rather, it is an attempt to defeat the reader’s desire to defer to the “moral authority,” the “novelist” John Coetzee. In an article in the New York Times, Rachel Donadio writes, “In a country [South Africa] where every inch of physical and moral ground is contested, Coetzee has been criticized for refusing to play the role of writer-as-statesman, one more easily played by his fellow Nobel laureate, Nadine Gordimer.”3 The wording is marvelous: for Coetzee has never been explicitly accused of failing to play a role. He has been accused of racism, of letting South Africa down, of not being a moral exemplar. But when I read the criticism, it seems to me that Ms. Donadio got it right: what irks people about Coetzee is his refusal to conform to their image of how he should behave—as “South African writer,” “Nobel Prize winner,” and “moral conscience.” We need to see this same refusal in his literary style.
JC writes, “Authority must be earned; on the novelist author lies the onus to build up, out of nothing, such authority” (149). But Coetzee’s authority lies in his ability to divest himself of authority: this is not manipulation, is certainly not coy, and, if “playful” is meant to be the opposite of moral seriousness, is not playful either. The questions are why he does it and how he does it. Why he does it is, I think, straightforward: he wants to defeat ersatz ethical posturing and promote genuine ethical thought in his reader. How he does this is tricky and requires some attention.
Within the Western philosophical tradition, there have been a number of attempts to use literary characters—most notably, at the beginning, with Plato’s dialogues. At the center is the figure of Socrates, who famously claims to know only that he does not know. Not only does Plato, as authority figure, disappear behind his characters, but the central figure distinguishes himself by eschewing authority when it comes to ethical knowledge. There are, of course, many other characters, some with worked-out ethical views, but the dialogues are set up so that there is always some question about how those views should be received. This is not simply a literary device to sustain the reader’s interest; it is an ethical strategy: an attempt to defeat any easy attempt to defer to the author or to any surrogate for the author in the text. Even the figures within the text need to be handled with care. If a respected character were to say, “When it comes to ethics, you really need to think for yourself,” one can imagine the response, “Anything you say: I really must think for myself!”4
Plato also was suspicious of writing as a medium for philosophical activity. In a famous passage at the end of Phaedrus, Socrates recounts an Egyptian tale of an ancient time in which King Thamus warns Theuth, the inventor of writing, that students “will imagine they come to know much while for the most part they know nothing.”5 Socrates’ worry seems to be that writing, by its nature, tends to defeat ethical thought. People can read the words, think they know what’s at stake, pass the words along to others who think they are being taught—all without friction. There is an imitation of ethical thought: the reading, reproduction, and transmission of “ethical arguments” that make no difference to how anyone lives. It stands to reason that a philosopher so aware of the dangers of writing would try to find a literary form that would defeat the transmission of ersatz thought.
There is, however, a problem with the dialogue form. It can encourage in the reader a sense that he is in the audience, watching the characters debate as though they were up on stage. Rather than being thrown into philosophy’s midst, one can feel like an arbiter, able to choose a position from among those presented according to taste. One doesn’t have to read the dialogues this way, but—(perhaps this is a reflection of the culture we live in)—I have seen generations of students incline toward it.
Perhaps it is this problem that motivated Kierkegaard, a devoted student of Plato, to create pseudonymous authors. Although Kierkegaard wrote many works under his own name, the works that are most famously associated with him—Fear and Trembling, Either/Or, Repetition, Sickness Unto Death, Philosophical Fragments, Concluding Unscientific Postscript—were all published under pseudonyms. But at the end of his pseudonymous authorship, Kierkegaard makes it explicit in a document signed under his own name that the pseudonyms are not pseudonyms for him. Rather, he, Kierkegaard, created pseudonymous authors who have themselves gone on to write their books. If it could work, the pseudonymous authorship would be an ingenious improvement on the dialogue form precisely because it breaks down the division between stage and audience. Instead of my watching two characters debate with each other “on stage” and adjudicating points to one or the other of them, it is as though one of the characters has come down off the stage—in fact, there is no longer a stage, no longer a character—and he is confronting me. “My pseudonymity,” Kiekegaard tells us in “A First and Last Explanation,” “has not had an accidental basis in my person . . . but an essential basis in the production itself.”6
But why did Kierkegaard need to write “A First and Last Explanation”? Imagine Shakespeare rushing out onto stage just after the curtain goes down, arms outstretched, saying, “Wait! Before you go, this is the first time I’m going to tell you this, and I’m not going to tell you again, but the character Lear does not have an accidental basis in my person, but an essential basis in the production itself.” If an explanation like that were needed, the “production itself” has failed. That Kierkegaard felt the need to explain his authorship is, I think, an indication that he thought it had failed.7
Might there not be a more forgiving (and thus more successful) way to use this literary form—one that wouldn’t require the self-defeating gesture of a first and last explanation? Perhaps one might put the pseudonymous author along with his book inside a novel in which author and book are both commented upon by various voices. If this a literary style aimed at provoking ethical thought in the reader, standing, as I think it does, in a tradition that goes back to Plato’s dialogues, and works through Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship, then it is a misunderstanding of the form to think that it is a clever (or irritating) literary feat—one in which if Coetzee were less clever (or less irritating) he would come out from behind his mask and tell us what he meant. But what if his concern were that our concern with what he meant would distract us from our concern with how we should be? If Diary of a Bad Year is ethical thinking in action, if it is directed toward stimulating ethical thought in the reader, then it would be a misstep for Coetzee to “step out from behind his mask” and tell us what he meant—not in the sense that he would be exercising bad political or literary judgment—but because there ought to be no mask out from which to step. There would be no content withheld—nothing more to say—and an attempt to say what that (nonexistent) content was would be an attack on the production itself.8 This is what it would mean to say that the pseudonymous author JC does not have an accidental basis in John Coetzee’s person—that is, he is not showing off—but an essential basis in the production itself.
One reason to divide a page is that it gives Coetzee a way to address different parts of our soul, at more or less the same time. In Phaedrus, Socrates claims rhetoric is a peculiar craft of leading the soul with logos.9 And in Republic he says that education should not be thought of in terms of putting something into another person but rather as turning the whole soul around.10 I think we need to see the split page of Diary of a Bad Year as a rhetorical move in this Platonic sense. This is Coetzee’s attempt to lead the whole soul.
For the sake of simplicity (and brevity) I am going to focus on two broad movements. If one reads across the top section, one is ostensibly reading Strong Opinions, the book that JC will publish in German translation. (One will later read what Anya calls his “Soft Opinions” and JC calls “Second Diary,” which JC does not publish but does share with Anya.) Reading across like this, one is confronted by what I shall call the dialectic of responsibility. I am tempted to say that this is the level of rationality, but that is not quite right. As we shall see, not all of JC’s arguments are rational. But this is the level at which we are presented with (and entangled in) argument. The movement works through logos. However, when we read vertically, downward, we encounter a spectacle of embedding. That is, we see how the moral stances that are officially to be presented in book form are embedded in the fantasies, happenings, musings, and struggles of the author’s day-to-day life. It is that from which a normal book of moral essays would be cut off. I suggest that this imaginary embedding is meant to draw along parts of the reader’s soul that would not be led by argument alone. The phrase “that from which” is a phrase Aristotle used to pick out the matter of a living organism.11 A living human being, for example, is a form-and-matter unity in which the stuff of human life, blood, guts, flesh, and bones, realizes itself in a self-maintaining form, the human being. The stuff of life is that from which its form emerges and that in which it maintains itself. I want to suggest that Strong Opinions, the book of moral opinions by JC, has the form of argument but that form is an aspect of a living form-and-matter unity that consists of JC’s arguments embedded in the stuff of his life. JC gives us the form; John Coetzee gives us the form-and-matter unity. Now, why seeing moral arguments as embedded in the life of a fictional character should defeat ersatz ethical thought, and perhaps even promote ethical thought in some, is a puzzle. But to solve that puzzle is to grasp the rhetorical strategy of the book.
Diary of a Bad Year opens at the very same place as the purported book Strong Opinions, whose author, we will later learn, is JC. It is an excursus on the origins of the state.
Every account of the origins of the state starts from the premise that “we”—not we readers but some generic we so wide as to exclude no one—participate in its coming into being. But the fact is that the only “we” we know—ourselves and the people close to us—are born into the state; and our forebears too were born into the state as far back as we can trace. The state is always there before we are.
(3)
JC’s official voice is one of reminder and recognition. He invites us to share his skepticism about how certain forms of philosophical argument implicate us in the formation of the state. In the polis version of chicken and egg, we are told that we came first and, out of our needs, created a state. JC reminds us that there is no “we” whom we can recognize as ever wanting or needing to do that. It does not follow that JC’s voice is therefore antiphilosophical. Philosophy is regularly constituted by questioning the uses to which philosophy can be put. Nor is JC scorning all uses to which a state-of-nature argument might be put. Rather, he is questioning a particular use, one that locates our responsibility in the wrong place. If we bear responsibility, it is not because of some original sin—a mythical act of mythical ancestors, who lived outside the state but nevertheless count as “us.” I suspect that the intended reader (that is, the reader whom John Coetzee has in mind, whom I will simply call the reader) is one who will enjoy this opening criticism: who will enjoy the recognition that I and we are not part of a nonexistent we who purportedly carried out this bogus act. That is, we begin with a satisfying recognition that we are not who this vindicating story of the state says we are. We are not people who owe allegiance to the state’s actions because “we” formed it—and we’re not going to accept an argument that tries to implicate us on such shabby grounds.
As we move toward the lower part of the page, we also move to the lower part of the body—and, not accidentally, the “lower” part of the soul.
My first glimpse of her was in the laundry room. It was mid-morning on a quiet spring day and I was sitting, watching the washing go around, when this quite startling young woman walked in. Startling because the last thing I was expecting was such an apparition; also because the tomato-red shift she wore was so startling in its brevity.
What could be more ordinary, homogeneous, self-contained than sitting in one’s laundry room (as, no doubt, he had often done) watching the washing go round? But this is a world that can be disturbed by a glimpse. A week later he happens to see her again “only fleetingly as she passed through the front door in a flash of white slacks that showed off a derrière so near to perfect as to be angelic. God, grant me one wish before I die, I whispered; but then was overtaken with shame at the specificity of the wish, and withdrew it” (8). If this were only a report of JC’s sexual fantasies, he would stand in an odd relation to his own imagination. What, after all, is it to have a wish and then “withdraw” it? For JC’s act to make sense, we must take his whispering to be not merely the expression of a wish but a plea to God. Wishes are not the sort of thing one can withdraw; requests are. But now that the divine has been invoked, we are not just within the realm of sex—are we ever?—there is an importance here, difficult to name or understand, that, at least in the moment, makes it feel instinctively, impulsively appropriate to call on God for remedy. JC calls it a metaphysical ache:
As I watched her an ache, a metaphysical ache, crept over me that I did nothing to stem. And in an intuitive way she knew about it, knew that in the old man in the plastic chair in the corner there was something personal going on, something to do with age and regret and the tears of things.
(7)
We need to take seriously the idea that this ache is actually metaphysical. Though it is a psychological occurrence, it is not merely that. It is, rather, an ache that can lead us to a richer grasp of what kind of being we are.
In the Symposium, Socrates tells of a conversation he had with the priestess Diotima, who taught him the art of love. “All of us are pregnant, Socrates, both in body and soul, and, as soon as we come to a certain age we naturally desire to give birth.”12 But pregnancy and reproduction are the ways that mortal beings participate in immortality. This is a godly affair, and it must occur in beauty—which is in harmony with the divine. Now, when someone is pregnant in soul, “he too will certainly go about seeking the beauty in which he would beget.” “In my view, you see, when he makes contact with someone beautiful and keeps company with him, he conceives and gives birth to what he has been carrying inside him for ages.”13 Now, for the beautiful young boy of ancient Greek aristocratic society, substitute the hot Filipina in her startlingly brief tomato-red shift, and thongs—“Thongs of the kind that go on the feet” (6). Much later in the novel, toward the end of JC’s book Strong Opinions, JC writes down in the middle section of the page:
Was Anya from 2514 in any but the most far-fetched sense the natural mother of the miscellany of opinions I was putting down on paper on commission . . . ? No. The passions and prejudices out of which my opinions grew were laid down long before I first set eyes on Anya, and were by now so strong—that is to say, so settled, so rigid—that aside from the odd word here and there was no chance that refraction through her gaze could alter their angle.
(124–25)
In one way, this fits the Socratic conception well. For the beautiful other is not a contributor to the pregnancy but the occasion for a long-standing pregnancy to come to term. In this picture, what we would see on the upper part of the page is that to which JC gave birth in the presence of the beautiful Anya. In the lower two sections, we would be witness to the birthing process. The book Strong Opinions is then a kind of husk: the externalization into the world of that which used to lie inside JC’s pregnant soul. Perhaps one reason that published “moral opinions” can fall flat in terms of ethical thought is that they are cut off from the birthing process.
But in another way JC provides a significant variation on the Socratic theme. For JC is not just erotically bowled over by Anya’s beauty; he is preoccupied with his aging, physical decay, and death. To be sure, there are intimations of this in Plato: it is because we are mortal creatures that we stretch ourselves to become immortal. And because we know (in some sense) that we are mortal, that we experience a push toward symbolic births-in-beauty. Yet JC’s birthing is more mired in anticipation of physical decay and death than anything Plato imagined. Let’s face it: JC is looking for a way to die. His metaphysical ache is the living recognition that (in his erotic longing, in all its inappropriateness) he is a creature who will soon not be. From the middle section: “Last night I had a bad dream, which I afterwards wrote down, about dying and being guided to the gateway to oblivion by a young woman. What I did not record is the question that occurred to me in the act of writing: Is she the one?” (59). Diotima talks of giving birth in beauty; JC is giving birth in beauty in the valley of the shadow of death. He has a fantasy of dying in a whorehouse and being dumped unceremoniously in an alley, and he continues (again from the middle section): “But no, if the new dream is to be trusted it will not be like that. I will expire in my own bed and be discovered by my typist, who will close my eyes and pick up the telephone to make her report” (65)”
It is clear that Anya picks up on the importance of this fantasy. Later, in the lower section, she reports: “He told me one of his dreams, I said to Alan. It was really sad, about dying and his ghost lingering behind, not wanting to leave. I told him he should write it down before he forgets, and work it into his book” (77). Is Anya here giving advice to JC or to John Coetzee? Coetzee writes about it in Diary of a Bad Year, but JC leaves it out of Strong Opinions. One might say that she is giving advice to them both or that John Coetzee is the one able to take up her advice, but I don’t think either option is correct. Anya is John Coetzee’s creation—who knows in whose presence he gave birth to that beauty. What we have in the fictional world is Anya giving advice to JC—and I think it is helpful to think of JC as following it (after his own fashion). JC’s Strong Opinions are written in the light of his own decay and death, in the presence of the beautiful Anya. Strong Opinions is JC’s own being-toward-death: it is that which he elects to put forward into the public world in the light of his own imminent demise. His own decay is not what he wants to talk about (that is Coetzee’s preoccupation): JC wants to utter the ethical word in the public domain. That is how he wants to spend his last days on earth: in the public domain, writing Strong Opinions; in private, entangled with Anya as quasi-Platonic lover. What all this means is far from clear. But the fact that Coetzee lets us see how JC’s ethical words are embedded in his living-toward-death allows us at least to explore, in gut-open ways, why taking such a stance might matter.
It is clear from the moment they meet that JC and Anya are in close intuitive contact. As we have already seen, the moment he feels the metaphysical ache, “in an intuitive way she knew all about it.” It was something “which she did not particularly like, did not want to evoke,” but she could recognize it, feel it. And JC recognizes that she feels it and is even able to grasp the meaning it has for her: “Had it come from someone different, had it a simpler and blunter meaning, she might have been readier to give it welcome; but from an old man its meaning was too diffuse and melancholy for a nice day when you are in a hurry to get the chores done” (7).
In short, this metaphysical ache is not the private property of JC’s imagination: it reaches out to Anya, is instantly recognized by her and responded to in her own imaginative act, which is itself immediately recognized by JC. The question is whether this ache is able to reach out, off the page, and entangle the reader. My own sense is that it does, and it helps us import an ethical ache into the Strong Opinions.
Even at this early stage, one can see in the form of communication a strategy designed to defeat ersatz ethical thought. In particular, any tendency in the reader to transfer authority to the author is undermined twice over. Not only is the author of Strong Opinions not John Coetzee—and thus whatever admiration one has for him cannot directly transfer into admiration for the opinions expressed—but even the purported author JC is shown to be entangling himself in a somewhat melancholy, perhaps pathetic erotic outreach to a hot little number he happened to glimpse in the laundry. Who knows what place his moral musings have in relation to this human drama? We know immediately that these “strong opinions” are being embedded in a larger context, but we have no idea what the significance of this embedding is. The “strong opinions” do seem to be what JC wants to be putting into the public domain during a period when he is contemplating his own decay and demise. This we can see not from Strong Opinions but from Diary of a Bad Year. But is this a final word that JC needs to speak, or is it simply an empty motion he is going through as he pursues what really matters to him, a relationship with Anya? There is no answer to this question in the text. Thus there is no easy way for a reader to take on the strong opinions simply by taking John Coetzee’s or JC’s word for it. If we think of ethical thought as not the sort of thing that can be accepted on authority, then this is a literary form that defeats a typical way in which ethical thought is itself defeated.
For a similar reason, the form also works against ethical thought’s becoming routine. With transference of authority, the problem is not only that we are taking an “expert’s” word for it; the word we take tends to lose vitality. So, to take an example that I shall presently consider in more detail, if we were to take JC’s word for it that “torture is a national dishonor,” how would that stand with our own sense of dishonor? This is the irony of “strong opinions”: opinions can’t be strong simply in virtue of their content. It is possible to “accept” the opinion, yet the strength of the opinion is drained off in the transmission. Certainly, there are many warnings in Diary of a Bad Year that the “strong opinions” may just be ersatz ethical thought. JC himself calls the invitation to write Strong Opinions “an opportunity to grumble in public, and opportunity to take magic revenge on the world for declining to conform to my fantasies: how could I refuse?”(23).14 Anya warns him that he has “a tone that really turns people off. A know-it-all tone. Everything is cut and dried: I am the one with all the answers, here is how it is, don’t argue, it won’t get you anywhere. I know that isn’t how you are in real life, but that is how you come across, and it is not what you want” (70). And of course, Alan in his obnoxious tirade says that the reason Strong Opinions is being published in Germany is because that country is the last on earth that has any interest in the shriveled musings of a white-bearded guru. Each of the charges has some plausibility. Thus, if JC’s voice—that is, the voice of Strong Opinions—is going to gain authority with the reader, it can only come after the reader has grappled with all the warnings against assigning it any authority at all. Ironically, Diary of a Bad Year inoculates Strong Opinions against being ersatz ethical thought by warning the reader that it might be just that.
Let us return to the dialectic of responsibility—reading across the pages of Strong Opinions. In an entry on Machiavelli, JC writes:
Necessity, necessità, is Machiavelli’s guiding principle. The old, pre-Machiavellian position was that the law was supreme. If it so happened that the moral law was sometimes broken, that was unfortunate, but rulers were merely human, after all. The new, Machiavellian position is that infringing the moral law is justified when it is necessary.
Thus is inaugurated the dualism of modern political culture, which simultaneously upholds absolute and relative standards of value. The modern state appeals to morality, to religion and to natural law as the ideological foundation of its existence. At the same time it is prepared to infringe any or all of these in the interest of self-preservation.
(17)
JC sees that Machiavelli has trickled down into “ordinary life”; the only people who somehow don’t get it are people he calls “liberal intellectuals”:
The kind of person who calls talkback radio and justifies the use of torture in the interrogation of prisoners holds the double standard in his mind in exactly the same way: without in the least denying the absolute claims of the Christian ethic (love thy neighbor as thyself), such a person approves freeing the hands of the authorities—the army, the secret police—to do whatever may be necessary to protect the public from enemies of the state.
The typical reaction of liberal intellectuals is to seize on the contradiction here: how can something be both wrong and right, or at least both wrong and OK at the same time? What liberal intellectuals fail to see is that this so-called contradiction expresses the quintessence of the Machiavellian and therefore the modern, a quintessence that has been thoroughly absorbed by the man in the street.
(18)
But when JC speaks about “liberal intellectuals,” whom is he talking about? And to whom is he speaking? He talks about them in the third person, and thus it would at least initially seem that JC, in his writing, does not take himself to be addressing them. Rather, he seems to take himself to be addressing a different group—we, the intended readers (whoever we turn out to be)—and he is talking about “liberal intellectuals” with us. The sense that “liberal intellectuals” are not us (readers) is enhanced by JC’s claim, “What liberal intellectuals fail to see . . .” JC implies that we (his readers) can see, merely by his pointing it out, what liberal intellectuals fail to see. And if it were that easy for “liberal intellectuals” to see what they purportedly fail to see, why couldn’t JC call them “you”? Why couldn’t he then address them directly, as he does us (his readers)? He could then say, “What some of you fail to see is . . .” I suspect that JC cannot address “liberal intellectuals” directly—cannot simply point out to them what they have hitherto failed to see—because what they fail to see, they cannot see. This is a blindness of some sort. Thus the simple activity of pointing something out could not possibly work. And so if one were somehow to bring this failure to see to the attention of those who are failing to see (that is, to the attention of liberal intellectuals themselves), one would have to use a less direct method.
In contemporary political discourse, when someone talks of “liberal intellectuals,” he or she is a conservative commentator, and the point of mentioning them is to pour abuse upon them for the satisfaction of other likeminded conservatives. But this cannot be what JC is doing. His outrage at Guantanamo, to take just one example, means he cannot be in the standard mold of conservative commentator—who takes Guantanamo to be a necessity of war. And the fact that he assumes his readers will be sympathetic with his views means this cannot be the standard derogatory trope of “liberal intellectuals.”
Precisely because JC’s use of “liberal intellectuals” doesn’t fit this mold, it ought to raise some curiosity in the reader as to just who he is talking about. And why is he talking about them to us? I would like to suggest that we construe “liberal intellectuals” broadly to include a group that meets three criteria:
Note that according to this characterization, “liberal intellectuals” would cut across the standard left-right divide. For example, the late Robert Bartley, the legendary editorial-page editor of the Wall Street Journal, right up to the end of his distinguished conservative career, called himself a “liberal” in the traditional sense of the term. In the conservative version of liberalism, the crux is the right of the individual to make up his mind in the market place; in the left-wing version, it is the dignity of the individual, which argues, for example, in favor of universal health care. In each case, what is at stake is some vision of the rights and dignity of the individual. The opposition JC is establishing, then, is not between left and right but between “liberal intellectuals” and “ordinary people.” What I think JC wants to investigate is the role of the intellect—at least, as it is given social expression in terms of privileged education—among those who take themselves to value the rights and dignity of the individual.
Although JC sets up an opposition between “liberal intellectuals” and “ordinary people,” it is noteworthy that against neither group will a moral appeal against torture succeed. “If you wish to counter the man in the street, it cannot be by appeal to moral principles. . . . Ordinary life is full of contradictions; ordinary people are used to accommodating them” (18). In effect, the “ordinary” response to torture is: “Yes, torture is a moral outrage, but sometimes it is necessary.” For “liberal intellectuals,” the moral appeal fails for a different reason: it is experienced by them as superfluous. They are already against torture and don’t need to be told that it is an outrage. JC tells us how we might nevertheless reach “ordinary people”: instead of moral appeal “you must attack the metaphysical, supra-empirical status of necessità and show that to be fraudulent” (18). If one can show that torture isn’t really necessary for the state’s survival, if you can show that the claim is a fraud, then ordinary people won’t need a further moral argument to be against it. But this kind of rhetorical move won’t work against “liberal intellectuals” precisely because they don’t think they need convincing. If there were going to be a rhetorical strategy that worked with them, it would have to be one that elicited from them recognition that, after all, they do need convincing. That being absolutely against torture does not preclude the possibility that they are somehow for it. This would be especially difficult for them to see if, as intellectuals, believers in logic, they assumed that their opposition to torture thereby ruled out the possibility that they are somehow also in favor of it.15
JC thinks we Americans are entangled in a national curse—a modern, secular version of blood guilt. Actually, JC is more concerned with shame than guilt—the transmission of dishonor. In this modern version, shame is transmitted not through blood but through citizenship. We are shamed, JC thinks, by the fact that we are citizens of a nation that engages in torture. Of the Bush administration, JC writes:
Their shamelessness is quite extraordinary. Their denials are less than half-hearted. The distinction their hired lawyers draw between torture and coercion is patently insincere, pro forma. In the new dispensation we have created, they implicitly say, the old powers of shame have been abolished. Whatever abhorrence you may feel counts for nothing.
(39)
It is here, in JC’s opinion, that each individual American faces the challenge of ethical thought: “How, in the face of this shame to which I am subjected, do I behave? How do I save my honour?” (39). But how does the shamelessness of the Bush administration trickle down and shame me? There are a number of peculiarities in the dynamics of shame. To begin with, shamelessness is shameful. But if the administration is, as JC alleges, shameless, then they will never feel the shame that, JC alleges, attaches to them. That is, there is objective shame that attaches to the administration because of their shameless behavior, but there is also subjective shame—the experience of being ashamed—that they will never feel (because they are shameless). When it comes to shamelessness, objective and subjective shame necessarily come apart. But now there is a further problem with JC’s claim that the shame has somehow become my shame, something in relation to which I must figure out how to live. Again, there is a split between JC’s claim of objective shame attaching to me and the subjective shame, a shame that I can’t yet figure out why I ought to feel. Is this puzzlement my very own form of shamelessness, manifesting itself in a sense that I don’t deserve to feel shame? JC is, I think, trying to block a familiar move: because I oppose George Bush, loathe the administration’s tactics of skirting the law, and abhor torture, I am therefore not responsible for what the government does. In this picture, my ethical thought has already been done—and though I may be disturbed by my government’s actions, I am comfortable with respect to my judgment of myself. For JC, this tactic won’t work, and he tries to enliven in the reader a sense that it is not working:
Dishonour is no respecter of fine distinctions. Dishonour descends upon one’s shoulders and once it has descended no amount of clever pleading will dispel it. In the present climate of whipped-up fear, and in the absence of any groundswell of popular revulsion against torture, political actions by individual citizens seem unlikely to have any practical effect. Yet perhaps, pursued doggedly and in a spirit of outrage, such actions will at least allow people to hold their heads up. Mere symbolic actions, on the other hand—burning the flag, pronouncing the words aloud “I abhor the leaders of my country and dissociate myself from them”—will certainly not be enough.
(40)
JC is attacking the liberal idea that the individual can be judged in his own terms, in isolation from the nation into which he happens to be born. His point is not that the nation or the culture will have influenced him or shaped his outlook and thus his complicity. Rather, JC’s claim is that even if the nation has had no influence on the individual at all, the shame is still his. It attaches simply in virtue of his being a citizen. There are thus, for JC, severe limits to an individual’s ability to ward off shame by saying, “It is not mine.” Worse, at least from the point of view of liberal imagination, these limits may not be rationally justifiable. This is what “liberal intellectuals” cannot see: the fact that I can reason my way out of the shame—after all, I did nothing to deserve it—does not mean that it is not mine. It is there, like a curse or an oracle. It attaches to me simply by virtue of my nationality. JC cites the “deep theme” of Faulkner: “The theft of the land from the Indians or the rape of slave women comes back in unforeseen form, generations later, to haunt the oppressor” (48). And he quotes the classicist J.-P. Vernant on the structure of tragic guilt as arising from a clash of an ancient religious conception in which an impious act can defile an entire race and a newer legal conception in which the guilty one is the individual who breaks the law (49). In JC’s nationalist conception, shame transmits not just across generations but also trickles down within a single generation from the political class that sanctions the taboo act to the citizens who may have had little or no say in how the political class operates. How is it fair, one wants to ask, that I should bear the guilt for acts I abhor, committed by leaders I voted against and over whose behavior I have no control? JC’s answer: whether you figure that out or not, the shame is yours.
In short, JC plays jujitsu with the liberal imagination. The liberal sensibility wants to start out with the individual—his rights, dignity, and responsibilities—and then asks, “How am I responsible?” JC begins with an accusation of shared shame: “You are dishonored, simply by being part of this tainted ‘we.’ Now figure out how to behave as an individual: for it is given to you to figure out how to deal with the shame you have inherited for acts you did not perform, for acts you abhor.”
In reading JC’s strong opinion, many reactions are possible. One might, for example, dismiss JC as a nut case, given to oracular pronouncements we could well live without. Or one might “agree” with JC in the service of bolstering a complacent sense of self-righteousness (“Yes, the shame is mine as well!” Now, where is my martini?). Really, only one avenue of reaction is blocked: the one that tries to object to JC’s accusation by saying, “The shame could not be mine, because I did nothing to deserve it.” This is essentially the reaction of the “liberal intellectual.” And it cannot be an objection because JC begins with the premise that this is a shame that attaches to you whether or not you did something to deserve it. One wants to say: it does not make sense that there should be such a thing as shame that genuinely attaches to me, though I’ve done nothing to deserve it. But JC already agrees that this shame does not make sense; he does not think it open to rational assessment in this way. Rather, he thinks one must just recognize it as there, attaching to me by virtue of my nationality, independently of my deeds. JC’s accusation may be one I refuse to accept, but I cannot refuse it on standard rational grounds. For the accusation does not claim to be rational—that is, to make sense according to contemporary standards of responsibility—it claims to be true.
What if this accusation were somehow to resonate with me? Wouldn’t that only show that I was susceptible to irrational appeals? Perhaps. But it might also serve to bypass a defensive use to which reason can be put. Rationalization is a process that purports to determine on the basis of reason alone whether or not, say, I ought to feel shame, but it is actually structured so as to arrive at the conclusion I want. To take a salient example: torture is forbidden by U.S. law, and there is widespread agreement that it would be shameful for this country to engage in torture. So, to the question, “Should we feel shame because our government engages in torture?” the official answer is, “Absolutely not; our government clearly forbids the use of torture.” However, in ruling out torture, the law also leaves it unclear what interrogation techniques count as torture. At the time of writing this chapter, the interrogation technique known as waterboarding has neither been conclusively ruled in nor conclusively ruled out. Or, as we shall see, in a funny way it has been both ruled out and ruled in. One might think: if torture is so horrible, if engaging in it would be a national disgrace, isn’t it a matter of urgency for us to make up our minds about waterboarding? And why, after all, call it “waterboarding”? Why not call it “torture by drowning”? Have we already implicated ourselves with the very vocabulary we use to discuss the issue? After all, if so-called waterboarding is not torture, it is certainly an effective interrogation technique, and we could perhaps engage in it more often. If, however, it is torture (as I believe it obviously is), then we are in the midst of a terrible crisis: The government is behaving in morally depraved ways in our name. People are suffering unimaginably and unjustly, and we should be doing everything we can to halt this crime against humanity. Instead, the situation is such as to leave us in a murky limbo. Again, on the one hand, waterboarding is absolutely forbidden to the U.S. military. The Detainee Treatment Act forbids “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” of detainees and requires that interrogation techniques be restricted to those authorized in the Army Field Manual. The Army Field Manual explicitly prohibits waterboarding. On the other hand, waterboarding has been used by the CIA. It was approved by a presidential finding in 2002 and then prohibited in 2006 by a directive of the CIA director, Michael Hayden. Even so, at the time of writing, it has not yet been ruled to be torture.
This is a complex structure of prohibitions and permissions. It almost looks like the solution to a complex algebraic equation: solve for a situation in which (a) torture is forbidden; (b) waterboarding is forbidden; (c) waterboarding was permitted and could be permitted again; (d) there is no contradiction. What is this complexity for? It seems to me that it is (d) that gives the game away. The law goes to great lengths to avoid the explicit Machiavellian contradiction that JC says “ordinary people” are used to accommodating, namely:
Torture is absolutely forbidden.
Torture is permitted when necessary.
It is as though this complex system were written for those who cannot tolerate this contradiction, that is, for the people JC calls “liberal intellectuals.” It is an attempt to capture all that is needed in the Machiavellian moment without admitting to it. Why not just admit to it? The only answer I can think of is: admitting to it brings with it a sense of shame. The liberal intellectual, as we have seen, is committed to the rights and dignity of the individual, and he is also committed to the use of reason. There is thus no way he can both forbid torture and allow it without disgracing himself (in his own eyes). But then reason is working not merely to determine whether a situation is shameful; it is working to ward off shame by whatever means possible. It is as though reason has been given a task: torture is forbidden; now use all your resources to show that all of our behavior (including waterboarding) has been consistent with the prohibition.16
Note that this strategy is very different from a more straightforward one that argues that waterboarding is not torture and thus ought to be permitted. Then one would allow the military to engage in it as well. It is also different from a strategy that argues that in certain cases torture is necessary. By contrast, the strategy that is being used is one that forbids torture but then goes to great lengths to keep it murky whether waterboarding is torture—and gives mixed messages about whether it is permitted. The contradiction is avoided just so long as we don’t look too closely into what is going on or what we are doing.
The national debate has not been explicitly about shame but about consistency with the law. Three events that have occurred while this chapter was being written speak to this point. First, Michael Mukasey was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as attorney general of the United States despite the fact that he refused to say whether he considered waterboarding to be torture. He did say that personally he found it repugnant, but he left it an open question whether it counts as torture.17 Naively, one might think, “Goodness, if waterboarding might be torture, shouldn’t we get clear about whether it is or it isn’t. And shouldn’t we be sure a nominee was on the right side of such an important issue before confirming him as attorney general?” But in this instance, being on the “right side” of the issue was being on neither side of it. Second, John McConnell, the director of National Intelligence, made the remarkable claim that waterboarding would be torture if used against him but “declined for legal reasons to say whether the technique categorically should be considered torture.”18 This is what today counts as judiciousness. Again, one might think, “If Mr. McConnell is so sure waterboarding would be torture if used against him, how could he as a matter of legality remain unclear about whether it is torture for others? And if as a matter of legality it is not clear, why doesn’t that legality apply in his case?” As anyone who has worked his way through these contortions can see, the issue is not that the law is unclear and thus the issue cannot be decided; the law has been written and interpreted in ways so that they can say that these officials cannot say. JC’s point is that consistency with the law has become a fetish whereby “liberal intellectuals” can ward off a sense of shame. Evidence in favor of JC is provided by the third recent event, the report of the CIA’s destruction of videotapes of interrogations where waterboarding was used.19 Officially, the destruction occurred in order to protect CIA interrogators from retaliation, and there has been some speculation in the press whether it might also have been done to protect them (or the CIA) against legal redress. But another explanation overwhelmingly suggests itself: the CIA (or those who ordered the tapes’ destruction) correctly understood that these activities should not be seen.20 It is under the gaze that one experiences shame. And the CIA is part of a complex structure such that shame is avoided not by avoiding the shameful act but by making it impossible that there should be a public gaze upon the act. If the public were to see the act, they would no longer be able to allow their leaders to remain vague about whether it was torture. But if public leaders must remain vague, then these images must not be seen. This entire complex edifice—the dance around whether waterboarding is torture—would collapse.
JC’s accusation of national shame blows this kind of casuistry out of the water. In effect, his accusation says, “It doesn’t matter what kind of reasons you can find; the shame is yours all the same. It doesn’t matter what the legal technicalities are, the shame is yours all the same. It doesn’t matter whether the videos have been destroyed, they have been destroyed for your sake, to protect you from feeling the shame that is yours all the same. Shame on you for using your reason to try to find consistency in your acts. Consistency will not protect you against the shame that is yours all the same.”
And to the individual who says, “I don’t see why I should bear the shame; I abhor torture,” we can now see that this is a repetition of what the law says about itself. The law abhors torture, and yet has somehow tolerated it. We abhor torture, and what have we tolerated? Can anyone be that confident whether his own “opposition” doesn’t have the same defensive structure? Thus although JC is officially talking to us (his readers) about “liberal intellectuals,” the thought begins to dawn, “Might he be talking to us, about us?” Might we not have a complicity we do not yet recognize?21
Having worked through one instance of the dialectic of responsibility, let me briefly recap its moments.
First, the task is to help us come to see that we are entangled in motivated structures of not-seeing. This cannot be done simply by pointing it out. We think we can see the situation as it is; we think we are already against torture.
So, second, we are told of a group, the “liberal intellectuals,” who fail to see the Machiavellian world in which they are entangled precisely because they refuse to accept its contradiction.
Third, we come to see that the law and its complex structure of enforcement and non-enforcement seem to be in place in order to placate the need for consistency of the “liberal intellectuals.” If the law simply reflected “ordinary people’s” understanding, it would be much simpler: torture is forbidden, except when it is necessary. But, then, who are these “liberal intellectuals” whom the law is going to such efforts to pacify? And why should they be the people who feel that they have no responsibility for the law?
Fourth, JC’s accusation is that we are entangled in this national shame irrespective of our reasons, solely by virtue of citizenship. I take this to be an intentionally scandalous claim. In effect, it says, “Your use of reason does not matter; it won’t get you off the hook.” In a funny way, this provides a certain kind of relief. If our reasons don’t matter, then we can at least momentarily take a break from using them to try to justify our innocence. We can at least begin to inquire into how reason has been used to tolerate and sustain this shameful situation.
Finally, the question begins to dawn: Might one of the ways reason has been used to tolerate this shameful situation be my giving myself reasons to think I am not implicated in this national shame? It is at this moment that I begin to wonder whether I am an instance of the “liberal intellectual” I have been reading about. But it is at this moment I cease to be a “liberal intellectual” precisely because I can now see what the “liberal intellectual” fails to see.
Note that none of this dialectic requires that JC be right that we share a shame solely in virtue of our citizenship, nor that we agree with him. JC and his accusation serve merely as a catalyst for a process by which we slowly come to see that our own reason has been implicated in a motivated structure of not seeing. What matters is that the accusation—perhaps by its scandalous nature—stimulates us to make this movement. In general, JC seems to think that human injustice requires motivated structures of not seeing. So, to take another example dear to his heart: the fact that meat ends up on our dinner table requires that we remain with, at best, a vague understanding of how it got there. His strategy is in the service of helping us see that we are motivated not to see.
Now what does the spectacle of embedding have to do with all of this? That is, what is John Coetzee’s strategy here, as opposed to JC’s? It seems to me the structure of the answer is obvious: there is something about seeing JC’s opinions embedded in the travails of his life that facilitates a process by which those very opinions come to matter to us in which they might not otherwise. The difficulty is in figuring out how this might be so. Here a comparison with Kafka might be illuminating. Kafka is more concerned with guilt; JC is more concerned with shame. Guilt is more associated with the voice, and Kafka is at his most powerful when he isolates the voice of judgment—“You are guilty!”—from any embedding. Shame, by contrast, requires a gaze. JC’s writing provides us with many images to gaze upon. As he himself says, Guantanamo Bay “is more a spectacle than a prisoner-of-war camp: an awful display” (21). But if we are not merely going to look upon shameful situations but ourselves participate in that sense of shame, we need some imaginative sense of being gazed upon. Arguably, this cannot be provided by a bare gaze (what is that?) as the voice of guilt can be provided by a bare voice. We need to have a sense of who is gazing upon us if we are to think that under his gaze we ought to feel shame.22 (I take it that if a Nazi murderer were to look down on us as weaklings for being unable to participate in the Holocaust, we would not thereby feel ashamed.) We would need to feel shame under the gaze of someone we could imaginatively respect.
And JC earns our respect not simply because of the content of his strong opinions but because of the honesty with which he faces up to his stumbling efforts to live through what he recognizes to be the end of his life. As readers, we are familiar with the novelistic trope of embedding a moral argument in a larger human drama. For instance, there is the hypocritical preacher, whose sermons are at odds with how he lives his life. Or, to take an example, closer to home, it is easy to imagine a David Lodge novel in which a philosophy professor travels all over giving lectures on how ethics is just a projection of our own values onto the world—and has an affair in each town in which he gives the lecture. We might, then, wonder about his psychology: how much does the content of his lecture flow from his need for extramarital affairs? By contrast, JC’s drama really has little to do with his personal psychology. He is facing up to his own death. He is trying to understand—and live out—the place of love and creativity as one moves toward death. These are issues that confront us all insofar as we are human. And it is as such that we are moved by him. It is not so much that we are struck by his personal dynamics as we are struck by the demands of the human.
This leads to the final point: the demands of the human require that we respond to metaphysical ache. This is not JC’s peculiarity; metaphysical ache marks us as human. And, I want to suggest, there is something about the realistic portrayal of metaphysical ache in another that can serve to stimulate it in ourselves. Though Anya may have been the occasion of JC’s metaphysical ache, she cannot on her own have been its balm. Nothing on its own could have done that. To grasp JC’s metaphysical ache, we need to look at the entire movement of Diary of a Bad Year. These include not only the moral cries of Strong Opinions but also the worry that they are ersatz. It includes also the semi-Platonic love affair that develops between JC and Anya. What changes? JC says that the opinions he publishes haven’t changed, but his opinion of his opinions has. And he goes on to write a Second Diary, not for publication, but one that he shares with Anya, that is more personal and passionate than anything in Strong Opinions. There is much in the Second Diary that is moving, and we are led to believe that it is his acquaintance with Anya that facilitated these thoughts and feelings’ finding their way into written words: “The best proof we have that life is good, and therefore that there may perhaps be a God after all, who has our welfare at heart, is that each of us, on the day we are born, comes to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. It comes as a gift, unearned, unmerited, for free” (221). There is also awe, reverence, for Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky that is as passionate as any homage I have read. Anya, for her part, is able to dump the crude Alan, but she is also able to develop into a person who wants to reach out to the aging author to be the company he seeks for his death. The moment of love is the moment of death—toward which both lives have become organized.
But for all of its residual chauvinism, I am most struck by this “soft opinion” of JC’s:
Why is it that we—men and women both, but men most of all—are prepared to accept the checks and rebuffs of the real, more and more rebuffs as time goes by, more humiliating each time, yet keep coming back? The answer: because we cannot do without the real thing, the real real thing: because without the real we die as if of thirst.
(179)
It is here, I think, that JC names the metaphysical ache, by saying what it is ultimately for: reality. This includes not only a living recognition that he is dying—that is, a life of dying in the company of Anya—but a living recognition of the reality of others. This would require not only recognizing their dignity but crying out against their humiliation, degradation, and torture. This is when the experience of shame might be the beginning of genuine ethical thought. And though we may everywhere be offered ersatz ethical substitutes, they cannot quench the thirst that marks us a human.23
Notes
1. J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (London: Harvill Secker, 2007), 47. All references in this chapter are to this edition and are cited in the text.
2. K. Harrison, New York Times Book Review, December 31, 2007.
3. Rachel Donadio, “Out of Africa,” New York Times, December 16, 2007.
4. With the possible exception of Plato, no one has better understood the foibles and vicissitudes of this kind of movement better than S. Kierkegaard. See his pseudonymous author J. Climacus (another JC), Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments, ed. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), esp. 72–125.
5. Plato, Phaedrus 275a–b.
6. S. Kierkegaard, “A First and Last Explanation,” in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments, by J. Climacus, ed. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 625–30.
7. See also S. Kierkegaard, The Point of View (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998). There Kierkegaard explains in his own name that his pseudonymous authorship was a constituent element of his life as a religious author. Again, that he felt the need to explain himself (“to history”) indicates he thought the pseudonymous authorship had been and would be misunderstood. I am indebted to James Conant for numerous conversations about Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship.
8. This, of course, raises a question of what I am doing, here in this essay. Am I, John Coetzee’s friend, writing my own “First and Last Explanation” so that he doesn’t have to write it himself? That would hardly be an improvement on Kierkegaard’s gesture. I don’t think there is an easy answer to this question; but what I would like to think is that Coetzee’s novel has stimulated some thinking in me.
9. Phaedrus 261a7–8: “psuchagôgia tis dia logôn”; see also 271d10–c2.
10. Republic 7:518c409: “periakteon . . . sun holêi têi psychêi.”
11. “To ex hou.” Aristotle obviously also used the term “hulê.”
12. Plato, Symposium, 205d, 206c.
13. Ibid., 209b–c.
14. JC wonders in his diary whether what he feels when he sees the horrible images of Guantanamo “is not really the dishonor, the disgrace of being alive in these times, but something else, something punier and more manageable, some overload or underload of amines in the cortex that could loosely be entitled depression or even more loosely gloom and could be dispelled in a matter of minutes by the right cocktail of chemicals X, Y, and Z” (141).
15. While reading Diary of a Bad Year a memory came back to me of my first assignment as a student journalist, trying out for the Yale Daily News. The article was about alleged branding (that is, like cattle) of students as a rite of initiation into a fraternity. George W. Bush, class of 1968, the past president of DKE, called the branding “insignificant.” Stating that there is little pain, Bush said, “there’s no scarring mark, physically or mentally” (Jonathan Lear, “No Intervention for Fraternities,” Yale Daily News, November 7, 1967).
16. From the Yale Daily News story: The head of the Inter-Fraternity Council “said it was more like a cigarette burn and goes away after two or three weeks. Labeling the branding as minor, he stated that it has never caused any medical complications. ‘It’s not as bad as it sounds,’ he said. He asserted that the definition of physically and mentally degrading act was ‘a matter of interpretation’” (Lear, “No Intervention for Fraternities”).
17. See e.g. “Mukasey Sworn in as Attorney General,” New York Times, November 9, 2007.
18. My emphasis. The story is by Pamela Hess of the Associated Press and thus ran in many newspapers on January 13, 2008.
19. See e.g. “Justice Dept. Sets Criminal Inquiry on C.I.A. Tapes,” New York Times, January 3, 2008.
20. In this regard, it is fascinating that there was an outcry in Congress about CIA waterboarding until it came out in the press that top Democratic leaders, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, were briefed on the procedure two years earlier and at least some urged the CIA to “push harder”; see Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen, “Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002,” Washington Post, December 9, 2007.
21. Looking back at that Yale Daily News story now, my attention is drawn to a completely different place than it has been before. “Fraternities will be allowed to ‘put their house in order’ without interference from the Yale administration, said Richard C. Carroll, Dean of Undergraduate Affairs, yesterday. Dean Carroll expects to let the Inter-Fraternity Council have complete jurisdiction ‘solving its own problems’, according to Carroll . . . ‘I suspect the hazing has been sensationalized just a little more than the facts warrant: it may not be as horrendous as it seems. I think there may be an exaggeration of the total picture,’ said Carroll” (Lear, “No Intervention for Fraternities”). This seems to me a perfect specimen of a certain type of academic dean: in the name of giving students responsibility for how they conduct themselves, he absolves himself of responsibility for directing them in any particular way. What if, in response to that incident, Dean Carroll had gone on a loud and public crusade? What if, in his remarks to me, he said instead, “What these young men have done may look innocent, but it is in fact very dangerous. It is a step along to the way to coarsening their souls. Here are people who may be future leaders, and they should not be taught to be indifferent to the pain they are inflicting on others. I hope Mr. Bush will come to see this for himself and apologize to those on whom he inflicted pain, even if it was meant to be ‘in fun.’ This cannot be fun; it is morally very serious. His ability to make moral discriminations is at stake.” Such a scenario would have seemed strange at the time, but I cannot help wondering what good it might have done.
22. See B. Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 81–85.
23. I am grateful to John Coetzee, James Conant, and Gabriel Lear for extended conversations on the philosophical topics discussed in this chapter. Obviously, only I can be held responsible for the views expressed here. But I should like to state explicitly that I have never had a conversation with Coetzee about his literary style.