14

Bruce Springsteen or Philosophy

MICHAEL VENTIMIGLIA

 

 

 

What is the spirit of philosophy? What is the spirit of Springsteen? Can you find the spirit of philosophy and spirit of Springsteen’s music in the same soul? I say “you” but, of course by “you” I mean “me”—it’s hard to speak of Springsteen without telling the stories of our own lives. I’ll put aside any pretension to omniscience about either of our topics, and I’ll talk about what these two things mean for me.

The spirit of Springsteen is a stubborn hope or faith in the future despite an honest accounting of the harshness of the present. It is the space between despair and hope, between facticity and faith, that Bruce seems to understand deeply. I think the reason his work resonates so deeply with so many is that he draws on what might loosely be called the religious impulse. His story telling relates a basic human desire for transcendence from our everyday surroundings. At times Bruce hints at, or even offers, such transcendence, but he leaves open the question of whether or not this transcendence is really possible, at least in any permanent way. This, I think, is the essence of his appeal. Everyone really does have a hungry heart. This is true of the accountant and the mill worker. Without underestimating the importance of economic injustice in Bruce’s writings, it’s important to point out that Bruce’s work is not merely about class struggle. Despite the political significance of much of his work—from stories of Mexican immigrants on The Ghost of Tom Joad to the anger of the often misunderstood protagonist of “Born in the U.S.A.”—Bruce’s work is not merely political. Despite his capacity for empathizing with criminals (without, by the way, glorifying them) his work is not merely about the social conditions that make the line between the right and wrong side of the law so thin. Bruce speaks to a yearning that itself transcends social or political place. He speaks to the dumb human sense that we are somehow trapped or limited by our everyday surroundings, that something better might exist, but it has somehow eluded us.

Is this spirit broadly consistent with the spirit of philosophy? Can one live in this space and seriously engage in philosophy? The easy thing to do here would be to talk about philosophy as a profession in order to reject its soulfulness. This would make philosophy a pretty easy target. But this is philosophy as an area of expertise, which is to say, most of the time, it is not really philosophy at all.

Although those of us who teach and write about philosophy for a living generally refer to ourselves as “philosophers,” we do a lot more explaining than we do philosophizing. We explain other thinkers’ philosophies to our students. We then go home, sit at our computers and explain other thinkers’ philosophies to or our peers. We read Aristotle (or whomever) carefully. We read what other people have said about Aristotle. And then, for the most part, we try to make small little interpretive points about Aristotle and send them out there into the academic world hoping they will be read and liked. This isn’t a bad thing. But it’s not really philosophy. Sure, we have our own individual insights and add our spins to things now and again, but on a daily basis we are not really engaged in the quest for wisdom, we are not really, literally, lovers of wisdom. Rather than create a straw man out of professional philosophy, let’s put professional philosophy, in the somewhat limited sense described here, aside. Writing and teaching about philosophy is not philosophy. So what is philosophy, really, and is it broadly consistent with the spirit of Springsteen’s work?

A City of Winners and Losers

To begin to answer that question, I need to tell a story. Everyone’s got a Bruce story. Even philosophers. Think of mine as a first case study in the distance between philosophy and Bruce.

I was approaching thirty. Unlike most of my friends—mostly first generation college students from Irish and Italian families in New York and New Jersey—I decided to go into academia. Not a common move for people like me. It’s not easy to come home from college for Thanksgiving and tell your dad that his tuition checks look like they’ll be paying for a degree in philosophy. (“Oh, and by the way Dad, even if I get into grad school, I’ll probably wind up driving a taxi when I get out.”) Thinking back, one of my main motivations was that I wanted to make it as a musician, and I figured that a few years of grad school would give me more time to sharpen up my chops on the piano before I threw it out there. But graduate school turns out to be an insane amount of work and suddenly there I am, nearly ten years later, in the middle of Nowhere, Pennsylvania, working on a thesis without a whole lot of new piano riffs under my belt. I am a grown man with no real job, no marketable skill, no completed degree, and literally about two hundred dollars to get me through August until my next teaching gig.

So a buddy of mine and I decided it would be a good idea to take whatever money we had left until the next paycheck and bring it down to Atlantic city. Here’s my memory of the subsequent events:

1. Fast food and cigarettes.

2. Singing the theme song to “Rocky” at the top of our lungs as we drive down the Atlantic City Expressway, the glow of the city on our horizon.

3. My friend—let’s call him Bobby—drops his $200 at the Blackjack table immediately.

4. Bobby hits the ATM machine and gets a cash advance on his credit card.

5. My $200 is gone. Blackjack and craps.

6. Bobby’s new money is gone.

7. ATM.

8. That’s gone.

9. Repeat lines 7 and 8.

10. Repeat line 9.

11. Too late to drive home so we get an overpriced room.

12. Bobby hands me his wallet: “Do not give this back to me!”

13. Bobby asks for his wallet back.

14. Bobby steals his own wallet out of my pants while I am sleeping.

In the morning Bobby is down three thousand dollars. (Note: three thousand dollars in graduate student money is about a billion dollars in real person money.) I’m down about five hundred—my two hundred, and now I’m in the hole with Bobby for another three hundred, on his credit card. So. We are still thirtyyear-olds, we still have no marketable skills, but now we’re also broke. Worse than broke. Bobby is already paying twenty-seven percent on his cash advance. And we’re out of cigarettes.

Silence in the car for miles. Depression. Gambling has a way casting a hue over your entire self-image, over every moment of your life which preceded your last win or loss. Your history seems entirely rewritten. You didn’t just win or lose; you are a winner or a loser. And today I am a loser. The trip is now just one more bad decision in a line that seems to stretch back half my life.

Bobby turns on the radio. Some cheese-ball classic rock station that plays all the same hits over and over serves up “Thunder Road.” And literally, from the first bar of the piano/harp intro, we are swept up in to that magical space between the real and the ideal that Bruce owns. “The screen door sa-lams . . .” We are singing again. “So you’re scared and your thinking that maybe we ain’t that young anymore . . . ” We’re singing loudly. We’re smiling. “Roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair . . . ” We’re screaming. We’re laughing. We’re driving faster. What the hell was I so worried about? “It’s a town full of losers and I’m pulling out of here to win.” Things are going to be fine.

Now, I don’t want to suggest that the plight of the over-educated in America is anything like the plight of the people Bruce often sings about. I didn’t have kids or a wife. I wasn’t crossing over from Mexico to sell my labor or make drugs so my family would have money. I had choices. No one will mistake Bobby or me for working class heroes. But I think this is why everyone’s got a Bruce story. Bruce talks about the space between the real and ideal like few can, but in a way most anyone can relate to. His stories are concrete, but his words and music capture the potentially universal experience of faith and optimism in the face of cold, harsh reality. Anyone can relate to this. Anyone can be uplifted by this.

This is a book about Bruce Springsteen and philosophy. For me, as we drove home from Atlantic City, it was clear that these two things just don’t go together. You can’t have your Bruce and your philosophy too. Philosophy was the over-thinking that I did for a barely sustainable living. Philosophy was the reason I needed to go to Atlantic City in the first place. Bruce was freedom from all that. Philosophy was pretension. Bruce was authenticity. Philosophy was unnecessary complexity. Bruce was sweet simplicity. The two were incommensurable.

I’d like to do another small case study to take us further into this question. Let’s look not at professional philosophy, but at a philosopher—a philosopher with a profound sense of the transcendent who tackled one of the most universal, accessible, and ordinary of philosophical problems—in order to see how he and Bruce stack up.

This Tree of Evil

When I teach the problem of evil to my introductory students, I tell them that this is the one philosophical problem that even the least philosophical people find themselves asking. Few people bother themselves about the nature of true knowledge. Few people spend much time thinking about the essential characteristics of Being. But most people, at some point, ask themselves this central question of philosophy: “If God exists, and he is all powerful, and he is the good guy that we’ve been told he is, why is there evil in the world?” For many people this boils down to: “Why would God let evil things happen? Maybe he just doesn’t exist.”

Unlike many other philosophical questions, which only seem to become compelling when we have the leisure and comfort to address them, this is a question that kicks us when we are down. This is a question that arises not in comfort but in pain—when a friend’s baby dies of a horrible disease, when people fly jets into tall buildings, when thousands of people slide into a crack in the earth as the ground beneath them gives way. It is the question many ask themselves when they have to deal with personal tragedy.

St. Augustine, a man from North Africa who lived from 354 to 430 C.E., is the most famous and influential Western philosopher to address this question. He is aware of what appears to be evil; he seems to share the sort of yearning for transcendence that animates much of Springsteen’s work. His philosophy is complex, but he offers a solution to the problem of evil that can be sketched out in three interwoven strands.

As most students figure out pretty quickly, the idea of “free will” seems important for addressing our problem. When human beings slaughter, torture, and exploit each other, this isn’t God’s will; it’s ours, Augustine says. God gave us free will so our choices would be meaningful. Sometimes we choose evil. This evil that humans commit against each other, “moral evil,” can be blamed on us, not God.

Let’s grant for a second that this gets us somewhere. Maybe it accounts for terrorism and genocide. But what about childhood diseases? Earthquakes? What philosophers call “natural evil”? Well, we can try and pin this natural evil on free will too and blame it on Adam and Eve. This is part of Augustine’s solution—certainly more convincing for some than for others—but he also points out that what seems like evil to us may be part of something good from God’s perspective.

Think of a little toddler being brought to the doctor for his shots. Out for the day with mommy. Maybe a lollypop. Life is good, until . . . some lady with what now appears to be a very deceptive smile whips out some very serious looking needles. Incomprehensibly, mom holds the kid down while this monster in a white coat gives him the pin cushion treatment. From the point of view of that kid what we have here is unquestionable, unadulterated, unmitigated evil, pure and simple. What the kid cannot see, of course, is that from a higher intelligence what seems like certain evil is, in fact, part of a larger good. Now, presumably the gap between our intelligence and God’s is far greater than that between a child and an adult. And so maybe what we think of as evil is in fact part of something bigger and better that we cannot begin to comprehend.

Finally, a third, complementary, solution of Augustine’s is to deny that evil has any reality at all. Augustine wanted to save God the embarrassment of either having created evil or having to fight a cosmic battle against an evil being of equal power, so Augustine denied the reality of evil. Augustine argued that what we experience as evil has no separate existence, but is merely a “lack” of goodness, an “absence,” a “privation.” This solution helped make it intellectually possible for him to convert to Christianity—with its belief in one good creator God—away from the “Manicheanism” of his day which claimed that evil was a real power in the cosmos. This argument seems strange, far more speculative than the previous two points, but it was borrowed from Greek thought and, through Augustine, this view that evil has no reality has had tremendous influence on the history of philosophy and theology.

Nebraska

For Augustine, then, the problem of evil has solutions, and with God’s grace, salvation or transcendence from this evil is assured. Let’s compare this to Springsteen’s implicit treatment of evil on Nebraska. Although Nebraska was not the commercial success Bruce’s record company had hoped for, it is among the most philosophical and penetrating albums that Springsteen has ever created. It is likely the most haunting, bone-chilling album he has produced. Rolling Stone (October 28th, 1982) called it “the bravest of Springsteen’s six records” at the time of its release, “his most startling, direct, and chilling . . . . as deep and unsettling as anything Springsteen has recorded.” It is as close to having Bruce sing to you in your bedroom as you can get. This is because it was, famously, recorded in his. It is Bruce with his guitar and harmonica. He is recording on a piece of equipment any amateur could buy from a local music store. And it is the album, I think, that is most relevant to our case study on Bruce and philosophy.

Augustine’s most important, though esoteric, solution to the problem of evil was that it did not exist. While Augustine did not mean to suggest that the perception of evil does not exist, he denies what philosophers call the metaphysical reality of evil. Nebraska, to the contrary, begins with a simple, concrete account of evil that seems to make all such distinctions melt into shallow chatter. The first song, the album’s title track, was inspired by the story of mass murderer Charlie Starkweather. In 1957 Starkweather and his fourteen-year-old girlfriend Caril Ann Fugate killed eleven people from Lincoln, Nebraska to Douglas Wyoming, including Fugate’s parents and her two-year old sister. In this first person narrative, Springsteen invites us to come to terms with evil in its simplest, most unapologetic terms. Evil with no accounting for itself. Evil with no remorse.

Bruce neither glorifies nor condemns. He just tells the story, as he understands it, on Starkweather’s terms in a disquieting acoustic ballad. In response to our felt demand that the killer comprehend the pain and suffering he has wrought, the best we get is that for “for a little while, sir, me and her had us some fun.” In response to our incapacity to process such heartlessness, we are told, “Well, sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.” Bruce’s lyric, ironically, is an unintended echo of the Manicheanism that Augustine tried to refute. Compared to this simple account of one man’s unapologetic killing spree, Augustine’s metaphysical gymnastics seem like pure sophistry.

Augustine speaks to the importance of free will for understanding moral evil. Nebraska, to the contrary, questions the meaning of free will when one is faced with few real choices. Twice on the album we learn about how people have “debts no honest man can pay.” The first is the narrator of “Atlantic City” who can’t find a job and realizes that in this simple gangland world of winners and losers the only way to climb out of his hole is to do “a little favor” for someone. The second is Ralph who, in “Johnny 99,” loses his job, can’t find another, and is losing his house. He gets drunk, gets a gun and shoots a night clerk. He doesn’t claim that he is a victim or that he is innocent, but he points out that it was all these factors together which led to his drunken violence.⁵¹ In “State Trooper,” the narrator, who’s got a clear conscience about whatever he’s done, quietly chants “Mr. State Trooper, please don’t stop me” as he drives the Jersey Turnpike with neither license nor registration. We don’t know what would have to happen if he was pulled over, but the narrator’s thoughts about the trooper’s hypothetical wife and kids suggest that if the trooper flips the switch, his family is going to be devastated. While none of these men is cast as an innocent or a victim or a hero, Bruce seems to suggest that anyone in a similar position could do the same as they have done. Yes, free will accounts for some evil, but freedom, in practice, is often compromised.⁵²

Finally, in contrast to Augustine’s suggestion that evil is part of the best possible world, we have Nebraska as a meditation on evil. The simplicity of the lyrics, the music, even the production make the ad hoc hypotheses Augustine is spinning out seem disingenuous. Despite what seems obviously true, Augustine seems to be arguing, things are as good as they can possibly be. Nebraska, on the other hand, is a straightforward and honest account of moral ambiguity and unapologetic evil. Bruce is wise to leave this ambiguity intact and unresolved where the philosophical urge might be to try to explain it away.

All the Redemption I Can Offer

Of course, both Bruce and Augustine offer redemption from evil, a faith in something better than that which hard experience teaches. Compared to Augustine’s hard-won and reflective faith, it may seem easy to ridicule the religious tenor of Springsteen’s offers of salvation through muscle cars and the open road. But Springsteen’s work is about the need for deliverance, and the small ordinary ways in which we can temporarily find it, rather than any promise of final salvation. On Nebraska Bruce doesn’t guarantee deliverance, but he speaks directly to the need to believe in it. In “Used Cars,” a young child angered and embarrassed by his family’s inability to afford a new car promises that he’ll never ride in another used car as soon as he wins the lottery. And “Reason to Believe,” the final cut on the album, contains three stories of persons whose need for faith blinds them to the obviousness of their circumstances.

Even though this is one of Springsteen’s darker albums, it is worth mentioning that the transcendence or deliverance offered on other albums is also often explicitly temporary or even illusionary. “Born to Run,” for all its gestures towards the eternal, ends with the acceptance that “till then” they were born to run. Someday, maybe, they will walk in the sun, but for the moment the narrator can offer something certain, a temporary transcendence in the most ordinary of situations. The hero of “Thunder Road” understands that he is no hero at all, but he can offer a moment’s respite from the reality he and his girl will surely have to confront again when the gas runs out and the thrill is gone. What may seem on the surface like a facile synthesis of religious imagery and testosterone drenched adolescent angst may be, in its deep modesty and in its self-awareness, as profound as any promise of eternal salvation.

Without offering final judgment regarding which sketch of evil and redemption above is more compelling, it seems safe to say that Bruce’s simple storytelling maintains an integrity that may be difficult to preserve in philosophy. This is because Springsteen offers no real solutions. Springsteen doesn’t solve the problem of evil for us. He simply leaves it in the concrete as a problem. He doesn’t guarantee eternal salvation, just small moments of deliverance which help sooth the desire for the eternal. Perhaps the best known and most explicitly philosophical lyric from Nebraska comes from “Atlantic City.” After musing:

Well now everything dies baby that’s a fact.
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.

. . . the narrator refocuses on the here and now:

Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City.

In this turn from eternal human questions to concrete moments of deliverance, in the here and now, we are offered a wisdom that may be incompatible with much of the philosophical tradition. And, yet, precisely because Springsteen appreciates the significance and depth of these eternal questions, we cannot fairly say that what is best in Springsteen cannot co-exist with what is best about philosophy.

Bruce and Philosophy

Philosophy is, again, the love of wisdom. Perhaps the most authentic and compelling image of the philosophical spirit is painted in Plato’s Symposium. In the Symposium, philosophy is depicted as a passion, a desire, an eros. The lover of wisdom is, not surprisingly, on a quasi-religious quest; philosophy is itself an expression of the desire for transcendence. As a kind of “love” (eros) Socrates relays, it is neither good nor bad, neither beautiful nor ugly. It is between these extremes. Such love is the expression of a lack. It is a hunger of the whole person, an eros. It is that which makes us aware of our poverty and points us towards something better. Socrates speaks of the condition of the god Eros, here translated as “Love”:

Love’s circumstances are as follows: In the first place, he’s always poor and far from being gentle and beautiful, as most people believe. On the contrary, he’s tough, wrinkled, barefoot and homeless. He always lies on the ground, since he doesn’t have a bed, and he sleeps in doorways and alongside the road in the open air. . . . he’s a schemer after beautiful and good things.... He engages in the search for wisdom throughout his entire life . . . ⁵³

Love itself is not beautiful; it is the yearning or hunger for that which is beautiful. It is the desire to understand Beauty, to be in the presence of Beauty, to be “there with it,” that draws one beyond his or her everyday surroundings.

Philosophy as a passion, a desire, a want to transcend time and place through wisdom or knowledge of eternal realities, is itself an expression of the sort of yearning that Springsteen seems to understand. Insofar as philosophy emphasizes the intellectual quest for transcendence, it is perhaps somewhat rarified and peculiar. Insofar as it thinks its quest is ever completed, the eros or the passion is destroyed and it self-destructs. But the philosophical eros itself, this pain, this need to transcend, is something that both Bruce and philosophers understand deeply. Philosophy is one, somewhat unusual, expression of this basic human need. In reply to Plato’s question, “Do you think that this yearning, this love, is common to all human beings, and that everyone wants good things to be their own forever?” I think, we could say, with Bruce, that everyone does, in fact, have a hungry heart.

Moments of Redemption

As Bobby and I made our way back through the streets of State College, Pennsylvania, the magic of our Bruce moment had worn off. But my puzzlement about how Springsteen’s music and professional philosophy could co-exist in my soul still hasn’t. For the moment, I have to find moments of redemption on the weekends and in the summers, when I get to watch how the music that comes from my fingers can occasionally travel up someone’s body and make them sway or smile. I think the best, most honest thing I can say is that the closest I come to what I am looking for during the week is what I find on the weekend. I guess that will have to do.