Between One and One Another. Michael Jackson
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and until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit them for public appearance,”55 many private experiences, such as love, are degraded by being made public, and the public sphere may assume a minatory, blob-like,56 totalitarian form, such as Heidegger described as Das Man.57 One also thinks of Baudelaire's despair at being lost in a soulless crowd, an experience with which Walter Benjamin clearly identified (“Lost in the base world, jostled by the crowd, I am like a weary man whose eye, looking backward into the depths of the years, sees only disillusion and bitterness, and looking ahead sees only a tempest which contains nothing new, neither instruction nor pain”).58 But as Edith Piaf's compelling song, “La Foule (The Crowd), reminds us, crowds can exhilarate as well as alienate. In this song, two lovers are suddenly separated by the crowd in which they had been happily borne along, singing and dancing. One moment they and the crowd are a single body; the next the woman is swept away, sundered from the man she loves.59 In a classical novel of the Meiji period, Natsume Soseki expresses his ambivalence toward twentieth-century civilization, identifying it with the steam train, roaring along, “packed tight with hundreds of people in the one box, merciless in its progress.” Though Soseki is writing thirty-four years before the transports of the Third Reich begin delivering their human freight to the death camps of northern Europe, the Japanese writer recoils at the thought of the “hundreds crammed in there,” travelling at the same speed, stopping at the same places, submitting to the same “baptismal submersion in the same swirling stream.” The train signifies a loss of agency and autonomy. “Some people say that people ‘ride’ the train, but I would say they are thrust into it; some speak of ‘going’ by train, but it seems to be they are transported by it. Nothing is more disdainful of individuality.”60
Clearly, a tension always remains between the selves we construct together and aspects of ourselves that cannot be made over to the public sphere, calling conventional wisdom into question, resisting recognized roles, refusing to fit in or swear fidelity to another sphere. Otto Rank wrote of this anxious relationship between the will to separate and the will to unite61 and, deeply influenced by Rank's thinking, Ernest Becker summarized our human dilemma as follows:
Man wants the impossible: He wants to lose his isolation and keep it at the same time. He can't stand the sense of separateness, and yet he can't allow the complete suffocation of his vitality. He wants to expand by merging with the powerful beyond that transcends him, yet he wants while merging with it to remain individual and aloof.62
It is this struggle between aspects of ourselves that pull away from the public realm and aspects that engage and identify with it that I am concerned with in this book. In trying to capture these shifts among personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal modes of apprehending reality, I have recourse to a style of writing that juxtaposes biographical, autobiographical, and abstract reflections, interleaving narrative and essay.
CHAPTER 2
The Philosopher Who Would Not Be King
I have spent 40 years looking for a coherent and convincing way of formulating my worries about what, if anything, philosophy is good for.
—Richard Rorty
The day was hot. Trudging up the long avenue toward the university, I kept to the shade. The figs and eucalypts reminded me of Australia, bark stripped and straggling, or littering the dry ground. The oaks, myrtles, and phoenix palms took me back to the South of France. I imagined that I could feel at home here, this commingling of antipodean, Mediterranean, and American flora, this winterless climate. But the buildings, colonnades, tiled terra-cotta roofs, and open courtyards were a less congenial mix. Inexplicably, Rodin's Burghers of Calais had been made strangers to one another, standing alone rather than grouped as they are in Calais and London, willing hostages prepared to give their lives to save their besieged city. At the entrance to the university there was an inscription dedicating the campus to the memory of Leland Stanford Jr., “born to mortality, passed to immortality,” a mother's undying love metamorphosed into an institution of timber beam, plaster walls, reinforced concrete, and carved stone. So we convert our tragedies into objects that will withstand corrosive rain, seismic upheavals, and time. We place memorial urns in the cloisters, a chapel at the heart of it all, columns and commemorative plaques that lift our eyes from the ground. Even our intellectual labor aspires to the condition of permanence and transcendence, though our lives are transitory in comparison, our miseries commonplace, our labors unavailing. I felt a strong desire to testify to the struggle of those who lacked the means to pretend that life was otherwise. In about an hour I would present a paper about the life of a Kuranko woman for whom this place might well appear to be paradise but whose thoughts were always under duress, bound by the obligations of parenthood, the struggle to make a farm, to pay her children's school fees and provide food for her children, and to overcome the debilitating effects of an undiagnosed illness. I was also thinking that this was where Richard Rorty taught from 1997 to 2005; Palo Alto was where he died.
That any philosophy mirrors the life of the philosopher is an assertion from which many thinkers would recoil,1 since it seems to reduce thought to the prejudices, preoccupations, and persuasions that supposedly characterize the musings of mere mortals. If every great philosophy is, as Nietzsche avows, “an involuntary and unconscious memoir” reflecting who the philosopher is before he or she takes up philosophy, then thought is but an adventitious by-product of one's life rather than the disciplined, disinterested work of reason. I thought of Nietzsche when I first met Richard Rorty. There was something disarmingly vulnerable about him. Though renowned for his groundbreaking critique of philosophy as a quest for the foundations of true knowledge or accurate representations of the essence of the world,2 and his MacArthur “genius award,” Dick Rorty seemed socially unsure of himself and nonplussed whenever the talk turned from academic to mundane matters like Australian wines, the films of Werner Herzog, or the best Vietnamese restaurant in Canberra.
The year was 1982. The place was the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. We were there on visiting fellowships—myself, Dick Rorty, Don Hirsch, Zygmund Baumann, Paul Connerton, Russell Keat, Patrick McCarthy, and others I got to know less well. I was writing essays on embodiment, profiting from long conversations with Paul, who was writing his book on bodily social memory, and Russell, who was preparing his critique of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. It was my hatha yoga practice that had inspired my explorations of body consciousness; unfortunately, it had also turned me into an obnoxious fundamentalist who believed that the respiratory and psycho-physical disciplines of yoga enabled one to achieve a truer and more realistic relationship with the world, and that discursive thought was largely illusory. Rorty objected to the essentialist overtones of my view, arguing that efforts to ground knowledge in the body or the mind, in reasoned discourse or strong intuition, were equally misguided. And he cautioned me against explaining any human experience in terms of some prior cause or first principle. In my defense, I pointed out that a philosophical argument against foundationalism could not be transferred to the real world, since all human beings have recourse to notions of firstness, foundations and fundamentals in their everyday lives. If it is existentially the case that life is insupportable without such notions, what is the point of making philosophical arguments to the contrary? Moreover, I felt that the Deweyan argument, to which Rorty subscribed, against Platonic dualisms like body-mind, true-false, and subject-object left unconsidered the way we deploy these antinomies to capture different modes of experience. Making epistemological claims for such distinctions is absurd, but recognizing the phenomenological differences they communicated was, I thought, vital to understanding human experience.
I suppose I was ineptly asking whether philosophy has anything to say that might make a real difference to our lives, and whether its insights had value only within the academic circles where they served as currency. I quickly learned that these were also burning questions for Rorty, for beyond the philosophical issue of whether we can ever truly represent what lies outside our minds—whether human thought can mirror nature—lies the much more pragmatic issue of whether the insights of thinkers can change the world.
Though Rorty's parents broke with the Communist Party in 1933, they turned