>>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 07/31/00 08:57PM >>>
>Actually there was serious content to what you perceived as a piece
>of wisecrack. Yoshie & I have long argued over uncertainty and
>self-questioning. I think it's a good thing, and she doesn't. I like
>to quote a remark by an Australian scholar of cultural studies &
>feminism, Catherine Driscoll, that she's not finished with a paper
>until she knows what questions to ask her answers. I think that's a
>great piece of wisdom, and Yoshie doesn't.
>
>Doug
I don't think it's a matter of whether "uncertainty" &
"self-questioning" are good things. The point is that we are
basically incapable of self-criticism.
__________
CB: We are dependent upon others for criticism. This is one of the "advantages" of the
human individual being a social individual. Through this socialality, we have some of
the power of seeing ourselves as others see us, including criticizing us, seeing our
blinds spots.
________
We can't see our own blind
spots, unless others (be they live human beings or dead authors)
point them out, and when they do, we don't accept criticisms easily
(we normally shoot down the message as well as the messenger). We
only accept criticisms from comrades whom we like, respect, etc., not
from our enemies. And once we overcome our blind spots (after much
struggles), we can then "criticize" them, but in that case, it is
only our "now enlightened" selves criticizing our "former ignorant"
selves. Think Thomas Kuhn's paradigm shifts here.
Anyhow, I don't know what Catherine exactly means by working on her
paper until "what questions to ask her answers," but I hope her
thoughts are not similar to Lionel Trilling's:
***** The New York Times
July 29, 2000, Saturday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section B; Page 9; Column 5; Arts & Ideas/Cultural Desk
HEADLINE: Dated? Perhaps, But His Insights Remain Powerful
BYLINE: By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
In a new collection of essays about Trilling -- "Lionel Trilling and
the Critics: Opposing Selves" -- even the editor, John Rodden,
acknowledges that for many contemporary readers Trilling may seem
"little more than a curiosity of literary history, a period piece."
His prose style can only accentuate the impression of things long
past: it is almost baroque in its winding, hesitating, qualifying,
venturing gestures. The words "variety," "difficulty," "modulation,"
"complexity" abound. Each phrase is limpid, but the arguments
themselves are tentative, often ambiguous.
So faded has his intellectual aura become that it provides no
immunity from the recent biographical accounts by members of his
family. His widow, Diana Trilling, in her 1993 memoir, "The Beginning
of the Journey," recalled his anguished depressions, petty squabbles
and nasty outbursts. In the journal The American Scholar, his son,
James Trilling, recently suggested that his father's behavior and
intellectual style were consistent with a psychological diagnosis of
attention deficit disorder.
Yet Mr. Rodden's anthology reminds a reader that Trilling was
complicated enough to be hailed by such disparate figures as Edmund
Wilson and Irving Kristol. A second, more significant, new anthology,
"The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent," edited by Leon Wieseltier,
shows just how much is at stake. It is the most capacious and pungent
single volume of Trilling's work ever published, with writings
spanning his entire
career: classic essays on the Kinsey Report, on Wordsworth, on Jane
Austen and on Kipling. It also includes Trilling's magisterial
discussion of Henry James's novel "The Princess Casamassima."
What gives these pieces enduring importance is not Trilling's
judgment that the Kinsey Report fetishizes science or that Kipling
gave nationalism a bad name. The essays' subjects really were
occasions for Trilling to brood on much larger themes that, far from
being dated or quaint, have lost none of their urgency.
"The Liberal Imagination," for example, was partly a critical
response to the Stalinism that tinged the era's liberalism. But in
the book's influential preface Trilling uncovered deeper tensions
within liberalism itself. One of the great achievements of modern
times, he suggested, was the liberal conception of humanity: the view
that there were universal and inalienable human rights, and that the
powers of reason could both honor those rights and eradicate the
world's evils.
The problem, Trilling went on, was that liberalism, in its search for
freedom and justice, had to exert power; it required legislation and
organization. Stalinism was an extreme oversimplification of
liberalism, one in which the social engineering was ruthless. But
even democratic liberalism, Trilling believed, exhibited a simplified
view of the world and an unwavering conviction about how the world
might be regulated. Since these qualities of simplification and
certainty were themselves illiberal, the enlargement of freedom
risked producing a contraction of freedom. "Some paradox of our
natures," Trilling wrote, "leads us, when once we have made our
fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make
them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our
coercion."
The impact on the mind could be even more baleful. The ambition of
rationally reforming society tended to minimize the importance of the
inner life, shrinking the conception of the mind. All dark desires,
untamable impulses, ambivalent feelings and contradictory thoughts
would then be considered failures of the outside world, imperfections
in the social order that could be controlled or legislated away. In
this way, liberalism risked evolving into doctrinaire puritanism --
or worse.
Such was liberalism's great temptation, in Trilling's view (a view he
shared with Isaiah Berlin). "Life presses us so hard," he wrote,
"time is so short, the suffering of the world is so huge, simple,
unendurable -- anything that complicates our moral fervor in dealing
with reality as we immediately see it and wish to drive headlong upon
it must be regarded with some impatience." And while liberalism was,
in its adversary position toward the world, a transforming force, it
was also, in its adversary position toward the mind, a limiting force.
This is where literature came in. Trilling suggested that the
variousness of literature could help shape the liberal imagination,
that it could temper impatient liberal objectives with reminders of
the complexities of the inner life and encourage a "moral realism"
that could soften the demands of "moral righteousness." Literature
would not serve the adversary culture; it would humanize it.
Because of this extended skepticism about liberalism, Trilling was
often attacked by liberals for being a conservative and attacked by
conservatives for not being sufficiently forthright. During the
1960's, for example, he grimly but cautiously criticized the
counterculture for turning liberalism's adversary position into
sweeping orthodoxies. His arguments for rejecting the simple
formulations of radical liberalism did indeed have conservative
implications, emphasizing limits more than possibilities. But
Trilling would also have objected to the conservative impulse to
simplify the relationships he perceived. Who in the midst of such
complexity could afford the certainty of self-righteousness, let
alone a declaration of allegiance? Complexity was Trilling's
prescription for all political positions; ambiguity was the solution.
Moral realism is a balancing act.
The sociologist Richard Sennett once accused Trilling of refusing to
take a stand during the tumult of the 1960's and the crises at
Columbia University.
"You have no position," Mr. Sennett declared. "You are always in between."
"Between," Trilling replied, "is the only honest place to be."
However honest, though, it does not make things easy. In Trilling's
brilliant examination of "The Princess Casamassima," the hero,
Hyacinth, poor and ill-educated, is drawn to two different worlds --
one of political radicalism in which great personal sacrifice is
required in the name of moral good, the other of aesthetic refinement
in which the greatest achievements of Europe are presented for his
delectation. He realizes that there is no separating the inequities
from the great works, but then how can he be true both to his
radicalism and to his aesthetic perceptions? The novel's greatness,
in Trilling's view, comes from its refusal to answer the question
clearly; the tension is potentially tragic. Trilling saw Hyacinth as
a version of Henry James, but he may have also seen him as a
reflection of himself, desperately trying to stake out a "between."
This is one reason that reading Trilling remains so unsettling. He
provides no firm place to stand. Despite his powerful analysis of
liberalism, his emphasis on complexity often becomes too sweeping a
response to every belief. It is partly a retreat from the world, a
declaration of its untenable tensions. But his portrait of the
American democratic mind, imperially pious one minute, queasily
unsteady the next, illiberally making demands in the name of virtue
and liberally tolerating virtue's ambiguities, celebrating reason
while distrusting its demands -- this mind remains as current now as
it was then. It is as familiar and as strange as Trilling's prose.
*****
What's good in a novel isn't always good for politics.
Yoshie
