HELENS: AUTOBIOGRAPHY AT THE CROSSROADS OF PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE by DAVID JEREMY HART (Under the Direction of O. Bradley Bassler) ABSTRACT This study considers the close relationship between philosophy and autobiographical forms of writing. Beginning with a comparison of two autobiographical works, Descartes’s Discourse on Method and Stanley Cavell’s A Pitch of Philosophy–the first publication of the prototype “modern” philosopher and the recent “post-modern” philosophy of the maverick Cavell–I consider the motivations for the autobiographical turn, distinguishing the Cavellian from the Cartesian. Attempting to bridge the gap between the two philosophers, I write my own philosophical autobiography in which philosophy turns out to be a sort of self-reflexive meditation on what it means to write autobiography, i.e. a meditation on the very activity in which it is engaged. Modern philosophy, I suggest, proves to be inseparable from notions of boundary, or rather standing at the boundary. Accordingly, its expression is intrinsically interdisciplinary, bringing together literary criticism, history of philosophy, fiction, and psychological portraiture, among others. My own study moves between these various modes, and in so doing, it constitutes a Baconian portrait of thinking as a process in which the most disparate subjects are juxtaposed without their collapsing into one another. INDEX WORDS: Autobiography, Philosophy of Literature, Descartes, Bacon, Modernity HELENS: AUTOBIOGRAPHY AT THE CROSSROADS OF PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE by DAVID JEREMY HART B.A., Georgia State University, 1998 M.A., University of Georgia, 2000 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2007 © 2007 David Jeremy Hart All Rights Reserved HELENS: AUTOBIOGRAPHY AT THE CROSSROADS OF PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE by DAVID JEREMY HART Major Professor: O. Bradley Bassler Committee: Elizabeth Brient Victoria Davion Elizabeth Kraft Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2007 iv DEDICATION This work is dedicated to my wife, Monica Smith, who walks in beauty. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to my family for their unflagging support and to my committee members for a wonderful and genuine educational experience. And special thanks to Brad Bassler for his courage, strength, and belief. I have kept hidden in the instep arch Of an old cedar at the waterside A broken drinking goblet like the Grail Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it, So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't. (I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse.) Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.............................................................................................................v FORWARD......................................................................................................................................1 CHAPTER 1 PROLOGOS ................................................................................................................21 A Remembrance.......................................................................................................21 A Forgetting ............................................................................................................35 A Riddle ...................................................................................................................51 A Communiqué ........................................................................................................65 A Love Letter ...........................................................................................................79 2 KATALOGOS .............................................................................................................85 The Birth of Philosophy...........................................................................................85 The Birth of a Town.................................................................................................93 The Birth of Helen ...................................................................................................97 3 ANALOGOS..............................................................................................................167 “In the Days of Variety” .......................................................................................167 The Conjurer .........................................................................................................171 Three Burlesques...................................................................................................174 A Dark Saying ......................................................................................................177 “The Vaudeville Philosopher”..............................................................................186 vii The Body................................................................................................................188 Short Film..............................................................................................................192 Detecting the Man in the Macintosh .....................................................................218 4 EPILOGOS ................................................................................................................245 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................264 1 FORWARD For Stanley Cavell, Descartes is a sort of bogeyman. Along with Derrida, he represents one face of the Janus-head of skepticism, which, through the withdrawal of the subject from the everyday world, threatens to suffocate what Cavell calls the “ordinary voice” of autobiography. “Everyone recruited into our present academic and cultural wars seems to have an answer to the question of philosophy,” Cavell writes in the opening sentence of A Pitch of Philosophy; “some say that philosophy is literature, some say it is science, some say it is ideology, some say it doesn’t matter which of these, if any, it is. For me it matters . .”1 Clearly, Descartes matters for those who say that philosophy is science. Indeed, he is their patron saint, for as the prototypical rationalist, Descartes’s mathematicizing of philosophy is often taken to inaugurate the philosophical development leading to modern science. The playful deconstructions of Derrida, on the other hand, tend to push philosophy in the opposite direction toward literature. But as Cavell notes, “there is no uncontested place from which to adjudicate such an issue,” the issue of what philosophy is.2 For what are we to do: give scientific reasons for thinking philosophy a science, aesthetic ones for thinking philosophy a type of literature? The issue is aborted in the very identification of criteria according to which it is supposed to be judged. What we are left with, Cavell might say, are choices. And choices are not made in a vacuum but instead in the context of a life. The question of philosophy is one that is settled (or 1Cavell, Stanley. A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994. viii. 2 Cavell vii. 2 unsettled) not in respect to some criterion whose authority exists independently of the events of our lives, but by each of us in relation to those very events. Or rather: by those aspects of a life that matter. This qualification is decisive, for philosophy, regardless of whether it tends to align itself with Descartes or Derrida, has claimed to speak not just for the individual human but for humanity itself. Since there is no uncontested place from which to adjudicate such an issue, I take it on, in my opening chapter, autobiographically, following two guiding intuitions: first, that there is an internal connection between philosophy and autobiography, that each is a dimension of the other; second, that there are events of a life that turn its dedication toward philosophy. The second of these intuitions is expressed in the question: What is an education for philosophy? If what distinguishes the philosopher is not that he or she knows anything that others do not know, then the education in question is one grounding the conviction, in words of Emerson, that ‘the deeper the scholar dives into his privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he finds that this is the most acceptable, most public, and universally true.’ Put otherwise, it is an education that prepares the recognition that we live lives simultaneously of absolute separateness and endless commonness, of banality and sublimity.3 The arrogance of the philosopher, Cavell tells us, is that he or she presumes in some way to speak for others even while dwelling on the most private of joys and sorrows–to speak for others to the extent that he or she gets to the bottom of these secret sentiments. Certainly, such an intuition, with its boast of surprising affinities, is mysterious. Perhaps it is an intuition possessed only by Cavell. In response to a letter from a University of Georgia professor of philosophy, Cavell sent the following reply: In answer to your (collective) wonder whether Derrida ever responded to my limited discussions of him. To my knowledge he never responded in print. But you say you would appreciate any information. There is a little. Derrida’s and my paths crossed several times.