Bergman on Dialogical Philosophy

Shmuel Hugo Bergman’s little-known but intensely readable primer, Dialogical Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Buber, presents a series of lectures given by Bergman in 1962. In his ‘Preface’, translator Arnold Gerstein – aptly, I sense – describes Bergman’s original language as ‘a semiformal but elegant conversational Hebrew that is compelling to students and philosophers alike’. The intimacy of Bergman’s lecturing style thus mirrors that of his subject: the dialogue. Nathan Rotenstreich, in his ‘Foreword’, maintains that the term ‘dialogical philosophy’ is ‘undoubtedly taken from Martin Buber’; both Rotenstreich and Gerstein, however, note that for Bergman it is Kierkegaard who emerges as ‘the central link in the history of the philosophy of the dialogue’ (in Gerstein’s words).

Later sections of Bergman’s study address other thinkers of central importance to Weimar era philosophy: Eugen Rosenstock, Franz Rosenzweig. Yet the first and by far the longest part of the book focusses on Kierkegaard’s thought. In some introductory statements prefacing this part, Bergman suggests the affinity of dialogical thinking to existentialist thinking: ‘What distinguishes any genuine dialogue is the fact that the participants are individuals, each bearing their own specific and generic traits. They are not abstractions but men of flesh and blood.’ On the following page Bergman adds a caveat: ‘The philosophy of dialogue which we will discuss in these lectures is not the same as “existentialism,” since not every existential philosophy stresses the dialogical factor; however, the two schools are identical with respect to the position of the individual within the philosophical system.’ As Bergman puts it later, ‘With this stress on the importance of the individual self, the single man in all his existential individuality, Kierkegaard lays the foundation for what has subsequently been called dialogical philosophy.’ But, as Rotenstreich rightly observes, Bergman’s treatment of dialogical philosophers’ relationship to existentialism is ultimately of lesser importance than the emphasis his book places on ‘the centrality of man’s individuality and the relationships and encounters between individuals and with God’. Bergman notes, for instance, that Kierkegaard’s dislike for German Romanticism’s ‘tempestuousness and exaggerated subjectivism that isolated man’, meant that he ‘strenuously sought the way to religion through the use of subjective irony’.

Crucially, in connection with Weimar political philosophy’s decisionism, Bergman shows how Kierkegaard’s thinking of the decision forms an aspect of his thinking of man’s emergent relationship with God, repeatedly referring to ‘the autonomous activity and self possession [sic] which are necessary in order to probe the true meaning of religion’. Because, as Bergman writes, for Kierkegaard ‘Real action is in the internal decision of man’, therefore for him ‘Man’s relation to God is not direct or objective; it is an inner relation, a relation of risk’. For Kierkegaard, as Bergman notes, within the moral and religious dimension of life ‘direct communication is impossible’. ‘In order to see God, one must break the direct-passive relationship. Man’s inner nature then bursts forth in an independent act, and he confronts the reality of God.’ 

Bergman emphasizes that the I-Thou relation, the relationship of man to man, is the concern of post-Kierkegaardian dialogical philosophy:

‘Actually, in spite of the tremendous importance of dialogue for Kierkegaard, the major dialogue for him is between man and God. The dialogue between man and man has no function in religious life because religious man leads a solitary life and cannot disclose to others the task that is imposed on him.’

Bergman’s attention to the importance of religious ‘silence’ or ‘speechlessness’ reappears within the context of his discussion of the modality of ‘non-Socratic learning’ within which, for Kierkegaard (as Bergman puts it), ‘a genuine mutual relationship between God and man is created’: learning as divine revelation.

‘The relationship between man and man is invariably Socratic – that is, it will always be such that one man, when he teaches another, even when he teaches him about revelation and faith, can only be an agent or a midwife. He cannot take the place of direct revelation, which comes through God as teacher.’

Commenting on Kierkegaard’s Repetition, Bergman stresses how ‘the essence of revelation’ involves a recreation of man by God, and that ‘God alone can recreate man’. ‘The learner is given something that was not within him and for which he was unprepared, and so the moment in which he receives the doctrine or revelation is of crucial importance.’ It is here that Bergman evokes the sort of divine revocation of speechlessness ‘which is expressed among Jews in the prayer: “Oh Lord, open thou my lips and my mouth may declare thy praise”’. We remember how Bergman wrote of how in relation to God, man’s ‘inner nature […] bursts forth in an independent act’: ‘Man enters this personal dialogue with God only through God’s action.’ It is as if the spiritual release afforded by the human decision is matched by – though it does not have the power to solicit – a divine revocation of our silence.

For instance when it juxtaposes Ferdinand Ebner’s view that (in Bergman’s words) ‘Man’s spirit is in its essence a receiving spirit dwelling in a relationship to a giving spirit’, with Wilhelm von Humboldt’s argument that (as Bergman puts it) ‘logos finds its way to our physical life and awakens it to the life of the spirit’, Bergman’s book foregrounds the position that ‘language is the revelation of God to man’. Noting that ‘this viewpoint predominates in the thought of Rosenstock, a friend of Rosenzweig’, Bergman explores the philosophy of language presented by Rosenstock in his Angewandte Seelenkunde [Applied Psychology], a text published in 1924 (but largely written some years before).

Bergman focusses on the concept of ‘true speech’ – revelational speech – which Rosenstock developed as a result of his view that, as Bergman phrases it, ‘The word, “logos,” is a revelation of divine presence’:

‘In speech [for Rosenstock] there are two levels, reflecting the distinction between true and ordinary speech. The two levels are the compulsion (or necessity) of speaking, and the ability to speak. True speech is not voluntary or arbitrary; it is not a matter of will but a necessity whose force causes speech to spring forth. True speech springs forth almost against the will of man, and thus all true speech is revelation.’

With this idea that ‘The word is given to man or forces itself upon him’, Bergman clearly echoes his earlier commentary on Kierkegaard – where he wrote of how ‘Man’s inner nature then bursts forth in an independent act’. It is as if Bergman’s exegesis of the philosophers’ views of the experience of revelation has become as compulsive and involuntary as the experience itself. Yet though for Rosenstock ‘true speech’ entails that (as Bergman puts it) ‘the speaker is entirely subject to his own speech’, this does not mean that for Bergman such involuntary revelational speech divorces the speaking/spoken subject from his own existential individuality. The example of revelational speech which Bergman provides – the Jewish hermeneutic practice of ‘the law of intra-linear parallelisms in the Book of Psalms’ – is itself, Bergman observes, ‘grounded in distress and necessity’.

‘In prayer Israel encircles the prayer leader, who passes in front of the Ark, while others release him by repeating the prayer which he has recited with such total self-absorption and compulsion that he does not hear it. The congregation repeats his prayer, paralleling it by half-lines in such a way that he can and must hear what he has prayed, and in this way they free him from his distress. This is true speech.’  

At the end of his book Bergman returns to this logic of call and response – of sacred language or prayer and hermeneutics – which characterizes revelational speech, noting how Buber (in his ‘The History of the Dialogical Principle’) situated the event of call and response at the core of his thinking influenced by Hasidism:

‘[…] the question of the possibility and reality of a dialogical relationship between man and God, thus of a free partnership of man in a conversation between heaven and earth whose speech in address and answer is the happening itself, the happening from above and the happening from below, had already accosted me in my youth. In particular since the Hasidic tradition has grown for me into the supporting ground of my own thinking, hence since about 1905, that had become an innermost question for me.’

The de-individualizing tendency within the dialogical philosophy of language treated by Bergman emerges clearly however, when he discusses Rosenstock’s idea of ‘liturgical grammar’. Bergman glosses Rosenstock’s notion of calling as recreation: ‘Rosenstock says that liturgical grammar would change Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” to read, “God, you have called me, therefore I am.”’ Bergman underlines how ‘The calling comes first and establishes the “I.”’ He also stresses the scriptural precedence for the idea that ‘only from the “Thou” can the “I” be created’. ‘The classic example is I Samuel, 3:5, where young Samuel turns to Eli and says: “Here am I for thou called me.”’ Within Bergman’s study of dialogical philosophy therefore, there seems to be a tension between his emphasis on the involuntary (and even de-individualizing) aspect of religious experience, and his emphasis on the contrasting ‘autonomous activity and self possession [sic] which are necessary in order to probe the true meaning of religion’ – on an individual’s decisive, committed, risk-taking experience. This tension seems to me to be resolved, though, by Bergman’s ongoing attention to the concept of redemption as recreation: that is, to a redemption of man by God which precisely enables man’s exercise of personal agency.

Bergman’s reading of Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption suggests that ‘the redemption of the world must be perceived as a vital process, as the animation of the world’. This sort of redemption is evoked again within Bergman’s account of Buber’s notion of the state of ‘realization’, which Bergman describes as ‘the perception of reality in its immediacy, when one leaps into it, as it were, and identifies with it’. Towards the end of his book, Bergman relays the illustration of realization offered by Buber in one essay in his 1913 Daniel, Dialogues on Realization – a precursor of Buber’s I and Thou of 1923:

‘Buber illustrates this with the example of a Swiss pine […]. If […] I open myself to the tree with all my energy directed toward it, if I assimilate it, as it were, commit myself to it, then I am transformed and I become the tree itself. […] I experience a particular tree. I identify myself with it, without surrendering my unique position. I succeed, in other words, in conjoining the two, myself and the tree. I have access thereby to the mystery of reality. […] Entering the mystery of reality is […] a higher state of activity which I initiate and through which I open myself and transform my energy into a magical strength that fascinates and gratifies, while quieting the chaos around me. […] This is the great miracle of realization which this essay attempts to describe. Something of the philosophy of the dialogue emerges here, because the true dialogue also has the same openness and commitment along with the self-preservation of the person speaking.’       

Dickinson 724

Here is poem number 724 from the Reading Edition of The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R. W. Franklin.

Each Life converges to some Centre –

Expressed – or still –

Exists in every Human Nature

A Goal –

Embodied scarcely to itself – it may be –

Too fair

For Credibility’s presumption

To mar –

Adored with caution – as a Brittle Heaven –

To reach

Were hopeless, as the Rainbow’s Raiment

To touch –

Yet persevered toward – surer – for the Distance –

How high –

Unto the Saints’ slow diligence –

The Sky –

Ungained – it may be – by a Life’s low Venture –

But then –

Eternity enable the endeavouring

Again.

In The Spiritual Condition of the Age, Karl Jaspers raised the question of free will: ‘the basic problem of our time is whether an independent human being in his self-comprehended destiny is still possible’. In Dickinson’s poem, the freedom to know and claim a destiny is figured as a singular human’s progress towards her ‘Goal’: that is, as a project of perseverance towards an apprehension of her own transcendent nature. Yet this project, she understands, is a ‘low Venture’; our life on this earth is everything which is distant from the transcendental freedom suggested by the ‘Brittle Heaven’ and the ‘Rainbow’s Raiment’. In My Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe discusses this poem in the context of the Puritan understanding, which Dickinson shared with her spirit-mentor Emily Brontë, that ‘Humanity must obey mechanical and supernatural necessity’. Their imaginations perpetuate ‘LEAR’s world of monstrous necessity where union with Nature means living outside comfort with the forces of destruction’. The bitter, low, ‘Life’ or nature through which we move towards understanding of our transcendent human nature, is identified with (obedience to) what Howe calls ‘the dominant social system’, or ‘a phantom and desolate world where life is a void labour, and Death, Desire’s dream’: determinism, as laid down by religious fundamentalism and work ethic capitalism alike.

Dickinson’s poem encodes the dialectic of free will and determinism that still resonates in American culture today, in the superb film based on Philip K. Dick’s ‘Adjustment Team’, The Adjustment Bureau (in which the death of the romancing protagonists’ high-flying careers turns out to be desire’s dream, vanquishing the Bureau's career planning), and which appeared in Weimar times in Jaspers’ opposition of human freedom to Weberian modern ‘worldly order’, in The Spiritual Condition of the Age.

‘The interlinking of every aspect of human life into stable organisations is rapidly increasing. The transformation of human beings into functions of a titanic apparatus compels a general levelling-down; the apparatus has no use for human beings of high grade or for exceptional individuals, but requires only average specimens endowed with particular gifts. Nothing but the relative endures. The coercion of the life-order enforces an entry into the various associations, and interferes with freedom of individual activity in every possible way. […] The movement is towards the bringing to pass of a stable and definitive condition. But this ideal of a worldly order is intolerable to those who know their being to be established upon a claim to freedom.’

A wildly exceptional individual who propounded the democratic insight that there ‘Exists in every Human Nature/ A Goal’, Dickinson – like Jaspers – experienced the rift between a claim to apprehend transcendental freedom and the structuration of deterministic order, the purposeless everyday battle of life which makes the idea of heaven itself appear merely ‘Brittle’. No doubt this lived antinomy contributed to her agoraphobia. ‘Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson, educated, reclusive, visionary women, rebels from a sin-obsessed Fundamentalist religion, felt God and Nature separating from each other’ (Howe). Perhaps precisely because it narrates her own existential condition, Dickinson’s poem is not content simply to diagnose the separation, and finally refuses to tolerate its weighting on the side of necessity – paradoxically, precisely when her writing admits that the ‘Sky’ is ‘Ungained’. In the final stanza, the grinding, everyday ‘low Venture’ through which we move towards an understanding of transcendence is flipped over, and its precedence stripped away, so that now the transcendental emerges as the enabling space within which the struggle of nature is held to be enacted. After death we can renew the Venture with faith, because ‘Eternity enable the endeavouring/ Again.’ Eternity, not the winners of the struggle, has been in control all along.

      

Next post: in the semantics hut with P. K. Dick

Reading with Vision, part 2

Here's the second part of my long essay on Vernon Watkins from 2007.

Downcast Lids

Henry Leroy Finch’s beautiful and clear-sighted study, Simone Weil and the Intellect of Grace, underlines the convergence of Weil’s thought with the visionary hermeneutics which I am attempting to develop from Watkins’s poetry here. In Waiting on God Weil suggested that our attention – visionary understanding – could be radically passive, radically female: ‘our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it’. Likewise, Weil’s own ‘messages’, Finch writes, ‘are messages of grace, received by those who wait and not by those who grasp’. Finch notes how post-Marxist Weil – like Watkins in ‘Rebirth’ – valued sacred human understanding over progressivist will and effort:

Simone Weil is the opposite of a secularist, because for her a true human culture comes from beyond the merely human. Science, art, poetry, music, philosophy, to the extent that they come unannounced to human attention waiting in patience, she calls forms of the implicit love of God; they are sacred deliverances. This is not romanticism or sentiment because it is not egotism. True making, like true doing, is not ours.

The understanding of knowledges, such as Watkins’s lyric visionary knowledges, as ‘sacred deliverances’, opens up – Finch sees – an emphasis on the common ‘vulnerability and dependence of each of us on others, which is our initial situation in the world’. Finch takes from Weil a Blakean critique of ‘masculine authority’, or of ‘the discipline of the powerful God of authority’; the sort of hierarchical, utilitarian, jobsworth discipline which, often in pseudo-feminist garb, controls today’s academic study of literature. ‘Simone Weil’s God of grace is a God divorced from power and necessity, which are after all nothing to admire and worship.’ The supernatural influence of the divine in human affairs, for Weil, is ‘decisive but subtle’ and ‘entirely beyond human control’. ‘The human principle, like Plato’s Good, has an inexorability about it too, but it is a providential one beyond natural causality. Higher dimensions show themselves only at scarcely recognizable points. This is how love makes itself felt.’

Ah dumb Piétà, fixed beneath closed eyelids,

Strong vision pledged to seek the unchanging light

Of angels, true above a changing world! [166]

Watkins’s ‘The Age-Changers’ relates a scarcely recognizable, fragmentary descent of grace, for instance through cultural artefacts, to the necessary exhaustion of youthful enquiry’s bid for visionary perception. ‘Light through downcast lids/ Is rising, where one drop of light decides.’ Watkins senses that an awareness of the sacred, light, can be launched by the adoration undertaken by the more elderly, more blind. ‘Mute wonder through the sweet, blind eyes looks out,/ Starts the sun’s memories life forgot.’ [18] In ‘The Song of the Good Samaritan’, Watkins lays out ‘a choice/ Between those visions acclaimed by pride overthrown,/ And the downcast, intimate eyes, the source of the voice.’ [148] The idea is that only baffled eyes, at sea in love, can see through lower dimensions: ‘But that disguise,/ Look up now, softly: break it with your eyes.’ [10] Another early poem notes, ‘Youth is itself infirm/ Until those sightless eyes/ Rarify youth and breath’. [21] Then the memories of illumination can begin to emerge, themselves reminiscent of the ‘transfiguring after-clarity’ of David Jones’s The Anathemata. ‘Doom’s serial writing sprang upon the wall/ Blind with a rush of light.’ [6]

Spiritual Involution

The flash we saw in the distance now becomes for us a shell,

Spun from the loom of waters to its own

Stillness, and inward music: mark it, where it fell. [350]

The springing out of ‘higher dimensions’ is twinned, in Watkins as in Blake, with a hermeneutic pursuit of grace inwards. In Jerusalem Blake recommended ‘O search & see: turn your eyes inward: open O thou World/ Of Love & Harmony in Man: expand thy ever lovely Gates.’ Where Blake projected the gates on to the city streets – ‘I write in South Molton Street, what I both see and hear/ In regions of Humanity, in Londons opening streets’ – Watkins identified them in coastal shells. Internal and external cities, still. ‘The Interval’:

It is that dark source which makes all things new

Scoops out, with changing lights, those fragile shells

Whose voice would perish, did I not pursue

Their inmost labyrinth still, to give the god his due. [277]

The continuation of the sacred voice is aided by the poet’s and the reader’s linguistic process of spiritual involution, a process which, Watkins emphasizes in ‘Swedenborg’s Skull’, leaves intact the ‘vessel of uninterrupted calm’ – just as the visionary’s grave-robbers ‘could not shake or destroy that interior psalm/ Intended for God alone, for his sole Creator.’ Hermeneutic involution becomes a developing, a complexification of the object’s calm.

So I see it today, the inscrutable mask of conception

Arrested in death. Hard, slender and grey, it transcends

The enquiring senses, even as a shell toiling inward,

Caught up from the waters of change by a traveller who bends

His piercing scrutiny, yields but a surface deception,

Still guarding the peace it defends. [247] 

When ‘the spiral dark’ is to be ‘kept, unseen’, ‘one is mute,/ Fearing far more the heresies of speech/ Than watchful waiting.’ [249, 252]

I have discerned a secret

Hid from the arc of day,

Locked in the heart of silence,

Stronger than death, and pure. [354]

The practice of hermeneutic involution distances the muted from politico-academic rhetoric.

Stop, then, and quail beneath their tyrannous eloquence,

All you, save one whose tongue is tense,

Transfigured by God with a message that has no words. [127]

Deeper than Language

‘The London writer is incapable of expressing his meaning, or escaping from it.’ Watkins’s poetic world too is dotted with those transfigured by their supernatural messages in no words. In ‘The Sinner’, ‘she had found Him, sleepless, redeeming time there,/ O deeper than language, in a circle where all was hushed’ [141]. Erinna similarly, in ‘Erinna and the Waters’, ‘sighed to recapture the music no sea could sing’ [249]. In Watkins the visionary’s expression relates to grace and fluidity, circularity: reciprocity. It relates to the senses, just as in Sinclair’s ‘A Few Hundred Yards from the Dwelling of Mr Prynne’, ‘I dip my left hand/ into Cambridge river’:

Now, if I speak, my words can belong to no book

For my fingers mingle the language of water and dove,

Ending, here at the source, the journey they took. [148]

 

Watkins’s sensual visionary words, which are no words because they ‘can belong to no book’, yet which follow a pilgrim’s ‘journey’ towards language, recall the new philosophy of language produced on the brink of modernism in pre-1914 central Europe. Bourgeois positivist rationalism was undercut then and there by a potent combination of what Paul Mendes-Flohr – in his editor’s introduction to the English translation of Martin Buber’s 1909 anthology of mystical writing, Ecstatic Confessions – calls ‘epistemological skepticism’ and ‘spiritual quest’. The mysticism of Expressionist poetry such as Trakl’s was matched by the mysticism of Fritz Mauthner’s pioneering critique of language. (Like so much of pre-Holocaust central European culture, Mauthner is perhaps now known, if at all, only through the canonical protocols of Benjamin reception: he is mentioned twice in Scholem’s Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. Though Mauthner could be known to Wittgensteinians too). Happily, Mendes-Flohr cites some lines from Gustav Landauer’s précis, in his 1903 Skepsis und Mystik, of Mauthner’s thinking – Landauer had edited Mauthner’s three-volume Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache [Contribution to a Critique of Language (1901-02)]. ‘Language, the intellect, cannot serve to bring the world closer to us, to transform the world in us. As a speechless part of nature, however, man transforms himself into everything, because he is contiguous with everything [“my fingers mingle the language of water and dove”]. Here begins mysticism.’

We can see how such ideas of the insufficiency of our language (which – with Watkins’s poetics – argue both that we are insufficient for language, and that language is insufficient for us), and of language’s supersession by vision inflect Buber’s introduction to Ecstatic Confessions, which holds that language ‘will never enter the realm of ecstasy, which is the realm of unity’.

The voice returned to itself round the sevenfold world

And perched on mystery. [233]

The effort has destroyed a part of the false sense of fullness within us. The divine emptiness, fuller than fullness, has come to inhabit us. [Weil]

In ‘The Death Bell’, Watkins found in Laocoön a personification of the supernatural expressive capacity of those of us who have been exhausted into uncomplaining silence by the insufficiency of our language. This capacity is one to project visionary ecstasy, ‘sublime unrest’ – as a human potentiality – if not to reach its realm through language.

He who, his strength being spent,

Still remained reticent,

Darts his sublime unrest

Into the marvelling breast

Because he did not speak.

Even thus far went the Greek. [212]

Watkins’s lyrics ask us to respect their own ‘reticent forces of rhyme’ [335].

Verse is a part of silence. I have known

Always that declamation is impure. [161]

Light Must Learn a Dying Trade

‘Fisherman’ finds in nature the sublime unrest of visionary fragments:

There are silver fish that flash before day, in the fragile moment of dawn.

I have seen them shiver before my eyes, then vanish before light shone.

These are redemptive fragments of spiritual insight, which interpretation can only gain by grace: ‘O little weights of the mind,/ O little floats to carry me up in a moment none can foretell’. As in ‘Fingernail Sunrise’, spirit-floats are liable to return to the dark; to the involution from which they emerged:

The flash we saw in the distance now becomes for us a shell,

Spun from the loom of waters to its own

Stillness, and inward music: mark it, where it fell. [350]

  

‘The Salmon’ hence traces visionary knowledge as ‘lost and living’. ‘A moment taken out of time, a flash along a weir,/ The light all men are chasing is lost and living here.’ [427] This poem holds a parable, which suggests that because light is in unpredictable motion, so must interpretation be similarly fugitive. As Sinclair puts it in ‘Walking up Walls’, ‘ATAQUE GRAVE. AS A MUGGER YOU ARE NEVER SAFE. It doesn’t matter who you are, who you think you are, the trick is: never, ever, stay still.’

And waiting for the salmon-flash, to steal immortal life,

An old man crouched beside the pool with net and sharpened knife

Till all his life had ebbed away. He slept and woke in tears,

Knowing he’d missed the little splash that might renew the years. [428]

The argument is that you can be still, but not when static, with sharpened knife. A reader’s harmless stillness enabling the reception of vision, that matches the reticence or silence from which the poet projects sublime unrest, is the grace surrounding a hermeneutic process – what ‘The Turning of the Stars’ calls ‘the love that guards this book’ [161]. In ‘Beckton Alp’ Sinclair wrote of a ‘breathing space’; of how ‘the point of a good view is that it should capture, and give relief from, the journey that led up to it. There are no good views in isolation. No empty frames. Unwalked, uncycled. Unearned. View is always an accident, a breathing space.’ Watkins’s ‘The Debt’ touches on this notion of rewarded process, or relieved struggle; here Watkins proposes a spiritual economy of exhaustion ‘where sacrifices race/ And leave a fuller mind.’

Vision bequeaths a sum

Increased by spending it.

Poor if I first become,

My gain is infinite.

But when did I divine

That what was fugitive,

Like water in a mine,

Alone could make it live? [413]

As ‘Logos’ has it, ‘light must learn a dying trade’ [427].

More next week.