The Personal, the Practical, and the Poetic

Critical discussion authors, if they are not too occupied talking about themselves and their own books (existent or projected), might reasonably be expected to answer three questions or three clusters of questions: (1) What is the topic of the book, what is it about, what is it trying to do, what is its aim, or maybe what does it assert? (2) Does the book meet its aim, does it deliver the goods, is its message correct or insightful or maybe even just valid and sound, is it a good book, should you read it? and (3) What issues, implications and consequences, criticisms and hesitations, insights and originality might direct ongoing conversation and further thinking by the author, by the speaker, by all of us? In short, a critical discussion reasonably might be expected to provide (1) a description, (2) an evaluation, and (3) some further suggestions.

Now, in taking up Megan Craig's Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology, I will address all three of these issues, these three reasonable expectations. However, I will fail to provide full or direct responses in all three instances. This failure is a planned failure—and it is, I think, consistent with this book's message or, much better, its mood or, in Jamesian language, its temperament. Put differently, I am less concerned with identifying and analyzing the book's propositions and assertions, and I am much more concerned with identifying and evoking and considering its mood and feeling. And this evocation of mood and feeling, an opening and a responding to mood and feeling—to multiple, different, singular moods and feelings—is exactly what I take the book to be inviting and encouraging its readers to do.

Description

I begin with the following lines from Tony Hoagland's poem "Description." Craig does not cite or draw on either this poem or this author. Still, it helps convey brilliantly, I think, a mood that is directly relevant not only to her book but to any pragmatic or phenomenological or pragmatic phenomenological philosophical approach that understands itself as descriptive. Hoagland writes:

Out of sight in the woods, the creek tricklesIts ongoing sentence; from treble to baritoneThe trees rustle over the house; they are excitedto be entering the poemin late afternoon, when the clouds are creamy and massive,as if to illustrate contentment. . . .In all of this a place must bereserved for human suffering:The sick and unloved, the chemically confused;the ones who believe desperately in insight;the ones addicted to change.How our thoughts clawed and pummeled the walls.How we tried but could not find our way out.In the wake of our effort, how we restedHow description was the sign of our acceptance.¹

In her preface, tracing her own reading and rereadings of Levinas, Craig asks: "Why read Levinas now? Why read Levinas in our own time of war? We might broaden these questions and ask, why read at all? Shouldn't we be doing something, getting up from our chairs and taking action?"— perhaps an especially acute question for Levinas, "known as the preeminent philosopher of passivity in the twentieth century" (xii). She quickly answers these questions in this first way: "He writes about hope. It is not just any variety of hope, but the kind of hope available in the midst of war, in the most hopeless times. It is a hope found in other people and banal decencies, the hope inscribed in Levinas's description of ethics as these words: 'After you'" (xiv). For Craig, Levinas thus locates us not in a consuming darkness but in a shifting and ambiguous light, situated human hope, and dense plural lights. She writes: "[Levinas] brings us all the way down to the closest, most dense things—to the people we live among, their expressions and faces. We have to give up the idea of a single peak with the best view. But we gain a new landscape of smaller and larger...