Epistemic Addiction: Reading "Sonny's Blues" with Levinas, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche

James Baldwin writes that "I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis."¹ Baldwin dealt with this crisis in his literary works through the strategic use of Christian theological themes and imagery to make compelling critiques of bourgeois cultural and Christian values. So "prolonged" was his "religious crisis" that Christian theological themes permeate Baldwin's immense literary corpus.² Baldwin thus both was influenced by Christianity and critiqued it in his works. Considering these two points, I think it appropriate to begin this essay with a biblical reference to the Christian narrative of the "fall" of humanity. I choose this biblical starting point not only because of Baldwin's Christian background and literary inclinations but also because I think that this starting point accurately depicts the moral problem that is at work in Baldwin's short story "Sonny's Blues." I shall call this moral problem "epistemic addiction."

I.

Regardless of whether one accepts the historical accuracy of the fall of Adam and Eve, or views it as a Platonic "noble lie," a moral principle emerges from the biblical narrative of Adam and Eve on which both biblical fundamentalists and biblical critics can agree: merely seeking knowledge of good and evil is problematic. Consider the circumstances of the biblical account of humanity's "fall": as Eve stood before the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, she noticed that the tree was "desired to make one wise."³ Fulfilling her desire to attain knowledge of good and evil, she consumed the fruit of the tree, disregarding an ethical directive to the contrary. But what makes the prohibition of God not to eat from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil an "ethical" prohibition? Why would God make knowledge of good and evil "off limits" to human beings? Does God want humans to refrain from knowledge and learning?

No. The quest for knowledge is not inherently problematic. Rather, Eve's problem was that she sought the "what" of knowledge without regard for the "how" of ethics. Eve was deceived into thinking that good and evil were merely something to be known, as opposed to something that one does. This is what makes the directive of God an "ethical" one: Good and evil cannot merely be known objectively; they are lived subjectively. And the failure to temper the quest for knowledge of good and evil with the realization that good and evil are practiced is what results in the "fall" of humanity. So as Eve ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, she did not recognize that in her quest to know evil, she was, in fact, doing evil. As she sought "knowledge," she did so to the exclusion of an ethical directive to the contrary: do not eat of the fruit of the tree. The biblical account of the fall of humanity thus illustrates the first sentence of Aristotle's Metaphysics: "All human beings by nature desire to know."⁴ Interestingly, Aristotle uses the term ορεγονται (oregontai), which translates as "desire to know" and implies a hand reaching out to grasp an object in the distance; this is precisely what Eve did: she "took" (in Hebrew, לָקַח, laquach, meaning "to seize," implying a grasping) the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and ate of it because it was "desired" to make her wise.

And it is this notion of grasping and seizure for the sake of knowledge that creates the moral problem at work in "Sonny's Blues": Because the narrator's epistemological impulse to "know" his brother Sonny is unaccompanied by an awareness of and sensitivity to his moral obligation to Sonny—in short, because the narrator is committed to an ethics of knowing and is not committed to an ethics of doing—the narrator, like Eve, "falls," for in his quest to "know" his brother, he attempts to assimilate him into a scheme of middle-class, bourgeois intelligibility. Indeed, the narrator takes action to help his brother, but only on the narrator's...