The Edge of Meaning (review)

Not many people manage to put together the meaning of life and the meaning of sentences. But White does, just as he manages, seemingly effortlessly, to be a professor of law, of English, and of classics at the University of Michigan. To locate his project on the broadest panorama possible, he writes in the space occupied also by Kant and Foucault, the space in which we construct for ourselves our moral values, our understanding of ourselves, and the purposes that make sense of our lives. I would add Aristotle to the list, but for White it is Plato all the way, with a focus on the Phaedrus. We get to Plato by reflecting on how to understand a single Greek sentence, taken "almost at random" from the Odyssey: a painstaking syllable-by-syllable study of how a language opens and closes ways of saying something. In an admiring but quizzical meditation on Huckleberry Finn, White asks, "How can you protect yourself against the force of the language you are learning, the culture you are entering, so that you may use it, and not it you?" Reply: "The only answer is a writing answer, and it lies above all in one's voice." Socrates himself would protest (indeed in the Phaedrus) that this is too academic a saying; most people need more voice, and some need less writing. Lest we become too dominated by words in any guise, White concludes with yet another chain of reflections, on how Vermeer invested his paint with meaning for himself (a self of which we know little in the form of reminiscences, but of which White gleans a lot from the canvases)—and with meaning for so many of us even now.