Lost Intimacy in American Thought: Recovering Personal Philosophy from Thoreau to Cavell

249 Pages·2009·0.76 MB·English

by  Edward F. Mooney

Lost Intimacy in American Thought
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Lost Intimacy in American
Thought
Recovering Personal Philosophy from
Thoreau to Cavell
Edward F. Mooney
The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc
80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com
Copyright © 2009 by Edward F. Mooney
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise, without the permission of the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 978-1-4411-8166-4 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-1-4411-6858-0 (paperback)
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed in the United States of America
a mountain shelter or a hut in the moor become seeds for words,
a way to become intimate with wind and cloud.
Listen recklessly.
—Basho, Knapsack Notebook, 9
[Without] the intimacy of touch, nothing is truly known.
No intimacy, no revelation.
—Henry Bugbee, The Inward Morning, 130
. . . ours is the long journey of the Saturday,
between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste, on the one hand
and the dream of liberation, or rebirth, on the other.
In the face of the torture of a child, of the love which is Friday,
even the greatest art and poetry are almost helpless.
The apprehensions and f gurations in the play of metaphysical imagining,
in the poem and the music, which tell of pain and hope,
of the f esh that is said to taste of ash
and of the spirit which is said to have the savour of f re, are always Sabbatarian.
They have risen out of an immensity of waiting which is that of man.
Without them, how could we be patient?
—George Steiner, Real Presences, 231
For
Steve, Gary,
Clark, Gordon,
Herb and Jack
CONTENTS
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Part I INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1 T HOREAU AND OTHERS:
Thinking from Imagination and the Heart 3
Part II HENRY BUGBEE, THOREAU, CAVELL
Chapter 2 A PHILOSOPHY IN WILDERNESS 19
Chapter 3 A LYRIC PHILOSOPHY OF PLACE 31
Chapter 4 D EATH AND THE SUBLIME:
Henry Bugbee’s In Demonstration of the Spirit 53
Chapter 5 B ECOMING WHAT WE PRAY:
Passion’s Gentler Resolutions 78
Chapter 6 T WO TESTIMONIES IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY:
Stanley Cavell, Henry Bugbee 93
Part III SIX PRAISING EXPLORATIONS
Chapter 7 S TANLEY CAVELL—ACKNOWLEDGMENT,
SUFFERING, AND PRAISE:
A Religious Continental Thinker 111
Chapter 8 B RUCE WILSHIRE:
The Breathtaking Intimacy of the Material World 129
Chapter 9 H ENRY JAMES—AN ETHICS OF INTIMATE
CONVERSATION:
Is the Unacknowledged Life Worth Living? 141
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viii Contents
Chapter 10 P RESERVATIVE CARE:
Saving Intimate Voice in the Humanities 162
Chapter 11 J . GLENN GRAY AND HANNAH ARENDT—SQUIRES
IN THIS VALE OF TEARS:
Poetry in a Time of War 175
Chapter 12 T HOREAU’S TRANSLATIONS:
John Brown, Apples, Lilies 194
CONCLUSION 2
Bibliography 25
Index 231
PREFACE
These essays on the loss of intimacy in American thought were not
written with a book-length argument in mind. Each was composed
from an immediate yet lasting impulse to celebrate the impact on my
reading and thinking life of a philosopher or writer, or of a fragment
of thoughts tendered. Recovering personal philosophy is recovering
the transf guring impacts of writing addressed intimately that may
well resonate not just with me, but with an indef nitely large circle of
hearers—call it an inf nite but intimate universal. Some aspect of the
words or sentences of these writers would catch me off-guard, seem to
resonate with my deepest interests in ways it was up to me to work out.
A number of crisscrossing themes and the return of certain passages
that seem to have become iconic for me hold these efforts together,
culminating in my lengthy excursion with Thoreau. Each can be read
independently.
One of my early efforts focuses on Henry Bugbee’s The Inward
Morning, a philosophical journal that explores somewhat autobiogra-
phically the writer’s earliest sense of what tied the world together—or
opened it up—for him. After two decades reading in and around this
book, by the mid-1990s it seemed time to acknowledge it, recount its
impact over the years—diff cult as that might turn out to be. And it
seemed time to make my ref ections known to its author, a man well
into retirement and of uncertain longevity. His journal was written
while on a George Santayana Fellowship in his last year as an assistant
professor at Harvard. To my ear, his entries registered a genius for
instilling an intimacy with what led him to think philosophically, and
how that thinking continued, in and out of books, in ever-surprising
directions. I was touched—and it turned out many others were, too—by
his candor and eloquence as he made his way through what seemed a
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