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Henry James and Modern Moral Life
Robert Pippin
Response to Critics
APA Pacific March 2001
Since a claim about indeterminacy in the imputation of intentions and about unresolveability in disputes about moral meaning are central to what I try to say about Henry James, perhaps I should start with a clear counter-example to such phenomena, a counter to what James himself in The Golden Bowl described as this “milky fog” and “golden mist” in attempts at mutual evaluation and assessment. Namely, that, contrary to these suspicions, I have unambiguously and objectively incurred a great debt and so owe a great deal gratitude to the other panelists today for the thoughtfulness and generosity of their comments.
Richard Eldridge raises a sweeping and very difficult “puzzle,” one which, he suggests, naturally emerges from what I say about the moral choices and difficulties that various Jamesean characters face, and one that is implicit in the modernity theory that I attribute to German Idealists like Hegel, and that I try to defend. The puzzle arises because of what is so insisted on in the post-Hegelian tradition and because of what I claim is implied in James’ International Theme: the temporal dimension, or historicity of human values. If our practices of blaming, punishing, shaming, honoring, approving and rewarding are radically different now then they have been, and if they could have been radically different than they are, and if they could be radically different again, what claims, especially what claims of “unavoidability” and practical necessity, can they be said to have on us? When people are living through some disorienting shift in what they feel allowed or obliged to do, a new sense of what they cannot remain indifferent to, and so forth, what is it like for them? What sort of moral community is it that can take up and live out somehow such an acknowledgement? What especially do we say when we still want to identify a clear violator of such norms? That he is now not one of us, or of our time? That he has made a mistake? That he was improperly socialized and habituated? And, in more thematic terms, since I do not treat James as a skeptic, but as someone who appreciates that some new way of thinking about these issues may now be called for, haven’t I thereby inferred some sort of non-historical theory of “the” moral life from James’s treatments, some “sense of practical reason as making a self-imposed standing demand”?
There are of course moderate versions of such temporality claims that, in their moderation, can avoid such puzzles. We might say that we occasionally have to rethink values like the moral dignity of each individual, or equal opportunity, or even politeness, but this just as a matter of judgment, a matter of the application of “the same value” in “changing circumstances,” requiring some espirit de finesse for which no rules can be given. This is all of course true, but at some point whatever agreement and continuity there is has become so abstract, and the differences in ways of life so profound, that this moderate concession to change in ethical life becomes pointless. (I think James believed that such a point was reached in his era, the era “of the new, remorseless monopolies that operate as no madness of ancient personal power thrilling us on the historical page ever operated” (AS, 104))
One might also object to the premise in such a question, and deny that any serious practical implications follow at all from acknowledging the contingency of ethical life or Sittlichkeit, even given fairly extensive and deep historical change. Why should it matter that such practices and norms are contingent? We are contingent and if things like respecting another, all others, everywhere, as an equally entitled subject, or being a person who charts the course of his or her own life and is as free as possible from subjection to the will of others, along with opera, and a commodious existence and intimate friendships, have all come to matter to us, then they have come to matter for whatever reasons they have come to matter, and they do matter.
Something like this response seems to me basically correct and relevant to the point of view implicit in James’s various reflections, on America especially, but the issue is obviously complex. For one thing, when and in what context and in answer to what question one invokes some claim like “this is simply who we’ve come to be,” or “we couldn’t imagine being anyone else,” and so forth, is quite important. These statements are, if you like, “sideways on” views of social actors, and there is not only something question begging and inappropriate in someone offering such a reason as a justification, in such a practical context it can often sound, almost has to sound self-serving and evasive. (It sounds like the manifest self-deception of Woody Allen’s famous fatalism “excuse”: “the heart has its own reasons.” ) The fact that our ethical dispositions are the products of a socialization and habituation that take quite a long time, in a way not up to us, and embody norms that are historical through and through, does not mean that we are in no sense reflectively responsible for them. They are ours, rather than things that happen to us, only by virtue of our being able to stand behind them in some way, and historical fatalism like this would be, I think, the wrong way. (The difficult question then is obviously how they can be said to be ours, how we can stand behind them as norms (which we can fail to live up to), all if, let us say, the Kantian understanding of such subjectivity and reflective responsibility is a philosophical fantasy.)
Such a response, in other words, an invoking of a kind of historical necessity and limitation, would be the wrong sort of answer to Eldidge’s “unavoidability” or practical necessity question. That James and we have come to take the category of agency or personhood or subjectivity to be central to any worthwhile life, even while we also acknowledge that such agency is multiply realizable (we are also “value pluralists” of a sort) is, while a historical fact of some sort, misunderstood if the role in plays in our practical lives is limited to that status. What is then playing the, on the one hand, historically contingent role thatwarrants our saying, on the other hand, that Milly Theale’s generosity and forgiveness were heroic, that Strether was right to think the adultery and all the lies to him were, in the end, morally insignificant, that Maggie has gained a husband but lost her life, and so forth?
But to get to that answer, we need to make the situation look even a bit worse. When, in what I would vote as James’s greatest scene, greatest aesthetic triumph, Strether in The Ambassadors stumbles across Mme. De Vionnett and Chad alone on a boat in the country and realizes that they had in fact been having an affair, that their relation was not “innocent” after all and that he had been lied to, it is quite important to realize that it is not as if he thereby discovers that some alternative Old European Ethic had been true after all, that it is a natural part of human flourishing for young boys to take up with married older women in order to become experienced. For one thing, Strether has begun to realize that Chad is not after all simply “better.” He is better and also worse, since he seems to feel no great pain at finally leaving Jeanne, and seems never to have really loved her as she obviously, genuinely, loved him. There is no new place to turn to when he realizes that his old verities from Woollett AND the new aesthetic sense of things that he had been trying to acquire are useless to help him understand and know how to react, and it is this that is, above all, unavoidable, practically necessary. I mean that Strether’s accepting this indeterminacy without becoming paralyzed by it is what is necessary in order to live or lead a life, to find a way to refuse acquiescence as an object for some other subject. He accepts fairly readily and acknowledges this complete unsettledness “now” in trying to come to an evaluation of what Chad’s dalliance finally “means.” Strether does not become indignant, angry at himself or cynical. What he does become, especially as evinced in his later interviews with Maria and Jeanne (indeed it is only in those interviews that he begins to understand what he thinks), is what I am rather crudely trying to characterize in more conventional normative terms. Of course, it raises the questions about resolution and ambiguity that Posnock raises, and the questions about the uniqueness of this situation, post death-of-God, thoroughly disenchanted, modern, that Rorty has raised. And it is not enough as an answer to Eldridge’s question just to point to Strether and say, “that!” But I hope to have said enough to indicate that this unsettledness, this realization that there is now, in this sort of world, nothing that Chad’s actions simply mean, is all not something that simply unavoidably happens to Strether. It could not happen at all were he not to take it up and begin to live it out. The anxiety about subjectivity that is at the heart of so many Jamesean novels and stories (and the lies and deceits and evasions that prevent and distort such agency) is not about agency or personhood as a metaphysical kind. (There weren’t “agents” until it came to matter to people to treat each other as agents. But the practical necessity of such a form of mutuality is not historical fate but is tied to what experience “for” the experiencer teaches us about the implications of living with or without such an acknowledgement. It is the kind of experience treated so well by novelists like James and Proust; it is a record of what we’ve learned. This kind of freedom is then a possible achievement, a kind of life, that one can keep faith with and sustain (or not), an achievement that requires some sort of minimum mutuality, social practices that sustain it. This is ultimately an old nineteenth century idea (its best idea)– that the crucial condition in the achievement of freedom is the freedom of others – but it is given an intimacy and richness in James (mostly in tales of failed subjectivity) that I know of nowhere else.
I mentioned earlier a certain anxiety about subjectivity in much of James’s fiction, or uncertainty about the possibility of subjectivity in a social world constituted by the forms of dependency and anonymity characteristic of mass, capitalist consumer societies. This had been a European anxiety since Rouseau’s Second Discourse, but ideas about a certain sort of resistance to such “absorption,” let us say, began to take much more various, increasingly extreme, even desperate forms towards the end of the nineteenth century, most prominently in modernist painting and music and poetry, but also in criticism like Baudelaire’s “Salon of 1846,” in avant-garde philosophy like Nietzsche’s, and much more subtly but no less importantly in James’s invention of the art novel and its proper subject. In the left Hegelian tradition and eventually the Frankfurt school, this all amounted to the problem of “critique” and the abstract covering term for such a problem remained Hegelian: the problem of negativity, ways of possibly not-being and so resisting, standing somehow apart from those "remorseless monopolies” mentioned earlier. Anyone interested in something like this owes a great debt to Posnock and his very fine book about William and Henry James, The Trial of Curiosity. No one has brought out better or helped us understand better James’s remarkable hostility to the bourgeois world of work, repression, and alienating conformism than Posnock, and so done more to rescue James from the ridiculous and even stupid museum categories to which he has so often been assigned (and, depressingly, so often still is): aesthete, arch conservative, anti-modern, mere stylist, hysterically afraid of sensuality, psychologically dense because unaware of the material and pre-conscious formations of consciousness, and so forth.
Posnock raises this issue here by asking about the implications of what we agree is James’s “deployment of an immanent logic of cultural critique,” and so James’s portrayal of some sort of “practice of non-identity thinking and being.” This involves, we agree, some rejection of his brother’s “proprietary sense of individualism” (or some demonstration in the novels of the “self-undermining” or “self-negating” experience of such presumed individual autonomy (paradigmatically in the case of Isabel Archer)). I would add that James’s picture of a thoroughly social self also excludes the possibility of the conventional, modern notion of negation or critique as some critical disengagement from life, as if practices could be assessed by stepping outside of them and appealing to a criterion accessible to pure practical reason, and as if what emerges as acceptable could be re-engaged as by an act of decision and will. As I noted before, however these social practices are to become ours, expressions of our subjectivity, aspects of our life, it cannot be by means of such a philosophical fantasy. So for me, this Posnock-Adorno question about negativity or non-being also marks out a possible place of agency, subjectivity, or in a broader sense freedom, and therein, I think, lies the beginning of a partial answer to his questions about the introduction of moral issues (freedom is the locus of the expression and violation of moral claims in James and to some degree is where ambiguity ends) and so to his questions about resolution and ambiguity.
But I should back up a bit and introduce the terms within which Posnock presents his basic unease. One element of the unease is a “move” in my argument from what Posnock calls “the dynamics of intersubjectivity and of a process of meaning making” to “a moral imperative, a fixed measurement by which he judges characters.” Secondly, Posnock responds with a tu quoque to a long footnote in which I try to distinguish my position from his, and later from other positions as well, like Cameron’s and Spears’s, which seemed to me to stress the Adorno-like oppositional and negative attributes of high modernist and so Jamesean art. Posnock then argues that my stress on inevitable “ambiguity” and irresolution is even more Trillingean than his own stress on “nonidentity thinking” in James’ fiction and prose. (I note, though it can only be a debater’s point at this juncture, that I cannot be guilty of ending up with both a “fixed measurement moral imperative” and a Densher-like, irresolute absorption with ambiguity. More of that in a minute.) Posnock rightly cautions against making a kind of ritual out of ambiguity-mongering, and cites the perfect example of such a temptation, Merton Densher, and so cautions against a “rapt absorption” with the “addictions of ambiguity,” “endlessly parsing moral nuance” and so ending up in an “asphyxiating mental life.” In contrast to all this, Posnock urges that we read James as a “pragmatist” in his response to modernity, although there is only time for him to allude here to what that means. (It is developed in much greater and very insightful detail in his book.)
Well, we must be arguing at cross purposes in some way, since I want to enlist Densher on my side too, and I open my book by presenting Densher as a figure of great Jamesean irony, someone who makes use of his brilliant mind and exquisitely refined sensibility, as ways of remaining irresolute, evasive, self-deceived, what James himself would have been had he been a very clever passive-aggressive neurotic. What I think might help is a more general re-statement of the notion of a “moral” evaluation in play for James’s characters, and so perhaps a way of lowering the expectations that might come into play when that very loaded term is mentioned.
At the most abstract level (or in the “smallest ‘m’ “ sense of “moral”), I mean only to stress first the normative and so evaluative dimension of meaning itself, the sense in which speakers of a natural language have to be taken to be rational agents, able to appreciate proprieties, commitments, exclusions, consistencies; “rules” in the most general sense, not regularities. The aspect of meaning most important to novels - psychological meaning, understanding someone’s, even one’s own intentions – introduces its own great complexities, but it remains an evaluative process, a kind of assessment, both for the reader and for the characters involved. The most frustrating (as well as the most reassuring) aspect of our social lives is that we cannot see or hear, I guess, such intentions and reasons; they are empirically invisible. And even the great and fantastic power of the modern novel – to make it as if we could see into or listen into such minds – only helps a bit, since character’s self-descriptions are unreliable, and even the narrator occupies a finite point of view and can quickly seem another character, and so demands interpretation, always, I am suggesting, also a kind of assessment.
When we learn that the young Marcel cannot go to sleep without a kiss from his mother, we are being invited to ask, along with the adult Marcel, what this means. One simple and unavoidable way of going about that interpretation is to ask what he really wants, and that means asking what has become so valuable to him in this ritual, and why and how it counts for such much among other things that he values. But we won’t be able to make much progress until we know not only a good deal more about Marcel but much more about the society he lives among, about the different meaning such a childhood experience has in adult memory, and about how that society comes to change so dramatically in the course of the novel. Or we know that Anna thinks she loves Vronsky, but we won't really be reading the novel unless we ask whether she does love him, whether she is deluded, indulging her own need for escape, etc. In a way, all one needs in order to change this into a Jamesean situation is to imagine characters intelligent enough to wonder to themselves if there is, can be, anything like love at all, and intelligent enough to be able to begin to ask what follows for them, for their lives, if they can no longer rely on what had been taken for granted when raising that issue. (I stress again that this is not the same as their having nothing at all to rely on.) In this, still rather limited sense, we participate in a "modern moral life” together with Proust and Tolstoy and in similar ways together with James. And in this context I don’t see myself as having portrayed this general responsiveness to norms and values as either importing some “imperatival” sense of obedience and constraint, nor as making some sort of moral virtue out of “endlessly parsing moral nuance.” No Henrietta Stackpoles or Mrs. Newsomes or Waymarshes; but no Denshers, no endless pursuits of “figures in carpets.” The post-religious, disenchanted, socially fluid, endlessly mobile, money-dominated world that James describes and invites us into is our world (“late modernity,” let’s say in anticipation of a response to Rorty’s remarks), and in order to understand it, I tried to claim, something substantive, and finally not ambiguous, has to be understood as having come to matter everywhere, as everywhere at stake in such a world, a capacity without which a life cannot be led, cannot embody any human value, cannot finally mean anything. That “moral” value (still small ‘m’, I think) is a free or self-directed life in some pretty qualified, refined, socially complicated, but still substantive sense, and it is that issue that I take to differentiate my position from what I understand to be Posnock’s.
Let me put this in terms of Trilling. (I should say: I don’t make my living in an English Department, but I probably should have known that using him to make a point might have unintended reverberations. At least I didn’t intend them and would myself be happy to share a “liberal humanist” cab with such an author. Trilling’s position in The Liberal Imagination on the moral significance of a sensitivity for ambiguity doesn’t go very far. It amounts there to a sort of Millean anti-dogmatism, and suggests the kind of value pluralism defended by Berlin, Rawls, Dworkinn and Walzer. I meant to stress the social dependence involved in assessment and understanding as a way of going far beyond this towards a much more substantive, if never un-ambiguous value; call it “freedom as mutual recognition” to coin a phrase. Accordingly, I defended readings of several Jamesean endings which reject the sort of sappy and patronizing interpretations which often take the ‘forever tragically saddled with ambiguity” line: that Isabel is afraid of, does not understand, her own sensuality, that Maggie Verver has heroically accepted the ambiguities and unresolveabilities of a modern marriage, that what happens to Densher and Kate is “tragic,” that Strether, given the unresolveability and tragic ambiguity of his situation leaves with nothing, not even his “own life.”
So, no moral, imperatival legislation to life from sort of absolute standpoint outside it, and no endlessly free play indeterminism in understanding and so evaluation. In the terms presented by Posnock at the end of his remarks, this would also mean: no contemplation/action dualism either, of the sort he associates with pragmatism. That is a longer story, but I would just add, pace his invocation of Nussbaum, that without some pretty determinate sense of what is substantively at stake in the moral conflicts James presents (and I mean also some sense of the social and historical meaning of such conflicts) one is likely to go wrong in all sorts of ways. One won’t have a clear enough sense of what NOT being Merten Densher amounts to, and so might be misled, as Nussbaum was, into falling into a familiar Jamesean trap: falsely admiring (and in Nussbaum’s Golden Bowl interpretation, sentimentalizing) a kind of (“pragmatic,” let’s say) decisiveness or falsely expecting that decisive action can provide finality or resolution. Hence all those poor souls looking for the undiscovered papers, the truth about the ghosts, the figure in the carpet, the beast in the jungle, or who end up, like Nussbaum admiring Maggie Verver’s possessiveness and greed, her mere capacity for decisive action, a Maggie Verver whom The Master himself still confidently refers to as that “little nun,” “Roman matron,” “Madonna,” and “doll.”
A different way to put this notion of mutuality and the inevitable stake one has in someone else being free would be to call to mind Rorty's quotation from Bayley about such mutual subjectivity, that beautiful passage about James's way of "overcoming loneliness," and "sharing intimacy.. like the secret converse of lovers whose understanding is not dependent on a single authority." Exactly right, I think. (One is reminded, as perhaps the epigram for all James’ great fiction, of Fenelon’s famous line: “Trust love. It takes everything; but it gives everything.”) But how this might be possible – how, historically, the freedom of lovers from a “single authority,” even from all authority, might have come to be possible, and what it might look like - are separate questions. Rorty suggests that this bond of intimacy, as if some relation of love between reader and author, might help explain the unusually fierce devotion to James and Proust that has existed in the last century or so (at least among a certain sort of intellectual – I can testify from a wide range of experience that many philosophers and intellectuals hate Henry James and Marcel Proust and think that all the folderol about them is bizarre). Rorty suggests that this effect is best thought of in quasi-religious terms; or at least that there is a kind of redemption or transformation in the reception of James and Proust, but it all occurs all without “redemptive truth.” (And I take it that Rorty’s suspicion is that I have fallen victim to conflating these two things, to subsuming what ought to be an alternative to philosophy under philosophy itself.) There is a kind of redemption, in other words, without redemptive truth. Whereas what I think is that the notion of an opposition between philosophy and literature doesn’t illuminate very much, and that the notion of redemption itself has been entertained in James’s fiction and rejected. If that is so then there is such a thing as “modern moral life” – that is what it is - but of course that is exactly what Rorty is also denying in his comments.
Now, the increasing reliance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of more and more people on novels as a window to the moral and psychological complexities of life; the fact that they learn most of the essential things they need to learn about human life, from novels, is of course a great theme in nineteenth century fiction itself, and pretty much, when it is raised, regarded as quite problematic. The overwhelming majority of novels read are still, as they were in the nineteenth century, romance or mystery novels. If there has been a transition, as Rorty has argued here and elsewhere, from a religious to a philosophical and now to a literary culture, that is very likely overall a net loss in any measure of civilized sensibility, a reduction of most of everything to the banalities of a country-western song. (And why, so optimistically, literature? Why not television, popular films, videos, as the sorts of things a modern Plato, in building the Republic, would most worry about? Is it really plausible that contemporary America bas become a “literary” culture?)
For another thing, Rorty concedes the possibility of an “upbeat” story about human freedom, but doesn’t think we should make too much philosophical hay about it. Yet wouldn’t it be likely that “transitions” from religious to philosophical and then literary sensibilities might be about as wrenching, disorienting, and unsettling as any imaginable? Rorty wants to claim that the situation of reflective individuals in my Jamesean modernity should be understood as pretty much the situation of reflective intellectuals everywhere and every when, that what I call “modernity” is just this “situation of the intellectual.” But I think James is right when he suggests that there has never been a woman like Isabel Archer, that there is nothing of the sort of epic Bildungsroman that is The Ambassadors in The Sorrows of Young Werther, or in Dante, or in Homer. There are no people like Henrietta Stackpole before Puritan America’s capitalist machine really gets chugging. Wouldn’t it be likely that the fine art produced in such transitional eras would evoke a great unease about such displacing forms of cultural authority (given that we are talking about cultural expressions of power and so about those (often those “lagging behind”) directly affected by such exercises of power on or against them. Wouldn’t it seem that the very radicality of the transitions themselves would be enough to create doubt that what is coming our way is owed any allegiance? One of the things that happens to Isabel Archer is that she gives up those heavy (German) philosophical books she was reading when her aunt called, and turned instead to what Nietzsche once called an “aesthetic justification of existence,” what Rorty has called “redemption.” But this leap of faith destroys her, and that fate would seem to “raise a problem.”
I am not exactly sure here how to respond to the general, skeptical points Rorty makes about the modernity theme, because I am not sure exactly what is at stake for Rorty in his own version of “the modern problem,” the problem of freedom. There is, he claims, more and more “spiritual freedom” in modernity (that is, to avoid unnecessary commitments, “recently” rather than “long ago”) and perhaps a moderate increase in the actual power of subjects to effect the ends they set, but this just means “more people being able to wield more and more alternative descriptions of things, of people, of institutions, and the course of history.” It would very probably be a good thing to increase the amount of material or enabling freedom (“wealth and literacy and leisure”) of as many people as possible so as to increase the range of spiritual freedom possible to as many more people as possible. But, he insists, there is no “philosophical” problem of freedom here, and nothing that we might say about “modernity” contributes very much to all this. It would be especially misleading to try to suggest, he argues, that the absence of a political or transcendent dimension in James should invite us to speculate on the general insignificance of such aspirations in “modernity” as some decisive epoch.
I still think that there are two problems left. One is exactly what we ought to say to someone who doesn’t care if there come to be fewer and fewer rather than more and more opportunities for spiritual freedom or for what Rorty later calls “self-creation.” The other is a problem as much endemic to the modern novel as to modern philosophy: we don’t know what a free life amounts to, whether what we might take to be self-creation really is. (Here again, an anxiety about subjectivity, stretching from writers like James to film-makers like Hitchcock.) In the nineteenth century alone, at various times, it looked like I could be said to be free if I had set a goal myself on the basis of reasons (freedom as autonomy of a sort); if I had psychologically identified wholeheartedly with the end (freedom as authenticity or non-alienation); if I precisely had not identified with any role, and could take on and discard roles the way an actor takes on and discards roles (freedom as irony, as in Rameau’s Nephew or Schlegel); if I had the means to achieve some end (freedom as power); if I had experienced no human impediments to my pursuits (freedom as negative liberty); or if I had experienced in my striving a development and growth (dymanic self-realization).
I might also allow myself a more general remark, and say that, for all the extraordinary richness and incalculably wide influence of Rorty’s own narration of the course and fate of modern philosophy, this is the element that has always seemed to me oddly missing: the pain and disorientation and uncertainty that was provoked by the final emergence of the shape of mass secular, technologically ever more complicated, democratic, capitalist societies, as they began to assume that final shape in the nineteenth century. (I have already mentioned the theme that I think most at stake in such a transition and in the German philosophy I am interested in, a growing, historically sensitive anxiety about the possibility of subjectivity or agency; freedom. If one thinks of Nietzsche as a great figure in whatever this last., modernist transition is, however we finally describe it, it is immediately obvious how hard it has been to come to terms with it ( and with him). His twin roles as avant-garde liberator and prophet, and as demonic nihilist and reductio of the consequences of the modern aspiration to self-sufficiency are well known. But Rorty often writes as if these historical transformations amount to a rapid changing of the subject, a shift in interest from this to that, with most of “this” simply left behind.
But such a shift is at the center of everything in James’s fiction and prose as a whole. (I think this is true of Proust as well, since the great historical theme is everywhere in that novel as well, with the loss of and nostalgia for Combray, the airplanes of World War I roaring overhead, and especially the end of the social reign of the great Guermantes, displaced by, and depressingly, really, no different than the horridly bourgeois Verdurins.) Both Proust and James, together with Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain and Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities, present us something that we have to face if we are to face honestly what has happened to us. (Only Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Heidegger have, I think, the same sort of historical urgency as philosophers.) I tried to argue in details in the book that it is most at issue in books like The American Scene and The Awkward Age and What Maisie Knew and many others. Decaying Europeans and on-rushing wealthy, powerful Americans, amount much more to a collision, than a changing of the subject . But this general notion of modernization as a kind of spiritual loss, even if, while disenchanting, also liberating and necessary, is hardly limited to these novelists, and I find it hard to fit into the schema Rorty has given us here and elsewhere. It is some aspect of this sort of mood, let us say, that has been so prominent in so much European high culture of the last hundred years, and it is the context of that culture that has made Nietzsche's Götzendämmerung, Nihilism, and "God is dead " rhetoric so prophetic and so important. Faust's failed bargain (or the "failure of science" and especially scientific power, "for life"), Hölderlin's elegiac sense of modernity's profound loss, Hegel's claim in Glauben und Wissen that the religion of modern times is: "God is dead," Balzac's, Stendahl's, Flaubert's pictures of our crummy "new" but not a all better bourgeois world, constant prey to romantic fantasies of recovery and restoration, Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor speculations, Joyce's and Eliot's ironic use of ancient myth, Rilke's elegiac metaphysics of absence, Husserl on the "crisis" of the European sciences, Heidegger on the forgetting of Being, the nightmare worlds of Beckett and Kafka, dominated by mere pretensions to presence and authority, and the new post-war world of absolute textuality, failed signifiers, the death of the subject, negative dialectics, the end of art, the death of the novel, the impossibility of poetry, absolute contingency, anti-humanism, and on and on. Everywhere the figures and images are of death and loss, and the language is the language of mourning, or even melancholia. Something, I would submit, is going on in all this hubbub, and whatever it is, it does not seem adequately answered by our becoming more sensitive to the temptations of our own egoistic delusions and becoming more sensitive to “the needs of others engaged in the same enterprise of self-creation.” I take part of the value of James to be to have shown us that we don’t really understand well our stake in such a goal, in what sense (and how much) it matters, and even, what it might be.