Reconstruction Vol. 13, No. 1
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Philosophy Comes Knocking. . . / Robert King and Alan Ramón Clinton
Keywords: Philosophy; Creative Writing Pedagogy; Hegel
Robert: While contemplating what piece I might contribute for “How Did I Write That? Reflections on Singularity in the Creative Process,” I decided to go ahead and ask Alan Clinton if the following topic would be suitable:
"...to examine the question of ’beginning‘ in writing, using Hegel‘s Science of Logic and a small variety of post-Hegelian responses to his Science of Logic. I am interested in the ways in which writing is a force of exteriority, singularity, construction, and in what is both systemic and non-systemic in the act of writing.”
As it turns out, my reliance on Hegel in addressing these conceptual matters (in relation to the writing process) will be on a single quotation from Hegel‘s Phenomenology of Spirit, but here is what Alan Clinton had to say:
Alan: This sounds like an interesting approach, especially the notion of exteriority and beginning. Are you planning on discussing how you have experienced these theories in a piece (or pieces) of your own writing? That would seem to take us beyond what I personally feel is problematic in the philosophy of the Hegelian "tradition," and philosophy in general (every field has its limitations, its fixations, so please don‘t take this as a personal attack), its reliance on abstraction and the obsession, as with Heidegger, with "authenticity," "truth," etc., but always in the abstract. We are trying to find a dialectic between theories of writing and, in more Nietzschean fashion, the disruptive nature of the anecdote. So, what would be most interesting to Angela and me would not be to confirm or refute Hegel‘s ideas as such, but to test them against your own experience as a writer.
Robert: I confronted this reply with a variety of pauses and curiosities, but more on these in what follows. My immediate reply was as follows, defensive as it was:
Interesting note, Alan. You seem to be confining the act of writing quite a bit here, no offense. Really, I do not mean to be offensive. My writing, in particular, has largely been defined by a struggle with the philosophical problem of beginning, and is certainly reliant on acts of abstraction (without discussing what this means, in any tradition). . . I would be highly suspicious of any writer who claimed not to abstract from experience in writing. My meditations and interventions in thinking and writing have tended to affirm breaks, breaks from the tradition (not simple repetitions of it), but certainly my aim has also been to construct what might be called a truth in my writing. Meanwhile, the problem of truth is one we ought to define together before pronouncing on it as somehow abstract. Indeed, I find constructivism, with its particular take on abstraction, to be such a fascinating act of thinking precisely for its re-positioning of fundamental Kantian and Hegelian, and traditional philosophical, themes. What is an abstraction, after all? Hegel especially was constantly wary of this particular issue, so for you to lump some generic reading of abstraction together with some relatively orthodox view on Hegel is a bit disappointing for me. Again, no offense meant. I sincerely believe that the idea you have for the special issue is fantastic. I will propose one idea and will be eager to hear how you might reply to it. I propose that we, you and I, take up these issues in a sort of dialogue and include the product of this dialogue in the special issue. Certainly there is much of interest and importance to discuss here. What do you think? Thanks for any consideration.
Focusing on my point about my suspicion that any writer might somehow do without the act of abstraction, Alan‘s reply took the following form:
Alan: Most philosophers may abstract from experience (all if we side with Nietzsche, psychoanalysis), but most of them hide the experience they are abstracting from. The purpose of our issue is to not suppress "the experience." On your above quote we agree, so I don‘t see what the problem is really. Why should I not cite the fact that I don‘t want traditional and orthodox readings of Hegel or any other philosopher since our journal rejects those all the time, because they are not new. You asked me a question about whether the topic was a good one, and it seemed like it was, and you of all people should know that I am not citing a non-existent body of work (a certain tendency) in philosophy as a discipline. I take you at your word above that you are not of that dominant (as in the teaching, the writing, the scholarship) tradition/tendency. I was just trying to give some guidelines as to what will not fly, and it seems we generally agree on those things. Am I wrong?
Robert: My reply, in short:
Wrong? Not at all. Sorry, I now realize my tone was too harsh. Yes, I became a bit defensive, but I did not want to come across as harsh since I am sure I have many sympathies with your (perhaps?) dissatisfaction with the traditional philosophical positions and tendencies to abstraction.
But what are my sympathies with any (perhaps Alan‘s) dissatisfactions with the tradition? I want to get clear on these; after all, the issues surrounding these points about abstraction are for me precisely problems of producing the singular in writing. Collecting some of the other themes I‘ve touched on with Alan here, I ought to say that issues of exteriority, beginnings, and abstraction all bear rather directly on singularity in the various writing acts which I claim ownership of. Let me also return to Hegel and that passage from the Phenomenology I mentioned earlier since it provides a nice beginning point from which I might trace out many of these issues:
The individual who is going to act seems, therefore, to find himself in a circle in which each moment presupposes the other, and thus he seems unable to find a beginning, because he only gets to know his original nature, which must be his end, from the deed, while, in order to act, he must have that end beforehand. But for that very reason he has to start immediately, and, whatever the circumstances, without further scruples about beginning, means, or end, proceed to action. (Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller Oxford University Press, 1977, 240).
How to begin in writing? If this is our question, I believe that Hegel offers some important guidelines, namely:
1. Writers write in a tradition, whether they wish to or not. Do we resist this point? Certainly this is not because the sometimes disappointingly reactionary and manifestly philosophical Hegel has helped to ramify this kind of view. But Borges would make a very similar point, in any case, in his “Borges y yo”:
"It poses no great difficulty for me to admit that he has put together some decent passages, yet these passages cannot save me, perhaps because whatsoever is good does not belong to anyone, not even to the other, but to language and tradition. In any case, I am destined to lose all that I am, definitively, and only fleeting moments of myself will be able to live on in the other."
The point, as I take it—whether we gloss it from Hegel or Borges—is that to escape tradition is both impossible (without breaking from tradition and thus forging something new, but then if such a break is accomplished there is no longer the tradition to speak of, from which one breaks) and necessary (in the sense that in order to produce the singular, one cannot remain a part of tradition), that is, if one wishes to produce, in writing or otherwise, that which is truly singular. For Borges, this is achieved through a certain loss of self, exteriority, exteriorization. . . (traditionally defined as the inner self, of some locatable presence which one can bring in relation with oneself in order to say, “I” am). Is Borges even the author or is tradition as the medium within which singularity unfolds the author? What about language, conceived as the medium or circumstance —words, bits of linguistic stuff—are these not the genetic conditions of producing singularity in writing—are words and language not the true authors, from which persons such as Hegel or Borges themselves emerge?
2. Thus, for Hegel, the individual is firmly lodged in a tradition, a circle, where beginning and end presuppose each other. The point to note, though, is that for Hegel this constraint does not mark a closure, e.g, the impossibility to begin, but is the very condition of creative singularity. Hegel then specifies the conditions of acting: performing a deed, writing, if we like. In fact, Hegel endorses a radical notion of action, act without scruples, just begin!
For me, as philosopher and literary critic by training, I am highly attentive to philosophical issues, both of form and content. This does not make me non-creative, surely. Rather, I tend to seek out more philosophical and critical modes of creativity, but for me the question of singularity is irreducible to medium or genre. Perhaps I am too attentive to specifically philosophical issues of creativity, but I wonder if those who would avoid these issues, whether out of naiveté or by dint of a highly mediated decision, would nonetheless still have to answer to them, if producing singularity is the aim.
Alan: What is interesting to me is how Borgesian this thing, this event between me and Robert, is, formally speaking. Speaking playfully, I would say that I feel almost tricked into not so much a demonstration of anything as a documented situation, but one which does revolve around questions of starting. It starts with a call for papers on writing that Alan and Angela hope will be more singular than most discussions of writing, which discuss writing in general, the tenets of writing, how one writes, and what we wanted was stories about people who have written that will lead to more stories. Both Alan and Angela love to be surprised, but find that often we have not been when it comes to questions of "how does one write"? Angela was writing a novel at the time and we were discussing something which is perhaps both philosophy and literary criticism of a sort—that is creative writing pedagogy—and our dissatisfaction with its tendency toward universal statements. We thought a simple reversal might be interesting, which is to ask not, "How does one write in the future?" but "How did one write in the past?" We thought this would tend to produce the exception as opposed to the rule. I, for one, think creative writing pedagogy is bad because it attempts to make rules out of what is singular—positing an idealized future event that never looks back to events that have actually occurred. Neither perspective yields truth, per se, but consider the act of teaching someone to drive a stick shift, the arguments that inevitably ensue. "Wait until you feel a catch in the clutch." "A what?" Inevitably, the experienced driver has to switch seats and start driving again so that he or she can recall what she just did, how a particular clutch/car feels at a particular moment with a particular person. Okay, so I‘m letting some present in, but there was always a present in the past, at least in the colloquial sense.
This is interesting to me, I hesitate to call it a singularity. This desire for the past results in a CFP, a call to the future, and receives a response from Robert, who is interested in how writing starts. It feels like coming full circle.
Robert: Indeed, I think I quite like this strategy of somehow attempting to avoid tendencies toward universal statements in writing, or to seek out the singular. If I could return to Hegel for a moment—and Hegel should certainly not be the last word on any of this—but his conception of the universal in the Phenomenology is precisely an attempt to conceive of singularity, an attempt to re-conceive a dominant notion of universality which was located only in perception and thus did not get at the singular contribution of the subject in the act of perceiving. For Hegel, locating the singular in the subject perceiving was to find the universality of the singular wherein it was the creative subject which actively produced the singular, the truly singular. Of course Hegel would again widen this domain to attempt to locate the subject within tradition, but even still, this was part of a critical strategy aimed at thinking that which was most truly or universally singular. The point is that Hegel was, in a sense, always on the search for the singular! The sort of singular which was most universal, and thus most true, the truly singular. This brings us back to the tricky tasks associated with thinking about or producing (in writing, say) that which is singular, of escaping from tradition even while requiring it so that there‘s something to escape. So, yes, I think that if we locate the production of the singular not in universal statements found in any writing on the page, but in a writing to come or a writing from the past which has remained un-accessed or inaccessible, we have widened the domain in which we might produce the singular (and perhaps these kinds of engagements would be abstractions from the present). Of course, Alan, we have a history, now, with its own odd sort of temporality.
Alan: An unexpected future came, and there was an unexpected past. Both Robert and I received PhDs from the University of Florida.
Robert: Of course neither one of us knew this until we reconnected over the CFP.[B1]
Alan: Even in his initial query, Robert both proffers and takes away philosophy, and in his responses Alan[B2] pushes philosophy away and wishes to reclaim it. And, then, Robert proposes a dialogue on these questions, to which Alan responds positively even if he is not initially hopeful or confident about its future. It turns out, the philosophy was occurring in "real time," as the initial call and response left e-mail and became this piece, which harkens back to Socratic dialogue, although dialogue is not inherently philosophical in the traditional sense of the word. What results seems to me more literary in form, although Robert might beg to disagree, either a literary work or an experiment in the most scientific of senses, in that neither one of us knows exactly what would/will result.
More literary, but in a Borgesian sense. And, of course, Borges is exemplary as someone who writes stories that seem to have a philosophical halo, not a theme but an idea to ponder for which the narrative material seems both necessary and supplementary at the same time.
Robert: Well, yes, I had no idea what would result—in a sense, I think we‘ve produced something singular and yet, like you‘ve pointed out with Socratic dialogue, we‘ve recalled tradition(s), both philosophical and literary, even perhaps somewhat in the mind of philosophically minded Borgesians—were these acts necessary for the production?
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