Joshua Landy

Philosophy as Self-Fashioning: Alexander Nehamas's Art of Living

To turn philosophy to the service of life—to become the “poet of one’s life”—is the animating thought behind Alexander Nehamas’s recent book, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault. The book’s central aim is to argue that philosophy can be an activity, a way of life, as distinct from a body of scholarly doctrine. While it has become standard to insist that “philosophy is a theoretical discipline” [AL 1], producing claims about the nature of truth, beauty, causality, and so on, Nehamas draws on an ancient tradition under which practical activity is the core philosophical enterprise, and the true philosopher, like Socrates in the Apology, need not author compelling theories but must live the life of a sage. His efforts to revive the ancient idea give rise to a conundrum, however. For he claims that his own book embodies the essentially practical type of philosophy, even though, to all appearances, it is standard theoretical fare: views are laid out, claims evaluated, and counterarguments refuted (often in extensive footnotes). How can we explain Nehamas’s conviction that his book belongs on the side of the practical philosophers, when it seems so theoretical? Where is the art of living in The Art of Living?

Still Life in a Narrative Age: Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation

We are living today in the great age of narrative. I do not mean that we are living in the age of great narrative; it is far from certain that W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz is aesthetically superior to Dante’s Inferno or that Milan Kundera’s Ignorance, stunning as it is, makes for a better nostos than the Odyssey. I mean simply that we Westerners are more obsessed with stories— good, bad, and indifferent—than ever before. We no longer have the slightest time for lyric poetry but instead consume infinite quantities of novels and films and television shows,2 and the programs we like most are

Proust, His Narrator, and the Importance of the Distinction

Although it is, in principle, almost universally accepted today that authors and narrators must be rigorously demarcated, somehow scholars of Marcel Proust seem—whether wittingly or unwittingly—to make an exception for In Search of Lost Time. Because it is written in the first person and because it incorporates scenes borrowed from Prousts own life, the fictional narrative is routinely read as his thinly veiled autobiography, if not as evidence for any number of psychiatric disorders. At the very least, critics tend to have no hesitation in taking theses put forward by the narrator as Prousts own vision of the world and the narrators future masterpiece as the Search itself. Now these are not only mistakes, as evidence both internal and external clearly shows, but also consequential mistakes: they prevent us, that is, from understanding how the novel functions and from taking advantage of all it has to offer. For above and beyond the dry, theoretical insights it presents for our consideration, it grants us the opportunity to train ourselves, both in the complicated art of self-fashioning and in the related art of self-deception. And it is only because the narrators insights do not entirely add up—a weakness, so long as one treats the Search as a treatise—that the implied author can produce the training effect, one which gives his novel its ultimate strength.

Conditional Goods and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: How Literature (as a Whole) Could Matter Again

We literary scholars have a notorious flair for the dramatic, and I suspect that for many, the first impulse when confronted with the question “does literature matter?” is to say something like “of course it matters, and anyone who doesn’t see that is a heartless brute,” or—a more probable response these days—“of course it doesn’t matter, and anyone who doesn’t see that is blinded by the shimmering allure of cultural capital.” But things, in reality, are never that simple. It’s not just that the word “literature” has carried a variety of meanings over the years. It’s not even just that literary texts affect different people in different ways (sometimes indeed the same person in different ways at separate points in her life). It’s that they tend, very often, not to matter on their own. In order to matter, plays and poems and stories need a little help from us; they are therefore neither automatically futile (as the cultural-capital brigade would have us believe) nor automatically beneficial (as the moral-improvement brigade would have us believe), but instead something whose importance depends in part on our involvement, something we can assist in mattering. They are also something we will fail to assist in mattering, as long as we remain stuck in our cynical and wishful pieties. While the wishful pieties have alienated potential readers, the cynical ones have turned into self-fulfilling prophecies; against that background, we have a lot of work to do if literature as a whole is one day to matter again. 1

The Devil, the Master-Criminal, and the Re-enchantment of the World (On The Usual Suspects)

What is so appealing about the figure of the master-criminal? The answer lies in the kind of solution it provides to the problem of suffering. Rather than just accounting for affliction—as, for example, does Leibniz’s theodicy—such a figure enchants it, transforming mundane objects into actual or potential clues, everyday incidents into moves in a cosmic conflict, random misery into a purposeful pattern. The master-criminal (the shadowy villain of The Usual Suspects, say) thus constitutes a secular replacement for the Devil, making possible a negative re-enchantment of the world.

Accidental kinsmen: Proust and Nietzsche

Proust and Nietzsche form a curious case of accidental kinship, one so striking as to warrant an extension of the traditional cliché: great minds think alike, we should say, even when they themselves don’t believe it. Proust himself had no idea that his views were so Nietzschean. In fact, he considered himself an opponent of Nietzsche, whom—based on the review article or articles which constituted the full extent of his acquaintance—he mistakenly labeled an ascetic intellectualist with an exaggerated estimation of friendship. He seems never to have realized, even as Nietzsche’s stock in France gradually rose during the first decades of the twentieth century, what an ally he could have had. Far from being a dry intellectualist, the real Nietzsche—just like Proust—deemed intellectual positions to be mere epiphenomena of more fundamental (and unconscious) drives, so that genuine communication takes place as it were in spite of the speaker, via the conduit of style. Far from being an ascetic, Nietzsche—again like Proust—treated the unconditional will to truth as a neurotic compulsion, potentially detrimental to the health. And far from overvaluing friendship, Nietzsche practiced and preached a fiercely autonomous individualism, while nonetheless cherishing one or two close friendships. Proust did exactly the same.