ON THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF THE TRAGIC: A RESPONSE TO RUBENS”

MARK FREEMAN

Department of Psychology, P.0. Box 26A, College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA 01610, U.S.A.

In addition to revealing, in graceful and admirable form, certain salient dimensions of the tragic sense of life, Rubens’ essay sets the stage for posing an important epistemological question: Is the desire to avow the tragic sense of life indeed “heroic,” in its insistence on the need to seek answers to the enduring questions of human existence? Or is it problematically nostalgic, in its insistence that we cannot help but fall irrevocably short of the absolute? More simply, is the root epistemological assumption of the idea of the tragic indeterminacy or determinacy!

Despite the heroic quality of the tragic quest, bound as it is to a kind of existential resignation to the indeterminacy of things, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that it remains fundamentally aligned with-and perhaps even dependent upon-the assumption of determinacy. On the one hand, it would seem that the idea of the tragic entails the notion that the world is a region of secrecy and irrationality: try as we might to comprehend it rationally and with confidence, it becomes painfully clear that, ultimately, there is no closure, no end, in sight. Some people, of course, staring into the face of such a profound abyss, might simply give up the quest and elect instead to bask in nothingness of one sort or another. However, this is not to say that they will be cast into the void; is may very well be that giving up the quest is cause for rapture and play. In a world without ends, a world in which “There is no maintaining, and no depth to, this bottomless chessboard on which Being is put into play” (Derrida, 1982/1972, p. 22), there would be little reason for suffering and angst. “There will be no unique name” in this world, “even if it were the name of Being,” Derrida continues. “And we must think this without nostulgia, that is, outside the myth of a purely maternal or paternal language, a lost native country of thought. On the contrary, we must affirm this, in the sense in which Nietzsche puts affnmation into play, in a certain laughter and step of the dance” (ibid., p. 27).

What has Derrida told us in this context? He has told us that the assumption of indeterminacy, strictly speaking, is in certain important respects incompatible with the idea of the tragic. For Derrida, it would seem, it is only by adhering to what he has termed a “metaphysics of presence” that we fall prey to a kind of mourning over our incapacity to ever fully grasp the world, the presumption here being that there does indeed exist something-a center-over and above

*Commentary on K. L. Kubens (lY92) Psychoanalysis and the tragic sense of life, Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. x47-36’L.

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our own finite human constructions, our own language. “‘l‘otalization,” this complete grasp of things, “can be judged impossible in the classical style: one then refers to the empirical endeavor of’ either a subject or a finite richness which it can never master. There is too much, more than one can say” (Derrida, 1978/1967, p. 289). Along these lines, the world is sitnply too f‘ull and large and dense for it to be represented adequately and exhaustively. It is in virtue of’this impossibility, theref’ore, that we must remain irreparably short of the mat-k of total comprehension.

Hut to the extent that this world we have before us is already in language, the absence of’ the possibility f’or totalization becomes understood not so much as iv/- possibility-a failure, a stopping short, but instead as t/otl-possibility: language, rather than referring to the world “in itself‘,” refers to language, which refers co language (etc.). “If toCalization no longer has any meaning,” therefore, “it is not because the infiniteness of’ a field camlot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field--that is, language and a finite language-excludes totalization” (ibid., p. 2X9). In any case, and to make a long story short, once we are able to avow the non-possibility of a complete grasp of things, owing to the finitude of language, there would appear to be little room for the idea of the tragic in the sense that Kttbens employs it. We could continue < to mourn, I suppose, over this finitude itself‘, and we could contittue to wish that there was in fact a center of’some sort that would arrest anti gt-outttl the endless play of language. Living still ~tntlet- the shadow of metaphysical thinking, these kinds of ctnotional responses will no doubt persist f’or some time. pet-haps even fi)t-ever. Memories linger on. Nevertheless, it follows that if’ metaph~~sical thinking is in fact surpassable, so too is the idea 01‘ the tragic.

Now, it may be argued, of’course, that our inability to grasp the world t‘uily is riot only a f‘unctiott of’ an epistetllological gap, so to speak, but of the f’ztct that there exist psychic ti~tws, ;tc.c.idetits, and unknown or unf’ot-rsecable circum- slances, all of‘ which militate against our e\w- quite knowing what’s whaf ‘l‘his is (0 say that, in additioti 10 issues pertaining to the limits of human cott~l~t-ehett- siott, the Itnatt~titial,ili~~ of‘ truth, and so on, chew will ;tl~~)s attd inrvitablv be the tteed to grapple with the problertt of fate. Even the most steadf’:tst Nietischean or Derridean, as c.ontf’ortably resigned as they may be IO living itt r he opett air of‘ indeterminacy, may still sul‘fel- and grieve over life’s twists atltl turns and o\‘er all that has sane on, and will continue to go on, behind their I);tc-ka. ‘1%~ litct of the matler is, altltou~ti the world mav not be predictable itt principle, it < often is in practice, atttl wheti this predictabiiity is thwarted. tltt-ortgh [lie vat-iet) of‘ruptttres in our routines that may befit11 us, it may well be diff’ic-ult to feel like playing and dancing. ‘Ilie idea of’ tli’e tragic ttiay not be so easy to eftitce af’iet- all, not even fitr ttoti-totalizing types.

‘l‘here may well be other, tnore important reasons, lio~~e\~~, for ~vliy the idea of‘ the tragic cannot be effaced. As Kubens suggests, irrespective of whecliet- one’s abiding epistemological perspective derives f’t-om Ihe assutnl~fioti of’ determinacy or that of itidetet-tiiitiacy, it is patently and it-refutably the case that one can either move forward in life. iii the dircc?ioti of. an enlarged tttidcrstanditig of‘ self atttl \vorld, or one C;III remain in (he grip of the past.

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refusing the future so as to prevent the pain and loss that will attend the process of letting go. What is it that happens in this movement forward, toward the future, that goes colloquially by the name of “development”? What happens, in effect, is that one’s old self and one’s old world is (more or less) annihilated, killed off, and left for dead.

With this in mind, we cannot help but ask: Isn’t the process of development one that entails, metaphorically speaking, a willingness to die, even a kind of perpetual suicide? We return to the existentialists here: Can one ever really live without this willingness to die? It is true enough, Rubens notes, that loss can be avoided by denying change; this is largely what is involved in neurosis. But something akin to psychic health, however difficult it may be to define unambiguously, requires that one possess the courage to seek out the duplicity or the inadequacy of one’s current understanding and transcend it by resurrecting a new self from the ashes of the old. The idea of the tragic may thus continue to loom large from this point of view for, at the very least, our own ceaseless death and resurrection renders it all too clear that, no matter how assured we may be in our convictions, there simply is no last word to be had.

An important question remains, however, and it is one that gets us back to the very issues with which we began. Is it possible, ultimately, to even conceive of the enlargement of self-understanding, of moving “forward,” of “developing,” and so on without there being an end to the process, a telos of one sort or another? In

line with what Rubens has told us, my own inclination is to answer this question with a cautious “Yes.” I say cautious here because the very ideas under consideration are on some level unthinkable outside of ends; to develop is to move toward something, even if that something holds nothing more concrete than distance from one’s previous mode of life.

I am also prepared to say that these same ideas are unthinkable outside of the assumption of determinacy, broadly-taken. For isn’t the process of self- understanding-however terrifying, ambiguous, uncertain, and endless-a process of determining just who and what one is? To assume that this process could be brought to completion is, of course, absurd, not to mention arrogant. To assume, however, that self-understanding is a wholesale illusion or a fiction, designed perhaps to ward off one’s secret recognition that the world is indeed indeterminate, is equally absurd. Without some working assumption that knowledge of self and world is possible, things would get very ugly very quickly.

Lukacher’s (1986) notion of the “primal scene” may be useful in this context. Extending this notion beyond Freud’s original conception [with its “bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents,” as Nabokov (1967) has felicitously put the matter], he suggests that in trying to understand the history of the self, we inevitably encounter an interpretive crisis: while on the one hand, we cannot move beyond interpretation to a discourse of truth, on the other, there is no denying “that the burden of truth continues to make itself felt” (Lukacher, 1986, p. 25). Moreover, however much the idea of causation has fallen into disfavor, in certain circles at any rate, it is plainly the case that we cannot wholly dispense with it; the very idea of self-understanding, as it is presently constituted, requires that we search for origins, no matter how

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concealed, out of reach;or absent they may be. The primal scene thus emerges as a “circumstantial construction that is predicated when there is a need to interpret but at the same time a fundamental concealment or absence of the sort of evidence that could definitively substantiate a particular interpretation” (ibid., p. 330); it is “the figure of an interpretive dilemma, which is to say, it is the figure of the dilemma of interpretation” (ibid., p. 331).

To speak epistemologically about the idea of the tragic, therefore, is to reveal precisely this dilemma. For at the very same time that the tragic chat-actei realizes that the rational is irrevocably circumscribed by the irrational and that the process of knowing will never, can never, be brought to completion, he OI she also realizes that the only suitable thing to do is to move on. This heroism can, of course, be tainte,d with nostalgia to the extent that moving on proceeds in the direction of discovering that “lost native country of thought” of which Derrida spoke. But it can also be carried out in the absence of nostalgia, pre- cisely through an attempt to inhabit and embrace the dilemma itself. This is uiieven ground, to be sure, but as K&ens helps to show, it is all that we can possibly have.

The idea of the tragic thus emerges not only as the embodiment of a particularly literary genre, but as the embodiment of the contradictory nature of interpretation itselt‘: we are destined to seek meaning even while knowing it is provisional and open to endless transformation. As suggested earlier, however,

there is still another dimension of contradiction at work; in seeking self- understanding, we find ourselves fueled by a desire “as persistent as it is incoherent, a desire whose lack of satisfaction gives death as the only alternative, but whose satisfaction would also be death” (Brooks, 1985, p. 58). Alongside the contradictory nature of interpretation, therefore, we must also recognize “the contradictory desire of narrative, driving toward the end which would be both its destruction and its meaning” (ibid.).

Strangely enough, Brooks implies that the fullest meaning of a life can only issue after death, that is, after the ending to which all previous episodes have been leading has occurred; the ending reverberates backward, as it were, serving to provide a measure of interpretive closure to what had heretofore been a

fundamentally open work. ‘l‘his means that in seeking the meaning of our lives

we are being drawn inexorably toward death itself. If only we couId be there to

tie all of the loose ends together! Our knowledge would still tall short of being

exhausti\,e, of‘ course, since the task of interpretation would remain, but then>

would at least be that distance of the self from itself’ that would allow li)r an uncluttered gale. Yet it cam101 be. ‘I‘he most we can do, from the standpoint of‘ ti-agedy, is imaginatively anticipate oui- posthumous recollections, \vitli the hope that they might do justice to the irreducible abundance, complexity, and uncertainty that was part of our lives.

‘I‘here is one final co~itradictory note to be sounded bef’ore closing. It is that avowing and affirming the irrationality and indeterminacy of life’s meaning, insofar as it represents an attempt to posit the true state of things, cannot be done except from the standpoint of a kind of‘ determinacy. In other words, in proclaiming that, yes, our knowledge of things is inevitably limited in important

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ways, we are also proclaiming that at least some sort of knowledge is indeed attainable-if only the knowledge that we cannot ever possibly know all that we might wish to. We thus find ourselves in a decidedly precarious position. Just as we may be prepared to move beyond Descartes, it seems that we have returned in some fashion, yet again, to one of his most fundamental philosophical insights: I know, indubitably, that I have some quite definite doubts about what I can know of this world.

We need not suppose, however, that acknowledging the centrality of doubt is a retrogressive move. There is good reason to suppose, in fact, that it is exactly the opposite. Why? The answer is a relatively straightforward one. It is only by recognizing the limits of knowledge that we can acquire that sort of epistemo- logical humility that will not only prevent us from being deceived into believing we have discovered the last word, but will provoke us into moving forward with a firm willingness to both displace and replace what we have been. Needless to say, there is never any sure guarantee that we are indeed moving forward rather than backward or sideways. Likewise, there is never any sure guarantee that we are engaged in self-understanding rather than self-deception. But this state of affairs, this uneven ground, will only prove crippling to those who continue to need to stand on something more secure and certain. As for those tragic characters of whom Rubens speaks, they will be able to seize upon their doubt and transform it, creatively, into a way of life that, alternating between grief and play, will provide the fullest possible spectrum of human realities.

REFERENCES

Brooks, P. (1985). Reading for the plot. New York: Vintage. Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and dijj erence, A. Bass (Trans.). Chicago, IL: University of

Chicago Press. (Original work published 1967) Derrida, J. (1982). Margins of philosophy, A. Bass (Trans.). Chicago, IL: University of

Chicago Press. (Original work published 1972) Lukacher, N. (1986). Primal scenes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Nabokov, V. (1967). Speak, memory. New York: Pyramid Books.