Commonplace Commitments by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

“Revision is,” Miller insists, “the conservation of functioning. That is the premise of history.”[13] To conserve, say, the form of language or that of governance, one must be willing to revise one’s inheritance, linguistic, political, and otherwise. Indeed, one will be compelled willy-nilly by the impetus and force of those forms themselves to revise those forms. The maintenance of our institutions demands their revision, often their radical transformation. History is, for Miller, first and foremost the revisions demanded of agents by virtue of the consequences of these actors’ commitments. Only in the discovery of some fatal threat to themselves in the framework of their inheritance can historically situated actors discover their freedom.[14] The fateful shapes of human freedom are, thus, those fatal threats to our inherited framework. The viability of these frameworks, and indeed our integrity, depend upon confronting these threats in a courageous, thoughtful, and imaginative manner.[15]

Think here of the imminent threat to the United States posed by the contradictions inherent in the Constitution of that country, in particular, to the institutionalization of slavery.[16] Miller is fond of quoting Abraham Lincoln[17] (“We cannot escape history . . .”),[18] or alluding to his predecessor’s utterance, precisely because nothing more dramatically illustrates his point regarding “revision” than the crises generated by the contradictions inscribed in the Constitution itself, the crises with which Lincoln was struggling to confront in their fierce urgency and unavoidable complexity. While, in principle, Miller is open to recognizing the historical exigency of radical revision, he tends in practice to be wary of those calling for such revision. He is certainly not wrong to be suspicious of both the motives of reformers and the efficacy of the efforts–-also the policies—of especially those who would sweep away the past in order to institute a future unmarred by the historical failings of human beings. But however reasonable is his practical wariness, his apparently hardened opposition to radical revision stands in tension, if not contradiction, to his own philosophical outlook.

But this is to jump to the end of the story. At the outset, we should attend to Miller’s creative appropriation of certain central features of our Emersonian inheritance and only afterward turn our attention to the immanent need for a radical revision of Miller’s own philosophical framework, a revision concerning how to understand revision itself. Emerson’s “Experience” is the source from which Miller appropriates two of his most central conceptions, whereas Baraka’s “Hunting Is Not Those Heads on the Wall” and allied writings suggest that the consequences of Miller’s own commitments, above all, his strictly philosophical commitments, drive in the direction of a radical reform of American culture along the lines sketched by Baraka and others.

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