Gesturing Toward Reality by Bolger Robert K.; Korb Scott;

Author:Bolger, Robert K.; Korb, Scott;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

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Like Wallace, Stanley Cavell spent much of his intellectual life considering how to inherit the late Wittgenstein. The term “Moral Perfectionism” combined for Cavell the instructive or therapeutic elements he admired in the Investigations with more traditional modes of literary-philosophical “inspiration,” evident in works as diverse as Augustine’s Confessions, Kierkegaard’s Either/Or and Emerson’s “Experience.” In the introduction to his Carus Lectures, Cavell describes Perfectionism as an (oft-neglected) tradition in Western thought concerned with “what used to be called the state of one’s soul,” and which imagines philosophy less as a search for better facts than as a “journey of ascent” toward a better self.16 In lieu of further definition, he advances a list of texts containing Perfectionist elements, beginning with Plato’s Republic and Shakespeare’s Hamlet and carrying on to Cavell’s “doorstep” with works by Freud, Thoreau, Beckett, and Wittgenstein.

Even more than Rand, Chris Fogle is imagined, in the longest continuous portion of The Pale King, as the product of an extended and debilitating adolescence. But the pivotal sequence in Fogle’s life involves, not a set of therapeutic conversations but a lecture, almost a sermon, which presents as inspirational precisely what Fogle, in his conformity with his culture, had previously viewed as banal or pathetic. This is what marks the section, for me, as being more Perfectionist than (philosophically) therapeutic. In tone and method, it resembles less the Wittgenstein of the Investigations than it does the Kierkegaard of Fear and Trembling or the Thoreau of Walden.

The great philosophical enemy of the Perfectionist text is skepticism or nihilism (they are intimately related in Cavell’s hands), but with these words being understood, as Wallace always understood them, to describe less a self-conscious philosophical position than a perspective or a way of life. In the course of his narration, Fogle refers to his younger self as a nihilist no less than four times. Like many in his generation, Fogle says, he “was not raised as anything” and as a teenager he romanticized what he now recognizes as a “narcissistic despair.” (He might have said that he and his friends lived lives of “quiet desperation,” or that they felt a “stereotyped but unconscious despair.”)17 In a sense, Fogle’s journey began when he learned the definition of the word “nihilism” (appropriately, in the “sixth week of theater class in high school”) (163), and culminated with his realization that he had in fact become “a real nihilist,” that it “wasn’t just a hip pose. That I drifted and quit because nothing meant anything, no one choice was really better” (223). In this, he was much like his peers. “Everyone I knew and hung out with was a wastoid,” he remembers. “It was hip to be ashamed of it, in a strange way . . . or just to feel directionless and lost” (165).

Several events prompted or “primed” Fogle for what he describes as his “change in direction,” but he did not finally manage to “put away childish things” (172) until he wandered, mistakenly, into an Advanced Accounting class at the Catholic DePaul University.

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