Epistemic Addiction: Reading “Sonny's Blues” with Levinas, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche

Abstract

James Baldwin writes that “I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis.”1 Baldwin dealt with this crisis in his literary works through the strategic use of Christian theological themes and imagery to make compelling critiques of bourgeois cultural and Christian values. So “prolonged” was his “religious crisis” that Christian theological themes permeate Baldwin's immense literary corpus.2 Baldwin thus both was influenced by Christianity and critiqued it in his works. Considering these two points, I think it appropriate to begin this essay with a biblical reference to the Christian narrative of the “fall” of humanity. I choose this biblical starting point not only because of Baldwin's Christian background and literary inclinations but also because I think that this starting point accurately depicts the moral problem that is at work in Baldwin's short story “Sonny's Blues.” I shall call this moral problem “epistemic addiction.”Regardless of whether one accepts the historical accuracy of the fall of Adam and Eve, or views it as a Platonic “noble lie,” a moral principle emerges from the biblical narrative of Adam and Eve on which both biblical fundamentalists and biblical critics can agree: merely seeking knowledge of good and evil is problematic. Consider the circumstances of the biblical account of humanity's “fall”: as Eve stood before the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, she noticed that the tree was “desired to make one wise.”3 Fulfilling her desire to attain knowledge of good and evil, she consumed the fruit of the tree, disregarding an ethical directive to the contrary. But what makes the prohibition of God not to eat from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil an “ethical” prohibition? Why would God make knowledge of good and evil “off limits” to human beings? Does God want humans to refrain from knowledge and learning?No. The quest for knowledge is not inherently problematic. Rather, Eve's problem was that she sought the “what” of knowledge without regard for the “how” of ethics. Eve was deceived into thinking that good and evil were merely something to be known, as opposed to something that one does. This is what makes the directive of God an “ethical” one: Good and evil cannot merely be known objectively; they are lived subjectively. And the failure to temper the quest for knowledge of good and evil with the realization that good and evil are practiced is what results in the “fall” of humanity. So as Eve ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, she did not recognize that in her quest to know evil, she was, in fact, doing evil. As she sought “knowledge,” she did so to the exclusion of an ethical directive to the contrary: do not eat of the fruit of the tree. The biblical account of the fall of humanity thus illustrates the first sentence of Aristotle's Metaphysics: “All human beings by nature desire to know.”4 Interestingly, Aristotle uses the term ορεγονται (oregontai), which translates as “desire to know” and implies a hand reaching out to grasp an object in the distance; this is precisely what Eve did: she “took” (in Hebrew, , laquach, meaning “to seize,” implying a grasping) the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and ate of it because it was “desired” to make her wise.And it is this notion of grasping and seizure for the sake of knowledge that creates the moral problem at work in “Sonny's Blues”: Because the narrator's epistemological impulse to “know” his brother Sonny is unaccompanied by an awareness of and sensitivity to his moral obligation to Sonny—in short, because the narrator is committed to an ethics of knowing and is not committed to an ethics of doing—the narrator, like Eve, “falls,” for in his quest to “know” his brother, he attempts to assimilate him into a scheme of middle-class, bourgeois intelligibility. Indeed, the narrator takes action to help his brother, but only on the narrator's terms; he attempts to make Sonny like himself. And this is the problem of epistemic addiction: one strives to “know” others without regard for their alterity such that one tries to make others like the self. Epistemic addiction, then, practices a sort of violence toward others where the “I” attempts to transform the other into what it wants the other to be. Emmanuel Levinas put it this way: “violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action.”5 I use the term addiction to emphasize the addiction motif of the story: although Sonny is addicted to heroin, his brother—the narrator of the story—is addicted to knowledge insofar as he wants Sonny to play a role in which Sonny will cease to recognize himself as a jazz musician and instead become a “stable,” middle-class, bourgeois, family man. But if this happens, Sonny is transformed at the expense of his identity; this is unacceptable for Baldwin, who, I believe, wants to affirm Sonny's alterity.This essay discusses the moral problem of epistemic addiction as Baldwin depicts it in “Sonny's Blues.” Not only does Baldwin critique epistemic addiction, but Baldwin's critique displays some remarkable affinities with Emmanuel Levinas, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche, all of whom provide critiques of epistemic addiction in their own work. Levinas, in response to what he claims are the epistemologically driven totalizing tendencies of Western philosophy, develops an ethics as first philosophy, demanding a regard for the alterity of the Other that makes a heteronomous demand on the ego, disrupting its economy of enjoyment and putting the ego in crisis. Unlike the Socratic doctrine of recollection from the Meno, which, according to Levinas, receives “nothing of the Other but what is in me,”6 Levinas argues for the utter alterity of the Other, lying beyond the reach of totalization. Kierkegaard also articulates a strong ethics by characterizing repetition as a passionate movement of commitment into the future, a movement that knowledge cannot make. And Nietzsche critiques the Socratic quest for knowledge, arguing that its naive optimism destroys the creative tension between the Apollonian and Dionysian forces, a tension that is essential for a vibrant culture. For Nietzsche, this creative tension helps us cope with the tragedy that characterizes human existence. Embracing this tension leads to a post-theological world in which human beings are free—and, more importantly, responsible—to create meaning without the pretense of certainty associated with epistemologically driven theological accounts of morality. Reading “Sonny's Blues” through Levinas, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche leads to a reciprocity of philosophical and literary appreciation: Not only do insights from Levinas, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche all surface in “Sonny's Blues,” thus helping one to clarify Baldwin's social critique, but Baldwin's presentation of philosophical issues in fictional narrative gives embodiment to the philosophical reflections of Levinas, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.In section III, I discuss how Baldwin's social critique in “Sonny's Blues” has greater explanatory force when it is read with Levinas's notion of ethics as first philosophy as opposed to Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the other as conceived in his notion of “dialogic discourse.” Although Bakhtin's notion of dialogic discourse demands a regard for otherness, I argue that it is Levinas's account of ethics as first philosophy that succeeds in getting behind the self to subvert its autonomy and rationality in a way that Bakhtin's dialogic discourse does not. Bakhtin's conception of otherness—unlike Levinas's—is firmly rooted in the self, a self that transforms the other into a text that the self authors, a self that is the alpha and omega of dialogic discourse, a self that treats the other as an equal with the self. But Baldwin does not want Sonny merely treated as an “equal”; he does not want reciprocity between Sonny and his brother. Instead, I believe that Baldwin's depiction of Sonny is more consistent with Levinas's concept of infinity: Sonny is the Other, incapable of assimilation into the self.Section IV discusses how Baldwin's narrator and Sonny correspond to Kierkegaard's pseudonym, Constantin Constantius, and the young man in love from Repetition. There is a correspondence in the character development and narrative structure between “Sonny's Blues” and Repetition that results in five remarkable similarities between the two stories. I also argue that Baldwin's use of flashback has affinities with Kierkegaard's notions of recollection and repetition from Repetition; for as the narrator is confronted with his ethical commitment to Sonny, he attempts to avoid this commitment through recollection: he recollects the security and stability of his childhood religious experiences. But Sonny can only be protected if his brother can commit to a future-oriented repetition toward him, yet this is the kind of ethical commitment that the narrator cannot make. So although he fondly recollects the circumstances of his childhood through the aesthetically oriented backward movement of recollection, the narrator cannot sustain his commitment to Sonny without making the ethically oriented forward movement of repetition.Section V argues that the narrator and Sonny correspond to Nietzsche's notions of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Drawing from The Birth of Tragedy, I argue that the narrator's inability to make sense of his brother's life indicates a larger failure of rationality to make sense of a world where, in Nietzsche's words, there are “effects without causes.” It is this world—Sonny's world of drug addiction and musical improvisation—that lies beyond the reach of the algebra teacher, his brother. The symmetrical, law-like nature of mathematical operations, articulated in the algebraic maxim “What is done to one side of an equation must be done to the other,” collapses at the sound of the Dionysian cacophony that is not only Sonny's music but also his life. Finally, drawing from Nietzsche's notion of the “death of God” from Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Gay Science, I argue that with the death of his daughter, named Grace—the central tenet of Christian soteriology—the narrator experiences, in a profoundly Nietzschean sense, the death of God. The narrator realizes that theological explanations of suffering can rescue neither him nor Sonny from the frigid clutch of Dionysian tragedy. Instead, the narrator must face the terrestrial reality of not only Sonny's suffering but also his own. I conclude in section VI.The narrative structure of “Sonny's Blues” is monologic discourse. The story is told entirely from the perspective of a nameless narrator (Sonny's brother). Throughout the story, one senses that the narrator, in his attempts to help Sonny, is actually driving Sonny further away from him. The harder the narrator tries to help Sonny, the more the estrangement between them worsens. Sonny thus seems to be epistemologically slippery; he is always already beyond or transcending the grasp of his brother's “helping hand.” On the surface, it is easy to applaud the narrator for his attempts to “help” his brother. But something more significant is happening here: The narrator wants to help Sonny, but he wants to help Sonny become like him. During the narrator's dialogue with Sonny after their mother's funeral, when Sonny confides in his brother that he wants to be a musician, the narrator admits that “I'd never played the role of the older brother quite so seriously before, had scarcely ever, in fact, asked Sonny a damn thing. I sensed myself in the presence of something I didn't really know how to handle, didn't understand.”7 The narrator's subjectivity is disrupted by the presence of an otherness that is beyond his grasp. That the narrator wants to constitute Sonny on his own terms, demanding that Sonny be what he wants Sonny to be, is evidenced when the narrator asks Sonny if he can “make a living” at being a jazz musician (SB, 121). The narrator reminds Sonny that “people can't always do exactly what they want to do” (SB, 122) and tells him that “it's time you started thinking about your future” (SB, 121). The narrator thus tries to discourage Sonny from being a jazz musician in an attempt to help him. But Sonny's alterity is forgotten. Sonny does not give himself kath-auto; that is, he is not accepted on his own terms. Instead, the narrator's being becomes the transcendental horizon for Sonny's appearing to the narrator. There is, then, embedded within the narrative structure of “Sonny's Blues,” an ethical problem of ego and other. What kind of “otherness” is Baldwin depicting here? And what kind of “otherness” gives Baldwin's social critique its most potent explanatory force?There are at least two views of otherness that can be used to interpret the narrator and his relationship to Sonny. The first view is Bakhtin's notion of dialogic discourse, which Sandy Norton has connected to “Sonny's Blues,” and the second is Levinas's notion of ethics as first philosophy. Norton has argued that the move from monologic to dialogic discourse in “Sonny's Blues” is a move that Baldwin makes to expose the narrator's difficulty in dealing with his own problems by forcing the narrator to engage with Sonny's otherness.8 Although Norton is correct in pointing out that Bakhtin's dialogic discourse recognizes otherness, I do not believe it to be the kind of otherness that provides Baldwin's social critique with its greatest degree of explanatory power. This conclusion finds support through an analysis of Bakhtin and Levinas and the application of their views of otherness to “Sonny's Blues.”On Bakhtin's account of otherness, dialogic discourse is contrasted with “monologic” discourse, which is the kind of discourse that “denies the existence outside of itself of another consciousness with equal rights and equal responsibilities.”9 In monologic discourse, “another person remains wholly and nearly another object of consciousness, and not another consciousness.”10 Bakhtin writes that “monologue is finalized and deaf to the other's response, does not expect it and does not acknowledge in it any decisive force. Monologue manages without the other, and therefore to some degree materializes all reality.”11 In contrast to monologic discourse, dialogic discourse provides the other with a voice, enabling a conversation with the ego. Dialogic discourse thus recognizes the equality of the other and, in doing so, illumines Bakhtin's tripartite structure of subjectivity: “I-for-myself,” “I-for-others,” and “the other-for-me.” Although scholars have indicated that the two latter categories provide Bakhtin with a clear notion of otherness,12 for Bakhtin, “the other human being exists for me entirely in the object and his I is only an object for me…. I am incapable of fitting all of myself into an object, for I exceed any object as the active subiectum of it.”13 So while there are three modes of Bakhtin's subjectivity, the “I-for-myself” mode remains primal. Nealon thus concludes that “at its best, the other in Bakhtin remains just like me: independent, internally free, unfinalizable, and indeterminate.”14 Furthermore, Nealon indicates that for Bakhtin, “the other, is in some sense … a version of me.”15 In the end, then, Bakhtin's notion of dialogic discourse invests a degree of otherness to the other that monologic discourse clearly does not, but that investment is made by a self that retains primacy over the other, creating the other as an author creates a text.Levinas's account of otherness is rooted in an attempt to replace metaphysics with ethics as first philosophy. According to Levinas, Western philosophy is characterized by an all-consuming epistemological impulse inclined toward what he calls “totality.” Since the pre-Socratics, philosophy has attempted to comprehend the world in its entirety. Levinas sees this in Thales's claim that “all is water.”16 For Levinas, it is the all that is problematic here; for it implies a sense of totality and completeness that is rooted in human reason. The noetic structure of Husserl's transcendental ego and the existential structure of Heidegger's Dasein employ epistemology and ontology, respectively, to attain a subjectivity that is in control. But Levinas wants to problematize these epistemic and ontological groundings of subjectivity, which are very much in control, with one's face-to-face relationship to the other person; that is, he argues that our most basic philosophical encounter is neither with a world that we can totalize through knowledge of the noetic structures of consciousness (Husserl) nor with the existential structure of Dasein (Heidegger) but, rather, with the face of another person who makes ethical demands on us. On Levinas's view, then, Husserl's and Heidegger's subjectivities are now in a position to attempt to divest otherness of its strangeness and alterity, and, in so doing, the Other is transformed into what the ego wants it to be. Determined to ensure an utterly asymmetrical relationship between the ego and the Other, Levinas rejects the notion that the Other could ever be the same as the ego. Indeed, even as Baldwin uses religious imagery throughout “Sonny's Blues” to articulate significant points of the story, Levinas appropriates Judeo-Christian theological terms to describe the significance of the other by calling the other “The Most High.” Levinas's account of the ego and the other is characterized by what he has termed the dimension of “height,” an utterly asymmetrical relation where the economy of the ego's enjoyment is interrupted by a heteronomous ethical demand from the Other.17 It is in this sense that one becomes a subject for Levinas: one's uninterrupted freedom and enjoyment are shattered by the significance of a moral demand from the Other that precedes one's autonomy.In comparison, Bakhtin's account of subjectivity sounds much like Husserl's account of subjectivity from the fifth Cartesian Meditation. There, Husserl provides an account of intersubjectivity where he employs a notion of “analogical appresentation,” conceiving of the other person in terms that are essentially the same as those by which the ego conceives of itself. Husserl's subject might not have access to the noetic content of the other (as Derrida argues in “Violence and Metaphysics”), but the ego is still, at least formally, defining the subjectivity of the other. And Bakhtin's subject plays a similar role, constituting the other as an author composes a text. But Derrida's defense of Husserl notwithstanding, Levinas is going to argue that Husserl's subject and, by implication, Bakhtin's are fundamentally still very much in control. And this is not the case for Levinas's subject, who becomes a subject by having his or her enjoyment terminated by the heteronomous and traumatic ethical demand of the Other. The difference between Bakhtin's subjectivity and Levinas's subjectivity is, then, the place and work of the subject: For Bakhtin, the subject is primal and constitutes the Other, but for Levinas, the Other is primal and constitutes the subject, who is secondary and decentered and remains in crisis.Now, with these differences between Bakhtin and Levinas in mind, one might ask: Does Baldwin simply want to open up dialogue between the narrator and Sonny, in order to expose an “other” who is characterized by an equity and reciprocity conferred by the self, or does Baldwin want to radicalize Sonny so that the narrator will respect Sonny for who he is as the “Other,” distinct from and utterly unequal to himself? Again, the “help” from his brother is not a helping hand in Sonny's time of need that accepts him as he is; it is instead the hand of Eve reaching out to “understand,” “grasp,” and “know” Sonny, but not on his terms, only on the terms of the narrator. Ultimately, then, it will not suffice for Sonny to be an other of dialogic discourse. Sonny must be the Other of ethical first principles. This, I believe, best explains Baldwin's critique.Kierkegaard's notion of repetition further clarifies the moral problem of epistemic addiction in “Sonny's Blues.” Kierkegaard's Repetition is the story of Constantin Constantius, the author, who encounters a young man in love. In what is likely an autobiographical reference, Kierkegaard—through his pseudonym—presents the young man as one who is in the midst of a profound existential crisis because he does not know how to break the engagement without hurting his fiancée. Constantin and the young man are distinct personalities. Constantin writes of himself that “as a rule I tend to relate to men as an observer.”18 Following this line of thought, he writes that “one is inclined to observe only when they are lacking and there is an emptiness or when they are coquettishely concealed.”19 Constantin begins the story with a detailed philosophical explanation about the difference between recollection and repetition. According to him, recollection and repetition are similar movements that are made in opposite directions and with different motivations. Recollection is an aesthetically motivated, backward movement into the past, and repetition is an ethically motivated, forward movement into the future. After contrasting and comparing these concepts in an extended philosophical discussion, Constantin introduces the reader to the young man, who, instead of being preoccupied with conceptual analysis, was, in Constantin's words, “occupied with himself.”20 He was “too restless to sit down but paced swiftly back and forth. His gait, his movement, his gestures—all were eloquent, and he himself glowed with love.”21 Constantin thus represents philosophical, theoretical knowledge, and the young man thus represents existentially lived experience.Against this backdrop of Repetition, one can see its parallels with “Sonny's Blues” in terms of both the narrative structure and the characters. First, in both stories, there are two principal characters; in “Sonny's Blues” it is the narrator and Sonny, and in Repetition, the two main characters are the author, Constantin, and the young man in love. Second, the young man in love from Repetition and Sonny are both undergoing an existential crisis: The young man is in love and wants to end the relationship, and Sonny is a heroin addict. Third, both the young man and Sonny attempt to gain some relief from people who want to help but who are woefully unable to help them. The young man attempts to get comfort from one who understands the movement of repetition theoretically but who, by his own admission, cannot make the movement existentially.22 And Sonny attempts to get solace from his brother, who has a hard time respecting Sonny's chosen occupation as a jazz musician. Fourth, both Sonny and the young man in love are asked to transform themselves in ways that they find objectionable: The young man in love is asked to pretend to dislike his fiancée, and Sonny is asked to forsake his interest in music to become a “stable” member of the middle class and hold down a “real” job. That both Constantin and the narrator ask the young man in love and Sonny to transform themselves, respectively, in these ways is significant; for it indicates that the narrator in “Sonny's Blues” and Constantin represent archetypes of epistemic addiction: they both are so interested in “knowing” the “what” in terms of what they think they know to be good for the other person that they have lost sight of the “how” of compassion, understanding, and regard for others on their own terms. Finally, the young man in love turns away from the epistemic orientation of Constantin to a religious text (the book of Job), and Sonny turns from the epistemologically addicted narrator to jazz. So it is that religion (for Kierkegaard) and jazz (for Baldwin) represent subjective ways of doing in contrast to objective ways of knowing.Recall that for Levinas, Socratic recollection is the way of immanence and sameness. And for Baldwin, it is this kind of immanence and sameness of the narrator of “Sonny's Blues” that leads to the disregard of ethics. As with Levinas, so it is with Kierkegaard's pseudonym, Constantin Constantius, the author of Repetition. For Constantin, recollection is associated with aesthetic enjoyment as opposed to ethical commitment, which can only come by way of repetition. Whereas recollection is static and aesthetic, fondly remembering the past, repetition is dynamic and ethical, committing to the future. In Repetition, Constantin attempts to re-create his trip to Berlin but realizes that the enjoyment of the trip cannot be re-created. Rather, the enjoyment of the trip can only be recalled. Constantin points out that recollection and repetition are the “same movement” but in “opposite directions.” Recollection is a movement backward to the past, but repetition is a “recollection forward” into the future. Repetition requires a degree of passion and dynamism that recollection does not. For when one repeats an action in an ethical sense, one must perform it with passion and enthusiasm as though it is the first time one has ever done it. Constantin uses the example of marriage. The ethical commitment of marriage is a forward movement, a movement into the future that requires some passion for the marriage to remain vibrant and alive. Moreover, if one is passionate about one's occupation, one can perform the ordinary tasks of the job without growing weary of it. One can do the same thing over and over and yet remain enthused. For Kierkegaard, Christendom is in need of passion. The listless and complacent lifestyle of Christendom was lacking in passion and was thus decidedly un-Christian. Similarly, the narrator is in need of a passion for his brother, not a passion to make him into what he wants him to be but, rather, a passion to commit to accepting Sonny as he is. Sonny is not married. Sonny does not have children. Sonny does not live a “stable” life. Sonny is a heroin addict. Sonny is a jazz musician. The narrator either will not or cannot commit to Sonny; instead, he tries to avoid his ethical commitment to Sonny through recollection, illustrated through Baldwin's use of flashback.Once Sonny has returned from rehabilitation for his involvement with heroin, the narrator is taking Sonny to his home to live with his wife and children. And this is too much for the narrator, for while interacting with Sonny in his home, he says that “everything I did seemed awkward to me, and everything I said sounded freighted with hidden meaning. I was trying to remember everything I'd heard about dope addiction and I couldn't help watching Sonny for signs. I wasn't doing it out of malice. I was trying to find out something about my brother. I was dying to hear him tell me he was safe” (SB, 113). The narrator, because he felt so awkward, speaks of his wife, Isabel, who helped to ease the tension: “And thank God she was there, for I was filled with that icy dread again” (SB, 113). It is in this context of “dread” over his commitment to Sonny that the narrator recollects his mother and his childhood, fondly remembering the momentary peace of a Sunday evening after dinner. It is significant that the narrator's flashback comes at a time when he is confronted with a future-oriented ethical commitment that he is trying to make to Sonny; for the timing of the flashback indicates that the narrator ventures into the past to avoid present and future commitments to Sonny. But the narrator cannot simply recall his ethical commitment; he must live it, which he cannot do.For Levinas and for Kierkegaard, Socratic recollection represents the way of immanence: The truth already exists within us, and we just need to recollect it to understand it. Levinas wants a radical alterity through his notion of ethics as first philosophy, and Kierkegaard wants the passionate ethical commitment of repetition as opposed to the stagnant doctrine of Socratic recollection. Nietzsche's critique of Socrates is somewhat different. For Nietzsche, Socrates represents the decline of Greek culture and, by extension, the decline of modern civilization. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argues that the Socratic quest for objective definition, characterized by generalization and theoretical abstraction, upsets the balance between the distinct yet complementary Apollonian and Dionysian artistic impulses that made Greek culture superior to the culture of modern Europe. According to Nietzsche, “Socrates is the archetype of the theoretical optimist whose belief that the nature of things can be discovered leads him to attribute to knowledge and understanding the power of panacea, and who understands error to be inherently evil. To penetrate to the ground of things and to separate true knowledge from illusion and error was considered by Socratic man to be the noblest, indeed the only truly human vocation.”23 Nietzsche points out that “from Socrates onwards, the mechanism of concepts, judgments and conclusions was prized, above all other abilities, as the highest activity and most admirable gift of nature.”24 It is through the “mechanism” of Socratic “concepts” that modern European culture has been put in a crisis. One cannot, for Nietzsche, assume control over one's life the way that Socrates seemed to suggest by his claim that one who knows the good will, in virtue of that knowledge, perform good acts; for Nietzsche holds that existence is fundamentally tragic and unpredictable. The mechanism of concepts is apparent in the Socratic notion that knowledge is tantamount to virtue. Socrates, then, according to Nietzsche, is a re