Leonard Cohen and Philosophy (17 page)

This collapse of irony into bare-faced cynicism is a danger present in all irony, since irony works by giving only a hint that there is more meaning hidden in a personality than what can be conveyed in words. This promise seduces us because it conveys that we, like the speaker, can contain an entire life that is unable to be expressed in words, but it also cancels itself as a promise. The ironist can always say, “What, you didn’t take me seriously, did you?” and we have no grounds for a valid counter-claim, since we were warned from the very beginning not to take everything too seriously. The ironist can betray us without leaving proof that we have been betrayed.

Socrates, too, sometimes rejected friends and demanded solitude, and in Plato’s depictions of him his assertions that he just wants to be left alone sometimes sound sincere. And yet in the
Phaedrus
Plato was also careful to have him denounce writing as a departure from the true activity of philosophy. Like the painter—and for that matter like Cohen’s singer from whom we’ll be hearing long after he’s gone—the philosopher who is present to us only through his writings is one who is no longer open to our appeals and challenges (section 275d). Like the writer who refuses to be held to account for his philosophical assumptions, the singer who refuses all desire for the return of his love has yielded to the temptation of making his irony absolute.

This is a large part of what makes Cohen so rare. The modern world has no shortage of ironists, and many, like
Socrates in the ancient world, succeed in speaking on multiple levels at once and enlivening us to the possibilities of personality. Yet Cohen’s songs show a commitment to establishing and renewing direct personal connections in spite of their ironic tendency to undermine such connections. For Cohen, it has never been “the gift of a golden voice” that allowed him to connect with listeners, but his acknowledgment of the limitations of this voice.

9

The Mystery of the Mirror

L
ISA
W
ARENSKI

T
he room is small, but the window faces the river and the light is good. The floor, made of fine burnished wood, is uneven. A dancer’s space. It’s here that the story told in the song “Suzanne” begins.

Leonard Cohen’s muse, Suzanne Verdal, was a modern dancer and choreographer. She was the wife of Armand Villaincourt, a sculptor of some renown who was fifteen years her senior and Cohen’s friend. After her relationship with Villaincourt ended, Suzanne rented an apartment in a rooming house along the Saint Lawrence River in Old Montreal, where she lived with her child by Villaincourt. There were few cafés in the area at the time, so Suzanne would have her friends come to her home, where she would serve them tea and mandarin oranges. She had a practice of lighting a candle to invoke the “Spirit of Poetry” and invite quality conversation when she and Cohen had tea together. (I found helpful details about the inspiration for “Suzanne” in
I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen
by Sylvie Simmons.)

As the story of the song unfolds, it exhibits a certain conception of self-awareness and of relationships between conscious subjects that is embraced by psychologists and those philosophers who work in the tradition known as phenomenology. Phenomenologists are concerned with the structures
of consciousness as they are experienced from a first-person perspective.

A key element of the view portrayed in the song is the idea that our bodies shape our minds: we experience the world through our bodies, and we’re implicitly aware of ourselves in our experience. A second, related component is that we come to appreciate ourselves and others as being “minded”—as having beliefs, desires, and emotions—through our interactions with each other. Psychologists take our capacity to understand ourselves as minded, as well as our capacity to understand others as having minds of their own, to be part of the process of maturation. This maturational process is activated in the context of a parent-child relationship in which the adult “mirrors” the developing mind of the child in such a way that the child experiences his mind as his own. The child will likewise come to understand other people as having minds of their own. Through this process, the child acquires the ability to represent and respond to the mental states of others—a process that is sometimes referred to as reflective functioning.

The Body Self

To begin to understand what it could be to “touch a perfect body with a mind,” we must first consider what it is to be embodied. Persons are conscious, and they have bodies, as Leonard Cohen notoriously reminds us. But you don’t just possess your body: your body
is
the perspective in space and time from which you understand the world. Your body structures your experience of the world, including your experience of other people. We can consider our bodies as objects that can be observed, examined, or represented in paintings or sculptures, and when we do, we’re considering our bodies as objects from a third-person perspective. But from a first-person perspective, our bodies
constitute
our point of view. We perceive the world with and through our bodies. Our experiences have the qualitative character that they do because of our sensory capacities. There is something that it’s
like
for
you, from your perspective, to walk along a misty waterfront, to hear the boats go by, and to see the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours. From a first-person perspective, the body is “lived” as opposed to experienced as an object. The lived body is the body as an embodied first-person perspective that structures our experience. This type of theory originates in the work of Edmund Husserl (as explained in
Husserl’s Phenomenology
by Dan Zahavi) and is developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
(Phenomenology of Perception).

A key dimension of the first-person, embodied perspective that plays a crucial role in our experience of ourselves and others is what phenomenologists call pre-reflective self-consciousness. Pre-reflective self-consciousness is a kind of awareness of ourselves that we have
before
we engage in any form of reflection. It’s implicit in our experience; indeed, it constitutes the distinct first-personal character of experience: my experiences are unmistakably mine in that it’s
I
who is having them. For phenomenologists, pre-reflective self-consciousness is embodied, and we are pre-reflectively aware of our bodies
in
experience.

Perception isn’t mere passive reception. It involves bodily action. The bodily actions may be so subtle and small that they aren’t noticed by the perceiver. For example, the tiny movements of our eyes, called saccades, that take place when we read a book or watch a basketball game typically go unnoticed. In other cases, we are tacitly aware of our bodies when we explore and experience the world. If I reach for a cup of tea offered by Suzanne, I’m tacitly aware of where my body is as I perform this action, and this tacit awareness enables me to judge how far I have to reach in order to pick up the cup of tea. As I draw the cup of tea to my mouth, I know where the cup is in relation to my mouth. I may slow the movement of my arm as I bring the cup near my lips, and I’ll tip my head to make contact with its thin china rim in anticipation of sipping the hot tea. I have a sense of where my body is and how it is moving as I perform the action (proprioception), and I know where my body is in relation to other things (kinaesthetic awareness). But I don’t ordinarily reflect
on my movements as I reach for a cup of tea; I simply reach for the cup.

The tacit bodily awareness that I have when I reach for the cup, draw it to my mouth, and take a sip of tea, is a form of pre-reflective self-consciousness. When I perform these actions, I’m not aware of my body as an object. My body isn’t “given” to me in experience as a spatial object in the way that it is when it’s perceived by another person. As Husserl observed, originally, my body is experienced as a unified field of activity, a potentiality of mobility and volition, an “I do’” and “I can” (
Husserl’s Phenomenology,
p. 101).

When I do sip the tea, I experience the tea as being hot, and there is something that it’s like for me to have this experience, which is to say, the experience has a particular qualitative character. The tea feels hot in my mouth, but I may also experience it as warming my body. My experience of the hot tea is unmistakably
mine
. This sense of “mineness” is also a form of pre-reflective self-consciousness.

My attention will likely be drawn to my experience of the hot tea, in which case I will become reflectively aware of my experience. I may say to Suzanne, “The tea is hot.” When I’m aware
that
I’m having an experience of a certain kind, I’m
reflectively
aware, which is to say, I’m reflectively self-conscious.

We are aware of our bodies in various ways and to varying degrees when we perform particular actions. We sometimes deliberately guide our bodily movements, but we’re often not fully aware of our bodily movements in the reflective and self-conscious sense of “aware.” For example, when I peel a mandarin orange, I may look for a spot near the top of the orange where I can insert the top of my thumb to pierce its skin, and I deliberately insert my thumb in the chosen spot. I am aware
that
I am inserting my thumb in a particular spot. I may also be self-consciously aware of the movement of my thumb as I begin to peel away the skin. But I’m not reflectively aware of the kinetic melodies of my fingers and hands as I remove the skin of the orange in its entirety and pull away the excess fibers. A given action will often involve both reflective and pre-reflective elements of self-awareness.

The Role of the Other in Self-Awareness

Philosophers and psychologists alike have recognized the importance of relations with other conscious beings—intersubjective relations—in our capacity for reflective self-consciousness. We become aware of ourselves when we’re perceived by others. As I will explain, the very possibility of your becoming a fully human person and acquiring an awareness of yourself as such depends on this kind of social interaction.

The way that another person can make you aware of yourself is nicely illustrated by the following example from the chapter entitled “The Look” in Jean-Paul Sartre’s
Being and Nothingness
:

Let us imagine that moved by jealousy, curiosity, or vice I have just glued my ear to the door and looked through a keyhole. . . . But all of a sudden, I hear footsteps in the hall. Someone is looking at me! What does this mean? It means that I am suddenly affected in my being and that essential modifications appear in my structure—modifications which I can apprehend and fix conceptually by means of the reflective
cogito
. . . . I see
myself
because
somebody
sees me—as it is usually expressed. (pp. 347–49)

Imagine that you are the person who has just looked through the keyhole. When you hear the footsteps in the hall, you are made aware of yourself in the way that Sartre describes. For this to be possible, you must be aware that you exist in such a way that you can be seen by another. But this sense of your own visibility is immediately linked to your pre-reflective, proprioceptive-kinaesthetic awareness of your body (“Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness,” by Gallagher and Zahavi, p. 24).

Imagine that you see the person in the hallway who is capable of seeing you. You see the other because the other is embodied and so is an object for you. But when you look at the other, you experience the other as an experiencing
subject
as opposed to a mere object. You don’t, of course, experience
the other in the same way that the other experiences herself; you experience the other as a subject whose perspective isn’t directly accessible to you. You’re able to recognize the other as an experiencing subject only because you, too, are an embodied subject. Leonard Cohen exploits this facet of perception in “Take This Longing” when he says that “your body like a searchlight” his (Cohen’s) poverty reveals.

Our capacity to recognize our mental states—our beliefs, desires, and intentions—as ours, as well as our ability to understand another person’s state of mind, originates in the context of social interaction. Developmental psychologists understand this process as having its roots in early social interactions, and in particular, in the context of parent-child relations. A developing infant will eventually come to experience her consciousness as distinctively her own by being exposed to the reactions of others to herself.

When responding to an infant’s changing needs, a parent plays the role of a mirror to the developing infant. In
Playing and Reality
(p. 151), Donald Winnicott asks, rhetorically, What does the baby see when he or she looks at the mother’s face? Winnicott answers that ordinarily, what the baby sees is himself or herself: the mother is looking at the baby, and what she looks like (to the baby) is related to what she sees there. If the mother is attentive and responsive to the baby’s expression, the baby will see himself or herself reflected in the mother’s gaze.

In this metaphor of the mother as mirror, the mother doesn’t merely reflect the infant’s behavior; instead, she anticipates and reflects the developing mental states of the infant. The mother is thus something of a “magical” mirror in that she facilitates the infant becoming a person. In her 1998 article “Having a Mind of One’s Own and Holding the Other in Mind,” Susan W. Coates explains the sense in which the mother should be understood as a magical mirror. The mother sees in the infant something that is still only potential—something that she both recognizes and shapes. The mother’s ability to see the unrealized potential in the infant is what allows the infant to find it in the face of the mother,
and to experience the reflected state of mind as his or her own.