Seeing Slant in the Company of Others

Liah Greenfeld, the eminent social theorist of modernity and philosopher of mind, once put a question to me that I have never quite set down: “Who are your most influential teachers?” My answer was quick and certain: Terry Robertson (literature as a source of possibility), Thomas Gladwin (the interconnectedness of things), Sarah Landau (art history as prospect), Robert Pippin (self-knowledge), William Veeder (close reading as method), Jean-Luc Marion (the limits of conceptualization), and David Tracy (the instability of meaning). I have been a rapid test taker my whole life. I know what I know immediately and reason through the uncertainties last. There were none such here, at least in terms of how I initially construed the question. Seen under a different slant of light, however, I truthfully could have also answered the question thus: William Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Leo Tolstoy, and Albert Camus. Recently, I replayed Greenfeld’s question in my mind, and it led me to recollect a transformative encounter studying Emily Dickinson under the guidance of David Tracy at The University of Chicago.

Tracy possessed a remarkable gift for illustrating how lines of text gesture towards the eternal, how they embody a deep history, deliver force in the moment, and open out to possibility. In this light, poetry is a source of truth. A poem, carefully attended to, can disclose the fundamental structure of experience itself. Yes, meanings have potential and valence, but that is not to say they are ungrounded or unstable. They rest on something firmer than the individual who apprehends them. Tracy’s teaching proved the proposition at the center of many of Dickinson’s greatest poems: encounter with another’s vision (and sometimes that “other” is another part of oneself) alters one’s aspect on the world. This proposition is well-recognized in the arts, yet social and political theorists of some sensitivity also understand that, in the presence of particular individuals, at particular times, and within and through the particular bonds that constitute our relation one to another, we learn to see. There is a stability that persists throughout the variety of sources of experience, an anchor of continuity that holds even as perspectives multiply. Tracy the influential teacher created opportunities for me to discover meanings that I had not seen (or even attempted to see) but which became visible to me and which I continue to see in sharp relief. That encounter helped set the course of my intellectual life, leading me deeper into epistemology and the philosophy of the human sciences. I have never lost sight of the truth that taking stock begins in the particular–with the intrinsic potential that a certain slant of light makes visible.

To better name the ways that an encounter with another can open our vision, let me turn to the source of my guiding metaphor, namely, the “Slant of light” from Dickinson’s poem #258, here quoted in its entirety:

There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons —
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes —

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us —
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are —

None may teach it — Any —
’Tis the Seal Despair —
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air —

When it comes, the Landscape listens —
Shadows — hold their breath —
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
On the look of Death —

My first contention is that the subject of the poem is the slant. From the standpoint of material reality, the light conditions the slant. No light, no slant. We meet these ideas, however, on Dickinson’s terrain, and she suggests the importance of the slant by capitalizing its initial letter while leaving “light” and several other nouns in lowercase. This poem is about a way of seeing, a standpoint of perception through which experience is constituted. The slant happens to take form through light, but its essence is the angle or the singular perspective itself. There is a play on the senses of slant as a subjective leaning (a theme that runs through many of her works) and as an oblique view of the world.

The poem’s first observation is that this slant “oppresses, like the Heft / Of Cathedral Tunes.” What are these “Cathedral Tunes,” and why is their heft oppressive? Let us assume the referent is sacred music and consider what it means for it to carry heft. Here we have one of Dickinson’s most arresting images. Cathedral tunes are not mere sounds; they are music, they are ordered, they elicit affect, and, often (as when heard in a cathedral), they speak a message–to the Lord and His Church. In these significant ways, the tunes are already circumscribed by meaning. The heft of such music–from one standpoint, from this slant–is the weight of a tradition of inherited meanings and symbolic significance. The meanings are woven into the material of the sounds, as inseparable from the music as weight from stone.

Yet the oppressive heft of this music may have a different origin. The cathedral tunes may overwhelm the intuition (as Jean-Luc Marion might say); they may give themselves in excess. They may offer more than our meaning frameworks or our organized sensibility can handle. We have words at hand that denote that which we know to be ineffable: awful grandeur, sublimity, etc. What do we see, as it were, when tunes overwhelm, stunning the listener with an awesomeness that exceeds the capacity of ordinary understanding to absorb? Seen from this slant, we are looking at an oppressive heft of superabundance. This is an actual overflow of meaningful possibility that endows the listener with a new premise or starting point.

Of course, Dickinson does claim that the slant gives us “Heavenly Hurt.” The phrase is startling. Is the hurt not hurtful because it is heavenly? Or is it something to be borne in our fallen condition? Dickinson says, “We can find no scar, but internal difference / Where the Meanings, are —” The slant is a force. It creates the conditions under which new meanings come into being and expands the reality of what we may experience. That expanded reality is at once within individual subjectivity and beyond it. It may become a traditum, a thing handed down, a way of seeing passed from teachers to students, from poets to readers, across distances of time that would seem to make such transmission of force impossible. This expansion of reality makes the encounter with the slant a true primordial event, by which I mean a moment when something genuinely new enters the domain of human feeling and understanding and becomes a condition for what follows. Just as a great painting can transform a landscape from a raw geographical object into a place, into a dignified entity charged with meaning and collective feeling, so can a slant transform the familiar world into something profoundly resonant that changes us, that leaves “internal difference.”

In poem #657 Dickinson illuminates this point masterfully:

I dwell in Possibility —
A fairer house than Prose —
More numerous of Windows —
Superior — for Doors —

Of Chambers as the Cedars —
Impregnable of Eye —
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky —

Of Visitors — the fairest —
For Occupation — This —
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise —

Here Dickinson figures the expansive power of the slant as a dwelling, a house of possibility that is “More numerous of Windows — / Superior — for Doors —” The slant, that fair house of possibility, affords seeing new vistas. A slant allows us to encounter aspects of the world as if for the first time in all of time. It may be paradise, indeed, to be gathered in our hands.

The force of the slant is not merely subjective. My teachers have slanted the light for me. A throughline runs between them and me and others for whom I may slant the light. The counterpoint to the subjective aspect takes a different form, however. Dickinson suggests that the slant itself affects the material world: “When it comes, the Landscape listens — / Shadows — hold their breath.” The landscape listens perhaps because the slant addresses it? Shadows hold their breath perhaps because it is only the “Slant of light” that has called them into being and, if it goes, the shadows go? No light, no shadows.

For those of us–indeed, here I refer to all mankind–immersed and reveling in intellectual things (ideas, concepts, frameworks of meaning), we know that holding on to a newly seen idea or watching a shadow appear and trying to map its contours before it disappears is often the most oppressive and liberating labor we undertake. A simpler way of making this point is to say the whole human world of experience is in thrall of the slant. Our inner subjectivity, our bonds with others and how our subjectivity conditions them, the meaning of the entire exterior world and the intuitions it provokes from us participate in the slant. The “internal difference” resonates with the outward world. When truth, beauty, and the good arrive, they demand witness. That we see them from this angle or that does not make what is seen relative, unstable, or disordered. It means only that the order is richer than any single vantage can exhaust.

Dickinson calls the slant an “imperial affliction / Sent us of the Air —” The air is invisible, and Dickinson characterizes it here as a medium of light. This is a strange idea from the standpoint of physics. Yet our organizing principle, the slant from which we apprehend this meaning, is not physical. It is poetic. The poem itself, sent us of Dickinson, demonstrates that a slant can be occasioned if not directly handed over like a material thing.

So what is the consequence of a departing slant? “When it goes, ‘tis like the Distance / On the look of Death —” Significantly, meaning in Dickinson’s imagery does not vanish. It recedes. All remains visible, although we may lose richness and sharp relief. Detail may escape us. The landscape returns to being mere landscape. The distance on the look of death is the sentiment or knowledge of absence of what was overwhelmingly present. This distance, this recession confirms the stability and actuality of what the slant reveals in one aspect or another. What we see is part of an enduring order even though we may not be able to take it in all at once. When the light shifts, we know what we have lost.

Consider how we actually come to see. We learn in the company of others, through the encounters they make possible and the perspectives they open for us. Long before we encounter a poem (or look upon a landscape on a winter afternoon), our experience of the world has been shaped by bonds of family, friendship, and community. These bonds give perspective and add resonance to what our vision takes in. We learn to see in the company of others. The interaction of persons gives rise to a shared ground that is itself a new condition for seeing.

I learned to appreciate Dickinson’s poem as a primordial event–to see how it set me on a new timeline and offered new possibility–because David Tracy created conditions under which its meanings became available to me. He did not hand me a syllabus containing settled conclusions. He improved my vision by slanting the light. Dickinson herself is part of this tremendous yet stable force. She created this poem, put something new into the world, as an occasion for others to discover their own slant. She handed down something that, although it is shared, does not make us alike. She showed that there is something to be seen. The poem is an inheritance that enlarges each heir differently, and this is, in fact, a defining quality of living tradition. This is the paradox at the heart of all genuine education and, indeed, of all great art: “None may teach it — Any —,” and when we encounter it from the right slant, we are forever transformed.

Despite the references to overt subjectivity and new timelines, there is much that is deeply conservative in all of this. Patently, there is what is handed down to us and the unbreakable linkage this creates with our forebears. What has come before–certainly Dickinson’s ideas, Tracy’s example, the traditions through which such ideas are handed on–merits honoring and stewarding for those who may follow. Less obvious, and more interesting to me, is the way that Dickinson’s argument about the slant helps us see that among the most significant conditions for human flourishing is the cultivation of our own subjectivity, which itself transforms the nature of the bonds we make with others, and, therefore, transforms others. These moments of meaningful transformation or propagation of internal difference are concrete enactments of liberty. They are emergences of intrinsic liberty rooted in the context of the eternal. The bonds we form not only connect us to one another but also to a past whose specifications of universal truth, beauty, and the good may even be hard for us to see … or they may be so until the angle of the light shifts. The radical potential and contextual valences of meaning rest on this stable ground. The poet, the teacher, and the student together form a chain of transmission in which what is handed down is a way of being in the world. Sometimes the intuitions will fit with our meanings, and sometimes they will exceed and overflow them. Is the effect different on winter afternoons? About this, I advance no claim.

Replaying Liah Greenfeld’s question in my mind, dwelling, if only for a short while in its fair house of possibility, helps me see more clearly that my initial answers to the question were of a piece. All of my most influential teachers share a deep appreciation of the potential latent in every condition of experience and its connection to predecessors, self, and those who follow. Greenfeld is now on the list, as are Ferdinand Tönnies, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, Robert Nisbet, and Jeffrey Alexander. Literature still sends tremors through my world, especially the works of Melville, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, McCarthy, and, still, Shakespeare. The primordial events that are their great works continue to shift the ground beneath me and thereby transform the angles of my slants. I see more clearly than ever that every teacher I named at the outset was slanting the light, each in a different way and from a different angle, revealing contours of the world I myself could not have traced alone. Having reasoned through the uncertainties, too, I appreciate now that my teachers’ gifts to me were others’ gifts to them, passed to them and through them and on to me.

Image Credit: Popular Science