Leonard Cohen and Philosophy

by Holt, Jason

  The Bleak Side of Irony

  This sets a pretty high bar for the successful songwriter. In order to hold together all of these thoughts, Cohen relies on a great deal of multiply embedded irony. In a typical verse, a surface expression of disappointment with love incompletely hides a willingness to forgive, and for this irony to work Cohen must assume the listener can perceive both the disappointment and the forgiveness at once. At the same time, in order for the sincerity of this expression of forgiveness to be apparent, Cohen must also make clear that he still feels wounded by the experience, and yet that this woundedness is not an absolute obstacle to a genuine connection. Moreover, to avoid putting undue pressure on the listener or appearing too ardent, Cohen must also recognize that there is nothing special about his reaction—that’s just the way love works—at the same time that he insists that he still finds this connection important or even sacred.

  With all this weight put on a single ironic expression, we should not be too surprised that Cohen at times allows his irony to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. This bleaker side of irony can be found in “Tower of Song.” The song begins with its irony in full force, as the narrator acknowledges his desire while simultaneously trying to eliminate every hint of a request: “And I’m crazy for love, but I’m not coming on.” But as the narrator continues we realize that he is really not offering any kind of connection at all apart from the pure dissemination of feelings through song. The song is strikingly earnest in its acknowledgment of the pain previous romantic failures have caused him, but it refuses to acknowledge any vulnerability in the present. Cohen is, to be sure, his usual charming self, modestly acknowledging his lowly position in the Tower relative to such greats as Hank Williams, but the Tower is less a symbol of phallic incompleteness than a fortress from which he can only observe the world passively. When the song shifts from the lofty third-person perspective to the intimate second, it fails to betray Cohen’s customary vulnerability. He finds himself stunned that the gulf between him and his lover has grown so wide and despairs, “All the bridges are burning that we might have crossed, but I feel so close to everything that we lost,” but he catches himself and ruefully observes, “We’ll never have to lose it again.” From his new position in the Tower, love is merely the raw material of song. His love will thus persist indefinitely in its present form: “You’ll be hearing from me, baby, long after I’m gone. I’ll be speaking to you sweetly from a window in the Tower of Song.” Here the notion that love is inseparable from its simulation, which such songs as “Closing Time” and “I’m Your Man” merely leave open as a possibility in order to solicit further intimacy, is acknowledged as an insuperable fact. He has been telling us all along that every promise of genuine intimacy had to be false, and yet we were innocent or stubborn enough to believe these promises anyway.

  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

  LISA WARENSKI

  The 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 persp
ective, 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.

  Dr. Coates offers us the
following example by way of illustrating how a child can come to discover something new about his mind through his mother:

  A young toddler, barely two, is playing in the backyard; he excitedly pulls at and sniffs some flowers while making excited but unintelligible utterances. His mother can see his pleasure, a pleasure that differs from her own, and smiles in recognition saying, “You really love those colors, don’t you? You are a guy who loves flowers.” Now in addition to the flowers and the child’s excitement, there is a third space (Ogden 1994) where the boy moves from a spontaneous sensory experience to a discovery of the experience (of his enjoying colors and the flowers) in the intersubjective space as it is held in the mind of the mother. The child looks at the mother, sees himself, and smiles; there is a recognition and a discovery of a part of the self held by the other. By virtue of being sensitively met, the child comes to experience loving colors and flowers as a part of his notion of himself, and this notion has emerged in the transitional space created by the mother’s attuned response. (pp. 122–23)

  By being attentive and receptive to the child’s responses, the mother has enabled the child to experience his responses as his own. The child thus experiences his mind as his own. In time, the child will come to appreciate the mother as an autonomous, separate person, and he will develop the capacity to experience some of her responses as expressions of love.