Leonard Cohen and Philosophy

by Holt, Jason

  The conflict here parallels the conflicted representation of God as caring yet distant, and all-forgiving but punishing. Given this fact, perhaps it is no wonder the man of faith experiences conflicting emotions, like hope and fear, or trust and guilt. One might even argue that there is something in the conflict that intensifies the experience.

  But clearly there is an issue over how the philosophical problem of self-deception should be resolved. In the rest of this chapter I will argue that Cohen’s conception of love can explain away this paradox if we take seriously the dreamer’s view of romantic love and beauty as fundamentally transcendental and beyond reason.

  True Love Leaves No Traces

  In Plato’s dialogues, the philosopher Socrates asks his interlocutors for definitions of key concepts; for example, he asks: What is justice? What is piety? In this regard, we might equally ask: What is love? It’s important to bear in mind that what Socrates sought in each case was a universal and essentialist definition, one that describes the essence of the thing in question, and according to which any given concept has a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. This endeavor presupposes what is known in philosophy and cognitive science as the classical theory of concepts.

  Given Cohen’s poetic and transcendental approach, it is clear that Cohen would reject any classical theory account of love. In other words, he would reject the very idea that love could have a definable essence in the sense described. For a philosophical exponent of this view, we might turn to the later work of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein characterizes his position in terms of “language games” and instead of claiming that there’s one thing in common to all things we call games, he says that there is a whole network of similarities and connections, rather like the idea of family resemblances:

  Consider for example the proceedings that we call “games.” I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all?— Don’t say: “There must be something common, or they would not be called ‘games’”—but look and see whether there is anything common to all.—For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. (section 66)

  So, according to Wittgenstein’s anti-essentialist view, there’s no one common factor connecting all instances of things we call games, or any concept for that matter.

  This position can be developed further if we think of love as an essentially subjective, rather than objective, concept. According to this view, love will differ in subjective experience from person to person because it is shaped by our cultural norms and attitudes. Psychologist Robert Sternberg argues that we construct our love stories. Our constructed love stories draw on our histories and experiences, and we can’t see outside of these stories. This view denies the singular and universal definitional approach we see in the classical theory of concepts and casts doubt on certain evolutionary accounts, which view love as a mechanism for survival and genetic replication. Instead, this view suggests a relativized notion of love. In other words, there are no objective truths about love, and love has no objective reality.

  Cohen’s transcendental account of love is ultimately subjective and won’t conform to the essentialist idea of love as being definable. So, if the concept of love has no objective reality—and we reject the idea that there are objective truths about love—and love is instead constructed by the stories and songs born out of the subjective experiences of individuals, then Cohen can describe love in ways that incorporate the contradictory beliefs we find in self-deception.

  Love beyond Reason

  One historically popular way to help us make sense of the self-deceivers we find in Cohen’s songs is to think of the mind as somehow divided. This is a view that we find in various thinkers, from Plato and Sigmund Freud, to the recent American philosopher Donald Davidson. Davidson puts the idea like this:

  The point is that people can and do sometimes keep closely related but opposed beliefs apart. To this extent we much accept the idea that there can be boundaries between parts of the mind; I postulate such a boundary somewhere between any (obviously) conflicting beliefs. Such boundaries are not discovered by introspection; they are conceptual aids to the coherent description of genuine irrationalities. (p. 211)

  This isn’t to endorse a physical idea of compartmentalization or division. Rather, as Davidson explains, such division is a conceptual tool to allow us to make sense of self-deception.

  One might argue that this “divided mind” explanation of self-deception allows us to make sense of the conflict that the protagonist feels towards Jane and his rival in “Famous Blue Raincoat.” Potentially, it’s a way to account for such “genuine irrationality.” But I think the way Cohen fuses the erotic with the spiritual means we can go a step further than this idea of mental division and irrationality; I think there’s a more fundamental explanation that means we can reject the premise that love must have some coherent definition and see Cohen as giving an account of romantic love that goes beyond reason.

  In understanding Cohen in this way, we can return to the work of Wittgenstein, this time on religion. In his biography of Wittgenstein, Ray Monk characterizes Wittgenstein’s view of religion in the following way: “Religious beliefs are not analogous to scientific theories, and should not be accepted or rejected using the same evidential criteria” (p. 410). So, following Wittgenstein, if Cohen’s stance on romantic love and female beauty is akin to religious experience and belief, as I have claimed, then the claims he makes of it need not be subject to the same level of evidential criteria that we reserve for the truths of science. Rather Cohen can endorse a faith-based approach to the truths of love, with all the inconsistencies and contradictions such an approach may entail.

  Sincerely, L. Cohen?

  Two consequences emerge from Cohen’s standpoint on the relativity of the truths of love. His position becomes both liberated and ironic. With both of these consequences comes yet greater authenticity.

  Ultimately, Cohen rejects a pessimistic determinism about love; there’s no ultimate path for love to follow but instead a range of narratives about potential love stories. From the conflict, then, we find freedom; and it’s in affirming this kind of freedom that I think Cohen reveals his authenticity as someone able to capture in song certain truths about love and beauty.

  This emancipatory element to Cohen’s work leads him to reject what the philosopher Richard Rorty calls a “final vocabulary.” A final vocabulary is a kind of expression that can’t be superseded by other alternative descriptions. To reject a final vocabulary of love means that love can be remade and reconstructed through new stories but never definitively articulated.

  A songwriter like Cohen, who rejects a final vocabulary for love, is poised to become an ironist. According to Rorty, an ironist fulfills three conditions:

  (1) She has radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary she currently uses, because she has been impressed by other vocabularies, vocabularies taken as final by people or books she has encountered; (2) she realizes that argument phrased in her present vocabulary can neither underwrite nor dissolve these doubts; (3) insofar as she philosophizes about her situation, she does not think that her vocabulary is closer to reality than others, that it is in touch with a power not herself. Ironists who are inclined to philosophize see the choice between vocabularies as made neither within a neutral and universal metavocabulary nor by an attempt to fight one’s way past appearances to the real, but simply by playing the new off against the old.

  Rorty goes on to explain that ironists have a “realization that anything can be made to look good or bad by being re-described” and are “never quite able to take themselves seriously.” They’re “always aware that the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to change, always aware of the contingency and frailty of their final vocabularies, and thus of their final selves” (pp. 73–74)
.

  Irony has always been part of Cohen’s fusion of the erotic and the spiritual. But, with Cohen’s advanced years, the later work embodies an increasingly ironic and self-deprecating tone. Witness songs like “Everybody Knows,” “I’m Your Man,” “I Can’t Forget,” “Tower of Song,” and “Going Home.” These songs are laced with irony. Furthermore, this increased irony is the natural consequence of the rejection of reason that underpins his fusion of the erotic and the spiritual because Cohen is no longer able to take himself fully seriously. And yet something about this only adds to the authenticity. We see more vulnerability; Cohen with his guard down. In doing so, Cohen toys with his relation to his listener, making us consider how much of his lyrics are a reflection of his genuine experience and how much they are employed for romanticized, artistic effect.

  This is a reflection we can apply to his entire body of work. We know that Cohen himself was the owner of the famous blue raincoat (I’m Your Man, p. 72) and was often described wearing it in his early years. So is he the undersigned or the recipient of the letter? Was his woman stolen from him, or did he do the stealing? If the truths of love are relative, then perhaps both versions of this love story can be true. If we dispense with final vocabularies, we can dispense with final selves—and, in doing so, we dispense with the distinction between protagonist and artist and bring about a fusion of the two. Perhaps the two fuse together most prominently in the deeply personal and confessional lyrics of “In My Secret Life,” where we find Cohen seemingly relating his own propensity to be deceptive.

  In conclusion, the notion of being overthrown by beauty that we find in “Hallelujah” and so many other songs provides the basis for Cohen’s transcendental account of romantic love. So depicted, love and relationships can be an unrelenting struggle. But with Cohen’s fusion of the erotic and the spiritual, this conception of romantic love is one that’s not constrained by the usual modes of reason. While the relativity of Cohen’s view leads to an ironist position, there is a liberating effect that allows him to reach and express greater authenticity.1

  ____________

  1 Thanks to Katerina Alexandraki, Fern Day, Sonja Delmonte, Malcolm Devoy, Jason Holt, Matthew Mayhew, Jill Riches, and Andrew Watson for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts.

  11

  Hallelujah and Atonement

  BABETTE BABICH

  Poet that he is, Leonard Cohen’s songs come to live within us. Indeed, Cohen’s observation that there’s “a crack in everything” resonates in popular culture and even echoes in the title of a book about not Cohen but spirituality: How the Light Gets In (Schneider).

  In his own songs, Cohen often seems to address us directly, his words expressing soul-wrenchingly dark feeling, desire, sometimes heartbreakingly keen. The erotic themes often include a constant dialectic, asserting (thesis) and countering (antithesis), and sublimating (synthesis) the claims of others, including the deity. In this way, his songs of love include not only the promise of grace, salvation, and blessing, but also conflict and abandonment, as well as affirmation and letting be.

  You

  This asserting and countering is ambivalent, echoing as it does in Hegel and in Plato’s terminology and indeed even before Plato in the turn from love to strife in the Pre-Socratic thinker, Empedocles. And there’s ambiguity too. Hence in Cohen’s “Hallelujah” we hear the ambiguous play between the “you” the singer seems to address—the one who isn’t really a music fan—and the “you” who seems to be David himself (could that be Cohen?). This is the David of the secret song, the one who finds himself undone by “her beauty in the moonlight,” and who later winds up bound to a kitchen chair, of all things, by some unnamed “she.” Associations run riot in the song (Babich, The Hallelujah Effect). With this poetic ambiguity there’s a suggestion of erotic sadism, sexual play, and a disturbing hint at an ultimate unmanning gesture. Everything falls into place, the domestic binding of strength, which shatters the locus of power, along with the special significance of a woman cutting an incapacitated man’s hair, and now we’re no longer talking about King David and any song, however pleasing to the Lord, but old Samson and the temple he brought down around him.

  Cohen’s ambiguity works between the lines of the song. The “you” addressed is lover and king and champion in one, and we remember that in addition to writing psalms, David was a warrior: one who knew how to keep his distance for the sake of triumph. Calculated distance adds to the sense of ambiguity. Still the flag that “you” would seem to have placed on some marble arch in the interim, complicates the dialogue. This “you” is the one who doesn’t really care for music, but at the same time it’s clear that “your” flag, however displayed, can’t hold a candle to the singer’s tale. It is of sublime irrelevance (this is the consummate synthesis of the song) as the “you” in question, whichever “you” hears the holy or the broken Hallelujah.

  Plainly, the song is only incidentally about David; it’s really about Cohen and his lovers, and it lets them know his singer’s disappointment, a lover’s resignation. The dialectic works because Cohen begins the song in his own voice: the first word—after “now”—is “I.”

  Both sympathy and ambivalence are possible from this perspective and in this same sense, Cohen asserts a sovereign interpretation of his own claim, partly sung to himself and partly sung to (and for) the listener who identifies with Cohen, the singer, and partly sung to his lovers. For his own part, what singer wouldn’t want a share in whatever secret King David knew, a sovereign secret to living large, with intrigues and battles, the secret of a series of lovers to sing to and a reputation as a lover and a singer exceeding nearly anyone in the Bible. Rather like Cohen himself.

  Ambiguity

  Lovers are more than fickle. The lover makes a promise to the beloved and seemingly always, nearly immediately breaks his word: it “breaks in his mouth,” as Nietzsche says (Genealogy of Morals, p. 60). Am I, can I be, the same person who promised in the past? Can’t I say: that was then, this is now? Everything changes, especially feelings. Feelings change, we change. Those who know us today often ignore the past, a distinct advantage for those who prefer to see themselves as able to reinvent, reconstitute themselves every day.

  Descartes reminds us that “because I was in existence a short time ago, it does not follow that I must now exist, unless in this moment some cause create me anew as it were,—that is, conserve me” (p. 95). Derrida echoes this point in the context of making promises: “in a promise, when you say ‘yes, I agree, I will’ you imply, ‘I will say “I will” tomorrow and I will confirm my promise,’ otherwise there is no promise. Which means that the ‘yes’ keeps in advance the memory of its own beginning” (p. 27).

  In practice, of course, promises and contracts are sometimes broken but that means only that they simply “stop,” so Derrida argues. Cohen seems to express a perspective on this stopping, addressing the “you” who changes from generosity to refusal (“but now you never show it to me”).

  And thus Cohen illuminates the ambiguity of the human condition: challenging us with his “Hallelujah”: “It doesn’t matter which you heard.” The thing about ambivalence is that Cohen can give his claims away again and again. The poet’s license takes it either way, has it both ways, in a nonexclusive disjunction, as the song goes.

  Ambivalence, having things both ways, having anything both ways, even when it comes to religion but especially when it comes to intimacy, is consummately erotic. At the same time, ethically speaking, it can be the essence of forgiveness and forbearance, even love. As Simone de Beauvoir highlights in The Ethics of Ambiguity, the ambiguous is emblematic of the human condition, existentially described as a lack of being: a person is what they are not, both their past legacy as well as future projects and plans.

  For the existentialist, the key turns on a life in time: the life lived by who you used to be and are no longer, as no longer young, innocent, trusting, foolish, and so on. At the same time, there’s the
life you currently live and have to live. This having to live is both obligation and condemnation. The past, even if it haunts you, is no longer an option; the future takes its own good time and, ultimately contingent, may turn out other than expected. A person is “freely obligated” to be, and may succeed or fail. And only for such a being can there be an ethics:

  One does not offer an ethics to a God. It is impossible to propose any to man if one defines him as nature, as something given. . . . This means that there can be a having-to-be only for a being who, according to the existentialist definition, questions himself in his being, a being who is at a distance from himself and who has to be his being. (Ethics of Ambiguity, p. 10)

  Cohen’s broken “Hallelujah” seems to sing of the failure that proves a higher order, even without God. One might call this higher ideal the “Empedocles effect” in Cohen as it retraces the alteration of love and strife as the cycle of cosmic time. As Empedocles describes the eternal cycle, “In Anger all are different forms and separate, but in Love they come together and are desired by each other” (The Presocratic Philosophers by Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, p. 293) according to the epoch in question. Parmenides is relevant to the extent that both Cohen and Parmenides would seem to share a vision of women as angels or messengers, as these guide the adept in the first part of Parmenides’s Proem: “The mares that carry me as far as ever my heart ever aspires sped me on, when they had brought and set me on the far-famed road of the god, which bears the man who knows over all cities. On that road was I borne, for that way the wise horses bore me, straining at the chariot and maidens led the way” (p. 473).

  For his own part, Cohen’s youthful idealization of women as poets (recollecting he supposed “that all women were poets,” and hence as we will see that he further reflects their language was the language of poetry) leads him to his own poet’s vocation. But where Parmenides is raising the question of Being, that which is and at the same time that which is impossible not to be (p. 245), Cohen himself expresses a vision of the divine. In keeping with his typical attention to ambiguity, Cohen includes Jewish, Christian, and even Buddhist elements. He refers to Buddhism not simply as an idle practice but from the perspective of an ordained monk.