A Letter to James Baldwin about "The Creative Process"

Dear James,

I read your short, majestic remarks on the creative process and found myself thinking and talking about two themes in particular. First, the aloneness of the artist. You open by saying an artist "must actively cultivate... the state of being alone." At stake: "conquer[ing] the great wilderness of himself," helping to "make the world a more human dwelling place." Dan Abella and I wondered aloud about purposely doing this in literary and philosophical history. He mentioned how being able to be alone was a critical feature of Romanticism. How can, say, the child be the father of the man if a man only has memories of raging over team sports or commenting on an influencer's livestream?

My work on Nietzsche and Heidegger, to a not insignificant degree, deals with their romanticization of loners and cranks. What if someone far removed from society, residing in cold, icy places, has the insight all of us need? Closer to the everyday work of teaching community college, there exists a dual need for our students to be accepted and also to develop a sense of independence. William Deresiewicz has a point when he speaks about the cultivation of a unique self which takes the time to introspect, reflect, and meditate. One which does not need to constantly text or post every single thought. To this end, I don't know if a serious attempt to become independent balances with being social at any cost. My rough thinking is that you have to know your worth, your dignity, and walk away from those who won't acknowledge it in the least. Easier said than done, of course: you have to do it without anger, possess a real knowledge of what you can do, and desire to be genuine and welcoming so that you can be welcomed. When I put it that way, I wonder who exactly has that skillset. I certainly don't!

All this is to say the power of being alone is radical and transformative. For myself, I think your point can be developed via dialogue with a second theme, the artist/writer as Socratic philosopher. Ironically enough, your remarks touch on ideas I am versed in because of the work of Leo Strauss and his followers. To wit: you present the artist in irreconcilable conflict with the conventional order, or, in Straussian parlance, the city. "The artist is present to correct the delusions to which we fall prey in our attempt to avoid this knowledge [the true nature of being human]" – the artist, like the philosopher, asks tough questions which can unravel society. This is their task; they are a perpetual gadfly. "The artist cannot and must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides."

I should note that Plato is a philosopher-poet with some reservations about poetry, or in other words, mass media as artistic spectacle. Yes, Sophocles' Antigone and Aeschylus' Agamemnon can serve as profound comments on political life. Yes, it is true the critique of poetry in the Republic is satire, as it indicts Plato himself. Still, it is the explicit commitment to knowing through questioning which sets Plato's dramas apart. The Athenians watched Antigone and did not reconsider for a moment the status of women. The psychic consequences of war outlined in Agamemnon did not create much hesitation regarding imperial ambition. Plato does not see the philosopher and artist as equivalent, I don't think. Why can't a philosopher be blunt and crude, flirting with the edge of thoughtlessness?

I do think you are correct to place the artist nowadays in a Socratic position. The artist in America must confront American history, must war with society as a lover, ultimately revealing the beloved to themselves "to make freedom real." In Straussian commentaries about Plato there is an emphasis on Socrates' lust for knowledge. I remember John Koritansky speaking of a Socrates who couldn't help himself in pursuit of every relevant fact. That desire of Socrates puts him face-to-face with the laws of the city in the Crito. Those laws can execute Socrates, but they must endure the revelation that they oppress the pursuit of human wisdom, a robust commitment to inquiry. Socrates himself is a philosopher-artist, contrary to Plato's implicit complaints and Nietzsche's explicit ones. The figure of one who would defend the sciences had to be drawn by someone. Perhaps more pointedly, our age needs artists to act as philosophers, as the title of philosopher does not guarantee the necessary questions will be asked. Those questions have to identify and combat dehumanization while advancing freedom. A lust for knowledge which sidesteps those topics entirely is a mere form of denial.

I want to dwell on how the artist, society, and revelation relate. I just said the laws reveal themselves to themselves in their drive to kill Socrates. That is one way of addressing the space you outline, where love can create confrontation with the most brutal of facts. (I guess, in this interpretation, Socrates did love Athens.) But I wonder about a more existential possibility. What if the artist can only grasp a true vision of the beloved, but do no more with it?

It sounds ludicrous, like a thought experiment doomed to be lost, then rediscovered in fruitlessness. Still, I'm thinking of my journey in trying to be a scholar. I am fortunate that my dissertation allowed me to see how complicated a problem like nobility can be.

You would think nobility simply a cover for mindless ambition. While that can be true, it is dismissive to indulge immediately. Some come to nobility with a misplaced desire to learn. Or they have a skill which can grant honor but no capacity for leadership. What I dealt with in the dissertation: a society's conventions do not really have a way of saying someone good, say, at horsemanship still has work to do in learning to lead the cavalry. A leadership or management course won't do, because the expert needed is the one good at horsemanship. And creating some kind of mysticism about leadership can make the problem a hundred times worse. Those aspiring to nobility must be encouraged to want a certain spirit, a knowledge of ignorance if you will. They have to start thinking about what they don't know, not simply settle for fashionable titles or claim a grand heritage. And so the spirit of Socrates, the idea of knowledge as a way of life, hovers over the city and hides within its cracks. It emerges in various, strange ways, like when we realize the noble action joined to a noble cause can be anything but noble, let alone good.

So here you are, talking about the philosopher-artist who can get their nation to confront their ignorance and brutality. Not so subtly implied is that without a true artist, everything is propaganda. I am partial to that line of thought at the moment. People watch the President say in the same breath that we have "obliterated" our enemies and also we desperately need allied firepower. And then they say the contradiction doesn't concern them because they don't know enough themselves. Declaring ignorance in order to not confront crimes against humanity is not just a terminal sign of imperial decline. It results from years of being told that we win no matter what. The glories of smug self-satisfaction allow us to neglect the pains of our neighbors and believe our own struggles are merely temporary.

My thinking has shifted from looking for classical wisdom to wondering about the reception of classical ideas. Hence, I have been reading Nietzsche and Heidegger with an eye to what they do with themes such as eros and sacrifice. There must be a more authentic human being, one who refuses to believe bombing children for profit is tolerable. I see examples of them every day, but they are not given any respect by our established system of government or societal norms. A deep desire for truth and justice stands inferior to the assumed progress generated by our leaders of industry. The motivation for modern constitutionalism – no taxation without representation, property rights as a vehicle for rights simply – has been lost. I sometimes frame my concern as "this is what constitutionalism does not see," e.g. it cannot see its best defenders, but the problem lies deeper. Any gain had from those we dehumanize is now considered "smart." Competition and materialism, drivers of modernity, once considered to steer us away from aristocratic and religious orders, serve as engines of violent bigotry. The classroom as a space to reflect and consider is in extreme danger. We think learning is for winning gains against each other, not identifying what really matters.

Nietzsche and Heidegger are vital to my project because the noble cannot simply meet the noble. Nietzsche's contempt for democracy and rank misogyny must be confronted. We have to know how a fierce sense of independence, an insistence on genuine achievement, can go horribly astray. Heidegger's Nazism is present in his musings on Antigone. If I want to say this nation can find its true self and treat everyone with dignity, I have to be clear that prophetic rhetoric has marked some of the most rancid attempts to double-down on misery and violence.

To return to the question: can an artist isolate an image of the beloved's true self and live with that alone? The more I think about it, the more that is where the loneliness of the artist comes from. You, the artist, push against obstacles internal and external, artificial and natural, to obtain fragments of an answer or question. There's an image of a beloved's true self somewhere in that collection, but only one person who would appreciate it. This sounds like a simple restatement of your original position, but there is a further set of considerations now in play. Aloneness itself must be embraced, and I think from the rest of this letter, you can see it must also be confronted. We are not properly social or alone when we automatically isolate ourselves or simply act like no one else matters. And that confrontation, weirdly enough, ensures you will be left to your own thoughts. Neglect and integrity pair in our lives in grotesque, difficult, and revolutionary ways. You could say that what we have identified, in all this musing, is a source of revelation.