By Qizhou Cui

Abstract

In his paper Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism, Kendall Walton observes that photographs and hand-made drawings (e.g., paintings, sketches, etchings, etc.) affect us very differently. Specifically, we seem to experience a sense of intimacy and contact with the objects of photographs that is less pronounced when viewing those objects in a drawing. Walton’s explanation of this phenomenon is that photographs are ‘transparent’ while drawings are not. In this essay, I will offer an alternate explanation for this phenomenon. I argue that we feel a stronger sense of contact with the objects of photographs because we believe that, in general, photographs are more epistemically reliable.

I. Introduction

In his paper Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism, Kendall Walton highlights an important phenomenological difference between our experiences before photographs and hand-made drawings (e.g., paintings, sketches, etchings, etc.). Characterizing this phenomenology is no easy task, but an intuitive thought is that seeing an object in a photograph feels more like being in actual, face-to-face perceptual contact with that object than does seeing that object in a drawing. Phenomenologically, seeing a photograph of Trudeau feels a lot like seeing Trudeau ‘in the flesh’, while seeing a painting of Trudeau does not. I take it that this phenomenology is what Walton has mind when he writes that:

Photographic pornography is more potent than the painted variety. Published photographs of disaster victims or the private lives of public figures understandably provoke charges of invasion of privacy; similar complaints against the publication of drawings or paintings have less credibility. I expect that most of us will acknowledge that, in general, photographs and paintings (and comparable nonphotographic pictures) affect us very differently. It’s hard to resist describing this difference in saying that [our experiences of] photographs have a kind of intimacy and realism which etchings lack.

Walton’s explanation for this phenomenological difference is that photographs are transparent while drawings are not. We ‘see through’ photographs at the objects they depict, but we do not see through drawings. Hence, our subjective experience of viewing these kinds of pictures feels different. In this essay, I will give another explanation for this phenomenological difference. I argue that the phenomenology of contact is stronger when viewing photographs because we believe that, in general, photographs are more epistemically reliable than drawings are.

In the next section, I will explain Walton’s photographic transparency thesis and how he uses it to explain phenomenological differences between viewing photographs and drawings. §III presents two problems with Walton’s explanation. In §IV-V, I present my own explanation of the phenomenological difference and give three considerations in favour of my view. In §VI, I end with some closing remarks.

II. Walton’s on Photographic Transparency

According to Walton, photographs are transparent—we “see through” them at the objects they depict. In his original phrasing: “we see, quite literally, our dead relatives themselves when we look at photographs of them.” To see a photograph of Trudeau, for instance, is, quite literally, to see Trudeau. Of course, it is not seeing Trudeau directly. One sees him by seeing the photograph of him, whereas to see Trudeau directly is to see him without the mediation of any other visible object. But nonetheless, seeing the photo of Trudeau is still a way to see him. Photographs are therefore like mirrors, eyeglasses, and telescopes; they are aids to vision. They extend the range of what we can see—in this case, all the way to someone now dead and gone. Hand-made drawings, on the other hand, are not transparent according to Walton.5 When one sees a sketch or a painting of Trudeau for instance, she does not literally see Trudeau. For Walton, the special sense of contact that we feel with the objects of photographs is the product of an actual perceptual contact, one which is lacking in our visual experiences of drawings. Hence, the difference in phenomenology.

Why does Walton insist that photographs are transparent? He seems to argue for this in two different directions. First, he believes that there are significant similarities between the way that photographs provide visual experiences and the way that ordinary vision provides visual experiences. Suppose that we see some object O face-to-face. Our ordinary vision functions in a way such that if O had been different in terms of some visual feature, this difference would be reflected in our visual experiences. Similarly with photographic images, they are counterfactually dependent on the scenes they represent. For example, had Trudeau been frowning at the camera rather than smiling, the resulting photograph of him would have looked different.

Moreover, when it comes to ordinary face-to-face seeing, this counterfactual dependence is not mediated by the mental states of other agents. The external world causes me to have visual experiences in a way that does not involve what others believe, desire, etc.

Crucially, this feature of ordinary vision is present when viewing photographs, but not when viewing drawings. When the photographer clicks the camera shutter, the camera’s physical mechanisms take over and the image is formed without any further involvement of the photographer. Drawings, by contrast, involve the artist’s mental states throughout the formative process. Not only does he decide what to paint and when to paint it, but once these decisions are made, he must continue to make many decisions about the arrangement of marks that constitute the image. Had the artist believed something different about the scene being drawn, then my visual experiences would be different too. This is one reason why Walton thinks that photographs are transparent while drawings are not.

According to the second line of reasoning, the transparency thesis gains support from its explanatory capacity. Here is how Walton puts it in a reply to one of his critics: “[Transparency] seems more inevitable than incredible, on reflection, however startling it might be at first. It is reinforced, moreover, by the contribution it makes to an explanation of the peculiar powers of photography…. If we deny the transparency of photographs, we will still be groping for explanations.” One of “the peculiar powers of photography” is precisely its phenomenological power.

III. Problems with Walton’s Account

I have just explained how Walton appeals to a difference in transparency to explain the phenomenological difference between seeing photographs and hand-made pictures. I am not convinced by Walton’s view, and I will now state what I think are two problems with his explanation.

The first is this. It is often said that we experience a ‘jolting effect’ once we discover that what we previously took to be a photograph is actually a hyper-realistic drawing. Walton says this about a hyper realistic self-portrait by artist Chuck Close (figure 1):

[Our discovery] jolts us. Our experience of the picture and our attitude toward it undergo a profound transformation, one which is much deeper and more significant than the change which occurs when we discover that what we first took to be an etching, for example, is actually a pen-and-ink drawing. It is more like discovering a guard in a wax museum to be just another wax figure. We feel somehow less in contact with Close.

Walton uses this example to dispel the intuitive thought that we feel more closely in contact with photographic depictions simply because they look more like ‘the real thing’ than pictures of the drawn variety. On this line of reasoning, photographs possess a kind of detail that drawings lack, and this is what brings about that special sense of contact. According to Walton, our initial experience of Close’s self-portrait feels just like a photograph-induced visual experience. However, after the ‘jolt’, this quickly collapses into a less intimate drawing-induced experience even though the portrait is just as detailed as it was before. This suggests that the special sense of contact associated with seeing photographs cannot be a matter of how detailed the picture looks.

Figure 1. Chuck Close, Self-Portrait, acrylic on canvas, 1968. Collection Art Center, Minneapolis. Art Center

I agree with Walton on this point, but it seems to me that his own account cannot make sense of this phenomenon either. Recall that for Walton, the special sense of contact that we feel with the objects of photographs is a product of an actual perceptual contact, one which is lacking in our visual experiences of handmade pictures. But this can provide no explanation for why, at first, one feels this special sense of contact with Chuck Close. For it is a painting one sees. Paintings are non-transparent on Walton’s account. So, by Walton’s own lights, it is not true that one is actually seeing Close. To the extent that Walton explains photographic phenomenology solely in terms of transparency, we have no explanation for how the phenomenology typical of seeing objects in photographs managed to occur in the case of seeing an object, i.e. Close, in a hand-made drawing. What this case shows is that an actual perceptual contact is not necessary for a feeling of contact at all. This spells trouble for Walton.

Here is the second problem with Walton’s account. His explanation for why photographs and hand-made pictures affect us differently presupposes that photographs (unlike drawings) really are transparent—i.e., that we actually see the depicted object. But there are reasons to doubt this. In their paper On the Epistemic Value of Photographs, Cohen and Meskin propose a necessary condition for a subject S to see some object O: S’s visual experience must ‘carry egocentric spatial information’ about O’s location. The idea here is that S’s experience needs to represent where O is located spatially in relation to S. When it comes to ordinary vision, this condition of seeing is met. When I see a building in my peripheral vision, my experience represents the building as being at a particular location relative to me (e.g., to my right). Prosthetic seeing like the type involving telescopes, eye-glasses, etc. also satisfies this condition.15 When I use my telescope to see Neptune, for instance, my visual experience represents where Neptune is located relative to my current position.

But what about photographs? When I look at a photo of the Eiffel Tower, my visual experience does not represent where the Eiffel tower is relative to my location. When I walk around with the photo, the Eiffel Tower’s relative location to myself will change but this change will not be represented to me by looking at the photograph. If Cohen and Meskin’s condition for seeing is correct, then photographs are not transparent. Walton’s thesis about photographic transparency is very controversial, and insofar as he needs to appeal to this thesis to explain the special affective capacity of photographs, this is a problem.

Let’s take stock. I started by giving Walton’s explanation of why, relative to drawings, our experiences of viewing photographs feel more like ordinary, face-to-face seeing. And next, I raised some problems with his account. In what follows, I will present my own explanation for this phenomenological difference.

IV. Towards a Doxastic Solution

Unlike Walton, my own account will not reference any facts about photographs themselves to explain this difference in phenomenology. Instead, I argue that it’s the viewers’ beliefs that are explanatory.

One belief that most of us hold about ordinary vision is that it is epistemically reliable: the information we receive from this process has a high probability of being accurate. When a stranger appears in the corner of my eye, chances are there really is a person there. While we can all think of cases where ordinary vision can fail to be veridical, such as when we encounter optical illusions, we all know that these cases are quite uncommon in our everyday lives. We know that in general, our ordinary vision gets the facts right.

I suggest that we also believe that photographs are epistemically reliable in this sense.

It’s for this reason that we use photographs as evidence, in both formal and informal contexts. The use of photographs as evidence goes back to the very earliest days of photography, such as when they were used as legal evidence in trials during the American Civil War. Today, photographs can act as evidence in newspapers, blackmail plots, courts of law, etc. Photographs also serve in informal contexts as evidence about all sorts of things, such as what we and our loved ones looked like in the past.

But now let’s consider hand-made drawings. Most of us do not think that drawings alone suffice to constitute evidence. We do not respond to the question ‘Why do you believe that?’ with ‘Well, I saw it in a painting’. At least, not without some further comment about who made it, where it was displayed, and so on. The presence of higher-order evidence is very important for whether we take drawings as evidence, while it is less important for whether we take photographs as evidence. Hence, drawings are rarely used as evidence in newspapers, blackmail plots, or courts of law, etc. For this reason, I suggest that most of us think that in general, photographs are epistemically more reliable than drawings are.

On my view, the more confident we are that a visual representation is epistemically reliable, the more in-contact we feel with their contents. When it comes to ordinary vision and viewing photographs, we are usually very confident that the information we are being presented with is accurate. Hence, we feel a sense of contact with the objects of photographs that’s similar to the kind found in ordinary vision. But since we tend to take hand-made artworks to be less epistemically reliable, that feeling of contact is less pronounced.

V. Considerations in Favour

Why should one think this is a good account of the distinct phenomenology of viewing photographs? I believe there are at least three considerations in its favour.

First, my account can explain puzzling features of our experiences before hyper-realistic drawings. This is because my account treats the phenomenology of contact as contingent upon the psychological states of the viewer, rather than as a product of the medium itself (as Walton contends). So what exactly does my account say about the jolt? In the initial stage of our experience, where we believe ourselves to be seeing a photograph, we are very confident that the information presented to us is true, since we know that photographs are generally reliable at telling the truth. Our mental states could be illustrated as:

1. Photographs are epistemically very reliable, generally speaking
2. I am seeing a photograph
3. Therefore, the information being presented is probably accurate

Upon realizing the picture is a hand-made one, our attitude shifts. Recognizing the picture to be hand-made, we are more guarded because we know that on average drawings are worse than photographs at getting the facts right. Where before we believed Close to look how our visual experience represented him to be, we are now less certain. We see the cigarette, horn-rimmed glasses, wild hair, and so on, but we don’t know how accurate the depiction is. We might even take ourselves to require more evidence before believing the information this is presented to us. For instance, evidence about how Close looks in reality, his goals for producing the picture, etc. Hence, Close seems more distant somehow, less present to us, upon the realization it is a painting we are looking at.

The second consideration is this. My account remains neutral on the issue of whether photographs, unlike drawings, really are transparent. There is ongoing debate surrounding this claim, and unlike Walton’s account, mine need not presuppose any controversial theses about the nature of the photographs themselves. On my view, whether or not photographs are transparent is irrelevant with respect to the viewer’s felt sense of contact. What is important, I suggest, is simply the viewer’s psychological attitudes.

The last consideration is that my account explains why the phenomenology of contact comes in degrees. For one, my account is able to explain why we feel a stronger degree of contact when we see a photograph of Churchill than when we see a painting of him. We believe that in general, photographs are epistemically more reliable than paintings are, so the phenomenology of contact is stronger in the former. But my account would not be special if that is all it was able to explain, for Walton also tells us why we feel more in contact with the objects of photographs. Where my account is superior is this: I am able to explain why even within the categories of photographs and hand-made pictures, the amount of contact we feel is not uniform but comes in degrees.

There are certain “traditions” of art which are known by and large to be epistemically reliable (and therefore commonly used as evidence). Some examples include courtroom sketches, royal portraitures, anatomical sketches, etc. Our experiences suggest that we feel particularly in contact with what these drawings depict, more so in comparison with other drawings. Take, for instance, the famous courtroom sketch from OJ Simpson’s trial (figure 2). Here, we feel a strong sense of intimacy and contact with OJ and his trial that is quite uncommon among most drawings that we see. My account is able to explain why this is. We know that in many jurisdictions, cameras are not allowed in courtrooms in order to prevent distractions and preserve privacy. And because of this, the artists who produce these sketches are credible members of the media who intend their work to be an accurate depiction of the events that take place. Unlike most drawings we come across, we believe that the information presented to us is likely accurate. Hence, the special sense of contact.

We feel varying degrees of contact when we view hand-made drawings. But what about photographs? Suppose that you come across an object in a photograph but simply fail to realize you are seeing a photograph. For example, you might believe that you are seeing a sketch or a painting, say. You might even wrongly assume that you are seeing a ‘photoshopped’, composite image. Still, you are seeing a photograph, but it’s doubtful that your experience will feel very much like it. Phenomenologically, you will feel more intimacy and contact when you view photographs from newspapers, bus advertisements, your friend’s Instagram posts, etc. On my view, this is because you’re more confident about the information you receive from photographs than the information you receive from drawings.

Figure 2. O. J. Simpson Trial, 1995. Marilyn Church

While my account explains why we experience various degrees of phenomenological contact both when we view photographs and hand-drawn pictures; Walton’s account does not. According to Walton, we feel more contact with the objects of photographs by virtue of a perceptual contact that we lack with the objects of hand-made images. But by referencing transparency, there’s no room in his account for explaining why we feel more contact with certain non-transparent pictures than others, or why we feel more contact with certain transparent pictures than others. Walton can only tell us why photographs affect us more than hand-made pictures.

VI. Closing Remarks

An interesting question that one may ask is why viewers believe that photographs are epistemically more reliable than drawings. One possible reason is that most of us know that cameras are designed to produce pictures that accurately depict the scene being captured. But on the other hand, we know that not all drawings are intended to be accurate depictions of the world. We know that for many artists, various aesthetic considerations factor into how their drawings look. This might be why we think that they are less reliable than photographs are. Another possible reason is this. Everyday experience suggests that photographic representations of the world generally are very accurate. When one takes a photograph, they typically turn out looking like the scene being captured. But this is not true of the drawings we see; they tend to look different from the real thing. And on the basis of these experiences, we generalize that photographs are epistemically more reliable.

In this paper, I investigated the question of why we find ourselves feeling more in-contact with the objects of photographs than the objects of drawings. First, I presented Walton’s explanation that photographs are transparent while drawings are not, and I showed why this explanation is inadequate. Next, I offered my own explanation and gave several considerations in favour of it. On my view, phenomenology of contact is stronger when viewing photographs because we believe that in general, photographs are more epistemically reliable than drawings are. 

References

Church, Marilyn, and Michelle Legro. “The Courtroom Artist Who Sketched Trump on Trial.” Topic. May 06, 2019. Accessed November 22, 2021. https://www.topic.com/murder-shedrew.

Cohen, Jonathan, and Aaron Meskin. “On the Epistemic Value of Photographs.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62, no. 2 (2004): 197-210. doi:10.1111/j.1540-594x.2004.00152.x.

Cohen, Jonathan, and Aaron Meskin. “Photographs as Evidence.” Photography and Philosophy, 2008, 70-90. doi:10.1002/9780470696651.ch3.

Dretske, Fred I. “Simple Seeing.” Body, Mind, and Method, 1979, 1-15. doi:10.1007/978-94-009-9479-9_1.

Walton, Kendall L. “Looking Again through Photographs: A Response to Edwin Martin.” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 4 (July & Aug. 1986): 801-08. doi:10.1086/448368.

Walton, Kendall L. “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism.” Critical Inquiry 11, no. 2 (1984): 246-77. doi:10.1086/448287.

By Owen Huisman

Abstract

In Works of Love, Søren Kierkegaard divides love into two types: Christian love of the neighbour and poetic love (Kierkegaard 46, 50, 52). Love of the neighbour is non-preferential love directed towards all human beings, whereas poetic love is directed towards a particular beloved (Kierkegaard 46, 48, 52). Kierkegaard assigns to Christian and poetic love the qualities of eternity and temporality respectively, with these qualities mandating distinct ways of enacting these forms of love (Kierkegaard 46, 48). Kierkegaard emphasizes that Christian love necessitates immediate action, specifically action which results in the ‘conversion’ of others, meaning the awakening of others to an awareness of the ethical necessity of universal love (Kierkegaard 46, 48). Kierkegaard characterises poetry as inherently reflective, with this reflective quality rendering the creation of poetry an inadequate response to Christian love’s call for immediate action (Kierkegaard 46, 48). In this paper I argue that T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets disrupts Kierkegaard’s assumptions that poetry is an inadequate response to Christian love and that truly ‘Christian’ poetry is an impossibility. To do so, I begin by demonstrating the similarities between Eliot’s descriptions of eternal love and Christian love. I argue that the Four Quartets accomplishes the ‘conversion’ of the reader to universal love through a disruption of the reader’s attachment to temporal love. Together with this demonstration of the ‘Christian’ content of the poem, I show that Eliot’s use of reflection to produce the ‘conversion’ of the reader challenges Kierkegaard’s dichotomy between direct and reflective responses to Christian love.

Introduction

In Works of Love Søren Kierkegaard questions the possibility of Christian poetry, based on the connection between poetry and the preferential love of particular individuals as opposed to the Christian love of the neighbour (Kierkegaard 46, 50, 52). Kierkegaard proposes that the realization of Christian love involves recognizing the needs of the neighbour and acting to fulfill these needs, whereas poetry’s necessarily reflective character bars it from being a successful response to the needs of the neighbour (Kierkegaard 46, 48). However, T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets challenges Kierkegaard’s proposal that poetry cannot contribute to the realization of Christian love, because the Quartets serve to disrupt the reader’s attachment to preferential love. The Quartets accomplish this disruption by alerting the reader to the temporality of preferential love and the despair that both Kierkegaard and Eliot associate with this temporality (Eliot “Burnt Norton” V.26-31, Eliot “Little Gidding” III.8-11, Kierkegaard 65-67). Furthermore, Eliot’s close attention to the temporality of language, as well as the shared nature of memory, proves that the Quartets are ‘direct’, which Kierkegaard requires expressions of Christianity to be, while also elucidating what ‘directness’ must mean in relation to eternal love. Thus, Four Quartets demonstrates the possibility of poetry which responds to Christian love’s call to be accomplished, while also expanding upon what is required of any attempt to speak or write directly about eternal love. 

Christian and Preferential Love in Works of Love

Kierkegaard’s critique of poets develops out of his dichotomy between Christian love and preferential love. Preferential love is the form of love which one typically feels for a friend, family member, or romantic partner (Kierkegaard 44, 52, 56). Kierkegaard contends that this form of love leads an individual to act with a preference for their loved one, which supersedes one’s general ethical duties towards all persons regardless of their identity (Kierkegaard 45, 49). This indicates that one who engages in preferential love treats their own preference as the most important principle when determining how to act (Kierkegaard 45, 49, 53-54). Preferential love is dependent upon both the lover and the beloved maintaining a certain degree of consistency. Given the ever-present potential for the beloved to change, either through an alteration of the beloved’s character, through a change in the beloved’s orientation towards the lover, or because the beloved dies, such consistency can never be certain (Kierkegaard 65-67). Furthermore, if one’s love for a beloved ends, then despair occurs (Kierkegaard 65-67). Thus, preferential love always exists within a limited period—that is, at it’s longest it lasts until the beloved dies, but may end even earlier if the beloved changes—and always exists as a possibility-of-despair (Kierkegaard 65-67).

Given that preferential love for someone justifies itself as a guide for action only for the individual whose preference it is founded upon, any expression of preferential love does not indicate that the listener should take the speaker’s particular preferences as a guide for their own actions (Kierkegaard 58-59). Thus, written or spoken expressions of preferential love do not produce any conflict within the listener regarding which principles/loves should determine how one ought to act (Kierkegaard 58-59). Kierkegaard sees poets as typically praising a particular beloved (Kierkegaard 89). While such praise does not necessarily lead the listener to love the poet’s beloved, it does elevate the prestige of preferential love for the listener (Kierkegaard 89). Given this connection, Kierkegaard uses ‘preferential love’ and ‘poetic love’ interchangeably. 

Christian love, unlike poetic love, is not the love of a particular beloved, but is love of the neighbour, meaning the love of every person by virtue of them being a person (Kierkegaard 89). Christian love rejects personal preference as a suitable justification for revealing who ought to be loved (and thus, who should be treated ethically), instead taking up the Biblical commandment to love the neighbour as the proper principle for discovering who should be encountered as a loved one (Kierkegaard 89-90). Kierkegaard considers such commandments to be eternal truths revealed by God (Kierkegaard 89-90). Christian love’s object, the neighbour, is any-and-every-person, and while individual neighbours may change or die, Christian love cannot lose its object insofar as any person still exists (Kierkegaard 65). Given its eternal basis (God’s command) and always present object (the neighbour), Christian love is itself eternal and unchanging, and thus is not a possibility-for-despair. Unlike preferential love’s validity for the singular lover, Christian love—being a divine commandment—asserts itself as a universally applicable and primary principle for determining how to act (Kierkegaard 58). Thus, expressions of Christian love should unsettle a listener who engages in preferential love, as the listener is called to acknowledge that only the commandment to love the neighbour should structure their own loves (Kierkegaard 58). This conversion of the listener—meaning, the unsettling of preferential love and its replacement with Christian love—is thus the task of any expression of Christian love. This conversion of the listener is beneficial for the listener by providing them with knowledge of ethics and by removing from the listener any possibility of despair by changing the particular beloved into the neighbour, who—as ‘any person’—is never absent, dead, or changing. 

Kierkegaard’s Rejection of Poetry as a Proper Expression of Christian Love

Kierkegaard’s rejection of the possibility, or at least the relevancy, of the Christian poet is reliant upon a connection between poetry as a specific mode of communication and preferential love. As discussed above, poetic expressions of love typically refer to a particular beloved and thereby lead listeners to become more entrenched in their own preferential loves (Kierkegaard 89). Even when the poet chooses to write about Christian topics, Kierkegaard remains skeptical that the poet can “help others (in such a way as one person can help another, since God is the true helper) to become Christians in an even deeper sense”, that is, realize that they too are commanded to love the neighbour (Kierkegaard 48). Kierkegaard bases this skepticism on the principle that “Love of the neighbour does not want to be sung about — it wants to be accomplished” (Kierkegaard 46). What Kierkegaard means here is that while Christian love constantly presents one with future tasks to complete—such as dethroning one’s preferential ways of loving, or in assisting the neighbour—poetry or ‘singing’ is reflective, as the poet draws upon their own past or present experiences of love (Kierkegaard 46, 48). Were the poet to attempt to reflect upon Christian love such that they may ‘sing’ about it, they would discover a “disturbing notice” that they must instead “Go and do likewise”, as Christian love demands its continual enactment insofar as any neighbour (anyone) is suffering (Kierkegaard 46, 48). Thus, Kierkegaard thinks that insofar as poetry fails to improve the condition of the neighbour, it must be considered an insufficient way of enacting Christian love.

Love and Conversion in the Four Quartets

In the Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot disrupts Kierkegaard’s binary division of love by reflecting on love without reference to any beloved, neither a particular loved one nor the neighbour (Eliot “Burnt Norton” V.26-31, Eliot “Little Gidding” III.8-11). However, the love which Eliot reflects upon—hereafter referred to as Eliotic love—shares enough similarities with Christian love that the poem should be considered as an attempt to help the reader to become “[Christian] in an even deeper sense” (Kierkegaard 48). A key feature of both Eliotic love and Christian love is that they are both eternal (in origin and persistence) yet must be expressed in and through the temporal. In Works this is expressed through the eternal origin of Christian love in the commandant, its eternal persistence through the continual presence of the neighbour, and its temporal expression both in speech about love and in responses to the presence of individual neighbours (Kierkegaard 65, 89). In Quartets the clearest expression of this is when Eliot writes that while love is unchanging and timeless, it is “the cause and end of movement” — love both motivates temporal action and is the goal of temporal action (Eliot “Burnt Norton” V.26-31). That both Christian and Eliotic love are expressed in the temporal through action/speech and can be cultivated by action/speech is necessary for a comparison of the mechanics and process of conversion through the temporal. 

Eliot clearly describes this process of conversion and emphasizes its necessity—meaning he calls for the reader’s internal conversion to love as Kierkegaard does—in the penultimate canto of “Little Ginning”. This canto begins with the entrance of the dove, the Holy Spirit, which initiates a reflection on the necessity of Eliotic or eternal love as opposed to temporal, preferential desire (Eliot “Little Ginning IV.1-7). This divine origin of Eliotic love mirrors the origin of Christian love in the commandment rather than human decision. Eliot then writes that we all have a choice between two fires, both arising from love (Eliot “Little Ginning” IV.7-10). The first fire can be identified with desire or preferential love, which causes one to suffer through its necessary ending, a result of its temporality and existence as possibility-of-despair. The second fire which ‘redeems’ one from the first may be identified as Eliotic/eternal love (Eliot “Little Ginning” IV.7). This love produces suffering in the same manner as Christian love, as it causes one to become unsettled and outraged at the possibility that one has to recognize that one’s habitual temporal love is not the highest form of love (Eliot “Little Ginning” IV.7, Kierkegaard 58). While Eliotic love cannot be identified completely with Christian love, given the absence of the neighbour, this similarity between the two in terms of the relationship between temporality and the process (and source) of conversion initially demonstrates the seeming possibility of Christian content in poetry.

Four Quartets and the Enactment of Christian Love

The Quartets may thus be considered to contain Christian content, or at least criticism of preferential love for reasons similar to Kierkegaard’s, but it is only through the unique application of the reflective character of poetry that Eliot has the Quartets become truly ‘Christian’. Kierkegaard takes it as required that any writing which seeks to be Christian must move beyond pure reflection and properly respond to the call to ‘go and do’ (Kierkegaard 46). Writings, such as Works — which takes on sermonic qualities, such as directly addressing the listener or making clear statements about the nature of the commandment — count as ‘doing’ (Kierkegaard 46, 89-90). This is because of these works’ active striving to awaken awareness of the commandant in the listener and provoke a rupture with the listener’s past ways of loving (Kierkegaard 46, 89-90). That the poem, as Kierkegaard construes it, has a necessarily reflective nature means that the adoption of such future-facing aspects of the sermon in poetry is impossible. Put otherwise, ‘singing’ is always a reflection about some thing (even a thing like Christian love), whereas doing is always in response to the presence of one to whom we say ‘you’ (the listener, the neighbour, God who gives us the commandment). However, Eliot transcends the singing-doing binary by demonstrating how through an unsettling of/engagement with memory, the reflectivity of singing can function to accomplish the same conversion of the listener as the ‘doing’ of the sermon. 

Memory and Conversion in the Four Quartets

The use of memory in facilitating the conversion of the listener is evidenced by Eliot’s treatment of the topic of memory itself, and also by his application of memory in unsettling the reader’s attachment to preferential/temporal love. This latter application is best reflected in the initial portion of “Burnt Norton”, where Eliot speaks of the poem’s effect upon the reader—this is the only moment in the first quartet where Eliot directly addresses the reader: 

… My words echo 

Thus, in your mind. 

                              But to what purpose 

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves 

I do not know. (Eliot “Burnt Norton” I.14-18) 

The poem, as we move through Eliot’s own memory, provokes the same process of remembering in the reader, thereby “disturbing the dust”, the dust which has settled on the reader’s own memories (Eliot “Burnt Norton” I.17). Thus, as Eliot moves away from his own preferential love and towards Eliotic love throughout the poem, the reader who allows for the re-examination or refreshment of their own memories may follow the same process. Memory functioning as a tool of conversion is most clearly expressed in “Little Gidding”: 

The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory: 

For liberation—not less of love but expanding 

Of love beyond desire, and so liberation 

From the future as well as the past. (Eliot “Little Gidding III.8-11) 

Through the act of remembering, the temporality of one’s various preferential loves/desires is revealed, thereby calling upon the reader to be liberated “From the future as well as the past” —from both past misery as the result of lost love and arguably from any possibility-of-despair (Eliot “Little Gidding III.10-11). This liberation entails the expansion of love beyond the temporal. That Eliot can, or at least seeks to, provoke an unsettling of preferential love in the reader—a critical step in conversion—demonstrates the possibility of the poem as a response to the ‘go and do’. In addition, since Eliot establishes in the passage from “Burnt Norton” that the act of remembering in the Quartets is both his own and the reader’s, the ‘singing’ about particular memories is always an address to the reader about the reader, thereby disrupting Kierkegaard’s binary division between descriptive/reflective singing and responsive/active doing. Yet, an apparent paradox must be addressed: namely, that it is through various temporal experiences of memory that the eternal—love beyond desire—becomes known to the reader (and to Eliot). 

That there can be ‘Christian’ poetry is reliant upon such poetry not merely being ‘Christian’ in content or converting the reader in response to the call to ‘go and do’, but upon such poetry being a direct way of responding to the call to ‘go and do’. The use of “riddles” or ambiguity by poets obfuscates Christian love (Kierkegaard 50-51). Yet the Quartets avoids both potential forms of indirectness and thereby proves that poetry can be considered a ‘direct’ way of speaking of Christian love. 

Four Quartets contains a response to the critique of ambiguous or ‘ridding’ ways of speaking of love through its analysis of the temporality of language, which in turn illuminates what directness necessarily means in relation to speech or writing about eternal love. Poetry as a literary form—as well as the nature of language itself—disrupts the idea that the efficacy of an expression of Christianity is reliant upon a sort of prosaic directness or perfect description of the nature of Christian love. This is expressed in “Burnt Norton”: 

Words move, music moves 

Only in time; but that which is only living 

Can only die. Words, after speech, reach 

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, 

Can words or music reach 

The stillness as a Chinese jar still 

Moves perpetually in its stillness. (Eliot “Burnt Norton” V.1-7)

Eliot here highlights that language is necessarily temporal, even when it describes the divine or eternal. If language “dies”, then any attempt to speak of the eternal must attempt to present what is atemporal in a temporal medium. Thus, Eliot’s references to eternal matters in the Quartets cannot be thought of as an attempt to provide the reader with direct access to the eternal (Eliot “Burnt Norton” V.1-3). Kierkegaard agrees with Eliot on the impossibility of temporal language perfectly expressing the eternal (Kierkegaard 209). This is demonstrated when Kierkegaard describes speech about the eternal as necessarily metaphorical, since we learn speech from our temporal experience before we become aware of the eternal (Kierkegaard 209). Thus, directness cannot just be ‘preciseness’ in providing a descriptive account of the commandment to love/Christian love. For if this were the case, then Christianity would never be perfectly direct, since a completely precise account of the eternal is impossible given language’s temporality. In other words, ambiguity is endemic to language as such, not just poetry. 

This passage from “Burnt Norton” also includes a positive picture of what directness must mean in relation to eternal love. While language is unable to directly express or make present the eternal, the effects of the pattern or motion of language persist “Into the silence” — that is, they persist after speech, or the reading of a piece of writing (Eliot “Burnt Norton V.1-4). In the Quartets the wider pattern or form includes the conversion of the reader. Therefore, for the Quartets—and by extension all attempts to respond to the ‘go and do’—to be considered successful, they must induce a transformation in the listener/reader which persists outside of the work or speech itself. ‘Directness’ in any discourse on eternal love must thus be considered success in impacting the listener/reader by addressing them and making them aware of the commandment to love, in such a way that persists beyond the experience of the discourse itself. Since Eliot accomplishes this conversion through Quartets, this work, and poetry, as well as any work which is not primarily descriptive or prosaically prescriptive, cannot be rejected as an invalid way of speaking directly about Christianity if that rejection is levied simply on the grounds that it is a work of poetry, or another discourse of the relevant type. 

Conclusion

Ultimately, Eliot, by his discussion of memory, demonstrates to the reader the temporality of preferential love, and the suffering which comes about because of this temporality. In alerting the reader to this temporality, Eliot converts the reader by unsettling their attachment to preferential love. This conversion of the reader represents a response to the call to ‘go and do’ that confronts the poet who seeks to write about Christian love. While Eliotic love and Christian love are not synonymous given the former’s lack of concern with the neighbour, both are eternal and originate from God. The similarity of the two types of love, as well as the use of memory in the conversion of the reader makes possible an analysis of the ‘directness’ of memory and poetry as ways of talking about eternal love. Eliot’s treatment of temporality and language highlights the impossibility of a perfect description of eternal love in temporal language, which in turn, implies that directness must instead be considered the efficacy of a work in converting the reader/listener. This direct conversion is precisely what the Quartets accomplishes, and thus Eliot demonstrates that reflective forms of discourse such as poetry can properly communicate the necessity of following the commandment to love.

Biography: Owen Huisman is a third-year student specializing in religion and minoring in philosophy. Broadly interested in the history of the relationship between philosophy and religion in the English and German speaking world(s) in the 19th and 20th centuries, Owen’s recent areas of focus include hermeneutics and the religious reception(s) of German idealism.