Leonard Cohen and Philosophy (19 page)

There Is a War

Ultimately, however, Cohen’s fusion of the erotic and the spiritual comes at a cost. Even a song like “Came So Far for
Beauty,” despite the protagonist’s persistence, is about all that is left behind. There’s a sense in which Cohen finds his view of female beauty almost overwhelming, even unsustainable. In “Hallelujah,” he places female beauty in the spotlight once again, this time observing it under the moonlight, and explaining how we can be simply overthrown by it. This idea is a recurring theme in Cohen’s love songs. A notable example occurs in “The Traitor,” in which Cohen draws a distinction between dreamers and men of action, and clearly aligns himself with the former camp. These are presented by Cohen as mutually exclusive categories in terms of one’s attitude to love and beauty. The dreamers and men of action are described as being at war; and, for a while at least, the dreamers seem to be winning the battle. Cohen is the great champion of the poet’s perspective and, here, we find him celebrating the prominence of the romantic idea of the dreamer; but, as the song goes on, the celebration wanes. By the end of the song, stung by his own falsity, Cohen tells us that he has been openly labeled a traitor.

Cohen’s distinction between dreamers and men of action brings to mind those who fantasize and entertain “higher” concerns, on the one hand, and those who take a pragmatic stance with tangible outcomes, on the other. We might broadly think of this distinction in terms of the philosophical conceptions of rationality and irrationality. Cohen’s protagonists, in their role as dreamers, can be taken to be endorsing something irrational in their transcendental appreciation of romantic love and beauty. However, the cost is a fragmentary picture of relationships, where things don’t run smoothly, despite Cohen’s apparent immersion. Often Cohen’s songs leave us with a beautifully captured but ultimately conflicted sense of distance and loss. Think of the bittersweet “thanks” in “Famous Blue Raincoat,” with so much conflict beneath the surface of simple gratitude; the resentment with which Cohen mocks the master in “Master Song”; and the weariness with which Cohen warns against the dealer in “The Stranger Song.” Cohen can cast himself as both close confidante and distant outsider, where the outsider is often also
the victim, as in “Death of a Ladies’ Man,” or in “Master Song,” which, like so many of Cohen’s best love songs, is about a love triangle, this time employing metaphorical characters of master, pupil, and prisoner. The distance, here, provides Cohen with the space to reflect, but it also yields safety.

So, despite Cohen’s protagonists’ all-encompassing faith in romance and beauty, their irrationality can also leave them blinded by beauty and, as he describes in “The Traitor,” literally among the enemies of love.

Self-Deception of the Dreamer

The irrationality of Cohen’s dreamer accounts for why he is able to occupy positions of both closeness and distance within these relationships. This irrationality may sometimes seem to veer into cases of self-deception. There are clear-cut cases of contradictory thinking in Cohen’s songs: the needing and not needing of “Chelsea Hotel #2,” and in his poem “You Do Not Have to Love Me,” where he writes, “I prayed that you would love me / and that you would not love me.”

But the self-deception Cohen depicts often probes much deeper into the heart of relationships. In “Chelsea Hotel #2,” Cohen conjures up a beautiful sense of reminiscence as he remembers the woman he was with, but the final verse contradicts our notions of love. Cohen suggests that despite the “love,” she was essentially just another. This is confirmed in the final line where he tells her that he doesn’t think of her that often. Despite the heightened sense of spiritual love, it appears to still be disposable.

Perhaps even more significantly, in “Famous Blue Raincoat,” Cohen has a striking relationship with his “brother”—who he also describes as his “killer”—one that appears so contradictory given the way Cohen seems at once to want to appreciate his killer, despite the fact that there’s so much underlying doubt, deliberating whether he misses or forgives him, even oddly approving of his rival’s thwarting him. Here, Cohen captures the uncertainty of a complex relationship beautifully. Crucial to this is the way he suggestively depicts
his wavering protagonist as a self-deceiver: as someone who holds contradictory beliefs at the same time; or, as philosophers have sometimes put it, as being able to lie to yourself.

In so doing, Cohen draws our attention to the paradox of self-deception. How can we lie to ourselves, since that would mean holding one belief and at the same time holding another that contradicts it? It might seem natural to think that there is—or ought to be—an underlying unity to the human mind, to a person’s overall system of thoughts and beliefs, a unity characterized by consistency and coherence. Following the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who characterized human beings as rational animals, the possibility of concurrently held contradictory beliefs doesn’t seem to fit with this intuitive picture of our minds. After all, surely I can’t be in a position where I’m genuinely able to lie to myself, can I?

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.