Thinking Things Through
21
souls), or a totalitarian regime that would make Robespierre or Stalin blush.
Although Steeves often garbs his political tropes in religious parables, echoing
reincarnation as he goes, the meaning of his utterances is this-worldly: “from the
belly is bom new life. It becomes the thought of a cow; it explores death, the
holes with which death leaves us, the presence of the absence of bodies, our
interchangeable bodies” (63). Indeed, but it is the body politic that Steeves has
in mind—of all things. Or at least, that’s how I read him, in the tradition of
Peirce (community of inquiry), Royce (blessed community), and Dewey
(participatory democracy governed by scientific method). There is also James to
reckon with: for it was James who taught us that we are our bodies, that even
metaphysically fabled consciousness is nought but breath (or behavior), long
before Merleau-Ponty and company caught up. Indeed, before there was James
(or Mead, whom Steeves mentions briefly [188]), there was Whitman, who sang
the body electric—and worshipped democracy, while realizing that it was
nowhere to be found, except on paper, or in a futile appeal for a slave such as
Dred Scott.
But Dred Scott gave birth (so to speak) to W.E.B. DuBois, whose
theory of double consciousness is the mo del or template for much of Steeves’s
own anguish at being an American (that is, U.S.) citizen, in an America that we
inherit, more than we inhabit; where we exist, but rarely dwell, as Frank Lloyd
Wright proved, without any help from Heidegger (who, as a student of mine
once put it, is a “space case,” since the notion of aletheia [unhiddenness] has no
room for subjects OR objects, hence is vacuous). Likewise, one of Steeves’s
students urged Descartes to go into therapy (233nl9), no doubt because he
forgot that a thinking thing {res cogitans) cannot exist without being related to
other thinking things—with language as the silent but permanent bond between
them. Hence methodic doubt is (like the notion of private language, for
Wittgenstein) self-refuting. Narramus {et audimns) ergo sum: we talk (and
listen), therefore we are. But every child knows this, and so does Bigfoot; it is
only (analytic) philosophers who are or become “like savages,” requiring
ordinary (language) savages to help them find their way out of a black forest, or
in more academic terms, to flee from fly-bottles, even if there is no escaping
ourselves.^
Words have origins; so do ideas. Steeves’s ideas come from many
sources, and his work resounds with their voices. The pity of it is only that he
hears echoes of European thought, when thinkers far closer to home (in every
sense) have already joined the choms. Why chastise Levinas for failing to
recognize alterity, when every dog knows what Levinas (or Kant) does not? For
that matter, why talk about the authority of the face (54) in print, when it lends
itself far better to film? As Gloria Swanson said, summoning her wounded pride
as an ex-silent screen star, “I am big .. . the pictures got small! Dialogue? Who
needs dialogue? We had faces, faces!” {Sunset Boulevard, dir. Billy Wilder,
1950).^ And what faces we have—Garbo, Chaplin, Lorre, Chaney, and Swanson
herself Fortunately, they are immortal, at least on celluloid. And that’s a life-