Knowing As Instancing: Jazz Improvisation and Moral Perfectionism

In what follows I will sketch an approach to understanding improvised music-one that discovers in certain outstanding jazz improvisations an emblem of what Emerson typically calls self-trust and Stanley Cavell, in recent years, has called moral perfectionism. Thus perhaps the greatest burden of these pages is to show how a way of attending to improvised music might reveal a form of knowledge that is essentially moral. By extending this general claim to moral perfectionism, I will be joining my discussion to a broader philosophical project-as well as to a tradition of thinking-to which the present occasion permits only the briefest of introductions. Moral perfectionism is best characterized not as a set of moral axioms or principles, as though it stood in competition with the dominant theories of morality (Utilitarianism and Kantianism), but as a kind of thinking that begins after or beyond such theories. It is a thinking whose distinctive features are a commitment to speaking and acting true to oneself, combined with a thoroughgoing dissatisfaction with oneself as one now stands. One might summarize these features by saying that they identify a way of living set against a life of conformity and a lifeless consistency. It is in his essay "Self-Reliance" that Emerson famously describes our human tendency to nullify ourselves in the face of our craving for conformity and consistency. The way out of this danger to the self is what Emerson means by selftrust or self-reliance; he speaks in similar contexts of heeding one's genius. There are of course trivial as well as arrogant ways to take up Emerson's call, exactly as many as there are trivial and arrogant ways of reading. ' But that it can be read as belonging to a tradition of thinking inherited from such figures as Plato and Pascal, and continued in such figures as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, was perhaps the most fertile conclusion of Stanley Cavell's 1988 Carus Lectures published as Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome.2 The central concern of those lectures, beyond that they identify this tradition of thinking, was to argue that the necessarily unending commitment to perfecting the self is not only in harmony with the equally unending or ongoing political commitment to democracy, but it is, in fact, democracy's precondition, even its fullest meaning. The feature of interest to me here, however, as I set out to suggest some connections between moral perfectionism and the work of some exemplary jazz improvisers, is the understanding that emerges from this tradition of how we manage to do anything new or different or original at all: to check our habitual responses to the world-for example, our reliance, when improvising a jazz solo, on familiar solutions to a pattern of chord changes-in favor of newly discovered or newly charted desires. This essay is divided into four sections. In the first section, I offer a critique of standard efforts to interpret improvised solos as though they were composed or preconceived, contrasting that approach to one that treats the procedures of improvisation as derived from and importantly at play in our everyday actions. The second section turns to a pair of discussions of artistic genius and originality: Kant's account of artistic genius in Critique of Judgment ??46-503 and especially Emerson's concluding essay in Essays: First Series-the one he calls "Art."4 My intent in this section is twofold: to show the extent to which Emerson's essay is written in response to