The Wound and the Bow

Who but the inimitable Edmund Wilson--an American intellectual in a class by himself--could have turned to the legend of Philoctetes and the dramatic poetry that has coalesced about it and reminded us that, here, in this ancient tale, lies a mythos for our time?

In Wilson's famous essay "The Wound and the Bow" we see the themes of genius and injury interwoven in a way that reveals the psychological wellsprings of behavior--moral and immoral.

We are, all of us, in one way or another, "damaged goods." The first obligation of moral inquiry, then, is self-inventory (what Nietzsche termed "genealogy"). We are obliged to proceed in this fashion because it is incumbent upon us to learn "the fundamental law of the authentic self." Otherwise, we are liable to be false to our own "natures" and to behave in unbecoming ways (see Wilson's rendering of Sophocles' Greek in TWATB).

Wilson resurrected Sophocles's great insight that "superior strength" may manifest itself as "inseparable from disability" (ibid). The fundamental law of the authentic self may be a "decree" in the form of an incurable wound. The moral impulse may then be construed as behavior in accordance with (or in response to) that decree--and may present itself as a "reaction formation" in Freudian terms.

Origen's great insight, as we have seen (previous post), is that the source of such injury may prove to be "some dart and wound of love" (in the Islamic tradition, Ibn Hazm [d. 1064 CE] is the great psychologist of affaires d'amour). Nietzsche's question (in "Schopenhauer As Educator") acknowledges Origen's insight (presumably unawares): "What have you up to now truly loved, what attracted your soul, what dominated it while simultaneously making it happy?"

In Walden we bear witness to the ways in which the wound of Thoreau's love for truth prompted that New England Nietzsche, that New England Philoctetes, to nock his arrow.