How should inquiry into ethical-political life come to terms with “depth experience”? By this, I mean experience that is extraordinary and breaks in on the familiar frames of meaning and reasoning that undergird everyday life, bringing with it some sort of transformation or significant solidification of basic commitments or identity. Stated in this abstract fashion, my question is likely to seem rather bewildering or simply uninteresting for the study of politics. Perhaps its sense and significance might be better grasped if I begin by pointing to a prominent example of such experience, and what I believe would be generally agreed was its far-reaching impact on contemporary ethical-political reality in the United States. Consider here George W. Bush's experience of being “born again,” and the effect it seems to have had on how he, as president, conceived his own and his country's callings in the wake of the events of 9/11 [Public Broadcasting System (PBS) 2004; Unger Reference Unger2007]. Repeatedly, Bush interpreted the intensity of his faith as justifying an absolute certainty about his political actions. The most memorable instances of this involved his call for a new “crusade” and the ease with which he continually reduced the issues arising from 9/11 to a struggle of good against evil (Bush Reference Bush2001; Ford Reference Ford2001, 1).Footnote ¹

If this example makes the stakes of my question more comprehensible, then it probably also prompts a quick answer. Political theorists, especially of the mainstream liberal sort, will hurry to warn that the influence of such experience on political life is highly deleterious and should be quarantined in private life. There is no doubt a good deal of wisdom in this sort of answer. But there may also be some wisdom in not leaping to this conclusion too quickly. First, we should not simply equate theistic depth experience with a will to certainty that is dangerous to democratic politics. Here one might usefully contrast Bush's easy talk of evil with evangelist minister Billy Graham's (Reference Graham2001) more sober and cautious remarks about evil in his address at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.Footnote ² One could also point to the admirable role that theistic depth experience played in Martin Luther King's actions in the civil rights movement (Garrow Reference Garrow1986, 57–58). Furthermore, the view that depth experience is so dangerous as to require its being kept entirely separate from public life fails to confront the problem that such experience may be so powerful and persistent that efforts to simply quarantine it will never be sufficiently effective. One might note in this regard a 2009 survey showing that close to half of the American population reports having had some sort of deep spiritual experience, defined as a “moment of sudden religious insight or awakening” (The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 2009, para. 6).Footnote ³ In the face of such evidence, we may be pushed toward the conclusion reached by the eminent liberal political theorist, George Kateb (Reference Kateb2000), who finds that our yearning for deeply meaningful experience is so strong that we do better not to try simply to suppress it, but rather attempt to cultivate it in a fashion that draws us away from a politics of certainty.Footnote ⁴

A final reason for resisting the urge to quarantine is that when one begins to reflect on depth experience, the sense of what might belong there begins to expand in provocative ways. Here I am especially interested in investigating nontheistic variants. For the moment, let me merely identify one example of what I have in mind. The first president of Czechoslovakia, following the “Velvet Revolution” against the communist regime in 1989, was Vaclav Havel. Before the revolution, Havel spent a significant amount of time in prison as a result of his opposition. During one of his periods of confinement, he reports having had an overwhelming, deeply formative experience that he characterized as nontheistic, but that nevertheless manifested similarities to the “fullness” of religious experience (discussed more fully in a moment).

There would appear then to be some good reasons for political theorists to more carefully explore the terrain of depth experience. The concern underlying my investigation is normative. I want to consider what frames of meaning citizens of late-modern, affluent democracies might need to bring to bear on such experiences in order to have at least some hope of enhancing the ethical-political promise they carry and of minimizing the deleterious effects. I refer to this background of meaning as a “constellation.” By this, I mean that when depth experience occurs, it will draw at least some of its meaning from a surrounding set of geistlicher entities. The set I envision includes ontological figures, an ethos, and a faith in democratic talk. Together, these three entities mutually interpret, incite, and chasten one another, and draw the raw power of depth experience toward certain fields of affect, perception, and rightness rather than others.

In what follows, I try to make this constructive project plausible. Toward that end, I first render the ideas of depth experience and constellation clearer. In the succeeding section, “Rethinking the Surface/Depth Contrast and Reimagining Its Background,” I explain how the background constellation I sketch helps mobilize some of the ethical-political promises lodged in depth experience and deflect certain dangers. One of the most distinctive promises involves how my account of depth experience and constellation can be brought into a mutually enriching relationship with the ideal of deliberative democracy. Finally, in “Faith in Democratic Talk,” I show how this benefit accrues in relation both to specific aspects of deliberation—such as the claim that it can change participants, in the sense of drawing them to critically evaluate their preferences and desires—and to the general claim that this is the most admirable characterization of democracy.

Before turning to this discussion, one further prefatory comment is in order. Why do I choose the image of depth to get at the sort of experience in which I am interested? Why not appeal to the “extraordinary” or the “abnormal” instead, especially because the language of depth seems to be rather philosophically passé? In particular, my choice might seem to predetermine reflection in favor of the idea that moral and political thinking must have deep, ultimate “foundations,” with God perhaps as the favored candidate. Hence, I might be thought to have undermined at the start my own goal of exploring nontheistic experience. But I see no such necessary disadvantage, and there may be some advantage. When I use the concept of depth, I am carefully refiguring it in a nonfoundationalist, nontheistic way. The advantage to proceeding in this fashion is that it hopefully makes my project more difficult for theists to ignore and thus more productive in the conversations it can spawn.Footnote ⁵

DEPTH EXPERIENCE AND ITS MODES

Although being “born again” is probably the most frequently identified depth experience in America today, it is crucial not to let that one type be mistaken for the entire category of experience in which I am interested. I take being “born again” to be an instance of what Charles Taylor (Reference Taylor2007, 5 ff) calls an experience of “fullness.” I would differentiate that general mode from another I will call “dearth.” These two modes comprise the category of depth experience. My underlying aim is to consider the implications such experience can, and ought to, have in the life of a late-modern democratic society. Before turning to that task, it is necessary to further elucidate “fullness” and “dearth.”

Fullness. For a number of years, Taylor (Reference Taylor1989, ch. 1) has sought to integrate depth experience into the way contemporary political theory understands human agency, judgment, and motivation. He argues that the most important qualitative judgments we make have the following structure: our explicit evaluations of events and situations are also always further “articulations” of the core ontological sources of ourselves.Footnote ⁶ The source may be God, nature, progress, or something other; in short, whatever we see and feel as giving our world its fundamental animation and direction. Each significant evaluation of the world we offer is a further specification and augmentation of our sources. This bond between self and source is a crucial element of our sense of identity and of the motivation for our actions.

To be “born again” becomes, in these terms, to experience in a particularly intense way the closeness or force of what is, or is becoming, one's source. One feels “inspirited” by, or “full” of, the power of one's source. Afterward, such an event can continue to animate one's life in a powerful way. Or one may, over time, progressively lose the previously felt intensity and drift away from that source, perhaps becoming drawn to another.

Taylor's (Reference Taylor2007) thinking on these matters is interesting for two reasons. First, he attends to religion primarily as a “lived experience” as opposed to it being a set of beliefs toward which you are disposed in the same way as, say, a given theory in physics. Second, he extends this sort of experience to include those who are not theists or religious in traditional Western senses. As he says, he is concerned with investigating “alternative ways of living our moral/spiritual life” (5). Ultimately, Taylor wants to argue in favor of theism, but the way in which he frames the space of inquiry about the self and experience is such that it invites nontheists into this space as well. I accept the invitation. I will avail myself of the opening Taylor provides for the purpose of promoting a certain sort of nontheistic, “moral/spiritual” commitment, and then of elucidating its possible implications for political theory.

Let me begin by presenting some examples of experiences of fullness that have rather different shapes than Bush's. This should help one see this category as broader than the contemporary fixation on being born again makes it seem. The example that occupies the central place in Taylor's book, A Secular Age, is that of Bede Griffiths, an adolescent in England in the 1930s, who reported the following experience:

Griffiths is not a well-known figure in the history of religious conversion. Why then does Taylor refer us to his particular experience? At least part of the reason, I suspect, is that Griffiths' experience of fullness generated, for a substantial period of time, a somewhat uncertain direction for his life. Although Griffiths described a sense of being “face to face” with “reality,” the exact meaning of that event and the reality it exposed were only articulated slowly, over several years. At first, he felt that what he experienced exposed as a lie the traditional Christianity of his upbringing. He became convinced that his encounter with the sublimity of nature could best be construed as opening out toward “a new religion” whose prophets were romantics such as Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats (Griffiths Reference Griffiths1979, 30). Later, he began to slowly turn back toward traditional Christianity. To his credit, Taylor does not lend this turn any air of seeming inevitability. His understanding is more sensitive to the real ontological weight of the “alternative construals” that were posed for Griffiths (2007, 10–11). In his context of the early twentieth century, some sort of “religion” of nature might very well have gained his ultimate commitment. If he had been born later in the twentieth century, then perhaps he might have ended up as an adherent of “deep ecology.”

Although a setting of unspoiled nature is often crucial to experiences of fullness, this is not always the case.Footnote ⁸ Bush's rebirth, as well as that of many others today, is constituted less by any engagement with nature than by an engagement with Jesus. His presence and one's personal experience of him are typically at the core of the contemporary American experience of being born again (Wills Reference Wills2007, 3).

A further example shows that depth experience does not necessarily involve God, or unspoiled nature, or Jesus. Consider Vaclav Havel's experience that I referred to previously. Nature was certainly involved, although the scene was anything but serene and unspoiled. Havel was in a prison yard sitting “on a pile of rusty iron” when he found himself captured by the sight of

Besides the specific setting in Havel's (Reference Havel and Wilson1988) case, there is a distinctive quality to it that is certainly not theistic in any familiar sense. Somewhat like Heidegger, he sees human beings as “thrown” into existence and separated from “Being.” This “separation” is interrupted by the experience of fullness that reminds us of the “incomprehensible abundance” and “integrity of Being” (190, 225, 319–20, 333). Havel speaks afterward of his “faith” in the transcendent, “absolute horizon of Being.” But he adds quickly, “I confess I can't talk of God in this connection.” All we have is “the experience of meaning and of meaningfulness” (233, 269, 333).

This last quality is perhaps what is most common to the experience of fullness. From there, some like Griffiths find that realm of meaning to be filled by God, the Word of God, and shared sets of beliefs. Others, such as Havel and Ralph Waldo Emerson, are wary of grasping onto unchanging convictions and rather hope only to honor those moments of plentitude when there is an influx of meaning by living their lives “constantly hearing a faint echo of it” (Havel Reference Havel and Wilson1988, 225).

My short survey of fullness shows, if nothing else, that such experiences do not come with a clearly printed set of guidelines attached, telling us unequivocally who or what the relevant ontological sources and entities are, and how they must relate to the everyday level of existence. But, at the same time, depth experience is not simply a kind of phenomenological putty into which we impress our will. Rather it moves us with a profound, “forceless force” or “carefree determination.” We typically try hard to find ways to draw that power of the experience into our lives more fully. We might do that by prayer, by taking a backpacking trip deep into the woods, by participating in a mass protest against an unjust government, by accepting the presidency of a country, or by meditating according to some regimen. In short, there is always a great deal of interpretive work involved in making sense of such experiences in which individual will, culture, and the beyond-human may be intertwined in a vast variety of ways.

Dearth. The second mode of depth experience to which I want to attend is “dearth.” If “fullness” relates to what most animates and gives force to a life, then “dearth” relates to the way in which that life is lived against the foreknowledge that it has a finite span. As with fullness, I am suggesting that it is an existentially fundamental experience, but not one with a fully determinate content and implications. A moment of growing awareness of my mortality might in some contexts lead to a withdrawal from public activity; in other contexts, it might lead to heightened activity, as I realize how short the amount of time on earth might be for me.Footnote ⁹ A crucial question from the perspective of this article will always be: what is the character of the background constellation in terms of which one interprets and cultivates such experience?

When Taylor (Reference Taylor2007, 6) introduces the experience of fullness, he also speaks of a corresponding “negative” sort of phenomenon: the experience of “a distance, an absence, an exile,” or an “exclusion . . . from fullness.” He does not attend to this sort of experience nearly as closely as he does to fullness. But one thing is clear for Taylor; such negative experience is essentially derivative from the positive power of one's source. A prominent example in Christianity would be the sense of my original sin separating me from God.

What I am calling an experience of “dearth” overlaps with Taylor's dependent category, but it is not totally subsumable within it, particularly in the modern world. Dearth in my sense is not to be understood as necessarily dependent on a transcendent source that defines one's highest good. Quite frequently today, dearth is experienced as the brute insufficiency of meaning that is made manifest when death or suffering appears against the modern background affirmation of the secular self: a capacious, sovereign subject that powers itself through the world according to its chosen narrative. Whereas dearth in Taylor is experienced against an encompassing, transcendent frame of meaning from which you have fallen away, dearth for the secular, sovereign individual—especially in the figure of death—has the sense of something that threatens to make a complete mockery of the very ideal of such a sovereign individual.

Another crucial characteristic of dearth experience is how much or how little it is mediated by violence.Footnote ¹⁰ The more immediate and horrendous the violence, the more difficult it becomes to draw such experiences into ordinary discourse. It is not possible in the present context to consider these most violent experiences. What I do want to draw out, however, is the significance of some dearth experiences that are lodged just this side of the line beyond which the agent loses the capacity to bring the experiences back into ordinary discourse. One example following illustrates how a transcendent source may be entangled with an extreme experience of dearth. The other is tied to nothing more precise than having a “livable” life; and it involves Judith Butler's striking autobiographical description of the context within which she was moved to write Gender Trouble in 1990, a book some criticized as being merely an academic exercise in high, rarified theory. Looking back a decade later, Butler (Reference Butler1999, xix–x) describes the pattern of intense experience within which the book was conceived:

Butler (Reference Butler1999, xi) refers here to a “certain crisis in ontology experienced at the level of both sexuality and language.” In the language I have been using, she is referring here to intense experiences of dearth, ones in which those whose existence has crossed certain gender boundaries find themselves without any ontological breathing space, without any acceptable script of meaning. Such lives are socially categorized as “unlivable,” and their deaths as “ungrievable” (1999, xxii; 2004, ch. 2; 2009, Introduction).

As the existence of Gender Trouble attests, Butler was able to respond cogently and powerfully to the deep impact of this experience. Something similar might be said of another vivid confrontation with dearth, only this one took place against a specific religious frame of meaning. In a posthumously published essay, John Rawls (Reference Rawls and Nagel2009, 261, 263) narrates a particular experience he had in the midst of combat during World War II. This experience moved him deeply in relation to his traditional Episcopalian Christianity. But it did not move him closer to that source; rather he “abandoned it entirely.” The identity and will of the traditional Christian God had become, as a result of this experience, so “alien” that he could no longer affirm him, at least in his traditional form.

“On My Religion” was written in 1997, more than a half-century after Rawls' experience of war. It sketches two occurrences that had a profound, overlapping impact on both his religious and ethical ideas.Footnote ¹¹ The first involved a request by a sergeant made to Rawls and another soldier, who was his close friend, that one of them volunteer to accompany a colonel to the front line where he could better observe the enemy position. A second volunteer was needed to give blood to a badly wounded comrade in a nearby field hospital. Rawls and his friend both volunteered and the decision as to who should go where turned on which of them had the right blood type. Rawls' matched that of the wounded man, so he went to give blood. His friend went to the front and was killed almost immediately by a mortar shell.

The other incident occurred within a month's time of the first. Rawls' unit was being given a period of rest from combat, and one evening he went to see a movie and news reports from the Army information service. There he saw the first film and heard the first accounts from the American soldiers who had come upon the German concentration camps.

These events led Rawls, over a period of “months and years,” to question Christianity's notion that God's will is manifest in the human world. The idea that God, for some reason, willed his friend's death and spared his own life, or visited the Holocaust on Jews as some sort of punishment, now struck Rawls as “hideous and evil.” He concluded: “To interpret history as expressing God's will, God's will must accord with the most basic ideas of justice as we know them” (Rawls Reference Rawls and Nagel2009, 263). This path did not lead him to doubt the existence of God; it meant, however, that God's will, like the will of a majority in politics, was not accepted by Rawls as the sovereign arbiter of right and justice.

So far, I have spoken of dearth and fullness as if they are diametrically opposed, and indeed they often are. However, sometimes depth experience manifests an intertwining of the two. For example, there may be a transformation of what is initially a confrontation with death into an experience of fullness. Consider the famous case of Frederick Douglass during his enslavement in early nineteenth-century America. As a young man, he was attacked by a particularly brutal white master. But what began as a deeply fearful event became “a turning point” in his life, as he subdued his attacker and felt himself able now to become “A FREE MAN” (Douglass Reference Douglass2003, 64, 69; McFeeley Reference McFeeley1991, 38, 47–48).

The peculiar quality of Douglass' experience of dearth and fullness is hardly alien to political theory. It mirrors, at least to some degree, Hegel's (Reference Hegel and Miller1977, 111–19) famous analysis of the master–slave dialectic. Hegel's analysis was influential among Marxists of the twentieth century, who were impressed by the idea of a revolutionary change in consciousness that occurs as the result of the slave's reflection on his labor in the material world.Footnote ¹² We need to be careful, however, in Douglass' case not to immerse it too quickly and completely in this stream of thought. For one thing, he seems to have retained for a long period of time a theological reference point for his experience. Framed in this fashion, Douglass' experience of dearth and fullness may have less affinity with secular ideas of violent revolution and more with theologically rooted notions of nonviolent resistance. If so, the more insightful line of filiation may reach forward from Douglass to Martin Luther King, who underwent a depth experience of dearth/fullness one night in the context of the 1956 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. One biographer refers to this as “the most important night of his life,” in the sense of the resolve he drew from the experience.Footnote ¹³

RETHINKING THE SURFACE/DEPTH CONTRAST AND REIMAGINING ITS BACKGROUND

The foregoing sketch of types of depth experience is intended merely to suggest that it can appear in various forms and can bear on political ideas and actions in a myriad of ways. Next, I want to explore the implications of having political theory engage more carefully and methodically with this experience. My specific aim is to investigate whether an openness to “depth” might move us in ways that could have a salutary effect on the congealed “surface” expectations of ongoing political life. The mere suggestion of such an aim is, however, likely to be seen as slightly bizarre or even dangerous, as I noted in the Introduction. Clearly, I need to better allay this suspicion before moving on to explore my substantive goal. I begin, therefore, by delineating two dangers that might be said to undermine any such exploration and then by offering some grounds for not allowing these concerns to halt the investigation before it even gets underway. Next, I turn to the idea that we might be able to best avoid these dangers by imagining our efforts to understand depth experience as unfolding against a particular background constellation of meaning in which are embedded distinctive cognitive, affective, and normative predispositions. I try to make this claim persuasive by elucidating specifically what it would mean in relation to both the experiences of dearth and fullness, and by looking to the character of Walt Whitman as a robust illustration of what it might mean to lead a life open to these dynamics.

Dangerous Depths. The most prominent danger likely to attend the influx of treacherous currents from depth experience into the calm everyday waters of political life is irrationalism. What such experience promises above all is to move and unsettle, to render us “undone” in some sense (Butler Reference Butler2004, 23–24). A movement of this sort is brought about not by mandates of reason, but rather by something we might call a “forceless force.” I choose this phrase deliberately with the intention of emphasizing a contrast with Jürgen Habermas' (Reference Habermas, Habermas and Luhman1971, 137; Reference Habermas and McCarthy1975, 108) term “forceless force of better argument.” Habermas wants to emphasize that we can be “moved” to support a norm that is able to gain the agreement of participants in a “practical discourse.” The peculiarity his phrase highlights is how reason and justice alone can effectively motivate us in moral-political situations. My usage, in contrast, depends on our being moved by something that is beyond reason, but that is also not reducible to the “force” of coercion. When I turn to a discussion of deliberative democracy, I make a case for understanding the two expressions, Habermas' and mine, as having complementary roles rather than simply conflicting ones. For the moment, however, I merely want to investigate the peculiar sense of being moved by experience in some way that reason has not fully authorized and coercion has not compelled.

Here one might consider again Rawls' (Reference Rawls and Nagel2009) effort to explain how his wartime experience changed his most fundamental beliefs, and how one might best characterize that change. The essay begins with a proud reaffirmation of liberal rationalism. The opening line warns: “My religion is of interest only to me. . . .” Furthermore, the deeply personal account of his experiences is, he tells us, “probably not” of any value in explaining how his view of religion and philosophy changed (261). The more I read this essay, however, the more I find such initial disclaimers to be as deeply problematic as some deployed by Rousseau. Consider how the latter begins his “Discourse on the Arts and Sciences,” announcing that he will speak as “an honest man who knows nothing. . . .” (Rousseau Reference Rousseau, Masters, Masters and Masters1964, 34). In neither Rousseau's case nor Rawls' does the explicit stance of denial do justice to the text that follows. Rather the thoughtfulness and force of both accounts far exceed their narrow rhetorical frames, and they do so in ways that reason need not disown. All I want to do here is simply keep the question of the relation of depth experience to reason from being too hastily resolved at the outset. In short, after reading an account such as Rawls', there is at least as much sense to holding this question open to investigation as there is to prohibiting it.

A second concern about depth experience and politics is that it is often quite oblivious to the role of power in relation to the character of the experience itself and to how its meaning is subsequently construed. Something that is beyond or outside the everyday is seen to break through the shell of ordinary life, carrying a message straight to the heart, untainted by the dynamics of power. Consider the horror and grief that accompanied Americans' viewing of the events of 9/11. The affects and attributions of responsibility seemed to flow in a “natural,” crystal clear current. But this naturalness was, of course, implicitly framed by multiple narratives of power, such as the one that directed us toward a new “crusade” against Muslims.

A similar naturalness appears in positive experiences of fullness. Many who are “born again” today seem oblivious to the ways in which their consciousness is in fact being mobilized by religious entrepreneurs and organizations. It is interesting to note here that the politics of rebirth mobilization had already been reduced to a standard formula in the mid-nineteenth century by preachers such as Charles Grandison Finney, the most famous evangelist of that period. The “revival” meeting was not a normal religious service in which someone might just fortuitously experience Jesus, but rather a carefully crafted theatrical event within which the “decision for Christ” was the climax toward which all the action built, and from which the reborn individual would hopefully march forth with a transformed normative orientation (Wills Reference Wills2007, 299–301). My point here is not to issue some particular indictment against those who experience a religious rebirth, but rather to suggest that the form and meaning of all such experience is suffused with contents from the culture in whose context it occurs, and, accordingly, always liable to carrying and augmenting the power relations existing in that culture. There just is no such thing as immaculate depth experience. Even if it is not as strategically mediated as in Finney's revivals, the culture of the person having the experience will have always already planted evidence of some sort. Thus, one should never accept at face value the fact that depth experience seems somehow completely outside the sphere of culture and power.

But, after having admitted this, there remains the fact that depth experience also can have a dislocating effect on given perceptions, commitments, and identities, and this dislocation might, in turn, unsettle existing power relations. In what follows, I want to embrace both insights—that depth experience can help reproduce given relations of power and that it can also unsettle them and help point us toward more admirable forms of life. If one does this, at least two tasks are thereby put on the agenda. The first involves a hermeneutics of suspicion deployed to expose how existing frames of power help constitute phenomena such as experiences of grief in wartime. Judith Butler's (Reference Butler2004, Reference Butler2009) recent work on post-9/11 America has been particularly insightful on this question. The second task can be gathered under the heading of a hermeneutics of affirmation that involves a self-conscious planting of evidence of the sort that offers the possibility of construing depth experience in alternative ways.

Planting Evidence in the Background. When evidence is planted in criminal cases, the authorities fix things so as to ensure that the suspected perpetrator will end up being convicted. The planting, to be effective, must be done secretly; otherwise, its illegitimacy will become apparent. But maybe there are ways of planting evidence with the intention of promoting some admirable normative orientation that we affirm, without the whole process being necessarily suffused with illegitimacy. I witnessed a simple example of this when my son was in the second grade. His teacher wanted to take her youngsters' typical fascination with dinosaurs in the direction of learning something about the work of paleontologists. So, before school, she buried a variety of plastic dinosaurs in the sandbox outside and then, later, when the children arrived, organized an expedition to search for them. The children were quite enthused to participate in a dig and get a feel for paleontology. One might see this as example of the teacher planting evidence and, thus, deceiving the students. Of course, in this example, whatever secrecy or deception may have temporarily existed was soon made clear to all. The whole exercise was accepted by everyone as a creative episode in teaching and learning. Perhaps, then, some instances of planting evidence may be more appropriately seen as having a legitimate educational function.

When it comes to the transmission of culture across generations, we might think of a spectrum from something like a pluralistic educational model, at one end, to a thoroughly paternalistic one, at the other. With this sort of evaluative context in mind, I want to advocate the value of a nontheistic frame or background “constellation” for interpreting depth experience. A full justification for the character of this proposal ultimately rests on the claim that it is an admirable response to a variety of challenges late-modern life throws up for citizens of wealthy Western societies. Elsewhere I gave an extended account of this justificatory framework (White Reference White2009, Introduction). Here I will largely have to presume its cogency, although hopefully the specific arguments I make in fashioning what I call an “ontological-political constellation” will have some persuasiveness of their own. What gets planted then are certain cultural features that together can provide an orienting background for depth experience and how it is construed. The hope is that they might exert a subtle influence on the ways in which actors are moved by the force of experience.

My description of this background as a constellation is intended to highlight several features. I want to think in terms of a threefold set that is composed of ontological figures, an ethical-political ethos, and a faith in democratic talk. To speak of them as a constellation is to posit a set of geistlicher entities, each of which helps interpret, incite, and chasten the others, and to see this array as a picture whose full impression exceeds the sum of its parts. The entities I want to help plant—or at least actively cultivate—draw on insights going back to Nietzsche and Heidegger and reach forward to philosophical controversies in recent years about Western modernity, its conflicted heritage, and speculation about how best to position ourselves toward it as we look into the future. If what I say here has any novelty, then it will attach to some of the specific interpretations I develop regarding those insights and to how I understand their influence as a constellation construing experiences of dearth and fullness.

Let me turn now to the actual planting. The first component is a cluster of ontological figures. These function as the most basic sources of the self and how it sees and feels the world. The two most important of these are (1) an understanding of the world as a presencing or becoming, rather than as, say, a field of meaning fixed in place by an unchanging God; and (2) an understanding of all identity as constitutively formed in relation to difference. This ontological character of the world is refracted in a distinctive way by humans. Given the anxiety generated by our foreknowledge of mortality, we have a persistent desire to secure our identities by denying their ontological dependence on difference. This produces the recurring temptation to put difference at a distance and relate to it as something hostile, an existential threat to be resented and dealt with by marginalization or coercion of some sort.Footnote ¹⁴

One might immediately object that I have just blatantly entangled myself in an underlying contradiction. How can I embrace a poststructuralist ontology of identity/difference and yet mount a project that is structured by a sharp, master duality of “fullness” and “dearth?” The answer simply is that this duality has no master status. I propose rather a pair of terms intended to highlight what I take to be two crucial aspects of the human condition. I try, of course, to present arguments to support my claims, but the question as to whether this dual perspective is of any real value is ultimately answered only by the quality of the conversations and insights it hopefully fosters.

The ontological figures I delineate stand in relation to an ethos or spirit that subtly colors the way we live our lives. I am referring here to a disposition toward moral attentiveness and presumptive generosity that we might display toward the presencing of the world and the difference that is constituted by our identity. The rough idea of an ethos of this sort has been suggested by a number of contemporary philosophers and political theorists.Footnote ¹⁵ I want to embrace this ethos as a frame within which to interpret depth experiences of both dearth and fullness. These experiences, in turn, hold the prospect of affectively animating such an ethos and supplying it with motivating force. I flesh this out later in the article.

The third component of the constellation is a vibrant faith in democracy. The core of this faith is not a belief that the world is somehow predisposed toward a consensual democratic resolution of all serious normative problems, and that we merely need to act in good faith in order for our deliberations to begin to slide decisively in that direction. Rather, it is the persisting commitment to the idea that many public problems can be ameliorated by serious, sustained deliberation. And people can, under certain circumstances, be moved from positions rationalizable solely in terms of narrow interests and power calculations to positions more open to the moral claims of others. Here I am merely highlighting one of the core claims of the deliberative model of democracy, namely, that sometimes my interests may be changed by deliberation (Warren Reference Warren and White1995, 167–200). The idea is that one can be “moved” by democratic talk in ways that are both significant and yet not easily predictable using an economic model of rationality.

Another quality of democratic faith is its commitment to further inclusion in the political community. In the history of Western democracies, this sort of expansion of the community has been a central theme. Often, the “door” to the community has not been opened to others voluntarily in a spirit of generosity; rather, it has been forced open. Bonnie Honig (Reference Honig2001, 99–101) felicitously calls this phenomenon “democratic takings.” Such forced access will probably always be necessary to a significant degree, but a democratic faith of the sort I envision relates to a willingness of those inside the community to be at least somewhat responsive to the deliberative nudge to include “all affected” in the discussion and justification of some proposed norm or policy. It is important to understand this commitment not as something like a grand categorical imperative, but rather as the persistent pull a democratic citizen should feel to glance outward and ask herself hard questions about how much her privileged position is dependent upon unfair, ongoing relationships with those outside her community, both within her own country and beyond its borders.

Having laid out the basics of my threefold background constellation, within which depth experience can resonate in a nontheistic, nonfoundationalist fashion, it is appropriate to pull back for a moment and try to become clearer about just what is on offer here. The components of the frame I have sketched have, of course, already been “planted,” to a small but significant degree, in the cultures of affluent Western democracies. This is the legacy of several decades of radical philosophical reassessment of the character of Western modernity. The labels roughly associated with this broad reassessment of thinking are poststructuralism, multiculturalism, and critical theory. My intention is to draw out of these strains a coherent hermeneutic of affirmation that provides what might be called a late-modern “bearing.” An agent who affirms the threefold constellation has given herself a “bearing” in two senses typically associated with the everyday meaning of that word. First, there is now a distinctive, broad direction to her existence, although this remains far more underdetermined in character than would be the case if she were to have animated her life with a more familiar teleological or theological perspective. Second, she carries or “bears” her most basic commitments in a fashion that continually honors the distinction between the depth of those commitments and any further, more questionable, conviction that those commitments equate to a universal truth.

With the background constellation in place, let me now elucidate how the process of cultivating depth experience might proceed. As I consider both dearth and fullness, I contrast this process with how the tradition of Western political thought has tried to come to terms with such experience in the past.

Dearth. Experiences of dearth have hardly gone unnoticed in modern political thought. Hobbes places our flight from the fear of violent death in a state of nature at the center of his constitution of political order. And, Locke (Reference Locke and Macpherson1980, ch. 9, para. 123), although he complicates his picture of the prepolitical condition, also has us conceive political order as what effectively removes us from “fears and continual dangers.” Despite having these central roles, dearth experience in both thinkers remains primarily an initial problem for which political order provides an effective solution. After that, dearth largely recedes from theoretical sight.

In the most prominent variant of contemporary liberal thought, namely, Rawls' paradigm, dearth experience does not have to be made to recede, because it plays almost no explicit role in his theory of justice. Behind Rawls' (Reference Rawls1971, 75, 136–42) “veil of ignorance,” I am asked to imagine that there is a chance, once the veil is raised, that I might turn out to be a member of the category of “least advantaged” people; and part of what qualifies one for membership in that category is, presumably, the probability of experiencing dearth more frequently and intensely. This hypothetical dearth arises as a possibility that I coolly and rationally allocate to the category of least likely outcome when I select the principles of justice. Thus, dearth is still something one flees from, even if the calculation has a more abstract, hypothetical character than it does in earlier liberal thinkers. Accordingly, the possibility of dearth having a continuing constitutive character in one's life is not broached. If it were allowed such a role, I would contend, then it might foster a range of insights to which political theory might want to attend closely, even cultivate.

The constellation of ontological figures and ethos of moral attentiveness and presumptive generosity that I sketched previously provides a cognitive and dispositional horizon that induces citizens to see the significance of keeping their finitude quietly and persistently in the forefront of consciousness. It draws actors to resist urges to simply flee or otherwise effectively ward off experiences of dearth, however understandable they might be. In so doing, it creates a dampening effect on our typical modern propensity to imagine ourselves as increasingly untrammeled, capacious actors, moving toward greater mastery of our lives and also, therefore, forgetfulness of what can never be mastered, namely, our condition of mortality.

Our willingness to tarry with dearth and our constitutive “undoneness” thus helps generate a subtle, but persistent, drag on our modern temptation to imagine ourselves as sovereign actors. This, in turn, encourages us to interpret our human condition as just as much a shared subjection to mortality as it is one of capacious creators about to launch our next project. A sense of this shared mortality that cannot be entirely relieved is allowed to persist, as it were, past the establishment of the polity. When this is the case and citizens keep themselves open to the force of that continual sense of drag on their capaciousness, the character of their engagement with other citizens acquires a subtly different quality. Interactions may not always be so quickly and completely locked into a bargaining framework that assesses the quality of that engagement solely in terms of how well it allows one to strategically advance one's initial interests.

I elaborate what this means more fully in the next section, where I take up the issue of democratic deliberation. But there is another important aspect of this novel perspective that should be highlighted. This concerns the significance of state borders. In general, when there is a strategic frame around actors and their interests, borders that close out sources of instability and unknown claims will appear to be generally advantageous. One cannot even plan a winning strategy in the game if the players and rules are continually in flux. What this means is that traditional political thought has typically fit well with the idea of political communities as clearly delimited nation-states.

Insofar as citizens allow dearth experience to come to partially infuse their consciousness, however, they may begin to feel a slight bond of a community beyond the one attached to their particular polity. This is a negative community, constituted by a common subjection to mortality.Footnote ¹⁶ Understood in this fashion, humanity takes shape as a possible community where all humans are imagined, as Judith Butler (Reference Butler2004, ch. 2) puts it, as included within the circle of those who are “grievable.”

When we allow dearth experience thus to prefigure humanity as this sort of minimal, negative community of mortals, we foster thereby a dispositional force toward questioning “gratuitous mortality.” I mean by this death and other serious harms that are preventable at minimal cost. When I am moved to raise this question, I may not have the motivation necessary for some major undertaking, but I will at least have been decentered enough to leave me liable to the self-reproach that I could at least have done something minimal. The “push” I feel from this dispositional force is slight, but hopefully continual; and it is thus not dependent for its effectiveness on those occasional “explosions of feeling” that temporarily animate members of affluent Western societies to extend their concern beyond the usual boundaries and, accordingly, respond generously to some disaster (Appiah Reference Appiah2006, 170).Footnote ¹⁷

Fullness. Experiences of fullness are most easily made sense of within theistic traditions because they provide one with a clear ethical-ontological entity that is the unmistakable source of that fullness. In such experiences, one is given a glimpse or taste of that ground of being. Things seem far less clear when one considers fullness from a nontheistic perspective. What exactly is the source of those affects typically associated with fullness such as wonder, joy, love, or a sense of the goodness of the world around you? At least in the case of dearth experiences, the nontheist is clear that her affective upheaval is connected ultimately to a sense of her finitude. What, for nontheists, is finitude's counterpart in cases of fullness?

Here it is useful to return to those basic ontological figures that are part of the constellation within which experience takes on meaning. The two crucial figures are, as I indicated previously, the world as presencing or becoming, and the idea that all identity appears against a horizon of difference that is always in a constitutive relation to that identity. The combined sense of these two figures is caught most eloquently and concisely by William Connolly's (Reference Butler2003, 170) phrase that “life exceeds identity.” Life is always presencing and exceeding one's attempts to fully domesticate it. This figuration of being can construe dearth and fullness in different ways. A dearth experience, such as the death of someone close to you, that occurs against this background can draw you toward a deeper sense of your own finitude and toward reflection on what it means to live more attuned to that insight. An experience of fullness, however, takes place for the nontheist in the form of sensing something like a subtle connectedness with the world, vivified by a feeling of exquisite resonance between my life and other life around me.

It is important to emphasize again that what is at issue here is not just the occurrence of “limit” experiences, such as Bede Griffiths'. It can also involve minor experiences; that is, ones that provide a light dose of enchantment. For nontheists of the sort I am talking about, there is no background metanarrative about the disenchantment of the modern world in whose spell we are imprisoned. For such people, as Jane Bennett (Reference Bennett2001, 3–12, 159–66) so vividly shows, the possibility of minor enchantments is something that can be creatively cultivated.

Experiences of fullness have not been ignored by the Western tradition of political thought, at least when one has in mind the more familiar theistic variety. Deep suspicion of such experiences and efforts to ward them off have been the most common reaction of modern theorists. The liberal tradition in the English-speaking world has always been deeply worried about the effects of fullness. This unease is sometimes gathered under the venerable term “enthusiasm.” In the wake of the English Civil War in the 1640s, many who wanted to return to stability were at pains to warn against the intrusion into political life of those who were full of religious “enthusiasm” to do God's will (Farr Reference Farr1988, 58–62). Liberal thought from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries has continually fought to keep the power of one's religiously generated animation from cathecting to a sense of duty to bring a fallen political world back to the truth.Footnote ¹⁸

Although liberals have found experiences of fullness anathema, radicals have not. Removed from its theistic connection, such experience became crucial to modern revolutionary thought. Often the motivation necessary to revolution has been envisioned as issuing forth from the sort of amalgam of dearth and fullness I discussed previously. For example, Marx famously evokes the proletariat's sense of growing immiseration, but a focus on that experience alone misses the centrality of another experience highlighted in the socialist tradition from Marx to the workers' movement in Poland in the 1980s. I am referring, of course, to “solidarity.” Marx (Reference Marx1988, 124)speaks in glowing terms of how workers draw strength and sustenance from the rich soil of “[c]ompany, association, and conversation.” For them, he continues, “the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase . . . but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines forth from their work-hardened bodies” (Marx Reference Marx1988, 124; Marx and Engels Reference Marx, Engels and Tucker1978, 500).

This amalgam can take on a variety of forms. As I showed previously, we can see this in the way Marx's form differs from the one we see in Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King. It appears in a further form in the work of some contemporary radical democratic theorists, such as Sheldon Wolin. For him, the initial fuel of democratic resistance is dearth: “misery” and “oppression.” But, at certain moments, those at the bottom of society look beyond their differences and experience evanescent moments of solidarity that reflect and enliven the possibility of seeing and acting on a new-felt commonality. This is the experience of a bond that Wolin (Reference Wolin1996, 98, 107) famously calls the “political,” and it sets in motion “the self-fashioning of the demos.”

This radical democratic rendering of fullness is imagined without Marx's social ontology of a chosen, collective subject of history. Rather, Wolin's ontology of democratic politics involves decentralized, “fugitive” movements that emerge sporadically among disadvantaged groups to push an elite-dominated state in different directions. For present purposes, I assume that Wolin is correct in envisioning a radical dispersion of democratic fullness away from a unitary “Many.”Footnote ¹⁹ I want to depart from him, however, both in attending to a further segment of society and in thinking somewhat differently about how it might experience fullness. My claim is that this experience is different from solidarity born of righteous indignation, but it nevertheless should be included in the contemporary democratic imaginary.

Wolin's vision includes dominant elites and fugitive movements of the disadvantaged; missing, however, is any accounting of the “middle.” The social ontology and affective economy of a late modern democracy need to better account for this category of citizens who are not typically in a condition of severe economic deprivation or clear oppression on religious, racial, national, or sexual grounds. That great democratic theorist, Richard Nixon, was a pioneer in this territory. When he coined the term, “Moral Majority,” he was targeting a population segment crucial to political fortunes in societies like the United States. Nixon can be understood as appropriating the traditional democratic sentiments of righteous indignation and solidarity, but deploying them in new ways. Both the content and collective subject of these radical sentiments were modified. The subject was now “the middle,” and the content was reformulated into a solidarity fueled by indignation at what was portrayed by Nixon as immoral and socially irresponsible categories of the population that were pressing for radical change in the 1960s and 1970s.

Nixon helped make late-modern society in both the United States and the other affluent Western countries a more complex object of theoretical comprehension. What I want to do is embrace this level of complexity, but consider the prospects of cultivating the depth experiences of those in the middle segment of such societies differently; more particularly, in terms of the background constellation I lay out. Thus, I do not confront the presencing of the world as something external to the fixed security of my identity and God, but rather as the source from which everything springs and then passes away. This presencing appears to me as a constitutive outside or beyond my identity, but this “outside” is not allowed the status of being “higher” in the sense of grounding certainty in my life. I can be deeply committed to my nontheistic sources, but that is not the same as the conviction that they embody a truth that applies to all. Such a conviction runs counter to the ineradicable mystery of presencing, in the sense of life exceeding identity. A citizen of the middle with the constellation I am imagining would also be developing resistance to free-floating sentiments of hostility and resentment, seeing the presencing of the world and other identities not as existential threat, but rather as part of the normal ebb and flow of life. Experiences of fullness by such a citizen might be cultivated so as to fold their meaning into a felt resonance between my life and this irrepressible movement of all life.

Further coherence for experiences of fullness would take shape against the background ethos I identified previously. Such experiences would thus be drawn into the affective sphere of a presumptive generosity. This framing would guide the progressive construal of the experience, and, in turn, receive new impetus from that feeling of fullness. One would interpret this feeling as a call to express an initial generosity as a response to the richness and abundance of presencing. A disposition of generosity in this sense would thus constitute a kind of sympathetic, mimetic answer to that calling. The feeling of being drawn or called toward this sort of generosity might initiate a light momentum from the initial “undoneness” of experiences of fullness toward a disposition to express generosity in action.Footnote ²⁰ One is moved or motivated lightly to imagine oneself as continually shifting between the role of the traveler who seeks to stay at least slightly outside his zone of comfort in engaging novel others, and the role of the host who is opening himself to the needs of others at his threshold. Given the democratic-theoretical background of my discussion of fullness up to now, it makes sense to imagine such dispositions as being expressed by those in the middle classes in relation to those fellow citizens who are less advantaged.Footnote ²¹ Moreover, these dispositions are in no sense uniquely shaped to fit only within nation-state borders. Rather, this way of reanimating democratic life opens out naturally to less advantaged others beyond the borders of one's country.

What effect might this slight pull toward an active, presumptive generosity actually have? One might consider this question in the context of Anthony Appiah's (Reference Appiah2006) discussion of cosmopolitanism. Appiah is at pains to suggest that there is almost an inevitability to this global extension of our concerns. We are, he contends, “a perpetually voyaging species,” always opening new “conversations” with different people. To my mind, Appiah makes things a little too easy with his image of cosmopolitanism growing almost effortlessly out of “inevitable” conversations (xx–i, 97–98). But there is nevertheless some real value to this focus on movement at the level of the small scale and everyday. A presumptive generosity and moral attentiveness may make me marginally more likely to initiate simple conversations with “strangers” (see Allen Reference Allen2004), exhibit sustained interest, and take modest actions whose collective effects may become quite significant. Moreover, such light, gratuitous generosity can sometimes spread with surprising ease (Fowler and Christakis Reference Fowler and Christakis2010, 1, 3).

So far, I consider how depth experiences might be inflected when they are imagined as occurring against a certain nontheistic constellation planted already in the culture of affluent Western societies. Political theory has an important role to play in vivifying the character of these possible inflections and showing how they might position us in admirable ways in public life. But the discussion so far has remained quite unspecific in terms of actual practice. In part, this is perfectly appropriate. My whole intention here has been to try to contribute to planting and cultivating a background that significantly inflects depth experience, without seeking thereby to tightly channel it into narrow institutional forms and disciplinary scripts. But a reluctance to contribute to paternalistic planting does not mean that one cannot speculate about how the planting and cultivation of some sorts of practices might resonate positively with the kinds of inflections I identify.

Consider here a couple of civic-cultural initiatives that have emerged recently in the United States. Kiva is a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization (Kiva 2010). What makes it fascinating from my perspective is the way it constitutes a specific site for engaging the kind of motivation, attentiveness, and affect that I have associated with nontheistically articulated experiences of dearth and fullness. Kiva combines aspects of a charity, a business, and a global Internet community. It makes small individual loans like the more familiar microfinance banks, but the capital is raised from individual donor/lenders of modest means in countries such as the United States that pledge small amounts of money. These individuals can keep track of their small quasicapital through the entire process. At the end, the donor/lender gets a return of capital, but not on capital; this is because the recipient in, say, Ghana must pay back the loan, but no interest is paid to Kiva or its contributors. The donor/lender initially selects a recipient from an online list of possibilities—an individual or a small group who will receive the funds—and is informed when repayment is achieved. The record of repayment is more than 95%. This creates an interesting chain of acknowledgment and responsibility between the donor/lender and the recipient of the funds. After repayment, the individual donor/lender is informed that her quasicapital is ready to go to work once again. For a middle-class American who is typically deeply oriented to ideas of individual responsibility and accountability, and suspicious of large international organizations claiming to work for human rights, this novel kind of organization seems to allow for reassurances on these dimensions. The foreign recipient appears to the donor/lender not as abjectly dependent, but rather as conscientious and prudent. With such skepticism of the other so assuaged, the commitment of money requires only a minimal, initial generosity. Moreover, the recipient of the funds is an identifiable, particular person or small collective: he or it has a face and a place that go along with some pressing need. Finally, when the loan/donation is repaid, the donor has his money in an account ready to be redeployed. Even less generosity than required initially is now all that is necessary to restart the process, although, importantly, the donor must travel again—at least virtually—outside his or her normal realm of concerns and comfort in order to decide to whom his further generosity should be directed. His moral attentiveness is thus put to work again and redirected toward additional, particular others.Footnote ²²

One can easily grasp how the design of this organization is congruent with a number of the ways that the threefold, nontheistic constellation construes fullness and dearth. Thus, the practices associated with Kiva help animate certain admirable motivations, orientations, and affects. The group is an enabler and “force-multiplier” for what I associate with fullness: a disposition toward moral attentiveness regarding the existence of need and vulnerability, and light, initial generosity. These practices also cohere with the primary figure that I associated with dearth, namely, the generation of drag on our propensity to see ourselves as sovereign. One aspect of that drag is the way it slows and particularizes our perception of the world. Grand visions of achievement certainly still warrant a place in our moral-political imagination. But we do well to decenter them sometimes and allow greater space for the cultivation of modest visions in which we are drawn incrementally to perceive and act somewhat differently. The lives of others may have for us at first sight a largely abstract value as part of a general category of, say, “the disadvantaged.” More modest visions and small acts, such as those engendered by the practices of Kiva allow one to periodically peer through abstract categories toward others who are now draped with the particularities of mortal individuals whose needs have a more visceral claim on us.

A somewhat similar, but more explicitly educational, initiative involves the “Alternative Spring Break” phenomenon on college campuses. Formed in the 1990s, this is less a single organization than an idea that has been realized in a multitude of venues since then. What was virtual travel in the case of Kiva becomes actual travel for students who volunteer to spend break time doing community service of some sort, often in other countries. Their desire to have an interesting travel experience is joined with a willingness to spend substantial time during the trip working, say, in a clinic in Belize or helping build housing in Columbia. This requires no major life choice for humanitarian work, as is the case with the Peace Corps. Rather, as a result of a limited, initial generosity, middle-class students travel beyond their familiar and relatively affluent world to experience radically different and far more vulnerable lives in their full particularity. At my own university, the alternative break phenomenon involved only a handful of students a decade ago; now the number is close to 800 per year (Alternative Spring Break 2010). It does not require any great leap of hope to envision individuals who have had such experience becoming increasingly likely to see themselves and their society in more interconnected cosmopolitan terms.Footnote ²³

Intertwining Experience: An Exemplar. What I just sketched is a picture of how experiences of fullness and experiences of dearth might be intertwined in admirable ways. If one speculates more broadly about how a life might be vivified by such a figuration of depth experiences and an ontological-ethical constellation, then an exemplar worth highlighting is Walt Whitman. The picture of Whitman that is most familiar to us fairly radiates experiences of fullness and an ethos of presumptive generosity. Whitman is always “traveling” toward otherness of every variety and singing its marvelous becoming. This is the Whitman of, especially, “Song of Myself,” in which his self continually extends itself to every other, enveloping it in his attentiveness: “I contain multitudes” (Whitman Reference Whitman and Murphy1996a, 123). These poetic expressions of the enthusiasm of fullness have perhaps never been exceeded. Yet, some react to this presumptively generous Whitman as being ultimately somehow too presumptuous.Footnote ²⁴ They feel resistant to this poetic amoeba who wants to envelop them and announce that they are somehow honored by being ingested.

Having felt this way myself about Whitman for many years, I am sympathetic to those who are resistant to this instantiation of the poetic spirit. But if one places this aspect of Whitman in the larger context of his life and work, a more multidimensional human being begins to appear. This broader portrait is one in which the depth experiences of dearth are intertwined with the more familiar ones of fullness. The most distinctive phenomenon in this regard is Whitman's activity during the Civil War, something that has been receiving renewed attention recently (Morris Reference Morris2000; Roper Reference Roper2008).Footnote ²⁵ Early in this conflict, his brother George was wounded. Intending to help with his recovery, Whitman traveled from New York to Washington, DC, and then to his brother's unit in northern Virginia. It turned out that his wound was not life threatening. But Whitman remained with the troops and experienced what war was like for those fighting it. He observed the aftermath of various battles and began to help out at field hospitals. Later, after securing some untaxing employment as a copyist in Washington, Whitman began to visit the military hospitals there. He ended up staying for a good portion of 4 years, during which he seems to have spent more time in the hospitals than he did at work. He helped out with some medical procedures, although he had no formal medical training. But that was not where the bulk of his attention was directed. Rather, His efforts were mainly focused on simply comforting the wounded and sick as best he could, from providing small necessities such as pencil and paper to sitting up all night with soldiers for whom death was imminent. What was most crucial about these activities, he thought, was simply his being a human “presence” for the patients. Whitman (Reference Whitman and Corviello2004, 100–101) estimated that, by the end of the war, he may have visited more than 80,000 men.

In light of his prewar poetry, one might imagine Whitman seeing himself as “containing” this multitude of patients. But in his writing about this period in Memoranda during the War, for example, there is almost no singing and few flights of enveloping imagination. The short entries in what was essentially a journal are sparsely written and typically relate a few sentences about a given patient, including such unmusical particulars as the identity of his military unit; his combat experiences; the engagement in which he was wounded; the progress or decline of his health; and, when necessary, an indication that he wrote a note to the soldier's parents giving them a sense of their son's last days (Whitman Reference Whitman and Corviello2004).

A new and distinctly different tone comes into Whitman's voice during this time. The distance he has traveled appears starkly in one of his poems about the war. In “The Wound-Dresser,” he recalls, after the war, children asking him to tell them “Of unsurpass'd heroes” and to “paint [for them] the mightiest armies on earth.” His reply, however, is about hospitals, about “clotted rags and blood” in a refuse pan. Parenthetically, he explains the disjunction between, on the one hand, the children's and his own initial wishes for inspiring war stories and, on the other hand, his eventual tale of dearth:

The subdued author of these lines is strikingly different from the author of “Song of Myself.” Nevertheless, I do not want to suggest that Whitman simply lost his love and song of the fullness of life and replaced it with a sense of dearth that infused everything. What appears rather is a marvelous intertwining of the two. The passage I just quoted seems to involve a kind of immobilizing darkness. Yet, it was precisely the fact that Whitman was not entirely undone by such dearth that is most stunning about his spirit. One cannot make sense of his hundreds of hospital visits without recognizing the presence of a generosity animated by experiences of fullness. Perhaps then there is both dearth and fullness in Whitman's (Reference Whitman and Valente1949, 22) later invocation of a democracy whose spirit is captured by the “great word Solidarity.”Footnote ²⁶

FAITH IN DEMOCRATIC TALK

The final element in the constellational background in which depth experience is to be contextualized is a faith in democracy. A vibrant democracy is one whose health is an abiding concern, and a crucial aspect of that health is gauged by the number and quality of the deliberative practices that exist in a society.

The idea of a “faith” in deliberative democracy is not that there is some ideal that one hopes will ultimately be fully instantiated. Rather, “faith” in a nontheistic sense means two things. First, it entails always being disposed to ask the question: why is there not more democratic talk and inclusion folded into a given issue, policy, practice, or institution? Second, faith means holding to the expectation that sometimes deliberation can lead to the movement of participants, in the sense that their preferences or interests change.Footnote ²⁷

The point in calling this questioning and expectation a “faith” is simply to highlight that the deliberative ideal may often be violated in various ways, but that fact will not immediately deplete the motivation to continue looking for other ways to enhance the deliberative and inclusive qualities of political life. It is also crucially important to realize that such a faith is not blind in the sense of thinking that fair spaces for perfect democratic talk emerge simply because we want them to. There is no reason such a faith cannot be critical in the sense of being attuned to all sorts of ways in which actors and supposedly deliberative spaces can occlude arrangements of power that undermine the character and outcome of democratic talk. In short, a democratic faith has no aversion whatsoever to a “hermeneutic of suspicion,” but rather sees it as a valued partner.Footnote ²⁸

The deliberativist further believes in the possibility that talk may sometimes elicit movement in my interests or preferences. In short, democratic talk may change me.Footnote ²⁹ This characteristic sharply differentiates the deliberative ideal from mainstream pluralist theories. The most familiar version of this distinctive idea is Habermas' “forceless force of better argument.” When democratic discourse is guided by the criteria of fair argumentation, then participants may at times be drawn by the force of practical reason to see that some of their initial preferences and interests are no longer supportable. In sum, reason may move us in significant, if usually modest, ways, and a healthy democracy depends ultimately on that fact.

For Habermas, when we are deliberating under fair conditions of argumentation, we can be moved to affirm the legitimacy of a contested norm, even when it goes against our initially expressed interests, if we come to see that it encompasses the interests of all who are potentially affected by that norm. This “force” of reason draws ultimately on our implicit knowledge of the “bonding” power of language for social life. As Habermas (Reference Habermas1984, 287) famously says, “Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech.” Insofar as we have the “communicative competence” to engage in linguistic interaction, reason has always already gained the capacity to move us (287). The problem with this line of argument, however, is that it rests on a claim that simply posits an ideal normativity in language. If one thinks of language as having evolved naturally, however, then it seems more plausible to say it has a multifaceted character and no “essence.” Thus, there appears to be no clear warrant for saying, as Habermas (288) does, that the “understanding-oriented” use of language is the “original” one, from which all others derive. But, if this is true, then the “telos of language” argument begins to look like a strong ontological, foundationalist claim about practical reason, not the “postmetaphysical” one Habermas believes that it is. The notion of a fair agreement that is contained in his idea of reaching an understanding embodies a notion of the moral equality of speakers that cannot simply be read off nature.

If this is true, then Habermas' idea of the “forceless force of better argument” does not have the kind of status that he wants to imagine. My point here is not to dismiss the idea totally. Rather, I want to reinterpret it in a weak ontological sense. By this, I mean that I want to endorse the idea as a deep hermeneutical rendering of the core of practical reason in Western modernity. It provides us with an interpretation of modernity's basic commitment to the ideas of moral equality and reciprocity, and to the desire for guiding interaction through speech rather than coercion. This claim implies that we moderns not only deeply affirm such a commitment, but we also realize that its being adhered to in a given circumstance is not going to be powered by any sort of transcendent spark. Rather, we must cobble together that adherence as best we can from our tacit involvement with the “force” and any congruent dispositions we can “plant” and cultivate. In other words, actually feeling the forceless force of a legitimate claim and being moved by it is a phenomenon of greater complexity than Habermas' account indicates.

The kind of disposition that might make me more likely to be moved by the reasonable claims of others can be elicited because the expectations of deliberation are folded into the experiences of dearth and fullness as they have been construed within the frames of meaning provided by the components of the threefold constellation. Dearth, when cultivated as I indicated previously, can move one in the sense of encouraging a drag or resistance to the smooth acceleration of the agent's will to sovereignty, expressed in his propensity to immediately flatten out the experience of deliberation into a purely strategic exchange, wherein I doggedly identify entirely with my clear and hardened preferences and interests. The infinite desire to be the “winner” of the deliberation will thus come to be tempered by an embrace of my mortality (which tells me no one really gets to keep their winnings). Furthermore, dearth, when cultivated through the ontological frame of presencing and identity/difference can help me in becoming accustomed to the unruliness and agonism in politics as things that are endemic to political life, not as that which I approach simply as a problem to be cleaned up.Footnote ³⁰

These dispositional qualities, when brought to deliberative practices, can potentially induce me to encounter the claims of others as something more than threatening moves. This does not imply wishing away the strategic dimension of politics, but only being more open to the moments when the other's claim perhaps rises to the level of being just and thus worthy of affirmation. That is the moment where one hopefully is so disposed as to be willing to bend to the forceless force of practical reason.

Let me turn now to the motivational force that a cultivated experience of fullness might bring to deliberative practices. Although a cultivated sense of dearth or finitude may help create drag on the confidence of the capacious self, that disposition has to be enriched by affects that draw the self toward an affirming engagement with the world. Here that pull to mimesis that I noted previously comes into focus. We honor the world as presencing by an attitude of presumptive generosity. The force of fullness creates a momentum toward engaging and exploring the other and its world. This turning toward the distinctiveness and particularity of the other may help me in imagining myself as a host opening his door or as a traveler crossing another border.

A democratic citizen who embodies this kind of sensibility will also possess some motivation to begin to follow a subject of deliberation off into novel directions. Included within Habermas' (Reference Habermas and McCarthy1975, 108) notion of rational, forceless force is the claim that participants in discourse will allow their sense of responsibility to be expanded beyond the community that is most immediately affected by some norm. We are obligated, he says, to consider “all those affected.” This means that we must be careful to think out the implications of some norm or policy and try to discern which unobtrusive others might be impacted, but who are not currently within the active circle of deliberation. Now, if this idea of “all affected” is imagined as a criterion that must be fully satisfied as part of a discourse that will lead to a rational consensus, then the attempt to do so will unravel the whole scheme quite quickly because there is no clear rational or natural end to the process of tracing long strings of affectedness. Rather, we should embrace this idea of “all affected” as a persistent reminder that complete justice in relation to all past, present, and potential voices always remains on the horizon. In a given instance of deliberation, we will, at some point, have to make a pragmatic decision to declare a limit to the search for those others possibly affected by a norm under consideration. Some exclusion of others is thus necessary, but it is just as necessary to see that there is no rational consensus immaculately free of shadows.

In the foregoing, I have tried to sketch out the way in which depth experience might be seen as animating the picture of deliberation that we are given by a democratic theorist such as Habermas. But, so far, I have not really offered much insight into what, specifically, the ideal of deliberation brings to the cultivation of the meaning of depth experience. Faith in that ideal is one of the three components of the background constellation that I propose as the primary sources for giving meaning to the raw experiences of dearth and fullness. I have shown how these experiences, under the influence of the other two components of the constellation, can further empower the forceless force of better argument. What remains to be shown is how deliberation, in turn, provides a crucial structuring of the meaning we come to attribute to depth experience. If such experience brings a kind of force to my reflections on fair deliberation, then deliberation, for its part, chastens this force in a significant way. It does so by bringing to depth experience the challenge of other, and sometimes contradictory, voices. This challenge helps draw one away from a perennial misunderstanding of such experience; more specifically, it makes it more difficult for me to equate deep commitment with absolute conviction. Deep commitment to fundamental sources is what should be encouraged by depth experience. The mistake is to equate this with absolute conviction about the practical truth or rightness I draw from experiences of fullness and dearth. Faith in vibrant democracy means such claims must always be understood as constitutively related to the test of intersubjective procedures; in short, fair deliberation.

Where does this overall line of argument about deliberative democracy leave us? This ideal of democracy offers an admirable portrait of political life that internalizes and persistently affirms core modern values of moral equality and reciprocity, as well as the ideal of resolving disputes by reason rather than coercion. But, as I hope to have also shown, in order for these strong expectations to have a more discernable presence in our ethical-political life, they need to be complemented by a late-modern bearing that can form when we show ourselves willing to cultivate our depth experiences against the horizon of meaning provided by the background constellation I have elucidated.