On Becoming Moral: Bellow’s Jewishness and Exclusion

Abstract

This paper is going to be a discussion of the way the philosopher writes about the poet compared to the way the poet writes about the philosopher, or how a stranger writes about another stranger. In other words, it will be a discussion of the strategies of exclusion and inclusion in the process of reconstructing the Jewish community and legislating for its moral norms. By the terms ‘exclusion’ and ‘inclusion,’ it is not meant to refer to the literal sense, but rather the researcher would concentrate upon their ontological and philosophical connotations. This subject matter will have to be limited. On this view, the researcher is going to address two narratives of Saul Bellow: Humboldt’s Gift [1] and Ravelstein [2]. The assumption is that they perfectly sum up the Bellovian philosophy of exclusion. In both narratives the move beyond the alienated world of the subjects can take two directions: either as ontological exclusion and intellectual madness or as faith and pure insight, where the former seeks reconciliation through philosophical meditations a beyond-outside the individual subject, while the latter seeks reconciliation by turning inward, to the self that can remain unsullied by the vanity of the social world.