Meditations on Hemingway's Robert Jordan

An Ontological Democratic Deontology

Abstract

Robert Jordan, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, divulges the generative ground of an ontology of inner freedom with its own deontology or ethics of freely chosen acts and the inevitable responsibility for them as evolutionary, creative, and imaginative undertakings. There are distant echoes of the long ago and far away stoics’ philosophy and metaphysics of Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations (1626) and Epictetus in his Enchiridion (55–135 C.E.). The well-known and fundamental concept of freedom as consciousness of something outside of itself is relevant. A highly imaginative, elegant, and cogent title such as For Whom the Bell Tolls partakes of the intrinsically magical art of poetry. Its prose is at once lyrical, experiential, and metaphilosophical. For Whom the Bell Tolls comes forth as a most appropriate, eloquent and elegant title for Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War epic. It is poignant as an inordinately comprehensive, profound, poetic, and meditative title. Introducing the reader to the mysterious primeval and problematic human condition, it educates us about our common universal twin oneness and otherness or alterity and a way out of its destructive, divisive duality. Robert Jordan offers an ideal opportunity for discussing important matters, which sometimes appear to go beyond knowledge as a clearing for disclosures, beyond which rationalizations sink into opacity of nonknowledge. Robert Jordan is no Utopian or perfectionist. He acts and dies impressively as a sovereign individual subject rather than a mere object of a particular ideology or reacting purely instinctively.