csuf e491 history of literary criticism fall 04

Home Page for E491

2004-12-07T09:18:00.000-08:00

Welcome to English 491, History of Literary Criticism

Fall 2004 at California State University, Fullerton

This blog will offer posts on all of the authors on our syllabus. It contains two kinds of notes: general and page-by-page. Both kinds are optional reading. While the entries are not intended as exact replicas of my lecture notes (and in fact, they cannot include an important part of the class sessions since each student will offer a few in-class presentations), they should prove helpful in your engagement with the authors. They may also help you arrive at paper topics and prepare for the final exam. Unless otherwise noted, the edition used for our selections is Leitch, Vincent (ed.). The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1st ed. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN 0393974294.

A dedicated menu at my wiki site contains the necessary information for students enrolled in this course; when the semester has ended, this blog will remain online, and a copy of the syllabus will remain in the Archive menu.

Rationale for the course: while there is some literary criticism on our syllabus, many of our Norton Criticism and Theory authors write straightforward philosophy and social theory, not literary criticism. But that’s fine with me. This is not a course in “applied” criticism or theory. Instead, my goal is to help ground you in some of the thought that made 20^th-century literary theory possible. Literature isn’t necessarily a central concern for authors such as Plato, Augustine, Kant, Marx, or Nietzsche, but their notions concerning truth, beauty, language, politics, etc. serve as enabling ideas for modern ways of discussing literature and art.

I don’t suppose this course will cause an immediate upsurge in your understanding of literature or “life in general.” I don’t know that reading Kant or Hegel will help anyone get a better grade on a paper about Milton (though it might, in some cases), much less run into the street and change the wicked ways of the world. This is difficult, contemplative stuff we’re studying, and much of it takes several readings over many years to pay its best intellectual dividends. It would be better to think of Kant, Hegel & Co. as “lifetime companions” rather than as schoolmasters who offer us discrete dollops of factuality. I’m 42, and only in recent years have I felt able to respond to such philosophers. Nowadays I try to “think along with” texts by these writers as if I were having a conversation with them. I don’t feel overwhelmed by the complexity of their ideas. I wasn’t able to read them that way at first, and at times I’ve found engaging with them frustrating. But if a reader will stick with the task and approach it with a cheerfully Nietzschean attitude (“Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger!”), the material can inform the way he or she thinks about any number of things, including even those that touch upon practical concerns (politics, social issues, etc.) rather than “just literature.” Those who strain for immediate benefits in intellectual matters risk losing any benefit whatsoever. And as for changing the world’s wicked ways, even if reading philosophy and literature doesn’t let us do that in any tangible way, I still think there’s value in not being an utter dupe—the kind of person who imbibes notions wholesale from television, talk radio, official statements by politicians, print journalism, and so forth: if “do little harm and try to see things somewhat accurately” is the best I can attain as a citizen, I’ll settle for that and continue leading my perfectly useless “examined life.”

So here are a few practical suggestions: take good notes (even—and especially—on what sounds obscure or confusing), don’t miss too many classes (audio mp3 recordings of sessions are available online—see our E491 wiki menu at www.ajdrake.com/wiki; the link to the audio files is under the E491 Resources sub-menu), and above all, don’t worry about it if not everything is immediately and 100% comprehensible the first time you read it! If you get the basics of, say, Hegel’s master-slave dialectic or Kantian aesthetics, you’re doing just fine. I’ve become fairly good at dealing with Kant, Hegel & Co. without “sounding like Kant and Hegel”—my aim is to be understood, not to impress people with my polysyllabic prating. I want students to finish the course with the feeling that they have obtained a good “first foundation” for learning still more later on. Below are some thoughts about four of our most important authors:

Plato—modern readers are both fascinated and repelled by Plato’s obsession with order and truth and by his distrust of art as a kind of lie. As we say today, Plato views art as ideological subversion or even outright madness. In modern times, the notion that art is socially and politically subversive, of course, actually appeals to some commentators. Others, like Plato himself, distrust it on the same grounds. Again and again, Plato’s powerful combination of mimetic (representational) and pragmatic (morality-centered) concerns finds its way into public discourse about art (and, in modified forms, literary theory itself) right on down to the present day.

Augustine—Saint Augustine gives us a good instance of early Christianity’s theory of signification. Reading him is vital because 19^th-century romanticism, a key movement in western literature, is suffused with Christian hopes and anxieties that it overtly rejects. Romantics such as Shelley seem to have carried forward an elegiac conception of “fallen” language as incommensurate with divine truth, incommensurate with the expression of spirit and emotion. Romanticism, with its emphasis on the power of the symbol, also carries forward a certain faith that the gap between God and man, between the letter and the spirit, can be bridged.

Marx—Some might say that Marx the “economic determinist” marginalizes art since he places it as part of an ideological superstructure subservient to economics proper (the engine of history and its characteristic class struggles). But that would be an oversimplification—art and literature, according to Marxists and those who borrow from them, often serve the dominant class as a means of articulating and defending its power. Those disciplines might also provide a space for contesting the ideological foundations of the ruling order—so again, we find some critics pointing towards the subversive potential in works of art.

Nietzsche—this philosopher-as-literary-man distrusts his idealist German predecessors’ penchant for systems and certainty, and has been enlisted as a supporter by those who would tear down the traditional privilege of literature over criticism and theory, of the creative artist over the critical expositor. One might, of course, also suggest that the same authors exalt literary and artistic thought as the master discipline. Nietzsche prefers to treat “big ideas” about truth, being, and meaning with the light and playful touch of a true stylist, so he is sometimes called the father of 20^th-century theory (deconstruction in particular) for this reason. Always resourceful in the face of philosophy’s insoluble problems, he celebrates language and creativity even as he points out that humanity’s faith in time-honored “truths” about itself and world stems from deep misunderstanding. A fair amount of modern literary theory takes its cue from this resourceful stylist in its dislike of systemic claims about literature, society, politics, or anything else.

Week 16, Henry James, Mallarmé

2004-12-06T14:26:00.000-08:00

Stéphane Mallarmé Notes

Post-It Notes on Mallarmé (with some additions)

Mallarmé is anti-utilitarian and anti-instrumentalist: poetry is an encounter with language as language. As a discussion point, one might ask whether or not this whole Mallarméan scheme takes anti-instrumentalism and impersonalism too far. It amounts to a complete divorce between ordinary language and poetic language, and therefore repeats on the level of pure language the isolation of the romantic poet from his society. At least, that's one way of looking at the matter.

Music, for Mallarmé, is orderly and yet liberatory. It aligns us with its successive notes, with its unfolding, and is experienced as pure play. We should not reaffirm our personal or “tribal” power over nature, but instead, and like the Greeks, connect by means of music and poetry with something beyond ourselves. Mallarmé refers to this realm as “impersonal,” but that doesn’t mean it is devoid of passion, I suppose. Poetry is a supplement -- it supplies a lack in the ordinary.

845-47. The “French Revolution II” is the movement from the Alexandrine verse of Racine and Corneille to free verse, vers libre. This change is no doubt allied with a shift in social and political arrangements from monarchical, semi-feudal to modern, parliamentary, commercialist C19 society. Well, Mallarmé isn’t exactly in favor of middle-class vulgarity and self-satisfaction, but the breakup of the Alexandrine is an opportunity not to be missed. It’s an opportunity for poetry to become what it ought to be -- both sensuous and ideal, an order that liberates all who come to it. It ought to be personal and yet lead us beyond personality.

The Alexandrine imposed a false decorum and order upon language, tamed it and imprisoned it. Language was therefore used to ratify conservative French values. Mallarmé’s poetics are anti-instrumentalist, just as he is anti-Cartesian more generally -- against the preeminence of mind as opposed to matter, reason as opposed to passion. As for ordinary language, we “use” it to express our feelings and ideas (romanticism) and to refer to things in the external world (realism, everyday living). Both uses are instrumental, and they falsify experience and even the meaning of being human. Language thereby becomes a mere tool shed full of tools, not the House of Being.

But Mallarmé considers language more worthwhile than the fake “autonomous individual” who supposedly uses it to shore up a narrow sense of self and world, more worthwhile than the everyday business that can be transacted with it or within its sphere. This anti-middle-class sentiment makes language the new principle of aristocracy, the ennobling force, the power that lets us keep contact with mystery, with “play” (jouissance, as in Barthes and Derrida) with the holy (Heidegger). Yet, the realm of Language isn’t an empty externality, a metaphysical far-away place we can use. The goal isn’t to get there from here since that would be to commit the same error as instrumentalists commit.

848-49. As the Beckett character says, “what matter who is speaking?” Ordinary speech disappoints us because it doesn’t correspond to real-world qualities when we expect it to. We aren’t Gods and cannot achieve a one-to-one correspondence between words and things. (Perhaps this is what Paul de Man refers to when he says that even Mallarmé leaves the supremacy of nature untouched.) But poetry liberates us from such selfish demands for pedestrian intelligibility; it’s an impersonal language where the Ideal is at play. It creates an order that we can step into, a sort of mystical realm. There is no need, as far as Mallarmé is concerned, to turn to the “author-function” (Foucault) as a principle of interpretive stability.

Evocation, suggestion, are better than fact. In somewhat plain and inaccurate terms, they lead us to a better realm than the everyday. Mallarmé might be described as a Platonist, but again that would be a bit misleading. He isn’t really pushing a movement from a deluded “here” to a metaphysical “there.” In his view, it seems, language itself is the realm of purity; language is a here-realm of pure play, not a beyond of the sort that philosophical realists posit.

851. Mallarmé’s flower example implies that what Nietzsche calls the abstraction-making power of language, its tendency to lie about the referential world, ought to be turned to account as music, as suggestibility that creates its own order. He is not out to shore up the triumphant individual ego, the narrow shopkeeper-self in us all. Instead, he wants to see the triumph of language with a capital “L,” language as its own order, one that liberates us into what Heidegger will later call “the light of Being.” Language isn’t a tool shed; it is the dwelling-place of all that is most valuable in humanity.

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 1st edition. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393974294.

Week 15, Baudelaire, Nietzsche

2004-11-29T14:25:00.000-08:00

Notes on Charles Baudelaire and Friedrich Nietzsche

General Notes on Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life

We can use Pater’s impressionism to draw out Baudelaire. It’s only the roughness of the eye that makes two things look identical. The point of Baudelaire’s ideas about art is that it’s getting harder to perceive anything in a fresh, accurate way. The artist’s task is to defend that capacity without rejecting modernity. To lose this ability is to lose your soul— Baudelaire borrows a lot from Christianity (original sin, the fallenness of perception, etc.) So he employs technological metaphors for moral purposes. Seeing is itself a moral act for Baudelaire. The Greek middle/passive verb Aisthanomai means “I perceive for myself” (not as others try to make me perceive or understand). Expressive poetics aside, this is not unlike what the romantics argued when they said it was vital to clear or strip away the ”film of familiarity” so that we might see things anew.

But Baudelaire doesn’t tell us to desert the urban site of spiritual corruption. Rather, he says we have to begin by seeing clearly what is all around us in our cityscapes. Artists should wrest from the Parisian boulevards with all their businesslike evanescence something of permanent value, something that will make them see what is all around rather than accept stale, conventional perceptions. Denaturalization is the key term here: art denaturalizes us to our surroundings, makes us see them as if we were wide-eyed, highly intelligent children with fine expressive capacity.

Baudelaire’s dandy does something different from the flâneur: he rejects life in order to maintain a perhaps archaic, but nonetheless valuable, principle of excellence. One can either embrace modernity or remain dispassionate and understand it, and the dandy does the latter in a somewhat haughty way. Here, the goal seems to be to maintain a sense of permanence and quality even as one is surrounded by the temporal and the evanescent. The flâneur's aim is to obtain clarity for an instant and to make art register that clarity in a clear thought or image. Impressionism in painting explains much in this regard; see also Pater’s literary impressionism.

Baudelaire captures the way modern art is of two minds about its relationship to the era. On the one hand, there’s immersion; on the other, there’s ekstasis. In neither case is there any question of simple realism. Even the flâneur as artist treats life as his raw material. It is a point of honor to create or capture beauty in the evanescent cityscape. It seems that Baudelaire’s “doubleness” would be a good way to describe modern art, its two tendencies: and literary modernism involves both of them.

Page-by-Page Notes on Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life

793. Artists don’t always have to privilege or represent the past, any more than they need to go back to nature and rustic language.

Beauty is a double phenomenon: an eternal element and a circumstantial element that depends on “the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions.” Beauty is both here and now, a kind of fashion and democratic realm, and aristocratic, aloof, ideal, standoffish. It is here for us but also leads us beyond the here and now. Artist experience themselves in dualistic terms—the pull of the body and the aspiration of the spirit.

794-95. The artist is a “photojournalist” and child. To make it new, you first have to see it new. Again, the artist’s task isn’t to abandon the present with disdain. the flâneur enters the hustle of modern commercial life, but keeps something, some portion of his or her being, always in reserve. This is not romanticism—individuals with their own “passions and volitions” coloring the world with subjectivity or rejecting it stormily. Rather, it is closer to the model of a roving, voracious photographer—the camera as “eye,” taking in everything as it is, this instant. To photograph is not simply to copy, and to repeat is not simply to copy.

Baudelaire is offering a new model of subjectivity that seems drawn indirectly from technology. The eye captures fleeting opportunities for clear images, the way a good photographer can catch the ineffable and render it permanently evocative in its ephemerality. Impressionism (cf the reference to Manet) is an enduring model. How does an “I” open to the world perceive the world just for this moment? Pater and Baudelaire are both insightful on this matter. And how best to “paint” my perception? Baudelaire posits a mind engaged with a modern, seemingly unaesthetic world, a world in flux yet entirely capable of offering up its beauty one instant at a time. Baudelaire’s “kaleidoscope” must be set over against high-romantic solipsism, the Byronic man.

796. Modernity? Well, it is the mutability of one’s age, one’s social life, and so forth, that matters. There is a modernity to be captured in every society: the ephemeral. Ignore it and you lose the chance to capture beauty whole, like a portrait of a nineteenth-century person in seventeenth-century dress. Only if you capture your era accurately in all its fleeting details and qualities will it pass into eternity, and become a worthy and true “antiquity” in its own right. Rejecting the present as one’s element is a mistake, just as surely as vulgar realism or mere copying would be. Beauty needs context; it isn’t a mere ideal. As Blake says, “eternity is in love with the productions of time.”

798-99. Dandies like Beau Brummel are a product of their times who seek to transcend them by imitating certain aspects of them in concentrated form. Dandified self-commodification is an attempt to keep the principle of aristocracy alive, to maintain the effect of distance from the crowd. Birth and wealth once afforded this, but “fashion,” a commodity realm, now generates the effect of aloof individuality and uniqueness. How utterly utter! Even today, we can’t stand to see someone else wearing exactly the same article of clothing as we are wearing. Imitation, yes, but not simple copying or homage. Self-commodification or dandyism is also a mode of criticism. When Brummel quipped in response to someone who asked him about his favorite lake in Wordsworth country, “I say, Robinson, which lake do I prefer?” he criticized the aristocracy’s belief that one could farm out one’s aesthetic judgments to a trained lackey, just as we pay people to make our clothing and other useful items.

800-02. Oscar Wilde is obviously on the same page as Baudelaire on many issues. On art’s relationship to nature, for example—Wilde, like Baudelaire, places art higher. That is a defiant posture, but it retains a tie to Schiller’s tradition of culture as an improving power. It also remains tied to romanticism’s emphasis on self-consciousness, even if the model of the self is not that of the romantic expressive individual. Wilde also writes that artifice is a virtue—it is natural for human beings to be “as artificial as possible.”

Page-by-Page Notes on Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Crisis in Poetry”

Mallarmé is anti-utilitarian and anti-instrumentalist: poetry is an encounter with language as language. We might, of course, ask whether or not this Mallarméan scheme takes anti-instrumentalism and impersonalism too far. It amounts to a complete divorce between ordinary language and poetic language, and perhaps therefore repeats on the level of pure language the isolation of the romantic poets from their society. At least, that’s one way of looking at the matter.

Music, for Mallarmé, is orderly and yet liberatory. We align ourselves as listeners with its successive notes, with its unfolding, and we should experience music as pure play. We should not reaffirm our personal or “tribal” power over nature, but instead connect by means of music and poetry with something beyond ourselves. Mallarmé refers to this realm as “impersonal,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is devoid of passion. Poetry is a supplement—it supplies a lack in the ordinary.

845-47. The “French Revolution II” is the movement from the Alexandrine verse of Racine and Corneille to free verse, vers libre. This change is no doubt allied with a shift in social and political arrangements from monarchical, semi-feudal to modern, parliamentary, commercialist nineteenth-century society. Mallarmé isn’t in favor of middle-class vulgarity and self-satisfaction, but the breakup of the Alexandrine is an opportunity not to be missed. It’s an opportunity for poetry to become what it ought to be—both sensuous and ideal, an order that liberates all who come to it. It ought to be personal and yet lead us beyond personality.

The Alexandrine imposed a false decorum and order upon language, taming and imprisoning it. Language was therefore used to ratify conservative French values. Mallarmé’s poetics are anti-instrumentalist, just as he is anti-Cartesian more generally—against the preeminence of mind as opposed to matter, reason as opposed to passion. As for ordinary language, we “use” it to express our feelings and ideas (romanticism) and to refer to things in the external world (realism, everyday living). Both uses are instrumental, and they falsify experience and even the meaning of being human. Language thereby becomes a mere tool shed full of implements, not the House of Being.

But Mallarmé considers language more worthwhile than the fake “autonomous individual” who supposedly uses it to shore up a narrow sense of self and world, more worthwhile than the everyday business that can be transacted with it or within its sphere. This anti-middle-class sentiment makes language the new principle of aristocracy, the ennobling force, the power that lets us keep contact with mystery, with “play” (jouissance, as in Barthes and Derrida) and with the holy (Heidegger). Yet, the realm of Language isn’t an empty externality, a metaphysical far-away place we can command. The goal isn’t facilely to get there from here since that would be to commit the same error as instrumentalists commit.

848-49. As the Beckett character says, “what matter who is speaking?” Ordinary speech disappoints us because it doesn’t correspond to real-world qualities when we expect it to. We aren’t gods and cannot achieve a one-to-one correspondence between words and things. (Perhaps this is what Paul de Man refers to when he says that even Mallarmé leaves the supremacy of nature untouched.) But poetry liberates us from such selfish demands for pedestrian intelligibility; it’s an impersonal language where the Ideal is at play. It creates an order that we can enter, a sort of mystical realm. There is no need, as far as Mallarmé is concerned, to turn to the “author-function” (as Foucault calls it) as a principle of interpretive stability.

Evocation and suggestion are better than fact. In somewhat plain terms, we might say that they lead us to a better realm than the everyday one we usually inhabit. Mallarmé might be described as a Platonist, but again that would be rather misleading. He isn’t really pushing a movement from a deluded “here” to a metaphysical “there.” In his view, it seems, language itself is the realm of purity; language is a here-realm of pure play, not a beyond of the sort that philosophical realists posit. Even so, it seems that Mallarmé invests a great deal in this order of language. The Symbolists generally treat language as having magical incantatory power, and (following Schopenhauer), as a refuge from human will and strife. Yeats describes the city of Byzantium in this manner; the holy city disdains “All that man is, / All mere complexities, / The fury and the mire of human veins.”

851. Mallarmé’s flower example implies that what Nietzsche calls the abstraction-making power of language (its tendency to lie about the referential world), ought to be turned to account as music, as suggestibility that creates its own order. Mallarmé is not out to shore up the triumphant individual ego, the narrow shopkeeper-self in us all. Instead, he wants to see the triumph of language with a capital “L,” language as its own order, one that liberates us into what Heidegger will later call “the light of Being.” Language isn’t a tool shed; it is the dwelling-place of all that is most valuable in humanity.

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN 0393974294.

Page-by Page Notes on Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” (870-884).

874-75. It makes sense to attend to Nietzsche’s rhetorical strategy. He begins with a question: given our dissimulative, self-important ways, where does anything like a “truth drive” come from? But as we might have guessed, Nietzsche’s goal isn’t simply to hand us “the truth about truth,” and by 878 he has more or less finished with that question. He’s interested in something anterior and more fundamental about us, something more unsettling and yet also, perhaps, more worthwhile—something that he will explain most fully at the bottom of 881 and onwards.

876-77. At the top of page 876, we are told that the process whereby the conceptual twins “truth/lie” are born begins with “the Social Contract.” As Nietzsche explains, “necessity and boredom” ( a need for peace and for community) lead to the tacit invocation and acceptance of this contract. Afterwards, “that which is to count as ‘truth’ . . . becomes fixed, i.e. a way of designating things is invented which has the same validity and force everywhere, and the legislation of language also produces the first laws of truth….” This development doesn’t in itself account for the acquisition of an interior drive towards “truth,” but it’s the beginning of the process. People desire “the pleasant, life-preserving consequences of truth,” and whatever doesn’t produce such consequences is designated by common consent as untruth. At 876 middle, Nietzsche raises one of modern philosophy’s most basic questions: regarding linguistic conventions, “Is language the full and adequate expression of all realities” To put this question another way, are words and the material world commensurate, or are they completely different orders? In a sense, the question is unanswerable since, after all, we would have to know exactly what “the world” is in order to say whether or not language can describe it fully. Even so, Nietzsche’s analysis of the movement from sensory perception to speech is compelling and comes close to a firm “No.”

Let’s look at how this movement occurs: “What is a word? The copy of a nervous stimulation in sounds,” writes Nietzsche. As he describes this “copying” process, “The stimulation of a nerve is first translated into an image: first metaphor! The image is then imitated by a sound: second metaphor! And each time there is a complete leap from one sphere into the heart of another, new sphere….We believe that when we speak of trees, colours, snow, and flowers, we have knowledge of the things themselves, and yet we possess only metaphors of things which in no way correspond to the original entities.” So whether or not language can correspond to the material realm, the empirical facts of perception show that it doesn’t. Well, we’ve all been told not to mix our metaphors – only Shakespeare was supposed get a free pass there, right? It turns out that we’re all sinners against the light in that regard: we can’t perceive and describe anything without performing what Nietzsche classifies as a fundamentally creative double-metaphorizing operation. What we call perception and experience are, to borrow a phrase, “always already” (immer wieder, toujours déjà, and all that jazz) The point he makes on 877 has some affinity to what romantic philosophers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Sage of Highgate, say: all perception is active, creative. The empiricists’ claim that we are passive recipients of the sensory perceptions that then (in their scheme, at least) become the basis of our knowledge-systems is a pure fabrication, and really quite an admirable one in its way. And what’s in a concept? Why, nothing. Nietzsche’s explanation here is incisive: “Every concept comes into being by making equivalent that which is non-equivalent.” Just as it is certain that no leaf is ever exactly the same as any other leaf, it is equally certain that the concept ‘leaf’ is formed by dropping those individual differences arbitrarily, by forgetting those features which differentiate one thing from another, so that the concept then gives rise to the notion that something other than leaves exists in nature, something which would be ‘leaf,’ a primal form, say, from which all leaves were woven.” But that’s crazy Cloud-Cuckooland talk straight from the Thinkery of Aristophanes’ Plato: there is no LEAF-of-which-all-individual-leaves-are-copies. In nature, as Nietzsche reminds us on 878, there are no species, forms, or types—therefore, the individual entity in the usual sense arises from a distinction we cannot prove to be legitimate. And much as we love Dr. Johnson, we really can’t be with him on his character Rasselas’ demand that artists shouldn’t streak their tulips. Johnson’s neoclassical “general idea” of a tulip, which is supposed to “recall the original to every mind,” does no such thing. It is a useful abstraction, a “concept,” that makes us suppose we’ve comprehended something universal and orderly about nature when in fact we haven’t. Nietzsche’s point isn’t that our metaphoric translation of stimuli into images into sounds is unnecessary; it’s that it has nothing to do with TRUTH.

All sorts of fine things can be done with substantive lies (i.e. nouns)—above all, they serve as false but compelling “causes” for natural actions, as in Nietzsche’s famous deconstruction of causality in The Genealogy of Morals: I say “lightning flashes,” and think I’ve explained something about nature. But really what I’ve done is invent an abstraction, a noun (a substantive, a substance, an essential thing), to account for “flashing” or “flashes.” What I’ve done is produce, ex post facto, a tautological expression that explains precisely nothing. Language isn’t caused by the external world, at least not directly. The same remarkable fiction governs statements connecting “doers” as the source and cause of their “deeds.” The “I” who is said to do the deed is just as much a fiction as “leaf” or “lightning.” (All honor to Lord Krishna in The Baghavad-Gita, who says much the same thing about the illusion of selfhood. Of course, Nietzsche doesn’t believe in Krishna, who attributes all actions to himself as “Doer in Chief.”) Again, none of this has anything to do with truth. It’s much closer to everybody’s favorite right-wing parodist Steven Colbert’s notion of “truthiness.” “I,” “leaf,” the “general tulip,” and “lightning” are truthy—they’re useful and they make us feel good.

878. But if we really want to know where the drive to truth comes from, explains Nietzsche, we must bear in mind that we aren’t even aware that we perform the above-described metaphoric and creative translations to produce language and conceptual systems. Like Colbert, we love truthiness, but unlike him, we perceivers and speakers are always on the air, deadpan, completely ensconced in our rock-solid Colbert-World. If it feels right, believe it, we might say. At 878 middle we find the heart of Nietzsche’s explanation of where that mysterious “truth-drive” comes from: “[people] lie unconsciously in the way we have described, and in accordance with centuries-old habits—and precisely because of this unconsciousness, precisely because of this forgetting, they arrive at the feeling of truth. The feeling that one is obliged to describe one thing as red, another as cold, and a third as dumb, prompts a moral impulse which pertains to truth…. As creatures of reason, human beings now make their actions subject to the rule of abstractions; they no longer tolerate being swept away by sudden impressions and sensuous perceptions….” There you have it: forgetting makes important things happen—a theme Nietzsche returns to again and again in his texts: “truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions….” Underlying grand illusions like truth, good/evil, civilization, science, the autonomous individual self, event, causality, god, and so forth is this capacity to forget how such concepts were first articulated. We’re all “salespeople” for such illusions, and, as an old friend of mine likes to say, “In the end, salespeople are the biggest suckers for the sale.” Why? Because, to borrow a line from Hamlet, “they [do] make love to this employment”; they’re enamored of the idea of the sale far more than the goods to be sold. If lying centers and grounds us, how can we be expected to give up such a fruitful occupation? As Nietzsche says, “Everything which distinguishes human beings from animals depends on this ability to sublimate sensuous metaphors into a schema, in other words, to dissolve an image into a concept” (878). And what accompanies this “humanity” of ours? Why, “the construction of a pyramidal order based on castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, definitions and borders, which now confronts the other, sensuously perceived world as something firmer, more general, more familiar, more human, and hence as something regulatory and imperative” (878 bottom). In a few words, the allied principles of rank and regularity. In sum, we acquire a taste for truth, an inner need for it; an unconscious manner of “lying” leads to a “feeling for truth.”

879. Paul de Man generally defines “ideology” as the confounding of words and the world. We seem to do this inevitably, and are most confounded of all when we think we are most certain of ourselves and our world. At 879 bottom, Nietzsche says much the same thing: our whole web of understanding is a product of anthropomorphization; “forgetting that the original metaphors of perception were indeed metaphors, he takes them for the things themselves.” Notice his near-simultaneous comic buildup and takedown of this process: first he says man is to be “admired” as a “mighty architectural genius who succeeds in erecting the infinitely complicated cathedral of concepts on moving foundations, or even, one might say, on flowing water.” Shades of “Kubla Khan,” no? And then he says of these concepts we reasoning creatures have spun out of ourselves, “If someone hides something behind a bush, looks for it in the same place and then finds it there, his seeking and finding is nothing much to boast about….” In Civilization and Its Discontents (1939), Freud would later poke fun of scientific endeavor (as Nietzsche does in the present essay’s Section 2) in similar terms, comparing its great discoveries to a man sticking his leg out from the covers on a chilly evening so he can feel warm and comforted when he puts the leg under the covers again. Marx’s great line comes to mind in this regard, too, although the context is different: “Mankind . . . inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve” (“Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859).

880-84. By now, the question about the origin of the truth-drive has come to sound a bit too truth-driven. Nietzsche is interested in leading us to consider a more fundamental “drive.” At 881 bottom, he writes, “That drive to form metaphors, that fundamental human drive which cannot be left out of consideration for even a second without also leaving out human beings themselves, is in truth not defeated, indeed hardly even tamed, by the process whereby a regular and rigid new world is built from its own sublimated products—concepts—in order to imprison it in a fortress. The drive seeks out a channel and a new area for its activity, and finds it in myth and in art generally.” In so far as we want to keep using terms like “humanity” and distinguishing ourselves from “the animals,” it is this drive—something which really does (unlike the truth-drive, which is acquired and derivative, a necessary bad habit) appear to be primordial and innate. We don’t pick up or learn how to perform the multi-step metaphoric translations previously discussed; we just do it. That other kind of dull-making creativity—the building of a stable sense of self and society—indeed builds upon this metaphoric drive as that which is to be “forgotten.” But what is forgotten, in Nietzsche’s scheme, doesn’t simply go away; the metaphoric drive is no more eradicated than Freud’s later “libidinal energy” disappears when it is repressed. In Nietzsche’s perceptual-instinctive economy and in Freud’s psychic one, what is repressed will return. And here, the return takes the form of artistic process, a process that seems to delight in making a break from the prison-house of concepts and staying close to the chaos and instability of raw perception. It isn’t that the artist returns to a time when “people saw things as they really were”: that is a ridiculous formulation because there never was such a time. No, art is a kind of “pretence” that seems most proper to “the intellect” (882 bottom paragraph) and gives the pretence-maker a sense of mastery.

With this exuberant praise of the artist, the person of intuition, we come to that all-important Nietzschean issue of attitude or style. What happens when we consistently admit to what Nietzsche has confronted us with about our sense of self and our security in language and the world’s truth? What attitude shall we strike up? Do we make like the Stoic who, “If a veritable storm-cloud empties itself on his head . . . wraps himself in his cloak and slowly walks away from under it” (884)? Do we engage in what Nietzsche calls Christianity’s “denial of life,” insisting to the bitter end on moral observance, on renunciation, from each believer and yet demanding an endlessly deferred, otherworldly security and justice because none is really to be had in this “valley of the shadow of death”? (Nietzsche interprets Christ’s redemptive sacrifice as part of the denial of life since the offer of redemption makes human suffering unnecessary: there’s a clear path out of the woods, so to speak, and no inherent need to get lost in them, unless it be from willful perversity.) It seems that Nietzsche instead urges us to be more like the ancient Greeks, who (at least before that decadent character Plato got hold of them) did not believe they could demand that the cosmos or universe yield them justice, security, or peace. As in their great tragedies, suffering is shown to be necessary, and we dare not demand that the gods be just. They are what they are. At 883 first paragraph, Nietzsche describes the “liberated intellect’s way of thinking and living: “The vast assembly of beams and boards to which needy man clings, thereby saving himself on his journey through life, is used by the liberated intellect as a mere climbing frame and plaything on which to perform its most reckless tricks; and when it smashes this framework, jumbles it up and ironically re-assembles it, pairing the most unlike things and dividing those things which are closest to one another, it reveals the fact that it does not require those makeshift aids of neediness, and that it is now guided, not by concepts but by intuitions. No regular way leads from these intuitions into the land of the ghostly schemata and abstractions.” He goes on to suggest that Greek culture established “the rule of art over life” where humanity’s “neediness” was persistently denied and where “the radiance of metaphorical visions” prevailed over reason. The Greeks had a tragic vision of life, then, and they were open to suffering, open to experience without the props of intelligibility. Consider Sappho’s fragment on love: “Eros seizes and shakes my very soul / Like the wind on the mountain / Shaking ancient oaks.” She wouldn’t be open to erotic experience if she weren’t strong enough, like the rooted oak braving the wind, to withstand the sway of her own passions (which the ancients figure as a god, an external force not unlike a great wind or storm). Ultimately, I think that’s Nietzsche’s vision of life, too: openness to experience, staying “true” not to “the Truth” but rather to the intuitive and metaphoric quality in human perception and thought. There is, again, no question of a return to truth; there is only the possibility of awakening to a sense of deception’s heady immediacy rather than moving ever farther away from it. Both the society-building “distortion” and the artist’s “pretence” and deceptiveness are, at base, creative—the first is creative in a constructive, comforting way, while the second is creative in a destructive, challenging way. Perhaps these two modes of creativity, like Nietzsche’s Apollo and Dionysus in another early text of his, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, are so intimately sourced and related that we can’t “think” them rightly in isolation from each other; perhaps they both need each other.

To conclude with a thought about philosophy and “theory” after Nietzsche, that grand concept humanity itself is just the sort of conceptual sham whose deconstruction (since Nietzsche’s way of handling his subjects is fairly labeled proto-deconstructive) such an attitude or style is meant to embrace, isn’t it? It, too, is a product of the distortional truth-drive Nietzsche has been examining. We don’t simply propagate ideology in the everyday sense—we are ideological constructions. Other modern authors have taken up an attitude, so to speak, about this great deflation of human puffery and certainty. Michel Foucault writes with antihumanist brio in The Order of Things (in French, differently titled Words and Things—Les mots et les choses), “it is comforting . . . and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form” (xxiii). Martin Heidegger is also instructive regarding the gist of Nietzsche’s deconstructive and antihumanist efforts. In his “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger suggests that humanists have reduced thought itself to a kind of techne or instrument, one which entails a permanent split between subject and object. Mind comes to know “world” through the instrumentality of thought, thereby shoring up its own firmness at the expense of authenticity. This kind of “thought” has surely stepped away from all that is proper and worthy of “thinking.” Much of Heidegger’s project involves the destruction of this humanistic, philosophical imposition upon thinking. De Man, while in dialogue with Heidegger’s texts, counsels something like perpetual vigilance when it comes to the question of ideology. Jacques Derrida, as a thinker and stylist, has a strong affinity with Nietzsche, insisting as he does on rigorous, yet somehow cheerful, deconstruction of anything that appears likely to set itself up (and of course without acknowledging what it’s doing) as the newest latest metaphysical grounding of certainty. In Derrida’s view, structuralism—of which the notes of Ferdinand de Saussure the linguist and, later, the published work of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, serve as prime examples—is just such a back-door metaphysical center, the unquestioned principle of intelligibility of what might as well acknowledge itself as a new version of a systemic philosophy, with its drive either to dismiss the world outright (some have said de Saussure’s emphasis on the synchronic dimension of language does that because he dismisses the troubled word-world connection issue out of hand) or to account for it altogether, as, say, the sophisticated Idealism of Hegel or the thoroughgoing materialism of Marx might be said to attempt. In a strong sense, both Nietzsche and Derrida and others who think along the same lines reject the notion (so pervasive here in America, by the way, with our move-it-along-now logical positivist tradition) that we can either simply accept or simply dismiss the ontological and epistemological concerns of traditional western philosophy. As I mentioned regarding de Man earlier, just when we have made a clean break with the past and its concerns, that’s when they have the most power to script and dominate what we do in the present. The one who thinks he or she has dismissed ideology (or Dame Philosophy) with a contemptuous wave of the hand is almost surely the biggest dupe of all. So when structuralism develops into the robust semiological adventure it becomes in the 1950’s and 1960’s (mostly in Europe; it never fully caught on here in the States), when what Derrida himself calls “the hyperinflation of the signifier” takes hold and everyone tries to explain everything after the manner of the structural linguist’s mode of analysis, it is then that the unexamined principle of “structure” should disturb us most of all. As the French saying goes about love relationships, “ni sans toi ni avec toi”: to paraphrase, “I can’t live without the other but I can’t live with the other, either.” I can’t even really decide the issue one way or the other, because if I do, it’s nearly certain that the troubles I’ve repressed will come back to haunt me when I least expect them to. Well, structuralism proper isn’t exactly in vogue nowadays, but such observations never really go out of style since they apply with equal force to anything that comes along (cultural studies, feminism, neo-formalism, whatever) and becomes the fashion in academic fields. Given that it is difficult today to distinguish between “literary theory,” philosophy, social theory, and so forth, it’s good to keep in mind this complex of concerns as you move forwards to a consideration of contemporary theory.

General Notes on Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (884-95).

Here the focus is on a genre (tragedy) from an ancient culture (the Greeks) that both produces and unsettles the Apollo/Dionysus split. Apollo is the god of light, reason, the lovely dream of order, justifying life’s tribulations in a purely aesthetic way. Dionysus is the god of wine, intoxication, and surrender of the calm, self-contained ego to forces both within and beyond that ego. But both gods are necessary to each other and cannot be kept separate. If tragedy can lead us to this insight, art is very significant, and in no way inferior to philosophy or theology.

At base, Greek tragedy offers a way to embrace one’s fate as a human being; it justifies suffering by creating beauty from it that does not simply disown the process of generation (of that beauty). End note for 894—together, Apollo and Dionysus account for the acceptance of life, amor fati, as opposed to Christianity’s supposed “denial of life.”

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 1st edition. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393974294.

Week 13, Marx, M. Arnold

2004-11-15T14:23:00.000-08:00

Matthew Arnold Notes

Arnold is a “culture-monger,” or guardian of culture. He’s actively engaged in a project of resisting that “hostile and dreaded censorship,” that smug self-satisfaction exhibited by the bourgeoisie in its own unexamined views and values. Arnold insists that we need culture and criticism. Contra Pride. Mostly, we need to step back from the fray and the buying and selling of ideas, and just examine them in a detached and calm manner. This is to import the Enlightenment and Hellenizing strain in favor of self-development, self-perfection. Arnold has little against pleasure, but he doesn’t see it as the aim of life, at least not by itself. And like Mill, he thinks it is of great consequence what things give us pleasure -- this is a matter for education, without which we are in essence beasts, and probably worse.

I would defend Arnold here because people seldom realize just how fragile our humanity is -- look around you and you will see, even in the C21, genocide, war, and all sorts of horrifying effects of stupid brutality. It would be nice to “let the ape and tiger in us die,” as Tennyson says we should, but they’re too deeply entrenched. Culture seems to me a miracle -- that we should want it at all, and that it should work such wondrously “humanizing” effects upon us, taking us outside our narrow interests and making us see the value in helping others. I can’t bring myself to accept the “pomo” dismissals of humanism too lightly because they never offer anything with which to replace old-fashioned ideas about progress and humanity. Bring up Adorno’s dislike for the “culture industry” and the rejection of enlightenment rationality as a totalizing ideology that brooks no dissent.

Post-It Notes

Initial note: Matthew Arnold addresses some very modern problems -- first, the status of art and culture in relation to economic and class arrangements. We find in him the paradox of Anglo-American humanism: “they also serve who only stand and wait.” But more particularly, the paradox consists in having to defend the arts and criticism by rejecting the suggestion that they should be immediately useful. Second, he addresses the specific relationship between art and criticism, a concern of interest to theoreticians today.

807-08. Arnold admits that art is, as Wordsworth claims, higher than criticism in the vulgar sense of essays that explain poetry and so forth. But on page 808, Arnold, who distrusts romantic pretensions to priestly status, insinuates that Wordsworth is being elitist when he disregards the lower, critical activity.
808. The second thing to keep in mind here is Arnold’s “man and moment” argument: art expresses cultures idea’s, and it may arrange them into a beautiful synthesis, but culture must provide or “discover” the material first. Art is not mere expression of emotion -- a passing thing -- it involves intellect, thought. Art should not be about the individual artist’s problems or spiritual struggles. It should work towards universal models for action. Arnold condemned his own poem Empedocles on Aetna because it failed in that regard. Artists should be inspired by the culture around them.

808-09. To continue, if that vital, freewheeling atmosphere is lacking -- if Shakespeare does not have his vibrant city of London, or Sophocles doesn’t have glorious Athens in its heyday (so that he can write about Apollonian calm and objectivity leading to action), then “the critical power” is required for the moment. “Make straight the way of the Lord!” -- Arnold plays the prophet. Arnold accepts that sometimes art is not organically related to or close to the artist’s society. If that is the case in the 1800s, then we need genuine criticism to help create a healthy environment that makes a broadly appealing art possible. Sometimes you have to be an elitist of sorts to be a man of the people in the long run. Criticism should serve as a bridge to eventual practice -- as Rev. Jesse says, “keep hope alive!”

810-11. Reading books is not a replacement for a vital national culture or a vital international culture, but engagement with past authors and cultures at least makes such a culture imaginable for the critic or the artist. For Arnold, culture is something that transcends the immediate social and political context. “True” ideas can be true forever, always out there as touchstones for us. But our times may make us unable to appreciate them -- at least, most people will be out of touch.
811-13. Edmund Burke versus the French revolutionaries. Arnold agrees with Burke that the revolutionaries tried to impose a radical, artificial, universal set of ideals upon a people who were not mature enough yet to live by such ideals. The French tried to go too far too fast, and did not respect the fact that society (its codes and its institutions) evolves slowly, organically. Therefore, their glorious ideals resulted in an epoch of concentration -- i.e. in reactionary measures against anyone interested in liberty. Burke believed in slow growth leading to inevitable progress without loss of order.

Well, if we cannot have revolution, what will be our agent of change? Certainly not radical politics or radical art in alliance with it. Rather, a shaping force is needed. That force would be criticism, which engages with a realm of culture not to be identified with “public opinion.” Karl Marx and Matthew Arnold would disagree on nearly everything, but not on the notion that ideology consists in treating as natural and eternal the class or political hobby horses most beneficial to oneself and one’s group. As Alexander Pope says, “whatever is, is right.” Of course, Marx would say that Arnold’s promotion of disinterestedness amounts to ideology, to fiddling while Rome burns.

We might say that Burke and Arnold would be willing to sign off on decades of injustice and repression. Arnold thinks “force” can prepare the way for right -- perhaps, if you take as your model enlightenment monarchy or bureaucracy. But force quickly becomes its own reason, doesn’t it? Refer to George Orwell’s 1984 and to Franz Kafka.

816-17. Critics must be willing to step back from politics and live by ideas, sifting the excellence of those ideas in their universal dimension. Arnold holds a developmental, organic conception of humanity, like the German authors he has been reading -- Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich Schiller, and Goethe in particular. Our purpose is to develop as human beings -- to develop our full individuality, not merely what pertains to our bourgeois desire to accumulate things and satisfy pleasures. (The moral condemnation implied here can be found much earlier -- see Shakespeare’s line “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action.”) This development must take place within a vibrant society that encourages self-discovery.

Criticisms burden at present is to keep open a space for the free play of mind, for the pure entertainment of ideas for the sake of ideas, until the right kind of social and political environment can become established. Democracy, in the bourgeois sense, promotes only property and pleasure -- not improvement. The mind needs “freedom and variety of situations,” and if the 19th-century critic must play a more dispassionate version of Shelley’s isolated nightingale singing to itself, so be it. They also serve who only stand and wait, to borrow a line from Milton.

817-19. In Arnold’s claim about “the mass of mankind” seems aloof and even elitist. Some would say he makes “apolitical” thinking too much of a virtue, and permanently divorces art and criticism, the realm of thought, from “the general practice of the world.” This would be a sad admission or concession to make for a man who takes as his ideal ancient Greece and Shakespeare’s England, where, supposedly, art and life were vitally connected.

Ultimately, Arnold wants to say that thought, whether art or criticism in the broadest sense, must resist commodification and the vulgar interests of class and party politics. But the question is, does this non-political stance amount merely to a bourgeois liberal “laissez-faire” viewpoint on current affairs? Is it a virtue to consider one’s thought as ideology-free, to think one has stepped outside the Plato-realm of worldly illusion in order to get at the truth with a capital T? Arnold may be playing out Schiller’s script about how the advance of civilization alienates sophisticated thought from ordinary affairs and people, in which case the artist and the critic figure as mandarins and philosopher kings.

Arnold recognizes that ideas are being used as brick bats for narrow, selfish, cynical political and economic interests. To be fair, he does have a conception of the kind of state that would be better than either aristocracy-saturated Toryism or laissez-faire bourgeois rule or working-class radical socialism. Arnold’s state would be like a large critic -- free of all narrow interest. But his trickle-down or slow-spread theory of cultural improvement is not entirely satisfying as an answer if we are asking how to get there from here.

The class system he opposes generates an overwhelming imperative for people not to think for themselves, so while removing oneself from the fray is a noble ideal, it may not produce the results Arnold hopes it will.

Good journalism might be an example of what Arnold is calling for. A good discussion point would be the role of fine journalism and the public intellectual in contemporary American and European society. It seems to me that the public intellectual is not a dead phenomenon. Consider, for example, Susan Sontag or Edward Said. Jacques Derrida also seems to have fit into this role, especially towards the end of his life. Retired politicians or businesspeople can also function as public intellectuals.

823. Arnold’s defense of critical autonomy claims that it will serve society by helping to create the conditions necessary for a healthy, vibrant intellectual life and a more just form of government, one free of petty class interests. Arnold links his free-thinking critic to a fair-minded, disinterested state.

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 1st edition. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393974294.

Week 12, Coleridge, Shelley

2004-11-08T14:22:00.000-08:00

Notes on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley

Page-by-Page Notes on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Statesman’s Manual (668-74).

673. Allegory turns upon keeping two points of comparison distinct; it wields abstractions, and is no more than extended metaphor. An example from chivalric romance: the poet may allegorize a demonstration of virtue as “a knight slaying dragons.” This satisfies mechanical understanding, which in our mental capacity is most closely tied to sensory data. Even metaphor, considered as a mere literary device, is mechanical. By contrast, Coleridge says, symbolic language participates in the reality it renders; it is not something separate from reality. A symbol allows us to discover universal meaning in a particular representation. In fact, “representation” is not strictly the right word—symbolic language doesn’t merely represent something universal or spiritual; it is part of the universal to which it refers. Coleridge’s key example is Jesus’ remark that “the light of the body is the eye.” The eye here is both material and spiritual at the same time.

674. The phrase “I am”—implies that our self-positing is a divine mystery. It seems that Coleridge is adapting the philosophical notions of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schelling to his present critical needs. The mind plays an active role in construing what we term reality, and this ability is a divine gift. Symbolic language, as Coleridge describes it, honors that gift. Language works like nature; it creates organic, living unities. As John Milton says in “Areopagitica,” a book is “a living thing.”

Page-by-Page Notes on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (674-82).

675. Regarding the precision required of poets, we can see that Coleridge’s schoolmaster the Reverend James Bowyer is the patron saint of formalism. Coleridge does not care about the author’s cleverness but rather about the unity of the poem itself. He’s against the C18 emphasis on “wittiness” because such wittiness demands the kind of language that calls attention to itself as ornamentation. Evidently, Coleridge believes symbolic utterances participate in reality without defacing or otherwise leading us away from reality.

676-77. The primary imagination is the miracle of consciousness itself—human consciousness involves self-consciousness: “I see a tree.” If I posit a tree, first I must posit the “I” that sees the tree. Coleridge says that this act is a finite repetition of God’s pure and continual act of self-consciousness. (As God says to Moses, “I am who am.”) As subjects, we are aware of ourselves confronting an object. The tree is an object of our experience; being human involves synthesis of subject and object.** We constitute raw data into intelligible forms, making them correspond to our mental categories. In this basic sense, imagination is the creative, synthesizing power that operates in all perception. We continually create the intelligibility we discover. Fancy is more limited to sensory data. Fancy is dead; it is too dependent upon the laws of association, as set forth by David Hartley, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke. We—that is, our will and imagination—are not the concentrated effect of nerve impulses, fluids, synapse-firing, imprints on gray matter, and so forth. To overemphasize memory and fancy is to deemphasize free agency until human beings are determined by external forces (or by internal forces that might as well be external since they are characterized as mechanical.)

**Postmodern theorists might say that we are thereby always doing something to something else, incorporating it by means of language and self-consciousness. Still, if such incorporation is inevitable, it comes down to “table manners”—perhaps how we incorporate something makes all the difference.

676. “Secondary imagination” is apparently Coleridge’s term for the poetic imagination. It is a purposive, directed “echo” of the primary imagination. The poet is used by and uses imagination to create symbolic meaning systems. Poetic imagination “dissolves, diffuses, and dissipates in order to re-create.” Wordsworth’s “Lucy Gray” and “Solitary Reaper” exemplify symbolic treatment of a given character. A symbol is not just one word or a mere device—it is a mode of language in its own right. Wordsworth’s secondary imagination breaks up, conjoins, and reconciles disparate categories of perception, feeling, and experience—the “Lucy Gray” lines, “a violet by a mossy stone / half hidden from the eye / fair as a star when only one / is shining in the sky do exactly that with respect to our ideas about Lucy, violets, and stars. We wouldn’t ordinarily put them into a meaningful relationship, but Wordsworth does so without hesitation.

In the above poem, the poet has made free choices; as Coleridge would say, the secondary imagination coexists with the conscious will. This does not necessarily mean that the source of poetry is consciousness, but rather that this power operates alongside of the conscious will. The esemplastic power (the imagination) generates complex unities but does not simply cancel distinctions—good symbolic language depends upon dynamic tension between a word and its contextual neighbors. What goes on in the poet’s imagination explains such poems as “Lucy Gray”—the poet brings together and synthesizes ideas, emotions, and sensory perceptions, and integrates them into an organic whole. Lucy is a star, a violet, and just Lucy all at once, and not simply in a mechanical way. The poet’s imaginative act generates this Lucy-star-violet, and we, as well, can understand and feel what Coleridge would call “multeity in unity.”

Further comments—in speaking of the primary imagination, Coleridge says it posits pure being. As repetition and re-seeking, it is linked with the basic human capacity to perceive and bring order to an otherwise chaotic world of sense data. Rhetorically, Coleridge is elevating our sense of humanity’s status perhaps to an even higher level than that posited of the Renaissance “man the microcosm,” since in Coleridge’s partly Schelling-based view, the mind is fundamentally creative. Coleridge cultivates a sense of mysterious communion drawn from the Bible, the Scholastic notion of community, and German Idealism. God says that he simply is. Being is mysterious, and so is our power of perception: the harmony between our minds and the world is mysterious. If secondary imagination is poetic imagination, it answers a need—it responds to the threat posed by quotidian habit and stale perception (cf. Nietzsche “On Truth and Lying in an Ultramoral Sense” on this matter), and it gives us a chance to “make it new” perpetually. The imagination makes possible a permanent revolution in consciousness. Mystery and belief in the supernatural are a meeting ground between Wordsworth and Coleridge, although they start from a different place to get there.

677. Notice the phrases “lethargy of custom” and “film of familiarity.” The secondary imagination helps to counter the threat posed by daily habit, which leads to stale perceptions and thoughts. We turn everything into an abstraction, a category, “other people’s convictions,” perceptions, and feelings. Coleridge makes one of the first in a long line of arguments against “mass culture” as something dehumanizing. Poetry is revolutionary with regard to perception—it shakes up the mind. It reorganizes minds so that they perceive and think themselves and the world differently, and to some extent more democratically and ecumenically. We may even, as Wordsworth promises, “see into the life of things.”

680. What is a poem? It is “that species of composition, which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species . . . it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.” So a poem is a living, complex entity. If you cut a branch from the tree, the tree isn’t whole anymore, and the branch has lost its purpose.

681. The poet is the person who can, by creative imagination, produce the poetry alluded to above. A poet is a unified person who “brings the whole soul of man into activity.” Imagination of this sort demonstrates the potential for the harmonious operation of our faculties: sensory perception, feeling, reason or intellect, willpower, will not be at odds when we are engaged with a poem; all will be exercised in a productive way. Imagination may be what Coleridge calls in the Biographia Literaria the esemplastic power or the power that “makes things into one,” but that same power doesn’t cancel differences to arrive at some indeterminate lump of oneness. Instead, it “Reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities.” Our “Lucy Gray” example in the Wordsworth section is a fine illustration of imagination at work in creating symbolic language: Lucy, the star, and the violet don’t lose their identity but instead gain something by being related to one another so vitally. Coleridge’s “Dejection: an Ode” offers a negative illustration in which the poet’s imagination isn’t harmonizing the natural world with his own subjective experience and emotional state. He remains isolated, and can create no order because his “genial spirits fail” and he can only “see, not feel,” how beautiful nature’s eternal forms are. Also on 681, symbolic language is said to remain true to the creative and imaginative process; it registers the “life” in which alone “nature lives.” It does not render the world as externality, and does not imitate it or distort it, but brings home to us the power of the primary and secondary imagination.

Final Comment. Coleridge disagrees with Wordsworth on the idea that we must get back to nature. He does not agree with the idea that rustic life is purer than city life. Only a philosopher (or at least an educated person) could benefit from close contact with nature. Nature, like trade, narrows the mind, and we quickly become impervious to its charms. Moreover, while Wordsworth relies a great deal on habit and meditation, Coleridge’s concept of imagination seems more dynamic and active, and his idealism is more thoroughgoing than that of Wordsworth’s “wise passiveness,” which implies a high degree of openness to the power of external things and the sensations they provide. (Walter Pater’s essays on these two men in Appreciations make this distinction aptly.) Coleridge opposes the materialist concept of experience, and he applies his point of disagreement with Wordsworth very broadly—only cultivation makes us capable of experiencing nature and truly appreciating the difference between consciousness and self-consciousness.

It is true that both poets offer a touch of the meditative and the mystical, but Coleridge privileges the philosophy of self-consciousness over Wordsworth’s rustic “wise passiveness.” As for poetic diction, rustic language is tied too closely to narrow, particular things. Philosophical language is superior because it flows from “reflections on the acts of the mind itself.” (See the Everyman edition of Biographia Literaria 197.) As for the effect of this kind of philosophical poetry, the audience would perhaps imbibe some of the benefits of reflection from their superiors and religious instructors.

Edition: Leitch, Vincent B., ed. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York : Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393974294.

Notes on Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Defence of Poetry"

Shelley writes in the purest romantic optative strain: he makes the fullest statements about poetry’s power to transform the individual and the world, the highest estimation of imagination and expression, and the grandest claims for the poet-priest-prophet who imagines and expresses.

But you also find the greatest anxiety about all these things -- sometimes in the same passage. Shelley’s work is based upon a poetics of isolation, alienation, and the incommensurability of language and the world. It is no wonder that post-structuralist critics like Paul de Man have so much to say about Shelley: here’s a case of the critic naturally gravitating towards his object.

Lyre: a dramatic figure for the way the imagination, played upon or “inspired” by a divine power, harmonizes what is outside us with our mental and spiritual operations. The lyre is merely mechanical, but the mind, explains Shelley, has much greater power to harmonize. You can see this lyre metaphor at work in several romantic poems -- Coleridge’s “The Aeolian Harp,” for instance, or Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” where his prayer to the wind is “make me thy lyre,” or in his early poem “Mutability,” which underscores the “dark” side of romanticism I mentioned above:

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness radiantly! -- yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost for ever:

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.

We rest. -- A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise. -- One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:

It is the same! -- For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man’s yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.

Smile: Just as a lyre will keep vibrating with sound after the wind dies away, a child’s smile at first expresses its pleasure, but when it persists after the pleasure has faded, the smile becomes a representation of a pleasure that has passed away. Poetry is like that -- it “represents” the feelings and ideals that generate it, keeping us in mind of them. Again, we find that romanticism is not necessarily primitivism: Shelley’s theory of poetry as representation of the mind’s operations and the spirit’s movements does not amount to “primitive expressivism.”

What is a poet? Someone whose “faculty of approximation to the beautiful” allows him to do what Coleridge said is necessary: strip away from our eyes the film of familiarity. Notice how Shelley takes mimetic theory -- as when he says people “imitate” and dance and sing, obeying a “certain rhythm or order” -- and makes it into an expressive act. Poets still do this best since they “express the influence of society or nature upon their own minds” in a way that pleases their fellows in society. (Shelley doesn’t seem to care which -- nature or society). Poets bring us back to the most vital kind of language -- the kind that can “mark…the before unapprehended relations of things,” and they can move us away from the stale, dead way we generally sling around words as convenient abstractions.

We have seen this claim in Wordsworth and Coleridge: the poet can “make it new.” The vitality of language is subject to a cycle of death and rebirth -- language tends towards abstraction, and we must keep bringing it back to its more vital state, the one in which it doesn’t simply plaster over the continuous miracles of humanity and nature for the benefit of the power-hungry, the comfort-seekers, and all who have no higher desire than to “get by” in this world. This is no idle connection I am drawing from Shelley’s passage: there is a deep connection, much explored in C20, between language and power, most particularly the abuse of power. Read Orwell’s 1984 for a delightfully distressing illustration of this issue: “Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Ingsoc!”

What is poetry? Shelley defines poetry, at least in the infancy of human history, as a very broad phenomenon indeed: primitive language is poetry, he insists. It’s close to the vitality of nature and the human heart, the deep bonds that tie human beings together and make them want to live together in a community. It is not as prone as our modern, sophisticated language is to alienate us from the truth we perceive. For early man, to be is to perceive, and to perceive is to feel and express. (There are more barriers for us between the conception and the expression.) The early law-givers, the “founders of civil society,” etc. -- these people all perceived the order of things and relations and were able directly to express it, set it down, for the rest of their fellows. And when the setting down settles into stale codes perpetuation hierarchy and blindness, it’s time for new artists, teachers, lawgivers, and a new foundation.

792. But the distinguishing characteristic of poetry is that it conveys the universal, the “eternal, the infinite, and the one.” It, and the poet who writes it, is beyond time, space, and number. The poet is beyond culture, beyond politics, beyond history. He apprehends what is timeless and universal for all of us at all times. This is a grand claim, even an apocalyptic claim on behalf of poetic genius. It takes an implicit tension between genius and history and environment, and pushes it to the limit. Genius isn’t just skill in writing or thinking -- it’s something beyond every conceivable limitation upon humanity. It is close to God. Wordsworth sometimes makes large claims for genius and imagination, but he sounds much more like a man of the eighteenth century than does Shelley. There’s a touch of the mystic striving after unity in Wordsworth, but he isn’t “apocalyptic.”

Notice how (793) Shelley sees language as doing anything but merely representing nature: words, he says, don’t refer primarily to anything in the world; they are “arbitrarily produced by the Imagination” and have “relation to thoughts alone.” This notion, of course, goes along with idealism, which says that the reality we perceive is the one we ourselves largely or entirely create by the operations of our own minds. Modern philosophy, by the way, wouldn’t necessarily disagree with this idea: except that the autonomous individual’s “imagination” here would be said to reflect a much larger social determination: we do not speak, but are spoken by language. Heidegger says that “language makes man.” The point is, some have come to doubt that language’s primary function is to refer to objects in the real world; they see it as a self-referential system of signifiers that refer to other signifiers, not to “rocks, and stones, and trees.”

On translation: I like the “violet in a crucible” image. Translation destroys the deep organic meaning of a poem: its significance is in the relations and tensions it establishes within its own little universe of words. If you translate them, you have torn a delicate flower and pounded it to extract its value. As if you could just mechanically translate the thoughts of one language into another. This is pretty much what later formalists will say about translation and paraphrasing of poems: you can’t do it without making a knave of yourself. Though it’s possible that Walter Benjamin was right when he said that in fact, only translation can “liberate the essence of a language.” Something comes out in the movement from one language to the other, which is neither the one nor the other, but something different.

795. Nightingale: Here is the finest statement of romantic alienation and isolation. The poet is a songbird who sings to lift its own spirits, and does not understand the profound effects it generates in its listeners. An attractive image, but in a sense a false one, as Shelley, author of “To a Skylark,” surely understood: the poet strives for the pure, unself-conscious expressive power, the one-to-one correspondence between heart and word, spirit and language, that a songbird has achieved without even trying. As Friedrich Schelling says, the songbird “bringeth forth something more excellent than it knows.” But human beings cannot achieve this kind of purity! They want to desperately, but they can’t: self-consciousness is a great gift, and yet a great curse, dooming us to perpetual deferral of correspondence between expression and desire. Shelley says it a lot better:

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not --
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught --
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Yet if we could scorn
Hate and pride and fear;
If we were things born
Not to shed a tear,
I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.

But our poet-nightingale is a glorious failure in the human quest to transform the world. He must await the judgment of his “peers,” his fellow poets in times to come. This implies a paradox: the poet is isolated in his own time, but speaks for all mankind in all times. Wordsworth, you will recall, made somewhat gentler, but more immediate, claims about the universal and therapeutic value of poetry. Shelley, like Schiller before him, has here admitted the problem that we shall find Matthew Arnold exploring later in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” Namely, poetry, or culture more broadly, has great potential to improve and transform us, but when will it be able to do that? We can’t really say, and cynics will ask, “what good does it do to sing to yourself, or to perfect yourself, while the world suffers?” It’s always difficult to say, “don’t just do something, stand there.”

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 1st edition. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393974294.

Week 11, Wordsworth

2004-11-01T14:20:00.000-08:00

Notes on Wordsworth

General Notes on William Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802” (645-68).

According to Wordsworth, our response to nature grounds elemental passions such as love. Language is the medium for the communication of these passions. City life destroys the link, and urban language cannot reestablish it. The poet’s language mediates between nature and the emotions based upon nature. That is why poetry is vital: poets can still feel and express the link to nature and so can help us reestablish it. Through their efforts, we can feel the link to nature anew, and reaffirm the power of our own minds because of the pleasure we take in art. The aim is to regain emotional health for the individual and to regenerate a sense of community.

Romantic poets represent and bring order to their own and others’ passions in a skillful manner, so they are not primitivists or solipsists. As we’ll see, meter is part of the poet’s craft, and it allows for the establishment of a distancing effect from raw emotion that might otherwise not rise above “gross and violent” stimulation. Craft helps the poet attain the proper meditative or reflective effect of poetry. A healthy mind is capable of being stimulated without immediate sensory experience—that’s a point Kant was determined to convey while explaining the basis for aesthetic judgment.

Wordsworth assumes that there is a general human nature, which is an eighteenth-century idea. But nature isn’t just an external standard; we are nature, and of course “reason” isn’t as important as the bedrock of humanity, the passions. To these we can always return, at least if we have the proper mediator and the right language as our guide.

Unlike the scientist, the poet must identify with rural humanity and with everyone else. He is “a man speaking to men.” Poetry is therefore intersubjective, and it reveals unified human nature as the basis for a united human community. Scientific knowledge is analytical, individual, objective; poetic knowledge gives common pleasure and universalizes and synthesizes experience. As Shelley will say later, we must “imagine that which we know.” Poets have the “courage” (Shelley’s term) to help us do this. They have the boldness to set deep culture against the mere public opinion of the day. That will be a critical and artistic task from the Enlightenment and Romantic period onwards.

1. The preface is a manifesto in an age of manifestoes, a revolutionary age. But this is a different kind of manifesto in that Wordsworth says social transformation comes after a renewal of the individual’s imagination and of a purer language tied to the primary, universal human emotions. Wordsworth is offering us a declaration of the poet’s power.

2. What is a poet? A poet is “a man speaking to men.” His imagination and need for self-expression are kindred to those of his fellow beings, but greater. Poets are in full, pleasurable contact with nature, their own thoughts, and their own feelings. Moreover, they can achieve the tranquility necessary to select and reorder those thoughts, feelings, and situations. When they do that, they are able to reveal the universal, orderly quality of readers’ thoughts and feelings. There is a common human nature, and poets are best able to express it because they experience it most fully.

3. What is poetry? Well, it is expression. It is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility.” It is certainly not an imitation of an action, as Aristotle would have us believe, nor is it likely to serve up Samuel Johnson’s tulip without the numbered streaks. Poetry is a concrete expression of the poet’s thoughts and feelings. This idea is genuinely new, at least in its intensity.

4. Wordsworth does not advocate direct self-expression or primitivism. Only by reordering their thoughts and feelings can poets present them to us as universal; only by selecting language and situations carefully can poets accomplish their task: to reveal and express the universal primary passions and tendencies of humankind. They need to make available to us the things in our common nature that bind us into a spiritual and emotional community.

How should poets compose and how should they select their materials? They should avoid neoclassical diction, which makes arbitrary connections between words and things and which tends to prop up an hierarchical class structure. Poets (if they follow Wordsworth’s advice) make a selection of language really used by ordinary people, choosing rustic, yet dignified language that is in touch with the “permanent forms of nature” and with the primary passions that have nature as their source.

5. Here we see the social dimension of Wordsworth’s claims about the poet and poetry. He opposes the destructive, analytic methods and effects of science and technology to the healing and unifying method and effects of poetry. Poets are “the rock of Defense for human nature”—they are prophetic figures and healers who unify fragmented, alienated, isolated individuals into a regenerated community. The Industrial Revolution, which involves urbanization, mechanization, and the accumulation of capital, has a dehumanizing effect upon individuals, reducing them to a state of what Wordsworth calls “savage torpor,” in which only “gross and violent” excitement satisfies.

Only the poet can attain the tranquility necessary to the composition of poetry. So this fuller human being is the catalyst of individual and communal regeneration. The poet is the key to social transformation. On this point, Raymond Williams claims that the effect of capitalism and technology was to marginalize, specialize, and commodify the act of writing poetry. Adam Smith, the main proponent of early capitalism, said that one day we would pay people to do our thinking for us; it makes sense to say as well that one day we would pay people to do our feeling for us.

Poets offer a religion of nature as an answer to the crisis of authority. They will serve as high priests in this religion of nature. Wordsworth plays something like this role in “Tintern Abbey” for his sister Dorothy. That poem is about two individuals—social and political transformation presuppose transformation in the sensibility and consciousness of individuals.

It has sometimes been said (notably by M. H. Abrams) that Wordsworth’s “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads displaces the revolutionary ideals of the French and recontextualizes them in a theory of poetics. Thus, “Liberty” becomes the freedom to express oneself freely and to reject the system of mimetic conventions prevailing in 18th-century poetry. Some would say that this amounts to middle-class individualism. “Equality” means that the poet may choose a common language from rustic incidents and thereby convey universal emotional states. “Fraternity” might be evoked when the poet writes in a vivid state of sensation and expresses a common human nature grounded in emotions that supposedly transcend politics, culture, and history. There is, in this view, a permanent human nature.

Page-by-Page Notes on William Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1802” (645-68).

648. At the outset, Wordsworth takes a scientific stance, claiming that his poems are experimental. Wordsworth aims to clear away perceptual deadwood and get to the most elementary passions and to the essential relationship between humanity and nature, between one human being and another. Just as Sir Francis Bacon aimed to brush off the cobwebs of scholastic theology to allow for concentration on the actual processes of nature, Wordsworth aims to clear away the false language and thought of the Eighteenth Century so that his audience can reconnect to the passionate element of their existence.

649-50. The poet aims to convey pleasure. Wordsworth implies that arguments about language amount to arguments about social regeneration. He says that he has selected rural life and speech because it is a safer repository for the essential passions of the heart. In rural speech, the link between the natural world and human manners is most purely expressed. We might say that language mediates between the passions and nature, which is partly a sign system for human emotions. As Wordsworth says, the goal is to reestablish the link between the primary laws of human nature and the beautiful and permanent forms of nature. He is by no means solipsistic in his poetics, but rather identifies the poet with rustic people and through them with all people.

651. At this point, Wordsworth says that poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” But he modifies this statement when he says that “our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts.” Repetition and habit play a large part here, and so we find common ground between David Hume and Wordsworth. Moreover, Wordsworth follows John Locke’s ideas of association; that usage is important because it allows the poet to suppose he is methodizing the passions and linking his own with others’ feelings. Representing feelings is more valuable than simply experiencing them.

652. “The feeling therein developed gives importance to the action and situation....” We find in Wordsworth an expressive theory of poetics as opposed to a mimetic one. “A multitude of causes....” The phrase “savage torpor” refers to the degrading effects of urbanization and the beginning of the industrial revolution. Technology and urbanization make us passive, killing the synthesizing power of the imagination and deadening our capacity to feel without “gross and violent stimulants.” Raymond Williams the cultural critic would suggest that the anti-industrial solution the romantics offer is an effect of the problem—poets stood to become merely specialized workers, so they hit back with the notion that their “specialty” really has universal and general significance; it should not, therefore, be marginalized or dismissed. On 652, Wordsworth offers a prophecy about the inherent powers of mind and the permanent therapeutic power of nature. He plays John the Baptist here, and is a romantic optimist in emphasizing the universality of our feelings.

654. “There neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.” Elsewhere in the Preface this remark finds its fullest significance, but it’s worth suggesting here that Wordsworth’s statement must hold for him because he has been saying all along that poetic language is itself at the root of all that is worthwhile in ordinary, rustic speech. There can’t be an infinite or unbridgeable gap between the two, or a difference in kind as opposed to a difference in degree or intensity. Language mediates between the passions and nature; nature is a sign system of passions.

655. “What is a poet? To whom does he address himself? And what language is to be expected from him?” The poet is “a man speaking to men.” The poet has a more lively sensibility, greater tenderness and enthusiasm, knows his own passions and volitions, feels more connected to an external nature, and has a more comprehensive soul. Wordsworth defines imagination as a power to be affected by absent things. In sum, the poet is able to express thoughts and feelings more powerfully than most people. So poets are 1) fuller and purer human beings; 2) connected to their own and to others’ passions and to nature; 3) gifted with a powerful imagination and expressive capacity to convey universal passions; 4) craftsmen who can and reorder their own feelings and thoughts into a pleasurable and intelligible whole or story.

656. “Aristotle, I have been told, hath said, that poetry is the most philosophic of all writing....” Poetry conveys the best kind of knowledge in the best way. The object of poetry is “truth general and operative.” In other words, its object is truth most closely tied to deep human nature. The poet conveys universal truth born of pleasure and carried into the hearts of others by passion. Poetry is “the image of man and nature,” and it links man and nature meaningfully. Poetry gives pleasure to the entire person, not to specialized elements of a person. Later, Wordsworth asserts this idea again when he discusses poetic truth in comparison to utilitarian, scientific truth, which actually turns out to be more remote than we had thought. The poet conveys a universal truth of the human heart, of feelings derived from unspoiled human nature in contact with an equally unspoiled natural realm. In sum, Wordsworth makes transhistorical claims about human nature.

657. “The poet writes under one restriction only....” Here science is contrasted with poetry. On the link between knowledge and sympathy, Wordsworth says that pleasure helps achieve this link. Pleasure comes from perceiving and feeling the harmony between humanity and nature, their mutual adaptation. Science, by contrast, dissects things and seeks remote truth as its object. The poet binds us into an expressive community by means of passion that conveys intuitive and pleasurable knowledge, while the scientist keeps us divided and subject to perpetual delay in achieving social harmony. Poetry delights us with its kind of knowledge because that knowledge flows from the depths of human nature.

658. “The knowledge both of the poet and the man of science is pleasure....” Again, science versus poetry is Wordsworth’s theme. We might contrast Sir Francis Bacon’s idea of science as future amelioration with Wordsworth’s more immediate promise of prophetic insight. The poet is almost a priest, erasing the consequences of original sin. Is this unfair to science? Well, Wordsworth probably refers more to a tendency than to specific practices, or to so-called pure science. What he offers amounts to a religion of nature. The artist is the high priest of that religion. At times, Wordsworth writes like a pantheist, praising “a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.”

659. “Among the qualities which I have enumerated....” The poet more promptly feels in absence of external excitement and is able to express feelings more promptly. This is only a difference in degree, not in kind. The poet conveys passions arising from moral sentiments and animal sensations; the poet derives these things from contact with nature and from his or her own emotions.

660. Wordsworth refers to “the tendency of meter to divest language in a certain degree of its reality....” Meter meets the need for restraint and distance. Wordsworth does not seek to convey extreme emotion or raw events. For both the poet and the reader, poetry is a meditative act. Meditation requires the bracketing out of noise, focusing intensely on some specific place or thing, and calling to mind what is associated with that place or thing or person. The point is to reorder thoughts and feelings and attain clarity, which moral and emotional clarity, Meyer Abrams suggests, constitutes “the affective resolution” of the greater romantic lyric.

661-62. “I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquility disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.” On this page, Wordsworth discusses the mental process leading to composition. The poet contemplates an emotion such as love, gratitude, hope, loss, etc. (as on 659) in tranquility. Then, a new and kindred emotional state arises, at which point mental composition begins. Later, when the poem is committed to writing, readers may go through a similar process, one that takes them from tranquility to a state of deep, genuine emotion. But in keeping with Wordsworth’s meditative scheme, neither the poet nor the reader experiences only raw and chaotic passion. Instead, while composing the poet is in a “general state of pleasure,” and the goal is to provide the reader with an “overbalance of pleasure.” How to do that? Well, meter generates a degree of distance from unprocessed reality and raw feeling, and its regularity gives us a sense of “similarity in dissimilarity.” This sense, says Wordsworth on 661, is the spring of all mental activity. His view of meter may recall Aristotle’s comments about mimesis: we can enjoy a representation of things that would cause us emotional pain in real life. Again, poetic composition is a species of meditation: the poet may experience vivid emotions, but restraint, ordering, reflection, and selection are vital if the poem is to produce in readers an “overbalance of pleasure” instead of simply stirring up chaotic feelings.

In general terms, meditation requires a combination of freedom and discipline. A person must bracket out “noise” while focusing intently upon some specific place, thing, or event and calling to mind the thoughts and feelings associated with it from past experience. The aim is to deal constructively with these thoughts and emotions; it is to achieve moral clarity and enlightenment. In some species of meditation, aside from attaining clarity, working through problems, and so forth, there may occur a passage to or intuition of a state not conveyable in words: perhaps a kind of ekstasis or sublimity. There are elements of this latter kind of meditative experience in Wordsworth, moments when, as in “Tintern Abbey,” one may feel “a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, / whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.” That poem is what Meyer Abrams calls a “Greater Romantic Lyric,” and as such it follows a three-part structure that resembles the stages of Ignatius of Loyola’s meditative technique in his Spiritual Exercises. The first is “composition of place,” in which t he meditator or “exercitant” thinks about some personally or theologically significant location, with the goal of achieving the calm necessary to focus the mind on some spiritual problem that needs resolution. The second consists in the examination of the spiritual predicament that has been recalled to mind thanks to reflection on the place; and the third is what Abrams calls the “affective resolution,” which in Loyola and Wordsworth, in their respective ways, amounts to an affirmation of spiritual faith and hope for the future.

His ideas resemble St. Ignatius of Loyola’s theory of meditation in The Spiritual Exercises. ( ) We begin with the composition of place. The origin of poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility. We contemplate past emotions until a new emotion is produced and composition begins, says Wordsworth. Then, the reader will contemplate the poet’s new emotion in tranquility, and the cycle continues. So poetry involves meditative states and the ordering or reordering of emotions. Again, that is why meter is important: it alleviates pain and chaos in the contemplation of real emotions and events.

663. “I put my hat upon my head, / And walk’d into the Strand, / And there I met another man / Whose hat was in his hand.” Indeed! Snorts the inestimable Dr. Johnson at his own delightful parody of Thomas Percy’s “The Hermit of Warkworth.” But Wordsworth wants us to take note of the real problem here: it isn’t so much that we are dealing with a poem that’s bad because its language is too ordinary; it is that the parody isn’t a poem at all because, in spite of its being of regular meter, its subject matter is too trivial to deserve expression in verse. It leads nowhere—well, nowhere except the Strand, anyhow.

664. “I have one request to make of my Reader, which is, that in judging these Poems he would decide by his own feelings genuinely, and not by reflection upon what will probably be the judgment of others.” This is an appeal to avoid being co-opted into accepting the prevailing aesthetic tastes, be they aristocratic and effete or melodramatic and vulgar. It’s common nowadays to lament that criticism has become an industry that does little good for poetry and the arts, but the truth is that such arguments have been leveled against criticism in some form or another since ancient times. And certainly in the English context, Alexander Pope was already well attuned to the problem of ignorant, arrogant, bloviating critics who nonetheless threatened to rob the public of any chance at achieving good taste, while Sir Philip Sidney and Dr. Johnson justly excoriate the absurd “illusionist” premises of some neoclassical critics.

666. “[T]he first Poets . . . spake a language which, though unusual, was still the language of men…. [T]heir successors . . . became proud of a language which they themselves had invented, and which was uttered only by themselves; and, with the spirit of a fraternity, they arrogated it to themselves as their own.” Wordsworth goes on to suggest that such clannishness is then extended to the gullible readership, which is thereby flattered into believing it has been offered membership in an exclusive club, a religion of poetic puffery. He condemns this sort of “personality cult” tendency as prideful and disunifying, as opposed to the kind of poetry he advocates. The concern that language will assert its autonomy from the world of men and things is an ancient one, of course, and it runs all the way forwards to the British empirical philosophers Wordsworth himself must have studied. Sir Francis Bacon, in particular, writes cogently in his scientific treatises about the way language sets “Idols” of various kinds in our path whenever we try to understand the workings of nature.

Week 10, Hegel

2004-10-25T14:20:00.000-07:00

General Notes on Hegel’s “Master-Slave Dialectic” from Phenomenology of Spirit and Lectures on Fine Art

Dialectic. In Plato’s dialogues, it’s easy to see that “dialectic” (root: dialogos,dialogeo) is a linguistic process whereby two speakers reason their way to the truth of some subject—or in Plato’s case as often as not and especially in the early dialogues, they pursue the object to the point where they realize they’ve said what they can say and haven’t arrived at the truth, even if they think there is a truth to be attained. The ancient contrast is between dialectic as a truth-retrieval process and rhetoric, language employed as means of praise or of persuasion in, say, a law-court as “forensic rhetoric” or in the assembly as deliberative rhetoric—what should we do? etc.

Rhetoricians may be concerned with truth, but all those jokes about lawyers should tell us that they may not necessarily be after truth first and foremost. Hegel’s version of the dialectic can be read in different ways—anthropologically or in terms of strife within an individual’s consciousness (as in deconstructive readings that don’t accept Hegel’s belief in the processive evolution of consciousness to higher and ever higher stages). What he’s trying to do in the Phenomenology of Mind, in the standard reading that it’s best to employ here, is to explain how individuals become fully conscious of themselves as rational and spiritual beings and how they come to understand that their individuality can only be brought out within a genuinely social setting. We need an objective realization of spirit in the good society.

Dialectic’s modern form is a way of arriving at philosophical “Truth” while accounting for a complex and dynamic world and individual consciousness, and for the interdependence between one human consciousness and others. In the Master/Slave Dialectic, we read about an unsatisfactory stage in the development of consciousness. But in this discussion we can see the makings of modern concentrations on the play of power, on struggle as central to social and political development, and on the need to place the individual in a dynamic relation with the others we collectively term “society.” Hegel isn’t trying to describe a disembodied, bloodless self; he’s trying to deal with the reality of human existence as something lived, felt, and experienced in subtle and ever-changing ways. One major point is that labor turns out to be central to human life: we “produce” ourselves through labor. Marx derived his ideas about the status of work from Hegel. Because of his sophisticated dialectic and refusal to oversimplify the processes of thought, Hegel remains central to philosophy and theory—in other words, we can’t just talk about individuals and events or historical periods in total isolation from everything else, formalist style.

Ideological Critique. Hegel articulates the question of form and content, and he also relates individual consciousness to the political or ideological realm. For instance, the first kind of consciousness, historically, would have been “desiring self-consciousness”—just being aware that one has needs. All those desiring people got into many a scrape, and so we move to master/slave consciousness—which is hardly a satisfactory state of affairs societally or individually. The slave consciousness works out strategies for coping with servitude—namely stoic self-consciousness and its concern for work and virtue, which of course tend to result in punishment since, as the saying goes, “no good deed goes unpunished”; and then skeptic self-consciousness (cynical disbelief and resignation, disdain of care for others). Skepticism leads to the unhappy self-consciousness: ascetic rejection of the world, etc. But the unhappy self-consciousness at least gets some sense of the power of free will. That leads to idealist consciousness, which makes Ideas the sole reality. That notion is ultimately untenable—it excludes nature, and we must come to terms with nature. So Rational Consciousness leads to Empirical Consciousness. But then the Empirical Consciousness can’t see itself as other than animal, with reality as something outside itself.

Ideological critiques are, of course, a mainstay of modern criticism and literary/cultural theory. One might say that ideology consists in the linguistic and institutional rules that inform our actions and beliefs and make us think there is a stable world and a place for a stable “us” in it. A different definition would be that it consists in a fundamental confusion: the attempt to confound words and the world. Language, according to some modern critics, simply doesn’t work the same way physical nature does, and you can’t just “use” it to describe the world as if there were a close fit between the workings of language and the workings of natural processes. People are constantly eliding the fact that words, no matter how well you arrange them, don’t describe reality and are not “the same as” reality. To think otherwise is to be mystified and to think that words and the world correspond or even reduce to the same thing.

It’s easy enough to understand that the word “tree” isn’t the actual thing out there in the park, but at a broader level we tend to assume that our language is operating on the world in substantive ways. We naturalize our linguistic tricks to the point where the tricks seem like nature itself. So today theorists tend to focus on the constitutive and ideological role of language and not on arriving at philosophical certainty about events and things by means of it. Perpetual demystification might be a good way to describe this process, except that demystification tends to presuppose that there is an unmystified final state we can get to. Hegel thinks he can account for the world and consciousness as a dynamic totality, or at least that it would be possible to arrive at an intelligible perspective on that totality.

Page-by-Page Notes on “The Master-Slave Dialectic” from Hegel’sThe Phenomenology of Spirit

Introductory remarks. Immanuel Kant tends to assume that we are self-contained units, and he depends upon the sameness of our faculties in dealing with our activities and customs, and with aesthetic perception, ethics, and so forth. For Hegel, the self is founded upon confrontational moments—risk, contradiction, dread. The self is established by struggle for recognition and certainty, which entails withholding recognition from others. Hegel is an idealist who finds progressive states of consciousness embodied in certain historical moments. History is teleological, and labor is central to subjectivity and purpose in life, to social formations. Humanity’s relation to objects is central to life.

630-31. “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when... it so exists for another....” To attain self-consciousness, we must first set boundaries. Emerson describes this as distinguishing between “me/not me.” Exclusion and separation are necessary to the founding of the self. The earliest stage is desiring self-consciousness. But then the situation becomes confrontational: a pair of self-conscious individuals confront each other as objects. They are not yet authentic in their self-consciousness.

632-33. “The individual who has not risked his life they will be recognized as a person, but he has not attained to the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.” Abstract self-consciousness must risk itself, must risk death to move towards genuine self-consciousness. Each side must try to annihilate the other. Something more active than exclusion is needed—recognition, a kind of incorporation/destruction of the other. But death would be negation, not a step forward. Therefore, a person needs recognition, but resents this need. Life implies limitation, negotiation, mediation. A different kind of relationship emerges from the struggle. The struggle shows a need for a mediated relationship. The Lord and bondsman both relate not directly to each other but rather to the thing.

The Lord consumes and negates objects, while the servant is forced to labor upon those objects—that is not the same thing as consuming them. But this is still unsatisfactory—the Lord only gets recognition from a non-essential and unequal other. The bondsman’s recognition cannot give the Lord a true grasp of himself or his relationship with others.

633. Paragraph 190. “The Lord relates himself mediately to the bondsman through a being [a thing] that is independent....” The thing becomes the locus of necessary mediation, part of the bargain struck to stave off death. However, as Karl Marx understood, this thing/being is also the site of great confusion in our relationship to things and, through them, to one another.

634-35. “The object in which the Lord has achieved his lordship has in reality turned out to be something quite different from an independent consciousness…. he is, therefore, not certain of being-for-self as the truth of himself.” The Lord is in effect the slave of his slave and of the objects upon which the slave works. Moreover, the slave withdraws into himself and becomes independent. See 635 on this matter. Fear throws us back upon the body’s confines, and the servant-to-be shrinks into “absolute negativity.” Service allows him to realize that he is an individual. Work allows him to work at recovering a sense of his independent selfhood. We produce ourselves by means of work.

636. Hegel goes on to describe the movement from stoicism to skepticism to the unhappy consciousness. The point is that the movement grasps increasingly the unsatisfactory nature and contradictoriness (divided consciousness) of the servant consciousness; and therefore of the whole lord/servant relationship. The movement is supposed to be towards freedom, which will require genuine reciprocity. Marx will exploit this exposure of contradictions. The keys to this selection are 1) intersubjectivity as the foundation of the self rather than positing an autonomous ego, which is no more than an effect; 2) contradiction as teleological process; 3) the centrality of labor.

Page-by-Page Notes on Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art

639-40. “What is man’s ‘‘need’’ to produce works of art?” Why do we need art and adornment? We think ourselves, represent ourselves to ourselves. (This point will be appropriate when we come to Baudelaire as well.) Perspective and identity imply a going-out-of-self. You cannot see something or grasp it mentally unless you get far enough away from it: “the universal and absolute need from which art (on its formal side) springs has its origin in the fact that man is a ‘‘thinking’’ consciousness....”

We make the journey in two ways—theoretically, through acts of self-consciousness, and practically, through practical activity like ordinary labor and artistic creation. We set objects before us and shape them, we embody imaginative acts in sensuous form.

And in the product, we see ourselves. So labor is self-production, spiritual process. A central human need is to transcend what we are, and to ‘‘get’’ somewhere.

A similar idea occurs in the master/slave dialectic—our sense of identity is not left to solidify on its own. It is a product of social interaction, a product that involves risk and confrontation. We confront another person, see ourselves in another person, and seek to annihilate or dominate that other person. Notice that Hegel often shows contradictions emerging in systems—competing, incompatible demands generated within the same system. Marx will describe capitalist economics the same way, especially when he discusses how overproduction crises lead to cycles of boom and bust.

639 bottom. “In the second form of art....” Adornment is natural—we turn nature into a means of self-reflection. Nature is useful as a springboard for successive acts of self-consciousness. However, this process is destructive and violent—what ought to be respected is annihilated or interpreted out of existence. Compare the Westerner’s “I have conquered the mountain” to the Buddhist’s claim, “the mountain has befriended me.” Hegel’s march of the spirit could be a violent and destructive series of aggressive acts against others. Marxism tends to advocate an outright struggle between humanity and nature for supremacy. We might even connect this attitude towards nature with Baudelaire and his fellow decadent authors on the need to reject nature in the name of artifice and variety.

640-41. “The first form of art is therefore rather a mere search for portrayal than a capacity for true presentation....” Symbolic art is a search to embody a vague ideal in matter. This kind of art achieves an asymmetrical yoking together of idea and material. The two roughly correspond but do not fit together well. Symbolic art also shows the foreignness of ideas to matter. It reaffirms striving as one of the keys to humanity, and it also encourages respect for the sublime, the mysterious, fermentation, and movement. It is a necessary stage in human experience—we must be foreigners in our own territory. Symbolic art is expressive of mystery.

641 (bottom) - 642. “In the second form of art which we will call the classical, the double defect of the symbolic form is extinguished.” Classical art is the second stage. Greek statues would be the perfect example. Greek sculpture achieves an adequate embodiment of the ideal. The human form expresses spirit determined as particular and human. The problem is that to do this, the sculptor must bring spirit down to the level at which it can be adequately represented or embodied. That is unacceptable since spirit is “the infinite subjectivity of the Idea” (643).

643-44. “The romantic form of art cancels again the completed unification of the Idea and its reality....” The third stage is romantic art, the perfect form of which is music. In romantic art, striving comes to the forefront again. Music is freest of material limitations. Romantic art seeks to transcend itself through itself, and we rediscover, as in the earlier stage of symbolic art, the incommensurateness of material to spirit. The problem with romantic art is that it triumphs over matter. The idea can only achieve perfection within itself. We see that we cannot simply fix spirit in stone or on the canvas, or even in a succession of notes on a page. William Blake understood well, for instance, that media are necessary but also liable to become traps. Romantic art is by no means comforting. It does not satisfy the individual’s sense of his or her own cognitive powers, the ability to render events intelligible, as in Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic theory.

Edition. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York : Norton, 2001. ISBN 0393974294.

Week 09, Lessing, Schiller

2004-10-18T14:19:00.000-07:00

Friedrich von Schiller Notes

Describe the main problem: Schiller very astutely describes civilization as more of a goal then as something we can actually achieve as an end state in the present. But this admission makes it difficult for him to offer us a time frame for the improvements art will bring us. So throughout our selections, Schiller articulates the fundamental split between the individual human and the needs of civilization.

573. Schiller announces here that art seems to have little power in his century. He describes the age as utilitarian, and is probably referring here to the French Revolution, which has little patience with aristocratic finery. It seems that the time is out of joint, and that idea will become a refrain during the romantic age.

574. Schiller says that the public’s taste has gone astray, and it no longer knows what it really needs. So Schiller will hold to the position that beauty, or art, must be placed above politics. The aesthetic is the true way to freedom. Schiller as a critic and as an artist removes himself from the political debates of his time, or rather he removes himself from direct political action, choosing instead to make his comments about aesthetics relevant to political analysis. Matthew Arnold will later make much the same gesture, though as we shall see, he also discusses the importance of statecraft.

574-75. It quickly becomes obvious that Schiller’s definition of civilization as a process is going to be sophisticated. He says that civilization involves a falling away from nature by the abuse of reason, only to return to nature by use of reason. This is somewhat like a secularized version of the fall, and we will see what path reason will have to pursue to achieve the salvation of humanity.

575. In Letter 6, Schiller offers us the example of the Greeks as naïve and therefore perfect. T. S. Eliot will later speak about a dissociation of sensibility setting in during the 17th century, and Schiller’s comments here are remarkably similar. In sum, he is saying that the Greeks were both passionate and intellectual and that these things were not strictly separate in the Greek psyche. And of course, Kant is behind these comments -- observe what Schiller says about the mind not leaving nature behind it. And then the definition of modern man follows: we are fragmented, stunted, our capacities or faculties do not work in harmony. There was a close fit between the individual Greek and his society, but the modern person suffers for the sake of his society and is not really a representative of it. It seems that we are only fragments or atoms, not “man the microcosm.”

576. Civilization is itself, explains Schiller, the cause of a split in the individual psyche and between one human and another. That is because civilization entails ever sharper distinctions in thought and social formation. He is talking about something like what Adam Smith calls division of labor. Intellect and passion withdraw into separate camps, both within the same individual and in society as an aggregate. This kind of analysis is common to Romanticism -- mention William Blake, for example. Government only makes the problem worse. Here Schiller is referring to the advance of bureaucracy during the C18. Bureaucracy was needed by many of the age’s enlightened rulers in order to secure a firm tax base and a well-regulated kingdom.

As society develops, labor becomes mere labor and does not express spirit; the State opposes the church, and law violates custom. It is interesting to note that later on, during the C19, Herbert Spencer would describe this process in evolutionary terms, without evident disapproval -- he speaks of an evolution of social forms from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. But in this text, Schiller deplores the necessary alienation of the individual from society. We become mere cogs in a vast wheel, and cannot relate our isolated activities to the whole even though we contribute to that whole. I suppose we are not very far from Franz Kafka, who describes the workings of bureaucracy similarly.

577. I like the way Schiller describes the relationship between people and government in terms of individual psychology. The government classifies people or pigeonholes them, and the people, in their turn, resort to a primitive morality where the point becomes simply to oppose public authority as if it were a big annoying person. those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained. Practical people come to despise anyone with imagination, and the imaginative people cannot connect with the practical.

578. Again, I am reminded of T.S. Eliot and the dissociation of sensibility -- thought becomes cold, and the practical person becomes narrow-minded.

But again, Schiller explains that what he is describing has been necessary. He is talking about historical necessity every bit as much as Karl Marx will describe capitalism as historically necessary.

Schiller describes civilization as a perpetual process, not a state we can actually achieve any time soon. The strife and isolation he describes is necessary for the sharpening of thought and the development of social forms. This causes much misery for the individual, for the concentration of his powers leads to many advances towards civilization, but it does not make him happy or a complete human being in the here and now. It is interesting that Schiller even sets forth Immanuel Kant as an example of the separation of powers within the human mind. It seems that you can either be a poet or you can be Immanuel Kant.

579-80. Schiller asks whether this is not a vicious circle. Pursuing civilization seems like a trap at this point. But here he proclaims that the instrument of improvement is fine art.

More Schiller Notes

573-75. “Utility is the great idol of our age.” The time is out of joint for art. Both the enlightened monarchies of the 18th century and the intellectual current of the French revolution are driven by utility. But Schiller will not offer a simple return to primitive habits.

574. “If man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.” Politics and social engagement alone will not lead us to a higher synthesis between culture and everyday practice. One must concentrate on beauty first because we only arrive at freedom through beauty.

574 bottom-575. People “must fall away from nature by the abuse of reason before they can return to her by the use of reason.” Schiller goes on to say that the Athenian people were complete; there was no dissociation of sensibility in early Greece. This state expressed the wholeness of each individual citizen. Civilization involves alienation.

576. “It was civilization itself which inflicted this wound upon modern man.” Reason sharpens with the advance of civilization, but discernment, the truth-drive, inherently involves division, fragmentation, and specialization at both the individual and collective level. Civilization is a mechanistic system, an organization, that gets the better of us and makes us serve its own ends. (Compare Sigmund Freud’s comments on the task of civilization in Civilization and Its Discontents.) Civilization divides labor from meaningful activity, reason from feeling, and one person from another. Marx will say similar things about capitalism. Heidegger of humanism along similar lines -- thinking becomes a specialized activity and steps outside its proper boundaries; in trying to articulate itself as something central to human life, thought becomes techne.

577. “Little by little the concrete life of the individual is destroyed in order that the abstract idea of the whole a drag out sorry existence....” The bureaucracies of the Enlightenment aim to categorize people -- something that generates mediocrity and encourages it. There arises an antagonism between a people and its government.

578. “Little as individuals might benefit from this fragmentation of their being, there was no other way in which the species as a whole could have progressed.” Schiller addresses the necessity of alienation, fragmentation, for the sake of progress.

“This antagonism of faculties and functions is the great instrument of civilization -- but it is only the instrument; for as long as it persists, we are only on the way to becoming civilized.” That is a very interesting statement -- Schiller admits that we are not yet civilized. Civilization advances by sacrificing the individual’s happiness to its goals. Again, see Kafka and Freud on this problem.

579. “But will such a mind, dissolved as it were into pure intellect and pure contemplation, ever be capable of exchanging the rigorous bonds of logic for the free movement of the poetic faculty...?” Schiller is obviously talking about Immanuel Kant at this point -- Kant’s narrow precision and brilliance in philosophy means that he cannot be a poet. Reason becomes stronger at the expense of emotion

579-580. “But how under the influence of a barbarous constitution is character ever to become ennobled?” Schiller asks whether civilization might be a trap. To solve the paradox that the result of human activity (civilization itself) strips us of our chance at wholeness and pleasure as individuals, Schiller asserts art as an atemporal ideal, a saving grace and realm.

“The artist is indeed the child of his age; but woe to him if he is at the same time its ward or, worse still, its minion!” Immediately after this quotation, Schiller refers to Orestes, treating him as the archetype of the artist in relation to his society. That is a complicated way of looking at such the relationship, given the violent action of Orestes and his consequent need for purification. {Aside -- Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon reads like postmodernism -- it visits us with vengeance for our own incomprehension, but no order emerges or is even promised at the end of the first play in the trilogy. Literary theory seems much less nihilistic than Samuel Beckett, for example, but perhaps I’m wrong here and Beckett is not merely nihilistic. Confronting people with the absurdity of the world they live in is productive -- but productive of what?

581. “But how is the artist to protect himself against the corruption of the age which besets him on all sides? By disdaining its opinion.” At this point, Schiller risks reinforcing the problem -- art becomes a total way of life, something that isolates its practitioner, not one necessary experience amongst others.

581-82. “Impart to the world you would influence a Direction towards the good, and the quiet rhythm of time will bring it to fulfillment.” Schiller ends this selection by asserting the shaping power of culture. The artist should give us what we who live in the present need -- not what gratifies our demand for utility and low desire. The artist must not be entirely enslaved to his own age. Schiller asserts that there is something beyond locality and time; he gestures towards an ideal of full humanity. But this gesture involves risks, as the reference to Orestes shows. Finally, Schiller’s insistence that we must place art above nature goes beyond Kant.

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 1st edition. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393974294.

Week 08, Kant

2004-10-11T14:18:00.000-07:00

General Notes on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment

Kant’s significance in his own era: a “Copernican Revolution” in Philosophy.

1. Politics: Kant’s Enlightenment-based, philosophical idealist claims about the sufficiency of the mind’s moral and rational powers leads to much grander claims on the part of romantic expressivists and political revolutionaries. Kant is a bit like Banquo in Macbeth—though no political revolutionary or proponent of formalism or art-for-art’s sake, he “gets” such heirs. Kant never traveled beyond his home in Königsberg , East Prussia , but his ideas about humans’ capacity to render themselves and their surroundings intelligible spread throughout Europe and, at least indirectly, went into the making of the French Revolution. Why? Because if the mind is posited as constitutive of reality (not passively receptive of it) and if we are cast as autonomous moral agents, the political implication, at least in the most motivated and optimistic readings, would be democratic revolution against the era’s prevailing monarchism (a kind of determinism by “natural rulers” over the ruled). The French Revolution of 1789 is the dynamic embodiment of this possibility of change.

2. Art: When Kant says that we can know the “phenomenal” world (literally, “that which appears”), his emphasis is on a kind of subjectivism (in the sense that we cannot simply step outside of the perceiving self and know things directly), which nonetheless posits universal faculties or mental capacities. And art, like nature, is part of the phenomenal realm—we see a beautiful object in nature or art and make an aesthetic judgment. So by valorizing and studying it, we are engaging with a realm that has cognitive significance. Kant validates the field of aesthetics as a legitimate branch of philosophy. Further, Kant’s theory of a capacity for disinterested aesthetic judgment—one not based on logic or external moral standards or sensory/sensual gratification, but rather on a felt harmony between the form of natural objects and the mind’s powers—led near-contemporaries to treat art as an autonomous realm of experience, one that could be kept separate from the encroachment of social constraints and corruptive influences like politics and economics. To the romantics, an autonomous realm of art could serve as the basis for societal renewal, with the poets and artists, accessible priests of imagination, as the ones whose claims to speak with authority about human problems should be granted the highest level of authority.

Kant’s significance for 20th-21st century theory.

1. Politics: Kant’s claims about our freedom as rational and moral agents living in a world we ourselves largely render intelligible and livable remain, in one variation or another, central to the argument over the possibility of political consensus and progress implying such assumptions. To what extent, if at all, can humans change themselves and the social and political reality they find around them? Modern theorists can sound cynical about the universality and “freedom” of the mind’s powers, but the questions posed by Kant and other Enlightenment philosophers continue to play a role in shaping contemporary discourse about political consensus and ethics. Is there a common set of human powers and traits that give us some measure of control over our destiny, or is it rather the case that nature or environment or even ideology (our belief systems and institutions, enshrined in social practices and linguistic usage and codification) exercise a determining power over all that we do and think and say, so that moral and intellectual freedom, even political freedom, are little more than humanistic illusions and philosophical sham? Does life boil down to power and ideological determination, to the exclusion of concepts like free will and enlightened, educated humanity? Does insistence on such free agency merely serve repressive political ends, perpetuating distorted views about the way things are?

2. Art: Kant’s positing that there is such a thing as a pure, disinterested, autonomous judgment (as indicated above) implies that art is at least potentially a free and independent realm of human endeavor and experience, and even one with tremendous regenerative power for individuals and societies. Few theorists today would accept that claim directly—they would suggest that art’s production and reception are permeated by ideological imperatives and that the people who make and perceive art are not free in the sense Kant implies they are. Still, none of these criticisms do away with the key questions about art’s social, political, and cognitive value: what is art, can we even ask what art is, what is the social and political significance of such arguments about what art “is”? etc.

Aesthetics has long been a suspect branch of philosophy. The insistence upon an autonomous realm of art is often seen as a form of political escapism into a never-never land free of immediate, real-life consequences; it is seen as implying a naïve model of human subjectivity. In fact, a seemingly escapist doctrine such as “Art for Art’s Sake” owes something to Kant—as manifested in the British Decadent Movement, it shows up as a commodified notion of elitism that can be marketed to the middle class. (That’s true even if we can’t imagine old Immanuel strolling along Piccadilly with a medieval lily in his hand.) But suspicions about aesthetics and aestheticism aside, we should not dismiss all consideration of the central assumptions underlying aesthetics.

One other point of influence about Kant is that although he describes beauty as something that happens in the perceiver, not in the perceived object itself, his aesthetics lead to later formalist theories such as that of the New Critics of the 1930’s-40’s. This is because he claims that the pattern, or arrangement, or form, of a phenomenally given object is a matter of significance. We judge an object beautiful, at base, because our mental faculties feel a certain pleasurable harmony with the formal arrangement of the object, as if the natural world is giving us a sense of its “it-fits-ness” with our own mental structure. The object accords with our powers of perceiving. Kant expressly says that aesthetic judgments about beauty are not dependent on the innate properties of things. Still, aesthetic judgments are the result of the mind’s ability to construct harmony from its own formal organization of sensory data. So does the New Critics’ brand of concentration on the formal properties of a text that they consider autonomous and coherent or whole.

Elaboration:

1. Kant said that the essence of the Enlightenment could be captured in the phrase “Dare to Know.” Humans possess the power of cognition, of reason, and they are responsible for knowing the sources, operational principles, and limits of that power. That is what the three famous Critiques are for: Critique of Pure Reason (how we can perceive and know); Critique of Practical Reason (Ethics); Critique of Judgment (Aesthetics). Kant asserts that we are rational and morally free. We are not determined by our environment or nature but are instead responsible beings who largely render the world intelligible by means of our powerful mental faculties. We give laws to what we call Nature, and our standards derive not from an external source (God) but rather from our own capacity to act morally.

It is important to realize that in Kant’s day much of Europe was split philosophically: Cartesian rationalism asserting that reality is derivable through logical operations or mathematical formulae, Leibnizian claims about a perspectiveless kind of knowledge, dogmatic Idealism asserting that mind alone is real; and the British empiricism of Bacon and Locke, which insists that all knowledge is derived from sensory data acting upon a passive, initially blank mind or “blank slate” (tabula rasa). Kant wanted to find a way to show some relation between human beings and nature without the need to deny the integrity of either. He does not want us to assert blandly that nature doesn’t matter or that we are entirely in the grip of natural laws. The latter option amounts to determinism, and it denies human dignity and free will.

Kant’s solution is ingenious. He says that we cannot indeed know “things in themselves” (the noumenal world, something not accessible through the senses). Ceasing to claim either that we can know noumena or that there simply is no noumenal realm turns out for Kant to be a liberating movement. Why? Without dismissing the possibility of an ultimate reality, Kant works things out so that any alleged ultimate reality ceases to be endowed with determining force over us. Not only is that so, but we can now begin to make a reasonably scientific investigation of the realm that we can know: the phenomenal world, the world of “things as they appear to us through our acts of perception.”

So in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant locates the “reality” he wants to investigate not in things themselves, not in some external realm, but rather in the mind’s own ability to organize sensory data into something intelligible. The most basic way this happens is through the fundamental forms of intuition, space and time. To borrow an analogy from Meyer Abrams and Hazard Adams, those forms are like spectacles we can never remove; we structure the world through them. Kant is implying that at this fundamental level, the mind is constitutive and active; it structures what we call reality. Furthermore, this reality is something we can investigate and come to know; we can know how we construct what we call reality. Kant is no empirical psychologist, but he asks, “how does the mind work?” Objects seem to accord with our perceptions. In that sense, at least, there is harmony between nature and our mental faculties. We are not aliens wandering an earth that we cannot understand or be at home in.

In the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant is concerned to establish the grounds of our moral freedom. Our status as rational and moral beings, he says, lifts us above animal nature and even allows us to connect with Infinity, what is beyond our finite perceptions. Our minds have “legislative power” over nature, so we can adopt an at least partly independent stance towards it without dismissing our existence as beings in nature. Similarly, our morality is not an externally derived or determinant force over us; our morality comes from an innate capacity to generate moral standards that bind us as individuals and as a community. Kant’s categorical imperative says that a moral law must be binding for all: I can’t go out and borrow money not intending to pay it back because that renders the whole moral universe meaningless. Who would lend money if there were no universally recognizable expectation that it ought to be paid back? If we make exceptions for ourselves as individuals, he insists, we put the very possibility of acting morally to shame. (See Francis Bacon’s quip that revenge does violence not only to the offender but also to the law itself; revenge, writes Bacon, “puts the law out of office.”) This kind of ethical “subjective universality,” treated as objective and binding reality, means that we can make a world in which we can live according to rules whose force we all recognize. It’s in our nature to do so.

In The Critique of Judgment, Kant’s claim is that aesthetic experience gives us a palpable sense of our moral and intellectual freedom; it helps us experience the bridging of the gap between the concepts of nature and freedom. Freedom isn’t just meant to be a truth we can understand through abstract philosophical study. Imagination or sensibility, the function of which is to supply the understanding with data that must be synthesized, arrives at a relation of free play and harmony with the understanding (which usually brings data under concepts with a view to action or knowledge, but which in the case of aesthetic judgments need not refer to any determinate concept like “goodness,” “usefulness,” etc.).

This pleasurable experience of the mind’s faculties in harmony makes us aware of our freedom and convinces us that nature is compatible with the mind’s powers. We cannot be alien to a world that gives us pleasure without making any demands upon us. So Kant’s analysis of aesthetic experience helps him bring home to us the claims made in the other two Critiques about our status as free, intelligent moral beings. As for the sublime, it’s important because although our experience with vast, powerful natural phenomena exceeds the capacity of our imagination and understanding to subsume it, we do not feel threatened by the “beyondness” of the experience. On the contrary, we are reassured in a very palpable way of the power of human faculties. We may not know the infinitely large in the sense of being able to quantify it or bound it determinately, but we still can think infinity in a manner that doesn’t overwhelm us. Our whole sense of self and of stability in the world doesn’t come crashing down upon us, so the mind must be a very powerful thing indeed.

Page-by-Page Notes on Kant’s Critique of Judgment

503. Editorial introduction. Kant is not concerned with the creation of art. Art is not necessarily created to achieve beauty. It may be made for many purposes—most notably ritual or religious. Or perhaps expression might be the goal of the artist; certainly contemporary art is not about beauty. It seems more like a confrontation with unintelligibility, or with the audience’s value system. It is “disturbing and disintegrating” (Wilde’s phrase) with regard to what we have falsely determined to be serene, integrated, unassailable, and unquestionable. Of course, this gesture can be turned into a style, a commodified act of rebellion. Oscar Wilde says that beauty is just such a disturbing element, given what it opposes. The difficulty lies in opposing the world while being immersed in it, working with and against the world’s rules, forms, and prohibitions.

505. Kant defines imagination as “the power of a priori intuitions”—i.e. the power to synthesize the intuitions given by sensibility. It is the power of exhibition. He defines understanding as “the power of concepts.” The point is that the mind is structured in such a way that its faculties can receive and construe sensory data. See Kant’s summary—subjective universality does not mean “merely subjective” in the non-philosophical sense. Taste is the ability to make aesthetic judgments.

506-07. “Interest is what we call the liking we connect with the presentation of an object’s existence.” Disinterestedness implies freedom from bias; it means we must have no immediate relation to the object we are contemplating and no sense that it must have an immediate purpose. The author’s intentions, the social implications of the object, and so forth, do not matter when one speaks of aesthetic judgments.

507. “Agreeable is what the senses like in sensation.” We merely like what is agreeable. Pancakes with maple syrup are not beautiful. They simply gratify our taste buds—we like the flavor. We must abstract from such sensory pleasure when making an aesthetic judgment.
We also take an interest in the good—we desire the existence of the object for its own sake (moral goodness) or because it is useful, as a wheelbarrow is useful to someone who wants to do some gardening. We do not take any interest of that sort in a flower or in a fine design. So whether we say that something is good in itself or good for some purpose, both statements involve an interested judgment; we would have to know a definite purpose. Kant refers here as well to what he will later call “free beauties” such as flowers and arabesque designs.

508-09. “For the good is the object of the will (a power of desire that is determined by reason).” Simply put, we want a “good” object to exist. But then Kant moves towards the three sorts of liking and to what constitutes a judgment of taste proper. “A judgment of taste ... considers the character of the object only by holding it up to our feeling of pleasure and displeasure.” We do not care about the existence of such an object, and taste is the ability to judge objects by means of a liking that contains no interest. Notice that towards the bottom of the page, Kant provides a straightforward summary after all the complex analysis he has offered—”we call agreeable what gratifies us, beautiful what we just like, good what we esteem....” Agreeable / beautiful / good; gratify / like / esteem; incline / favor / respect. So a judgment of the beautiful is “disinterested and free,” as Kant says at the top of 509.

510. “A judgment of taste must involve a claim to subjective universality.” Freedom from interest makes us say that our judgment of beauty is universal and valid.

510. “If he says that canary wine is agreeable he is quite content if someone else corrects his terms and reminds him to say instead: it is agreeable to me.” My example is passionfruit fudge. It would be boorish to insist that others should like strange flavors or particular baseball teams just because we do.

510. “But if he proclaims something to be beautiful, then he requires the same liking from others.” We demand that there be a universal faculty of taste. We assume that an unbiased mind’s judgments will be the same for everyone, or that they ought to be the same for everyone. An unimpaired, free judgment would indicate that this particular painting or this particular flower is beautiful. Kant assumes a universal model of how the mind is structured and how it works, and says (see below) that failure to reach universal consensus in actual life need not destroy our faith in this assumption.

510-11. “There can be no rule by which someone could be compelled to acknowledge that something is beautiful. No one can use reasons or principles to talk us into a judgment on whether some garment, house, or flower is beautiful.” Can we prove that our judgment is correct? What if somebody contradicts us? Well, so what? We are not reasoning about the point; we are positing a universal voice, a capacity to make universally binding judgments: “nothing is postulated in a judgment of taste except such a universal voice about a liking unmediated by concepts.”

512-13. “If the pleasure in the given object came first....” Pleasure does not arise from mere sensation. What causes the pleasure is a certain set of occurrences in the mind. These result in a “universally communicable mental state” that allows us to say, for example, “this rose is beautiful for everyone.”

513. “Now this merely subjective (aesthetic) judging of the object, or of the presentation by which it is given, precedes the pleasure in the object and is the basis of this pleasure, [a pleasure] in the harmony of the cognitive powers.” So pleasure arises from the free play of the imagination and understanding working together harmoniously towards no determinate purpose. We judge an object beautiful before taking pleasure in it—the pleasure comes from harmony between the mind’s powers. The mind engages freely with objects in the phenomenal world, and we feel harmony, a correspondence between mind and nature. Aesthetic encounters offer us a pleasant and easy way to experience our potential freedom. Ethics and philosophy are more difficult, and ordinary perception does not yield us free pleasure—it is too busy, too self-interested.

In aesthetic judgment, our ordinary faculties (the ones that let us construe the world as intelligible) operate in a special way. Beautiful objects of any sort are an oasis; they provide a contemplative encounter that gives pure pleasure. That is, imagination and understanding must work for even general cognition to take place, but in aesthetic experience, they play freely, so we experience our subjective, universally communicable freedom in the presence of an object given us from nature or art. We take pleasure from experiencing our freedom. To borrow from the high-serious realm of gaming, how about a pinball image? Experiencing beauty in nature or art sends us into a recursive scoring loop, racking up pleasure-points. A terminology issue: at the bottom of 513, Kant defines presentation as “the presentation by which an object is given us.” A “presentation” is that “by which an object is given us.” (Bottom of page.)

514-15. “A pure judgment of taste is one that is not influenced by charm or emotion…and whose determining basis is therefore merely the purposiveness of the form.” Kant defines “form” as shape or play on 515 top. Form is the design or pattern of presentations (not things themselves, but phenomenal “presentations” to our senses).

“Empirical aesthetic judgments are judgments of sense (material aesthetic judgments); only pure aesthetic judgments … are properly judgments of taste.” Color, musical instrument tones, and so forth, are charms. They please our senses and are agreeable, but they aren’t beautiful. They may even get in our way if we aren’t sophisticated or measured enough in our taste. (Notice the Hellenist term “barbaric” on 515.) Sensation is only the matter or raw material, the facilitator, for pure aesthetic judgment. Form is the determining element: “Design is what is essential” (515). Formalists will later pick up on this claim.

515. “Even what we call ornaments (parerga), i.e. what does not belong to the whole presentation of the object as an intrinsic constituent….” There is ornament and there is mere finery. Kant goes on to say that emotion isn’t involved in an aesthetic judgment; neither is sensation part of an aesthetic judgment: “Hence a pure judgment of taste has as its determining basis neither charm nor emotion, in other words, no sensation, which is [merely] the matter of an aesthetic judgment.

516. On Free Beauty: flowers and designs. “Flowers are free natural beauties.” And “Thus designs à la grecque, the foliage on borders or on wallpaper, etc., mean nothing on their own….” Kant will need to deal with the issue of imitation when he discusses art as distinct from natural beauty. Below, he writes that “When we judge free beauty … we presuppose no concept of any purpose for which the manifold is to serve the given object, and hence no concept [as to] what the object is [meant] to represent….” Here is the idea of play that Schiller will recast as a fundamental drive, a Spieltreib.

517. At the end of this section, Kant defines imagination as “the power of exhibition.”

518. “We solicit everyone else’s assent because we have a basis for it that is common to all.” The common basis for judgment is the sameness of each mind’s powers, at least the potential sameness.

518. “[I]s taste an original and natural ability, or is taste only the idea of an ability yet to be acquired and [therefore] artificial….? It will be interesting to see how Kant responds to this question. It’s an important one—either taste is innate, or it depends purely on cultural acquirement, or some mixture of the two.

519. “It seems, therefore, that only a lawfulness without a law….” Kant refers here to “purposiveness without a purpose.” If your judgment were referred to a standard such as the original of a portrait, or a firm idea about the object, the judgment of taste would not be pure.

520. “But some significant differences between the beautiful and the sublime are also readily apparent.” Sublimity and its quality of “unboundedness” suggest the possible incommensurateness between mind and nature. Perhaps objects don’t pre-accord with our capacities, and perhaps, as a corollary, nature is not purposive like art, but rather mechanical or simply chaotic. The sublime is reassuring because it “indeterminately” confirms reason’s superiority over sense and imagination, the “power of exhibition” or impregnating intuitions with concepts. What was a threat becomes a hosanna to the highest—Reason. Humanity, like honor, goes before everything. Current theory exploits the same possibility with regard to language and nature, intentionality, and so forth. The sublime suggests some violence to our imagination, underscoring a seeming disjunction between mind and nature. But in the end, the sublime is very important because it leads us towards at least some sense that there's a transcendental order beyond anything to which experience can give us access. What it leads us towards, Kant implies, is faith that there is an order of this sort and a God. Those who go back to Kant from a post-modern perspective are probably more apt to emphasize the unsettling initial moment of the sublime. And those who are interested in aesthetics may be most captivated by Kant's notions about how we judge an object in nature or art beautiful.

520. “[N]atural beauty carries with it a purposiveness in its form, by which the object seems as it were predetermined for our power of judgment….” The sublime, Kant goes on to write, suggests that the object of sublimity is “contrapurposive for our power of judgment, incommensurate with our power of exhibition, and as it were violent to our imagination….” (Be sure to read this passage. Refer also to the note at bottom about reason and understanding.) When Wordsworth writes in his “Immortality Ode,” “to me the meanest flower that blows / can give thoughts that too often lie too deep for tears,” might we call that an expressive version of sublimity?

521. “For what is sublime…cannot be contained in any sensible form….” A stormy ocean, or indeed any object in itself, is not per se sublime. Rather, we would have to refer this sight to “ideas of reason, which, though they cannot be exhibited adequately, are aroused and called to mind by this very inadequacy….”

521. “Independent natural beauty reveals to us a technic of nature that allows us to present nature as a system in terms of laws whose principle we do not find anywhere in our understanding….” Aesthetic judgment leads us to analogize nature and “purposive” art.

521. “However, in what we usually call sublime in nature there is such an utter lack of anything leading to particular objective principles and to forms of nature conforming to them….” The sublime does not suggest harmony between objects of nature and our powers of perception, so it isn’t as important as the beautiful. Of course, some will later say that this threat of disjunctiveness is very important! (Tentatively, we might say that contemporary theorists interested in aporia and so forth are pursuing a variant of sublime experience, only this time it’s an experience with language.)

522. “[N]othing that can be an object of the senses is to be called sublime.” Reason demands something that imagination is not able to deal with.

523. “[I]f we are to give an example of it that is fully appropriate for the critique of aesthetic judgment, then we must point to the sublime not in products of art…but rather in crude nature….” So the sublime is a matter of raw nature, not art.

524. “If the human mind is nonetheless to be able even to think the given infinite without contradiction, it must have within itself a power that is supersensible….” We can think of the world as a totality, but imagination cannot represent it.

525. “[I]n judging a thing sublime it [the aesthetic power of judgment] refers the imagination to reason so that it will harmonize subjectively with reason’s ideas….” Kant writes that “[T]he mind feels elevated in its own judgment of itself when it contemplates these without concern for their form and abandons itself to the imagination and to a reason that has come to be connected with it….” Here on this page is the key to the reassuring quality of the sublime: reason’s ideas are greater than imagination, the power of exhibition. The sublime experience exalts our sense of reason’s power. We can think infinity even if we can’t see it or count it or bound it. That is a very special thing to be able to do!

526. “In presenting the sublime in nature the mind feels agitated….” This is the opposite of the experience of beauty, where the mind is restful.

527. “Just as we cannot pass judgment on the beautiful if we are seized by inclination and appetite, so we cannot pass judgment at all on the sublime in nature if we are afraid.” The sublime requires safety—you can’t be standing on the edge of a cliff.

527. [The sublime] reveals in us a superiority over nature that is the basis of a self-preservation quite different in kind from the one that can be assailed and endangered by nature outside us.” The sublime shows our superiority over nature. Reason is higher than sensibility in Kant’s scheme, but he seems careful in his praise at this point for the sublime because he doesn’t want us to become arrogant about our powers—self-sufficient and mature, willing to be responsible for our actions, yes, but not arrogant and withdrawn from nature. As mentioned above, though (see comment about pg. 520), this doesn't diminish the value of the sublime.

529. “[T]he fact that a judgment about the sublime in nature requires culture … still in no way implies that it was initially produced by culture….” The sublime, Kant goes on to say, has its foundation in moral feeling. Also, “taste we demand unhesitatingly from everyone, because here judgment refers the imagination merely to the understanding, our power of concepts; in the case of feeling, on the other hand, judgment refers the imagination to reason, our power of ideas….” Reason ranks higher—it is the “power of ideas.” Understanding is only the “power of concepts.” That is, understanding has to do with the ordinary capacity to perceive things.

Perhaps we can see Coleridge and Shelley here—the world of sense is chaotic, and for Shelly, imagination takes on some Kantian functions; it harmonizes sensory input. Faculty psychology seems to get sucked into “imagination” as if it were a philosophical black hole. See also Coleridge’s idea about Primary Imagination, which works like the Understanding, only tinged with the divine. Secondary Imagination is the capacity the poet employs; it is the creative power at work in the making of art.

530. “[W]e must [here] take sensus communis to mean the idea of a sense shared [by all of us], i.e., a power to judge that in reflecting takes account…of everyone else’s way of presenting….” This is a key passage on sensus communis. Read also the following: “[W]e compare our judgment not so much with the actual as rather with the merely possible judgments of others….”
530. “[Let us compare with this sensus communis] the common human understanding, even though the latter is not being included here….” Then Kant makes the fundamental claims of the Enlightenment: “(1) to think for oneself; (2) to think from the standpoint of everyone else; and (3) to think always consistently.” The main thing is to be liberated from superstition. Being human, by definition, involves being able to think beyond the senses. Nietzsche says that consistency is admirable, but false. (One might profitably relate Nietzsche to Kant, Schiller, and Freud on the task of civilization.)

531. But Kant elevates the term sensus communis by saying that taste is more properly called a sensus communis than is common human understanding. He writes further that “We could even define taste as the ability to judge something that makes our feeling in a given presentation universally communicable without mediation by a concept.” The judgment of beauty doesn’t require a college degree—all it requires is that our basic capacities aren’t impaired; it demonstrates the mind’s freedom and nature’s accordance with our primary capacities: the free play of the imagination with the understanding. The sublime has more to do with reason and, to an extent, culture. Yet, the sublime tends to make us arrogant and rationalistic. It withdraws us from nature rather than making us feel at home in its proximity and harmony for us. We are not “aliens” on earth, as the medieval Church says. Yes, the romantics will like Kant—he keeps us rather close to nature.

531. “Art is distinguished from nature as doing…is from acting or operating in general….” Regarding “On Art in General,” we might refer to Coleridge’s statement that the secondary imagination “coexists with the conscious will.”

532. Art is a product of deliberation—the artist intends to make art. But that isn’t the same thing as saying precisely what the characteristics of the finished work will be. Art is a kind of play, so the viewer is able to deal with it as “beautiful” much as with a flower in nature. There is no need to refer it to a definite idea or preconceived conception. The artist needs rules to provide “body” for spirit. The material is the medium for spirit.

532. “Art is likewise distinguished from craft.” Art is not the same as labor. But Kant also says that “there is yet a need for something in the order of a constraint….” Art requires constraints, just as Wordsworth says poetry, while it mustn’t be reduced to meter, requires meter and other constraints.

533-34. “[G]enius is the exemplary originality of a subject’s natural endowment in the free use of his cognitive powers.” Genius consists in being highly endowed with the free use of mental powers—especially imagination. If I am sculpting a bird, for instance, a free imagination may play with or develop the concept, tease out its possibilities.

Moreover, spirit is transmissible; the artist can express the “mental state” involved in the creative act. That is, the artist can embody the harmony of creation or passion in an image or an idea. Kant is not interested in the claim that art is imitation. He’s close to the Coleridgean remark that genius provides its own intrinsic rules.

534. On imitation—artists shouldn’t strive to imitate genius’ example; the point is to follow genius by way of emulation. Some concluding questions about the difference between art and natural objects: the form of a painting can be beautiful, as can the form of a flower. But what if the painting is an imitation or representation of an object? What if it is a portrait of which, as Aristotle would say, we know the original? Or even if it is only claimed to be a portrait of Lady So-and-So, 1784? Wouldn’t this amount to accessory beauty—adhaerens—something that we would refer to an original? Can a portrait or an image of a flower be matter for a pure judgment of taste?

See the Werner Pluhar edition of Critique of Judgment, page 173, paragraph 45. The fine arts, as opposed to the mechanical arts, seem like nature. We do not think about the artist’s intention to copy something—a face, a rule, etc. As for genius, Kant says, it gives the rule to art. Genius is natural endowment, and it operates like nature. We suspend our consideration of the artist’s intent. Finally, Kant does not capture the entire range of possible values in an encounter with art. He emphasizes the one that allows him to demonstrate our freedom from determination by nature. Notice the contrast here with Aristotle, who pays a great deal of attention to the emotional side of our response to art.

New note for 2005 session: the first page of our selection is a summary of Kant’s aesthetics, so it’s a good passage to analyze in straightforward language. At bottom, Kant is positing an experience that is universally communicable and (at least potentially) valid for all. As individuals, we get a pleasurable, even “easy,” sense of our own mind’s power, and we also might derive from this experience at least the possibility of a universal human community rooted in pleasure—rooted, that is, not just in cold reason or logic, but in feeling. Kant’s notion of humanity is itself based on his faith in the power of enlightenment—we all have a tremendous amount of potential, so we can develop ourselves into fuller human beings and develop communities in which everyone, both together and individually, takes full responsibility for his or her actions. It is well to investigate the mind’s logical and intellectual powers (Critique of Pure Reason), and well also to investigate what is meant by duty (Critique of Practical Reason). But a vital part of Kant’s philosophy is his concern for aesthetics, for the experience of beauty. This experience is, in his view, liberating—we sense our powers in a way that doesn’t leave us enslaved to nature (the world of objects), or cast us as mere thinking machines, or as a set of imperious duties and responsibilities always to be carried out. In a way—and in spite of the difficult vocabulary in Critique of Judgment, Kant is playing Philip Sidney’s “right popular philosopher” when he writes about aesthetic judgment: he is embracing the realm of pleasure and feeling, rather than bracketing it out in favor of absolute philosophical coherence.

Edition:The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York : Norton, 2001. ISBN 0393974294.

Week 07, Johnson, Hume

2004-10-04T14:17:00.000-07:00

David Hume Notes

David Hume says we must ground ourselves in common experience. The point is not to prove things by intellection but rather to live well and get along with others.

488. “No sentiment represents what is really in the object. It only marks a certain conformity or relation between the object and the organs or faculties of the mind....” One possibility is the commonsensical notion that there is no point in criticizing taste. There cannot be any universal standard of beauty. Another possibility is that the realm of taste is about social consensus, not abstract truth or logic. Rather, it is in the realm of shared experience: “but though this axiom, by passing into a proverb, seems to have attained the sanction of common sense; there is certainly a species of common sense which opposes it....”

489. “But though poetry can never submit to exact truth, it must be confined by rules of art, discovered to the author either by genius or observation.” There are general rules we can derive from common sentiments over time. But individuals will sometimes failed to arrive at this level due to various factors. Refinement and delicacy are required of cultures and individuals. Homer will always appeal to us, although some periods may fail to appreciate him.

490-491. “In each creature, there is a sound and a defective state....” The faculty of taste: the sound or competent judge is necessary. This is Hume’s way of inscribing the authority principle he seemed to have abandoned. Yes, taste is a matter of experience, and so it is at base natural. However, only “sound” nature’s exhibit good taste. The best judge will possess delicacy of taste, and will have developed or grown into the full use of what nature has provided. The aim is to keep things distinct, not to lump them together. The example Hume provides is from Don Quixote -- Sancho’s relatives each taste a cask of wine; one tastes iron and another tastes leather. Both are correct because of what lies at the bottom of the cask -- a key with a leather string.

492. “Nothing tends further to increase and improve this talent, than practice in a particular art, and the frequent survey or contemplation of a particular species of beauty.” Here we see the neoclassical idea of “nature methodized” again. Practice and experience perfect the organ of taste. The artist and the perceiver must practice. We come to desire and like what others desire and like.

493. “By comparison alone we fix the epithets of praise or blame....” Hume makes a claim of objectivity here -- when we hear that word, somehow we want to run quickly. Still, it is a fine ideal. Comparative culture gets its start here -- we must compare various cultures without being prejudiced. Still, Hume puts down what he evidently considers the crudeness of Indian taste.

494. “Reason, if not an essential part of taste, is at least requisite to the operations of this latter faculty.” Reason is part of taste -- we must compare parts to the whole, find out the purpose of a given work, and so forth. If consensus is to mean anything, reason and discernment must guide needed sentiment. The principles of taste are universal, but not “just anyone” is fit to reach them or talk about them. Education and leadership (not necessarily connected to absolutism) are central to Enlightenment thinkers.

595. “But in reality the difficulty of finding... the standard of taste, is not so great as it is represented.... theories of abstract philosophy, systems of profound theology, have prevailed during one age: in a successive period, these have been universally exploded....” Sentiment is most meaningfully universal -- philosophies and religions come and go, but the passions remain the same.

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 1st edition. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393974294.

Week 06, du Belley, Corneille, Pope

2004-09-27T14:16:00.000-07:00

Alexander Pope Notes

Nature: nature is structured like mind, operates in a rational and stable way. The ancients based their works upon Nature, so studying Homer is like going “back to nature.” They’re the same, in fact. So the “rules” are actually based on nature -- that’s why we should follow them, and why we should value the ancients. Not to hold them in high regard merely shows that we have gone astray from what Dr. Johnson will call “just representations of general nature.”

Imitation: Notice the predominance in C18 of certain mimetic figures: mirror, speech as dress, ornament. What is to be dressed and finely decked out is “nature,” human nature, or the social and political hierarchy. These are already solid and “there”; the point is to make them memorable and attractive. In this way, poetry is something like elegant rhetoric, whose point is to reaffirm our sense that our ways and understandings are right. “Whatever is, is right.” You say you want a revolution? Well, we’d all like to change your head….

The point is that neoclassical critics generally support the principle of hierarchy underlying the social order -- so they can conceive of a genial, erudite critic who does justice to the work itself and helps a somewhat broader “public” (gentlemen, not Dickensian kitchen scullions and hookers) understand the work’s complexities to as great an extent as possible. So such a critic serves the text and the public.

Modern formulations betray an anxiety that culture is either a top-down ideological control mechanism or an exercise in commercial vulgarianism: bread and circuses, the nightly news as entertainment, etc.

Of contemporary interest:

Relationship between author/work/public and criticism:

Calls for consideration of the cultural value of art: does it reflect already held value system and merely “dress” or adorn it? Or is art a shaping force, a creator of culture, rather than a passive storehouse of normative ideas and aesthetic images?

We can see art as establishing and maintaining consensus, or as tearing it down in favor of something new. Seems reasonable to say that it has done all these things -- interesting to watch how critics and artists have reacted to them (example: romanticism).

Some critics see themselves as guardians of culture -- highbrow watchdogs, one might say, others see themselves as unmasking texts’ claims to normative status, others claim they’re more or less operating in a politics-free zone where they are able simply to “see the object as in itself it really is.”

During C19, the notion of a “public” and even of several levels of public, from the low to the high, really becomes an issue. We see the rise and fall of the “man of letters” and the advent of what George Gissing describes in New Grub Street as hack journalists and critics churning out semi-cultured pablum for a quarter-educated public. Pope isn’t really facing this kind of crass commercialization or embourgeoisification of art to the lowest common denominator. But you can see in his admonitions to critics to “know their limits” a flicker of anxiety that criticism may be starting to pander to a paying public. Modern artists have had to try and turn this stricture into a positive thing, but it isn’t easy to do, and to varying degrees it may mean ceding ground on the claims surrounding art’s power to change people and even societies.

a) Is literary author superior?

b) Is critic’s task to explain the text, add to it? (Arnold/Wilde)

c) To what extent should authors be familiar with criticism?

d) Today, “theory” asserts something like an independent right to be what it is, and not simply be a handmaid to art. This claim reject the notion that art innocently exists as an autonomous realm or that it straightforwardly adorns a culture’s values.

e) Rejecting the responsibility to make texts accessible to a broad public by explaining them amounts to an atrophying of the critical function, or at least a narrowing of it to wholly academic circles. This is not necessarily to be condemned since there is much of value that “the public” simply can’t appreciate and yet shouldn’t hound out of existence. But if that’s all there is to it, it’s easy to see that the arts are too divorced from just plain folks to have much of a social impact. They look like the products of marginalized, specialized labor -- not something vital that everyone has some interest in.

Post-It Notes

441. “Too many critics” would be troubling. Pope values just criticism for the same reason Horace does -- it can notice the best work and make it available for public appreciation and emulation by modern authors. But criticism quickly becomes an industry, almost detached from its object. Consider modern formalism as a looming, institutionalized propagator of artistic standards. Bad critics pander to a vulgar public -- this would be a good place to mention Pope’s background as a Catholic and as someone who had to earn his living as a writer.

442. “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan….” Here at lines 46-49 is the lesson adapted for critics. You can’t just spin out “rules” from your own head. The great author of classical times isn’t to be condemned because he does something you don’t understand. Homer and Virgil constitute an external, transhistorical, universal set of standards to which you must conform your sensibilities: taste is intricately tied to education. This is an anti-mass way of understanding art -- we shouldn’t go up to the work with our hands in our pockets and expect it to please us at first sight or first read.

“Unerring Nature….” Nature is Pope’s sun, source, and end. Mind and nature work analogously; the world follows Reason -- it is an intelligential order. Homer follows human nature, which accords with natural process. See page 443, where Pope writes that the rules are themselves rooted in nature. So conventions are natural to humanity, not mere extrinsic ornaments. The artist and critic help us appreciate the intelligibility of the natural order, the compatibility of mind and nature.

443. “those rules of old, discovered, not devised….” Neoclassical authors such as Pope are careful to insist on selection from nature -- nature must be “methodized.” They do not say authors should copy nature in the lowest sense. This carefulness is partly due to the moral that is pragmatic, demand of neoclassical criticism: art should teach by delighting. But it is also an Aristotelian demand to derive the universal significance from the particular instance.

446. “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” Pope is against mediocrity for the same reason as Horace: art should reflect our society and values to us elegantly; that is the meaning of decorum. Otherwise, we end up with Plato’s demagogues and critics and artists pandering to the lowest common denominator. In that case, art would not exert any shaping power, and we would be on a degenerative arc with respect to the ancients. At the bottom of the page, Pope insists we must know the whole work, not just the parts.

447. “True wit is nature to advantage dressed.” True wit does not get itself a raised podium or become its own order of things. The 18th century authors distrust words and wittiness because they tend to get in the way of truth, of things as they are, and so forth. Witty language “dresses” nature to advantage. Just as fashion succeeds only when it knows the body well, so art must accord with human nature. Words “clothe” thought, which implies that thought itself refers to a stable order of things prior to language. The emphasis is on coherence, on building and maintaining consensus. True wit is like nature in that both give us back a proper image of our mind.

448. “But true expression, like the unchanging sun….” Pope makes the same point about language here -- it should clarify things and “gild them.” But it should not change the object. True felicity lies in apprehending the order of things, and in expressing that order attractively. We will see Matthew Arnold refer nostalgically to what he calls “the object as in itself it really is.” He thereby reasserts human values and facts, not scientific objectivity as something opposed to stable human values.

450. “Some foreign writers, some our own despise;/the ancients only, or the moderns prize….” Pope does not simply say the ancient authors are better: the category true-false does not reduce simply to old-new.

454. On achieving consensus in public taste: the term “the public” implies a degree of democracy, at least in the sense understood by a market society. Since the function of the critic is to be positive and to form public taste and morals, the critic must behave in a civil manner. Notice that Pope says pride is the main fault of intellectuals, at lines 631-32. Recall how Sir Philip Sidney describes the way to move people towards virtuous action. That is a typical 18th-century notion -- literature is better than philosophy. If the critic is an authority, he is a benevolent one, not a tyrant, not destructive because you cannot achieve consensus that way.

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 1st edition. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393974294.

Week 05, Augustine et al., Sidney

2004-09-20T14:14:00.000-07:00

Sir Philip Sidney Notes

Intro: S is fighting Gosson’s “School of Abuse,” which this comic playwright had ironically dedicated to him. Gosson makes the usual arguments that drama is licentious, and says that theaters incubate and cover all sorts of immorality on the audience’s part.

Behind S’s argument are Christian Psychology and Humanist educational doctrine. Let’s discuss psychology in looking over the text, but here’s a brief account of humanist education: Sidney borrows from Horace’s dictum that poetry should teach and delight. Similarly, Sidney says that poetry teaches us by pleasing us. What, then, does a Renaissance humanist mean by education? The term means “full development of all one’s faculties, with human perfection as the goal.”

The point is not simply to memorize content; it is to develop a person’s potential. E-ducere means “a leading forth,” and the aim is a well-rounded and virtuous individual. Keep in mind that virtus connotes power, force, strength (cf. virtú). Education should develop a person’s moral and intellectual powers so that he can act in the world. As Sydney puts it, “well doing” is the goal of all learning. We learn for the sake of doing. This practical goal contrasts with the heavier touch of scholastic erudition.

Classical and Medieval Liberal Arts: Trivium = grammar, rhetoric, logic; Quadrivium = arithmetic (#), geometry (# in space), music (# in time), astronomy (# in space and time). In scholasticism, which combines philosophy/ theology, goal is scientia, wisdom, or science in liberal sense. (Opposing this = practical learning that we get from servile arts.)

Renaissance humanists are impatient with their church-bound medieval counterparts; their own encounter with the ancients, combined with changes in economics, environment, and the emergence of national cultures and languages, makes them prefer the Roman emphasis on the language arts as vital to civic culture. Therefore, poetry, despite many arguments about its relation to rhetoric or the art of persuasion, is an important branch of the language arts. Cicero himself had said poetry should be part of a young person’s studies.

Exordium: Pugliano praises his own horse; Sidney backs Pegasus, Muse of Poetry. S pretends he’s just illustrating point that everybody thinks his own job’s best. This is typical of S’s “sprezzatura” style: easy-seeming grace, even carelessness. That’s best way to fight boorish Gosson. Sidney is not trying to be overly erudite -- his sprezzatura-style argument reflects the passionate workings of the poetry and drama that he is defending against Puritan moralists who see it as dangerous and connect it with the behavior of a licentious audience.

330-31/936. S follows Aristotle on imitation, with nature as the source. But while other disciplines are limited by their subject matter and must work with what already is, for better or for worse, the poet’s intellect escapes such narrow ties. The poet conjures for us our Golden-World beginnings; he is the “Wizard of Ought.”

This emphasis on the poet’s creative power is pre-romantic: S is not saying that the poet’s mind takes on godlike powers to create an independent reality. Rather, he’s using faculty psychology to argue that the poet’s wit, has a freer range than other people’s, and so the poet can go beyond imitating nature. And by “wit” he refers mainly to the imagination, fantasy, and memory. Those are three of the inner wits, and their function is to process and recall sensory data. (Other two are judgment and sensus communis.) This is a much more mechanical and passive idea about imagination than we will find in romantic poetics, where the mind is more original and creative than combinatory and receptive.

331/937. S also follows Aristotle in saying that poetry gives access to universal patterns: the poet makes not a particular Cyrus but a universal Cyrus, a “speaking picture” of a virtuous king. The poet grasps the principle by which nature made the original Cyrus, so he can complete Nature’s work by recognizing the eternal Form immanent in that material Cyrus, giving us a pattern of moral conduct to imitate. S says that our faculties encompass nature’s workings, and the poet’s work therefore honors God the first “maker” of the original Cyrus.

331/937. Erected Wit/Infected Will. Here is the faculty psychology behind S’s defense. The point is simple: when humankind fell, the will, appetite, and reason went out of sync, so that we are constantly being pulled away from virtuous conduct due to our lowest appetites. In order for virtuous behavior to reign, our will must be properly aligned with God’s plan for us. Since unfortunately we are usually “misaligned” in these latter days, we need pleasing patterns to realign our will so that it can let reason work as it should, and action happen as it ought.

331-32/938-39. The three kinds of poet: David, philosophical poets such as Lucretius, and poets who “imitate” only “what may be and should be.” These latter are the ones we need today. S says that what constitutes a poet is moral purpose -- the poet imitates in order to deliver universal moral lessons. Verse form helps us remember poetry, enhancing its effect. S begins making distinctions between the poet the philosopher and historian by reminding us of this moral purpose: “the final end is to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of.” And he further describes the body as a dungeon imprisoning the mind. In sum, a medium that appeals to the senses leads us beyond the senses; this is in accordance with what we said about Augustine and Aquinas.

334-40/940-43. Only the poet teaches in a sufficiently concrete and delightful manner; historians remain tied to things as they really happen in an unjust world, imitating a corrupt world’s ways may further corrupt us. Philosophers teach only in abstractly, and cannot move us to virtuous action. Poetry moves us to learn, and to behave well, we will put our learning to good use. Poetry mediates between abstraction and materiality, sense and understanding; it is medicine for the fallen, taking us back to first principles and possibilities, causal patterns.

348-49. The charges laid at poetry’s door: 1) there are better uses of time; 2) poets lie; 3) poetry is morally corruptive; 4) Plato banished poets. As for 2, the poet “nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.” Besides, people don’t take what they see on a stage or read in a fable as literally true. We know how to keep our distance from make-believe and yet take it seriously enough to profit by it morally, while truth-narratives like history may mislead us. S may recognize here what Aristotle doesn’t in Poetics: history requires invention and “emplotment.” Poetry, at least, doesn’t make false promises or bogus systems of abstraction. It mediates between sense and spirit for fallen humanity.

350-51. On 3, any instrument can be dangerous if misused -- if it couldn’t hurt someone, it wouldn’t be worth much. So “man’s wit abuseth poetry.”

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 1st edition. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393974294.

Week 04, Horace, Plotinus

2004-09-13T14:12:00.000-07:00

Plotinus Notes

Here is Plotinus’ scheme: The One connects to the intellect (thought thinking itself, creative, thinks forms or substances), which connects to the soul (mediates between the sensible and the intelligible).

174-75. “It concerns us, then, to try to see and say… how the Beauty of the divine Intellect and of the Intellectual Cosmos may be revealed to contemplation.” How can we perceive supersensible beauty? We can perceive it in material art -- in sculpture for example, not in the stone but in the mind of the artist first. More specifically, in his participation in his art. The artist, like Plato’s bed maker, has some sense of what he is copying. Plotinus takes this idea of participation much farther than Plato did, and makes the artist a craftsman and art in itself a form. Art is not simply a debased copy of a copy. What we call material beauty is derivative, to be sure, but it is not thereby worthless.

“Still the arts are not to be slighted on the ground that they create by imitation of natural objects….” Artistic creation is not mere imitation but rather involves understanding of reason-principles.

“Whence shone the beauty of Helen…?” The natural beauty of Helen resembles the beauty of art, and vice versa. The Idea communicates something of itself to “Helen.”

176. “Thus there is in the Nature-Principle itself An Ideal archetype of the beauty that is found in material forms….” Plotinus implies that contemplating works of art in light of the idea that there is a platonic form, Art, leads to an appreciation of Beauty. Contemplating art provides discipline in thinking about the structure of reality. The soul precedes the nature-principle, and the beauty-archetype remains always in reserve as a ground. The lower archetype provides a point of entry to the higher. I think Plotinus, with this insistence on such a primal ground, preserves the workings and dignity of the senses, but the emphasis is on the fact that something more important is going on when we behold the beauty of material works of art, human beauty, or beautiful things in nature. We will see that the notion of “emanation” is an attempt to exalt platonic intelligibility but also to diminish the expense of maintaining this higher realm to the senses and materiality. There is in Plotinus a touch of intuition.

177. “To ‘live at ease’ is there; and to these divine beings verity is mother and nurse….” The gods are all in all: pure being, translucence, intersubjectivity. They are similar to Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita. But here Absoluteness is more of a fixed ground. Buddhism would say that divine intersubjectivity is available to everyone, at least potentially. But in Plotinus and the Christian tradition, the relative dignity of our lesser realm comes at the expense of setting up a permanent distance from and inferiority to the absolute. Buddhism approaches this problem through its belief in the relativity of all moments and all states. In psychological terms, for Plotinus ecstasy entails pathos, as in romantic dualism -- “our sincerest laughter with some pain is fraught.”

178. “All that comes to be, work of nature or of craft, some wisdom has made….” Beauty may be a better way to apprehend the intelligible realm. Plotinus says that our way of treating knowledge as theorems and aggregations of propositions, as a method, doesn’t give us any intuitive access to Being, to the One.

179. “Consider the universe: we are agreed that its existence and its nature come to it from beyond itself….” The universe was not planned out, instrumentalist-style. So by implication a work of beauty does not send us off contemplating the cleverness of the author or the sculptor. The natural object or artwork is the thing to contemplate.

180-81. “Since there is a source, all the created must spring from it and in accordance with it; and we are rightly told not to go seeking the causes impelling a source to produce….” There is a source beyond which we must not seek -- the world is good because of what made it. At the top of this page Plotinus says we admire a representation because of the original, the form or archetype that itself emanates from the One and the intellect. In the middle of the page, the word sphere means vision of unity, the intelligible world as seen without sensory perception.

182-83. “To those that do not see entire, the immediate impression is alone taken into account….” Plotinus refers to the ecstatic union of the perceiver with the One. In the presence of beauty, we can achieve this ecstasy. Beauty is an entrance-point to transcendence, to an appreciation of intelligibility and trans -- subjective truth. The truth is privileged, but again, the lower multifarious realm can give us some access to it. Beauty reminds us of its source in Substantial Form up to intellect, and of the permanent existence of the One.

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 1st edition. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393974294.

Week 02, Plato, Aristotle

2004-08-30T14:10:00.000-07:00

Notes on Plato.

The Republic, Book 2.

49. “The most important stage of any enterprise is the beginning….” Education is vital because young minds must be molded properly—that sounds much like our concept that early learning is the most important kind. Plato says that children’s minds are quite impressionable—the stories we tell them make an impression, most likely a permanent one, too. We will choose apt future guardians or phulakes—agile-minded, teachable children in whose souls we can leave a good imprint that will generate predictable results and a stable society. Everyone will lead an orderly life, do one appropriate job well, and love the Good and Reason as far as possible given his or her capacities as nurtured by sound education. Here we find Plato’s pragmatic emphasis—art can shape morals and maintain social control.

The Greeks generally considered poetry and music the primary instruments of paideia, or education. (See Werner Jaeger’s multivolume Paideia.) Plato doesn’t try to do away with poetry as a means of education since everyone in Greece treated Homer and other poets the way modern Christians treat the Bible—something to be relied on for an apt line or a moral precept, appreciated for its beauties, and so forth. This was the tradition. Still, Plato insists upon reforming poetry as a vehicle of education so that its effects may be controlled more effectively. After all, the State will be in charge of education; it won’t be simply a matter of children imbibing stories about Chronos trying to eat his children or Zeus dallying with nymphs. What we want is to shape minds for a lean, if not mean, Utopian State (one like Sparta)—not the corrupt and luxurious polity that Plato dislikes so much.

50. “Even if these stories are true, they ought not to be told so casually to young people and people who lack discrimination; it’s better to keep silent….” Only philosophers may suppress the truth or even lie because they do it for the people’s good. Philosophers-as-state-planners must restrict scurrilous tales about the gods to the ears of the very few who can avoid being corrupted by them. This is censorship, of course—but Plato’s goal is not freedom for modern bourgeois individuals; it is a sound moral collectivity.

51-55. On page 53, Socrates says “any spoken words or composed works will have to conform to the principle that God is not responsible for everything, but only for good.” The divine realm must be purged of obscene portraits of the gods and made to serve as the source of moral and intellectual integrity. This would be necessary even if the gods actually were just as Homer describes them. I would say that the old religion helped the Greeks to endure in a world that sometimes seemed unjust, but Plato rationalizes religion and expects it to adhere to his notions of ultimate truth. For Plato’s purposes, the Divine Realm must be purged of its rascally particularities—there’s just one Divine (though there may be many gods), and from it flows only good. This Divine Realm or “God” will serve as a principle of moral intelligibility and, at the highest level of Plato’s philosophy, will be closely associated with Reason and the Good. If we were to need a fictional affirmation of this realm’s existence, so be it—the wise must draw the future guardians and auxiliaries onwards to appreciate the Good.

Of course, the issue of making art triumph over the Real and Reason and common human sentiment could be raised at this point: “isn’t that what the Nazis did?” would go the argument. They turned politics into aesthetics—the state was considered a work of art (to borrow a phrase from Jacob Burckhardt), so a fiery defeat in battle might be glossed as The Twilight of the Gods straight out of Wagner, the murder of innocent millions translated into the “purification” of a mythic Herrnrace, and so forth.

An aside—while the old mythology of the Greeks helped people endure a harsh cosmos (as Homer’s Apollo says near the beginning of The Iliad 24, “an enduring heart have the fates given unto men”; τλητὸν γὰρ Μοῖραι θυμὸν θέσαν ἀνθρώποισιν), Plato would have it serve as a principle of moral and ontological clarity: a way of claiming that there is an eternal realm of Beauty and Goodness beyond this mess we find ourselves in. The ancient myths dealt with what Christian theology calls the “problem of evil” by not trying to deal with it: the gods did what they wanted to, and were beyond our standards of justice or fairness. But if you claim your god has the status of Jehovah in the Hebrew scriptures, you must directly confront the problem of who is responsible for evil. Plato shares that problem with Christianity and several other religions.

Well, this all leads to a general point for the course: a major use of art has long been identified as the shaping of an audience’s morals, the molding of individuals from their youth up into a unified collectivity that has come to agree about matters of right and wrong. Art can, in this view, partly generate and strongly reinforce moral consensus.

Alternately, some moderns would claim that art should reinforce ethical norms already in existence: we might refer to arguments about, say, Robert Mapplethorpe’s bizarre visual art being shown in galleries receiving money from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Some middle-class people object to tax-funded radicalism. They probably do not see art as a vehicle for challenging values upon which they see little or no need to reflect, and it offends them if you say that art should “afflict the comfortable” or that it should “disturb and disintegrate” (Wilde’s phrase) views and practices they hold dear. Even though I am not exactly a political animal in the classroom, I have sometimes seen this attitude in college students in direct response to assigned material: “I don’t like Dostoyevsky or Freud or Marx; they say things I don’t understand and that sound disagreeable.” My question to them would be, “is education for finding out about new things and ideas, or for getting our prior belief systems validated by people with fancy degrees?” Of course, this “Culture Wars” struggle has been blunted of late, at least with regard to the arts—I recently saw Dana Gioia, a poet and the head of the National Endowment for the Arts, talking about how the most alarming matter for America’s cultural health is that around half of the public doesn’t read literature at all. One might as well add in Wildean fashion that large numbers of the rest of them read it rather badly….The point is, this is baseline stuff—there’s no point talking about art being dangerous if nobody is capable of engaging with it. The Culture Wars focus has shifted to the struggle over the War on Terror, the long-continued Iraq venture, and so forth.

Later “bourgeois” versions of this usefulness-claim would have us all formed into one big consensus-happy public sphere, where right moral sentiment and the normative ways of doing everything prevail. Plato is didactic in the way he handles the value of art as education: it should form us into what we ought to be as members of a collective society, and help us find our proper place to serve others in the community. For him, art isn’t a vehicle for self-development, expression, or free individuality in the modern sense.

The Republic, Book 3.

56-57. “We will implore Homer and the rest of the poets not to get cross if we strike these and all similar lines from their works.” Emotionally effective poetry is especially harmful and contagious. The guardians might think tears and fears are fine, while what we require from them is firm adherence to reason, just as we need from the auxiliaries or soldiers blood, sweat, and obedience. After all, John Wayne isn’t supposed to play Macbeth, is he? (The old Greeks of Homer’s day would find restraining tears downright un-Greek. Homer’s heroes are often wailing about something or other.) Plato might agree with Sir Philip Sidney that art should give us “speaking pictures” of virtuous men and women, so that we will want to think and act like them. Plato insists on what has been called the “contagion theory of art”: when we see something, we will want to do it, too. Look at the way he describes the soul as tripartite in Phaedrus 245ff: the soul’s pilot is reason, and it must control the two horses or steeds that pull it towards an object. Modesty and temperance must prevail if there is to be no wreck. This metaphor construes human beings as powerfully moved by desires of various sorts—and if the lower or sensual desires prevail, we shall be led to immodesty and ruin. Things we see and hear have a strong effect upon us, for better or for worse.

58-59. “Clearly lying should be entrusted to doctors, and laymen should have nothing to do with it.” Lies are dangerous when uttered by the wrong people, by subordinates. Only those whose “craft” is philosophy—who know the good end and the proper way to achieve it while working with the given material—can be allowed to lie. At this point—one shouldn’t take this too far—truth begins to sound like a ruse of statecraft. Order is the first necessity, not truth. Plato isn’t so “un-Greek” as to be less than frank on this point. But ultimately, when he comes around to ontological arguments in Book 10, he returns to the issue of poetry’s truth status, and finds it lacking.

59. Socrates asks, “and aren’t the most important aspects of self-discipline, at least for the general rank and file, obedience to those in authority and establishing one’s authority over the pleasures of drink, sex, and food?” Reason and temperance outrank sensual pleasure and fiction-making. Food, sex, poetry: all are dangerous if handled badly.

61-62: This section resembles The Symposium in its advocacy of education as a leading-out of youth from the senses towards the adult’s fuller appreciation of the beauty of reason and goodness. For political purposes, Plato recognizes that humans are passionate creatures, that they have appetites and bodies as well as the capacity to reason their way to an apprehension of truth. That practical concern leads him not to dismiss poetry from consideration as he builds his word-State, but rather to reform its role in traditional paideia. He says that we must smooth the way from childhood to rational adulthood and citizenship, keeping away from children anything that might impede their progress towards love of the good and right. So we need to attune young minds to harmony in language, music, dance, everything. True craftsmen must surround children with a virtual Sesame Street environment of beautiful objects and harmonious sounds and actions, putting them in a region of health and beauty so complete that when they become adults, they will greet the beauty of reason as an old friend, without, perhaps, even realizing how it came to be so familiar. We move almost imperceptibly from Big Bird to Big Brother: the Good. Plato is a spiritual reformer in education, as Werner Jaeger might say. So the goal in educating children is to smooth their progress from the material to the nonmaterial kind of good, from belief towards knowledge, from the unexamined life towards the examined life.

Cultural education is vital to Plato. As Marcus Aurelius will say in his Meditations, we should come not even to “think in inmost thought” what would offend our fellows. The goal here is temperance and self-restraint in all things. It’s interesting, however, that for all his reputation as a stern banisher of poetry on ontological grounds, Plato seems rather passionate about Reason. Or at least he sees that in practical or pedagogical terms, our early passionate, unreasoning attachment to beauty and harmony is vital to our subsequent development into mature citizens. Ion isn’t a proper craftsmen, but someone working under a philosopher-king could generate quite an effect in the Republic’s children. The teacher must accept our initial dependence on the senses, on ordinary pleasures, and use it as an instrument for our moral and philosophical advancement. It seems we must transcend the senses by first being educated with their aid. Pleasure in material objects will be replaced by pleasure in non-material goodness. Education is vital, and must be reformed: Plato sees “human nature” in a realistic way, but isn’t satisfied with us au naturel. He’s no individualist, but he shows the humanist’s dissatisfaction with what is founded merely upon nature or even “human nature” as is. We seem to be perfectible. Plato’s doctrine, at least in Book 3, is an early version of what Schiller will later call “the Aesthetic Education of Man.” Education includes art, and so art is vital to the task of civilization. But of course Plato will not add “individualism” or “freedom of the individual” or “freedom and variety of situations” to his list of necessaries, as von Humboldt or Schiller and his fellow romantic philosophers would. Still, art is a formative and shaping power, and is integral to being “civilized.” Even in Homer, there is a negotiation between the wild and the civilized.

The Republic, Book 7.

This book is partly about the teacher’s command of truth, of the Forms as opposed to the world of sham and appearance. Education involves an acclimation to “beholding” the Intelligible realm. The Allegory of the Cave’s simple point is that this world of sensible things is a prison. The uneducated adults are in chains, looking only straight ahead. These adults, the ordinary citizens of a democratic commonwealth like Athens (in whom Plato puts little trust), become hostile and threaten to murder the returned Promethean bringer of light. The parallel to Socrates is obvious—he had been executed in 399 BCE, a quarter-century before Plato wrote The Republic.

So Plato offers us an allegory about the power of philosophy and the risks that truth runs when it makes itself available to the profoundly ignorant. He suggests that the world runs on illusions and that it’s no easy matter to disabuse people of their illusions, built as they are upon sensory experience and a deep need for certainty. Plato’s problem with art is that it doesn’t even try to disabuse people of their illusions; only philosophy and “cultural education” crafted by philosophers can disabuse us without bringing the house down on our heads.

One could say that Plato’s sentiment here is genuinely Greek—we must be able to bear the weight of vision, of knowledge. Homer says, after all, that the fates have given us enduring hearts. Still, if you strip away people’s illusions too quickly and you blind them with truth, they will hate you. Our prisoners have built a whole system of reward and punishment, an integral society, out of their own perceptual and intellectual errors. See Nietzsche’s “Truth and Falsity” essay on this power of abstraction-making to stabilize the world and make it seem livable. See page 67: if our truth-seer is so uninterested in coming back to the Cave, doesn’t his reluctance undermine Plato’s attempt to build an ideal Republic? In other words, doesn’t The Republic end on a note of alienation between philosophy and life—one that art has taken on as a mantle, as in Symbolism and romanticism at its most “satanic”?

The Republic, Book 10.

In Book 10, Plato looks at poetry more sternly from an ontological standpoint, so he sounds more dismissive of it here—it turns out that poetry isn’t true craft like the craftsmanship in the lean, healthy state; instead, it merely copies copies, generating something like the effects of the Allegory of the Cave’s “shadows on the wall.” It only convinces people that their illusions are truth and have the gods’ sanction.

67. Now all imitative poetry must go; this is a shock since it was formerly alright to present carefully crafted images of virtue.

68-70. Plato is in full onto-throttle here: there is the Idea of “Bed” (its form or pattern, design), the material object made by the joiner, and the bed represented by the painter, who merely imitates the joiner’s bed. So the painter makes a copy of a copy.

74-76. The painter or imitative poet satisfies the ignorant multitude, who want nothing but copies in any case. He’s a democratizer in the realm of pleasure. He confirms and even multiplies ordinary people’s confusions and contradictions in the sensory realm, where they are content to remain.

76-77. Poetry counteracts reason and public necessity. Notice the panopticon tendency in Plato: the self, as far as he is concerned, should remain a public construct. This public construct is rather like Freud’s “superego,” the power of parental authority and collective wisdom, or what passes for it.

77-78. Poetry appeals to the lowest element of our nature, Plato says. It appeals to the petulant side that gives reason so much trouble, and not to the “intelligent and calm” side. It stirs up the multitude, creating amongst them a bond in their lowest passions. Note that at 78 top, Plato directly links imitative poetry and demagogic ruffians’ control of politics.

78. Worst of all, poetry not only miseducates the young, it corrupts even the good.

79-80. Plato’s Socrates will admit only “hymns to the gods” and “eulogies of virtuous men”—supposedly non-representational poetry that is not made solely for the pleasure of hearers but that instead reinforces a productive moral.

Notes on Plato’s Phaedrus

Is writing a remedy or a poison? The Greek word pharmakos means both remedy and poison. Also, supplementarity comes into play—either this term indicates the supplying of a lack, or an addition to something already whole. Well, as Derrida says, it means both in philosophical writing, and any attempt to reduce this complexity generates all sorts of mischief, most particularly bogus certainty.

Socrates says that Thamus sees writing as sanctioning forgetting. That’s vital since for Plato learning is anamnesis, an unforgetting of what the timeless soul always knew, or has long known.

Speech, here, is closer to truth, to our own consciousness, which has the capacity to apprehend truth. Speech maintains its relationship to inner consciousness and intentionality, and can always refer back to these realms for validation. Speech is contrasted with the dangerous disseminative power of the written word, which is much more obviously a public code, a set of signs that function in the absence of the writer’s consciousness. A concrete example would be to write a word like “dog” or “umbrella” on the blackboard—how could the word be interpreted unless you don’t have to depend on direct access to the mind of the author? In the case of writing, it’s painfully obvious that meaning multiplies promiscuously with no firm standard of reduction to stability.

Plato says elsewhere that politicians always want to write. He connects writing with democracy: the promiscuous dissemination of power amongst the unworthy. Plato, we should remember, is considerably younger than Socrates, so he has really taken the lesson of Athens’ fall in the wake of the disastrous Peloponnesian Wars (431-04 BCE) with Sparta. A democratic-spirited people became too full of themselves, we might say, and their leaders (Pericles foremost) marched them off a cliff. Plato was an aristocrat by birth, it seems, and he simply didn’t trust the common folk to make intelligent decisions. In this sense, his view of human nature is probably much darker than that of Socrates.

On the issue of writing and speech, Derrida’s view is that the privileging of speech, with its supposed link to absolute truth, has been the trick of philosophy for millennia. In the service of unitary meaning and theology-grade stability, philosophical discourse effaces itself as writing, trying to come at us as pure speech conveying systemic truth. But the same thing is true of speech as is true of writing: it can only mean something if we do not rely on direct access to the speaker’s supposed intentions. Speech is a public code, too, subject to the same indeterminacy and unfinality as is writing. The opposition between speech and writing is false; they are both similarly diffuse, sliding, drifting, and cannot give us final meaning or ultimate truth. Rather, they work by potentially endless deferral and difference. That we believe we manipulate speech as a code does not do away with its similarity to writing. I can’t explain my intentions for every sentence I utter—that would in effect privatize my speech in a deferred manner; neither can my gestures take me outside this process of signification since gestures are themselves signs that must be interpreted.

Our view of speech posits a unitary “consciousness” that then links back to and validates speech as true (cf. Derrida on Husserl’s phenomenology). We speak, referring our words back to consciousness for validation or authentication. But consciousness itself is perhaps an effect of speech. Intentionality is an ex post facto construction. If this Nietzsche-like point is valid, perhaps we can test it simply by listening to our own internal dialogue: I don’t believe in intentionality, at least not in the most direct sense: ask “where do my words come from?” and you will be able to perceive that in your own inner dialogue, they don’t seem to come from anywhere or to be commanded in some a priori manner by consciousness. Again, consciousness may well be an effect, not a cause. (This may be an overstatement since research on certain kinds of brain damage, I believe, has sometimes called into question the primacy of speech in the formation of consciousness—I once saw a television segment on a fellow who had sustained an injury and had come to “think” in images rather than words, for example.)

The point is not to condemn “meaning” and “consciousness” as useless illusions, but rather to suggest that illusions are not without consequence even if they are necessary. It’s possible to build systems in philosophy or politics. And it’s dangerous either to leave them in place or to tear them down, especially since you must work with the components of what is in the process of being torn down.

So what has all this talk to do with literature and literary criticism? It offers us insight into certain kinds of literature and methods of interpretation. For instance, take romantic poetry, which tends to efface its status as written word in favor of lyric utterance. With the romantics, this isn’t just a polite convention as perhaps it is for, say, Philip Sidney or Thomas Wyatt. The romantic symbol or poetic word is supposed to work its magic upon our spirits, carrying alive into the heart the poet’s passions and expressive truths. The therapeutic power of poetry depends in part on their model of consciousness and speech. Words, as in Christian theology, are the bearers of spirit and culture, or at least they point us in that direction. They reinforce or even partly create our humanity in its deepest sense, and have a vital bond with the natural world. Imagination and symbol are beyond ordinary language.

A further point: anybody who claims privilege for a certain kind of consciousness—unified, a sanctuary for truth whether its ultimate source is inside the mind or external to it—must efface the operations of writing, or the link and the spell will be broken. Any act of criticism would separate itself into a unified consciousness or perspective, maintaining a certain distance from the object it creates in the process of positing itself. So it must reduce the operations of textuality, must disclaim participation in or contact with the process of signification that is the text. But surely the relationship is less straightforward than that. (An easy way of putting this, for initial reference, is that “criticism constitutes its preferred object.”) Criticism that ignores the effects of writing ends up repeating or otherwise affirming the ideology and illusions—the project—of the texts it studies. If you go to the text trying to reconstruct the project of the movement, the poem, the author, etc., you must know that you are part of that project, that you are involved in positing a “there” where there’s no fully prior “there.” Carry this insight about effects of the code farther back, and you see that the author, text, movement, did not have a lock on its own “intentions,” no matter what explicit declarations it makes. Intention is a unity-making post hoc construction.

Aristotle Notes

The traditional reading is that Aristotle makes tragedy safe for reason, or for rational philosophy. This makes sense because he is a culmination of the philosopher-science movement from Anaximander onwards; for these people, the point was to explain things on their own terms and not by means of a deus ex machina argument.

However, we could “go Greek” in our reading of Aristotle. Aristotle writes in the awareness of a shift from an all-encompassing “mythology for life” to a more practical commercial way of life. Art and life have become somewhat more distinct by his time. Therefore, when Aristotle goes back to tragedy, the stuff of mythology, though of course in Sophocles and Euripides that mythology has been highly reworked and reinterpreted, Aristotle is to some extent to doing homage to the ancient stories that have shaped Greek life and thought. He certainly places great value upon them. He treats the ancient pathology as a “usable pass,” as equipment for modern life, as Kenneth Burke might say. Aristotle is revaluing the old forms of thought and life, bringing them into the present day.

What is the intelligibility or clarification that we get from tragedy? Perhaps this clarification is surprisingly ambivalent about our standing or status here in the cosmos and with regard to our relationship with the gods. Aristotle never says “don’t worry, be happy.” He is not turning poetry into a useful thing in the vulgar sense. Neither does he argue that catharsis is the poet's direct goal.

Nonetheless, we still must respond to a question about clarification: if it has an emotional shade, perhaps Aristotle is trying to make an uneasy peace with the old terrors. The kind of cleansing or purification to which he refers must be repeated from time to time.

It may well be that the old gods and stories give us insight into the limitations of our understanding, our powers of reasons. If that is so, it would make Aristotle a recuperative figure, not a cheerful analytic scientist seeking only use value in poetry. Aristotle’s poetics could be an honest admission of his philosophy’s limitations, an admission that there is more to the human animal then rational philosophy can account for. Remember, Aristotle likes to study complicated things.

With a so we face a dilemma when we read Aristotle on poetry: we come to him laden with other people’s interpretations as well as with our own desire that everything should make sense. This may cause us to misunderstand the nature of the object Aristotle understands he is studying.

Conclusion: a “perverse” reading of Aristotle could at least lead us to see that his philosophical methods are processive, that they consist in a project of overcoming limitations by recognizing them. In this way, Aristotle begins to look like the system-builder that Friedrich Nietzsche admires; he sees that intuition and abstraction are both necessary, that we cannot entirely separate them without falsifying the validity of each.

Aristotle Post-It Notes

91. “Our topic is poetry in itself and its kinds….” Aristotle treats art scientifically, classifying it in terms of medium, objects, and manner. Art is a species of representation, and tragedy as a subspecies of art. Plato wasn’t interested in this sort of natural science method.

93. “Representation is natural to human beings from childhood.” Learning satisfies a primary “instinct” -- we learn by imitating when we are children. Since imitation is a valid way of seeking knowledge, and poetry is imitation, poetry yields knowledge. So much for Plato’s condemnation of poetry on ontological grounds. Since we delight in engaging with representations, Aristotle’s theory at least partly recuperates pleasure, too. Apparently, seeking pleasure is a universal characteristic of human nature. But Aristotle will have more to say about this pragmatic or audience-oriented issue. (Pity and fear lead to catharsis.) The Lascaux Caves suggest that Aristotle is correct about our instinctual need to imitate. Aristotle shows concern for the formal coherence of works of art: a representation need not produce pleasure on the basis of its accuracy. If I haven’t seen the thing or person represented in a painting, I can appreciate it as a presentation. Aristotle isn’t interested in narrow ideas about verisimilitude. See 114 -- if someone paints a female deer with horns out of ignorance, the viewer could still judge the painting good for its formal coherence -- “because of its accomplishment, colour, or some other such cause” -- rather than for its strict accuracy.

95-96. “Tragedy is a representation of a serious, complete action….” The deeper ontological or mimetic argument appears in Aristotle’s definition of tragedy as the imitation of a complete action. What is the plot “imitating” or representing? Not simply events. The events or incidents themselves are mythological -- you couldn’t imitate them in the strictest sense because they never happened. Rather, Aristotle implies that the dramatist arranges the particulars or incidents of his plot in accordance with probability and necessity so as to present to us a complete action. This “action” reveals something fundamental about the nature of things. Examples: the action of Oedipus the King is that of a man fleeing the truth about a prophecy, but the prophecy getting itself fulfilled in spite of the hero’s best efforts. Antigone’s action involves the clash of competing rights -- Creon’s political order and Antigone’s familial and religious order. In Dickens’ Great Expectations, as Albert Wlecke says, we can see a universal, intelligible pattern emerging in that various hopes are exposed as rooted in illusion. One hopes on the basis of illusions, and then sees the hope frustrated and must give it up. Aristotle says that life’s aim is an action: what we do matters more than our “sort” or our character. Our actions will fit into a larger intelligible pattern, and will render us happy or unhappy.

96-98. “So plot is the origin and as it were the soul of tragedy, and the characters are secondary. Moreover, poetry is more universal than history. A drama links its incidents according to the probably and the necessary. History cannot derive intelligible patterns because it is limited to what actually happened: “poetry tends to speak of universals, history of particulars” (98 top). (Well, a modern idea of history is that it, too, requires emplotment.) In a tragedy, if we are to learn anything from it, the protagonist’s slide downhill must occur in a way we can grasp: the action must have a properly linked beginning, a middle, and an end, along with recognition and reversal. A well-rounded plot gives us a complete action. The unities of time and place aren’t very important here. Aristotle doesn’t assume, as Plato does, that an audience needs to be taken in by the play; rather, it is a learning experience that requires critical resistance -- not total immersion. We must explain what he means by “pity and fear” after this point.

98-99. “Among plots, some are simple and some are complex….” Recognition and reversal are logically structured plot-points, events on the way towards self-knowledge or knowledge of one’s standing with respect to the gods. Probability and necessity reign here -- the movement of the plot should seem inexorable, and what happens should develop organically from within the sequence of events. So if all is well done, the audience experiences catharsis, a medical term meaning purgation. See pg. 100.

100. “We must perhaps discuss next what [poets] should aim at and what they should beware of in constructing plots….” Characters are types; they are admirable but not perfect. They must “make a mistake” (hamartano), “miss the mark,” do something by which they become miserable. They will commit an error that we ourselves might commit were we in their position, though of course we know we aren’t in their position. So we will pity Oedipus or Antigone -- might we not do as they did, if presented with the same dilemmas? And this empathy will make us shudder -- something equally bad could befall us. My further suggestion: Aristotle is still interested in the issue of “critical distance” even when it seems we are most immersed in the play. Greek self-control is important to him. He offers perhaps a colder version of Sappho’s “I am prepared to be shaken,” something akin to the Nietzschean quality of openness to experience.

A question posed by Wlecke -- why arouse pity and fear simply to achieve catharsis or purgation of pity and fear? Isn’t that like asking to be beaten because it’s enjoyable when the beating stops? Perhaps it makes more sense to say that we learn something about an action by our emotional response to it, and that we learn something about pity and fear, too.

102-03. “Regarding characters, there are four things at which [the poet] should aim. Character is subject to typification. We should preserve and ennoble the type. Characters should be good, appropriate, life-like, and consistent. Otherwise, if we can’t categorize them, we will draw no lesson from what happens to them -- no pattern will emerge. Aristotle’s formal demands are in the service of his interests as a pragmatic critic: a tragedy succeeds by achieving certain formal effects. If it does that, it induces catharsis.

Edition: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 1st edition. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN: 0393974294.

Week 01, Introduction to E491

2004-08-23T09:17:00.000-07:00

Welcome to English 491, History of Literary Criticism

Fall 2004 at California State University, Fullerton