The Representation of Animals

Talk of "the Other" was popular for a long time in Continental philosophy. Perhaps it still is. To tell you the truth, it bores the hell out of me. People who still think capitalizing the "O" is going to shock people into realizing something are perhaps misjudging how much ground they've gained in the last 50 years, and forgotten that it was a rhetorical tactic, not an ontology. (Well, in fairness, much of the mischief was because many did originally think it was an ontology.) This will likely be the only time I talk about animals in a philosophical way, since I tend to think that all the hard work to be done is in talking about factory farms, which means for the most part giving up trying to penetrate the silent face of animals to hear their call. I register in some fashion the fact that all philosophical reflection deals on some level with two prior distinctions in order to get off the ground--humanity's distinction from Nature, and humanity's distinction from Animals. But I don't think this fact gets us terribly far by itself, though a lot of ground has been gained in better ways of treating both ideas.

References:

Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulation, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

Press), 1995

Garrard - Ecocriticism, (New York: Routledge), 2004

Midgley 1 - Animals and Why They Matter, (Athens: University of Georgia

Press), 1984

Midgley 2 - Beast and Man, Rev. Ed., (New York: Routledge), 2002

Perkins - Romanticism and Animal Rights, (New York: Cambridge University

Press), 2003

Snell - The Discovery of the Mind, trans. T.G. Rosenmeyer, (New York: Dover),

1953, 1982

Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations, 3rd Ed., trans. G.E.M. Anscombe,

(New York: Macmillan Company), 1953
A version of Robert Burns's "To a Mouse."
A version of Anna Laetitia Barbauld's "The Mouse's Petition."

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Apparently reporting on a break in recent scholarship, Greg Garrard says that there is a “split between philosophical consideration of animal rights and cultural analysis of the representation of animals” (Garrard 136). Whether this is accurate or not, I should argue that it is odd, since how we represent animals leads directly into how we philosophically consider them, for you can’t consider them without first conceptualizing them in some manner. Garrard briefly takes up this line of thought in talking of Mary Midgley, but the power of this point in tackling not only the particular issue of animals, but also the wider issue of “nature” is obscured. I will argue that Midgley’s pragmatic sensibleness opens up a vista with which to explore representations of animals as reflections on humanity that histrionic talk of the radical otherness of nature and animals obliterates—which, then, ironically destroys the only hope of these silent beings. To illustrate the profitability of this vista, I will consider Robert Burns and Anna Barbauld’s different representations of mice in their two short poems.

Midgley’s appreciation of anthropomorphism, which Garrard briefly considers (137-8), basically consists in the note that language—and hence all verbs, nouns, and particularly descriptive adjectives—is in some sense a projection of our own humanity. When facing down the threat of Cartesian solipsism produced by the sundering of Mind from Nature (in Descartes’ res cogitans and res extensa), we face what Midgley calls the “unrealistic sceptical isolation of human life from every possible context” (Midgley 1 128). It is because of this previous Cartesian platitude that anthropomorphism—when taken as an ecocritical concept—becomes distended. Defenders of nature and animals, wishing to do right by those they defend, wish to render the “authentic” animal, the lion qua lion. But registering the previous note that language is a set of human categories, the idea of anthropomorphism can generate the sheer impossibility of conceptualizing animals entirely, suggesting that “God – and indeed all non-human life – must be so unlike us that none of it can be understood from a human standpoint at all” (128). This is what Wittgenstein meant when, pointing at this Cartesian picture holding us captive, he said, “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him” (Wittgenstein 223). The idea that we could understand the lion qua lion is a mirage created by our previous posited isolation from him, and this mirage—appearing the oasis from humanity’s tainted touch—is what renders the lion qua human categories reprehensible.

This Cartesian isolation is what produces the tangled web of Horkheimer and Adorno’s and Heidegger’s pessimism about the human situation. The haunting inevitability of “blindly pragmatized thought” [fn.1] lurks behind Heidegger’s obscure attempts to clear away and rehabilitate what he calls, in contradistinction to scientific thought, “Thought.” But Heidegger’s late-stage obscurity about what exactly he means by “Thought,” or “the Thinker” or “Poet,” just highlights the on-going struggle with the Cartesian problematic. Even Midgley falls for it, albeit briefly: “There is nothing unusual about confusing a symbol with the thing symbolized, about projecting a fantasy. … Mixing up a symbol with an attribution is, in fact, normal. Among human beings, it is often best checked by the victim, the walking symbol himself, who can say, ‘Hey, look—I am not that, but me’” (Midgley 2 33) Asking “the victim” is the Heideggerian point about the redescription of essence (res) as a “gathering,” which leads to Heideggerian authenticity (every “thing” has its own authentic collection of attributes) and the switch to aural metaphors (if only we could hear them). But this distinction between projected attributes and essential attributes can’t be maintained for the same reason that the Galilean metaphor of Science reading the Book of Nature cannot be maintained—only humans have and use language, and Heidegger’s reversal (“language speaks man”) simply obscures the silence Baudrillard says haunts us about animals. Even here, however, Baudrillard’s sense that Reason, and hence experimentation, is simply out for the “admission of the principle of objectivity” (129) muddles just what else we are supposed to do. Baudrillard says, “What is essential is that nothing escape the empire of meaning, the sharing of meaning. Certainly, behind all that, nothing speaks to us, neither the mad, nor the dead, nor children, nor savages, and fundamentally we know nothing of them, but what is essential is that Reason save face, and that everything escape silence” (137). Baudrillard is attempting to cast Reason as a bad guy for putting words in unspeaking mouths, but it is unclear what speaking is once you get “behind” the “empire of meaning”—behind meaning is noise, and even those who speak for themselves take part in that empire, which means animals do not present humans with a peculiar problem, so much as the constant threat of the breakdown in communication always does.

The representation of animals has to remain a pragmatic event of trial-and-error, for there is no “essence” to anything that we do not put there. This antiessentialism comes out of a consideration of how language works in the Cartesian problematic because the only way to beat Cartesian solipsism is by attribution, by the extension of what you are aware of (as a self-aware res cogitans) to everything else by analogy. The cessation of doubt, rather than through the theoretical scaffolding Descartes hoped to erect from undoubted doubting, to God, to everything else, is rather a practical affair of testing extensions and seeing what works. When we come to the particular kinds of attributions humanity has made to animals, they are varied, but one pernicious one Midgley analyzes is the “Beast Within” (Midgley 2 35). Midgley suggests that this image was created to “solve the problem of evil” (39). Whereas in the Iliad, the formula for explaining misfortune seems to be “if you cannot blame the enemy, blame the gods” (41), the slow slide in belief in Gods' efficacious externality (including their internalization as thumos—will, drive, spirit) produced the need for a new scapegoat. And so we get Plato’s Simile of the Charioteer, with the partitioning of the soul into a good horse and a bad horse, and as Midgley says, “the feelings named in this connection are shame, ambition, the sense of honor, never, for instance, pity or affection, where the body might be held to make good suggestions to the soul. Plato’s map excludes such a possibility” (42).

This is the shift we see taking place in the Romantic era. The rise of the function of Imagination in the role of the mind’s relationship to reality is concurrently the rise of sympathy’s fortunes in the realm of morality, which we can see in Edmund Burke’s account of the mind’s faculties in the Philosophical Enquiry and most especially in the Scottish Enlighenment’s redistribution of the mind’s powers for morals, e.g., in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. The dynamic begun by Homeric and Platonic similes is still best given by Bruno Snell in his still classic, if a bit battered, The Discovery of the Mind: “it is not quite correct to say that the rock is viewed anthropomorphically, unless we add that our understanding of the rock is anthropomorphic for the same reason that we are able to look at ourselves petromorphically…. In other words, and this is all-important in any explanation of the simile, man must listen to an echo of himself before he may hear or know himself" (201, italics mine).

In Burns’s and Barbauld’s poems about the mouse, this analogical attitude is on full display, though in different ways. What is interesting in this juxtaposition is that, as Perkins notes, Barbauld’s “mouse speaker is an intellectual” (Perkins 9), whereas Burns’s ploughman is “more personal, impulsive, and emotional” (10). This juxtaposition registers the fact that the ploughman, on the one hand, as a human is the intended audience for the sympathetic plea. So the reader, as a fellow human, identifies with the ploughman, who makes the plea because he shows imaginative sensitivity to the plight of the mouse (e.g., lines 19-24, when the “Nest” of the title is analogized to “Thy wee-bit housie”). On the other hand, the first move of imagination is already made in Barbauld’s poem when she makes the speaker’s voice the mouse’s. Instead of having to make the superior position (the ploughman) receptive to the work of sympathy, Barbauld’s taken the locus of weakness as the poem’s voice, and the mouse—following out Burke’s insight about size—makes itself quite a naturally sympathetic voice. To counter an over-balancing, in which the mouse becomes pathetic and therefore threatens to become an object of contempt, Barbauld rather makes the mouse a site of intellectual power. And in the course of the plea, Barbauld’s mouse argues for sympathy—unable to display the sympathetic ear (as with the ploughman), the mouse reasons that the “well taught philosophic mind” “feels for all that lives” (line 25, 28). The important move in Barbauld’s poem is “men, like mice” (line 46)—the center of gravity of the simile is the mouse. The conceit of the poem is the projection of the highest virtues of humanity (vaunted Reason and Philosophy) to mice, which are only then glancingly reflected back to humanity.

Endnotes

[1] I talk a little about Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment in "Blake and the Dialectic of Englightenment," though not nearly extensively enough. Their pessimism is succinctly treated in Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 56-7. Bernard Yack diagnoses the underlying problem of both Horkheimer and Adorno and Heidegger as a totalizing concept of modernity in his The Fetishism of Modernities, Ch. 5. Yack's impressive little book presses home the thought on contemporary theory he excavated in The Longing for Total Revolution: that the troubling theoretical problems of both post-Marxist forms of thought (Frankfurt School critical theory to Birmingham School cultural studies) and post-Nietzschean forms (from Heidegger and Sartre to Foucault and Derrida) are one and the same--a totalizing concept of Society requiring a Herculean concept of autonomy.

Pirsig's Quest for Certainty

This was initially written from a prompt by Leela, who asked in a discussion at the MD, after suggesting that the quest for metaphysical certainty drove Pirsig to insanity, whether Pirsig achieved a comfortable equilibrium.

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From what little appearances we know of Robert Pirsig's life since the time of ZMM, he's been able to control the demons that left him in the corner of a Chicago apartment with cigarettes burning into his knuckles. I think the most important thing to understand about Pirsig's philosophy is the personal nature Pirsig most of the time perceives to be at the heart of the philosophical enterprise. This is the point at which we might bring up the James picture of a hallway with different doors, or an art gallery with a myriad of paintings. This, of course, makes Pirsig sound like he only half-meant the Metaphysics of Quality. Emphasizing the fact that Pirsig thought philosophy was like playing chess, rather than having a perfect set of chess moves, suggests to some Pirsigians that the system Pirsig created is trying to be ignored. The question is: how do we balance Chapter 26 of Lila, the philosophology chapter wherein Pirsig tells us how to read philosophy, with Chapter 12, the levels chapter wherein Pirsig solves a few philosophical problems with his Metaphysics of Quality?

Pirsig attempted to develop a new metaphysics not just for himself, but for others, too--everybody gets that. The Metaphysics of Quality wasn't just for Pirsig. However, the way to balance the self-other equation might be like this: the Metaphysics of Quality is Pirsig's, but the insights of the Metaphysics of Quality are for everyone.

The "comfortable resolution" of a quest can only be decided by the life lived, because that's ultimately where philosophy dumps out. I think one of the greatest passages Pirsig wrote is the gumption chapter in ZMM. In that chapter, Pirsig brought together philosophical abstraction with practical living--he showed us how he thinks his explorations of the "high country of the mind" dump out into the valleys of life. What he shows is how a mind can get trapped in certain thought-loops, like the monkey and the rice. That's what happened to Phaedrus. That's the problem with the Quest for Certainty, as Dewey named it. What Pirsig picked up are techniques for quelling the inferential machine known as the mind--that's what the art of meditation specifically helps with. Pirsig perceived (rightly I think) the modern mind as quickly skipping down a road that will eventually prove to be self-destructive to both individual and society. So Pirsig wanted to expand a different set of roads, to show how we don't need to run into dilemmas like "where is the value, in the subject or object?"

But there are many ways of avoiding certain bad trains of thought--Pirsig's one occasional fault is that he sometimes creates the appearance of yelling out alone at night. But there are a lot of intellectuals who perceive similar evils and propose useful techniques and roads of travel. The one major problem caused by Pirsig's occasional flirtation with superlative uniqueness, which we could forgive in a friend, is that it leads to inflexibility of thought in fellow-travelers. It leads people to perceive themselves as not fellow-travelers, but rather disciples. It leads to the thought that edifices of thought generated by thinkers must be either rejected or accepted wholecloth, and that disagreement with the master is a rejection of everything holy.

Pirsig became comfortable with his quest for certainty because he eventually learned how to tone down the personal ramifications for failure. I think he learned that it isn't a Quest for Certainty that the philosophical tradition is in search of an answer to, but rather a personal quest for the kinds of everyday certainties that we act out of. Phaedrus' quest in ZMM may have begun as Plato's, but Pirsig's quest in writing it down was the quest to resolve doubts about the everyday certainties that are leading to bad things. Phaedrus began with Doubt about the possibility of Certainty, but Pirsig finished with specific doubts about particular certainties. Pirsig eventually became comfortable with the line of thought he'd written down, and the kinds of life-instincts it had given him.

That others may not be comfortable with his resolution only matters insofar as what is being pointed to are limitations in the tools and insights he afforded. Philosophy is autobiographical--we are commending things we've found useful. What philosophy is not is a search for an Answer to an antecedantly posed Question, like from Reality, or some other entity that's big and powerful enough to be able to pose a question antecedantly to spatialtemporal people. Only with the latter understanding of philosophy does it make sense to "reject the MoQ," or any system. Only if one assumes that there are universally perspicuous questions that every philosophy or person must have an answer to would one think that the MoQ's success rests on its ability to please everyone. Only if one thinks there's a big universal Quest humanity is on, rather than a lot of little quests individual people are on, will one take seriously the rhetoric of "demonstration" and "proving."

Philosophy is autobiography for Pirsig, and it is best served by taking it seriously, but not too seriously.

Order in Stevens

Poets who are better philosophers than philosophers are my favorite poets. It's a sad state of affairs, but everything I read gets fit into the stories of intellectual power that are constantly playing in my head. One of the curious effects of reading Bloom and Rorty, however, is that the aesthetic and the cognitive tend to dovetail, and so fitting everyone from Plato to Blake to Heidegger to Charles Brockden Brown into a sweeping story of how the West was won, or rather became itself (two ways of saying the same thing after Emerson), is a perfectly acceptable practice, if not any easier to do.

I probably like Stevens more than any other poet of the last 100 years because it always seems like he's wrestling with Plato. At least, that's all my ear picks up. That's pretty much the sum of the reading below, the final paper in a "Close Reading" seminar. There's not a lot to it, just a gerrymandered reading of three poems of Stevens I happen to like, barring "Of Mere Being," my favorite, because I'd already written on it.

You can find the three poems online here:
Anecdote of the Jar
The Idea of Order at Key West
The Poems of Our Climate (scroll down)

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To motivate my close reading, I’d like to remark at the outset that Stevens seems obsessed with the poet’s capacity to create order with words. Every poem, by being a poem, would seem to create its own implicit order, but what this means for order to be created by words is a theme Stevens often takes up in the poem. In Anecdote of the Jar, the problematic is set in the ambiguity that ensues as the jar attempts to order the landscape. In The Idea of Order at Key West, the poet’s relationship to her power in ordering is focused and takes on a sad, lonely tinge. Finally, The Poems of Our Climate takes the other side of the relationship, and shows a perfect order to not even be desirable.

The landscape of Anecdote is dominated by a hill, a jar, the wilderness, and—in a more subtle way—the “I.” The spare set-up of the anecdote begins: “I placed a jar in Tennessee,/And round it was, upon a hill.” (1-2) The “I” almost appears to look out onto the poem, never really moving from its position before placing the jar and disappearing. Like the singer’s voice in Idea of Order, the placing of the jar has a similar power of causation. The “I” creates a proxy in the “jar,” transferring its power as a finger pushes over the first domino. The effect of the jar being placed on the hill is felt immediately: “It made the slovenly wilderness/Surround that hill.” (3-4) Specificity is drawn out in “a hill” and again in “that hill,” a repetition of the anecdotal thematic. The truly curious thing about that jar on that hill, of course, is that it made the wilderness surround the hill.

The difficulty in the jar’s relationship to the hill appears more boldly when we add the next two lines: “The wilderness rose up to it,/And sprawled around, no longer wild.” (5-6) This is the moment of ordering, but the ambiguities implied are twofold: 1) the verbs of “surround” and “rose” are ambiguous between a literal movement on the part of the wilderness, as if the jar caused the wilderness to march up to the hill, and a change in perspective caused by the jar being placed in the landscape, the juxtaposition of the newly placed jar making the wilderness appear differently than it did before. And 2) “slovenly” and “sprawled” give a very untidy appearance to the wilderness, but the effect of the jar on the wilderness is to make it “no longer wild.” To remove the “wild” from “wilderness” would be to disembowel, one would think, its very essence. Yet the “making” began in line 3, when it was first introduced as “slovenly” (let alone as “wilderness”), and even if we imagine its slovenly appearance to be in the midst of a makeover, the second action taken by it (“rising”) is accompanied by its sprawling and its no longer being wild. These two ambiguities create a sense of failed change, failed ordering. The actions of surrounding and rising are the appearance of action, simply a created effect—the jar suddenly appears on the hill and so the wilderness appears to surround and rise up to it. The wilderness is announced as no longer wild, yet it still sprawls. Just as the jar is taking “dominion everywhere” (9), the wilderness appears like a child who was ordered by its mother to clean up, but does so in name only.

The ambiguity of order is continued between lines 7 and 8: “The jar was round upon the ground/And tall and of a port in air.” Line 7 has a kind of ordering with the internal rhyming of “round” and “ground,” but the squatness of “round” when it is on the ground is juxtaposed in line 8 with its tallness when it is in the air. Further, the jar’s two different appearances are not vigorously separated by a “but,” but rather softly distinguished by the “and.” And whereas on the ground the jar is squat, in the air it has a certain “port,” or carriage. This shift in outward appearance, or carriage, is matched by a shift in diction, “port” being an archaic usage, age carrying with it a raised dignity. The movement we should notice is that while on the one hand, as the jar goes into the air, the diction rises and the jar appears more regal, on the other hand, all of the jar’s power occurs in its movement towards the ground. Just as the powers of order occur low to the ground, so does Stevens lower the poetic diction in shifting from the traditional “ode” (like to, say, a Grecian urn) to the “anecdote” (five appearing in Harmonium). Whereas the ode now gives the semblance of being over-composed, “anecdote” is from the Greek for “things unpublished.” If the ode gives us the sense of an embarrassedly raised diction, something too well-ordered, then Stevens’ anecdote gives us its proper opposite. In Anecdote of the Jar, we are treated to a jar that orders, but within the loose assemblage of the “anecdote.” In a similar way, Stevens achieves this contrast of dictions in the title of The Idea of Order at Key West. On the one hand there is “the idea of order,” with its high, Platonic-like diction, and on the other there is “Key West,” an American resort town.

The powers of ordering in Anecdote are transferred from the jar to the “she”-singer of Idea of Order:

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard. (8-14)

We were introduced to the sea as a “body wholly body” (3) that makes “mimic motion” (4). Lines 8-14 further differentiate the sea from the singer’s song. As we are introduced to the song, like in Anecdote, the verse itself takes on “melodic” attributes to mimic the order being created. The above is in blank verse, in perfect pentameter with near perfect iambs. Most of the poem is in something near blank verse, with a random dispersion of 10 to 12 syllable lines, and indeed takes on the form of something like a Homeric hymn, with its long stanzas of description, and particularly with the split five feet between lines 33 and 34 (“Of sky and sea./It was her voice that made”). Somehow the single rhyming sound at the end of lines 10, 11, 12, and 14 don’t seem overbearing or repetitive, possibly upset by “word by word,” with the first “word” sonically disturbing the perfect rhyme and so setting up the next between 11 and 12. Further melodic ordering includes the mirroring of “grinding water” and “gasping wind” and the beautiful closing internal rhyme before the final “heard” in line 14.

The singer is a poet. “For she was the maker of the song she sang.” (15) Homeric poets were rhapsodes, and their poetry was actually sung, thus beginning poetry’s long romance with metaphors of song. “Poet” comes from the Greek poiētēs, which meant “maker.” But there seems to be a tension in “The maker’s rage to order words of the sea” (53). “Making” seems to imply an act of creation, whereas “ordering” seems to imply an arrangement of things already there. The poem seems to be granting that creatio ex nihilo is an impossibility, but goes further still in honing a tension between the singer’s attempt to create something new as opposed to simply arranging things that were already there. Most of the poem spends its time consolidating the singer’s power in contradistinction to the sea. The simply stated “The song and water were not medleyed sound” (9) creates the impression that the “fluttering” (3) of the sea’s “empty sleeves” (4) are a mere epiphenomena to the song, yet the “It may be that in all her phrases stirred/The grinding water and the gasping wind” (12-13) compromises this sense. Even as lines 8-14 begin the consolidation of the singer’s power, the lines seem sad. This sadness begins to set in with “yet its mimic motion/Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry” (4-5). In the odd epanorthosis which corrects the sea crying to simply causing a cry, it is difficult to tell which is the more disturbing, though in the end the correction merely appears as a repetition for emphasis as “we understood” (6) the cry to be “of the veritable ocean.” (7) After the singer begins her ordering of lines 8-14, the tone of melancholy reaches its denouement for the sea when we find that the “tragic-gestured sea/Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.” (16-17)

I sense a transference beginning, however, when the next line begins “Whose spirit is this? we said” (18). The audience, of which our hidden narrator is but one (never fully making an appearance until he begins talking to Ramon Fernandez), makes a distinction between the “spirit” and something else. At first we might simply take it to be the sea, that “body wholly body” (3). But as the auditor continues to listen, the answer seems to change. Lines 21 to 28 contain a long conditional that begins “If it was only the dark voice of the sea” (21) and finally ends “it would have been … sound alone” (25, 28). The sea is “sound alone”—no spirit. But then: “But it was more than that,/More even than her voice, and ours, among/The meaningless plunging of water and the wind” (28-30). This is an effusive “more,” more than sound alone, more than the singer’s voice, more than the audience’s voice (the implication that the audience makes sounds similar to the singer’s). Yet this effusive “more” seems to obscure the spirit-body distinction that we would’ve identified with the song-sea distinction. It is this same effusive “more” that is cut off by the split pentameter of lines 33 and 34. Almost asking to begin again, 34 restores the singer’s voice to power: “It was her voice that made/The sky acutest at its vanishing.” (34-35) But as the singer accumulates more and more power (“when she sang, the sea,/Whatever self it had, became the self/That was her song,” 38-40) she becomes more solitary: “Then we,/as we beheld her striding there alone,/Knew that there never was a world for her/Except the one she sang and, singing, made.” (40-43) This near solipsistic moment achieves the singer’s own melancholic denouement. We find that the sad cry of the sea is a mirror for the sad, solitary cry of the singer, obscured before, but now mimicked by the parity between her measuring of the sky’s “solitude” in line 36 and striding “alone” by the sea in line 41.

The narrative of Idea of Order is the auditor’s coming to terms with the song and the sea, between ordering and making. On the one hand, the “words of the sea” simply do what the singer tells them to do, the more power taken, the more alone she is. On the other hand, the audience espies a spirit behind both the sea and her voice, something more. As a mere ordering (as in lines 8-14) turns into a stronger making, the singer becomes solipsistic—and yet even then, something escapes. This something “more” arises again in The Poems of Our Climate. We are presented with “Clear water in a brilliant bowl,/Pink and white carnations.” (1-2) The syntax in which the carnations are pictured in the bowl gives a kind of simple, lyric quality to the lines. And yet:

Pink and white carnations—one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there. (6-10)

The “brilliant bowl” of “clear water” achieve some of the jar’s causal power as the day seems to be simplified by the bowl itself. Compare the bowl’s “complete simplicity” (11), how it is “low and round” (9), with the jar being “round upon the ground” (Anecdote, 7) and “gray and bare” (10).

Certainly with the jar one would want more, and as the jar neuters the wilderness, so does the bowl strip down the surrounding world:

Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white snowy scents. (Poems, 11-17)

The “complete simplicity” of the bowl is opposed to complexity, to the “evilly compounded, vital I,” yet as light and airy as the “newly-fallen snow” appears in the first stanza, the bowl itself seems the sinister element, the pink and white carnations a mere façade. The “evilly” in the second stanza seems imposed by the order of the bowl, not fitting with the I’s vitality. In fact, I take the “vital I” to be the same “I” that places the jar on the hill, the only real, unambiguous action in that poem. In Poems, the sense is that as nice as the carnations and clear water seem, there is something missing that one wants, and the “vital I” seems the key.

The “more” seems even more incessant than in Idea of Order, and whereas the “more” of Idea of Order was of something more that escaped the sea and the voice, the “more” of Poems turns into a desire to escape:

There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds. (18-24)

The ambiguity of order in Anecdote, where it isn’t clear if the jar succeeds in neutering the still sprawling, un-wild wilderness, compares well with the ambiguity of both success of an ordering-turn-making (with the spirit still escaping) and our desire for the resultant solipsism in Idea of Order. The latter’s “blessed rage for order” (Idea of Order, 52) should be compared to the juxtaposing of delight and bitterness and paradise and imperfection in Poems. Indeed, the “however clear” (25) that the sea was in Idea of Order finds its way into “clear water” of the bowl. And while our imperfection is “hot” (Poems, 23), the bowl is “Cold, a cold porcelain” (9). The tensions in Anecdote and Idea of Order become explicitly manifest in Poems, becoming the exact source of not only our sadness, as in Idea of Order, but also our happiness.

Stevens’ sense of order is an imperfect arranging. In Anecdote, the order that appears only does so by its contradistinction to the wilderness which surrounds it, that even as it takes “dominion everywhere,” the wilderness is only ambiguously tamed. In Idea of Order, the singer’s “rage to order words of the sea” masters the mimicking sea, but the spirit still escapes. In Poems, order takes its appearance as an unsatisfactory, “complete simplicity.” In each poem, something escapes the order, and Stevens seems to be suggesting that we should delight in this imperfection of our imposed order. The jar’s perfect ambiguity is expanded into the singer’s solipsistic rage and focused in the bowl as our imperfect paradise.

Cavell and Romanticism

Stanley Cavell is a unique figure in philosophy and literary criticism, not quite having a home in either but tending to demand attention nonetheless. I'm not sure how Cavell's fortunes are faring in Philosophy Departments, though I suspect he'll go the way of Santayana, but if you're working the streets of Romanticism these days, particularly Emerson or Thoreau, Cavell shows up on the litcrit radar. As well he should, for despite Rorty's strictures against taking philosophical skepticism seriously, if one were to, Cavell is one of the few to show how. The route through is to deflate its philosophical character, which following Rorty we should say is its "Philosophical" character. And by returning to what Cavell calls "the Ordinary," we can better see what live issues there are surrounding the hubbub Descartes created (or Pyrrho for that matter), though perhaps not why we should call it "the Ordinary" and make such a big deal "O" of it. On the other hand, the way I read Cavell is as I read Rorty's talk about metaphors as the engine of cultural change, which is an important point to make.

I stumbled into philosophy by accident, a random obsession with Pirsig which, stumbling into a book at a bookstore one fateful Christmas-break day, blossomed eventually into a random obsession with Rorty. There are perhaps two philosophers with which I wonder what I would think should I have become obsessed with their writing rather than Rorty's, two writers who hold a candle in my imagination. But I doubt Bernard Williams would have captivated by attention in just the same way. Cavell would have.

References are to Cavell's In Quest of the Ordinary.

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One of the unique things about Cavell is the payment one receives by close reading him. I take the following passage, describing his relationship with Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, to encapsulate Cavell’s understanding of the Romantic project:

But I had never been able to stay with it for longer than a chapter, and maybe half of the next, before closing the book with fear and frustration—both at the hopelessness in its ambitions for reconstituting the history of thought, by means, for example, of its elated obscurities as it translates Schelling on the task of something called uniting subject and object; and at its oscillation of astounding intelligence and generosity together with its dull and withholding treatment of Wordsworth’s sense in claiming for poetry the language of the rustic and the low. (Cavell 41)

If we aren’t careful, I think it might be easy to read the “hopelessness” as driving his fear (ambitions too tall) and the “oscillation” as driving his frustration (“why can’t Coleridge give Wordsworth a break?”). I think, however, that Cavell feels both fear and frustration at both the “hopelessness” and “oscillation.” Romanticism has lofty goals and ambitions and this loft produces “elated obscurities.” The trouble, and where the conflict and oscillation comes, is that the overall ambition of Romanticism, as Cavell understands it, is the reconstitution of what he otherwise calls “the Ordinary.”

To restate Cavell’s thought: philosophy began as a flight from the everyday, and began building its floating thought-castles to replace, in some fashion, the bleakness of the ground it wished to flee. The Romantic perceives this flight as misguided and wishes to replace, in some fashion, Philosophy. However, doing so means fighting them on their own ground, which is to say, in the air. And there is a sense, no less, that the impetus to philosophy—skepticism at pieces of the everyday—wasn’t wrong, and should be reconstituted in the replacement Romanticism. This resketching of Cavell, I think, catches his point about “romanticism,” with its lowercase “r,” being not just an historical entity, but a current of thought that runs everclear. But while this is the case—which makes lowercase philosophy a deathless force—the historical entities known as Romanticism (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, etc.) and Philosophy (Plato, Descartes, Kant, Schelling, etc.) must still be contested on their own terms. The question of what the “terms” are is, again no less, what is in part at issue and causing of the loft of ambition needed to engage.

Cavell is frustrated at having not just to contend with these obscurities, but produce them himself in trying to reconstitute the history of thought. This frustration then also fuels his fear that these ambitions might be too great, that the philosophical acts required might be all for naught. Is there something special in this for romanticism, though? Why would this frustration and fear loop not just be the regular fears and frustrations of the ambitious? Why is Cavell, as I think he is, especially confronted with this double problem by Coleridge’s text? So far I’ve been concentrating most on the hopelessness-of-ambition part of Cavell’s two-part fear and frustration. In glossing the “history of thought” bit, I’ve attempted to hint at how the hopelessness of philosophical ambition (and the attendant annoyingness of philosophic diction) is entwined with Cavell’s problem with Coleridge’s oscillation. Attending to what Cavell confronts in Coleridge’s confrontation with Wordsworth, I think, will give us the problem that is specific to romanticism.

Cavell’s frustration with Coleridge’s “elated obscurities” is counterpointed by his frustration with Coleridge’s attitude towards Wordsworth’s “claiming for poetry the language of the rustic and the low.” The fact that poetry should have to lay claim to “the low” articulates poetry’s natural, tall position in the equation. The oscillation that Cavell feels is between Coleridge “getting” Wordsworth and then not, between “praising his power and promise” and then “cursing him” for “failing his power and breaking his promise” (41). “Getting the hang” of Wordsworth, I think, is an appropriate idiom to import, and Cavell’s word is “generosity”—Coleridge gives something to Wordsworth when he understands him properly, the sense in which he claims the low for poetry. Cavell unpacks this oscillation as Coleridge’s projection of “the achievements back into promises” (41). That is the key, hiding as it is in Wordsworth’s use of what Coleridge said to him in the 1815 supplementary essay to the Lyrical Ballads: the great poet creates “the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.” What Coleridge acts out unconsciously in his critical glance at Wordsworth and what Cavell senses in the promise and problem of romanticism is that the poetic, visionary, prophetic achievement opens the view in which the achievement can be seen at all, but it is always a partial failure for it cannot itself step through the opening. The achievement creates the terms by which it should be judged, and predictably enough the letter is found wanting by an evolved and retrospectively glancing spirit—an ungrateful spirit created by the letter. In other words, the oscillation is a necessary trait of romanticism, for the more Coleridge gives to Wordsworth’s achievement, the more he changes into his vision, and the more he sees is wanting because of the more he sees.

To help better understand this swing from praising the vista to damning the groundbreaking limitations, we might add Cavell’s brilliant summary of his The Claim of Reason: the “mark of the natural in natural language is its capacity to repudiate itself, to find arbitrary, or merely conventional, the lines laid down for its words by our agreement in criteria, our attunement with one another…” (48). If we go the other way at this suggestion, it brings to light philosophy’s relationship with poetry—the “artificial” in language is that which is stipulated, that which by definition does not need agreement for it asks for none, that which asks for no generosity. The process of agreeing to stipulations is the passing of poetry into “natural language”—the “getting the hang” of an idiom. A vision opens a future in which its taste can be enjoyed, but it only becomes the present as people generously pass through the opening. This is the hidden flipside to the Fall story that “seems a romantic’s birthright”—poetry passing into theology, in Blake’s terms, is the fate of any vision to be enjoyed, and yet its enjoyment is its fall from grace, from pure poetry into something understandable, agreed upon, attuned to. By claiming the language of the low for poetry, Wordsworth was internalizing the dialectic of life and death lived by the poet’s metaphors.

Of Mere Being

I am not a great reader of poetry, and really not a reader at all, but I've begun to find poets and poems that I can read, by which I mean I find nourishment, if not articulated understanding.

I can't tell whether it is just an effect of having read so much of Harold Bloom, but I find that my tastes are identical to his. At least, the early Bloom. I haven't found my way in Shakespeare or Homer yet, but the early Bloom was preoccupied with Romanticism and its offspring, and I hazard that the three poets who loomed largest were Blake, Emerson, and Wallace Stevens. And those are the three who've found me most. As Bloom aged, and he endeavored to take more and more history in his grasp, the only one of the three to continue on at the forefront of his writing was Emerson (probably an effect of wanting to become an American Sage) and in contrast to the others' fall was the J-writer, Homer, Milton and Shakespeare's rise. But that's merely an effect of perspective: if you asked him even now who he loves most, rather than who was most powerful over a 3,000 year span, I think he would say Stevens and Hart Crane.

I took a "Close Reading" seminar a little time ago, and after taking a class on English Romanticism, I'm finding the little readings I wrote for those classes beginning to make a useful collage. The pattern was, no doubt, predetermined by my preoccupations, which are in some ways taken from my heroes, like Rorty and Bloom, but their preoccupations come from the source material I now look at, so it isn't surprising I see and write about their themes in relation to it. And perhaps these might find useful exposition under my jagged saw, if only to send one to the nearest surgeon's knife.

Of Mere Being can be found here (corrected copy with "decor" and not "distance").

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A lone palm frond rises up before us and it is difficult to tell where it came from. Such is the effect of the Godlike, yet human, stance taken in the poem—there’s hardly a “tone,” if tone be something emotional, at all. This dry, surveying of an interior space, of course, is the proper affect of an explorer, reporting to his fellows his discoveries. The Explorer stands inside of us, our minds, and is telling Us his findings—what makes us happy or unhappy. But since the Explorer is also us, there is a certain self-addressed quality—the introspective sojourner, telling us and himself about what he found inside of himself, which is also inside of us.

The figure repeated by this Cartesian Explorer, which seems to undergird his very existence as an Explorer, is the spatial metaphor for the mind—if the mind weren’t a space, it would be difficult to presume that we need an Explorer, “out” “un-covering” facts about the way things “are” (before they were covered). The tropes of factual existence and space are so tightly bound together, it is difficult to tell which one came first, or how to unbind them. The affect of a tonal blandness, what we call “matter-of-fact,” is a further trope difficult to untangle—even knowing they are all tropes, and so created, we can’t seem to get away from the “fact” that when you want to “emote” the way things “are,” you do it “matter-of-factly,” as if the way things are had a special sound or tone. And then, of course, you huddle your difficulties together in scare quotes to pretend like you don’t really mean those words, without realizing that “really meaning” anything would seem to itself imply the thing you’re scared of.

Our Explorer, however, is unafraid, and calmly pushes, like furniture out of the way, “Beyond the last thought” (2) to “The palm at the end of the mind,” (1) which “rises/in the bronze decor” (2-3). Such a silly image, our mind as a bronzed room in which the Explorer has discovered a palm frond rising out of at its edge—near the window, perhaps, just past the chaise-thought—is the oddity we began with: how matter-of-factly presented! Yet on we go, to find “A gold-feathered bird” (4) presented to us, which “Sings in the palm” (5). At this point, the Explorer begins withholding from us: the song is “without human meaning,/Without human feeling, a foreign song.” The sense of “without” as being a “withheld” is given by the sense in which the Explorer, having discovered this bird that sings, is telling us that its song is without meaning or feeling. And yet, the bird is within all of us, so the description is an assertion about the song's unavailability, despite what we may think should we care to explore the bronze room ourselves. And further, that the song is “foreign,” and not unintelligible though pretty noise, suggests that our Explorer, or someone, can understand the song—its translation is being withheld from us, either willfully or do to sheer inability on our part. And given the godlike, surveying powers of the Cartesian Explorer, it is difficult not to feel a little of both.

The Explorer now mounts an argument: “You know then that it is not the reason/That makes us happy or unhappy./The bird sings. Its feathers shine” (7-9). Like a scientist building a case for his theory, “You know” stands in for “given the evidence I just gave you.” The Explorer has discovered something, and given this, we know something else. But given our tilting apprehensions at information being withheld, the argument plays a little forced. The Explorer, seeing his hand bent a little too far forward, rushes the staccato evidential claims, “The bird sings. Its feathers shine.” The Explorer emotes a little uncertainty thereby, given his own listening to the song he’s singing.

The report of the last stanza gives the feeling of ebbing away. I think this should suggest to us that the tone of matter-of-factness becomes the trope I called it earlier. The juxtaposition of the matter-of-fact tone with the silly image heightens until it shakes the Explorer’s own faith in it. There is a shift in tone between the third and fourth stanzas, from dry arguing and listing of data to increasingly lyrical and “poetic” descriptions. We first get the palm frond again, but then we get an entirely new sentence which gives us a slow breeze blowing through the verse, an environmental quality to the mind that was missing in the staid, dry tone used earlier. And while it is a “wind,” and not specifically a breeze, there is a feeling that by the last line, it would have been a “willowy wafting breeze,” as the Explorer lets loose a pure, poetic outburst, with a sudden alliterative nightmare of complications to metaphors (the gold feathers are now “fire-fangled”; what is “fire-fangled”?; they dangle down despite the wind; why dangle?). This complete about-face in tone and style, his entire rhetorical edifice, suggests that the Explorer is spiraling away from himself, giving to himself not only hints of uncertainty in the third stanza with the rushed argument, but a full crisis of being.

I do not think the last line means anything—I think it is as close to an unintelligible outburst as Yeats’ “that dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.” The Explorer mirrors his last line—which is still yet an image within the mind, within the compass of his exploration—on the boundary, “the end,” “the edge” of intelligibility created by the bird’s own “foreign song,” in order to create the effect of our minds actually reaching that edge, which is at the same time to pull down the curtain hiding the tropeness of discovery and the mind as an interior space. The Explorer begins as an Explorer, but ends as a Poet, giving the impression that if we could just disentangle this last “foreign” phrase, “fire-fangled feathers dangle down,” we might know what the song means. But what we know, in line seven, is that “it”—the song—“is not the reason/That makes us happy or unhappy.” It’s the feathers—the poetic act of near-unintelligibility, gently nudging the edges of our mind back.

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Postscript

I took the easy way out with the last line. Most litcrits these days seem to be quite enamored with this uncertainty, Keats’ negative capability, with the fact that the oddity of the metaphor, the distinct unclarity of the trope, should not be something washed away, and if you did, you might be thereby effacing the trope.

Well, with the last line—knowing well in advance that everything can be made into a trope and that this wasn’t the first time (we always want to be a poem’s first time, don’t we?)—the sheer unintelligibility of “The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down” became, for me, the trope. Instead of seeing the line, and going, “Damn—now what the hell does that mean!?,” I said, quite matter-of-factly, “The last line of the poem does not mean anything.”

Which of course, like the depth of surfaces, is just to say that the last line does mean something—specifically, nothing. The question of course is, “how do you know it means nothing?” And hence the several hundred words before, all about a “matter of fact” tone, held throughout the poem of “discovery” of the boundaries of meaning in the “inner space” of the mind. Once one realizes that the mind-as-a-space is a trope, that produces an “Explorer” in the first place, this allows you to “discover” that the far-reaches of the mind is the far-end of trope. The Explorer turns into a Poet at the end because he realizes that the edge of intelligibility teaches the tropeness of tone and rhetoric, and so drops the tone of the Explorer, picks up that of the Poet and lets loose with a piece of nonsense. The last line is the written version of the “foreign song” we were told doesn’t have any meaning—now we see it doesn’t have any meaning.

Which is all quite a pat argument, and somehow makes the poem less fun—except the last line, which always remains fun, for it means nothing. Until I say it specifically means nothing, thus enclosing it with a certain meaning: nothing. Then I read it again and go, “yeah, but what the hell does that mean?” And I have to remind myself, “nothing. It means nothing.” And so it ebbs away in my mind, having wrangled its meaning, the metaphor dying andthenIreaditagain “fire-fangled feathers dangle down” and go, “How could anybody attach any meaning to thatohyeah: it means nothing....But—no, nothing, right....right?yes, nothing....bu—okay: YOU HAVE TO STOP READING THE POEM.”

Rhetorical Universalism

I shall define universalism as the philosophical position taken by any range of claims of which it is said that a claim might be true whether someone believes it or not. For a universalistic claim, truth swings free of belief.

To weigh the universalist claim, I would distinguish two questions: 1) Is it true? and 2) Is it effective?

On its face, to distinguish these two questions seems to concede the issue to the universalist—the effectiveness of a claim is its ability to claim belief. So to distinguish between effectiveness and truth as two different questions is to already claim that truth swings free from belief.

To justify this distinction, I would suggest that attempts to move around the distinction fall into two camps, two different reductionisms: Platonists and Sophists. The battle between Platonists and Sophists is the battle between Platonists who think that the second question collapses into the first (truth automatically produces effectiveness) and Sophists who think that the first question collapses into the second (effectiveness automatically produces truth). Each camp, however, needs to explain their own set of anomalous occurrences. The Platonist needs to explain why the truth isn’t always effective—why isn’t hearing a true statement always convincing? Why does it sometimes fall on “deaf ears”? The Sophist, on the other hand, needs to explain the smell of sulfur—why is her claim not just an excuse to tell lies, since we all know lies can be as effective as truths?

The way I’ve described both anomalies cues both camps to their own pernicious, and unsatisfactory, responses. The Platonist can claim that it is just deafness on the part of some, which at its extremes is a kind of willful plugging of the ears. The Sophist can claim that that’s all truths are—just lies we all believe, and the name of the game is getting people to buy what you’re selling, however you do it. Both of these responses are unsatisfactory for the same reason—they are too easy, both ending discussion with a dogmatic assertion of how things are. And if the retort from either is, “ah, but that doesn’t mean what I’m saying isn’t true,” then we’ve already moved further into the game I’m suggesting—that truth and effectiveness are distinct.

To defend their reductionisms without contradiction, without reducing and distinguishing in two separate, analogous breaths, both the Platonist and the Sophist need to suggest a mechanism by which we can tell when one side has been reduced to the other. This mechanism would then be able to suggest to us what cases of pernicious static do in fact look like. For example, for the Platonist to not look like a jerk who cries “you are deaf to the truth!!!” every time someone disagrees with him, the Platonist needs a method that’s publicly available that will tell us when a person really is just willfully plugging their ears or spitefully blinding themselves in order to hold on to some cherished, though now falsified, belief. Likewise, for the Sophist to not look like a devilish, insincere fraud who will say anything to get her way, the Sophist needs a method that’s publicly available that will tell us when a particular line of reasoning or justification that up-holds some particular belief is sincere truth and not simply convenient falsehood. In other words, the Platonist and the Sophist are looking for the same thing.

Since a search for a theoretical method or theorem that will ascertain truth is a typical trope for what we think of as Platonism, but not the Sophist, I will say a little bit more about the Sophist. For, have not philosophers occasionally argued that we do not need truth, that all we need is justification? Justification, when properly distinguished from truth, is relative to an audience in a way that truth is not. Your ability to justify yourself in front of an audience is relative to your ability to communicate with them, which means sharing a language, relevant concerns, and a sense of what counts as evidence and good and bad reasons. This means that you could find yourself in front of an audience that counts as a good reason a belief (e.g., in God) that you yourself do not hold. So what is stopping you from grasping at the disbelieved straw if it gets your audience to do what you want?

One might say the virtue of sincerity, but Platonists don’t think this option is available to the Sophist. They don’t understand why, if one really thought that all you needed was effectiveness, one wouldn’t grasp at whatever means were available at any moment to attain one’s ends. I don’t have an answer to this because I honestly don’t see the difficulty—it is unclear what the relationship is, to use Bernard Williams’s distinction, between truth and truthfulness (from his book Truth and Truthfulness). It is that relationship that further needs theoretical adumbration, a mechanism.

In my first formulation of Platonism and Sophism, I claimed they were reductionisms and that this reduction requires a mechanism. In this sense, they both deny the distinction between truth and justification. On this formulation, however, it makes as much sense to say that Platonists can use whatever justification they want, just so long as they know the true truth in their hearts. For if you know the truth, but have no mechanism available to convince other people, what aside from sincerity keeps you from grasping whatever means of persuasion you can? But this lack of mechanism includes the link between truth and sincerity, so if it is denied the Sophist, so too for the Platonist. And the fact of the matter is that I think there is historical precedence for both phenomenons—for pernicious liars who are pathologically only out for themselves (e.g., the Hitler administration) and for pernicious Holders of Truth who will do what they need to do because they know it’s true in their gut (e.g., the Bush administration).

I’d like to note that I modulated earlier from “truth reduces to justification” to “all you need is justification.” The “all you need” formulation is a modulation from the reduction-formulations to try and capture a wilier version of this problem, to try to avoid stawmen as much as possible. But look what happens when we apply both versions to Platonism and Sophism. The picture of the Platonist looks normal when wearing the notion of a mechanism, but the Sophist does not. So to help the picture of the Sophist I modulated from reduce-as-mechanism to reduce-as-“all you need.” But “all you need” is not a reduction in the strictest sense because what it requires is a firm distinction between two things (only one of which you need). The picture of the Sophist looks normal when wearing the notion of reduction, but the Platonist looks a little odd with “all you need” because we are used to associating the Platonist with Up-Holders of Truth. As I’ve suggested, though, without the “Up-” of mechanism, the Holders of Truth could produce just as much nasty material as liars.

So what is going on? James, Dewey, and Foucault all seemed to toy with the Sophist reduction. Foucault’s channeling of Thrasymachus in the formula “knowledge is power” is just the darker-seeming flipside of James’ more optimistic-seeming “the true is the good in the way of belief.” The more neutral formula of what both come to is Dewey’s “truth is warranted assertibility.” But what does this reduction amount to without the mechanism? So-called “postmodern” reductions of truth to illusions, of which Foucault’s is one of the more sensible (once you understand what Foucault means by “discipline”), themselves founder for the same reason the appearance/reality distinction does—if you aren’t going to offer a method for discerning truth from illusion, using the rhetoric of illusion for anything is self-referentially inconsistent at the level of theory.

I would like to say that the dialectic between Platonist and Sophist I’ve brought us through helps us better appreciate the situation we face when considering the universalist claim. The idea that truth swings free from belief is often associated with the Platonist side of the dialectic, but notice that if we don’t get a mechanism—which is what drove the seesaw—it is unclear what the universalist claim gets us: the Platonist wanted more truth, but without the mechanism, what more does the universalist claim give?

Rorty’s strategy for dealing with the situation was to claim that truth and justification are distinct, but that justification is the only route we have for making a claim of truth. I want to call this rhetorical universalism. By the time the Sophist side of the dialectic with Platonists reaches Dewey, it has become clear that Dewey would need a mechanism as much as the Platonist. This realization causes us to notice the similarities. Against reducing truth to justification that has been a typical strategy of pragmatists, Rorty sides with Donald Davidson’s claim that truth is a semantic and radically non-epistemic notion. Truth swings free of belief, but that tells us nothing about what to believe.

If we call the universalist claim—a claim might be true whether someone believes it or not—the realist intuition, we can see the impetus behind philosophical realisms and Platonisms and the force of Davidson’s theory as a way of paying homage to that intuition. The realist and Platonist want to emphasize that what we happen to believe now might not be the truth. Davidson is saying that it is the case that truth swings free of belief, but that there is no way to motivate this in a way that tells us which particular beliefs are false (aside from the universalist claim itself). The key is motivating truths—how do you motivate the realist intuition that is, e.g., housed in the semantic, disquotational theory of truth: “X” is true iff X. Davidson claims that the disquotational theory of truth is all the theory we are going to get. All it tells us is how the word “true” works: a sentence is “true” if and only if what the sentence says is the case. “Snow is white” is true iff snow is white.  What it doesn’t give us is a mechanism for ascertaining the truth of the sentence. What Davidson is saying is that the realist intuition is true, but that’s as far as it goes.

But say we accept all this—is there not still something left to account for in coming to terms with the realist intuition? For, where did the realist intuition come from? Even if we don’t believe in various supernaturalisms, positing various kinds of “intuitive” faculties; even if we are naturalist through and through, that still means the realist intuition came from somewhere.

In fact, intuitive faculty explanations turn out to be the easy way out. To say that an intuition of some kind, some belief you have about this or that which you have no easy explanation to offer about its source, to say that it came from a “direct” relation to reality is to basically halt the explanatory sequence at that the claim of directness. Doing this changes the subject of explanation from “where did this particular belief come from?” to “what is this ‘direct relation’ exactly?” The former question is a perfectly understandable, naturalistic historical-rhetorical question. The latter question is a perfectly suitable, specifically epistemological question. If your interests are to move from questions anybody can answer to a disciplinary question only specialists can answer, then this performs the delimiting magic required. However, to delimit the field of inquiry in this manner—to construct “epistemology” as a subject that asks questions which are not historical-rhetorical—is to revert to a Cartesian-Kantian understanding of epistemology. Specifically, I am suggesting that direct-relations claims will at some point need to fall back on a faculty psychology, one that is anti-naturalistic.

So to return to the difficult historical-rhetorical question (rather than posing a different, non-natural question)—where does the realist intuition come from? What is it about the world that produces the sense that some things are true whether or not you believe them (like snow being white)? The answer that I think Davidson would suggest is that to use “the world” in stating the question has been what has misled us into creating philosophical realisms all these many years. There is a hidden, pernicious distinction in the question between “the world” and “us,” how “the world” is that produces something “in us.” For Davidson, the fact of successful communication presupposes triangulation, an inseparable triad of person-community-world. So the best answer about where the realist intuition comes from may be “it comes from the fact that a single person is typically successful in her communicative negotiations with other people and the world at large, and that the idea of ‘success’ presupposes an occasional unsuccess, which produces in the single person a sense that she might be, on occasion, corrected in her attempts at communication.” Or to put it more simply: “I feel like I’m right, but I have to allow for the fact that I might be wrong.” The realist intuition is just fallibilism. Philosophical realisms have been trying to convert our occasional wrongness about the world into a theory. When the topic has been truth, it has taken the guise of a certifying theorem that will convert historical-rhetorical justifications into irrefutable, infallible true statements that are impervious to further inquiry. But we have found out—so goes the Rortyan story about the march of 2500+ years of philosophical dialogue—that there is no theorem that will relate justification and truth in this way. There is no route from fallibility to infallibility.

What I’m calling rhetorical universalism is the claim that we are always and everywhere situated in a rhetorical web, and that this is true whether or not you believe it. Davidson’s arguments about triangulation, the disquotational theory of truth, the principle of charity, the rejection of the scheme/content distinction—all of these dovetail into a description of how communication must work for something called “communication” to be said to be happening at all. And since we agree that we do most of the time successfully communicate, it follows from this very simple fact that we are always situated in a historical-rhetorical community—that “rhetoric goes all the way down.” This truth has not always been recognized, would not have always been justified, would not have always been rhetorically effective. But there is nothing contradictory between holding these two things, just so long as you distinguish between two questions: Is it true? and Is it effective?

Are There Bad Questions?

Richard Rorty spent the last ten years of his life redacting some of his more controversial rhetorical strategies, which included endlessly apologizing for hyperbole. One of his favorite strategies was to say that there were bad questions: to pursue a certain line of thought was to put yourself on the path to a conversational cul-de-sac, ending in aporia, a seeming inability to get anybody to agree to an answer. This inability to find criteria that you could get people to agree on to explain what a good answer would look like was the tell-tale sign of a bad question. The “bad question” approach to philosophical disagreement is hiding in his earliest writing, but began to truly flower when Rorty first formulated the groundplan for Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature in 1970 with “Cartesian Epistemology and Changes in Ontology,” became solidified in that book, and most famously codified in the introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism. In that intro, the bad-question approach becomes entwined with another strategy Rorty came to embrace: the I-don’t-have-a-theory approach. “[The pragmatist theory of truth] says that truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting theory about” (CP xiii).

The ironic self-contradiction has always been plain to people, though most who have taken to pointing it out leave out the irony and what it means: the pragmatist theory of truth is one about why we won’t have an interesting theory about truth. That’s important, though I’m not sure Rorty always understood quite how important. For a page later he says, famously:

Pragmatists think that the history of attempts to isolate the Truth or the Good, or to define the word “true” or “good,” supports their suspicion that there is no interesting work to be done in this area. It might, of course, have turned out otherwise. People have, oddly enough, found something interesting to say about the essence of Force and the definition of “number.” They might have found something interesting to say about the essence of Truth. But in fact they haven’t. The history of attempts to do so, and of criticisms of such attempts, is roughly coextensive with the history of that literary genre we call “philosophy”—a genre founded by Plato. So pragmatists see the Platonic tradition as having outlived its usefulness. This does not mean they have a new, non-Platonic set of answers to Platonic questions to offer, but rather that they do not think we should ask those questions anymore. When they suggest that we not ask questions about the nature of Truth and Goodness, they do not invoke a theory about the nature of reality or knowledge or man which says that “there is no such thing” as Truth or Goodness. Nor do they have a “relativistic” or “subjectivist” theory of Truth or Goodness. They would simply like to change the subject. (CP xiv)

This “I have no theory” approach gets broadened into “and neither arguments nor theses,” as when he said in the late-70s, “Non-Kantian philosophers like Heidegger and Derrida are emblematic figures who not only do not solve problems, they do not have arguments or theses” (CP 93). This eventually turns into his claim that Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity contains no arguments (evidence to the contrary). The interrelationship between what Rorty means by “theory,” “argument,” and “thesis” at any given moment can be parsed, and I think it would show that it depends on which direction he’s facing—whether towards Platonists, who think we must have a theory, or towards pragmatists, who think they are optional. This can be a complicated needle to thread (principally because it involves the fact that people have, e.g., selves though having a theory or thesis about that fact is optional), but to make the first pass in knitting the row, I would point out that Rorty doesn’t mention who finds the essence of Force or definition of “number” interesting. Because I certainly don’t. There are two different audiences for “number” and then “truth.” In the former case, the audience is likely mathematicians. In the latter case, Rorty’s audience is professional philosophers. And it is those who disagree with how interesting results about truth have been. So what does Rorty mean be “interesting”?

Rorty usually means by “interesting” in these contexts “discernable effect on people’s lives.” In the case of numbers, though non-mathematicians could care less, the fact that mathematics professors do and keep producing results that pan out into the warp of society means that the woof of what they do has interest. This is not the case with “truth” and “good” as of yet, for Rorty’s claim is that inquiry into Truth has not helped people produce more true statements. And by and large (emphasis on the “large”) this is true. The trouble is that Rorty has to admit that for philosophers, inquiry into Truth has helped them produce more true statements—for example, Davidson’s claim that “most of our beliefs are true.” This, as Rorty admits, is interesting and could not have been done without the context of logical positivism and their unacknowledged Platonic goals.

Being forced to face this equivocation in his rhetorical stances, Rorty began to finally admit that he does have theses, or theories, or pictures, of this or that philosophical-looking kind of object (“the self” or “reality” or “experience” or “language”). This means a disentangling of the bad-question approach and no-theory approach. “I have no theory” is really code for “you are going to be really disappointed when I tell you what it is…,” and this because of the Platonic expectations typically carried by people asking for one. But this means that “bad question” isn’t inherent, but rather a conversational stability produced by the instability of criteria for what counts as a good answer. Rorty can answer the question of what truth is, but because of the wildly ranging differences of opinion over what it is good for, it will seem a bad answer to somebody. The light in which Rorty’s answer, or anybody’s, can appear good is a stipulative light—“if for the moment we agree on X, Y, and Z, then this theory will satisfy it.” Rorty’s stipulation on truth has been the stipulation that truth, properly speaking (which is to say “for the occasion of my theory”), is a semantic and radically non-epistemic concept. That is not the only way we use the word “true,” but when push comes to shove, we should stop trying to incorporate those uses, e.g. the endorsing use, into our theory of truth because doing so is what leads to bad questions that we can’t seem to answer, or would have any practical consequences even if we could (like how we know when “snow is white” corresponds to the fact that snow is white). When Rorty would say, “That’s a bad question we shouldn’t ask,” he was suggesting there might be other, more profitable questions to discuss. And when Rorty gave an answer to the bad question, e.g. a disquotational theory of truth, it was intended shut down avenues of thought that have proven interminable cul-de-sacs (hence the epithet for disquotationalists of “deflationists” and, more generally on Platonic questions, “quietists”).

Rorty had begun sorting out these equivocations and changes in stances in his last ten years, but in Rorty’s reply to Jaroslav Peregrin in his installment to the Living Library of Philosophers, Rorty says most clearly what I’ve articulated above (and what produced the impetus to further articulate this point on the scope of his writing):

I should also have been careful not to invoke Wittgenstein’s contrast between “advancing theses” and “practicing therapy.” Doing the former now seems to me a perfectly legitimate, and often useful, therapeutic technique. Peregrin cites Wittgenstein’s claim that he was “in a sense making propaganda for one style of thinking as opposed to another.” He says that this would be a good description of my preferred mode of philosophical activity. I am happy to accept the suggestion, but less happy about this suggestion that “neither Wittgenstein nor Rorty thinks that it is possible to give a theory answering ‘philosophical questions’.”

Consider Davidson’s thesis that most of our beliefs must be true, or Brandom’s inferentialist theory about the origin of singular terms. Such theses and theories provide answers to questions like, “Well, what will we say about the relation between language and nonlanguage, once we abandon the familiar ‘realist’ account?” By providing the pragmatist with such answers, they facilitate his propagandizing efforts. Not everybody feels it necessary to pose such questions seriously, but when somebody does it is nice to be able to gratify her. Though sometimes it works best to say, “that’s a bad question, one that we pragmatists don’t ask,” with some interlocutors it is more effective to reply, “here’s an answer to that question, since you insist on asking it.” (The Philosophy of Richard Rorty 247-8)

If I had to speculate on what most produced this change in Rorty, I would have to say it was the work of his student, Robert Brandom. Rorty grew up, philosophically speaking, on Davidson, who was at Princeton for a time in the late 60s. Rorty spent much of the 60s retooling as an analytic philosopher, which meant falling in love with Sellars and becoming acquainted with Davidson’s cast of mind. Rorty was left to his own devices after Davidson left, and the formative 70s—when Rorty was drawing out the consequences of Sellars, Quine, and Davidson—were also the years Brandom was at Princeton, ’72-’77.

Rorty’s fall from analytic-grace was initially a souring with “system,” with the hopes of pay-off attending all the work that must be done to create a system. Rorty was first and foremost a voracious reader, and he loved reading systems in the hopes there has a hidden source of power in them (he wrote his master’s thesis and dissertation on Whitehead). In the end, I think Rorty liked reading too much—sitting at a desk, pouring energy into getting the system just right, didn’t seem appealing because it took him out of the library stacks too long (or away from the forests where he loved bird-watching). And combine this with his reading of so many systems, whether Kant’s or Hegel’s or Carnap’s or Whitehead’s (or Dewey’s, for that matter), all claiming to have the hiddern power, and all of them contradicting each other, and you have a recipe for someone with a pretty good self-justification for not writing a system himself. Rorty’s disagreement with Davidson throughout his career pretty much amounts to the fact that Davidson always wanted to write a system, but never got around to it—so Rorty would always wonder about the aspiration, since the work he was doing in essays was so good itself. Brandom, however, is a brilliant systematizer, and has done in Making It Explicit what Davidson was never able to do and Rorty never thought worth doing. From the time of that book's publication in 1994, you can see a slow slide in Rorty’s responses to Brandom, beginning with a queasy reaction to his rehabilitiation of “representation” to a final “I still don’t think regular people need a system, but if you want one, get a load of this…totally worth it.”

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Addendum on Pirsig

What does Pirsig think about bad questions and systems?

I think it’s important to notice the course of events and presentation. In ZMM, Pirsig describes the S/O Dilemma as an aporia created by a previous agreement on the terms of debate. Pirsig later describes “truth traps,” on the analogy of the “old South Indian Monkey Trap”—which is similar to Chinese finger-cuffs—and interprets the Japenese word “mu” as “unask the question.”

And then ZMM ends (there’s a chance I might be forgetting something). The trick is that Pirsig offers a few half-hearted stabs at sysematizing his thoughts about Quality (don’t forget the diagram in Ch. 20), but the point of the story doesn’t appear to be a replacement system, but rather the resurrection of Phaedrus after chasing down the ghost of reason to Plato. When we move to Lila, I think we should pay close attention to how the Metaphysics of Quality is introduced. Pirsig quickly presents us with the quandry of SOM, a sort of recapitulation of the point of ZMM, and begins to describe his metaphysical answers. What happens then is that Rigel intercedes and objects (Ch. 6). Pirsig then bemoans his answers given, and the problem turns out to be a pernicious understanding of virtue—Pirsig let Rigel and the Victorians decide the terms of debate (the definition of the terms) and so lost before the fight even began.

The Metaphysics of Quality takes flight after a conversational difficulty. Pirsig writes that Phaedrus “realized that sooner or later he was going to have to stop carping about how bad subject-object metaphysics was and say something positive for a change” (Lila 123, Ch. 9). Why? Because “he had already violated the nothingness of mystic reality” (124), he’d already said something positive rather than sticking to the via negativa that mystics, particularly in the West, typically force themselves to stick to, a route that after Hegel (and particularly Adorno) became more and more prominent in non-theological metaphysics, too. Pirsig realizes that he has to say something, even that saying things are good. And this is where the presentation is interesting. The two paragraphs run like this:

By even using the term “Quality” he had already violated the nothingness of mystic reality. The use of the term “Quality” set up a pile of questions of its own that have nothing to do with mystic reality and walks away leaving them unaswered. Even the name, “Quality,” was a kind of definition since it tended to associate mystic reality with certain fixed and limited understandings. Already he was in trouble. Was the mystic reality of the universe really more immanent in the higher-priced cuts of meat in the butcher shop? These were “Quality” meants weren’t they? Was the butcher using the term incorrectly? Phaedrus had no answers.

. . . [ellipsis Pirsig’s] That was the problem this morning too, with Rigel. Phaedrus had no answers. If you’re going to talk about Quality at all you have to be ready to answer someone like Rigel. You have to have a ready-made Metaphysics of Quality that you can snap at him like some catechism. Phaedrus didn’t have a Catechism of Quality and that’s why he got hit. (124)

Pirsig considers metaphysics to be a good thing to do because it gives you an answer to people like Rigel, people who insist on certain questions. The analogy with Catholic practices in particular highlights what Pirsig has in mind. “Catechism” is from Greek roots that mean an “indoctrination.” This has bad connotations to our ears now, as does the other name Catholics have for it: dogma. But all Pirsig is highlighting is how what he is lacking is a systematic way to keep things straight in his line of thought, and how to answer people who press him.

Pirsig immediately goes on to analogize metaphysics with chess, and writes this:

Trying to create a perfect metaphysics is like trying to create a perfect chess strategy, one that will win every time. You can’t do it. It’s out of the range of human capability. No matter what position you take on a metaphysical question someone will always start asking questions that will lead to more positions that lead to more questions in this endless intellectual chess game. The game is supposed to stop when it is agreed that a particular line of reasoning is illogical. This is supposed to be similar to a checkmate. But conflicting positions go on for centuries without any such checkmate being agreed upon. (125)

I’m not sure Pirsig ever comments further on the purpose of this paragraph. But we might notice that Pirsig’s subsumption of “reasonable” to “good” from ZMM should still be in effect, which may explain why “illogic” does not always hold sway. And further, we might imagine that Pirsig did have his Catechism of Quality at the ready when Rigel comes calling—would Rigel have been blown away? Should he have? There is no indication in these early pages, and particularly with the above paragraph, that Pirsig believes that had Phaedrus the MoQ ready to snap, it would have changed Rigel’s mind. It would have, rather, continued the conversation (until, perhaps, Rigel tired out first). Consider, too, the fact that when Rigel returns at the close, there’s no indication that any of Phaedrus’ “answers” are what lead Rigel to come back (for more on this curious aspect see my “Prospectus”).

What sometimes gets lost in metaphysical system-building is the person doing the building, and what the building is for. For Pirsig, there is a strong indication that metaphysics is for keeping yourself straight in conversation—consider Pirsig’s introduction to Lila’s Child where he picks up the chess metaphor again and says that “real chess is the game you play with your neighors. Real chess is ‘muddling through.’ Real chess is the triumph of mental organization over complex experience. And so is real philosophy” (viii). “Muddling through” is one of Dewey’s favorite images, one that Rorty loved to promote. Between Pirsig’s lament about getting broad-sided by Rigel and the Catechism of Quality, there’s Pirsig’s chapter on metaphysical platypi—the outcome of previously made cuts in the metaphysical firmament, previously made choices about which questions deserve answers. Pirsig says early in that chapter that “saying that a Metaphysics of Quality is false and a subject-object metaphysics is true is like saying that rectangular coordinates are true and polar coordinates are false” (Lila 115, Ch. 8). Both are used, are determined better or worse, relative to the purpose with which you are using them. The figure standing there weighing the options between the two alternatives is the philosopher, who sometimes goes missing in the attempt to limn the structure of reality.

And if someone insists on asking whether Quality is in the subject or object? Just say, “both—the object’s made out of inorganic, and maybe biological static patterns of Quality, and for the subject just tack on some intellectual and/or social static patterns of Quality.” And then you have your answer to a bad question. The questions won’t stop, but do they ever?

Blake and the Dialectic of Enlightenment

This is a fairly uninteresting piece, gerrymandered together out of reading Blake, Horkheimer and Adorno (H/A), and a Romanticist named Mark Lussier (for a class reflection in ecocriticism). In my understanding, H/A formulated one of the most thorough articulations of the post-Rousseauian longing for total revolution, a phrase borrowed from Bernard Yack. I think this longing is one of the most important conceptual pieces to understanding much about modern thought. Once one identifies society as the problem and pervasive, you begin to wish it would all go away--somehow. English Romanticism contains this longing, but like Rorty, I see something else going on, too. I think American Romanticism--Emerson--does much to overcome the problem of this longing, and I take it to be the tension between what Emerson termed "solitude and society" and the identification of that tension as power.

There isn't any of that here, but what Harold Bloom calls Emerson's "dialectics of power" has echoes in this discussion of people "across the pond" (as we stuffy litcrits apparently like to say), and what I identify below as Blake's sly humbling through metonymy is Emerson's mode in Nature. So while below I suggest that Blake's Platonism can't break through H/A's formulation of the dialectic, the real problem isn't Blake's Platonism (which I take to be ironic like Emerson's), but the formulation--the longing--itself. In Blake, the dialectics of power that shirks this longing shows up as the dialectic between Poets and Priests found in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, also not discussed here. To understand this dialectic, between self-alone and self-among-others, it helps to translate Blake's categories into Bloom's: poetry and belief. Santayana helps beautifully with this, too: "Poetry is called religion when it intervenes in life, and religion, when it merely supervenes upon life, is seen to be nothing but poetry" (Interpretations of Poetry and Religion v). Working out the involution of that sentence will move one far towards understanding what Rorty means by metaphors as the catalyst of cultural change and his public/private distinction.

What I have left to work out in these stories is the relationship between mathematics (an enemy common to H/A in the Dialectic of Englightenment and Heidegger in, e.g., "The Age of the World Picture") and the ironic Platonism I find in Romantics from Blake and Emerson to Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison. I suspect that I find their Platonism ironic precisely because Platonism took the path of method identified with mathematics, and that this path ironically transformed into materialism in the New Science (an irony charted by Blumenberg)--hence, the needed irony of a return to Plato and Greek idealism.

References are to an article by Lussier, "Blake's Deep Ecology," in Studies in Romanticism Fall 1996 (my pagination is not coordinate to the hardcopy). The H/A translation of the Dialectic of Englightenment used throughout, except one place noted, is to the new Jephcott translation.

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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The story Horkheimer and Adorno tell about the history of thought is compressed and dense, but one of its central components is that “in thought, human beings distance themselves from nature in order to arrange it in such a way that it can be mastered” (Horkheimer and Adorno 31). What Horkheimer and Adorno fear is the instrumentalization of thought, the turning of thought into merely a tool: “blindly pragmatized thought loses its transcending quality and, its relation to truth.”[fn.1] The disturbing thing in Horkheimer and Adorno’s picture is that once the dialectical path is stepped upon, there is no getting off until the bottom. Like Marx’s sense that once the division of labor is made, the rest of history is but an extension of that first moment, it is difficult to find in Horkheimer and Adorno where the wrong but civilization-creating turn was. What they term “enlightenment” is out to destory myth, but it is a hopeless battle: “Just as myths already entail enlightenment, with every step enlightenment entangles itself more deeply in mythology” (8). So the question is: can we turn back the clock? Can we break the dialectic of enlightenment?

Mark S. Lussier has suggested that Blake has, indeed, formulated a way through. By driving straight at Blake’s dualism between humanity and nature, and suggesting that they are deeply symbiotic, Lussier hopes to capitalize on Blake’s formulation of the fall from innocence that marks the birth of modernity Blake stands astride. And much like Horkheimer and Adorno, Lussier highlights Blake’s fingering of Bacon for complicity in the act. Horkheimer and Adorno say that “Nature, before and after quantum theory, is what can be registered mathematically…” (18). Mathematics bring the “self-satisfaction of knowing in advance” (18) which is ironically coupled with the “apotheosis of advancing thought” (18). Galileo is associated with the former and is the treatment of “nature as self-repetition” (12). But in its repetitious nature, there is the endless scribbling to reinstate math’s preplanned plan—experimentation, of which Bacon is the father. Scientific thought advances in empirical experimentation, just as math makes the experiments less and less interesting.

Lussier references one of Blake’s handy lists of mathematizing, empirical culprits, “Bacon, Locke & Newton” in Milton, but I’d like to refocus on that same list in Jerusalem: “I am your Rational Power!/Am I not Bacon & Newton & Locke who teach Humility to Man!” (Jerusalem, Ch. 3, v. 16-17) This line tells us something important about the spirit of Bacon and enlightenment—they teach humility before nature. Rather than treating nature as a god to be fought with, as the myths show us, we must acknowledge nature’s power. We must bow respectfully before it and simply trace its contours. But through humility, we gain power. Horkheimer and Adorno’s reading of Odysseus help unlock this process: “The formula for Odysseus’s cunning is that the detached, instrumental mind, by submissively embracing nature, renders to nature what is hers and thereby cheats her” (Horkheimer and Adorno 45). By reducing ourselves, we reduce nature—much along the lines of Lussier’s reversal of Blake’s formula: “just as ‘nature is barren’ in the absence of man, so too, by necessity of the proverb’s own symmetries, man is barren in the absence of nature” (Lussier 5). This reduction of nature’s power by draining ourselves of our own functions along the lines of Harold Bloom’s figure of kenosis, and Bloom assigns the trope of metonymy to this poetic maneuver—the trope Blake is constantly using, as in his use of “Bacon.” By this logic, the enlightenment stands humbled before nature, promising to experiment and test nature slowly, in order to circumscribe nature with mathematics. And Blake humbles himself before “Bacon & Newton & Locke” in order to circumscribe them with his poetry.

The difficulty in breaking the dialectic Horkheimer and Adorno map out still lies before us, though: “Any attempt to break the compulsion of nature by breaking nature only succumbs more deeply to that compulsion” (Horkheimer and Adorno 9). Even a humbling is a succumbing to the dialectic. It isn’t clear how Blake’s Platonism can save him, for it still posits a dichotomy between humanity and nature, and even if they are symbiotic, the trouble is that humanity would rather debase themselves by instrumentalizing their thought than suffer nature’s tyranny. “Human beings have always had to choose between their subjugation to nature or its subjugation to the self” (25). In such a dark formulation of the problem of enlightenment, it’s difficult to see how a regression to Platonism, the earlier metaphysics which was the first step past myths (which inexorably produced it), is the way through. And as Lussier, quoting a deep ecology mission statement, agrees, “nothing short of a total revolution in consciousness will be of lasting use” (Lussier 5). The trouble that even stunted Horkheimer and Adorno was in how to conceive of it.

To ferret out this problem in Blake’s Platonism, I would reread a selection of the Book of Thel that Lussier glosses:

Ah! Thel is like a watry bow. and like a parting cloud.
Like a reflection in a glass. like shadows in the water.
Like dreams of infants. like a smile upon an infants face.
Like the doves voice, like transient day, like music in the air; (I, v. 8-11)

Lussier says that, “in an interesting reversal,” “it is consciousness, and not nature, that ‘mirrors’” (4). This strikes me as just wrong, and it signficantly elides the dialectical danger of Platonic dualism. Lussier wants the reversal so he can say, “See—nature and man need each other so that neither is barren.” But the reversal is not strongly tuned in Lussier’s direction. Noting Bloom’s comment that “Thel” is Greek for “will,” Lussier, I think correctly, identifies Thel with consciousness. But whereas Lussier is focused on Thel’s transformations through the repeated and varied simile, I think one needs to slow down and look at what exactly Thel is like, particularly “a reflection in a glass” and “shadows in the water.” Thel, consciousness, is “like a reflection in a glass”—consciousness is paired with “reflection,” which means nature, as earlier in the Vision of the Last Judgment, is the mirroring glass. “Shadows in the water” is even more Platonically disturbing for consciousness—the water, nature, again reflects back consciousness, and what it reflects are transitory shadows, like those in the Plato’s Cave.

It isn’t clear to me that Blake proposes a total revolution, nor is it clear that he even wants to escape Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialectic. In the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he says “Without Contraries is no progression.” (Plate 3) An other-worldly, Platonic-like answer would be to shunt progression, then, to avoid the dialectical devolution portrayed by Horkheimer and Adorno entirely. But Blake says these contraries are “necessary to Human existence.” (Plate 3) The escape of an Edenic Heaven is always paired with the energy and vitality of Hell and Milton’s Satan. For Blake says, “this history has been adopted by both parties” (Plate 5).

Endnotes

[1]This is the old translation by John Cumming, which I greatly prefer to Edmund Jephcott’s translation: “thought in its headlong rush into pragmatism is forfeiting its sublating character, and therefore its relation to truth” (xvi).