Sunday, January 31, 2010
Bolano's Nazi Literature in the Americas (2)
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Bolano's Nazi Literature in the Americas (1)
Friday, January 22, 2010
Rorty and Heidegger: Narrative and Essentialism
In his essay, Heidegger, Kundera, and Dickens (page 69 of Essays on Heidegger and Others), Richard Rorty writes, “. . . In 1935 Heidegger saw Stalin’s Russia and Roosevelt’s America as ‘metaphysically speaking, the same.’ In 1945 he saw the Holocaust and the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe as two instances of the same phenomenon. As Habermas puts it, ‘under the leveling gaze of the philosopher of Being even the extermination of the Jews seems merely an event equivalent to many others.’ Heidegger specializes in rising above the need to calculate relative quantities of human happiness, in taking a larger view. For him, successful and unsuccessful adventures – Gandhi’s success and Dubcek’s failure, for example – are just surface perturbations, distractions from essence by accidents, hindrances to an understanding of what is really going on.
“Heidegger’s refusal to take much interest in the Holocaust typifies the urge to look beneath or behind the narrative of the West for the essence of the West, the urge which separates the philosophers from the novelists. Someone dominated by this urge will tell a story only as part of the process of clearing away appearance in order to reveal reality. Narrative is, for Heidegger, always a second-rate genre – a tempting but dangerous one. At the beginning of Being and Time, Heidegger warned against the temptation to confuse ontology with a story which relates beings to other beings. At the end of his career he takes back his earlier suggestion that what he called ‘the task of thinking’ might be accomplished by narrating the History of Being, by telling a story about how metaphysics and the West exhausted their possibilities. In 1962 he cautions himself that he must cease to tell stories about metaphysics, must leave metaphysics to itself, if he is ever to undertake this task.
“Despite this suspicion of epic and preference for lyric, the ability to spin a dramatic tale was Heidegger’s greatest gift. What is most memorable and original in his writings, it seems to me, is the new dialectical pattern he finds in the canonical sequence of Western philosophical texts. I think that his clue to this pattern was Nietzsche’s interpretation of the attempts at wisdom, contemplation, and imperturbability by the people whom he called ‘the ascetic priests’ as furtive and resentful expressions of those priests’ will to power.”
COMMENT: Rorty disagrees with Heidegger’s belief that the West has fallen, or collapsed, or become exhausted. Earlier, Rorty writes, “Heidegger and, more generally, the kind of post-Heideggerian thinking which refuses to see the West as a continuing adventure, I want to put forward Charles Dickens as a sort of anti-Heidegger.” I sort of see what Rorty has in mind by using Dickens. Although I would prefer a more modern example, Dickens’ oeuvre fits the West as Rorty’s “continuing adventure.”
Heidegger would have enjoyed Battlestar Galactica. The collapse he envisioned in his philosophy is graphically illustrated. Technology turns against humanity with a vengeance. And as humans continue to squabble amongst themselves, we are reminded in each episode, of the small number of humans who remain in the Universe. Despite that, the Cylons, the robots who “evolved” have more attractive personalities than the humans. The end of the series is near (as far as I’ve watched) and the number of Cylons has also been reduced. If I had to choose just one set of beings to save (based upon what the writers of Battlestar Galactica have shown me), I would select the Cylons. What does about the philosophical beliefs of these writers?
The Battlestar Galactica writers anthropomorphized Technology, but Heidegger reified it, as he did “The West.” The West cannot be literally reified. I know people do, or think that they do, but they create imaginary images that bear no reality. Someone disagreeing with me could say the West is this and this and this, and go on enumerating whatever it is that he would put in a category he considers “the West,” but then it is no longer a unity. There is no essence to it. Why stop with such an enumeration? Why not go on and list everything that has ever existed?
Is there a definition of “the West” we can all sign up to? I think of Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations at this point. Would he disagree with what I have written? He refers to the various civilizations, but if we read what they are, they prominently include “religion,” for example. The Orthodox Civilization was shaped by Orthodox Christianity and the West by Catholic and Protestant Christianity, but is that not the “Narrative” of the West rather than its “Essence”? Huntington was not interested in establishing essences of the various “civilizations,” only narratives, only where they have brought themselves by the point in time in which he wrote his book.
Who in America today could read Spengler’s or Heidegger’s narratives of “The West” and recognize themselves or their beliefs? Which American could read Heidegger and say, “wretched man that I am, who can save me from this narrative of failure and collapse?” No, we won’t say that. We may very well say “those people over there have caused lots of trouble.” If we could only render them inactive we could move ahead smartly and progressively, but we are a long way from failure or collapse. And Rorty would interject at this point, “and don’t you see? That is the continuing adventure of The West.”
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Rorty, Heidegger, and whether language can be transcendent
Monday, January 18, 2010
Heidegger and authentic thinking
On page 44 of Essays On Heidegger and Others, Richard Rorty quotes Heidegger to say, “History only begins when beings themselves are expressly drawn up in their unconcealment and conserved in it, only when the conservation is conceived on the basis of questioning regarding beings as such. The primordial disclosure of being as a whole, the question concerning beings as such, and the beginning of Western history are the same.”
Rorty then goes on to explain what he thinks Heidegger means: “I interpret this as saying that prehistorical people living in the west may have played sophisticated language-games, written epics, built temples, and predicted planetary motions, but they didn’t count either as ‘thinking’ or as ‘historical’ until somebody asked ‘Are we doing the right things?’ ‘Are our social practices the right ones to engage in?’
“Thought, in Heidegger’s honorific sense of the term, begins with a willing suspension of verificationism. It begins when somebody starts asking question such that nobody, including himself or herself, can verify the answers for correctness. These are questions like ‘What is Being?’ or ‘What is a cherry blossom?’ Only when we escape from the verificationist impulse to ask ‘How can we tell a right answer when we hear one?’ are we asking questions which Heidegger thinks worth asking. . . .”
COMMENT: Taking the above second and third paragraphs together we see that the sort of thinking Heidegger believes is authentic is the sort for which verification doesn’t exist. An engineer might figure out how to build a pyramid out of stones, but that sort of figuring wouldn’t qualify as authentic thinking for Heidegger. Not even the sort of thinking that created the milieu and framework within which Pharaohs felt a need to construct such pyramids to secure their happiness in an afterlife would qualify as authentic thinking. If we accept the theses of Sir James G. Frazer (in The Golden Bough), we can see that a sort of pragmatism went into the creation of the Egyptian religion. Certain things pleased the gods, that is had a beneficial result, and others didn’t. Certain actions worked, or worked most of the time, and others didn’t.
Later on the Egyptian and indeed all other religions were rejected by atheists, but did these atheists engage in “authentic thinking”? Not the ones who followed Darwin. Darwin was a sort of engineer in such matters. He studied the fossil record and certain animals such as pigeons, and drew conclusions based upon that evidence. He accounted for all animal life that he saw or envisioned and developed a principle from his observations: the creation of species through natural selection. Modern day atheists follow his “verifications,” but such following (and probably not Darwin’s thinking itself) does not comprise authentic thinking.
Taking one of Rorty’s examples, Marx engaged in authentic thinking when he questioned the “social practices” of his time – unless we call him an “engineer” for correcting the authentic thinking of Hegel. But let’s for the sake of discussion assume that Marx did engage in “authentic thinking” about the social practices of his time. The result of this thinking resulted in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, The Poverty of Philosophy, Wage-Labor and Capital, Manifesto of the Communist Party, and his magnum opus, Capital. Thus, if Marx was an authentic thinker, we see that all those who came after him, who sought to apply his philosophy, were being engineers. However much they sought to promulgate his ideas and however persuasive their arguments, they were not engaged in “authentic thinking” but in applying, as engineers, the authentic thinking of another.
But what about the person who developed the ability to think authentically who happened to have lived in the USSR during the Stalinist period. He might have thought authentically, even rethought Hegel’s and Marx’s philosophies and been more authentic about his thoughts than Marx was about his, but the times would have been against him. If he voiced his authentic thoughts, he might well have been shipped off to a Gulag, but being a philosopher, which is what a person capable of authentic thinking is, he probably would have thought through all the possibilities resulting from speaking his thoughts and decided to keep them to himself.
But all those non-authentic thinkers who followed Marx as engineers would have rejoiced in the oneness they felt with the master. They would have joyfully burned at the stake any authentic thinker who disagreed with him. There was no premium on authentic thinking in the days of Stalin, nor is there today -- or any other day. We today in the U.S. are successful not because we think authentically, or admire those who do, but because we are very good at applying the innovative (whether authentic or not) thoughts of others. We value the entrepreneur, the person who can apply thoughts (whether authentic or not) in such a way as to result in a profit.
Consider the authentic thinking of Jesus Christ, e.g., “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. . . Blessed are the meek for they will inherit the earth. . . .Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. . . Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” What do those words mean? However the engineers apply themselves to their exegesis, they slip away. The engineers can’t apply this authentic thinking in any very practical way. And if one of them tries, whatever he comes up with is sure to be contradicted by the conclusions of some other engineer. Look now at Paul at any part of Paul’s writings. He is often called the real founder of Christianity because he thought as an engineer about what Christ taught. We are comfortable with Paul because he tells us what to do, but what are we to do with Jesus Christ, that is the difficult question Christians have to grapple with – unless they would rather follow some engineer who filters the teachings of Jesus in some pragmatic way.
And what do we do with Heidegger? That is a question that more of us as time goes on decide to grapple with. He is being applied but the steps taken in the application are mysterious. How does Derrida derive himself from Heidegger for example? And what of Heidegger’s students, Arendt, Lowith, Jonas and Marcuse, whom Richard Wolin sees as deriving from Heidegger, but they do not – or do so only grudgingly? In the end, everyone becomes an engineer. The “authentic thought” is nothing, so the thinker thinks, unless it can be applied; so Arendt, Lowith, Jonas Marcuse and others set about applying Heidegger or applying their “own” thoughts (only coincidentally related to Heidegger’s), but they did it, notice, in different ways. Heidegger spent much of his academic life seeking to think authentically and did not worry about being applied – except now and again usually during an interview, and he often sounded (and probably was) out of his element.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Rorty on Heidegger's world-view(s)
On page 42 of Essays on Heidegger and Others, Rorty writes, “. . . after seeming to contrast ontology and world-view, Heidegger goes on to say the following: ‘It is just because this positivity – that is, the relatedness to beings, to world that is, Dasein that is – belongs to the essence of the world-view, and thus in general to the formation of the world-view, that the formation of a world-view cannot be the task of philosophy. To say this is not to exclude but to include the idea that philosophy itself is a distinctive primal for [ein ausgezeichnete Urform] of world-view. Philosophy can and perhaps must show, among many other things, that something like a world-view belongs to the essential nature of Dasein. Philosophy can and must define what in general constitutes the structure of a world-view. But it can never develop and posit some specific world-view qua just this or that particular one.’
“But there is an obvious tension in this passage between the claim that philosophy ‘is a distinctive primal form of world-view’ and that ‘philosophy . . . can never develop and posit some specific world-view.’ Heidegger never tells us how we can be historical through and through and yet ahistorical enough to step outside our world-view and say something neutral about the ‘structure’ of all actual and possible world-views. . . .”
COMMENT: Rorty then goes on to put the matter in his “own jargon” in order to disagree with Heidegger, but if we leave this matter in Heidegger’s terms it makes excellent sense. To illustrate, after fighting an enormous number of battles against the Cylons, the Battlestar Galactica crew encounters another Battlestar, the Pegasus. The commanding officer of the Pegasus, Admiral Cain is superior in rank to Commander Adama and at first Adama accepts the new situation. Military protocol demands that Adama give way to Cain, but Cain has developed a very different “world-view” from Adama and his crew. Adama’s military background is in “obvious tension” with the world-view he and his crew developed in their fight against the Cylons. When Admiral Cain arrests two of Adama’s best men and plans to execute them, Adama has had enough. Adama’s “military world-view” gives way to his newer “Galactica against the Cylon world-view.” He is prepared to take the Galactica to war against the Pegasus unless Cain returns his men unharmed. This is a very “authentic” piece of writing. It illustrates Heidegger’s argument about “world-view.” At one time the crews of the Galactica and Pegasus were part of the same civilization and shared the same world-view, but after the Cylon attack they went their own ways and developed unique world-views; which as it turned out were not very compatible.
To use another example, consider the Christian Church. It is almost more accurate to call it the Christian Churches because so many different “world-views” have developed. We see the world-view-process at work in the earliest days. Paul and Barnabas were sent off on an evangelism mission, but the day came when the Paul realized that his “world-view” had diverged from the “world-view” of the church at Jerusalem and sought a meeting to reconcile their differences. They seemed to be largely reconciled, but reconciliation didn’t last. We are so used to “new world-views” being developed in the Christian Church that we no longer are alarmed about it. We don’t have Paul’s concern about ironing out all the differences and achieving unity. And the longer our churches are separated the more distinctive the world-views. Consider the differences between the Orthodox churches and the Western Christian Churches. Then consider the differences between the Lutheran and the Calvinistic Churches. The Western churches since the Peace of Westphalia in 1641 have been learning to accept each other. Still, we Christians do believe a meta-Christian-world-view exists. It comprises the thoughts of God as God thinks them. Some believe their particular church’s “world-view” equals the meta-Christian-world view. Others aren’t quite that presumptuous. All are, more or less, tolerant of the others. The secularism that grew out of the Christian Church has made “tolerance” one of its cornerstones.
As Rorty worked through this subject he was not willing to let go of the idea that philosophically their “could be only one.” Perhaps there could be different histories, but the job of philosophy was to cut through those differences and find the one true ontology. For Heidegger the one truth is that there have always been and probably will always be multiplicities of world-views, weltanshauungen.
But what of Fukuyama’s Liberal-Democratic World-View? Isn’t that view “one”? It is in a sense, a meta-world-view based on the “tolerance” developed in the West since the Peace of Westphalia. It works well on the level of the individual nations much as the Christian Church works well on the level of the individual denominations. Much of the world seems amenable to the Western sort of Tolerance. The Islamic Civilization seems to be a hold-out at present but Fukuyama thinks they will eventually come around. An article in Foreign Policy, Jan/Feb 2010 seems to support that view: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/04/the_islamists_are_not_coming
I haven’t watched all the Battlestar Galactica episodes yet, but my observation is that the Cylons, with their single World-View dominated the humans who had multiple world views. The Cylons could operate in accordance with a single plan. Humans couldn’t manage that level of solidarity. Peace between the Cylons and Humans won’t be achieved until the Cylons become more human – and learn to squabble amongst themselves.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Rorty and "The End of History"
Heidegger, politics and despair
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Heidegger's Linguistic chauvinism
I am ready to abandon my investigation of Heidegger’s Nazism. I have most of the major attacks against Heidegger written in or translated into English, and while I haven’t read them all cover to cover I have read enough. I have had difficulties with these anti-Heideggerian authors as I have indicated in earlier notes. I found the arguments of the pro-Heideggerian, Julian Young, the most convincing and satisfying. Young in his Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism, concludes with an “Afterward.” He writes, “This work will no doubt be received by some as a whitewash perpetrated by a ‘Heideggerian’. Let me say in anticipation, therefore, two things. First, that I did not start out with any such intention. On the contrary, though I had long been convinced of the essential ‘innocence’ of Heidegger’s pre-1930 philosophy, with respect to the later work I was initially convinced by the accounts of, in particular, Wolin and Losurdo – which is why, in chapters 4 and 5, I have made them central targets for criticism. The conclusions I have presented here were arrived at, even somewhat reluctantly, only after long exposure to the texts made my preconceived picture of things no longer tenable. The spirit of Gelassenheit, the ability to let the texts speak for themselves, to ‘let them be’, arrived only slowly.”
In Young’s “Second Point” he discusses an objection to Heidegger he has retained. I am not quite ready to abandon this one. It has to do with Heidegger’s “linguistic chauvinism. German cultural chauvinism was evident in Heidegger’s 1933 ideology, “Germany as uniquely the land of Dichter und Denker, poet and thinker.” That Heidegger continued to hold this view is evidence by an interview with Spiegel sometime after the war in which he said “[There is an] inner relationship of the German language with the language of the Greeks and with their thought. This has been confirmed for me today again by the French. When they begin to think, they speak in German, being sure that they could not make it with their own language.”
Young examines the evidence pertaining to this cultural or linguistic chauvinism and concludes that Heidegger maintained his belief that the German language was superior to all other European languages. Young finds later references in which Heidegger thought the Japanese language might be even better suited to philosophy – and a statement in which Heidegger said that “Descartes was ultimately a greater philosopher than either Kant or Hegel”; so Heidegger was at least ambivalent on the subject. Young, living in New Zealand doubted that Heidegger meant to denigrate English. “Given the close kinship of English and German this looks to be highly irrational. Heidegger’s disposition to privilege German over all other European languages really is, it has to be faced, irrational chauvinism.”
COMMENT: Heidegger was entitled in my view to take some pride in the number of philosophers that developed in Germany, primarily in Prussia which is interesting, although Heidegger himself was a Bavarian. But the French do have a philosophical history that is respectable. One thinks (at least I do) of Montaigne, Descartes, and Rousseau, but when one comes forward in time to look at the major philosophers of the 20th century, one finds German antecedents. Michel Foucault was influenced by Nietzsche. Derrida was influenced by Heidegger. Bourdieu was influenced by Marx. Lacan was influenced by Freud. So perhaps Heidegger had France in mind and simply dismissed the other European languages as not even measuring up to the French.
It is interesting that the American, Richard Rorty has created his own philosophy out of American Pragmatism. He was inspired by Pierce and James but moreso by Dewey and Davidson. It is interesting because Pragmatism seems especially suited to the American work ethic. It is a suitable philosophy for our “can do” Capitalistic Technology – which Heidegger hated.
A comparison of Anglo-American philosophy to German philosophy might be interesting. If Heidegger were to mention just some major names, he might assert that Kant, Hegel, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and cough, cough, cough, he himself, as much greater than the corresponding major names in Anglo American philosophy, perhaps Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Berkeley, Dewey, and Peirce. I would quibble at once asking why he didn’t include (in the list I made up for him :-) Marx – Marx, another Prussian, who while great in influence was also extremely great in causing harm. But I am merely quibbling. Probably Heidegger was right in his assertion that German philosophers have achieved the most in the philosophical traditions that the Greeks began. I will concede that to him.
But when we move into the realm of poetry I think Heidegger is in over his head. We Anglo-Americans have Shakespeare. Perhaps Holderlin was a poet for a destitute time, but Shakespeare invented the Human, if we are to believe Harold Bloom who wrote Shakespeare, The Invention of the Human. Bloom has some interesting arguments, and I half believe them. Heidegger doesn’t make any claims quite so grandiose about German poets as far as I know. He doesn’t seem to have liked Goethe as much as he did Holderlin – at least he doesn’t put Goethe forth as an example of German culture; so I will do it for him. If we advance Shakespeare as (in Bloom’s sense) the inventor of the human, how shall we advance Goethe? In The Sorrows of Young Werther, he offers good reasons to commit suicide. In Faust he dwells upon the idea of making a deal with the devil. Of course I am giving away my American pragmatic roots when I put the comparison in these terms, but . . . so be it.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
On Poets for destitute and other times
John Taratuta has left a new comment on your post "Poets for destitute times":
The concept of "universal salvation" seems to have floated back, oddly enough, by way of Heidegger or rather under Heidegger's influence.
'Anonymous Christian' is the concept introduced by the theologian Karl Rahner (1904 - 1984) a student of Heidegger, declares that "people who have never heard the Christian Gospel or even rejected it might be saved through Christ."
Another poem that seems to reflect some destitution of the spirit is "I AM" written by John Clare (1793 – 1864). It is believed to have been written in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum.
Lawrence replies,
Tillich also was a Universalist, if I recall correctly, but how much he was influenced by Heidegger in this regard, I can't see, but perhaps Rorty could (see below).
In regard to John Clare's poem "I Am," I would agree that it reflects "some destitution of the spirit" but don't think he or his poem fit the description as being for a destitute time. I take Heidegger to have an exalted view of "the poet for a destitute time." He liked Rilke, and thought Rilke wrote some important poetry and may have been for a destitute time, he said diplomatically, but time would tell.
Your invoking of Clare suggests a more egalitarian approach to the idea of "what is the poet for in a destitute time?" I assumed Heidegger had an elitist view and only Holderlin fulfilled what he had in mind. I have suggested Eliot and Milton as fulfilling the elitist qualification.
But if we insist on our right to borrow from Heidegger and then modify what we borrow as we see fit, we could take a more egalitarian view. We could declare that any poet who bemoaned the destitute times in which he lived was living up to the Heideggerian ideal, but I rather think Heidegger would have a problem with that. I think he would come closer to granting me Eliot and Milton, than he would granting Clare.
Consider a comment made by Rorty on page 19 of Essays on Heidegger and Others: "I would grant that Heidegger was, from early on, suspicious of democracy and of the 'disenchanted' world which Weber described. His thought was, indeed, essentially anti-democratic. But lots of Germans who were dubious about democracy and modernity did not become Nazis. Heidegger did because he was both more of a ruthless opportunist and more of a political ignoramus than most of the German intellectuals who shared his doubts. Although Heidegger's philosophy seems to me not to have specifically totalitarian implications, it does take for granted that attempts to feed the hungry, shorten the work day, etc., just do not have much to do with philosophy. For Heidegger, Christianity is merely a certain decadent form of Platonic metaphysics; the change from pagan to Christian moral consciousness goes unnoticed. The 'social gospel' side of Christianity which meant most to Tillich (a social democratic thinker who was nevertheless able to appropriate a lot of Heideggerian ideas and jargon) meant nothing to Heidegger."
Perhaps I infer too much, but just as feeding the hungry or shortening the work day would have meant nothing to Heidegger, I suspect that Clare's personal anguish would have meant nothing to him either.
On page 18 Rorty writes, "The pragmatist and Heidegger can agree that the poet and the thinker (in Heidegger's special 'elitist' senses of these terms) are the unacknowledged legislators of the social world. But whereas Heidegger thinks of the social world as existing for the sake of the poet and the thinker, the pragmatist thinks of it the other way around. For Dewey as for Hegel, the point of individual human greatness is its contribution to social freedom, where this is conceived of in the terms we inherit from the French Revolution." If Rorty is correct here then (I infer) "THE POET" is to ordinary poets what the ubermensche is to ordinary men. Personally, I'm more comfortable with the Poet in this role than the political leader. And I don't intend this as a cheap shot at Heidegger for having thought for a while that Hitler might be that great leader. Even if we concede that Heidegger probably had a leader in mind with the qualifications of Frederick the Great, and even if Frederick was as great as Thomas Carlyle thought he was, I would rather muddle through with the inferior Liberal-Democratic leadership we are accustomed to than risk the downside of totalitarianism.
In thinking further about Milton, his ambition was to write an epic poem, something to match The Iliad and The Aeneid. If that was his sole goal, then he might say it just happened that he lived in destitute times and it was merely coincidental that his poem might be seen as a metaphor for those times. Eliot too wanted to prove himself as a poet, to demonstrate his greatness, but he also lived in destitute times and could think of no other subject suitable to his task than the waste and confusion that followed World War One.
Milton wanted to write an Epic Poem and Eliot did not. Heidegger doesn't seem to have an exalted view of the epic poem. His poet will not seek to follow that ideal but will instead seek something else. Heidegger concludes his essay by writing, "Holderlin is the pre-cursor of poets in a destitute time. This is why no poet of this world era can overtake him . . ."
"If the precursor cannot be overtaken, no more can he perish; for his poetry remains as a once-present being. What occurs in the arrival gathers itself back into destiny. . . ."
Two American poets come to mind as having failed in these regards. They sought to write epic poems. The first was John Brown's Body written by Stephen Vincent Benet. He wrote the poem in 1928 about the destitute times of the Civil War; which Heidegger might say was doing things backwards. There is something prophetic in Holderlin's poetry. There is something historical in Benet's.
The second failure is Hart Crane's The Bridge. He had exalted ambitions but perhaps they never took on a form that he could truly believe in. This is from Wikipedia: "'Faustus and Helen' was part of a larger artistic struggle to meet modernity with something more than despair. Crane identified T. S. Eliot with that kind of despair, and while he acknowledged the greatness of The Waste Land, he also said it was 'so damned dead,' an impasse, and a refusal to see 'certain spiritual events and possibilities.' Crane's self-appointed work would be to bring those spiritual events and possibilities to poetic life, and so create 'a mystical synthesis of America.' This ambition would finally issue in The Bridge (1930), where the Brooklyn Bridge is both the poem's central symbol and its poetic starting point." Critics didn't like Crane's poem. And Crane evidently came to view it as a failure. Why would the negative poem about destitution, The Waste Land, succeed while his more positive poem about "spiritual events and possibilities" fail? Perhaps some of it had to do with Eliot's superior ability, but perhaps also it had something to do with Eliot reaching honestly into the abyss -- whereas Crane resolved to reach elsewhere, and in doing so wrote of what "ought to be" rather than what the abyss held. He might have succeeded had he truly resolve questions of the abyss, but I don't think he did. He was as destitute as John Clare, but rather than write about it as Clare did (dying in 1864 [in an asylum] 'after years addicted to poetical prosing'), he leaped off the aft end of a ship into it.
Monday, January 4, 2010
Poets for destitute times
I encountered Eliot's poetry long before I knew anything about him. I was very impressed by it. Perhaps Eliot had Fascistic tendencies. I read a biography and the first half of the first volume of his letters years ago but don't recall them. He was an aristocratic prig and an unpleasant personality. He whined a lot. In a review in the London Times of the second volume of his letters, the reviewer dealt with the whining by saying he really was sick and so was his wife. Furthermore, the reviewer adds, people who cared about him really did want to know.
The question of whether one should reject or at least demote a person's work when one learns his life has serious flaws is an interesting one. It has been dealt with almost continually in Western thinking. For example, Origen was a very important "church father" but he was also a very independent thinker and many of his ideas were later declared heretical, "universal salvation" was one such "heretical" idea. The Church couldn't reject him entirely. Many of the doctrines that the Church (Protestant as well as Catholic) still holds came from Origen. But Church leaders were cautious in dealing with his works.
One of the major controversies in the early Church was whether one could denounce Christianity, under duress, and later (after the coercive force was removed) recant the denouncement. The Donatists believed that a Church in which traditors both existed and dispensed the sacraments was no church, and baptism administered by traditors was no baptism. Traditors, surely, were eternally lost, but the Church eventually came around to the view that this denouncing, this cooperating with the coercive power, could not be an "unforgiveable sin" for had not Peter denounced Christ three times without losing his salvation?
And what of all the French as well as German traditors? Their sins weren't settled in Church Council, but they were settled in that Western tradition. A "secular council" was created to deal with them, the Nuremberg. Certain individuals, the coercers, were considered to have committed unforgiveable sins and executed. But those coerced, the traditors, were for the most part accepted back into non-Fascist societies as members in good standing. They were forgiven.
The question I was attempting to explore was first of all, what Heidegger had in mind when he asked "what are poets for in destitute times?" This essay of his was based on a lecture he delivered in 1946 on the 20th anniversary of Rilke's death. I doubt that Heidegger could have answered his own question in any definitive way. He liked Rilke, but said in his lecture Rilke was less of a poet than Holderlin; so only Holderlin measures up completely. I have the Penguin Classics edition entitled Selected Poems and Fragments, and can see, somewhat, why Heidegger appreciated him, but just because Holderlin was Heidegger's "Poet in a Destitute Time" doesn't mean we are stuck with this one example.
The Waste Land was the first poem that came to my mind when I searched for an Anglo-American "Poem" for a time of destitution. If instead of all the "critics" who wanted to tell us what Eliot's symbols and references were we had historians explaining this poem, then we would see, I believe, that it was of a piece with the destitute times in England and Europe in which Eliot lived. Eliot didn't go on being a poet for a destitute time, in my opinion, but he was when he wrote The Waste Land.
Another Poem that comes to mind is Paradise Lost. Surely Milton lived in a destitute time, and was the poet for it. What better subject for such a time than the loss of paradise? This was a great poem for the Revolutionary times in which Milton lived. Milton's critics both in the (Protestant) church and out of it are critical of Milton's heretical beliefs – some of which appear in his poem if we look in the right spots – and these "spots" are easier to find, if I recall correctly, than Fascist ideas in Being and Time.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
T. S. Eliot, a Heideggerian Poet?
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
"They called me the hyacinth girl."
––Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Oed' und leer das Meer.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations.
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying "Stetson!
"You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
"Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
"Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
"Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
"Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
"You! hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frere!"