tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88188116093687663942024-03-15T08:46:49.356+00:00Rethinking Weimarnotes on German philosophy of the Weimar era (1918-33) and visionary writingDr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.comBlogger58125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8818811609368766394.post-73334775132041842712019-12-10T11:27:00.000+00:002019-12-10T11:27:11.735+00:00Another Europe: my new blog<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Arial",sans-serif;">I have now launched a new blog on
European identity and culture, <b><a href="http://www.anothereurope.co.uk/" target="_blank">Another Europe</a></b>. I expect to post about every six weeks
and, as always, comments are welcome.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />Dr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8818811609368766394.post-48983139856085248442013-12-16T17:45:00.001+00:002013-12-16T19:01:42.250+00:00The Existentialist Poetic of Thoreau's Journal<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; text-align: justify;">Henry
David Thoreau conceived of his writing of nature in his Journal as an
experiential form of writing. As he commented in his entry of 2 July 1852,
‘Nature is reported not by him who goes forth consciously as an observer, but
in the fullness of life. To such a one she rushes to make her report.’ The
grounding of nature writing within one’s own personal experience is emphasized
again by Thoreau on 19 April 1854: ‘I am not interested in mere phenomena,
though it were the explosion of a planet, only as it may have lain in the
experience of a human being.’ Such sensual experience generates the reader’s
sense of the writer’s physical presence, so that we no longer feel imprisoned
in our mechanized contemporary environments but instead actively there, out
there, with Thoreau. ‘The forcible writer stands bodily behind his words with
his experience. He does not make books out of books, but he has been </span><i style="font-family: Arial; text-align: justify;">there </i><span style="font-family: Arial; text-align: justify;">in person.’ (3 February 1852)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Thoreau
drew a direct link between the plenitude and degree of illumination of a
reader’s or student’s cognition, and that student’s ability to immerse himself
in studies which enable him to become charged by sensual experience.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘It
is essential that a man confine himself to pursuits – a scholar, for instance,
to studies – which lie next to and conduce to his life, which do not go against
the grain, either of his will or his imagination. The scholar finds in his
experience some studies to be most fertile and radiant with light, others dry,
barren, and dark. If he is wise, he will not persevere in the last, as a plant
in a cellar will strive toward the light. He will confine the observations of
his mind as closely as possible to the experience or life of his senses. His
thought must live with and be inspired with the life of the body. […] Dwell as
near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.’ (12 March 1853) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Here
we find an affinity between the impulses underlying Thoreau’s journalizing and
a central aspect of <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Weimar</st1:place></st1:city>
era German thought to which I have referred often on this blog. For we are
reminded here of Jaspers’ early existentialism which, as Chris Thornhill writes
in his study <i>Karl Jaspers</i>, sought to
‘<span style="background: white;">deploy Kant as the basis for an existential
metaphysic of possible lived unity’. Jaspers’ early
existentialism, Thornhill notes <b><a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/jaspers/">elsewhere</a></b>,
sought precisely to overcome Kantian antinomies such as that of reason and experience,
by ‘incorporating all aspects (cognitive, practical and sensory) of human life
in an encompassing account of rational and experiential existence’. This existentialist
project was anticipated by Thoreau’s requirement of the subjectivist researcher,
‘whether he be poet or philosopher or man of science’, that </span>‘His thought
must live with and be inspired with the life of the body’:<span style="background: white;"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial;">‘There is no such thing as pure <i>objective </i>observation. Your observation, to be interesting, <i>i.e. </i>to be significant, must be <i>subjective</i>. The sum of what the writer
of whatever class has to report is simply some human experience, whether he be
poet or philosopher or man of science. The man of most science is the man most
alive, whose life is the greatest event.’ (6 May 1854) </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In
his journal entry for 14 July 1852, Thoreau had already related his concern
with the ‘most alive’ to the question of a living language. Here he pointed to
the emergence of the sort of artificial, manufactured-to-death language which
characterizes today’s bureaucratic, public sector discourse and capitalist,
private sector discourse alike. ‘A writer who does not speak out of a full
experience uses torpid words, wooden or lifeless words, such words as
“humanitary,” which have a paralysis in their tails.’ The deathliness of
‘humanitary’ results from its excess: from its self-aggrandizing add-on, the suffix
‘-itary’. Just as here he notes the excessive moment of particularity in ‘humanitary’, on
30 March 1853 Thoreau went on to comment on how a particularizing, analytic
perspective on life diminishes our full experience, or our existential sense of
‘possible lived unity’. His references to ‘view’ and ‘the unbounded universe’
make it clear that he thinks of such full experience in terms of our visionary
capacity:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Ah,
those youthful days! are they never to return? when the walker does not too
curiously observe particulars, but sees, hears, scents, tastes, and feels only
himself, - the phenomena that show themselves in him, - his expanding body, his
intellect and heart. No worm or insect, quadruped or bird, confined his view,
but the unbounded universe was his. A bird is now become a mote in his eye.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Crucially,
for Thoreau the writing of full experience is genuine poetry, because such a
writing conveys the ‘affinity’ or </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">sympathy</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">
between the writer and whatever he has experienced – ‘the phenomena that show
themselves in him’. In that way it also conveys the sympathy between the
particular elements of nature which scientific observation simply separates.
‘What affinity is it brings the goldfinch to the sunflower – both yellow – to
pick its seeds? Whatever things I perceive with my entire man, those let me
record, and it will be poetry.’ (2 September 1851) Or again, three years later
on 24 September 1854: ‘What name of a natural object is most poetic? That which
he has given for convenience whose life is most nearly related to it, who has
known it longest and best.’ Thoreau’s preoccupation with a unified life’s
possibilities of sympathy and relationality, enabled him to describe the action
of existential poetic naming which derives from imbibing a natural object’s
spirito-existential ‘nutriment’: on 19 September 1854 he had written, ‘I have
given myself up to nature; I have lived so many springs and summers and autumns
and winters as if I had nothing else to do but </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">live </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">them, and imbibe whatever nutriment they had for me’.</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">On
2 January 1859, Thoreau’s exposition of ‘vital and natural’ poetic language
brought him to counterpose ‘artificial’, patriarchal, academic regulations of
language to the free speech of mothers, brutes and animals:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘When
I hear the hypercritical quarrelling about grammar and style, the position of
the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain
rules of theirs, - Mr. Webster, perhaps, not having spoken according to Mr.
Kirkham’s rule, - I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is
that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or
an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or
father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless
as a lamb’s bleat.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Thoreau’s
suspicion of academic language use – of ‘literacy’ – rests on his sense that,
just as natural life itself symbolizes human experience, so too, conversely,
human symbolic expression is grounded in natural phenomena: ‘Talk about
learning our <i>letters </i>and being <i>literate</i>! Why, the roots of <i>letters</i> are <i>things</i>. Natural objects and phenomena are the original symbols or
types which express our thoughts and feelings’ (16 October 1859). It is because
their language conveys the sourcing of letters in natural things that ‘We
cannot spare the very lively and lifelike descriptions of some of the old
naturalists’, as he writes on 17 February 1860 (for example). ‘They sympathize
with the creatures which they describe.’ But for Thoreau, importantly, a vital
and natural – poetic – language conveys not just nature’s facticity, but its
spirit too. On the following day, his journal entry expounded his animist
phenomenology and noted the inadequacy of traditional scientific description to
that phenomenology:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Surely
the most important part of an animal is its <i>anima</i>,
its vital spirit, on which is based its character and all the peculiarities by
which it most concerns us. […] <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"> Science in many departments of natural
history does not pretend to go beyond the shell; <i>i.e.</i>, it does not get to animated nature at all. A history of
animated nature must itself be animated.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">On
15 February, Thoreau wrote of ‘the physical fact which in all language is the
symbol of the spiritual’; his sense of natural phenomena as being symbols of natural
<i>anima</i>, explains his intention –
stated nine years earlier on 9 November 1851 – that lively and lifelike, poetic
expression is to convey ‘animated’ phenomena on their own terms, without
reducing them to mere brute facticity, as would the ‘common sense’ view of
nature. For only such a form of expression can convey the sympathy between the
writer’s <i>anima</i> and nature, or the way
in which the writer has experienced and imbibed natural <i>anima</i>. ‘My facts shall be falsehoods to the common sense. I would
so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic. Facts
which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Thoreau
opposes vital poetic language and the experience of nature which it conveys, or
what he calls ‘the true growth and experience, the living speech’ (16 October
1859), to the paralyzed vitality and ‘dry technical terms’ which he associates
with academic science’s specialist accounts of nature:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘I
look over the report of the doings of a scientific association and am surprised
that there is so little life to be reported; I am put off with a parcel of dry
technical terms. Anything living is easily and naturally expressed in popular
language. I cannot help suspecting that the life of these learned professors
has been almost as inhuman and wooden as a rain-gauge or self-registering
magnetic machine. They communicate no fact which rises to the temperature of
blood-heat. It doesn’t all amount to one rhyme.’ (6 May 1854)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">On
5 September 1851 we find Thoreau praising James John Garth Wilkinson’s <i>The Human Body and Its Connection with Man,
Illustrated by the Principal Organs</i> for its analogical method. By drawing
quotidian physical analogies (such as when he describes the papillary cutis as ‘“an
encampment of small conical tents coextensive with the surface of the body”’),
Wilkinson, Thoreau feels, finds in popular, nonspecialist language a means of
communicating unified, existential reason’s sympathetic experience of the body:
this is true cognition or ‘perception of truth’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘The
faith he puts in old and current expressions as having sprung from an instinct
wiser than science, and safely to be trusted if they can be interpreted. The
man of science discovers no world for the mind of man with all its faculties to
inhabit. Wilkinson finds a </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">home </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">for
the imagination, and it is no longer outcast and homeless. All perception of
truth is the detection of an analogy; we reason from our hands to our head.’</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Nine
years later, on 13 October 1860, Thoreau’s existentialism leads him to argue
that, because of their success in conveying ‘the highest quality of the plant,
- its relation to man’, ‘it is commonly the old naturalists who first received
American plants that describe them best’. Here Thoreau again advocates (the ‘free
and lawless’ writing which can relay) singular, existential cognition over
professional scientific knowledge:</span><br />
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘After
all, the truest description, and that by which another living man can most
readily recognize a flower, is the unmeasured and eloquent one which the sight
of it inspires. No scientific description will supply the want of this, though
you should count and measure and analyze every atom that seems to compose it.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Thoreau’s
rejection of the language of academic science and advocacy of an existential
poetic, relates to his rejection of professional, scholarly literacy in favour
of popular, democratic literacy. ‘Anything living is easily and naturally
expressed in popular language.’ On 6 December 1859:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Literary
gentlemen, editors, and critics think that they know how to write because they have
studied grammar and rhetoric; but the art of composition is as simple as the
discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely
greater force behind it. This unlettered man’s [Irving’s] speaking and writing
is standard English. Some words and phrases deemed vulgarisms and Americanisms
before, he has made standard American.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh9pceikT6u2VYmJav7PogJqG3NGHCe1XM3Frc5s0ewL3JdXdU8WskAvnpVGreBvD9-B8IGh431gXdit33RxvwwKfMmYdr9dujSxnhklH2_CycrC52C-LAUrOPsg9vljuA471tom5-mMk/s1600/19o8Thoreau'scabinWaldenPondsiteof2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="317" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh9pceikT6u2VYmJav7PogJqG3NGHCe1XM3Frc5s0ewL3JdXdU8WskAvnpVGreBvD9-B8IGh431gXdit33RxvwwKfMmYdr9dujSxnhklH2_CycrC52C-LAUrOPsg9vljuA471tom5-mMk/s400/19o8Thoreau'scabinWaldenPondsiteof2.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Walden Pond in 1908</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">We
are reminded of the earlier remark that ‘the first requisite and rule is that
expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an
interjection’. It is as if, for Thoreau, an academic aesthetic architecture of
‘grammar and rhetoric’ is to be supplanted by a demotic aesthetic physics of verbal
force and compaction. Already on 12 November 1851, he was thinking in terms of
‘interjection’ and discharge: ‘Those sentences are good and well discharged
which are like so many little resiliencies from the spring floor of our life, -
a distinct fruit and kernel itself, springing from terra firma.’ The ‘continent
concentrated thoughts’ of which Thoreau wrote on 30 August 1856 recall these
well-defined resiliencies. In order to adequately reflect the complexity of
nature, Thoreau maintains on 27 October 1858, language really should be
compounded – ‘ground together’ – rather like in German:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Who
will undertake to describe in words the difference in tint between two
neighbouring leaves on the same tree? or of two thousand? – for by so many the
eye is addressed in a glance, In describing the richly spotted leaves, for
instance, how often we find ourselves using ineffectually words which merely
indicate faintly our good intentions, giving them in our despair a terminal
twist toward our mark, - such as redd</span><i style="font-family: Arial;">ish</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">,
yellow</span><i style="font-family: Arial;">ish</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">, purpl</span><i style="font-family: Arial;">ish</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">, etc. We cannot make a hue of words, for they are not to be
compounded like colours, and hence we are obliged to use such ineffectual
expressions as reddish brown, etc. They need to be ground together.’</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">A
principle of compounding or compaction can also be found underlying Thoreau’s
broader conception of writing as the creation of ‘a theme’, and subsequent
identification of ‘one pertinent and just’ thematic ‘observation’. Thoreau’s
idea of writing here would reverse today’s academic writing practice, which
typically </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">starts </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">from a pre-set,
often predatorily pre-identified theme, before exploitatively selecting the
material (and only that material) which will enable one to sustain one’s forced
argument. The dominative logic of subsumption, against which Theodor Adorno directed much of his thinking, continues to determine so much of what passes for intellectual life now. A commodity is to be delivered, or you will be made unemployed, your
selfhood erased and then accused of mental illness, etc. On 3 February 1859
Thoreau noted:</span><br />
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘The
writer has much to do even to create a theme for himself. Most that is first
written on any subject is a mere groping after it, mere rubble-stone and
foundation. It is only when many observations of different periods have been
brought together that he begins to grasp his subject and can make one pertinent
and just observation.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">In
his entry for 13 October 1860, Thoreau suggested that visionary affirmation of
natural phenomena, by contrast with professional scientific description of
nature, involves an existential, sensually delighting form of language which
has its own inevitable momentum: like the interjections and discharges of which
he writes elsewhere, these ‘unconsidered’ or ‘unconscious’ statements – acts of
definition – are not impeded by the sort of career-sustaining guards and
scruples which complicate academic language.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘[…]
unconsidered expressions of our delight which any natural object draws from us
are something complete and final in themselves, since all nature is to be
regarded as it concerns man; and who knows how near to absolute truth such
unconscious affirmations may come? Which are the truest, the sublime
conceptions of Hebrew poets and <i>seers</i>,
or the guarded statements of modern geologists, which we must modify or unlearn
so fast?’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">On
1 April 1860, Thoreau’s understanding of how the action of inevitably releasing
verbal statements of visionary definition accords with a principle of natural
law – a ‘sympathy with the universal mind’ – is so transcendentally shocking as
to negate for him the import of communication itself. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘The
fruit a thinker bears is <i>sentences</i>, -
statements or opinions. He seeks to affirm something as true. I am surprised
that my affirmations or utterances come to me ready-made, - not forethought, -
so that I occasionally awake in the night simply to let fall ripe a statement
which I had never consciously considered before, and as surprising and novel
and agreeable to me as anything can be. As if we only thought by sympathy with the
universal mind, which thought while we were asleep. There is such a necessity
to make a definite statement that our minds at length do it without our
consciousness, just as we carry our food to our mouths. This occurred to me
last night, but I was so surprised by the fact which I have just endeavoured to
report that I have entirely forgotten what the particular observation was.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">(All
Thoreau quotations here are taken from: Henry David Thoreau, </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">The Journal, 1837-1861</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">, ed. by Damion
Searls (New York: New York Review Books, 2009))</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span></div>
</div>
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</div>
Dr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8818811609368766394.post-61751358083337016952013-10-31T18:21:00.000+00:002013-11-01T12:49:27.697+00:00Heidegger, Prynne and 'Parataxis' <div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">'in Cambridge, let's split'</span></div>
<div style="text-align: right;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">-Iain Sinclair, <i>Red Eye</i></span></div>
<div style="text-align: right;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In
an attempt to get an initial grasp on the Heidegger-Prynne interface, I have reached
for my little pile of back issues of the <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Cambridge</st1:place></st1:city>
journal <i>Parataxis</i>, most of which I bought from Drew Milne around 17 years ago. Edited largely by Milne, from 1991 to 2001, the content in <i>Parataxis:
Modernism and Modern Writing </i>has long overpowered me with its complexity,
representing as it does a benchmark for criticism of the contemporary
poetries of J. H. Prynne and other representatives of what Milne, in <i>Parataxis </i>3, tentatively labels ‘the
Cambridge axis’. Now that, tragically, so much of this seems posthumous – <i>Parataxis</i>, the <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Cambridge</st1:place></st1:city> axis, myself – the time is at least
perhaps opportune for a less intimidated attempt on my part to understand the
positions which <i>Parataxis </i>articulated,
in particular in relation to Prynne and Heidegger. It is clear to me now, finally,
after all my years of starstruck bafflement, that the <i>Parataxis </i>critics articulated a triad of suspicions: of a
phenomenology-aligned reading of Prynne’s poetry, of aligning Prynne with
Romanticist poetic tradition, and of the concern with a return to prior
temporality which Prynne’s work shares with Heidegger’s. Yet <i>Parataxis </i>also voices Prynne’s own
resistance to circularity, and it seems important that his powerful critique of
totalized recursion is echoed in the pages of the journal by a particular
critique (Alan Marshall’s) of <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Cambridge</st1:place></st1:city>
cultural Marxism’s negative dialectical approach, which usefully begins to restate the relation
between Prynne’s poetry and phenomenology. You could even conjecture that Marshall's intervention in the penultimate issue of <i>Parataxis</i> in 1996 represented as significant a moment within the genealogy of academic Prynne reception, as the later, broader but perhaps less interesting, shift from the early-mid 1990s, cultural critique mode of <i>Parataxis </i>(a mode energized by the fury of 1980s anti-Thatcherism), to the depoliticized exegetical mode of <i>Glossator 2: On the Poems of J. H. Prynne</i> </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">[online </span><b style="font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://www.glossator.org/volumes/">here</a></b><span style="font-family: Arial;">] </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">in 2010</span><span style="font-family: Arial;">. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Disregarding
the possibility of Heideggerian Marxism, in </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">Parataxis
</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">9 Milne responded to </span><st1:city style="font-family: Arial;" w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Marshall</st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">’s
claims on the part of phenomenology by seeking to cordon off the diverging
critical approaches of Marxism and Heideggerianism still further.</span><br />
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘If
any attempt is made to relate what “phenomenology” might mean for poetry, the
phenomenology of experience suggested by Hegel and Marx is in sharp conflict
with that developed by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. The “experience” of
capitalism may be incommensurate with a phenomenological account of
experience.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In
my experience, the letter from your university informing you that you have
earned £4500 this year as an hourly paid lecturer, is an equally gritty and
vicious phenomenon whether you view it with your Marx or your Heidegger specs
on. (As is the lack of a letter when you are then sacked without warning, after
having been assured repeatedly that your contract would be renewed). But in the
next number of </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">Parataxis</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">, in his
article ‘Speculative Assertions: Reading J. H. Prynne’s </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">Poems</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">’, Milne’s reading of the reference in Prynne’s ‘Foot and
Mouth’ to the ‘Pressure Sensitive/ Tape (also known as RUBAN ADHESIF and NASTRO
ADHESIVO)’, persists in separating Heideggerian from Marxist perspectives on our experience of this world. In
this reference of Prynne’s to what Milne calls ‘the trans-national language inside rolls of
Scotch tape’, Milne writes, ‘The world-at hand is figured not as the
transcendence of tools in the revelatory unveiling of Being, but as an
implicated concern for the techniques and habits which sustain this world.’
This sort of sardonic pillorying of Heideggerian terminology is
particularly depressing given Milne’s inability to stand by the Marxism to
which he opposes that terminology. The response to </span><st1:city style="font-family: Arial;" w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Marshall</st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">
in issue 9 comments that ‘there remains the task of showing how dialectical
thinking which is critical of what is usually thought of as phenomenology could
be developed, or how an account of the affinities between Adorno and Prynne
could be sustained’. This comment is hardly an investment of faith in original </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">Parataxis</i><span style="font-family: Arial;"> co-editor Simon Jarvis’
landmark Adornian reading of ‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’, which had appeared in </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">Parataxis</i><span style="font-family: Arial;"> 1 (and which has been republished </span><b style="font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://www.jacketmagazine.com/20/pt-jarvis.html">here</a></b><span style="font-family: Arial;">). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Jarvis’
article argued that Prynne’s poetic resists the presentation of
phenomenological immediacy because such a presentation would be undialectical.
Prynne’s poem ‘The Numbers’, Jarvis maintains, does not supply us with ‘a
choice to seal off some realm of this-ness which could be seen as impervious to
external determination’:</span><br />
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Attempts
(such as that of Michael Grant in the <i>Dictionary
of Literary Biography</i>) to assimilate Prynne’s wish to start from individual
experiences to Husserlian phenomenology write off his acknowledgement that to
understand individual experience is also to go beyond it. Prynne invokes
demonstrative immediacy not phenomenologically, as a category, but
dialectically, as a moment: once examined, apparent immediacy necessarily
reveals its own mediatedness.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRmRjtpWI9Rr1g7K4mVDgqKXYKnbOdetXBeuaH0mDcn2t19opCbjjPf6y7yg4wLYU_-vHtN5aroEnGa07GFbsVC1q2awq8_55tHPekHoujx9T94UVv4TOcgTNradYxLs_Q_zkVvz3dGGw/s1600/Sick-Club-Rules-1967-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRmRjtpWI9Rr1g7K4mVDgqKXYKnbOdetXBeuaH0mDcn2t19opCbjjPf6y7yg4wLYU_-vHtN5aroEnGa07GFbsVC1q2awq8_55tHPekHoujx9T94UVv4TOcgTNradYxLs_Q_zkVvz3dGGw/s400/Sick-Club-Rules-1967-1.jpg" width="272" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Before
I get to </span><st1:city style="font-family: Arial;" w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Marshall</st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">’s
reaction to these remarks, I want to note two further attempts, other than Marshall's, to
reclaim the possibility of recognizing phenomenological immediacy in Prynne.
The first relates to the particular immediacy of a certain strand of Prynne’s
poetic discourse which we could call his Londoner’s language. Prynne’s origins as a Londoner are rarely attended to by critics, though there are
occasional references to his registering of wartime experience in his poems.
But it seems to me that in his essay for </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">Parataxis
</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">9, ‘Counterfactual Prynne: An Approach to </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">Not-You</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">’, John Wilkinson unwittingly touched on precisely the arch London quality of Prynne’s language, when he wrote of the </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">Not-You </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">line ‘our confidence is end-up
like a roller towel’, that it is ‘a characteristically Prynnian witticism which
tends to make exposition sound laboured’. Academic exposition is attracted,
because ‘end-up like a roller towel’ is a hermetic, difficult phrase. Why a </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">roller towel </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">? But this phrase also
carries a sort of difficulty which renders exposition unnecessary: because it
is as if hermeneutic mediation is resisted by precisely the incisive immediacy
– the sheer phenomenological baldness – of the language’s quality of underworld
hermeticism. This line of Prynne’s </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">is </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">a
slap round the face with a rolling pin, never mind a roller towel. A new
semantic content has been displaced, from elsewhere, somewhere covert, and is
suddenly here. This </span><st1:city style="font-family: Arial;" w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">London</st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">
tenor of phrasing has maintained its speakers outside the law for centuries, and
it will continue to shock academic interpreters whilst holding its secrets
close. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">This
first attempted reclamation of phenomenological immediacy, like the second one
which I want to note now, enlists an attention to Prynne’s involvement with what
we could call visionary phenomenology.</span><br />
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; text-align: center; text-indent: 36pt;"> [...] This is the place</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; text-align: center; text-indent: 36pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> where, deaf to meaning, the life stands</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> out in extra blue. [...] [</span><i style="font-family: Arial;">The Oval Window </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">]</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">N.
H. Reeve’s extended discussion of these lines in his ‘further note’ on </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">The Oval Window</i><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">for </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">Parataxis
</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">6, begins by relaying his ‘suspicions’ of their communication of visionary experience. ‘Any celebration of an enhanced, heroic moment, unashamed to assert its
claim to superiority, almost automatically gives rise to suspicions as to the
interests it could be serving.’ However, Reeve continues, ‘in this case […]
those suspicions stay secondary’. For ‘here the momentary thrill can remind us
that this cynicism reflects a loss to which we are not reconciled, that there
is still the ghost of something dear to us which we expect poetry to awaken’. It
is precisely the phenomenological experience of visionary shock, that is – or what Reeve
goes on to term ‘an apparently immediate sensation’ – which brings us to
awareness of both the desacralization and disenchantment of this life, which
typically is not definite enough to be ‘the’ life, and the continuing existence
(however spectral it may be) of ‘a degree of intensity and radiance unavailable
to our normal categories’. </span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Reeve’s
reference to ‘the Romantic tradition of the privileged lyric moment’, suggests
the relation of Prynne’s involvement with such visionary phenomenology to the
Romanticist poetic tradition from which his poetry is distanced elsewhere in </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">Parataxis</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">. In his ‘Speculative
Assertions’ essay of 2001, for instance, Milne maintains that ‘Foot and Mouth’
‘could be read as a satirical revision of the conflicts of ethos and pathos
enjoyed in the late romanticist and quasi-philosophical readings associated
with [Harold] Bloom’s Wallace Stevens or Heidegger’s Holderlin [sic]’. (In his
footnote to this Milne notes that the ethos/pathos opposition was in fact later
‘deployed by Prynne’s de Kooning/ O’Hara essay’). In a significant comment in a
letter to Allen Fisher of 16 September 1993, published in </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">Parataxis </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">6, Milne aligned his long-standing suspicion of the
poetic lineage of ‘faded romanticism’ – a romanticism far from Prynne’s own
romanticism of ‘extra blue’! – to his scruple regarding phenomenological
readings. One suspects here too a suspicion of the concept of poetic tradition
itself; the postmodernist suspicion that anything connected, integrated or
whole is universalist, coupled with a Marxist charge that poetic linguistic
beauty is that which is consumed by the bourgeoisie and produced by the naïvely
artisanal (those who believe themselves to be ‘originally’ related to language).</span><br />
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘In
the restricted notion of poetry, a phenomenology of experience and faded
romanticism gesture at the tradition of poetry while implying utopian ideas
about the civic possibilities of language. What makes it restricted is the
assumption of a poetic relation to language, and an overdetermined sense of
what constitutes formal beauty and coherence.’
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Milne
offers Fisher no explanatory background for these assertions, beyond the rather
inane remark that ‘I take it that one of the faultlines in contemporary poetry
and poetics is the relation between a restricted notion of “poetry” and a more
dispersed sense of a poetic relation to linguistic manifolds’. However, in his important
article for <i>Parataxis </i>9, ‘The Two
Poetries and the Concept of Risk’, <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Marshall</st1:place></st1:city>
usefully explained how Milne’s statements invoke ‘the idea of the two
traditions of modern poetry’. In relation to this schema, Milne’s ‘restricted
notion’ of poetry refers to the notions of the Stevens, or ‘symbolist’,
tradition. <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Marshall</st1:place></st1:city>
summarizes:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘A
typical formulation of the two traditions of modern poetry thesis can be found
in the criticism of Marjorie Perloff, particularly in the essay “Pound/
Stevens: whose era?’, where Perloff uses these two authors and the apparently
incommensurable positions of what become in effect their respective critical
camp-followers to entrench a dichotomized formalism, already known perhaps from
the writings of Charles Altieri as that of the objectivist versus the
symbolist, but variously referred to here as: the constructionist versus the
expressionist, the encyclopaedic (or epic) versus the lyric, the fragmentary
versus the meditative, and so on.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Milne’s
determined opposition to aligning Prynne’s writing with the Stevens, or
symbolist/Romanticist poetic tradition is clear in ‘Speculative Assertions’,
when he distances Prynne from ‘humanism’ and ‘civic personhood’. Milne
acknowledges (the early) Prynne’s ‘lyric sequences’, but recasts Prynnean lyric
as anti-lyric, a lyric mangled by the ‘destructions of subjectivity akin to
anti-humanist phenomenology’ which drive it. Such a lyric is intrinsically only
a diminished Olsonian ‘epic’ anyway. (Phenomenology is seemingly now
admissible, as a prop for Milne’s anti-humanist inclination).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Prynne’s
poems eschew the vocalizations of humanism, providing neither a congealed
“voice” nor an identifiable persona or civic personhood. The bardic temptations
of post-humanist epic – that poetry could include everything </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">and </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">history
– are brought into the briefer focus of lyric sequences. Song is acknowledged
as an expressive parameter, but the agencies prompting lyricism are not those
of a singer, and are more easily read as destructions of subjectivity akin to
anti-humanist phenomenology.’</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">It
is the </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">Parataxis </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">article on Prynne most willing to engage with
Heidegger's thinking which is also most sympathetic to associating Prynne’s
poetry with Romanticist poetic humanism. In their essay ‘Deaf to Meaning: On J.
H. Prynne’s </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">The Oval Window </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">’, which
appeared in </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">Parataxis </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">3 (and is
republished </span><b style="font-family: Arial;"><a href="http://www.jacketmagazine.com/20/pt-reev-kerr.html">here</a></b><span style="font-family: Arial;">), N. H. Reeve and
Richard Kerridge read the following lines from </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">The Oval Window </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">:</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> It is not
quite a cabin, but (in local speech)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> a <i>shield</i>, in the elbow of upland water,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> the sod roof almost gone
but just under<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> its scar a rough opening:
it is, in first<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> sight, the oval window.
[…]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Reeve
and Kerridge argue that this description of what they call (reflecting on the
picture on the volume’s cover, and anticipating Prynne’s 2008 ‘Huts’ essay) a
‘rough shepherd’s hut’, ‘seems to touch’ on ‘various Romantic traditions of
negotiating a place for the self, a place of at least provisional stability,
amidst the boundless organicism of the world’. Where Milne admits lyric into
Prynnean poetics only if its very constitution is warped by ‘destructions of
subjectivity’, Reeve and Kerridge attend to the way in which </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">The Oval Window</i><span style="font-family: Arial;"> rearticulates the
remnants of a Romantic poetic of self-stabilization. ‘The poem’s emphasis is
always on the temporary, threatened, fragmentarily glimpsed moments of “staying
put”, and the barely habitable condition of such buildings as would make
Heideggerean “dwelling” possible.’ In this connection, Reeve and Kerridge also
quote the lines referring to the arctic tern which ‘stays put wakefully, each
following suit/ by check according to rote’. They comment that the tern’s
condition – of ‘patience which is not passive lethargy, repose which is alert
and vigilant rather than timidly self-protective’ – represents ‘something close
to what Heidegger meant by “dwelling”, a kind of reverential letting-be and
letting-come of the world in which man was properly rooted’.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Such
references to a form of ‘dwelling’ that stabilizes the subject are echoed in D. S. Marriott’s article in </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">Parataxis</i><span style="font-family: Arial;"> 9, ‘Contemporary British Poetry and Resistance: Reading
J. H. Prynne’, which, in its discussion of the relevance of the Orpheus and
Eurydice myth to ‘Thoughts on the Esterházy Court Uniform’, relates the idea of
‘dwelling on the earth in the light of day’ to Prynne’s preoccupation with
return. Marriott states that the poem ‘elliptically refers’ to Orpheus’ ‘need
to </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">return </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">to the land of the dead to
reclaim (and ultimately lose) the lost love’. Prynne’s poem’s metaphor of ‘the
sun making things “worse”’, argues Marriott, ‘draws on the local-existential
sense of being on earth in the Orphic myth and its explicit connection between
human life and dwelling on the earth in the light of day’; the latter ‘two
processes’ are ‘etymologically linked in the Latin derivation of </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">humanus </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">from </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">humus</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">’.</span><br />
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In
his essay in the same number of <i>Parataxis</i>,
‘The Spirit of Poetry: Heidegger, Trakl, Derrida and Prynne’, Anthony Mellors
writes of ‘Thoughts on the Esterházy Court Uniform’ that it represents Prynne’s
‘most protracted meditation on the subject of return’. Marriott’s article quotes the following lines:
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">
[…] To our unspeakable loss; we
make<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">sacred what we cannot see without coming<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> back to where we were.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 144pt;">
<i><span style="font-family: Arial;"> Again</span></i><span style="font-family: Arial;">
is the sacred<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> word,
the profane sequence suddenly graced, by<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> coming back. […]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The
</span><i style="font-family: Arial;">Parataxis </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">critics suggest two
distinct ways of reading such meditations on return. Marriott’s reference to
the ‘semantically incomplete and referentially opaque’ nature of Prynne’s
poetry, straightforwardly explains Prynne’s own references to unspeakability
and ‘what we cannot see’, as well as the uncertainty (in the second cluster of
lines just quoted) as to exactly </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">what</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">
the profane has been ‘suddenly graced’ into. Marriott, moreover, encourages us
to be wary of the idea that such opaque reflections on return were formulated
as a conscious critique of secular, liberal-progressivist rationality: Prynne’s
poetic opacity, Marriott writes, ‘cannot be construed as an oppositional
hermeticism as Mellors argues [in his PhD thesis]’. But Mellors’ charge, in the
pages of </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">Parataxis</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">, that the idea of
return in Prynne is a ‘mystical’ one, is indeed instinct with his criticism of
the opacity of Prynne’s poetic language, which Mellors casts in Heideggerian
terms. ‘Prynne wants to get rid of “meaning” altogether, and replace it with a formal
significance, which, through the indeterminate contingencies of poetic Saying,
moves beyond them to reaffirm a hidden agenda of mystical return.’</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Milne
had already evinced a similar dislike for the idea of ‘mystical return’ when,
in a letter to Prynne of 7 March 1993, which was published in </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">Parataxis </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">5, he noted his poetic
‘determination’ when writing his own </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">Satyrs
and Mephitic Angels</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">, ‘to evade a Heideggerian fetish of the etymological
and pre-Socratic grounds of language and being’. A specifically Heideggerian
mysticism is clearly Milne’s particular target, since here he also writes of ‘a
Benjaminian dependence on a theological mystification of history which is often
my own gnostic temptation in the face of defeated reason’. So late-Benjaminian
mystification of history is endorsed, whilst Heideggerian mystical restoration
of origins, or what Mellors calls ‘the Heideggerean project of “destruction”
that attempts to clear away metaphysical abstractions from supposedly original
properties’, is impugned. Quoting from Derrida’s </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">Of Spirit</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">, Mellors extended to Prynne his suspicion of Heideggerian
return to an ‘original temporality’:</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Heidegger
constantly invokes the spiritual (especially in the essays on Hölderlin, Rilke,
and Trakl) and, like Prynne, claims to undercut Christian (and Platonic)
appropriations of the term by returning to a prior or original temporality: “In
its most proper essence, as the poet and thinker allow it to be approached, <i>Geist is neither </i>Christian <i>Geistlichkeit</i> <i>nor </i>Platonic-metaphysical <i>Geistigkeit</i>.”’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Mellors
goes on to practically accuse Prynne’s poetic of the late 1960s of Aryanism
when, having noted that ‘the arcane pursuit of etymological value arises as a
justification for and sublimation of crude beliefs in national, racial, and
sexual superiority’, he specifically compares Heidegger’s essay on Trakl to
Prynne’s ‘A Pedantic Note in Two Parts’. ‘As in Prynne’s essay, we are dealing
[in Heidegger’s Trakl essay] with the cultural programme of defining and
returning to our “proper home” in a neat dovetailing of Indo-European
linguistic origins with the philosophy and poetics of temporality.’ This sort
of alignment of Prynne with Heidegger’s Nazi Aryanism strikes me as being little
more than sensationalism: when Prynne observes that the runic <i>wynn</i> 'was the <i>name</i> for "bliss"; it was a <i>proper </i>name, reaching right across Germania and back before the division of the Indo-European peoples', he is not advocating racial exclusivity or hegemony.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">It
seems to me that the critique put forward in </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">Parataxis </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">of Prynne’s concern with return to a prior or original
temporality, needs to be tempered by an awareness of the resistance to
circularity which Prynne expressed elsewhere in </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">Parataxis</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">. I am thinking of the attack on totalized recursion made
by Prynne in a letter to Milne of 21 March 1993, published in the journal’s
issue 5. ‘If swinish contentment or stoic damage control are both off the map,
then the work of any manifold (poetry included) must be directed so as to minimize
inclusion in the main structure of unrecognized recursive loops.’ In their </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">Parataxis</i><span style="font-family: Arial;"> article Reeve and Kerridge had
already wondered, in connection with </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">The
Oval Window, </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">about the nature of the ‘quest’ in that poem for ‘alternative
responses to the world, Heideggerean or otherwise, which are not artificially
stabilized by controlling circuits and mechanisms’. But such a controlling
circuit – a ‘main structure of unrecognized recursive loops’ – could itself be
linguistic, recalling the ‘Infantile,/ recursive pandect’ already posited by
Prynne as early as the </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">Wound Response </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">poem
‘An Evening Walk’. The ‘main structure’ of his letter to Milne indeed seems to
refer to totalized significatory or semantic circularity: later in the letter
Prynne writes of ‘the cycle of pure irony’, and it is in relation to the
possibility that both Milne’s and his own poetries now are trapped within and
stabilized by their hyper-vigilance, that Prynne desires a poetic irony
‘directed to forward the passage of non-circular predicates’:</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Perhaps
this is my own current look-out, indeed, and I reserved a bolt-hole at the
outset here [in this letter] by referring to non-conductive irony, coyly
leaving room for a version not armed against itself (I think that’s a recursive
illusion anyway) so much as directed to forward the passage of non-circular
predicates.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Prynne’s
observation of the <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Cambridge</st1:place></st1:city>
late modernist tendency towards hyper-vigilant poetic irony echoes Out to Lunch’s
insightful witness, in his review of Wilkinson’s ‘Harmolodics’ for <i>Parataxis </i>4, of the ‘frozen gaze of
Parataxis [sic] scruple’. Coyly concealed behind his post-punk <i>nom de plume</i>, Ben Watson pointed here to
the recursive circuit of total scruple which characterizes the late modernist
poetics propounded within <i>Parataxis </i>(and
which was precisely what was so intimidating to a graduate student like myself,
newly arrived in Cambridge and trying to find the confidence to position myself
in relation to late modernist poetries – in particular to the work of Iain Sinclair,
the Olsonian element of which is a special victim of Cambridge scruple). It
seems to me (now) that the <i>Parataxis</i>
scruple is frozen by nothing other than the academic prejudice of which it ultimately
consists. When Milne, writing in <i>Parataxis
</i>4, simply <i>asserts</i> that ‘Adorno’s
critique of Heidgger’s [sic] poetics of Hölderlin in his essay ‘Parataxis’
(recently translated in <i>Notes to
Literature </i>vol. 2) remains pertinent’ to Martin Harrison’s use of
Heidegger, but does not explain how or why it remains pertinent, the student
senses a cultural Marxism whose argumentation has become paralyzed by its own
arrogance. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></st1:place></st1:city></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Marshall</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">’s article for <i>Parataxis
</i>9 offers close readings of two poets, Prynne and George Oppen, ‘who are
ordinarily associated with the Objectivist tradition as defined or redefined by
Olson and others’. But this positioning of these poets does not lead Marshall
to cordon them off within the field of ‘open’ poetry – Marshall underlines ‘the
inadequacy of the idea of the two poetries, one that is open [Pound/Olson etc.]
and one that is closed [Stevens etc.]’. Therefore, and whereas Milne disdains
attention to ‘phenomenology of experience’ as a feature of the ‘restricted’
(closed) poetry he critiques as a Marxist, Marshall’s approach frees the potential
for a phenomenological reading of Prynne whilst showing <i>Parataxis </i>cultural Marxism to be paralyzed within a ‘fixed
opposition’:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘I
shall argue that the kinds of risk both writers [Oppen, Prynne] take cannot be
properly understood with reference simply to the fixed opposition between 1.
lyric ego meditating on the phenomenology of experience and, 2. unbeautiful
dance [cf. Milne’s ‘improvised dance’ in <i>P
</i>6, 28] over the manifolds of language. I shall argue that neither writer
abandons the phenomenology of experience altogether.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Marshall</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">’s intervention against <i>Parataxis </i>cultural Marxism also locates that Marxism’s paralysis in
the negative dialectical approach to Prynne advanced by Jarvis’s work on
‘Aristeas, in Seven Years’. In this way, <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Marshall</st1:place></st1:city>
echoes Prynne’s own resistance to circularity with a critique of paralytic
negative dialectical criticism of Prynne, which again restores the potential
for phenomenological readings of Prynne’s poetry. <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Marshall</st1:place></st1:city> identifies a ‘danger for
“dialectical” criticism […] in its haste to disavow phenomenology, “as a
category”’, of encouraging a lack of ‘daring the “moment”’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘In
an early essay for <i>Parataxis</i>, Simon
Jarvis wrote: “Prynne invokes demonstrative immediacy not phenomenologically,
as a category, but dialectically, as a moment: once examined, apparent
immediacy necessarily reveals its own mediateness.” A truly dialectical
criticism would have nothing to fear from “apparent immediacy”. On the
contrary, the danger for “dialectical” criticism is that in its haste to
disavow phenomenology, “as a category”, it will turn mediation into an empty
truism, without ever daring the “moment”.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">To
get frozen, recursive-dialectical reading of Prynne moving by ‘daring the
“moment”’ would first involve recognizing, with Marshall, that poetry is itself
a contingent <i>process</i> of
phenomenological (visionary) definition: ‘each poem is a trial, a process, an
attempt to come “face to face to a fact” (as Thoreau aptly puts it) rather than
a complete facing up’. Recovery of the ‘mediated immediate’ that is the
phenomenology of experience within a poem, is, Marshall argues, therefore only
possible through a recovery of the ‘element of process’ – both within our
practice of reading and then, when our reading is un-frozen, within the poem
itself:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘[…]
any language can be regarded as reified: that is, only by recovering a moment
of the process (or to put it in the statutory pigeon-Hegelian, of the mediated
immediate in the instance of its mediation) can language and experience reflect
upon each other (in the way that Hegel says the concept of the object reflects
upon the subject): this element of process is riskily evoked in the reified
analogue of the reading process itself.’</span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
Dr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8818811609368766394.post-26553129810098658132013-09-04T15:29:00.000+01:002013-09-04T17:35:27.060+01:00Bathos Monotone<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">J. H. Prynne’s
poem, from his 1971 volume <i>Brass</i>, is
titled ‘Thinking of You’, but at first sight it appears to address kitchen
waste, rather than the traditional romantic object of the lyric poem. This form
of bathos has its own dark comedy, a bitter comedy that is reinforced by the
sheer monotone relentlessness of the repetition of the references to the 'can' or its ‘fat’ within the poem’s
series of functional, prosaic statements. These functional-yet-gnomic
statements are layered, or laid down, almost like a sequence of disregarding
slaps. I say <i>almost</i> like, because in their diminished functionality the slaps are sloppy, miscast ones. In fact Prynne's use of unexpected punctuation, such as the comma inserted in line 4, can be seen to effect the breakdown of the violence of philosophical logic - that sterile argumentative fury which is so helpful for efficiently constructing a dissertation, or maintaining (and raising) one's place in the hierarchical academic 'rank' - into a species of philosophical verse which is cognition of academic violence and not its unwitting perpetuation. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 72.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Not going forward let alone re-<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 72.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">turning upon itself, the old fat in the
can.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 72.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The old fat rises to a reason and<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 72.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">seems because of its can, not going<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 72.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">forward but in its rank securely,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 72.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">so as to be ready. Divinity rises to<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 72.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">no higher reason since going up alone<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 72.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">is returning itself to the can. You
choose<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 72.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">if you like whether we stay in the rank<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 72.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">or go forward as alone we can, divinely<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 72.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">secured about the midriff. Older than<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 72.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">forward is the way we might go and<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 72.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">grow because we do, fat. In the can it<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 72.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">is the rancid power of the continuum. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Human
sublimity – such as the sublimity of romantic love, or of the visionary
capacity of our imagination – is referred to here, in terms of access to the divine.
Perhaps the solitary transcendental imagination – when we each, ‘alone’, are
‘divinely/ secured about the midriff’ – is privileged over sublime I-thou
relations, or being as the Siamese twin of a You. But any human sublimity,
solitary or otherwise, is bathetically reduced to old fat, animate spirit
converted into inanimate matter. You could call this Prynne’s Marxist
materialism: a critique of alienation, of the reifying commodification of
the subject, which in fact holds out little hope for humanism. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But
the use of the comma in the penultimate line, for example, seems to complicate this reading.
‘we do, fat.’ These words could be taken as suggesting our conversion to fat in
the can, dead matter (‘we…fat’), but perhaps they simply refer to the way that,
when we ‘grow’, <i>we </i>become fat. Hence Prynne stills holds out the possibility that, even after all
the abuse under capitalism, we remain (perhaps overweight) humans with spirit. In addition, the
proposal that we might ‘go forward as alone we can’ claws back the fact of
human agency, our status as can-do mammals, from the very word for the
inanimate lump of metal itself: ‘can’. Humans ‘can’ create works of spirit,
such as this poem, and such a human cultural construction can appear unusually
bloated, or ‘fat’, as a consequence of the poet’s intention to double-space its lines (the double-spacing of ‘Thinking of
You’ is unusual in <i>Brass</i>, though
there are areas in ‘Of Sanguine Fire’ which are double-spaced
too). So you could say that if ‘Thinking of You’ itself, as a poem, ‘is’ fat it
is only because Prynne decided that it should be so; indeed the air between the
lines which fills out the poem on the page or screen could be said to emblematize the human spirit which
chose to put it there, just as Prynne chose to put spaces between the constituent
words of his later title ‘Air Gap Song’.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyFtExz2B3bx3BSdRiJpBbDuGbqETwIIvTq2hVNWspOXXGf6Hu8EJY5ZSXL1eN8e__bSQc6Y_VeOow5emGhTRZetpfNyB_a1u-AlJ75zoeAQ2bcCvJdzCAXXzUJaT6RdBJ7I2zuuqmadQ/s1600/fattirecan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyFtExz2B3bx3BSdRiJpBbDuGbqETwIIvTq2hVNWspOXXGf6Hu8EJY5ZSXL1eN8e__bSQc6Y_VeOow5emGhTRZetpfNyB_a1u-AlJ75zoeAQ2bcCvJdzCAXXzUJaT6RdBJ7I2zuuqmadQ/s320/fattirecan.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But
of course the poem sees us old (modern) humans, emblematized as ‘old fat’, to
be in dire straits now – spirit contained within a reified can-world. ‘Not
going forward let alone re-/ turning upon itself, the old fat in the can.’ As
Keston Sutherland rightly suggests in his article on <i>Brass</i>, 'Hilarious Absolute Daybreak' (online <b><a href="http://solutioperfecta.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/g2-sutherland.pdf">here</a></b>), the poetic
performance of bathos effected in <i>Brass</i>
entails not ‘lamentation’ of hopelessness so much as a direct statement of
hopelessness. Hence the refusal of the idea of spirit’s self-critique: ‘let
alone re-/ turning upon itself’. Quoting Prynne's poem ‘Crown’ from his <i>The White Stones</i>, Sutherland writes:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘<i>Brass </i>does what <i>The White Stones</i>, Olson and Heidegger programmed themselves not to
do: it recasts the <i>Heimkehr </i>of
fortune as the paralytic transit from destiny to modern politics, and it does
that by <i>evacuating </i>lamentation rather
than by universalising it. <i>Brass </i>is
the reversal of a reversal, “the question/ returned upon itself”.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Floating
contained as the fat in the can, the modern spirit of ‘Thinking of You’ reprises the ‘crust’ from the earlier <i>Brass </i>poem<i> </i>‘The Ideal Star-Fighter’: the ‘slight
meniscus’ which ‘floats on the moral/ pigment of these times’. In each
poem the meniscus, the spirit-level – that is, the attenuated form of our
spiritual life – can be seen to be an epiphenomenon of a moralizing, mass media-entwined contemporary politics. The second stanza of ‘The Ideal
Star-Fighter’ begins by commenting on this particular version of an infantilizing politics
of the ‘ought'.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">And so we hear daily of the backward<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> glance
at the planet, the reaction of<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 72.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> sentiment. Exhaust washes tidal flux<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> at the
crust, the fierce acceleration<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> of mawkish
regard. To be perceived with<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> such
bounty! […] <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">True to Sutherland's imputed explosion of 'destiny' within ‘modern politics’, this poem adds that a politics which dominates the environment whilst cosseting the
population in an enforced state of eco-friendly ‘moral/ stand-by’, remains vulnerable to the inevitable, predestined revenge of nature that it is bringing upon itself:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> […] We should</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">shrink from that lethal cupidity; moral</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> stand-by
is no substitute for 24-inch<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> reinforced
concrete, for the blind certain<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 72.0pt; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> backlash. Yet
how can we dream of<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 72.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> the hope to continue, […] <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">The
bad idealism represented by ‘moral/ stand-by’ <i>has</i> a contrary, the last lines here imply. It is just that the
hopeless micro-climate of <i>Brass</i>
stifles such a good morality at inception. ‘how can we dream of/ the hope to
continue’. Likewise in ‘Thinking of You’, the old fat attains ‘a reason’ –
perhaps that of Kantian moral normativism – and remains canned. Lacking the
hope to continue, it is ‘not going/ forward but in its rank securely’. This is
precisely ‘so as to be ready’: as if it too has been convened by the
TV/Twitter news to ‘moral/ stand-by’. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial;">But
then some lines later ‘Thinking of You’ proposes that we can still choose to
‘go forward as alone we can, divinely/ secured about the midriff’. It seems to
me, however, that these lines contain a critique of reason </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">à la </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">moralizing progressivism: Prynne is noticing here a false,
privatized progressivism, supported by religion or transcendence. Earlier in </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">Brass</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">, the poem</span><i style="font-family: Arial;"> </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">‘L’Extase de M. Poher’ had already warned against the
self-insulation of an over-articulate poetic avant-garde from mass society:
here carnal collision was already advocated over being ‘divinely/ secured’.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial; text-align: center;">[…] No</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">poetic gabble will survive which fails</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; text-indent: 36pt;"> to collide head-on with the unwitty circus:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 108.0pt; text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> no history
running<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 108pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> with the french horn into<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 180pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> the alley-way, no<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 144pt; text-indent: 36pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> manifest emergence<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 144pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> of valued
instinct, no growth<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 144pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> of
meaning & stated order: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Earlier
lines in ‘Thinking of You’ suggest moreover that a movement of private reason –
‘going up alone’ – itself hobbles divinity’s own civilizing action:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial; line-height: 200%; text-align: center; text-indent: 36pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial; line-height: 200%; text-align: center; text-indent: 36pt;">[…] Divinity rises
to</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> no higher reason since going up alone </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; line-height: 200%;">is returning itself to the can. […]</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">What
might it mean for transcendental potential to rise to a ‘higher reason’? And
what might it mean for a <i>collective</i>
exercise of reason to <i>escape</i> return
to ‘the can’? With the latter concern we are returned to Prynne’s early
visionary politics of socialized language, which </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">(as I note in my book on Iain Sinclair) </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">he propounded in an important
letter to </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">The English Intelligencer </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">of 14 March 1968, but also, in </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">The White Stones</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">,
in the memorable third and fourth points of the ‘up-/ shot’ concluding
‘Questions for the Time Being’: </span><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0px;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; text-align: center; text-indent: 36pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial; text-align: center; text-indent: 36pt;">[…] 3. What goes on in a</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> language is the corporate
& prolonged action</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; text-align: center;"> of worked
self-transcendence – other minor verbal</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> delays have their uses but
the scheme of such<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> motives is at best
ambiguous; 4. Luminous<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> take-off shows through in
language forced into any<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> compact with the historic
shift, but in a given con-<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> dition such as now not even elegance
will come<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> of the temporary nothing in
which life goes on.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">By
the time of <i>Brass </i> the life-world has darkened from our ‘temporary
nothing’ to ‘the hate system’ and ‘the entire dark dream outside’ of ‘The Ideal
Star-Fighter’: ‘the rancid power’ of the progressivist-capitalist ‘continuum’. True
to Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis in their <i>Dialectic of Enlightenment</i>, enlightenment has reverted to mythic
barbarism in the can-world.<i> </i>But still
in ‘Thinking of You’, arguably, self-transcending, ‘corporate’ and ‘historic’
linguistic activity is identified by Prynne with the emergence of visionary
potentials. The final lines of ‘Thinking of You’ show that such ‘Luminous/
take-off’ is never abjured as a<i> </i>possibility
for our collective exercise of reason, even in <i>Brass.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><i><br /></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; line-height: 200%; text-align: center;"> […] Older
than</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial; line-height: 200%; text-align: center;"> forward is the way we might go and</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> grow because
we do, fat. In the can it<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> is the rancid
power of the continuum.</span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; text-align: center; text-indent: 36pt;">This last particular 'fat', </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">referring
as it does to the traveller on a ‘way’ of collective reason which is ‘Older
than/ forward’, or more mythic and irrational than progressivist enlightenment
reason, yet also – precisely as such a life-force or exercise of crazy vitalism
– a transcendental potential which can itself ‘grow’ and rise to a ‘higher
reason’, arguably looks back specifically to the ‘fanatic resin’ mentioned in
the preceding poem in </span><i style="font-family: Arial;">Brass</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">, ‘Es Lebe
der König’.</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial; text-align: center; text-indent: 36pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial; text-align: center; text-indent: 36pt;">[…] the plum exudes its</span><br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">fanatic resin and is at once forced in, pressed<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">down and by
exotic motive this means the rest,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> the
respite, we have this long.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In
both poems Prynne suggests that this is now our time of decision: in ‘Thinking
of You’, ‘we might go’, and in ‘Es Lebe der König’, ‘we have this long’. Given
that ‘Es Lebe der König’ is dedicated to Paul Celan and that the ‘You’ of which
the succeeding poem’s title is thinking could well again be Celan, it seems
that ‘the rest,/ the respite’ within which reason might decide to grow is
indeed our own historical moment following the reversion of enlightenment to
myth in the Holocaust. ‘Es Lebe der König’ indeed has its analogue to the bad
alternative, the canning of reason with ‘the rancid power of the continuum’: the
moment of restriction within instrumentality when ‘the beloved enters the small
house’. ‘The house becomes technical, the pool has/ copper sides, evaporating
by the grassy slopes.’ Yet the very evaporation of this version of the can
hints that we still have respite within which to decide whether to let our potential
path of reason atrophy into academic sophistication, and ‘re-enter the small
house with/ animals too delicate and cruel’. Structured by bathos, hopelessness
and the recognition of technology’s restriction of spiritual horizons, <i>Brass </i>can still imagine its own copper
sides breaking open, growing into a wider path on ‘grassy slopes’. In ‘The Five
Hindrances’, Prynne writes of the way of collective reason to which <i>Brass </i>thus points in terms of glowing
‘air’, spirit. ‘The future history of the/ air is glowing, with amity beyond
the path itself’. The present-day time of decision, when the narrow old way
might vanish for good, is also the moment of ‘manifest emergence/ of valued
instinct’, of ‘growth/ of meaning & stated order’. For this contemporary
moment of decision, ‘The Five Hindrances’ adds, is as dazzling and bemusing as
the visionary element which it holds in fruition:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 144pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> […]
Now we come through<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> the air
we breathe bemused by the week: the fire<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 36.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"> of heaven, gentle, very light. […]</span></div>
</div>
</div>
Dr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8818811609368766394.post-58089366440142292262013-07-31T13:18:00.001+01:002013-07-31T17:35:37.617+01:00Conditioned<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Whoever has lived through these times and paid attention feels in the inmost way that an hour of reckoning has now come for the German spirit. In sleepless nights of listening and waiting one senses, very close by, the hot breath of this spirit. Now that false dreams of power have been dreamed out, now that need and suffering have burst the hard shells that threatened to suffocate it, this spirit, with a monstrous display of power, struggles toward its realization. […] Nearly all of the innumerable movements that now tremble throughout Germany and shake it to its foundations testify, despite their apparently contradictory directions, to the desire and nature of this spirit. Youth groups that carry forward generalized human ideals or the ideas of the Germanic fraternities; communards whose values are linked to the communism of primitive Christianity; associations of the like-minded that have as their goal a renewal from within; interfaith religious groups; democratic-pacifist unions; and several efforts at popular education: all these seek the same thing, to emerge from abstract ideas anchored in the ego and arrive at concrete communal forms.</i>’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>-Siegfried Kracauer, ‘German Spirit and German Reality’ (1922)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Kracauer’s insightful definition of the stirring of collective, existential spirit-life during the early years of the Weimar Republic, is quoted by Michael Jennings in the course of his essay on Walter Benjamin for the 2012 collection edited by Leonard V. Kaplan and Rudy Koshar, <em>The Weimar Moment: Liberalism, Political Theology, and Law</em>. This summary of the early existentialist <em>Zeitgeist</em>, as involving a struggling forth of <em>Geist</em> out of the conceptualizing ‘ego’ and into ‘concrete communal forms’, can be read as a programme statement of <em>The Weimar Moment</em> itself. In his ‘Introduction’ to the volume, Koshar stresses its ambition to attend to the theological dimension of the intellectual life of the Weimar era:</span> </div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Although scholars such as Mark Lilla have celebrated liberalism’s separation of the political and theological spheres, the cumulative effect of these essays is to show that even in its most secular and “humanist” variations, the debate for or against liberalism constantly allowed “theological” themes and gestures entry.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">On this blog [<strong><a href="http://downcastlids.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/suzanne-kirkbrights-life-of-karl.html">here</a></strong>] I have referred to Chris Thornhill’s emphasis on the way in which Jaspers’ early existentialism evolved out of his critical reaction to neo-Kantianism, in particular the variety propounded by Heinrich Rickert. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Weimar Moment</i> shows what <st1:city w:st="on">Jennings</st1:city> calls the ‘the religious revival that swept <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Germany</st1:place></st1:country-region> in the early 1920s’, to be instinct with the emergence of meta-Kantian – for instance existentialist – thinking at this time. In his contribution, John P. McCormick notes how Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss also were both ‘deeply affected by the early-20th-century crisis of neo-Kantian thought in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Germany</st1:place></st1:country-region>’. In statements that bring to mind the debilitating crisis of contemporary academic rationality too, McCormick writes:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘This crisis is perhaps best characterized as a widespread perception that Enlightenment rationality could not ground itself: that the most sophisticated system of reason required either a leap of faith to get itself off the ground or some external motivation outside the system itself.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">In the early 1920s Benjamin as well was becoming aware of the limitations of Kantian rationality, as Jennings stresses when he discusses Benjamin’s positive reception of Erich Unger, whose <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Politik und Metaphysik </i>of 1921 Benjamin classed as the ‘most significant writing on politics of our time’. (Interestingly, Unger’s title foreshadows the sub-title of Thornhill’s 2002 book <em>Karl Jaspers</em>). As <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Jennings</st1:place></st1:city> underlines, ‘each man’ – Unger and Benjamin – believed that philosophical thought ‘must move beyond a Kantian model that for them was based upon an inadequate understanding of human experience and knowledge’. Quoting Unger’s book, Jennings continues by noting that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Politics and Metaphysics</i> ‘thus conceives politics as an activity whose primary goal is the provision of an arena for psychophysical experience that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">may</i> “correspond to a disclosure of divine reality”’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘As Margarete Kohlenbach has put it, Benjamin and Unger shared the conviction that “philosophical thought is to seek to identify the conditions in which man could objectively experience, and thus know, that which in modern religiosity is at best believed, or somehow sensed, to be true.”’ <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Rodrigo Chacón, in his contribution to </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Weimar Moment </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">titled ‘Hannah Arendt in </span><st1:city style="font-family: Arial;" w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Weimar</st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">: Beyond the Theological-Political Predicament?’, notes the shift in Arendt’s terminology in the course of her life, so that later ‘she would attempt to provide existential concepts for the religious notions that she had used in her dissertation’. For example, ‘human “createdness” would become human “conditionedness” (</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bedingtheit</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">)’. Yet Chacón thus suggests that Arendt’s existentialism was inseparable from the initial accent on religious experience in her thinking. In the 1920s, he writes, Arendt was ‘deeply marked by the attempts of Heidegger and [Rudolf] Bultmann to provide a philosophical account of certain Christian possibilities of existence’. Opposing Arendt’s later emphasis on existential </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bedingtheit </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">to Hermann Cohen’s neo-Kantian ‘hyper-normativism’, Chacón points to the way in which Heidegger’s and Bultmann’s attention to existential experience of the spiritual quality of our life – of Christian possibilities – modulated in Arendt’s mature thought into her existentialist attention to ‘existential sources in Christian religious experience’:</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Like Bultmann, Barth and others, Arendt was not a moral – let alone a “normative” – thinker, […] because (human) morality – especially in the form of an ethics of the “pure will” – is essentially a rebellion against what conditions us or what is given to us. Thus [for example], again like Bultmann, Arendt problematized a fundamental ethical and religious precept – neighbourly love – from the standpoint of a more authentic understanding of its existential sources in Christian religious experience.’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The essay from Samuel Moyn and Azzan Yadin-Israel, ‘The Creaturely Limits of Knowledge: Martin Heidegger’s Theological Critique of Immanuel Kant’, focusses on Heidegger’s 1928 work </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">. Here again </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bedingtheit</i><span style="font-family: Arial;"> and an awareness of human limitations seems to offer the key. Moyn and Yadin-Israel argue that ‘unlike Kant’s, Heidegger’s philosophical argument is intended to win assent for an anthropology of human abasement, neediness, and dependence’. It is in temporality, Moyn and Yadin-Israel assert, that Heidegger finds ‘the damning proof of man’s dependence and indigence – an insuperable limit to his autonomy and perfectibility’. Or alternatively they maintain that, in </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">, Heidegger transfers autonomy to time. They cite the following extract, commenting that it ‘touches on precisely those capacities that for Kant mark the human subject as a citizen of the noumenal world but transposes them so that they are now attributes of time: self-activation, independence of experience, and a kind of autonomy’.</span></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVMKkg03aWytNnXEXQBnrY0GELrcggJpmyLBF-PKocUYfoQwyQKVOUTx9c8nY62xwv7URAGQ1EwoIz2FFGO7kVO0HKMMYRRRLOwxXGsr1X30h3y2wZ2n3Z6i5rGsa1kVlpBrxlYsAacv0/s1600/marketa_luskacova_006.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="208" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVMKkg03aWytNnXEXQBnrY0GELrcggJpmyLBF-PKocUYfoQwyQKVOUTx9c8nY62xwv7URAGQ1EwoIz2FFGO7kVO0HKMMYRRRLOwxXGsr1X30h3y2wZ2n3Z6i5rGsa1kVlpBrxlYsAacv0/s320/marketa_luskacova_006.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">(Marketa Luskacova)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Time is only pure intuition to the extent that it prepares the look of succession from out of itself. […] This pure intuition activates itself with the intuited which was formed in it, i.e., which was formed without the aid of experience. According to its essence, time is pure affection of itself. [….] As pure self-affection, time […] forms the essence of something like self-activating.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Indeed for Heidegger, as Moyn and Yadin-Israel continue, ‘Time must be self-affecting for human being to remain consigned to a state of receptivity’, of dependence and finitude. This reference to receptivity leads into Moyn and Yadin-Israel’s discussion of Heidegger’s ideas of attunement, summoning and service. </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">: ‘In order to allow the being to be what and as it is, however, the existing being [</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dasein</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">] must already have projected that it is a being on the strength of what has been encountered. Existence means dependency upon the being’. As Moyn and Yadin-Israel put it, ‘Knowledge, Heidegger concludes, lies not in the individual’s ability to gain mastery over nature but in an ability to properly orient oneself toward receiving the revelation of the world.’ As Chacón notes too, for Heidegger ‘revelation was to be understood in terms of </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dasein</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">’s openness for meaning or sense (</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sinnoffenheit</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">)’. Moyn and Yadin-Israel see Heidegger’s location ‘squarely in the aftermath of Barth’s insistence that man’s indigent need for external revelation be recovered as the lost core of Christianity (with Heidegger obviously displacing the source of this necessary revelation)’, as determining his emphasis on ‘Readiness to be summoned to receive the external gift of revelation, presented as an offering and made available through the agency of the “wholly other”’. </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Weimar Moment</i><span style="font-family: Arial;"> repeatedly returns to the link made by </span><st1:city style="font-family: Arial;" w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Weimar</st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;"> dialectical theology between conditionedness and revelation. Chacón quotes from Bultmann’s ‘The Eschatology of the Gospel of John’ of 1928: ‘To know him [sic; God] is to see him as really made manifest, and that means to recognize him as Creator, to submit one’s self to be determined by him.’ Ulrich Rosenhagen, in his article treating the Weimar era Jewish-Protestant encounter, summarizes Friedrich Gogarten’s </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Die religiöse Entscheidung </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">(1921; </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Religious Decision</i><span style="font-family: Arial;">) as both an attempt ‘to define a new language of God and revelation beyond history’, and a rejection of religion </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">qua </i><span style="font-family: Arial;">‘an arrogant human enterprise to overcome the absolute contradiction between creator and creature’. </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">McCormick’s account of Schmitt’s and Strauss’ response to the crisis of neo-Kantianism is suggestive in relation to contemporary intellectual crises such as postmodern, nihilist relativism and the conversion of mass socialist politics (in the UK) into the debt-building profligacy of consumerist New Labour. But perhaps the progressivism of Blair’s ‘Things can only get better’ is morphing now into a wary stoicism, of ‘Things had better stay the same’. Recent academic phenomena such as the online journal <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong><a href="http://www.thinkingverse.com/">Thinking Verse</a></strong></i> or Simon Jarvis’ ultra-formalist epic poem <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><strong><a href="http://www.enitharmon.co.uk/pages/store/products/ec_view.asp?PID=583">Night Office</a></strong></i> – which holds to an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">abababcc </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>rhyme scheme throughout all its 218 pages <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">– </i>can be read as rebellions against today’s version of the modern rejection of limits, or as restatements of the Weimar era theorists’ insistence on the need to evolve conceptions of conditioning form: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="font-family: Arial;"></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Schmitt and Strauss each insisted that Enlightenment rationality was unravelling into a way of thinking that violently rejected “form” of any kind, fixated myopically on human capabilities rather than natural limits, and lacked any conception of the structural constraints that condition the possibility of philosophy, morality, and politics. Consequently, for both authors, Enlightenment reason obfuscates “genuine” expressions of rationality and obscures the necessity of political order as such.’ <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">McCormick analyzes Strauss’ schema of varying atheisms, in order to underline his
conception of the religious ‘fear that
is necessary for stable human interactions’ (McCormick’s words) and founds
political order:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Strauss
observed that traditional atheisms associated with Epicureanism and Averoism [sic] were fundamentally soft; they rejected the harsh rigours of religious
observance and diminished the necessity of fear of the divine. On the contrary,
Strauss suggests that modern atheism, as expressed by a Hobbes or a Heidegger,
confronts and embraces the harshness of human existence, accentuates the
necessarily and fundamentally fearful state within which human beings exist,
and accentuates the inescapable fact that human beings are in need, as such, of
dominion, of being ruled.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Whether
manifesting now as submission to the principle of capital accumulation <i>à la </i>Weber, or else to an infantilizing
consumer culture <i>à la </i> the Wyndham Lewis of <i>The Art of Being Ruled</i> (1926), such religious awe remains the human
norm. Surely religious fear and the need to submit underpinned what Kracauer called
the imperialistic-militaristic ‘false dreams of power’ which afflicted <st1:country-region w:st="on">Germany</st1:country-region> in the years preceding the First World War. When we need to be ruled we too in turn begin to dream those
dreams; but arguably in ‘German Spirit and German Reality’, Kracauer, with his
association of the growing thinking of existential spirit-life with its own
‘monstrous display of power’, begins to suggest a new form of power and an
alternative way of being ruled. For what was the 1920s push towards the
emergence of existential spirit-life but a more progressive manifestation of
‘The Hunger for Wholeness’ which Peter Gay, in his <i>Weimar Culture</i>, saw to characterize the Weimar era ‘fear of
modernity’? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Not
all who, in the twenties, hungered for connection and unity were victims of
regression; a few, outnumbered and not destined to succeed, sought to satisfy
their needs not through escape from but mastery of the world, not through
denunciation but employment of the machine, not through irrationalism but
reason, not through nihilism but construction – and this quite literally, for
this modern and democratic philosophy was formulated in their writings and
carried out in their buildings by architects.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">Jaspers is positioned on the same axis of civility as Gay's mentor, Ernst Cassirer. Jaspers’
early existentialism was not anti-Kantian, but meta-Kantian. If it sought to
supersede Kantian formalism, it remained structured by the antinomies (such as
reason/experience) which it sought to overcome by, in Thornhill’s words [<b><a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/jaspers/">here</a></b>], ‘incorporating all aspects (cognitive, practical and sensory) of human life in
an encompassing account of rational and experiential existence’. To submit to (the
project of) such an encompassing account, or to seek to absorb oneself within
psycho-physical wholeness, was the early existentialist variant of the more
populist 1920s trend defined by Kracauer: ‘to emerge from abstract ideas
anchored in the ego and arrive at concrete communal forms’. But of course the
existentialists, like the new urban constructors, were either ‘outnumbered’ or (in Heidegger's case) seduced by Nazism:
<st1:country-region w:st="on">Germany</st1:country-region> drifted on into submission to authoritarian leadership, and remained
fatally trapped within the old forms of power.
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Dr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8818811609368766394.post-65697871620479379982013-06-22T02:01:00.000+01:002013-06-22T02:07:40.634+01:00Note on Not Posting<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It is now over a month since my last post on this blog, and it looks like it may be another month yet before my next post. Behind the scenes, my conception of this blog has been undergoing some major structural alterations since I left my voluntary work at Hammersmith & Fulham Mind a month or two ago. Basically, releasing myself from the influence of my befriendee somehow returned me to my interest in literature, and I have been reading again in Thoreau and J. H. Prynne. This means I have had to work out how to begin to align these literary interests with (what had become) the workings of this blog as a sort of forced amateur encyclopaedia of Weimar thought, an over-responsible charm against my befriendee's irresponsibility: that is, a series of rather formal, very detailed crystallizations of what one contemporary academic (often Thornhill) had to say about one historical thinker (often Jaspers). So far as I have worked it out, you can expect quite a bit of Heidegger here in the future. But my posts may be a bit more informal than they have been in the past; exploratory attempts to return to the sort of philosophical literary criticism I once practiced as an academic.<br />
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My next post, which will stem from last year's important essay collection<em> The Weimar Moment</em>, will still be 'purely philosophical'. But because of my altered plans now, I will not be producing an entire post puffing this year's sensation, the<em> Weimar Thought </em>anthology edited by Gordon and McCormick. So here's an advertisement of its front cover instead. I recommend it. To my mind it & its theological turn definitively supersedes the old identity politics manual, <em>The Weimar Republic Sourcebook</em>.</div>
Dr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8818811609368766394.post-34589714620206619322013-05-17T11:05:00.001+01:002013-05-17T11:05:50.120+01:00Habermas on Cassirer in the 1920s (2)<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In Habermas’ presentation in ‘The Liberating Power of Symbols’, the conflict in the 1920s between Cassirer and Heidegger is related to the former’s concern with a humanist, normative (Kantian) constitutionalism. This concern of Cassirer’s is reflected in his upholding of (German-)Jewish ‘ethical ideals’ and civility, in the face of the emergence of fascist political myth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Fundamental to Habermas’ account of Cassirer is his emphasis on Cassirer’s understanding that it is (in Habermas’ words) ‘the dynamic of symbolization which drives the process of civilization forward’. ‘In the symbolic constitution of human existence and in the symbolic mediation of our life activity the path towards a humane conduct of life is already anticipated.’ This stress on Cassirer’s insights into the entwinement of symbolization and civilization or humanization, underwrites Habermas’ presentation of the Cassirer-Heidegger opposition as an opposition between German-Jewish civility and Heidegger’s (mythic) thinking of (mythically) autonomized, fated praxis – ‘between the decent, cultured spirit of a cosmopolitan humanism, and that fatal rhetoric set on throwing man back onto the “hardness of his fate”’. This proto-Nazi hardness refers to a praxis without fundamental or transcendental norms, such as the norms which, in Cassirer’s thinking, derived from the (post-)Kantian transcendental analysis of language; Habermas suggests that it was Cassirer’s unwillingness to run with and generalize Humboldt’s revolutionary use of Kant’s notion of the transcendental, or ‘transform the heuristic priority which the transcendental analysis of language and of the linguistically constituted lifeworld does in fact enjoy in his researches into a systematic priority’ of his theory of symbolization, which lay behind the limitation of the 1929 Davos disputation to a superficially culturo-philosophical rather than fully philosophical-political debate.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘The question of the evaluation of symbolic forms remained open, and the normative foundations remained entirely unclear. This may be the systematic reason why the controversy in Davos did not touch on the real crux of the dispute. The conflict between Cassirer and Heidegger, which extended into the political domain, was not played out. The opposition between the decent, cultured spirit of a cosmopolitan humanism, and that fatal rhetoric set on throwing man back onto the “hardness of his fate”, was reflected only in a contrast of gestures and mentalities.’</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">A foregrounding of the transcendental conception of language derived from Humboldt’s innovations, or of the linguistic ‘normative foundations’ of (the construction of) symbolic forms would, Habermas suggests, have enabled Cassirer to develop the civilizing impetus or content within his theory of symbolization; ‘the emancipatory power of symbolic shaping’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘With this step Cassirer could have overcome his epistemologically constricted vision, and resolved the conflict between the perspectivism of equiprimordial worlds [symbols acting as concepts], on the one hand, and the emancipatory power of symbolic shaping [symbols acting as images], on the other, which dogs his philosophy of symbolic forms.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Habermas observes that Heidegger himself, by the stage of Davos, had not yet achieved a non-nominalist pragmatics of language in his own thinking: ‘it is worth noting that Cassirer, on the basis of his reception of Humboldt, had already long since achieved the turn towards a pragmatics of language which still lay in the future for Heidegger’. Yet ironically, it was Heidegger at Davos who pointed to Cassirer’s lack of an emphasis on the transcendental aspect or normative foundations of his philosophy of symbolic forms – precisely the emphasis which could have stood up to Heidegger’s praxis without norms. For Heidegger a ‘terminus a quo’ – what Habermas calls the ‘fundamental dimension’ – remains unprobed by Cassirer:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘One could say that for Cassirer the terminus ad quem is the whole of a philosophy of culture in the sense of an elucidation of the wholeness of the forms of the shaping consciousness. For Cassirer the terminus a quo is utterly problematical […] Cassirer’s point is to emphasize the various forms of the shaping in order, with a view to these shapings, subsequently to point out a certain dimension of the shaping powers themselves.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">As Habermas underlines later in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Liberating Power of Symbols</i>, it would be left to Apel subsequently to turn a transcendental view of language against Heidegger’s upholding of autonomized linguistic praxis: Apel insists, Habermas saw, on ‘a transcendental-hermeneutic conception of language, which was directed against the autonomization of the world-disclosing function of language in Heidegger’s history of Being’. For Apel, as Habermas reiterates, ‘Innerworldly “praxis” is only “mediated” by the disclosing “poiesis” of linguistic world-constitution.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Yet as Habermas also shows, it is Cassirer’s political pronouncements of the 1920s which evince the normative aspect of his philosophy, and illustrate his repeated appeal to ‘Kant’s theory of law’. ‘When Cassirer took a stand on matters of public concern he made no attempt to conceal his fundamental normative convictions.’ Habermas quotes from Cassirer’s 1928 Constitution Day speech, to demonstrate how it (as Habermas puts it) ‘sketched with bold strokes the origins of human rights and democracy in the tradition of rational law’: ‘the idea of a republican constitution is in no sense a stranger, let alone an alien intruder, in the overall context of the history of German thought and culture’. Instead, Cassirer maintained, <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Weimar</st1:place></st1:city> republicanism ‘grew out of this very ground, and was nourished by its most authentic forces, the forces of Idealist philosophy’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jankel Adler. 'Woman with Hat'. 1940</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Habermas observes how Cassirer’s support of the normative political process of <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Weimar</st1:place></st1:city> constitutionalism was followed by an analysis of the collapse of this constitutionalism, which occurred along with the fatal threat to ‘normatively significant cultural processes’ (Habermas’ words) such as civilizing symbolization. In one of his last essays, the 1944 ‘Judaism and the Modern Political Myths’, Cassirer upheld German-Jewish humanist, normative ‘ethical ideals’ against the bad foundationalism represented by what Habermas calls the ‘fake primordiality of political myths’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘We [modern Jews] had to represent all those ethical ideals that had been brought into being by Judaism and found their way into general human culture, into the life of all civilized nations. […] If Judaism has contributed to breaking the power of the modern political myths, it has done its duty, having once more fulfilled its historical and religious mission.’ <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Cassirer saw how Nazi political myth enlisted the support of technological products of the scientific enlightenment, perceiving the political practice of the Nazis to be – as Habermas writes – ‘an ominous fusion of myth and technology: fascist mobilization succeeds by employing modern techniques of mass communication in the service of the revival of mythical forms of thought’. Moreover, Cassirer, as Habermas interestingly suggests, could therefore argue for the value of the monotheistic myth of Judaism precisely because Judaism historically fed into a humanizing (German-Jewish) religious enlightenment, rather than into a dehumanizing scientific enlightenment:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘It is worth noting that Cassirer trusts religious far more than scientific enlightenment as a counter-force to the violence of political myths – he relies on the confinement of myth within its own proper sphere, which was long ago achieved by monotheism.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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Dr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8818811609368766394.post-1474787928172914512013-04-29T23:46:00.001+01:002013-04-30T12:11:04.601+01:00Habermas on Cassirer in the 1920s<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I want to underline three particular aspects of Ernst Cassirer’s intellectual life in the 1920s which Habermas draws attention to in the opening lecture in his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Liberating Power of Symbols</i>, in order to reiterate Habermas’ emphasis on the importance of Cassirer’s work of the 1920s – an emphasis which, I feel, remains somewhat understated in the lecture ‘The Liberating Power of Symbols’ itself. These three aspects are: (i) his involvement with the Warburg Library circle, (ii) his novel reception of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s philosophy of language and, (iii) Cassirer’s relation to Heidegger alongside his concern with a humanist, Kantian constitutionalism. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Whilst stressing the independence of Cassirer’s philosophical development, Habermas nonetheless observes how ‘the interest which [Aby] Warburg and Cassirer shared in the symbolic medium of the human mind’s forms of expression was the basis of their intellectual affinity’. Habermas notes that, in 1921, Cassirer was ‘one of the first’ to give a lecture at the Warburg Library based at the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Hamburg</st1:placename></st1:place>. Habermas then adds that the following description (by T. von Stockhausen) of the present layout of the Warburg Library, ‘which, since 1958, has been housed in Woburn Square in London in an arrangement modelled on the Hamburg original, reads as though inspired by Cassirer’s philosophy of the development of symbolic forms’: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘The library was to lead from the visual image, as the first stage in man’s awareness, to language and hence to religion, science and philosophy, all of them products of man’s search for orientation, which influence his patterns of behaviour and his actions, the subject matter of history.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">As Habermas writes, the library’s very design thus reflects the way in which, for Cassirer, ‘The world of symbolic forms extends from pictorial representation, via verbal expression, to forms of orienting knowledge, which in turn pave the way for practice’. We can see that a progress through the Warburg Library, Image-Word-Orientation-Action, also follows (broadly) the subtitles of the three successive volumes of Cassirer’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms </i>– <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Language</i>,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>then <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mythical Thought</i>, then <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Phenomenology of Knowledge</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> A representative report on the recent threat to the Warburg Library emanating from the new management culture of the University of London can be read <strong><a href="http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/The-Warburg-Institute-is-fighting-for-its-life%20/21203">here</a></strong>. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Yet Warburg’s thinking influenced Cassirer’s theory of the process of symbolization in the first place, as Habermas shows when he points to Warburg’s concern with what Habermas calls the ‘force of artistic creation, purged of its demons’ – a concern described in E. H. Gombrich’s intellectual biography of Warburg: ‘More than ever therefore, the Renaissance appears in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mnemosyne</i> as a precious moment of precarious religious equilibrium in which the sources of heathen passions were tapped but still under control.’ Warburg’s atlas project, Habermas notes, was to be introduced with the following emphasis of Warburg's on the emergence of culture out of a work of distantiation: ‘The conscious creation of distance between oneself and the external world may be called the fundamental act of civilization. Where this gap conditions artistic creativity, this awareness of distance can achieve a lasting social function.’ As Habermas sees, Warburg’s insights are reflected in Cassirer’s ideas that (as Habermas puts it) ‘the fact that sensory contact with the world is reworked into something meaningful through the use of symbols is the defining feature of human existence’, and that ‘the objectifying force of symbolic mediation breaks the animal immediacy of a nature which impacts on the organism from within and without’. Habermas quotes this account of the process of symbolization in Cassirer’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Geist und Leben </i>:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Language and art, myth and theoretical knowledge all contribute to […] this process of mental distanciation: they are the major stages on the path which leads from the space of what can be grasped and effected, in which the animal lives and within which it remains confined, to the space of sensory experience and thought, to the horizon of mind.’ <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Of course Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms also emerged out of what Habermas calls his ‘innovative reception of Humboldt’s philosophy of language’ – a reception recorded in the 1920s in Cassirer’s 1923 essay ‘The Kantian Element in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Philosophy of Language’. Before considering Humboldt’s rôle in Cassirer’s thought, however, it is helpful to understand how his contact with the Warburg Library circle influenced his theorization of the symbolic function of expression. As Habermas notes, the most obvious result of the stimulus which Cassirer received in the 1920s, ‘if not from Warburg himself, then from the scholarly discussions of religion in the circle gathered around him in his library’, can be found in Cassirer’s ‘important reflections on mythical images and linguistic symbols’. Cassirer’s 1925 treatise on ‘Language and Myth’, which – as Habermas observes – appeared in the series of studies published by the Warburg Library, drew on Hermann Usener's classic (1896) work on the formation of religious concepts, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Götternamen</i>.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bifurcation of the fetishizing gaze.<br />
Ilse Bing. 'Self-Portrait in Mirrors'. 1931</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Cassirer’s idea that, as Habermas writes, ‘Symbolic form is […] originally generated by a stylizing force, which condenses the dramatic impact of experiences’, made use of Usener’s theory of ‘momentary gods’ to (as Habermas puts it) ‘account for symbolic condensation as a response to the exciting ambivalence of meaning-laden experiences’. It is as if the symbolic transformation of sense experience into meaning is triggered by the very focussing intensity of the nature-traumatized human. ‘Such compressed, highly significant experiences, which are the focus of an isolating attention, can congeal into a mythical image, can be semanticized and thereby spellbound, given fixity by a divine name which makes it possible to recall and control them.’ Habermas quotes Cassirer: ‘only when this splitting off succeeds, when intuition is compressed into a single point and apparently reduced to it, does a mythical or linguistic structure result, only then can the word or the momentary god emerge’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Again, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Language and Myth</i>, Cassirer maintains that language and myth are ‘two diverse shoots from the same parent stem, the same impulse of symbolic formulation’, in that language and myth apparently emerge simultaneously from ‘the same basic act of mental processing, of the concentration and intensification of simple sensory intuition’. In a way which perhaps is comparable with Gillian Rose’s underlining (in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Melancholy Science</i>) of the importance for Adorno’s thinking of a Marxist-modernist aesthetic of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">brüchigkeit </i>or brittleness, Habermas stresses Cassirer’s concomitant emphasis on ‘the broken character of our symbolic relation to the world, a relation which is mediated by words and tools’, and on ‘the indirectness of a self-relation which forces human beings to make a detour via symbolically generated objectifications in order to return to themselves’. For Cassirer, Habermas writes, acts of symbolization are distinguished by the fact that they ‘break open environments shaped by the peculiarities of a particular species’; they do this by ‘transforming fluctuating sense impressions into semantic meanings and fixing them in such a way that the human mind can reproduce the impressions in memory and preserve them’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Rose cited Adorno’s ‘The Essay as Form’ on how the essay ‘thinks in breaks (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in Brüchen</i>) because reality is brittle (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">brüchig </i>[split, class-divided, antagonistic]) and finds its unity through the breaks, not by smoothing them over’. It can be argued therefore, that in a sense for Adorno as for Cassirer, unified (symbolic, essayistic) expression<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>is consequent upon experiential brokenness. Yet Cassirer’s basic notion of symbolization, as Habermas notes, also posits a symbolic function of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">conceptualization</i> distinct from that of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">expression </i>: this separate function of conceptualization too would have to be factored into any convincing comparison of Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms with Adorno’s aesthetics of the riven essay form. Habermas outlines the distinction between expression and conceptualization so as to emphasize how Cassirer’s insights drawn from his involvement with the Warburg Library circle’s study of religion, in fact simply supplemented the thinking that he had launched in his earlier reception of Humboldt’s philosophy of language:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Expression transforms forceful sense impressions into meaningful elements, individual mythical images, which are able to stabilize affective responses; concepts articulate a view of the world as a whole. In his analysis of the expressive function, which is unmistakeably [sic] inspired by myth, Cassirer was stimulated by the discussions in Warburg’s circle. But, as regards the linguistic function of world-disclosure, Cassirer had already learned much from Humboldt prior to his arrival in <st1:state w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Hamburg</st1:place></st1:state>. The insights drawn from the study of religion helped to deepen a conception which ultimately derived from Cassirer’s genuine insights in the domain of the philosophy of language.’ <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Habermas writes that Cassirer’s ‘original achievement’, his ‘semiotic transformation of Kantian transcendental philosophy’, rested on his being ‘the first to perceive the paradigmatic significance of Humboldt’s philosophy of language’. Cassirer ‘thus prepared the way for my generation, the post-war generation, to take up the “linguitic [sic] turn” in analytical philosophy and integrate it with the native tradition of hermeneutic philosophy’ (Habermas’ speech on Apel, reprinted later in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Liberating Power of Symbols</i>, indeed lists Humboldt among the ‘marginal figures in the philosophy of language’ recovered within Apel’s early work). We can begin to understand the rôle played by Humboldt within Cassirer’s thinking of the symbolic function of conceptualization – his thinking of the way in which symbols, when acting as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">concepts </i>rather than as mythical images, ‘articulate a view of the world as a whole’ – if we refer to Habermas’ account of Cassirer’s understanding of the symbolizing process as ‘an interplay of contrary tendencies’. ‘The world of symbolic meanings arises on the one hand from the production of a plenitude of meaningful images, and on the other from the logical disclosure of categorially articulated domains of experience.’ Cassirer, we can see from Habermas’ explanation, took from Humboldt’s thinking the principle of linguistic world-disclosure, against traditional nomination theory of language, but he continued to stress the Kantian aspect of this innovative principle of Humboldt’s:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘He [Cassirer] retains an epistemological standpoint in the sense that he interprets linguistic world-disclosure on the model of the transcendental constitution of objects of possible experience. He assimilates Humboldt’s linguistic articulation of the world to Kant’s constitution of a domain of objects of possible experience. He reduces both to the common denominator of the categorial articulation of a symbolically generated world.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Habermas stresses how, by relying on ‘the common denominator of the categorial articulation of a symbolically generated world’, Cassirer’s reception of Humboldt’s philosophy of language in fact ‘underestimated the scope of these innovations’, or the scope of Humboldt’s own semiotic transformation of Kantian transcendental philosophy. For Cassirer reduced Humboldt’s thought here to a Kantian theory of objectification, as he sustained his own cherished theory of linguistic conceptualization and then made symbols of his conceptual objects:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Relying on an analogy with categorial synthesis, which first endows the manifold of sense impressions with the unity of the objective experience of things, he also understands the function of linguistic form in terms of “objectification”. In so doing, he exploits the ambivalence of the expression “objectification”; for we also use this term to describe the process of externalization which characterizes the sensuous, symbolic embodiment of an intellectual content: “What Kant describes as the activity of judgement is only made possible in the concrete life of the mind by the mediating intervention of language, as Humboldt makes clear. Objectification in thought must pass via objectification in the sounds of language.” This interpretation is the direct descendant of the theory of concepts which Cassirer had already developed by 1910.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Yet crucially, as Habermas also underlines, Cassirer <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">did </i>see that Humboldt’s use of Kant in fact in a way took him beyond Kantian epistemology. Humboldt, Habermas summarizes, <strong>‘</strong>takes from Kant the notion of the transcendental production of a categorially structured world of objects of possible experience, in order to explain the meaning-conferring function of language’. In this way Humboldt ‘describes the productivity of language as a world-projecting spontaneity’. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Geist und Leben</i>,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>Cassirer conveys this idea of what Habermas calls language’s ‘conceptual articulation of a world of possible states of affairs’: ‘Languages are […] not in fact means of representing a truth which is already known, but rather means of discovering what was previously unknown.’ Habermas underscores the revolutionary implications of Humboldt’s positing of language’s projective capacity and meaning-conferring function in this way:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘The spontaneous process of world constitution is thus transferred from the transcendental subject to a natural language employed by empirical subjects; the constitution of a domain of objects is similarly transformed into the grammatical pre-structuring of a linguistically articulated world. […] Whatever the members of a linguistic community may encounter in the world is accessible only via the linguistic forms of a possible shared understanding concerning such experiences.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">For Cassirer, Habermas writes, this meant that ‘Symbolic form overcomes the opposition of subject and object’. For by ‘transforming the world-constituting activity of the knowing subject into the world-disclosing function of the trans-subjective form of language’, Humboldt’s use of Kant’s notion of the transcendental exploded ‘the architectonic of the philosophy of consciousness as a whole’. Habermas quotes from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Geist und Leben</i>: ‘Thus the basic opposition which dominates the entire systematics of Kant’s thought seems inadequate […] when it comes to defining the specificity of the domain of language as a product of the mind.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">To be continued.</span></i></b><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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Dr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8818811609368766394.post-38886578395044635602013-03-21T12:22:00.000+00:002013-03-26T12:53:36.881+00:00Either/Or (Part I)<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
Here are some<strong><em> </em></strong>of my reading notes on the first part of Kierkegaard’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Either/Or</i>.<br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘that eternity which lies not outside time but in the midst of it’ [<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">51</b>. Compare, regarding actualizing the eternal in the temporal (Bergman), the reference on 37 to ‘an idea that joined the finite and the infinite’. Cf. also 54, for instance the remark that ‘Only where the idea is brought to rest and transparency in a definite form can there be any question of a classic work’ (compare 103: ‘the stillness of the moment’). These references to rest and stillness are themselves worth comparing with Kierkegaard’s (hereafter SK’s) notion of ‘suspension’: ‘The art of recollecting and forgetting will also prevent a person from foundering in any particular relationship in life – and assures him complete suspension.’ (295) </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">This effect of an ‘artistically [vs. ethically] achieved identity’ of forgetting and recollecting seems to me to correspond to the Buddhist meditative condition of detachment or acceptance; for me mindfulness can be what SK, on the same page, calls ‘the Archimedean point with which one lifts the whole world’. Suspension - also because it is an aesthetic position - is of course a relativistic state: one ‘does not hoist full sail for any decision’ (293).]<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><br /><span style="font-family: Arial;">‘When was it that the hetairias became common in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Greece</st1:place></st1:country-region> except at the time when the state was in the process of disintegration? And does not our age have a striking likeness to that age, which not even Aristophanes could make more ludicrous than it actually was? Has not the bond that in the political sense held the states together, invisibly and spiritually, dissolved; has not the power in religion that insisted upon the invisible been weakened and destroyed […]’ [<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">141</b>. These statements, like the similar ones in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Irony</i>, seem to evoke the conditions of <st1:city w:st="on">Weimar</st1:city> era <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Germany</st1:place></st1:country-region> – as well as the conditions of our time.]<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Our age has lost all the substantial categories of family, state, kindred; it must turn the single individual over to himself completely in such a way that, strictly speaking, he becomes his own creator.’ [<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">149</b>. Cf. the ‘subjectivity reflected in itself’ on 143, and the quotation from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hegel’s Philosophy of Right </i>regarding ‘the right of subjective freedom’ on 626 n. 13.]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘since we […] acknowledge as characteristic of all human endeavour in its truth that it is fragmentary, that it is precisely this which distinguishes it from nature’s infinite coherence, that an individual’s wealth consists specifically in his capacity for fragmentary prodigality […]’ [<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">151</b>. Cf. the advocacy of concise communication – ‘simple statements’, ‘time-and-talk-saving pithy aphorisms’, ‘economizing’ – on 465. Cf. too the recommended ‘venture in fragmentary endeavour’ in line with ‘the disjointed and desultory character of unfinished papers’, and a vocation of obscurity, on 152 (& 137).]<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">[quotation above from 151 regarding ‘fragmentary prodigality’ continues with:] ‘what is the producing individual’s enjoyment is the receiving individual’s also, not the laborious and careful accomplishment or the tedious interpretation of this accomplishment but the production and the pleasure of the glinting transiency, which for the producer holds much more than the consummated accomplishment, since it is a glimpse of the idea and holds a bonus for the recipient, since its fulguration [<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fulguration</i>] stimulates his own productivity […]’ [<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">152</b>. 629 n. 36 glosses ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fulguration</i>’ as a loan word in Danish, meaning ‘a sudden flashing (for example, the flashing of molten gold or silver)’. Compare, therefore, 129: ‘Then in the most distant heavens, far off on the horizon, one sees a flash; it speeds away swiftly along the earth, is gone in an instant. […] it seems as if the darkness itself has lost its composure and is starting to move. […] There is an anxiety in that flash; it is as if in that deep darkness it were born in anxiety – just so is Don Giovanni’s life. There is an anxiety in him, but this anxiety is his energy. […] Don Giovanni’s life is not despair; it is, however, the full force of the sensuous, which is born in anxiety; and Don Giovanni himself is this anxiety, but this anxiety is precisely the demonic zest for life.’ In this relation, compare too SK’s constellation of aesthetic-intellectual love, risk and a Nietzsche-like terror of natural contingency (contingent even in its ‘infinite coherence’). ‘With what kind of love do we embrace nature? Is there not a secretive anxiety and horror in it, because its beautiful harmony works its way out of lawlessness and wild confusion, its security out of perfidy? But precisely this anxiety captivates the most. So also with love, if it is to be interesting. Behind it ought to brood the deep, anxious night from which springs the flower of love. Thus the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nymphaea alba </i>[white water lily] rests with its calyx on the surface of the water, while thought is anxious about plunging down into the deep darkness where it has its root.’ (424; cf. 294) On 102 Don Giovanni is posited as ‘absolutely musical’ because, unreflective and nonverbal, he ‘does not have that kind of [intellectual] continuance at all but hurries on in an eternal vanishing, just like the music’.]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘love is always present tense’ [<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">226</b>]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘the repelling force always required in the negative, which is actually the principle of motion. It is not merely repelling but infinitely repulsive, and whoever has the basic principle behind him must necessarily have infinite momentum for making discoveries.’ [<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">285</b>. Cf. Hegel’s infinite absolute negativity adopted in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Irony</i>, and Hegel’s definition of negativity as ‘the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">turning point </i>of the movement of the Notion […] the innermost source of all activity’ quoted in 641 n. 3. Cf. with this principle of motion the ‘movement of thought […] in the service of reflection’ discussed on 188, where, for the will (mediation, and the ethical) to begin, or to free itself from serving reflection, it ‘must be altogether impartial, must begin in the power of its own willing; only then can there be any question of a beginning’. The logic of this replacement of the principle of (aesthetic-)intellectual motion by the free exercise of the will (the decision, ethics), seems to me to be analogous to the meditative logic wherein mindfulness emerges from (within, ‘in the power of’) the body’s own wisdom: the breath. Cf. also, however, SK’s opposition of spirit-motion to the perpetual motion imposed by the capitalist work ethic. He writes of the ‘businesslike zeal with which they work at the office’ on 289: ‘There is an indefatigable activity that shuts a person out of the world of spirit and places him in a class with the animals, which instinctively must always be in motion.’ (<st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Cf.</st1:city> <st1:state w:st="on">SK</st1:state></st1:place> on ‘busy bustlers’ on 25, and critiquing working for a living on 31).] <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘There is so much talk about man’s being a social animal, but basically he is a beast of prey, something that can be ascertained not only by looking at his teeth. Therefore, all this chatter about sociality and community is partly inherited hypocrisy and partly studied perfidy.’ [<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">288</b>. Cf. the quotation from Aristotle’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Politics</i> in 642-43 n.12: ‘man is by nature a political [social] animal. […] the natural outcast is forthwith a lover of war; he may be compared to an isolated piece at draughts’. Cf. 22, and also Hobbes?] <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Every erotic relationship must always be lived through in such a way that it is easy for one to produce an image that conveys all the beauty of it.’ [<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">390</b>. Cf. 418: ‘For love, everything is a symbol […]’; ‘Erotic love is much too substantial to be satisfied with chatter, the erotic situations much too significant to be filled with chatter. They are silent, still, definitely outlined, and yet eloquent, like the music of Memnon’s statue. Eros gesticulates, does not speak; or if he does, it is an enigmatic intimation, symbolic music.’]<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘To have an understanding of the moment is not such an easy matter, and the one who misunderstands it is doomed to boredom for life. The moment is everything, and in the moment woman is everything; the consequences I do not understand.’ [<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">433</b>. Cf. the seducer’s statements with the references to the moment on 90 and (as 658 n. 209 points out) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Concept of Anxiety</i>, 82-91.]</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">As in my <strong><a href="http://downcastlids.blogspot.co.uk/2013_01_01_archive.html">previous post</a></strong> on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Concept of Irony</i>, the page numbering here refers to the relevant volume of the <st1:place w:st="on">Princeton</st1:place> edition of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kierkegaard’s</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Writings</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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Dr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8818811609368766394.post-55821590269771238602013-03-01T20:21:00.001+00:002013-03-02T09:39:22.127+00:00The Research of Hope<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">William Kluback’s ‘Karl Jaspers and Schmuel Hugo Bergman: Believing Philosophers’ appeared in the collection edited by Richard Wisser and Leonard H. Ehrlich, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Karl Jaspers: Philosopher among Philosophers</i>. Kluback opens with a scene which movingly evokes the attempt to perpetuate Weimar era German-Jewish thought after the Holocaust, in the form of a philosophical conversation between Israel and postwar Germany: a meeting on a street in Jerusalem in April 1949 between Jaspers and Bergman (the subject of my <strong><a href="http://downcastlids.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/bergman-on-dialogical-philosophy.html">previous post</a> </strong>on this blog), who had been the first Rector of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. ‘In 1948,’ Kluback notes, ‘Jaspers had published a book on philosophical faith, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Der philosophische Glaube</i>. Bergman had reviewed the book in the newspaper <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Haaretz</i> a day or two before and now the friends spoke about it.’ Jaspers’ book, writes Kluback, made ‘a deep impression’ on Bergman. ‘The book rightly shocked him. He was stunned by its description of the spiritual situation of the time and by the helplessness of the philosophy that was offered to a tortured mankind.’ For Bergman, Kluback continues, ‘The shattering nature of the problem’ exposed by Jaspers’ book ‘lies in the silence of transcendence’: that is, in contemporary nihilism. Kluback – from the vantage-point of an adherent of religious tradition – points to a post-Kantian ‘anarchy of autonomous, sophistic subjectivity, of inescapable relativism, and of an incurable hedonism’. Weimar thought itself, viewed from Kluback's position, was already coloured by nihilism: ‘Bergman was right when he saw the shattering consequences of nihilism in the decades before 1948 and those which were yet to come.’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Kluback understands nihilism in terms of social coercion, or the way in which a power-hungry rationalism can turn itself into political dogmatism. As ‘philosophers in the age of despotism’, Bergman and Jaspers, Kluback maintains, ‘worried about the efficacy of philosophy […] only because at times some of their colleagues turned to political insanity while others fought and died in physical and spiritual exiles’. For Kluback, ‘The philosopher knew that in the tempests of politics nihilism was the ever present threat to spiritual and physical survival’, because ‘When Bergman spoke of the shattering effect of Jaspers’s book, he recognized the power of nihilism, the profanation of the sacred and the blatant and uncontrolled will to power’. Kluback could be talking about the will-sapping, depressing corruptions which characterize the marketized state bureaucracies of the <st1:country-region w:st="on">UK</st1:country-region> today, such as the higher education system; actually here he is referring to the threat to the creation of the new state of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Hugo Bergman described his reaction to this discussion of nihilism as shattering, threatening the birth of a state in a hostile world where the depths of the oppositon [sic] had hardly been measured. The future demands an unflinching courage, a masterful self-confidence and an incontrovertible hope in man’s reasonableness.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Nihilism hits at the root of the philosopher’s decisive participation in state-building, Kluback emphasizes, because ‘The problem of values was not merely academic; it became the essential quality for the society, the expression of the state’. The emergent state demands an education – a transmitted and interpreted intellectual culture, a community of debate – which is not eroded by nihilism.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘The Arab question had become acute for the independent Jewish state. There were the historical values, the constitution, the rule of law and the security of the state; all these issues had to be addressed. These were debated and needed consensus and solution. The philosophers had a role to play.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Kluback’s suggestion, therefore, is that nihilism threatened Jaspers’ philosophical work towards the refoundation and rehumanization of <st1:country-region w:st="on">Germany</st1:country-region>, just as it threatened Bergman’s work as a public intellectual in the new <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region>. We can note too that the anti-nihilist ‘historical values’ shared by all three thinkers to which Kluback refers in this connection – Jaspers, Bergman and Buber – were precisely the philosophical values which came to fruition in 1920s Germany: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘The philosopher [in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Israel</st1:place></st1:country-region>] accepted the role of educator. Jaspers knew this well. He had been an educator in a <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Germany</st1:place></st1:country-region> destroyed by Nazism. He spoke to the people of the true German spirit. His voice was heard. He had to lay the foundations of a <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Germany</st1:place></st1:country-region> that would seek to lessen the effect of twelve years of totalitarianism. Bergman and Buber had similar tasks in an emerging state. Jaspers would continue his work from Basle, Bergman and Buber from a divided <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Jerusalem</st1:place></st1:city>.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">It is clear that the post-postmodern supermarket that is the contemporary university is unable to offer such an anti-nihilist education. The blogosphere is awash with disaffected academics (or post-academics) complaining of their alienation from a higher education system lacking in values – for instance an English lecturer in the UK notes today’s inane <strong><a href="http://sciencefiction365.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/pandemonium-or-infernal-cacophony.html">cacophony</a></strong> of academic discourse, whilst an American Max Scheler scholar comments on the recent interviewing of only one philosopher, himself, for a post in philosophy (the other candidates included an historian and someone from an English department). Both examples point to the fact that the university itself now is programmed by a relativistic nihilism – by the educators’ own inability to hold to any value, effectively, other than their own self-assertive need to hustle, and make some noise. The academic system fosters quasi-celebrities, strange spectral celebrities whose elite peer group glamour is accrued through the canny autopoietic administration of existing knowledges, rather than the creation of new knowledges; it is as if short-term subcultural infamy is to be attained through the collective self-distancing from truth, rather than long-term public fame - the fame of a Kierkegaard, say - achieved following the individualistic creation of new truths. The Scheler scholar, in his blog post [<strong><a href="http://philosophicalchasm.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/postmodern-pedagogy-and-texts.html">here</a></strong>], concludes that the genuine philosopher can only respond by returning to the work of searching for truth: ‘<i>we can resist the postmodernist on the grounds that not all texts inspire in the same way; philosophical texts are those that inspire the search for truth </i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">[his italics]’.</span> Jaspers’ definition of nihilism in his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Perennial Scope of Philosophy</i>, quoted here by Kluback, had<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>indeed focussed exactly on the absence of truth and loss of faith:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘“While demonology and deification of man,” he said, “offer a substitute for faith, open unbelief is known as nihilism. The nihilist ventures to appear without disguise. For him all contents of faith are untenable, he has unmasked all interpretations of the world and of being as delusions: for him everything is conditional and relative; there is no fundament, no absolute, no being as such. Everything is questionable. Nothing is true, everything is permissible.”’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">It is in contrast to such a nihilist that Bergman and Jaspers, Kluback maintains, are ‘believing philosophers’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘When other men compromise and conform to the needs of the time the philosopher remains embedded in his belief in freedom, in human dignity and the communicating community. These beliefs the philosopher shares with all reasonable beings. In them he sees a hint of the Idea of mankind. The philosopher sees danger in nihilism; it becomes his single antagonist.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Bergman argued, Kluback writes, that ‘if we are to prevent the danger of nihilism “we must turn to God:” this is the powerful task which Jaspers gives to philosophy’. ‘“What he would like,” Bergman remarked, “is the renewal of philosophical belief that is hidden in the religious, the transformation of religion into philosophy. This certainly will not be the way of mankind, although it may be the way of a minority.”’ Kluback signals that (Jaspers’ and) Bergman’s concept of philosophical faith, and their practice as believing philosophers, may be regarded as being elitist (or at least as being avant-gardist); he observes of Bergman that ‘He knew that a turning toward God was not the answer for mankind, but he also knew that the philosopher had to be a believer; on his faith others depended’. Yet Jaspers’ conception of faith, like Bergman’s concept of revelation, is – Kluback stresses – not exclusive. The believer, Jaspers wrote, must be able to ‘acknowledge the faith that is alien to him as a possible truth emerging from a different source, even if he is unable to understand it’. Bergman, Kluback writes, ‘found in revelation a universality which was at the foundation of his idea of The Believing Community’. Kluback suggests how Bergman's position on the hinge of two faiths, liberal-rational philosophical faith and potentially dogmatic-exclusive religious faith, was determined by his own inspiring conception of a decisively directing, socially unifying revelation:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘He moved easily between philosophical and religious faith. In fact, it would be difficult to distinguish one from the other in his life and thought. This is comprehensible because he believed that a revelation was given to the people and it concerned their earthly destiny, their service to mankind and their vision of a future that spoke of justice, compassion and love. In a letter to his life-long friend Robert Weltsch, the editor of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jüdische Rundschau</i> (11/2/71), Bergman spoke of his conviction “that only a new moral direction would make it possible to find a solution for all difficulties, however utopian this may be”.’</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Kluback also quotes from an important 1945 letter to the philosopher Jacob Fleischmann in which Bergman clarified his idea of the non-dogmatic path of faith – the shared ‘new moral direction’ – which springs from revelation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘“I do not believe in an absolute religion. All religious art [sic, pres. ‘religions’], in my view, are methods to a goal, ways. The dogmatic divisions are artistic superstructures which religions have built over or under their dwelling (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bau</i>). In my eyes they are not important. […] Every people, and their epochs have their paths to God. But God is one, and if we feel a nearness to the Jewish tradition, it is because <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">this </i>pedagogy, and not the dogmatic, is close to our heart. I don’t believe in the absolute <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">truth</i> of either Judaism or Christianity. I believe in a particular mission of the Jewish people which has shown itself in such a fruitful way in our time. Thus it is for me tasteless and laughable when Zionists draw from a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">religious</i>-historical reality simply <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">political </i>consequences.”’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Like Jaspers, Bergman in this letter is suspicious of objective religious forms on account of their potential dogmatism. Again like Jaspers, Bergman would supplant such absolute religion with a decisive hermeneutic of transcendence; a path to God. Because of his personal closeness to Jewish tradition, Bergman (unlike Jaspers) identifies the path to God with his contemporary ‘particular mission of the Jewish people’. Thus for Bergman the non-dogmatic hermeneutic of transcendence itself has assumed the dimensions of a ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">religious</i>-historical reality’: for him here the struggle towards transcendence takes place within contemporary Jewish history, just as for Jaspers, we could add, it first took place within the religious-historical reality of <st1:city w:st="on">Weimar</st1:city> era <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Germany</st1:place></st1:country-region>. Both religious-historical realities are built out of, and hence consist of, philosophical faith.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Noting that ‘What we find revealed in Jaspers is the capacity of philosophy to describe the nature of faith, a clarification of the modes of faith’, Kluback underlines the fact that Jaspers’ decisive hermeneutic of transcendence remains a Kierkegaardian, negative one. ‘Faith becomes for Jaspers certainty “coupled with distance.” […] Faith defies description; it belongs to experience. Man never escapes the reality of non-belief, of inner doubt and despair.’ Because, as Kluback writes, ‘Faith is not a given to be held in perpetuity undiminished’, ‘Bergman and Jaspers knew that faith was a struggle; it was a gift’. Thus just as the mission towards God <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> faith, in the sense that it consists of it, faith itself <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i>, consists of, the struggle – the (transcendentally) decided, decisive risk. Kluback quotes from Jaspers’ final book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Philosophical Faith and Revelation </i>: ‘“There is hope without deception”, he said, “only when we do not hold it to be a certainty, not even a probability, but dare to live by it because such a life can be worthy of us and founded in transcendence.”’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Kluback stresses that a philosophical life is ‘formed through commitment’; ‘The philosopher shows the way of faith; he must decide to travel it.’ His very commitment to the path also suggests, as Kluback intimates with an additional quotation from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Philosophical Faith and Revelation</i>, that philosophical faith can become a collective, rather than an exclusive or elitist, project: ‘all our actions are based on what we expect of men – and that means of ourselves. Whoever despairs of man despairs of himself. Contempt of man is self-contempt.’ Kluback reinforces this point: ‘Faith is the foundation of man’s actions, of his world view, of his concept of the future.’ Faith thus emerges as the quality which relates people to each other, as well as to the distinct (yet interrelated) phases of human experience – past, present and future. Once more, the point is that each ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">religious</i>-historical reality’ quite literally consists of philosophical faith.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I have tried to suggest in this post that Kluback shows Weimar era Germany and the new postwar Israel alike to be exemplary religious-historical realities instancing how, as he put it, ‘The problem of values was not merely academic; it became the essential quality for the society, the expression of the state.’ The intuition that in these two historical and intellectual moments the projection of philosophical faith became a social – even a state – project, could perhaps become more sustainable through a consideration of the concern within Weimar thought with natural law; particularly if we understand the tradition of natural law thinking as an articulation of what Kluback calls ‘a sacred covenant of belief between the philosopher, the past, the present and the future’. Kluback’s opposition to the lineage of post-Kantian reason – ‘The [French] Revolution declared the end of the sacred tradition that declared that God is truth’ – brings him to quote from Edmund Burke’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reflections on the Revolution in France</i>. ‘Each construct of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society […] connecting the visible and invisible world according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and moral natures’. Whereas now amidst our nihilism, Kluback comments, ‘We have discovered what it means to deify man, to identify history with natural law’, Jaspers and Bergman ‘knew that faith alone held together the sacred covenant that tied the generations to each other’.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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(The phrase 'the research of hope' is borrowed from Robert Hullot-Kentor's essay 'Critique of the Organic: Kierkegaard and the Construction of the Aesthetic' (reprinted in his <em>Things beyond Resemblance</em>))Dr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8818811609368766394.post-43688725289317121912013-02-14T13:22:00.000+00:002013-02-14T13:22:52.121+00:00Bergman on Dialogical Philosophy<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Shmuel Hugo Bergman’s little-known but intensely readable primer, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dialogical Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Buber</i>, presents a series of lectures given by Bergman in 1962. In his ‘Preface’, translator Arnold Gerstein – aptly, I sense – describes Bergman’s original language as ‘a semiformal but elegant conversational Hebrew that is compelling to students and philosophers alike’. The intimacy of Bergman’s lecturing style thus mirrors that of his subject: the dialogue. Nathan Rotenstreich, in his ‘Foreword’, maintains that the term ‘dialogical philosophy’ is ‘undoubtedly taken from Martin Buber’; both Rotenstreich and Gerstein, however, note that for Bergman it is Kierkegaard who emerges as ‘the central link in the history of the philosophy of the dialogue’ (in Gerstein’s words). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Later sections of Bergman’s study address other thinkers of central importance to <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Weimar</st1:place></st1:city> era philosophy: Eugen Rosenstock, Franz Rosenzweig. Yet the first and by far the longest part of the book focusses on Kierkegaard’s thought. In some introductory statements prefacing this part, Bergman suggests the affinity of dialogical thinking to existentialist thinking: ‘What distinguishes any genuine dialogue is the fact that the participants are individuals, each bearing their own specific and generic traits. They are not abstractions but men of flesh and blood.’ On the following page Bergman adds a caveat: ‘The philosophy of dialogue which we will discuss in these lectures is not the same as “existentialism,” since not every existential philosophy stresses the dialogical factor; however, the two schools are identical with respect to the position of the individual within the philosophical system.’ As Bergman puts it later, ‘With this stress on the importance of the individual self, the single man in all his existential individuality, Kierkegaard lays the foundation for what has subsequently been called dialogical philosophy.’ But, as Rotenstreich rightly observes, Bergman’s treatment of dialogical philosophers’ relationship to existentialism is ultimately of lesser importance than the emphasis his book places on ‘the centrality of man’s individuality and the relationships and encounters between individuals and with God’. Bergman notes, for instance, that Kierkegaard’s dislike for German Romanticism’s ‘tempestuousness and exaggerated subjectivism that isolated man’, meant that he ‘strenuously sought the way to religion through the use of subjective irony’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Crucially, in connection with Weimar political philosophy’s decisionism, Bergman shows how Kierkegaard’s thinking of the decision forms an aspect of his thinking of man’s emergent relationship with God, repeatedly referring to ‘the autonomous activity and self possession [sic] which are necessary in order to probe the true meaning of religion’. Because, as Bergman writes, for Kierkegaard ‘Real action is in the internal decision of man’, therefore for him ‘Man’s relation to God is not direct or objective; it is an inner relation, a relation of risk’. For Kierkegaard, as Bergman notes, within the moral and religious dimension of life ‘direct communication is impossible’. ‘In order to see God, one must break the direct-passive relationship. Man’s inner nature then bursts forth in an independent act, and he confronts the reality of God.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Bergman emphasizes that the I-Thou relation, the relationship of man to man, is the concern of post-Kierkegaardian dialogical philosophy:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Actually, in spite of the tremendous importance of dialogue for Kierkegaard, the major dialogue for him is between man and God. The dialogue between man and man has no function in religious life because religious man leads a solitary life and cannot disclose to others the task that is imposed on him.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Bergman’s attention to the importance of religious ‘silence’ or ‘speechlessness’ reappears within the context of his discussion of the modality of ‘non-Socratic learning’ within which, for Kierkegaard (as Bergman puts it), ‘a genuine mutual relationship between God and man is created’: learning as divine revelation. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘The relationship between man and man is invariably Socratic – that is, it will always be such that one man, when he teaches another, even when he teaches him about revelation and faith, can only be an agent or a midwife. He cannot take the place of direct revelation, which comes through God as teacher.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Commenting on Kierkegaard’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Repetition</i>, Bergman stresses how ‘the essence of revelation’ involves a recreation of man by God, and that ‘God alone can recreate man’. ‘The learner is given something that was not within him and for which he was unprepared, and so the moment in which he receives the doctrine or revelation is of crucial importance.’ It is here that Bergman evokes the sort of divine revocation of speechlessness ‘which is expressed among Jews in the prayer: “Oh Lord, open thou my lips and my mouth may declare thy praise”’. We remember how Bergman wrote of how in relation to God, man’s ‘inner nature […] bursts forth in an independent act’: ‘Man enters this personal dialogue with God only through God’s action.’ It is as if the spiritual release afforded by the human decision is matched by – though it does not have the power to solicit – a divine revocation of our silence. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">For instance when it juxtaposes Ferdinand Ebner’s view that (in Bergman’s words) ‘Man’s spirit is in its essence a receiving spirit dwelling in a relationship to a giving spirit’, with Wilhelm von Humboldt’s argument that (as Bergman puts it) ‘logos finds its way to our physical life and awakens it to the life of the spirit’, Bergman’s book foregrounds the position that ‘language is the revelation of God to man’. Noting that ‘this viewpoint predominates in the thought of Rosenstock, a friend of Rosenzweig’, Bergman explores the philosophy of language presented by Rosenstock in his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angewandte Seelenkunde </i>[<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Applied Psychology</i>], a text published in 1924 (but largely written some years before).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Bergman focusses on the concept of ‘true speech’ – revelational speech – which Rosenstock developed as a result of his view that, as Bergman phrases it, ‘The word, “logos,” is a revelation of divine presence’:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘In speech [for Rosenstock] there are two levels, reflecting the distinction between true and ordinary speech. The two levels are the compulsion (or necessity) of speaking, and the ability to speak. True speech is not voluntary or arbitrary; it is not a matter of will but a necessity whose force causes speech to spring forth. True speech springs forth almost against the will of man, and thus all true speech is revelation.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">With this idea that ‘The word is given to man or forces itself upon him’, Bergman clearly echoes his earlier commentary on Kierkegaard – where he wrote of how ‘Man’s inner nature then bursts forth in an independent act’. It is as if Bergman’s exegesis of the philosophers’ views of the experience of revelation has become as compulsive and involuntary as the experience itself. Yet though for Rosenstock ‘true speech’ entails that (as Bergman puts it) ‘the speaker is entirely subject to his own speech’, this does not mean that for Bergman such involuntary revelational speech divorces the speaking/spoken subject from his own existential individuality. The example of revelational speech which Bergman provides – the Jewish hermeneutic practice of ‘the law of intra-linear parallelisms in the Book of Psalms’ – is itself, Bergman observes, ‘grounded in distress and necessity’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘In prayer Israel encircles the prayer leader, who passes in front of the Ark, while others release him by repeating the prayer which he has recited with such total self-absorption and compulsion that he does not hear it. The congregation repeats his prayer, paralleling it by half-lines in such a way that he can and must hear what he has prayed, and in this way they free him from his distress. This is true speech.’ <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">At the end of his book Bergman returns to this logic of call and response – of sacred language or prayer and hermeneutics – which characterizes revelational speech, noting how Buber (in his ‘The History of the Dialogical Principle’) situated the event of call and response at the core of his thinking influenced by Hasidism:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘[…] the question of the possibility and reality of a dialogical relationship between man and God, thus of a free partnership of man in a conversation between heaven and earth whose speech in address and answer is the happening itself, the happening from above and the happening from below, had already accosted me in my youth. In particular since the Hasidic tradition has grown for me into the supporting ground of my own thinking, hence since about 1905, that had become an innermost question for me.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The de-individualizing tendency within the dialogical philosophy of language treated by Bergman emerges clearly however, when he discusses Rosenstock’s idea of ‘liturgical grammar’. Bergman glosses Rosenstock’s notion of calling as recreation: ‘Rosenstock says that liturgical grammar would change Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” to read, “God, you have called me, therefore I am.”’ Bergman underlines how ‘The calling comes first and establishes the “I.”’ He also stresses the scriptural precedence for the idea that ‘only from the “Thou” can the “I” be created’. ‘The classic example is I Samuel, 3:5, where young Samuel turns to Eli and says: “Here am I for thou called me.”’ Within Bergman’s study of dialogical philosophy therefore, there seems to be a tension between his emphasis on the involuntary (and even de-individualizing) aspect of religious experience, and his emphasis on the contrasting ‘autonomous activity and self possession [sic] which are necessary in order to probe the true meaning of religion’ – on an individual’s decisive, committed, risk-taking experience. This tension seems to me to be resolved, though, by Bergman’s ongoing attention to the concept of redemption as recreation: that is, to a redemption of man by God which precisely enables man’s exercise of personal agency.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Bergman’s reading of Rosenzweig’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Star of Redemption</i> suggests that ‘the redemption of the world must be perceived as a vital process, as the animation of the world’. This sort of redemption is evoked again within Bergman’s account of Buber’s notion of the state of ‘realization’, which Bergman describes as ‘the perception of reality in its immediacy, when one leaps into it, as it were, and identifies with it’. Towards the end of his book, Bergman relays the illustration of realization offered by Buber in one essay in his 1913 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Daniel, Dialogues on Realization</i> – a precursor of Buber’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I and Thou</i> of 1923:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Buber illustrates this with the example of a Swiss pine […]. If […] I open myself to the tree with all my energy directed toward it, if I assimilate it, as it were, commit myself to it, then I am transformed and I become the tree itself. […] I experience a particular tree. I identify myself with it, without surrendering my unique position. I succeed, in other words, in conjoining the two, myself and the tree. I have access thereby to the mystery of reality. […] Entering the mystery of reality is […] a higher state of activity which I initiate and through which I open myself and transform my energy into a magical strength that fascinates and gratifies, while quieting the chaos around me. […] This is the great miracle of realization which this essay attempts to describe. Something of the philosophy of the dialogue emerges here, because the true dialogue also has the same openness and commitment along with the self-preservation of the person speaking.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span> </div>
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Dr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8818811609368766394.post-89432563231144117442013-01-08T14:46:00.001+00:002013-01-08T14:46:54.126+00:00The Concept of Irony<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Some <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Reading</st1:place></st1:city> Notes<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Here is the first in what I hope will be a series of occasional posts presenting some of my notes from the work of thinkers of central importance to <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Weimar</st1:place></st1:city> thought. These notes may be on texts by thinkers of the <st1:city w:st="on">Weimar</st1:city> period itself (Carl Schmitt, say), or alternatively on texts by earlier philosophers, such as Hobbes and Kierkegaard, who significantly influenced <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Weimar</st1:place></st1:city> era theorists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Kierkegaard’s dissertation, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Concept of Irony</i>,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>is referred to substantively in Adorno’s second <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Habilitationsschrift</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic </i>(1933). Page references here are keyed to the relevant volume of the <st1:place w:st="on">Princeton</st1:place> edition of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kierkegaard’s Writings</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Socrates, in assigning to insight, to conviction, the determination of men’s actions, posited the Individual as capable of a final moral decision, in contraposition to Country and to Customary Morality, and thus made himself an Oracle, in the Greek sense. He said that he had a daimon(ion) within him that counselled him what to do, and revealed to him what was advantageous to his friends.’ [Hegel, quoted on <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><em>161</em></b>. Compare Hegel’s reference to self-knowing and freedom cited on 162; Kierkegaard (hereafter SK) on subjectivity versus ‘the established’ on 163 (cf. identity vs. the established on 126); & the remarks on heteronomy, subjectivity and decision in Hegel on 163-65 (cf. 263, 264).]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘When we take into account that even in our countries, where the state, precisely because it has undergone a far deeper mediation, allows subjectivity a much greater latitude than that which the Greek state could allow, when we take into account, I say, that even in our countries someone living on private means is always a dubious person, we may infer from that how the Greek state must have regarded Socrates’ attempt to go his own way and live as a private person.’ [<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><em>179</em></b>. Cf. 447. Compare too the remark on Socrates’ ironic and ‘purely personal relation to individuals’ on 180-1. Compare also the remarks on the ironist, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Taugenichts </i>(good-for-nothing) and a vocation of obscurity on 281 (& on Hamann: 434).]</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘True freedom, of course, consists in giving oneself to enjoyment and yet preserving one’s soul unscathed. In political life, true freedom naturally consists in being involved in the circumstances of life in such a way that they have an objective validity for one and through all this preserving the innermost, deepest personal life, which certainly can move and have its being under all these conditions but yet to a certain degree is incommensurate with them.’ [<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><em>182-83</em></b>] <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘we do find [in Socrates] a most consistently sustained irony that lets the objective power of the state break up on the rock-firm negativity of irony. […] In this way he becomes alien to the whole world to which he belongs […] ; the contemporary consciousness has no predicate for him – nameless and indefinable, he belongs to another formation.’ [<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><em>196</em></b>. Cf. 447. Compare too the note on Socrates’ ‘negative relation to life’ on 39; & the remark on his inability to ‘contract any real relationship to the established order’ on 178. Cf. dissident consciousness: Schmitt-Luhmann-Konrad (etc.); & the category of the extraterritorial as in my ‘Vortex Out of German London’ (Kracauer: <strong><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/114012108/Vortex-Out-of-German-London">here</a></strong>)? See also the counterposition of ‘fear of the law’ to ‘conscious knowledge of why he acted’ on 228.]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘In many ways, the <st1:city w:st="on">Athens</st1:city> of this period calls to mind what <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Rome</st1:place></st1:city> was at a later time. Intellectually, <st1:city w:st="on">Athens</st1:city> was the heart of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Greece</st1:place></st1:country-region>. Thus when Greek culture approached its disintegration, all the blood rushed back violently into the chambers of the heart. Everything concentrated in <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Athens</st1:place></st1:city> – wealth, luxury, opulence, art, science, recklessness, the enjoyment of life – in short, everything that, as the city hastened toward its ruin, could also help to glorify it and illuminate one of the most brilliant intellectual dramas conceivable. There was a restlessness in Athenian life; there was a palpitation of the heart intimating that the hour of disintegration was at hand. But from the other side, that which was the condition for the decline of the state proved to have immense significance for the new principle that was to appear, and the disintegration and decay became indeed the fertile soil of the new principle.’ [<strong><em>200-1</em></strong>. Compare the <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Weimar</st1:place></st1:city>/ interwar period?] <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘It [‘the contemporary age’] does not permit one to stand still and to concentrate; to walk slowly is already suspicious; and how could one even put up with anything like that in the stirring period in which we live, in this momentous age, which all agree is pregnant with the extraordinary? It hates isolation; indeed, how could it tolerate a person’s having the daft idea of going through life alone – this age that hand in hand and arm in arm (just like itinerant journeymen and soldiers) lives for the idea of community?’ [<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><em>246-47</em></b>. Community as a mere temporary alliance of the self-interested or combative: so that now, the phrase ‘care in the community’ means nothing at all. Cf. the comment on irony as ‘isolation according to its concept’ on 249.] <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘dissimulation denotes […] the objective act that carries out the discrepancy between essence and phenomenon; irony also denotes the subjective pleasure as the subject frees himself by means of irony from the restraint in which the continuity of life’s conditions holds him – […] Irony […] has no purpose; its purpose is immanent in itself and is a metaphysical purpose. […] irony, in which the subject has no purpose.’ [<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><em>255-56</em></b>. Irony as a freeing from contingency; beyond this, for SK, is the sort of acceptance of heteronomy commented on (in terms of assigned virtuous tasks) at 235. Compare the important remarks on a religious reconciliation with actuality on 297, 298 (on the latter page SK writes of ‘becoming clear and transparent to oneself, not in finite and egotistical self-satisfaction but in one’s absolute and eternal validity’, anticipating <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Either/Or</i>, part II (& cf. 445, 299 here)).]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Here, then, we have the idea […] as the infinite absolute negativity. Now, if this is to become something, the negative must assert itself again in a finitizing of the idea – that is, in making it concrete. [> existentialism?] The negative is the restlessness of thought, but this restlessness must manifest itself, must become visible; its desire must manifest itself as the desire that actuates the work, its pain as the pain it engenders. If this does not happen, then we have only the unreal actuality of contemplation, devotion, and pantheism.’ [<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><em>312</em></b>. Compare SK’s reference to infinite absolute negativity on 26, the sourcing Hegel quotation on 476, and 131. Cf. also 305 (‘In no way is the true ideal in the beyond’); 319 (‘The true actuality becomes what it is; the actuality of romanticism merely becomes.’) Cf. too 271.]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘if our generation has any task at all, it must be to translate the achievement of scientific scholarship into personal life, to appropriate it personally. [On subjectivity as truth (cf. in Bergman, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dialogical Philosophy</i>), compare the note on 219 and 552 n. 189 (><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Postscript </i>etc.).] […] Irony as a controlled element manifests itself in its truth precisely by teaching how to actualize actuality, by placing the appropriate emphasis on actuality. In no way can this be interpreted as wanting to deify actuality in good [socialist] St. Simon style or as denying that there is, or at least that there ought to be, a longing in every human being for something higher and more perfect. But this longing must not hollow out actuality; on the contrary, life’s content must become a genuine and meaningful element in the higher actuality whose fullness the soul craves. [Actualized actuality an element of transcendental(-ized) life: the quotation continues onto the next page.]’ [<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><em>328</em></b>] <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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Dr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8818811609368766394.post-55271792155972649802012-12-07T20:41:00.002+00:002012-12-08T01:23:01.111+00:00Walser Addendum: Two Anthropologies<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">It may be that my reading of Walser in recent posts – with its reliance upon Simmel’s theory of depersonalization and then Jaspers’ projection of a hermeneutic of transcendence – is riven by a tension between two conflicting anthropologies, functionalist and transcendental. In his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Karl Jaspers</i>, Thornhill notes that whilst a functionalist anthropology ‘views human life as both produced, and adequately described, by its objective forms’, a transcendental anthropology such as Jaspers’ promotes the view that ‘the human being is most human, most <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">existent</i>, insofar as it is least material, and least bound by the objective forms (laws) of scientific rationality and social orientation’. </span><span style="font-family: Arial;">Thornhill observes:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘The constructive receptions of Kant which underpin the philosophies of Jaspers and Heidegger [...] describe an unbridgeable fissure at the centre of German existential thinking. On one side of this, Jaspers insists on the ethical difference of humanity from its forms. On the other side, Heidegger insists on its ethical adequacy to these. Jaspers’ philosophy is a morally transcendental anthropology, in which humanity interprets itself most truthfully in its unconditioned imperatives. This has later echoes in the neo-Kantian writings of Habermas. Heidegger, by contrast, provides the basis for a functionalist anthropology, anticipated already by Georg Simmel and Carl Schmitt, and echoed later by Arnold Gehlen, in which human life interprets itself as delivered unto its realized objective forms. Jaspers’ anthropology is strongly obligated to the remnants of idealism and transcendental subjectivism, and it creates a metaphysic of the person on the foundation of these. In Heidegger’s anthropology, in contrast, the transcendental subject, and its ethical derivates in practical reason, are replaced by a historicist metaphysic of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Volk</i>, or of the functions which the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Volk </i>imposes upon its members.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">In my presentation of Simmel’s theory of depersonalization <strong><a href="http://downcastlids.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/behind-mountains-part-2.html">here</a></strong> it is unclear whether I am maintaining that Simmel critiques the functionalization of the human or (as Thornhill indicates) merely discerns it.</span></div>
Dr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8818811609368766394.post-44640600333861811012012-12-06T12:42:00.000+00:002012-12-06T14:30:56.857+00:00Behind the Mountains, part 3<span style="font-family: Arial;">A second radical implication of Walser’s articulation of modern self-abnegation, relates to the way in which it enables his writing to develop its thinking of freedom. In ‘Tobold (II)’ the narrator celebrates the fact that ‘I was a servant! I served!’:<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘My position, consequently, was a good one, which sufficed to set my person to rights. Isn’t it true our lives first take on beauty when we’ve learned to be unassuming, to forget or set aside our own wishes and desires, and instead devote ourselves with all our liberated, willing hearts to a precept and lifelong service, to satisfy people with our conduct, and meekly and boldly forgo beauty?’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The dialectic of the precept and liberation here is accompanied by a twinning of self-abnegation and self-exaltation (or self-transcending self-elevation), which Walser proposes in the preceding sentence. ‘So exalted I felt, even, I can say, yes, elevated far above my own person, which I scarcely dignified any more with so much as a hasty glance, or rather a hasty thought.’ Self-transcended, the narrator paradoxically no longer looks down on himself as on an alienated object (with ‘a hasty glance’), and can instead give a ‘hasty thought’ to his serving <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">self</i>. Walser’s sense of transcendence as something that gives one back to oneself, was voiced already in the following statements of the narrator’s towards the beginning of ‘Tobold (II)’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Newly emerged from a terrible weariness of life, I attained fresh insights, began to enjoy living. As Peter, I’d had no real worldview, no true notion of life; […]. Living can be so tiresome when you lack an inspiring, elevating thought or point of view or vision to help you come to terms with the disappointments awaiting you in life. No longer did I chase after fame or the like; the sublime no longer drew my gaze. I had learned to love the small and insignificant, and, armed with this kind of love, I found life beautiful, just, and good. I was delighted to renounce all ambition.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">These lines identify self-abnegation, cast in terms of the renunciation of monetary ‘ambition’, with the self-transcending self-elevation enabled by pursuit of a transcendental idea, or ‘an inspiring, elevating thought or point of view or vision’. Walser thereby suggests that truly el(ev)ating happiness, true enjoyment of life, can be attained by holding to an inspiring vision of non-elevation. Elsewhere in ‘Tobold (II)’, the narrator identifies the happy condition of non-elevation itself – of ‘modest being’ – with spectatorship of an inspiring vision of others’ happiness. Genuinely fulfilling personal modesty is here contingent upon (liminal observation of) others’ illusory ‘glory’. Walser ironizes the notion that the elevated might really be freer: for him what matters is holding to the transcendental idea of happiness, to the 'glow' that surrounds the aristocratic diners 'playing their roles'. ‘I always took great pleasure in observing the splendour, the glory; for myself, though, I’d always desired a place in the quiet, modest background from which I could gaze with happy eyes up to and into the bright glow.’ The ‘twilight shadow’ is where the ‘common servant’ finds ‘a great benevolence’ and feels ‘most secure, most faithfully sheltered’, precisely because privileged life is viewed as a mere ‘magical spectacle’, at which the narrator ‘thought it lovely just to look on, entranced’. The idealizing worldview - the ‘whole picture’ – is what he ‘found so beautiful and cherished above all else’. But just this idealization of power is what enables him to find freedom in the refusal of power. ‘So I was always conscious of my merit, station, and joy in life, and took extraordinary delight in the modest being I embodied.’ </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">In a short piece from 1917, ‘The End of the World’, Walser’s twinning of self-abnegatory, radical modesty with the self-transcending self-elevation enabled by pursuit of a transcendental idea, can be seen to expand into what could be called a broader geo-political twinning of apocalypse (or the limit) with utopia (or absolute freedom).<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>In this piece, after ‘imagining the end of the world […] as a sea of bliss in which it could rock forever’, ‘everything looked so prosperous, fine, and free that at once the child was convinced this was the end of the world’. In this context we could also think of the inversion of nature associated by Walser with human conflict in ‘The Battle of Sempach’; when ‘Nature is […] annihilated in a battle’. ‘The sound was like a black, gaping abyss, and the sun now appeared to be shining from a darkened sky, glaring down more dazzling than ever, but as though from a hell, not the heavens.’ Here, unnaturally, the sun becomes brightest when as if apocalyptically detached from its heavens. Excessive brightness – brightness aspiring to the absolute, pushed to its limit – has already been associated with apocalypse on the previous page. ‘The whole earth, no matter how bright it looked, seemed to him to rumble and thunder in anger.’ Walser sees the earth, like the sky, to be darkened by its own aspiration to dazzle. A conception of the end of the world, for Walser, is inseparable from the conception of a transcendental urge towards brightness, freedom, utopia.<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Walser’s imbrication of the limit and transcendence seems to me to be<strong> </strong>echoed by Karl Jaspers’ theorization of the decisive hermeneutic of transcendence available to those in existential crisis. As Thornhill summarizes in his book on Jaspers, for Jaspers ‘Transcendence is accessible only to a decisive hermeneutic, which stands in the absolute limit-situation of human existence, interpreting transcendence through its own crisis.’ Thornhill quotes from the third volume of Jaspers’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Philosophy</i> : ‘“Failing [<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Scheitern</i>]”, Jaspers argues, “is the encompassing ground of all cipher-being. Seeing the cipher of the reality of being arises from the experience of failing”.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">For Jaspers, Thornhill writes, ‘Being […] is present only negatively, as a series of possible implosions in the order of human consciousness, in which consciousness is referred to its own limits.’ Jaspers’ conception of the decisive hermeneutic of transcendence practiced by those in crisis, rests on the view that, subjectively, such implosions (as Thornhill notes) are ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">decisions</i>’, through which ‘human life decides interpretively to reflect upon its own possibilities (ideas), acts in a manner which accords with these, and thus places itself upon a more unified level of reflection above its habitual practical and cognitive orientations’. The narrator in ‘Tobold (II)’ indeed decides to reflect upon self-abnegation, identifying it as a decision to ‘devote ourselves with all our liberated, willing hearts to a precept and lifelong service, to satisfy people with our conduct, and meekly and boldly forgo beauty’. Continuing his self-hermeneutic, he emphasizes too that to freely and decisively act upon such radical modesty, and ‘forgo heaven’, is to interpret the possibility of transcendence ‘many times more beautiful’:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘For when I forgo something beautiful: doesn’t a brand-new, never-before-dreamed-of beauty a thousand times more beautiful come flying toward me in reward for my display of goodwill and my kind, strongly felt self-denial? And if, of my own free will, elevated by courage and compassion to nobler sentiments, I should forgo heaven: won’t I then, sooner or later, in reward for my righteous behaviour, fly into a heaven many times more beautiful?’ <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">We can view Walser’s writing as a whole in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Masquerade and Other Stories</i> as itself a decisive hermeneutic of transcendence, undertaken by a vulnerable adult. In linguistic terms, the transcendence at which it aims is, surely, the sort of visionary register to which Bernofsky points when – in her translator’s preface – she quotes from Walser’s ‘Meine Bemühungen’ (‘My Efforts’) of 1928-29. There he comments that in his late work he was ‘experimenting in the linguistic field in the hope that there existed in language an unknown vivacity which it is a pleasure to awaken’. This vivacity is in language but also beyond it, as Walser hinted already in his piece ‘Tableau Vivant’ from 1909. ‘Words won’t venture anywhere near the description of this dynamo. He sings, or something around him seems to be trembling with sounds. Behind the mountains, bells are ringing.’ Walser’s staged tableaux and prose masquerades are also aiming at transcendence in terms of an ideal ‘whole picture’, or ‘dream’, the construction of which they often dramatize. I am thinking here in particular of these marvellous lines in ‘The Aunt’:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Gradually I came into the mountains and soon reached an isolated village ringed all around by high crags; this was the birthplace of my mother. It seemed strange to me, yet also familiar and familial. The whole world, and I as well, appeared wonderfully old and young; earth and earthly life were suddenly a dream; I felt everything was perfectly comprehensible, yet also utterly inexplicable.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJT8HH6CmmhTkotfYIyjkDe_Nl3bP9hJirKJ-E4dgyCFZOq463Uf5RWFJOJNMOwieGDGnKr8h_gBNdnkg-9CysHx79Enu7LyJqTnG94LsSv6TnSIxMP73OGX6CI_lzeUJUyftem6gh30c/s1600/Hofer-%2527Montagnola%2527c.1930.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="316" nea="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJT8HH6CmmhTkotfYIyjkDe_Nl3bP9hJirKJ-E4dgyCFZOq463Uf5RWFJOJNMOwieGDGnKr8h_gBNdnkg-9CysHx79Enu7LyJqTnG94LsSv6TnSIxMP73OGX6CI_lzeUJUyftem6gh30c/s400/Hofer-%2527Montagnola%2527c.1930.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">What better description could there be of the goal of Jaspers’ hermeneutic process working towards (in Thornhill’s words) ‘a more unified level of reflection above its habitual practical and cognitive orientations’? Walser here captures the existential uncertainty – the sense of the ‘utterly inexplicable’ – which, for Jaspers, accompanies any decisive hermeneutic bid for a transcendental cognitive unity at the limit of knowledge. As Thornhill observes in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Karl Jaspers</i>, whilst Heidegger argued that language (as Thornhill puts it) ‘defines and constitutes the practically disclosed horizon of the world’, and thus ‘expressly excludes all ideal components from experience’, Jaspers by contrast maintained that language ‘always positions human consciousness in a relation (albeit existentially uncertain) to its primary ideal unity (its transcendence), and it thus permits an ideal/practical disclosure of this unity’. Thornhill, moreover, describes Jaspers' implicit fusion of Hamannian hermeneutics and Kantian epistemology by referring to Jaspers’ view of revelation or transcendence as mere ‘appearance’ – a term which seems to parallel Walser’s ‘whole picture’ or ‘dream’:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘The hermeneutic of revelation […] has its profound validity in its ability to signal that the ideal limits of cognition do not reflect the absolute limits of being itself. Nonetheless, with Kant, Jaspers also argues that transcendence can only be knowable as a mere <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">appearance </i>of the possible unity of knowledge: true transcendence, thus, is inevitably beyond the limits of human thought.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Walser’s lines in ‘The Aunt’, therefore, seem to me to exemplify what Jaspers would call an aesthetic cipher. Ciphers, though also decisive ‘moments of experience, embedded and disclosed in human historical life’, are for Jaspers (as Thornhill writes) ‘only the fleeting appearance of guiding ideas – akin to Kant’s transcendental ideas – which give shape to, but do not encompass, the ultimate underlying unity of human life and knowledge’. For Jaspers a truthful hermeneutic of ciphers ‘always also requires a critical-epistemological approach’ – Thornhill emphasizes – which with Kant and against Hamann, posits God as ‘an “idea”, which illuminates the limits of human consciousness, but which is never the realized experience of human transcendence’. (Walser: ‘It seemed strange to me, yet also familiar and familial.’) Thornhill sees that for Jaspers, it is indeed ‘only because the idea of God is not the experience [but the] appearance <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">of </i>transcendence that it is interpretable <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as </i>transcendence’. As I have argued <strong><a href="http://downcastlids.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/hamann-and-jaspers-part-2.html">elsewhere</a></strong>, you could say that mere appearance lends the quality of definition (or decision) to Jaspers’ visionary hermeneutics – in Thornhill’s words, ‘it is the (epistemological) recognition of the limits of human knowledge which makes the (hermeneutical) disclosure of transcendence, in ciphers, so radical and truthful’.</span></div>
</o:p></span>Dr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8818811609368766394.post-58456453375102587622012-11-21T12:39:00.000+00:002012-11-21T18:47:18.914+00:00Vortex Out of German London<div class="separator" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I am glad to announce that ‘Vortex Out of German London’, a long essay of mine from 2006, is now published in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies</i>, 3 (2012), 28-66. A copy of the final proofs is available to read <strong><a href="http://www.scribd.com/robert_bond_16">here</a></strong>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Focussing in particular on the involvement in Anglo-German cultural phenomena which characterizes both the Vorticist-period radical culture in London and contemporary neo-Vorticist activity, my article documents points of affinity between the visionary sensibilities of a range of ‘extraterritorial’ cultural phenomena across the twentieth century: Vorticism, the ‘Lukács circle’ and Expressionism around the First World War, along with the London neo-Vorticism developed by Iain Sinclair and Brian Catling during the mid-1970s and after. In the article I argue that the floating social position, as well as the visionary perspective and strategies, adopted by these extraterritorial avant-gardes is of considerable relevance to today’s intellectual life – a condition increasingly riven by reliance on the short-term academic contract and random redundancy. I conclude that the vitalist primitivism of Vorticism, laid out first by Lewis in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blast</i>, leads the aesthetic to occupy a place within a traceable lineage of visionary <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">London</st1:place></st1:city> writing concerned with the modern citizen’s spiritual passion. This explains why Vorticism interfaces with the exilic modernist sensibility developed within central <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place>, which similarly fused romantic anti-capitalism with a magical perspective.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">If I were writing the article now I would probably seek to derive its existentialist content from Karl Jaspers rather than Siegfried Kracauer – but, in its belated appearance now, my work drawing on Kracauer does at least chime with what seems to be a tiny Kracauer vogue at the moment (given the current <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New Formations </i>devoted to <strong><a href="http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/newformations/issue/nf61.html">him</a></strong> and Graeme Gilloch’s long-awaited monograph out at the end of the month). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
</span>Dr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8818811609368766394.post-43280090072808796822012-11-08T14:49:00.000+00:002012-11-08T14:49:36.777+00:00Behind the Mountains, part 2<div class="separator" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Gass returns to the characteristically depersonalized and depersonalizing quality of Walser’s writing when he notes the ‘detached, desperate “inhumanity” of his work’. The narrator’s depersonalizing self-negation is foregrounded explicitly in ‘The Alphabet’: ‘<st1:place w:st="on">I.</st1:place> I skip over, for this is I myself.’ Depersonalizing narratorial strategies are most evident in ‘Tobold (II)’ however, in numerous instances of self-negating narration such as this sentence:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Concerning a keg of the finest rye whiskey that, to the delight of the steward and that of a certain additional person – namely, to my very own, grinning, hand-rubbing delight – showed up only to be closely inspected and quite thoroughly investigated and examined by the two abovementioned important or insignificant personages, I shall take care not to waste another word.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">In ‘Tobold (II)’, the ‘certain additional person’ that is the modern self is brushed aside and reduced to the point where his very moods and their attendant whims are directed by an invisible heteronomy. The narrator’s investigation of his workplace is less a focussed product of individual agency, than a dissipated effect of being seduced by that which is more powerful: ‘The castle itself was an imposing edifice, and the many beautiful rooms and chambers I was permitted to glance into as the mood struck me naturally captured my attention and interest with their aristocratic appearance.’ Narration once more becomes a vehicle for expressing the narrator’s self-alienation and loss of personal agency, in the following presentation of vigilant attention directed by the formless authority which it tends: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘One of the choicest duties I had to perform was caring for the numerous lamps, an occupation that gave me great pleasure, for I developed quite a fondness for it. Each evening at nightfall I brought light, so to speak, into the dubious twilight that reigned on all sides, or if you prefer, into the darkness. As the count was a fancier of beautiful lamps and lampshades, these always had to be tended and treated with the greatest care. On beautiful evenings, as I crept about the rooms, all quiet as a mouse, a delicate mood in the air, the entire castle seemed bewitched. All the rooms were as if enchanted, the park an enchanted park, and with my soft, discreet, cautious lamplight, I seemed like Aladdin leaping one evening with his magic or miraculous lamp up the high, broad palace steps spread with splendid oriental rugs.’ <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">In this passage the radical modesty of the narrator – as he creeps about the rooms, ‘all quiet as a mouse’ – renders him indistinguishable from the narrated environment: the succeeding clause, ‘a delicate mood in the air’, could refer to him just as easily as to the castle. Then this submersion of the narrator’s identity within the described environment blends into a self-alienation in the form of a self-fictionalization: ‘I seemed like Aladdin’. The sense of narratorial self-alienation has already been generated by the recurrently self-qualifying, self-negating prose: ‘I brought light, so to speak, […] or if you prefer […]’. Here we are reminded of Walser’s foregrounding of the depersonalized quality of his writing in ‘The Green Spider’, where the narrator refers to ‘my mouth and its modest tool, my inherited language’, so divorcing a potential description enabled by such language from his human physicality ‘incapable of […] stammering it out’. By self-consciously stressing that this is writing removed from its writer, Walser emphasizes his own radical alienation from the reader. This is the effect of the final lines of ‘A Flaubert Prose Piece’ too, which once more draw attention to Walser’s writerly self-abnegation and the depersonalized quality of his prose. ‘Her report contained nothing that might have surprised him. They glided and passed among the people gliding and passing by, like a dream vision within the vision of a dream.’ <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I want to draw out the radical implications of Walser’s articulation of modern self-abnegation; of the radical modesty of being, as Gass puts it, ‘Lightly attached to people, to the formalities of society, to any work which lies beneath another’s will like a leg beneath a log’. To take a first example, Walser’s position of self-abnegation enables his writing to develop a powerful critique of self-interest. In her translator’s ‘Preface’ to the collection, Susan Bernofsky quotes Elias Canetti on Walser, in the former’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Human Province</i> : ‘His deep and instinctive distaste for everything “lofty”, for everything that has rank and privilege, makes him an essential writer of our time, which is choking on power.’ Walser’s fascination with power struggles – his typical focus on human relations in terms of conflict or war – is communicated, for instance, in the following passage in ‘Tobold (II)’. Here the narrator discerns two distinct forms of human conflict, low battles concerning self-interest and ‘noble’ battles concerning natural morality:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Intrigues show up in castles, the same as in all other major establishments and institutions. Now the cook wanted to incite me against the steward, now the steward against the cook, but all this factional bickering and class conflict left me cold, for I had no interest in it. Anywhere a noble, splendid, sensible struggle can be found, I’ll be glad, perhaps, to take part in it – why not? – for instance in the struggle of the good versus the wicked, the benevolent versus the malevolent, the open and flexible versus the hardened and insensitive, the quick-witted versus the unenlightened, the diligent and industrious versus those who do nothing yet always stay on top, the struggle of the guileless versus the crafty and sly. This could be a battle I might like to lend a hand in, it can rain blows and punches for all I care, the more the merrier.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Walser’s critique of modern, institutional self-interest relates to the way in which his writing – as I want to suggest – projects a similar opposition of modern purposive rationality to natural human life, to that proposed within Georg Simmel’s contemporaneous <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Philosophy of Money</i>. (Simmel’s text was published in<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>1907, whilst Walser’s ‘Aschinger’ and ‘The Battle of Sempach’ – to which we will refer soon – date from 1907 and 1908 respectively). In his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">German Political Philosophy</i>, Chris Thornhill outlines how Simmel’s political and sociological theory involved ‘the first major step on the path towards a reconstruction of vitalist philosophy, especially that of Nietzsche’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Like Nietzsche, […] Simmel saw the capitalist economy as marking the final triumph of the human being as a formally purposive agent, and he also saw the purposive rationality of capitalism as weakening or neutralizing the relation between people and the purposes or objects of their possession, and even between people and their own actions. Under the generalized rationality of capitalism, therefore, the purposes of economically constructed persons assume a heteronomous primacy over human life itself.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Indeed, as Thornhill summarizes, because the formal purposiveness of modern monetary subjects involves an alienation of those subjects from their own true purposes, it generates – Simmel maintained in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Philosophy of Money</i> – an experience of depersonalization, such as we have seen reflected throughout Walser’s prose pieces: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘As an agent seeking purposes, he [Simmel] argued, the modern subject alienates itself from the experiential sources of genuine subjectivity, and it constructs itself as a thinly neutralized set of contents and objectives. The monetary alienation of the human subject from its purposes and actions, then, also leads to a weakening or dissipation of the relation between people and other people, and ultimately, to a weakening or dissipation of the person itself – to a lack of “definite substance in the centre of the soul” or to a diffuse experience of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">depersonalization</i>.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">We can find Walser detailedly projecting an opposition of formal purposiveness to natural human life within the following extraordinary description of war in ‘The Battle of Sempach’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘The rushing crowd, apparently full of passion, drew closer. And the knights stood their ground; suddenly they seemed fused together. Iron men held out their lances; you could have gone for a buggy ride across this bridge of lances, the knights were squeezed in so tightly, lance upon lance stuck out so mindlessly, firm and unyielding – just the thing, you might think, for such an impetuous, raging human breast to impale itself on. Here, an idiotic wall of spikes; there, people half-covered with shirts. Here, the art of war, the most prejudiced there is; there, people seized with helpless rage. Just to put an end to this loathsome horror, one man after the other recklessly charged into a lance tip, maddened, insane, flung by fury and rage. Flung to the ground, that is, without even having struck the helmeted, plumed iron scoundrel with his hand weapon, bleeding pitiably from his breast, tumbling head over heels, face down into the dusty excrement left behind by the noble steeds. This was the fate of all these almost naked men, while the lances, already red with blood, seemed to smile in scorn.’ <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Walser’s tableau foregrounds two aspects of human experience. The ‘people half-covered with shirts’ represent passionate humanity. Their behaviour, their purposes, are self-directed: these are people simply ‘impetuous’ or ‘seized with helpless rage’, who are representatives of uncontrolled nature – ‘maddened, insane, flung by fury and rage’. On the other hand, there are the knights reified into their weapons: ‘an idiotic wall of spikes’, ‘the art of war, the most prejudiced there is’. On this side it is impossible to separate reified humans (‘Iron men’, ‘the helmeted, plumed iron scoundrel’), from humanized lances which ‘seemed to smile in scorn’. These knights emblematize an alienated condition of formal purposiveness. Their behaviour is rigidly purposeful, to the point where they are themselves indistinguishable – ‘squeezed in so tightly, lance upon lance stuck out so mindlessly, firm and unyielding’ – from the object-world of instrumentality and neutralization that they project. Walser obsessively delineates what he intuits to be the structuring conflict underlying modern life, and his forecast of the outcome is not utopian: as he writes in the preceding sentence, ‘Nature is always annihilated in a battle’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Thornhill shows how Simmel’s opposition of formal purposiveness to natural human life was grounded in Nietzsche’s thinking about law, reason and nature. Nietzsche, Thornhill summarizes, thought that fear of nature stimulates the legislation of ‘rational or moral purposes for humans to pursue, so that they are distracted from their naturalness’. Laws are formed in order to differentiate human life from ‘the cyclical temporal processes of mere nature or from the chaotic temporal events of historical contingency’. ‘Laws and values produced in this manner serve to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">humanize </i>the world’, Thornhill notes; ‘they allow human beings to live, at least, in an illusion of human justification and moral purpose’. But they also reflect ‘a fearful will to obtain power, a power that can only be secured through the extirpation of whatever is residually <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">natural</i> – including the residues of nature in reason itself’:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Whilst possessing the obvious psychological utility that they protect people from knowledge of their own naturalness, however, Nietzsche argued that the laws created by reason form highly coercive and dominatory intellectual structures, which, in seeking to suppress fear, fixate human reason on the acquisition of power.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">For Nietzsche, as Thornhill writes, this is ‘invariably the will to power of weak people’; it is ‘power resentfully desired by those who cannot contentedly tolerate the naturalness and spontaneous futility of life’. Those who cannot accept contingency, and remain trapped in nihilistic <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">horror vacui</i>, ‘produce sense for their lives only through the pursuit of obligatory, yet ultimately illusory laws and purposes’. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">We can argue that Walser’s writing articulates the perspective of those whom competitive capitalist society labels ‘weak’ or ‘vulnerable’ – of the radically modest – in order to discern, with Nietzsche and Simmel, the true weakness of those who pursue ‘obligatory, yet ultimately illusory laws and purposes’. In Walser’s ‘Aschinger’, their rushed, non-accepting satisfaction of appetitive processes of mere nature is not enough for the competitive and power-seeking, who must then flee into ‘the commercial air’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘The dissatisfied quickly find satisfaction at the beer spring and the warm sausage tower, and the satiated dash out again into the commercial air, generally with a briefcase beneath their arm, a letter in their pocket, an assignment in their brain, firm plans in their skull, and in their open palm a watch that says the time has come.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Walser suggests that, slotted into their new, artificial time (of money, not of nature), the supposedly ‘firm’ purposes of economically constructed persons do not derive from their own natural brains – or from any ‘definite substance in the centre of the soul’ – but are instead plucked out, as if at random, from the empty, depersonalized skulls within which they float. A critique of the modern differentiation of ‘plans’ from naturalness or contingency may also be said to lie behind Walser’s ironization of the self-with-attainments in ‘Tobold (II)’: ‘Incidentally, it should also be mentioned that the secretary was an excellent pianist. Why shouldn’t we have a fondness for people who bring us pleasure with their skills, gifts, sciences, or knowledge?’ Walser proposes, in ‘Marie’, that the illusory plans and instrumentalized attainments which animate the capitalist city merely sustain a society in which both ‘work’ and ‘sophisticated pleasure’ are paratactically, and barbarically, inseparable from ‘privation’:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>‘“Where are you going?” Frau Bandi asked.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“I’m not quite sure yet. Well, to one of the centres of contemporary civilization, culture, work, privation, sophisticated pleasure, modern elegance and education, to one of the big, noisy cities where I’ll learn how to go about winning some respect and repute for myself among my fellow men.”’ </span></div>
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Dr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8818811609368766394.post-52599293073263410402012-10-19T09:59:00.001+01:002012-11-07T18:42:02.008+00:00Behind the Mountains<div class="separator" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA9r9vpiIK2kw1y1_wCh3sK9EBA0tQb54BmWJcTYxFiYEAw5v4tQr1bt2hDsEVQfIGpl3xQK7frwBRLIU7xmZwRFqI7T684u89O7RJLBd71Y08v_uMLpCiCzvJrGQpa6gJ-7juyMg7-nY/s1600/robert-walser.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" nea="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhA9r9vpiIK2kw1y1_wCh3sK9EBA0tQb54BmWJcTYxFiYEAw5v4tQr1bt2hDsEVQfIGpl3xQK7frwBRLIU7xmZwRFqI7T684u89O7RJLBd71Y08v_uMLpCiCzvJrGQpa6gJ-7juyMg7-nY/s320/robert-walser.jpg" width="313" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The world of the prose pieces of Robert Walser’s assembled in the collection <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Masquerade and Other Stories </i>is one of those who hold to ‘modest being’, as Walser phrases it in<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>‘Tobold (II)’. It may be easy, at first sight and when one is aware of Walser’s own history of depressive illness, to confuse such modesty – perhaps particularly when expressed in terms of an abdication of agency or occupation – with mental incapacity. In his ‘Introduction’ to the collection, William H. Gass describes Walser’s eventual institutional mode of existence, when he deliberately abandoned his lifelong, modernist vocation of obscurity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘His mind pleads incompetence. Asylums <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">are </i>asylums. There he can guiltlessly surrender his fate and pass his days at the behest of others. He will no longer need to write in such a way that its public obscurity is assured. He will no longer need to write. The daily walk will suffice.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Yet, in the course of his description of the narrator’s unemployment in ‘Marie’, Walser places depression – or the radical form of modesty which is a personal refusal of occupation – in dialectical relation to an impulse towards freedom. Even as he is ‘confined, restrained, imprisoned’ by, or reified within, his obsessive negative thought patterns, Walser’s narrator ‘should have liked to wander far off, out into the bright, wide, open, healthy world’. However self-ironizing, repetitious and concentric Walser’s depressive’s prose may be here, this conjunction shines out: ‘I was free, then suddenly wasn’t at all free.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Sometimes I did in fact reproach myself most sternly about my idleness, but without being too terribly worried about it. Employment was always on my mind; I resolved to get to work, but for all that was still a long way from working, and instead kept running around jobless, without anything at all in the way of occupation. Melancholia and pensiveness held me strangely captive; all day long I was unable to free myself from any number of thoughts, found myself bound by my ideas. I was, so to speak, both prisoner and prison, felt confined, restrained, imprisoned. I was free, then suddenly wasn’t at all free. […] I should have liked to wander far off, out into the bright, wide, open, healthy world, but then again didn’t have the least desire, the slightest urge to do so, though I was by no means really too indolent.’ <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Precisely the unfreedom of the narrator in ‘Marie’, the way in which he is crippled by his depression, conditions his particular form of freedom, which consists of an impulse towards freedom or a desire to be free: the ‘certain ardent searching and longing’ upon which Walser expands on the following page. Walser’s hyper-irony notes that this longing too is a mode of unfreedom, though one that we ‘should not even strive’ to escape. Indeed, as (in) a sort of beneficient infinite recursion, it is itself ‘desirable’, and more so than any utopian end-point:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Around this time I went for a walk across the mountain with an honest, straightforward man. I vividly recall a good and most agreeable conversation we had along the way, in the course of which the person in question, my walking companion, pursued a train of thought according to which we humans, as long as we live, are generally incapable of freeing ourselves from a certain ardent searching and longing, and should not even strive to; that our longing for happiness seems far more beautiful, always far more sensitive, more significant and all in all probably far more desirable than happiness itself, which perhaps need not even exist, since the fervent, gratifying pursuit of happiness and an everlasting, deep desire for it perhaps not only suit perfectly our needs, but satisfy them far better, far more profoundly; that being happy is by no means to be taken casually, unquestioningly as the meaning of the world, the goal and purpose of life, and so on.’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The physical activity of exploring nature – the mountain walk – is an appropriate stimulant of these cogitations on this ‘ardent searching and longing’: in later pieces Walser explicitly conceives of longing in organic, natural terms. ‘The One of Fairy Tales’ has the phrase ‘The mountain fire of longing’. A 1927-28 ‘Prose Piece’ ends with this sentence:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Waves and branches have snakelike shapes, and there come moments when we know we are no more and no less than waves and snowflakes, or than that which surely feels, now and then, from its so wonderfully charming confinement, the pull of longing: the leaf.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Whilst this prose piece highlights the passivity of a plant’s experience of longing, other pieces of Walser’s, such as ‘Fritz’, do emphasize human active longing and its attendant agencies. Fritz would dazzle his potential employer with his general positivity, his resolve and ‘willingness to lay it on as thick as possible’, in order to satisfy his ‘profound longing for rewarding and long-term employment’. Yet his ironical attitude towards all this is reinforced by the page’s typography.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘She remarked that only ardent <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><span style="font-family: Arial;">who had a mind to go all the way could be taken into consideration, whereupon I replied I was resolved to be every bit as ardent and to go ever bit as far as I thought would please her; she’d be astonished. I was beyond all doubt an optimist.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The narrator of ‘Tobold (II)’ again foregrounds longing, ardency and resolution: ‘Some day what I have long wished to do should and must be achieved.’ With this emphasis on will and courage, Walser here could be said to promulgate a radical decision theory:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘That an act requires courage is, in my opinion, enough to make it worthwhile, that is, healthy and honest. Whether or not the enterprise has a chance of succeeding strikes me, as I said before, as irrelevant. What really counts, what has weight and significance, is showing courage and firmness, not failing to undertake some day the thing you’ve proposed.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Yet because decisive <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">undertaking</i> is more about pure will than carried-through, practical action or the achievement of an objective goal, and because Walser’s narrators tend to verbalize or theorize undertaking rather than actually undertake anything, it is easy to describe Walser’s creations as passive, depersonalized selves, as does Gass.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Walser’s narrators (and we can presume, in this case, Walser himself) have become will-less wanderers, impotent observers of life, passive perceivers of action and passion. Only on the page, will the Will risk the expression and exercise of its considerable means.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>Tbc.</em></span></b></div>
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</o:p>Dr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8818811609368766394.post-84089551264016967442012-10-04T13:00:00.000+01:002012-11-07T19:11:15.878+00:00Martian Time-Slip, part 2<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Martian Time-Slip </i>Dick clearly upholds individual freedom, whether it be in terms of the schizophrenic ‘turn inward to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">meaning</i>’ or Zitte’s bid for economic freedom. Yet the novel’s representation of mental illness also emphasizes the negative aspect of subjective inwardness. Dr Glaub draws attention to how ‘“in child autism, as with Manfred, there is no language at all, at least no spoken language. Possibly totally personal private thoughts…but no words.”’ Dick stresses how autistic noncommunication cages the subject within privatized existence – a sort of privatization which chills Jack Bohlen despite his experience of an empathy with the autistic boy, when he is ‘caught in a symbiosis with this unfortunate, mute creature who did nothing but rake over and inspect his own private world, again and again’. Earlier in the text, when he is exploring the ‘Public School’, Bohlen is troubled by the way in which autism ‘was in the last analysis an apathy toward public endeavour; it was a private existence carried on as if the individual person were the creator of all value, rather than merely the repository of inherited values’. Bohlen thinks that it is important that ‘The child learned that certain things in the culture around him were worth preserving at any cost’, and that ‘His values were fused with some objective human enterprise’. Dick bemoans the divorce of the radically noncommunicative from a communal objectivity, which he thinks of in terms of a taught tradition of values and culture. This divorce also represents the entrance to what Doreen Anderton, in conversation with Bohlen, calls ‘“the Tomb World”’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Jack thought, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">And people talk about mental illness as an escape! </i>He shuddered. It was no escape; it was a narrowing, a contracting of life into, at last, a mouldering, dank tomb, a place where nothing came or went; a place of total death.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Dick thus associates psychotic noncommunication with a condition of total reification, or a freezing within an absence of experience; an absence of change. ‘It is the stopping of time. The end of experience, of anything new. Once the person becomes psychotic, nothing ever happens to him again.’ Yet despite lamenting the breakdown of the subject’s relation to objectivity in this way, Dick also offers a critique of objectivity in the form of the ‘composite psyche’ represented by the Public School. In this context he once more upholds the individual’s freedom, accusing an unfree society of imposing a diagnosis of mental illness on any child who displays signs of personal singularity:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Paul Klee. Early Sorrow. 1938</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘It was a battle, Jack realized, between the composite psyche of the school and the individual psyches of the children, and the former held all the key cards. A child who did not properly respond was assumed to be autistic – that is, oriented according to a subjective factor that took precedence over his sense of objective reality.’ </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Hence whilst Dick bemoans the alienation of the radically noncommunicative from intersubjective objectivity, or ‘the reality of interpersonal living, of life in a given culture with given values’, he critiques their educational institution – the Public School – which represents the ‘link’ to the ‘inherited culture’, and which is there ‘not to inform or educate, but to mold, and along severely limited lines’. ‘It bent its pupils to it [the culture]; perpetuation of the culture was the goal, and any special quirks in the children which might lead them in another direction had to be ironed out.’ Bohlen views ‘the fixed, rigid, compulsive-neurotic Public School’ as being, on one level, ‘an invention arising from necessity’ – insofar as its very neurosis offers the children a bulwark against their own psychosis, or ‘a reference point by which one could gratefully steer one’s course back to mankind and shared reality’. The reified, ‘compulsive-obsessive’ environment which the Public School represents – ‘a world in which nothing new came about, in which there were no surprises’ – at least enables ‘a deliberate stopping, a freezing somewhere along the path’ of psychosis. But Bohlen is also preoccupied by the way in which the Public School environment represents the conversion of ‘inherited culture’ into a form of reified intersubjectivity. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘[…] Jack Bohlen, for the life of him, could not accept the Public School with its teaching machines as the sole arbiter of what was and what wasn’t of value. For the values of a society were in ceaseless flux, and the Public School was an attempt to stabilize those values, to jell them at a fixed point – to embalm them.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">It seems to be apparent, therefore, that what the novel’s treatment of the interface between mental illness and impaired communication is focussed on, above all else, is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">reification</i>. Dick laments reified intersubjectivity just as he laments reified subjectivity. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Martian Time-Slip </i>an important definition of psychosis returns to the vocabulary of jelling or coagulation, to describe the self reified beyond empathy and communication: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘A coagulated self, fixed and immense, which effaces everything else and occupies the entire field. Then the most minute change is examined with the greatest attention. That is Manfred’s state now; has been, from the beginning. The ultimate stage of the schizophrenic process.’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">It is as if the reified self expands until, become pure 'attention', it wipes itself out. Jameson’s ‘Philip K. Dick, in Memoriam’ concludes with a discussion of Dick’s prophetic treatment of the ‘end to individualism’ which increasingly characterizes society now. In response to the ‘death of the subject’, Jameson sees Dick’s writing as staging a ‘fitful and disturbing reappearance’ of ‘the collective’ – when the collective reappears precisely in the context of our reified intersubjectivity, or ‘the logic of stereotypes, reproductions and depersonalization in which the individual is held in our own time, “like a bird caught in cobwebs” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ubik</i>)’. Jameson reads Dick’s fiction as colliding a marginal collective made up of the vulnerable and the posthumous, with the radically alienating world of digitalized, virtualized intersubjectivity imposed on us by technology and mass media: within this scenario, Dick can attach some sort of redemptive value to the reification experienced by the autistic or ‘half-life’ community.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘It is a literature in which the collective makes a fitful and disturbing reappearance, most often in a paralyzed community of the dead or the stricken, their brains wired together in a nightmarish attempt to find out why their familiar small-town worlds are lacking in depth or solidity, only to discover that they are “in reality” all immobilized together in some cryogenic half-life.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">As Jameson would go on to stress, in his ‘History and Salvation in Philip K. Dick’, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Martian Time-Slip </i>Dick upholds the marginal, immobilized collective as the only social formation capable of future mobility. At the end of the novel, Dick presents Manfred Steiner as having been rescued, eventually, by Jack Bohlen’s attempt to communicate with him. In the novel’s climactic scene back-from-the-future Steiner may now be, as Jameson puts it, an ‘android-type prosthetic being’, but this is also Steiner’s (in Jameson’s phrase) ‘final apotheosis’, and a moment in which he can thank Bohlen for his humanity. ‘It lapsed into silence and then it resumed, more loudly, now. “You tried to communicate with me, many years ago. I appreciate that.”’ Though physically quite literally semi-reified, by now Steiner has found a way of releasing himself from the sort of contemporary reified intersubjectivity emblematized by the AM-WEB building, precisely – so Dick suggests – as a result of a developing capacity for communication and relationality. Bohlen asks Steiner, ‘“Did you escape AM-WEB?”’ ‘“Yesss,” it hissed, with a gleeful tremor. “I am with my friends.” It pointed to the Bleekmen who surrounded it.’ Relating to the Bleekmen, as Bohlen had surmised earlier, can enable Steiner to break through reification, by learning how to adjust – to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">change </i>– precisely through learning how to be true to his own singularity:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Perhaps, for the first time in his life, the boy was in a situation to which he might make an adjustment; he might, with the wild Bleekmen, discern a style of living which was genuinely his and not a pallid, tormented reflection of the lives of those around him, beings who were innately different from him and whom he could never resemble, no matter how hard he tried.’</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Franziska Moebius. Kinder im Weg. Leipzig 2006.<br />
transit trauma and arrested development</td></tr>
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Dr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8818811609368766394.post-44693900242260909402012-09-14T00:07:00.000+01:002012-11-22T14:38:46.352+00:00A Return to Postwar Humanism?<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">I am interested by the statement made by the leftist London cultural historian Ken Worpole, in his response early last year to new editions of novels by Alexander Baron [<a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2011/01/baron-novels-war-jewish-class"><strong>here</strong></a>], that ‘we sorely need’ a ‘return’ to the ‘vital postwar humanist “moment” in European cinema, fiction and intellectual life’. I can certainly identify the category of postwar humanism in terms of (what I have called elsewhere on this blog) ‘English existentialism’: Murdoch, Wilson, and quite probably Gascoyne, Read and Baron himself. Karl Jaspers is presented by Chris Thornhill as an – perhaps the – exemplary German humanist thinker of the immediate postwar period. But as I read more deeply in Thornhill’s books, I am realizing that the postwar German moment of reconstruction was far from straightforwardly humanist: there is also the functionalist strand of social thought, or social philosophy, which culminates in Luhmann’s antihumanism. I wonder too whether, within the British context, Worpole’s category of postwar humanism is not rendered similarly paradoxical by the development of welfare state ideology: the British functionalism? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I found Worpole’s article via Susie Thomas’s worthwhile piece for the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Literary London Journal</i>, ‘Alexander Baron’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Lowlife </i>(1963): Remembering the Holocaust in Hackney’ [<strong><a href="http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/september2011/thomas.html">here</a></strong>]. I have written about Baron's wonderful novel myself <strong><a href="http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/september2003/bond.html">elsewhere</a></strong>, though I have not been able to approach its treatment of the war. Thomas notes of Baron’s protagonist Harryboy Boas: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Harryboy's longing for oblivion, and his repeated failure to retain any material possessions, is also connected to the fate of the Jews in postwar <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place>: in particular to the need to be exonerated of the guilt of surviving. At one point Harryboy considers becoming a slum landlord in the <st1:place w:st="on">East End</st1:place>: “I could get a whole tribe of immigrants in here, straight off the boat, paying me a pound a week each to kip on mattresses on the floor. My golden future”. But he loses the houses in a crap [sic] game: “Empty, the burden of possession lifted from me, I walked away”. Only by having nothing can he remain innocent.’ </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">This resonates, I feel, with my own strangely innocent and contactless life, as a London-born, guilt-born son of an East German refugee, and in particular with the idea of a 'vocation of obscurity', which I propounded in my book <em>Iain Sinclair </em>and then, on this blog, in relation to Hamann's early form of Christian existentialism. It is as if already with Hamann, humanism is contiguous with a more Eastern-style, Zen or Daoist detachment from the subject, an abdication of agency; in the same way, perhaps, as a dialectic of humanism (manifesting for example as post-Kierkegaardian decisionism) and antihumanism (Heideggerian indifferentism/fatalism; Schmitt?) later emerged to vividly characterize interwar German thinking.</span></div>
Dr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8818811609368766394.post-28381219512536501612012-08-21T13:32:00.001+01:002012-11-07T18:53:07.044+00:00Speculating Histories<div style="text-align: justify;">
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I notice that my article 'Speculating Histories: Walter Benjamin, Iain Sinclair', which was published in <em>Historical Materialism</em>, 14.2 (2006), 3-27, is now available online. So I have placed it in my Scribd folder [<strong><a href="http://www.scribd.com/reading_feed">here</a></strong>] too. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">more Luskacova</td></tr>
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Dr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8818811609368766394.post-64677092479279684602012-08-16T11:45:00.001+01:002012-11-07T19:06:02.360+00:00Martian Time-Slip<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><div class="separator" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Helio, lowering his book, said, “This child has a speech impediment which I am overcoming.”’<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Edward, Spitalfields 1989<br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">It is, surely, Dick’s unflinching presentation of the interface between mental illness and impaired communication in his 1964 novel <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Martian Time-Slip</i>, which brought Patricia Warrick – as Umberto Rossi notes in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Twisted Worlds of Philip K. Dick </i>– to comment on the ‘terrible sincerity’ of the text. For Fredric Jameson, in his ‘History and Salvation in Philip K. Dick’, the settlements on Mars in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Martian Time-Slip </i>represent ‘the most depressing of all his novelistic “realities”’ – though I would add that the settlements presented in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Maze of Death </i>are none too cheering either. The sincerity which Dick achieves in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Martian Time-Slip </i>is particularly sobering, I would argue, because it posits the misery involved with mental illness to be an increasingly generalized condition within contemporary life. When Rossi writes that ‘the title of the 1963 novella “All We Marsmen” – that Dick expanded into the novel – might also suggest that it is a story about “All We Madmen (and Women)”’, I would go further and emphasize Dick’s intention in the novel to suggest that, increasingly, We Are All Madmen and Madwomen now. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Martian Time-Slip </i>has Jack Bohlen remark that schizophrenia poses ‘“one of the most pressing problems human civilization has ever faced”’; later the text describes schizophrenia as ‘the most pervasive, ominous psychic process known to man’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Mental illness is repeatedly presented by Dick in terms of a breakdown of communication and relationality. He has the psychiatrist, Dr Glaub, observe that ‘“In autism, especially, the faculty of interpersonal communication is drastically impaired.”’ As Rossi comments, in connection with the novel’s autistic protagonist Manfred Steiner and his disturbance in time-sense, ‘the time-slip that allows Manfred to see what will happen also prevents him from communicating with others in the present’. Dr Glaub describes ‘“disturbed persons”’ as ‘“encapsulated individuals cut off from ordinary means of communication”’. Bohlen articulates Dick’s understanding of such noncommunicative isolation:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Now I can see what psychosis is: the utter alienation of perception from the objects of the outside world, especially the objects which matter: the warmhearted people there. And what takes their place? A dreadful preoccupation with – the endless ebb and flow of one’s own self. The changes emanating from within which affect only the inside world. It is a splitting apart of the two worlds, inner and outer, so that neither registers on the other. Both still exist, but each goes its own way.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Dick’s understanding of mental disturbance as a confinement within interiority, relates to his sense that contemporary mental illness derives from the influence of the exercise of modern rationality. Manfred Steiner’s father traces his son’s autistic alienation back to the influence of Manfred’s mother’s academic personality, with its detachment from lived sensuous experience, its coldness and lack of love. Her dominative, instrumental rationality has <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">reified </i>her. By contrast, Silvia Bohlen is ‘a genuine mother and woman, vital, physically attractive, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">alive</i>’:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘In his own mind, Steiner blamed it all on his wife; when Manfred was a baby, she had never talked to him or shown him any affection. Having been trained as a chemist, she had an intellectual, matter-of-fact attitude, inappropriate in a mother. She had bathed and fed the baby as if he were a laboratory animal like a white rat. She kept him clean and healthy but she had never sung to him, laughed with him, had not really used language to or with him. So naturally he had become autistic; what else could he do?’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Dick consolidates an imputed critique of today’s academic culture and academic reason, when he has Dr Glaub refer to disturbed ‘“minds so fatigued by the impossible task of communicating in a world where everything happens with such rapidity that -”’. Here it is difficult not to think of the purposelessly accelerated, bureaucratized conditions of contemporary academic production – or<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>this society’s ‘publish-or-perish’ privileging of the quantity of academic research produced over its quality – and the damage that these conditions do to our mental health. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Martian Time-Slip </i>in fact offers a potent Weberian or Frankfurt School-like prophecy of our existing culture of enforced higher education, intensified social differentiation and career specialization:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘The ad listed all the skills in demand on Mars, and it was a long list, excluding only canary raiser and proctologist, if that. It pointed out how hard it was now for a person with only a master’s degree to get a job on Earth, and how on Mars there were good-paying jobs for people with only B.A.’s [sic].’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Jack Bohlen further illuminates this vision of a fast-paced, specialized <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">polis, </i>the complexity of which entails an ultimately changeless, reified and reifying, density of experience which threatens our sense of the freedom of the self. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘“Frankly, Kindly Dad, I emigrated to Mars because of my schizophrenic episode when I was twenty-two and worked for Corona Corporation. I was cracking up. I had to move out of a complex urban environment and into a simpler one, a primitive frontier environment with more freedom. The pressure was too great for me; it was emigrate or go mad. […] I went mad standing in line at the bookstore. Everybody else, Kindly Dad, every single person in that bookstore and in that supermarket – all of them lived in the same building I did. It was a society, Kindly Dad, that one building.”’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The novel develops its critique of the modern use of instrumental reason in the course of a conversation in which Heliogabalus describes schizophrenia as ‘“the savage within the man”’, and Arnie Kott responds by calling it a ‘“reversion to primitive ways of thought”’. Helio identifies psychoanalysis, taken as an instance of the sort of modern instrumental reason which would reshape suffering selves, to be a ‘“vainglorious foolishness”’ which is mistaken in its therapeutic mission of restoring the subject to optimum functionality and sense of purpose. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘“Question they never deal with is, what to remold sick person like. There is no what, Mister.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">“I don’t get you, Helio.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">“Purpose of life is unknown, and hence way to be is hidden from the eyes of living critters. Who can say if perhaps the schizophrenics are not correct? Mister, they take a brave journey. They turn away from mere things, which one may handle and turn to practical use; they turn inward to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">meaning</i> . There, the black-night-without-bottom lies, the pit. Who can say if they will return? And if so, what will they be like, having glimpsed meaning? I admire them.”’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Dick here suggests that in a real sense mental illness is itself a valid response to the perennial philosophical question of human purpose. Modern instrumental rationality involves an objectivizing use of reason, which latches on to objects to ‘turn to practical use’; in contrast, (rational) irrationality can refuse objectivity and seek not practical purpose, but the impractical purpose of uncovering the absolute grounding humanity. It is in this context of the ‘turn inward to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">meaning</i>’ that Dick’s conception of irrationality, converges with the conception of existential reason developed in Jaspers’ thinking: as Chris Thornhill notes in his <em>Karl Jaspers</em>, 'transcendence' is for Jaspers 'an inner attribute of truthfully self-interpreting humanity'. Dick’s defence of the schizophrenic turn inward to meaning is also supported by the novel’s depiction of the Martian environment; Mars is presented as ideal territory for asocial interior voyagers towards the sources of human value, in a way that recalls a phrase from Iain Sinclair’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lud Heat </i>: the ‘private moon voyage’. Early in the novel, Bohlen judges that his father will adjust to Mars precisely because he is ‘in touch with some level of knowledge which told him how to behave, not in the social sense, but in a deeper, more permanent way’. Then the ‘lonely’ children of Mars appear; frantic yet diffident, Kafka-solitary pursuers of the transcendental beneath the surface. Young hermeneuticians, slightly dazed by the austere immensity of their ‘black-night-without-bottom’, the landscape of their quest.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘The children had a large-eyed, haunted look, as if they were starved for something as yet invisible. They tended to become reclusive, if given half a chance, wandering off to poke about in the wastelands. […] When he flew by ‘copter, Arnie always spotted some isolated children, one here and another there, toiling away out in the desert, scratching at the rock and sand as if trying vaguely to pry up the surface of Mars and get underneath…’ <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The novel’s foregrounding of the schizophrenic turn inward to meaning has a sociopolitical correlate in Dick’s characteristic vaunting of repairman Otto Zitte’s doomed bid for personal economic freedom.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘He hated the big racketeers, too, same as he hated the big unions. He hated bigness per se; bigness had destroyed the American system of free enterprise, the small businessman had been ruined – in fact, he himself had been perhaps the last authentic small businessman in the solar system. That was his real crime; he had tried to live the American way of life, instead of just talking about it.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Of course these statements are representative of Dick’s typical populist celebration of, in Jameson’s words (in his ‘Philip K. Dick, In Memoriam’), ‘small employees such as record salesmen, self-employed mechanics and petty bureaucrats […] caught in the convulsive struggles of monopoly corporations and now galactic and intergalactic multinationals’. Darko Suvin, Rossi records, has interpreted the AM-WEB building in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Martian</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Time-Slip </i>as a reference to the ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American Web</i> of big business, corrupt labour aristocracy and big state’. The novel’s defence of an individual’s freedom, in the face of both the right-wing and left-wing varieties of reified intersubjectivity which manifest in our contemporary convergence of monopoly capitalism and bureaucratic statism, is clear. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><strong><em>To be continued.</em></strong></span></span></div>
Dr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8818811609368766394.post-91545129748238362132012-08-07T00:54:00.000+01:002012-11-07T19:10:35.822+00:00Transcendence of Soviet<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Arial; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Beyond cool. DDR synth music from 1978. Found at <a href="http://penultimatetruth.blogspot.co.uk/"><strong>The Glimmerlight</strong></a> .</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">How to read this? As a celebration of USSR-funded technology or instead as an articulation of a transcendental aspiration to flee from Stasi oppression into the cosmos?</span><u><span style="color: blue; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></u></div>
Dr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8818811609368766394.post-5938253246565195872012-07-31T19:17:00.000+01:002012-11-07T20:52:18.922+00:00Scheitern, part 2<div class="separator" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Thornhill shows the congruity of Jaspers' conception of foundering communicative reason as a decisive ‘hermeneutic of possible transcendence’, with the <city w:st="on"><place w:st="on">Weimar</place></city> socialist theologian Paul Tillich’s theorization of revelation. For Tillich as for Jaspers, revelation involves ‘the shattering of reason’ (in Thornhill’s words); precisely as such however, revelation ‘is not the negation of reason’, because it is ‘the moment where reason <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">experiences</i> its highest degree of transcendent and unconditioned truthfulness’. Both Jaspers and Tillich conceive of revelation as being ‘not solely a fact of faith, but also a philosophical possibility of human reason’, which presents itself wherever reason founders, or ‘encounters the limits of its formal processes’. Thornhill also explains how Jaspers’ theory of the limit, or of a decisive hermeneutic operating in existential limit-situations, parallels Tillich’s conceptualization of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">kairos</i>, and how both thinkers thus theorize a ‘decisive moment of responsible transcendence’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Tillich used the concept of kairos to capture what he called ‘fulfilled time’; the moments in human life ‘in which eternity breaks in’ on the usual conditions of human history. In Thornhill’s words, kairos is thus ‘a moment of historical time in which human life reflects upon its possibilities at the limits of its historicality’; in a way recalling Jaspers’ theory of the limit, Thornhill notes, Tillich could therefore assert kairos as a ‘historical consciousness […] whose ethos is unconditioned responsibility for the present moment in time’. Thornhill stresses that – and whilst Heidegger simply ‘interprets the moment of human decision as the awareness of the immutability of the historical forms in which human life is placed’ – Tillich and Jaspers alike understand ‘true kairological decisiveness’ to be an ‘ethical position’. This is because they both sense that genuine ‘transcendent(al) self-knowledge’ articulates itself in ‘acts of active self-choice, self-disclosure and, in the strict sense, historical <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">responsibility</i> towards others’. Both Tillich and Jaspers assert, Thornhill clarifies, that ‘kairos provides the grounds for an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">innerworldly</i> ‘metaphysic of responsibility’. Quoting Tillich, Thornhill emphasizes this point:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘It is only in the kairological specificity of historical responsibility, not in the compliance with “universal law”, that human life explains and enacts the possibilities of its transcendence. The decisive moment of responsible transcendence (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">kairos </i>for Tillich; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Grenze </i>[limit] for Jaspers) does not effect here (as for Barth) an absolute crisis of the human realm. Rather, in quasi-Kantian, or even quasi-Weberian manner, both Tillich and Jaspers see the kairos of responsibility as an ethical intrusion into the existing conditions of human life, and as an unconditioned position of accountability towards these conditions.’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">It is important to note, finally, that when (what Thornhill calls) Jaspers’ ‘ethical kairology’ enables him to posit an innerworldly metaphysic of responsibility, he is thereby nonetheless thinking towards a true non-secularity; for Jaspers, as Thornhill writes, ‘the truth of history, although interpreted in history, cannot be reconciled with the present conditions of historical life’. Thornhill underlines this point by explicating the shared foundations of Jaspers’ and Karl Barth’s ‘eschatological hermeneutic as the guarantor of the historicality of history’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Jaspers and Barth, Thornhill sees, ‘share the conviction that revelation cannot be objectified in a particular set of worldly imperatives, and that revelation cannot be cemented in any system of legal or political obligation’. Both assert that, as Thornhill puts it, ‘No order within history itself, […] can arrogate the authority of transcendence to itself. Any attempt of this kind is merely an example of bad secularity, or bad metaphysics.’ Hence both thinkers claim that ‘the disclosure of transcendence occurs at all times at the limit of history, and that it cannot be incorporated into the fixed orders of everyday history’. Moreover both Barth and Jaspers indicate that ‘human life can only interpret itself adequately insofar as it interprets itself and its products under the index of their limits and their possible otherness’. Barth and Jaspers’ shared argument that ‘humanity interprets its own transcendence only as it brings into suspension the forms in which it exists, only as it knows itself external to the forms of its worldliness’, Thornhill stresses, is precisely why Barth (from a christological viewpoint) and Jaspers (from a hermeneutical viewpoint), ‘retain a far stronger attachment to the eschatological basis of Christianity than their opponents amongst liberal and conservative theologians’. Jaspers’ identification of a truthful hermeneutic of transcendence with a self-hermeneutic of individual crisis or failure, means that for him – as for Barth – transcendence is, in Thornhill’s words, ‘merely a decisive possibility at the limit of the temporal’; for both thinkers ‘true interpretation must take place at the limit of objective self-awareness’, and ‘all attempts interpretively to integrate transcendence into a historical synthesis inevitably fall into the trap of false objectification’. Jaspers and Barth’s shared conviction that, as Thornhill writes, ‘the interpretation of revelation is never final’ is therefore what brings both Jaspers and Barth to suggest ‘an either explicitly or implicitly eschatological hermeneutic as the guarantor of the historicality of history’: both thinkers hold ‘the essentially eschatological belief that human history in its present condition cannot provide for final truthfulness, and that the truth of history, although interpreted in history, cannot be reconciled with the present conditions of historical life’. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Thornhill thus pays considerable attention to the way in which Jaspers, like Barth, argues that ‘the interpretation of transcendence cannot be historically fixed as a reflex within any continuum of culture, politics or doctrine’. Yet, crucially, Thornhill also suggests that the type of non-secularity established within Barth’s thinking, is distinct from the true non-secularity established within Jaspers’. The truth of the non-secularity thought by Jaspers, Thornhill’s argument hints, hinges on his proposal of a self-hermeneutic of individual failure. Jaspers, Thornhill sees, charges Barth and the dialectical theologians with interpreting revelation as ‘the unique source of authority <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">against </i>human history’; precisely in their opposition to secular legitimacy, they ‘succeed only in recreating revelation at the limit of human history as a new source of objective authority’. Thornhill writes that when Barth in this way insisted on the objective authority of revelation, and so ultimately aligned himself with the Lutheran theologian Emanuel Hirsch and Barth’s other reactionary adversaries, he became ‘complicit in the process which secularizes and materializes religious contents’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Crucially, Thornhill stresses that, viewed from Jaspers’ perspective, Barth’s thinking of radical anti-secularity necessarily creates an ‘objectivizing system of belief’, precisely because it fails to recognize ‘the human relativity of all truly transcendental interpretation’. Thornhill maintains that when the Lutherans, viewed from Jaspers’ position, ‘crudely press revelation into service for the authority of the nation state’, and Barth poses revelation at the limit of history as a new source of objective authority, this is because – so Jaspers’ thinking intimates – they all obscure ‘the absolute relativity of revelation’. ‘In this respect, both eliminate the genuine transcendence of revelation, which is its uncertainty, and both falsely concretize transcendence as authority – as law.’ Thornhill’s work suggests that, in opposition to this juridical tendency of Weimar theology, Jaspers’ identification of a truthful interpretation of transcendence with a self-hermeneutic of individual crisis or failure, recreates the relativity of truly transcendental hermeneutics, and so establishes a true non-secularity – one which ‘relies on an interpretive component of humanity, secularity and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">liberality </i>’. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
Dr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8818811609368766394.post-21681815327058235512012-07-18T14:04:00.000+01:002012-11-07T21:27:11.049+00:00Scheitern<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">In the last of this series of posts drawing heavily on Chris Thornhill's work on Karl Jaspers, I want to present a summary of Thornhill’s account of a central concept within Jaspers’ thought: that of foundering or failing (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Scheitern</i>). Probably the most fundamental context within which Thornhill addresses Jaspers’ concept of failure, is that of what Thornhill calls Jaspers’ and Kierkegaard’s ‘respective fusions of negative-anthropological and negative-metaphysical positions’. Influenced by Jaspers’ student Jeanne Hersch’s work on metaphysics and ontology in Jaspers, and discarding both Leonard Ehrlich’s description of his thinking as ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">negative theology’</i> and Sebastian Samay’s categorization of his thought as ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">negative ontology’ </i>– though he does not contest Samay’s characterization – Thornhill suggests that we view Jaspers’ work as collapsing the universal metaphysics of Kantianism into a ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">negative-anthropological metaphysic</i>’. Thornhill sees Jaspers as making ‘a clear Kierkegaardian addition to his basic Kantian position’. Kierkegaard’s theology, Thornhill notes, correlated a ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">negative anthropology</i>’ – ‘in which the conditions for authentic human-being recede ceaselessly into the indeterminate, suffering interior of the historical person’ – with a ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">negative metaphysic</i>’ which views the transcendent essence of humanity as a quality which can only be addressed as a ‘manifest absence’. Thornhill identifies a similar correlation within Jaspers’ thinking, resulting in a comparable negative-anthropological metaphysic.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"> Jeanne Hersch </td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Jaspers’ reconstruction of Kant asserted, Thornhill writes, that ‘the possibility of transcendence enters human interactions as a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">telos</i>, which draws life progressively out of its material orientations’. However unlike Kant, Thornhill argues, Jaspers also asserts that humanity ‘only has truthful access to the possibility of its own transcendence insofar as it reflects upon the impossibility of this possibility: in its failure (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Scheitern</i>)’. Partly determinant as it is of Jaspers’ communicative, negative hermeneutic liberated from objectivist preconditions, his negative-anthropological metaphysic maintains, as Thornhill puts it, that ‘human life only constitutes itself through processes of transcendent (self-)interpretation which cannot be accomplished in the modes of action and existence which are open to it’. Referring to Hersch’s explication, Thornhill adds that for Jaspers, ‘The metaphysical moment of transcendence […] exists only in a relation of unattainability to human reflection, and as such it describes both the unity and the absolute end of all determinations of human-being’. Thornhill also shows how Jaspers’ negative-anthropological metaphysic moves on from Kant’s philosophy of religion, and his ‘theory of religious unknowingness’. For Jaspers takes the absence of positive human knowledge about God as (in Thornhill’s words) ‘the fundamental experiential basis of human existence itself’:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘In his response to Kant’s scepticism, Jaspers thus replaces the formal uncertainty of God, which is at the core of Kant’s critique of metaphysics, with an experiential uncertainty, which interprets transcendence as an elusive possibility of human life, and which ceaselessly refers humanity to a pained experience of its own antinomies and limits. The lack of a positive knowledge of God is for Jaspers, therefore, not an index of the formal limits of reason, but an experience of the limits of existence.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">For Jaspers, metaphysical transcendence – Thornhill summarizes – ‘is thus never present: it is self-interpretation against the limit of this absence’. Jaspers’ subjection of ‘the tradition of occidental metaphysics to a hermeneutical (anthropological) reconstruction’ in this way, enlists the aid of his theory of ciphers of transcendence. Thornhill’s account of Jaspers’ thinking here quotes from the third volume of Jaspers’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Philosophy </i>:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Human speculation, he asserts, interprets its innermost (metaphysical) essence in what he calls the ciphers of transcendence. Ciphers are “being which brings transcendence to the present”, and which permits human-being to interpret fleetingly its primary transcendent origin. “Wherever I read the cipher”, Jaspers explains, “I am responsible, because it is only through this that I read my self-being […] I attempt to tear myself out of the constant falling; I take myself in hand; I experience the decision, which emanates from me”.’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Thornhill sees Jaspers’ philosophy to be ‘a fractured, antinomical ontology’, ‘whose triadic conception of human life’ – in terms of levels such as orientation, illumination and metaphysics – is ‘rendered internally fluid by the fluidity of being itself, and of the absolute in being’. ‘“With the insight into the fragmentary nature of being”, he explains, “the demand for an ontology ceases and transforms itself into an impulse to obtain being, which I can never acquire as knowledge, through self-being”.’ In other words, as Thornhill puts it, ‘Only insofar as we experience and recognize the inevitable crisis (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Scheitern</i>) of our attempts to interpret our transcendent origin do we actually begin to approach this origin.’ Jaspers thus ‘de-objectifies the truth-claims of metaphysics’, so as to replace them with the self-interpretations undertaken by shattered humans. Thornhill continues:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Orientation, illumination and metaphysics are thus ways in which being is present to human consciousness. But none of these, ontologically, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is </i>being. Being, rather, is present only negatively, as a series of possible implosions in the order of human consciousness, in which consciousness is referred to its own limits.’ </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Thornhill distinguishes between such implosions in ‘objective logic’ – limit-situations such as ‘death, guilt, suffering and anxiety’ – and implosions in ‘subjective logic’. Crucially, in subjective logic, these implosions are ‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">decisions</i>’, through which ‘human life decides interpretively to reflect upon its own possibilities (ideas), acts in a manner which accords with these, and thus places itself upon a more unified level of reflection above its habitual practical and cognitive orientations’. In other words, as Thornhill summarizes, ‘Transcendence is accessible only to a decisive hermeneutic, which stands in the absolute limit-situation of human existence, interpreting transcendence through its own crisis.’ For Jaspers the ‘truthful hermeneutic of transcendence’, in Thornhill’s words, is ‘also a self-hermeneutic of individual crisis’. Thornhill quotes once more from the third volume of Jaspers’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Philosophy</i> : ‘“Failing [<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Scheitern</i>]”, Jaspers argues, “is the encompassing ground of all cipher-being. Seeing the cipher of the reality of being arises from the experience of failing”.’ Jaspers’ argument is grounded in his sense that, as Thornhill puts it, ‘Transcendence discloses itself as a response to the existential questions which I ask about myself, but for which – ultimately – no answer can be found in the world.’ </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘My knowledge of my own absolute crisis releases me from any conviction that I can obtain cognitive or objective certainty about the conditions of my life. For this reason, however, it also prepares me for the evanescent interpretation of my transcendence in ciphers. The meaningful interpretation of the cipher, therefore, is possible only for being, which is “shattered as existence” and which “finds its ground in the being of transcendence”.’ </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">We have already explored – in earlier posts – Jaspers’ understanding of foundering in terms of the imperfect communication which can begin to explain transcendence to humanity. Whilst Kierkegaard saw ‘the temporal presence of God’s absence only in closed interiority’, Thornhill notes, Jaspers sees ‘the presence of God’s absence as disclosed in the absolute, and yet absolutely believing, relativity of interpersonal communication’. You could say that speech, for Jaspers, is at once necessarily decisive and necessarily dysfluent; just as, whilst for him philosophical belief (as Thornhill writes) ‘has its only hold in the ciphers of transcendence’, the interpretation of these ciphers is ‘only existentially binding because they do not stabilize transcendence as certainty, but merely refer humanity to its own possibilities’. Necessarily dysfluent communication exemplarily enacts and enables recognition of our existential and cognitive uncertainty: the ‘imperfectibility of all communication’, Jaspers asserts in <em>Reason and Existenz</em>, reflects the ultimate inadequacy of ‘every shape of truth in the world’. But whilst human communication for Jaspers is a reflection of the impossibility of truth, enacting our existential uncertainty, the committed quality of existential communication also implies the possible resolution of that uncertainty: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reason and Existenz</i> states how, ‘The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">imperfection of communication </i>and the weight of its failing become the openness of a profundity, which nothing can fulfil but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">transcendence</i>’. Necessarily failing, existential communication thus nonetheless forms what Thornhill calls ‘an ongoing attempt to articulate truthfulness: it is the only practically possible expression of transcendence’. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<strong><em>To be continued.</em></strong></div>
Dr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8818811609368766394.post-79506843889694300342012-07-09T01:41:00.001+01:002012-11-09T12:09:20.683+00:00Existential Communication, part 3<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">We can now begin to see more clearly why Thornhill summarizes Jaspers’ philosophy of communication as a ‘doctrine of committed existential relativity, which charges all absolutizing or totalizing world-views with a primary falsehood’, and which tries to give an account of human freedom which ‘resists’ both Kantian ‘formal-idealist’ and Heideggerian ‘objectivist’ preconditions. Thornhill emphasizes that the precondition of truthful existence is for Jaspers ‘a recognition of uncertainty, and this uncertainty is given exemplary form in speech’. Speech for Jaspers, as Thornhill writes, is ‘an activity in which consciousness is liberated from its prior (juridical) reification in idealism, but in which it also maintains a distinction against the objectively instituted orders of freedom posited by more avowedly anti-idealist thinkers’, such as Heidegger. Referring to the second volume of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Philosophy</i>, Thornhill cites Jaspers’ argument that the ‘necessity of existential communication’ is always an expression of freedom, and it is therefore always ‘objectively incomprehensible’. As we have seen, Jaspers suggests, as Thornhill puts it, that ‘The more I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">decide </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to act in accordance with the unconditioned logic of my existence (ideas)’, ‘the more I disengage myself from any objective <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a priori </i>certainty about what it means to exist, or about the final truth of my existence’. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jaspers argues, moreover, that because speech is (in Thornhill’s words) ‘by character relative, uncertain and interpretively open’, it constitutes ‘the only medium in which human existence can describe or enact its own relative, uncertain and interpretively open relation to its ideas’. This is why, to summarize, ‘whilst Kant reflects both the foreclosure and the possibility of metaphysical truths by outlining a doctrine of equal, universal, and anti-authoritarian <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">law </i>as the foundation for free, truthful humanity’, Jaspers, ‘for very similar reasons, outlines a doctrine of tolerant <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">communication</i>’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">In order to understand more fully how such a theory of tolerant communication underpins Jaspers’ conception of worldly human freedom and liberalism, we can return to his thinking on revelation, and the relation of his thought as a whole to contemporaneous political theology. Jaspers’ ‘most central interest’ in theology, Thornhill notes, is revelation; revelation is ‘at the heart of all his debates with his theological contemporaries’. Jaspers viewed revelation as it is generally conceived by religious thinkers, Thornhill writes, as ‘the key example of a hypostatic belief-system, which confers falsely absolute objectivity on its contents, and which is absolutely at odds with his own existential theory of transcendent(al) uncertainty’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Jaspers therefore sought to reconceive of revelation as - in Thornhill's words - 'an ongoing and uncertain aspect of human existence, which must forever be relatively, spontaneously and communicative(ly) redisclosed'. Such a relative and spontaneous interpretation of revelation is for Jaspers the basis of true belief; of 'philosophical belief'. Thornhill identifies Jaspers as outlining here a 'tantalizingly unexplored position in the broad tradition of theological/anthropological inquiry', because he is seeking to supplant the typical model of submission to concretized 'revelation as law, or as the ground of law', with his own model of an ongoing, uncertain hermeneutic realization of the originary truth which revelation constitutes. 'The reinterpretation of this truth is not a mere re-declaring of primary truths, but a course of reflexive and communicative human fulfilment.' Jaspers' assertion that the originary truth which revelation constitutes is, as Thornhill puts it, 'a truth which is internal to the experiences, thoughts and words of people', along with his sense that 'the realization of the primary truths of revelation still awaits completion', hence introduces a liberal anthropology of tolerant communication, or</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> the possibility of free human praxis to the religious concept of revelation. Jaspers' opposition in this way to acceptance of concretized revelation as law, Thornhill notes, was 'directed very generally against Catholic theologians, and very specifically against the conservative Protestant theologians of inter-war Germany'. It also offers 'a striking counterpoint to certain more conservative perspectives in Jewish political theology': Thornhill references Leo Strauss. </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">We can now see more clearly how what I am calling Jaspers' liberal anthropology of tolerant communication, enabled him to reconceive historical freedom and responsibility. Thornhill helpfully distinguishes Weber's concept of historical responsibility (as 'a means of securing worldly authority'), from Jaspers' conception of historical responsibility as 'an essentially communicative attitude and mode of praxis'. For Jaspers, Thornhill explains, a human's 'unique historicality [...] only legitimizes itself insofar as it reflects forms of commonality and experience, the disclosure of which requires truthful communication'. In its emphasis on 'the transcendentally communicative essence of historical uniqueness', Jaspers' thinking is indebted to Dilthey's transcendental historicism. Here we could also remember how Jaspers' concept of (philosophical) belief, as Thornhill writes, 'always contains an interpersonal communicative dimension'. 'The disclosure of human transcendence in revelation only truly becomes revelation as it is spoken by people amongst themselves.' This is because of<em> </em>the tolerant quality of communicative humanity; because 'only in an uncertain, relative and communicative disposition towards others can I begin to explain my own unstable experience of myself as possible transcendence'. One freedom enabled within Jaspers' liberal anthropology of tolerant communication is thus the freedom to communicate interpretively on human transcendent possibilities; yet for Jaspers such tolerant hermeneutic communication also enables us to think possibilities of historical freedom and responsibility. Indeed it <em>enacts</em> historical freedom and responsibility: in Jaspers' view, (philosophical belief entails that) particular historical moments of transcendentally interpretive conversation clear space for histories of openness and equality. Jaspers, Thornhill notes, 'bases his hermeneutic on the conviction that God - as a quality of human transcendence - is hidden, and that all qualities of God can only be suggested as non-formal, non-material ways of being between people'; moreover, the 'hiddenness of the interpreted truth founds a way of being towards others in liberality, tolerance, freedom and <em>historicality'</em>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Thornhill shows how Jaspers’ concern with the freedom to communicate interpretively on human transcendent possibilities, or with the freedom of human thought to access what Thornhill calls ‘the uncertain historical conditions of its transcendence’, underpins the theory of democratic republicanism expounded by Jaspers in later works such as his 1961 book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man</i>. Jaspers, Thornhill notes, asserted that ‘democracy has its legitimacy over other forms of government because it provides a situation in which human thinking is able to develop its own resources of tolerance, culture and responsibility’. Democratic order ‘at least offers the chance that human thinking might communicatively open itself towards others in committed historicality and responsibility’. The sort of responsible truthfulness embodied and enacted by hermeneutic communication is not possible in non-democratic orders (such as have come to determine the education system now); democracy alone ‘is able to sanction a sphere of free communication which is not directly regulated by the technical, political or ideological imperatives of state and economy’. Whilst Jaspers thought that in non-democratic orders, as Thornhill writes, ‘the access of human thought to the uncertain historical conditions of its transcendence is invariably obstructed by the imposition of technical and ideological commands on the processes of human thinking’, like Arendt, Jaspers in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Of Truth</i> indicated that ‘human thought and action, if unregulated by technical strategy, create a world of spontaneous but utterly committed historicality and responsibility’. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Thornhill goes on to expound the relation of Jaspers’ theory of communicative transcendence to his democratic humanism. Thornhill argues that in their conceptions of the human, Heidegger and Lukács take up positions which are ‘closely united against Jaspers’. For Jaspers, Thornhill maintains, both Lukácsian totality and Heideggerian <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dasein</i> see human truthfulness as ‘an objective unity of knowledge’, in which ‘the elusive diremption of ideas and objective life, which (for himself) always defines true humanity, is superseded by a unifying practical, and thus anti-humanist, authoritarian ontology’. For Jaspers any attempt – such as Heidegger’s or Lukács’ – ‘to postulate a mediated (ontological) totality in historical knowledge’, is ultimately to resort to what Thornhill calls ‘a falsely mystical notion of uniform truth, in which knowledge is fixed in inner-worldly practical objectivity and endless time’. Lukács, Heidegger and Jaspers, Thornhill notes, all conceive of ‘the totality or unity of knowledge, in which reflection is perfectly united with its phenomena, as the ultimate ground and motive of human thinking and of humanity’. Yet for Jaspers objective totality ‘is always false totality’, and the riven, failing, non-objectified process of communicative transcendence which works towards unified knowledge never achieves such totality. ‘Any attempt to collapse the primary antinomy of human being into the processes of a unitary worldliness, he thus implies, destroys the truth of humanity itself.’ Thornhill adds:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘[Jaspers] always indicates that these unities of knowledge and reason can never be finally realized, and that meaningful humanism is always the consequence of the exteriority of unified knowledge to objective human praxis. Because the unity of knowledge cannot be reached, he implies, humans must define themselves communicatively in the uncertain historicality of relativity and tolerance, which reflect (but do not fulfil) a striving for totality or unity.’<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Thornhill explores how Jaspers’ view of communication as ‘a gradual event of interpretation in which consciousness experiences, interprets and begins to articulate its own possible founding totality’ (in Thornhill’s words), points towards Habermas’ ‘development of communication as a means of salvaging reason from its idealist reification’. The critique of neo-Kantianism underlying Jaspers’ theory of communication has ‘exemplary character for subsequent communication-theoretical innovations’, because whilst, for Jaspers, communication becomes ‘the medium in which the ideal/metaphysical components of human-being can be disclosed’, it remains ‘of fundamental importance’ for him that ‘these elements are never pre-stabilized as a prior unity of being’. Jaspers’ existential-hermeneutical approach, Thornhill sees, anticipates Habermas’ communication theory’s critique of the idealist process of reification, when Jaspers implies that speech is ‘a mode of agency in which human reflection places itself in relation to underlying ideas, but does not formalize these as unitary components of its own original structure’. Whilst never categorically abandoning ‘the idealist precondition that human consciousness has an ideal structure against being itself’, and thus holding to Kant’s recognition that ‘the true is not real, and that human praxis is not true praxis unless it is motivated from sources which are outside itself (by ideas)’, Jaspers resists the reificatory result of Kantian idealism ‘merely to trace the ideal limits of human consciousness against the sources of its truth’ (in Thornhill’s words). Kant’s formal-rational attempt to define the relation of consciousness towards truth does not, for Jaspers (Thornhill writes), ‘give a sufficiently full account of the diverse ways in which human-being can experience and articulate its origin, unity and ideality’. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">This is why, Thornhill sees, speech emerges within Jaspers’ thinking as an ‘eternally unfinished event (not a prior or ideal unity) in which humans relate most truthfully to their own practical and epistemological determinants (ideas)’; humans ‘become truthful through the spoken disclosure of a relation to their ideas, not through the prior formalization of this relation’. For Jaspers, speech ‘transposes the foundation of idealism into an ongoing experienced process: in speech, the human relation to truth (ideas) is not realized <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">before</i>, but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">through </i>experience’. This process – that of reflexivity, as it is redefined within Jaspers’ ‘communicative-hermeneutical reconstruction of Kantian notions of reason’ – is ‘not a solitary cognitive agency, but a practically self-clarifying, and essentially other-including way of disposing oneself towards the truths of experience’:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">‘Existentially committed speech, he claims therefore, is a mode of interaction in which human experiences can disclose and interpret their transcendent(al) components. [...] Speech is […] therefore conceived by Jaspers as a medium of ideal praxis, in which practical reflection and ideal self-illumination originate from each other, and in which the ideas of human knowledge clarify themselves through the praxis of human experience.’ </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Crucially however, Thornhill maintains that though this quality of existential communication as ideal praxis ‘generally opens the ground for a communicative critique of formal reason’ such as Habermas’, it does not enable his existential philosophy to ‘move seamlessly into the positive hermeneutics of speech later associated with Habermas’. Jaspers’ reconstruction of Kant’s epistemology ‘only as a negative hermeneutic of possible unity’ means, Thornhill argues, that Jaspers does not – unlike Heidegger, Arendt and Habermas – ‘see spoken reason as the foundation for positive agreement, or for the positive disclosure of the world. Rather, he sees truthful speech as the elucidation of the inner transcendent(al) possibilities of consciousness.’ Such an elucidation is a negative one. Thornhill suggests that Jaspers ‘actually moves close to a negative-hermeneutical counterpart to Adorno’s negative dialectics’, in that Jaspers’ negative hermeneutics can be seen as ‘a way of imagining the metaphysical unity and totality of consciousness as a condition which (against Kant) cannot be formally excluded from reason, but which (against Hegel) cannot be stabilized as an objective order of knowledge’. ‘Such unity, thus, can only be negatively interpreted, as truthful absence’. Because Jaspers’ communicative existentialism holds that – perhaps rather as for dysfluent speakers – ‘at no time […] can speech place consciousness in a unitary relation to truth’ (as Thornhill puts it), Jaspers, like Adorno, can be seen developing a philosophical position ‘subverting both Kantian epistemology and Hegelian phenomenology, which does not incorporate consciousness in positive or juridical form, and which sees the truth of consciousness only in the self-interpretation of fleeting appearances’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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Dr Robert Bondhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06030767890981916601noreply@blogger.com0