Hobbes, Enlightenment, Kant

Remember Hobbes' definition of 'happiness'--and it's endless pursuit? That idea is deeply embedded in modern capitalism and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. It went largely unquestioned (I believe) by the other philosophers and thinkers of the Enlightment, just as they did not question but on the contrary welcomed the mechanistic universe promised by modern i.e. Newtonian science, with its corollary, Deism. Paley's argument for the existence of God pretty well sums it up: just as a watch implies a watch-maker, so this great machine the universe implies a Designer and an Engineer rolled up into one. Since the universe is entirely deterministic, the possibility of Providence disappears. It also creates or seems to create a dilemma for anyone who believes in the freedom of the will (Hume said the opposite but we'll have to let that go til later.)

Kant, a scientific pioneer himself, set out to give a rational explanation and justification of the methods of the natural sciences which he rightly looked upon as the major achievement of the age. Instead, as Isaiah Berlin shows in an essay which ought to be read by anyone interested in modern history, "he lifted the lid of a Pandora's box which he was among the first, with perfect honesty and consistency, to disown and condemn."

The determinism of modern science put Kant in an ethical box from which there seemed to be no escape. But Kant was a philosophical Houdini: he found or invented a stunningly clever escape module which enabled him to preserve both science and the freedom of the will--but at a price, wnich I will get to in a moment. First, I have to admit that I do not understand Kant's "transcendental" metaphysics very well. Basically, insofar as I understand it, Kant turned the problem of knowledge inside-out: the rational order we find in the universe is an order that our minds have created and imposed on it--including its deterministic structure. And the price? Well, if science is an a priori creation of pure reason, what is reason reasoning about? If our knowledge of world and universe is a human invention, how do we know it's true? And here it seems to me, Kant lost it. (But what do I know?) He invented an unknowable Substance as the foundation for reality, and he called that Substance "things-in-themselves." Why did he do this? Because if determinism is merely a rational construct of the mind, the mind--far above that grubby and unknowable Substance down at the unknowable base of reality (down at the quantum or even Planck scale had he only known)--is free to ignore it: one can assert one's freedom by an act of will. That (I guess) is where we encounter Kant's "categorical imperative" which is more or less equivalent to the golden rule: live by the same rules you would impose on others; or, which is not quite the same perhaps, act in conformity to the rules that you would willingly make universal. Anyone who makes it a point of honor to act consistently according to a principle of this kind (or of any kind, perhaps) is heroic. This is not a new idea; the ancient Stoics, or Christians waiting to become lion food knew all about it. But Kant added conditions that raised the bar almost impossibly high: if one acts under the influences of causes which one cannot control, whether external such as physical compulsion or internma such as instincts or desires or passions, then the act whatever its consequences, good or bad, have no moral value. The Self, Kant tells us, must be "raised above natural necessity", for if we are ruled by the same laws as which govern the material world,"freedom cannot be saved" and without freedom there is no morality. So Kant, without intending to, made the exercise or rather the assertion of raw will morally compelling in itself.

In what follows, I shall be drawing heavily on Isaiah Berlin's essay, "The Apotheosis of The Romantic Will."

Romanticism, Romantic, Romance

At first, in the 13th or 14th centuries or thereabouts, a romance was a story written in what was then the premier romance language, French. A French story or poem. As we can learn by reading Don Quixote (1607) these were wildly improbable tales in which just about anything could happen and the heroes lived and acted according to an extraordinarily noble code of behavior. No one could accuse Don Quixote of not doing his best to live up to his own chivalric ideals. Other writers, Tasso, Spenser, Sydney, for example had used the romance form for their own purposes, but Cervantes was the first to make his story self-referential thereby leaping at one bound into hypermodernity.

The Romance is an aristocratic art-form; the novel invented (I guess) by Defoe is thoroughly bourgeois and not in the least bit romantic--though the characters may from time to time act in 'romantic' ways. Romanticism, is a response to or reaction against the accelerated rate of economic, technical, industrial development that occurred, first, in England in the late 18th and early 19th century; continental Europe quickly followed. Revolutions are not pretty. There are likely to be more losers than winners. The losers may look back nostalgically to the past; they may try to conserve as much of it as possible. Looking back, we may see the vast popularity of Scott's novels of medieval life as evidence of future-shock.

Here is a sonnet by Wordsworth that gives us something of the essence of romanticism:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It move us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

ps: Anyone who thinks that name-calling is an acceptable form of criticism does not deserve a hearing.

"The German System of Romantic Thought"

What did Troeltsch mean by that phrase, "the German system of romantic thought"? Well, what he has to say on this subject is both interesting and complicated, so be prepared to pay attention for a little while:

The peculiarity of German thought, in the form in which it is nowadays [remember, this in 1922] so much emphasized, both inside and outside Germany, is primarily derived from the Romantic Movement... Romanticism too is a revolution, a thorough and genuine revolution: a revolution against the respectability of the bourgeois temper and against a universal equalitarian ethic: a revolution, above all, against the whole of the mathematico-mechanical spirit of science in western Europe, against a conception of Natural Law which sought to blend utility with morality, against the bare abstraction of a universal and equal Humanity. Confronted with the eruption of West-European ideas of Natural Law, and with the revolutionary storms by which they were accompanied, Romanticism pursued an increasingly self-conscious trend in the opposite direction of a conservative revolution. In the spirit of the contemplative and the mystic, the Romanticists penetrated behind the rich variety of actual life to the inward forces by which it was moved, and sought to encourage the play of those forces in a steady movement towards a rich universe of unique and individual structures of the creative human mind.

Please understand that Troeltsch is not speaking as a defiant German nationalist; he is trying to understand what the war was all about and how Germany can move beyond its rift with western-Europe: "Our duty to German traditions is not to push them to an extreme and one-sided conclusion... but to bring them into new contact with all the great movements in the world about us."

German romanticism in the 19th century would seem to be reactionary, in the spirit of Joseph de Maistre. What was it reacting against? The French Revolution with its rationalistic, ahistorical doctrines of human rights most obviously, but also what Troeltsch calls the "mathematico-mechanical spirit of science in western Europe"--to which, as it happens, the Germans had contributed as mightily as anyone else. Even as he was writing, in 1922, German mathematicians and physicists were creating modern quantum mechanics; Einstein, in 1905, won the Nobel prize for his papers on Special Relativity, the photo-electric effect and Brownian motion; ten years later he completed his work on General Relativity. To all of this, Troeltsch seems oblivious. But so what? He is right to be emphasizing the profoundly conservative nature of German pre-war Romanticism. That's a fact. Which leads to the question I want to ask: Wasn't Romanticism an inherently conservative, even reactionary, response not only to science but to technology and the industial revolution, to modernity in general? And not just in Germany but throughtout Europe? Even in France, the mother of all revolutions?



(to be continued)

As Germany Saw It

If the great German philosopher and theologian, Ernst Troeltsch, had had a chance to read The Wasteland, he might have said to himself "I knew it all along!" Here he is in 1922, reflecting on Germany's defeat in WW I and the fundamental differences between the "Romantic thought" of Germany and the soul-destroying individualism and utilitarianism of the West:

"Here we touch the core of the contrast. We begin to see, on the one hand, an eternal, rational, and divinely ordered system of Order, embracing both morality and law; we begin to see, on the other, individual, living, and perpetually new incarnations of an historically creative Mind. Those who believe in an eternal and divine Law of Nature, the Equality of man, and a sense of unity pervading mankind, and who find the essence of humanity in these things, cannnot but regard the German doctrine as a curious mixture of mysticism and brutality. Those who take an opposite view--who see in history an ever-moving stream, which throws up unique invividualities as it moves, and is always shaping individual structures on the basis of a law which is always new--are bound to consider the west-European world of ideas as a world of cold rationalism and equalitarian atomism, a world of superficiality and Pharisaism."

More About Yeats

Thomas Banks wonders what I think of the poems in (and before) Yeats' 1899 volume, "The Wind Among The Reeds." It's a good question, because Yeats 'modernized' his style around the turn of the century. Early Yeats is different from later. It's a long time since I've read or thought about this very great poet and I'm glad to be doing that now. Some of the earlier poems, like the Lake Isle of Innisfree ("I will arise and go now . . ."), The Song of the Wandering Aengus and Who Goes With Fergus? never lose their charm. The Rose of the World takes us straight into the fin de siecle sensibility of a poet like Ernest Dowson. (We use to pay our kids so much a foot to memorize poetry and The Song of the Wandering Aengus was one of the poems they especially liked.)

Yeats wrote a number of poems about the kind of poetry he was trying to write; or about the way he had changed his style as a poet. The following come to mind: Adam's Curse, To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing, A Coat, Ego Dominus Tuus, The Fisherman, The Circus Animals Desertion. What he says of Dante applies to him: "He set his chisel to the hardest stone." Like Eliot and Pound, he wanted to put as much distance as he could between his own poetry and conventional notions of poetry as self-expression, which he despised as bourgeois. And I'm pretty sure Frost and Wallace Stevens--and probably most of the other great modernist poets and artists would have agreed, though not perhaps in quite those terms. Modernist art, then, is implicitly aristocratic. Which is why it is not popular among post-modernist intellectuals and academics, and why they would like to pretend that it doesn't exist.

Poet And Poem

I am about to do the very thing I said critics shouldn't do: connect poet and poem. But then I am not a critic but something far less important, a student of literary as well as other kinds of history i.e. "a harmless drudge" as Samuel Johnson says.

Let us suppose--as others have--that The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is a satiric self-portrait. It is of course a virtuoso performance which Prufrock himself would have been quite incapable of. Eliot, however much he may have resembled Profrock in his relations with women, is not only a brilliant poet but an accomplished scholar, learned in the ancient languages, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and ABD in Philosophy. He is studying philosophy in Germany in the summer of 1914; when Europe descends into the state of war, he moves to England. He is 26 years old. He writes to his friend Conrad Aiken, "I am very dependent upon women (I mean female society)" and complains that he is still a virgin. He meets a young woman, intelligent, gifted and no doubt pretty, named Vivienne Haigh-Wood who, I guess, promptly seduces him. They are married in June, 1915. It is a miserable marriage. Vivienne, it turns out, is not only gifted but deranged--"hopelessly so" perhaps, says Hugh Kenner. Later, in his sixties, Eliot had this to say: "I came to persuade myself that I was in love with Vivienne simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England. And she persuaded herself (also under the influence of Pound) that she would save the poet by keeping him in England. To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land."

Eliot worked on that poem for a long time but couldn't pull it together or finish it. Like his marriage, it was an incoherent mess when he took it to Pound and asked him to make sense of it. Which Pound did--though it is not at all clear that poem as we now have it is the poem that Eliot intended to write. One thing, however, IS pretty clear: the mind that created this poem was in a state of despair.

To read The Wasteland is to encounter a cacophony--or echo-chamber-- of disparate, disconnected voices. That in itself would seem to be a metaphor for modernity: Once upon a time, the poem implies--the time of the universal Church, perhaps--life was more liked a choir than a cacophony. If there were nothing more to the poem than that, I don't suppose we would still be reading and thinking about it. But the voices of this poem, even the annonymous voice or voices of the poet, are voices of strangely intense individuality--even the flat banality of this one: "In the mountains, there you feel free." One of these voices is almost certainly the voice of Vivienne, in Part II ("A Game of Chess"). This section begins with an allusion to Shakespeare's Cleopatra: "The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne/ Glowed..." but then Cleopatra disappears, to be replaced by an extraordinary (and, I believe, intentionally incoherent) tangle of allusions, metaphors and images. Then we hear this:

Footsteps shuffled on the stair.
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.
"My nerves are bad to-night. Yes bad. Stay with me.
"Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
What are you thinking of? What thinking? Think."

The Wasteland is a desert where nothing can grow; Eliot's marriage was equally barren. He and Vivienne had no children. Later, Eliot allows himself to dwell briefly on a world where things might have been otherwise--as here in Marina (1930) for example:

What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping at the bow
What scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog
What images return
O my daughter....

What is this face, less clear and clearer
The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger--
Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye

Whispers and small laughter bwtween leaves and hurrying feet
Under sleep where all the waters meet.

Burnt Norton (1936) begins with a glum meditation on the hopelessly unredeemable nature of time: "If all time is eternally present" (as it would be in the mind of an omniscient God), then "All time is unredeemable," and

What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibiliity
Only in a world of speculation. [Nevertheless?]
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden....
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world....

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitely, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might of been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

The following poem by Yeats would seem to sum up the sad life of T. S. Eliot. It is called The Choice:

The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

When all that story's finished, what's the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse.

Eliot said it himself: since he was not a prolific poet, every poem (and he never knew after he had written one whether he would ever write another) had to be "perfect." But there was one poem that was not perfect--The Wasteland--which he published anyway.

Modernist Anomalies

I can think of at least two. The first of these may not strike you as odd but the predilection for primitivismn in many modernist artists would seem to be on the face of it at least slightly paradoxical. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring comes to mind. D.H. Lawrence remarks (in Women in Love) on the modern fascination for African art. Think of Gaugin's paintings or those of Henri Rousseau--or for that matter, the work of Picasso.

The other anomaly is deeper and more unsettling. When the great modernist poets, Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Frost and Stevens broke away from their romantic predecessors, the rupture was not only stylistic but political. Both Eliot and Yeats were politically conservative, to say the least, but while both found Fascism tempting, they did not--unlike Pound-- take the plunge. Some of Eliot's lesser poems, and much of Pound's, are uglified by anti-semitism. Frost had a low opinion of progressives and liberals. Stevens was a business man and, by all accounts a very good one. His poetry is apolitical. Since the poetry audience tends to be progressive and liberal, a certain tension began to characterize its attitudes toward some at least of these white men. This tension could not easily be resolved for a reason that is easy to say but hard to explain: these men are truly great poets; the poetry they write is beautiful and unforgettable. Here is single example of what I'm talking about, a poem by Yeats entitled "In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz"(1927):

The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
But a raving autumn shears
Blossom from the summer's wreath;
The older is condemned to death,
Pardoned, drags out lonely years
Conspiring among the ignorant.
I know not what the younger dreams--
Some vague utopia--and she seems,
When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,
An image of such politics.
Many a time I think to seek
One or other out and speak
Of that old Georgian mansion, mix
Pictures of the mind, recall
That table and the talk of youth,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.

Dear shadows, now you know it all,
All the folly of a fight
With a common wrong or right.
The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time;
Arise and bid me strike a match
And strike another till time catch;
Should the conflagration climb,
Run till all the sages know.
We the great gazebo built,
They convicted us of guilt;
Bid me strike a match and blow.