Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
Theory
As It Is
In Defense of a Classical Education
Carlos Aureus
1
Critical Theory As It Is
In Defense of a Classical Education
Carlos Aureus
Contents
I. Preface
II. Introduction: What is Critical Theory? ..
III. The Classical Background: Mimesis
A. Plato: Introduction .
B. Plato: Republic (Books II, III, and X) ..
C. Aristotle: Introduction
D. Aristotle: Poetics ..
E. Horace: Ars Poetica .
F. Longinus: On the Sublime
IV. The Medieval Worldview.
A. Plotinus: On the Intellectual Beauty
B. St. Augustine: Semiotics ..
C. Manlius Severinus Boethius: Consolation of Philosophy .
D. St. Thomas Aquinas: Aesthetics and Hermeneutics
V. The Neoclassical Tradition: Decorum
A. Sir Philip Sidney: An Apology for Poetry .
B. John Dryden: An Essay of Dramatic Poesy
C. Alexander Pope: An Essay on Criticism ..
VI. Epistemological Bases of Romanticism
A. Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful
B. Immanuel Kant: Introduction .
C. Immanuel Kant: Critique of Judgment .
D. Friedrich von Schiller: Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.
E. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Introduction
F. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: The Philosophy of Fine Art
VII. The Romantic Imagination .
A. William Wordsworth: Introduction .
B. William Wordsworth: Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads
C. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Biographia Literaria ..
D. John Keats: On Negative Capability and the Egotistical Sublime
E. Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Defense of Poetry .
VIII.
The Poetics of W. B. Yeats: A Vision
IX. Epilogue
X. Appendix A: The Euclidean Poetry of Alexander Pope ..
XI. Appendix B: Course Syllabus
Preface
he title of this book is Critical Theory As It Is. It is not critical theory as viewed
This study, moreover, does not reject different perspectives. On the contrary, we firmly believe that
different perspectives invigorate and enrich any discipline or study. (This recognition and appreciation of
various perspectives will be amplified below) What we object to is the my view is the only true view
stance.
2
From time to time, a cry has gone up that all critical theory before a certain date is now mercifully
obsolete, that one may safely ignore it. Hazard Adams, Introduction, Critical Theory Since Plato, p. 1.
Note: unless otherwise indicated, Critical Theory Since Plato refers to the Revised 1992 edition.
It is regrettable, to say the least,3 that students taking courses in the Humanities
enter classrooms with very little or no exposure to the classics. Consequently, they
never even hear of it, even in courses taken as electives. Even for the three groups
European Languages majors, English majors, and students who, on their own
conviction, have been convinced of the cultural and practical value of even a little
exposure to the classicsdisenfranchisement has become a fact of life. Into the lives of
such mature students, it is a pity and a lost opportunity to put teachers who in pace and
in thought are haters of the classics.
As a result, Critical Theory of the classical tradition is no longer part of the
intellectual equipment of our students, even students of the best colleges and
universities. True it is that a majority of intelligent students read and discuss the works
of Foucault, Ren Girard, Derrida, Edward Said, et al.; or display knee-jerk excitement
over anti- and/or post-colonial discourse/s, whether they be hybridized, nationalized, or
nativized.
But Critical Theory of the classical tradition remains a closed book. Whatever the
reasons, most well-educated students are familiar with the names of Plato and Aristotle,
Horace and Longinus, Aquinas and Augustine, but they do not know what or where
exactly their eminence rests on. Why these names have become bywords for more than
two millennia after their deaths remains a mystery to them. To unravel that mystery is
the intent of this book.
I have no quarrel with Philippine folk and regional literature, popular culture,
feminist literature, translation studies, regional postcolonial writings, nativism,
unhomeliness, protest literature, englishes, and all that. I myself do write in my native
vernacular (Bicol) because I feel most comfortable in the tongue of my native town.
What I find ghastly inappropriate is the way we think that young people can
understand and appreciate everything, including critical theory itself, only if we make it
trendy and forcing us all to see everything through the jaundiced eyes of
postcolonialism. It seems that we are not confident enough to let the works speak for
themselves and as themselves.
It also seems to me that teachers who deliver their message by means of the
stunts and tricks characteristic of the faddists are not being honest. By sugar coating the
primary sources and presenting them through biased bromides, teachers are actually
teaching counter-productively, in that they are defeating their own purpose of winning
new converts, so to speak. I know for a fact that young students of today are interested
in critical theory and are much more readily engaged by exposure toand
unadulterated presentations oforiginal primary texts. It is the What Is that really
grabs them. No gimmicks, no hidden agendas. There's no need for me to amplify this
further to the passionate few dedicated to having our students appreciate literary
theory and criticism. To these teachers I say, hold aloft the torch of liberal education. Do
not be bamboozled by the faddists. We owe the students the best and only the best of
the best, and we are doing precisely that by presenting critical theory as it is, Ding an
sich, and nothing short of it.
3
Maslow's hammer: "When the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it
were a nail. Abraham H. Maslow (1966). The Psychology of Science: A Reconnaissance. Maurice Basset
Publishing, 1966, p. 15.
5
Karl Popper, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Ed. Ted Honderich. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1995. 702-3.
6
Francesco Petrarch (1367). Apologia cuiusdam anonymi Galli calumnias (Defence against the calumnies of an
anonymous Frenchman), in Petrarch, Opera Omnia, Basel, 1554, p. 1195. This quotation comes from the
English translation of Mommsen's article, where the source is given in a footnote.
fiestas and evening processions with passion without having to chant Amen or
Halleluiah after every sentence.
Hop in and join in. You do not need to belong to academia to enjoy my book. In
fact, you do not need to attend my classes at university at all to be my friend.7
And what matter if our voices are as yet unheard and crying in the wilderness.
One has only to look up at the night sky to see from a larger perspective how this
postcolonial schlock, like all ideologies that preceded it, will turn out to be a transition at
best to a still different ideology. If you look up at the night sky, you will see many stars
and heavenly bodies that follow the natural laws. You may also see a meteor or two.
Meteors are very bright stray fragments that break away from the natural orbit. They
choose wild courses of their own. After some time, however, they are drawn into the
natural orbit of some law abiding planet and are dissipated.
Ours is a small band of law abiding citizens of the universe who know enough,
and therefore care enough. We will not be intimidated any longer by meteors. To quote
that oft-repeated passage from Edmund Burke: All that is necessary for the triumph of
evil is that good men do nothing,8 this book is my modest way of saying that I am doing
something.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the University of the Philippines for granting me a
sabbatical to write this book. I would also like to thank my students in Classical Latin for
urging me to finish this book. In particular, I would like to thank my students, graduate
and undergraduate, for having done me the honor of recording many of my lectures
livea gesture that has obligated me (in a very pleasant way) to scrupulously weigh and
consider every word I released in these classroom lectures.9 The keen interest they have
7
The Poet Himself did not attend university. In his Groats-Worth of Wit (1592), Robert Greene, surveying
the literary scene in London, mocks an upstart Crow who, with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde,
supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse and is in his owne conceit the onely Shakescene in a countrey. Greene here parodies a line taken from Shakespeares very early play Henry VI, part
3; it is clear from his remarks that Master Shake-scene was already quite well known, both as an actor
and as a dramatist. What galled Greene was the fact that this yokel, this bumpkin from the province
was not a member of Greenes exclusive university wits. I am digressing, but what matter. This is
Shakespeare.
8
Edmund Burke Irish orator, philosopher, & politician (1729 - 1797). One chapter is devoted to him in a
separate chapter of this book. The above quote is often attributed to Burke, but it is inaccurate. Burke
never put it this way. According to Daniel Ritchie in his book Edmund Burke: Appraisals and Applications
(NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1990, p. xiii), the exact quote is "when bad men combine, the good must
associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. Professor
Ritchie took it from Burkes Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770).
9
All the lectures in this book (vide Appendix B: Course Syllabus) have been recorded live and may be
downloaded at http://criticaltheory.weebly.com/index.html
shown me in their eagerness to learn the classics in general and critical theory in
particular has not only inspired me to walk on but also greatly contributed to the
enhancement, organization, and substance of this book. They are my co-authors.
The mistakes, however, are my responsibility.
Many manuscripts submitted for publication often drag along with them a heavy
freight of bibliographic cross references, content footnotes, reference footnotes, and
annotated bibliographies to impress upon the reader the amount of research done and
the meticulousness of documentation that have been dug out. I must confess that I too
have been guilty of this tendency. For this book, however, I have decided to curb the
spur, so to speak, and provide the reader instead with as few sources as possible for one
reason: In an on-line age such as ours, the absence of direct references to authorities in
the text can no longer indicate a lack of indebtedness. My purpose is to preclude the
tendency to overwhelm the reader with a long list of sources one can easily locate by
accessing on any on-line bibliographic database. I want to give the reader a minimum of
overt scholarly apparatus by including only those that have direct bearing on the main
topics discussed.
Most of the insights you will find here have been derived from lectures and
writings by who I regard to be some of the best teachers in the world. These are the
passionate few that Arnold Bennett writes about,10 the few who have devoted their
lives honing areas I have barely grazed over. Students here will hear echoes of my first
teacher in critical theory Dr. Edilberto K. Tiempo of Silliman University (who introduced
me to the Smith and Parks book), the echoes of my mentor and adviser Dr. Elmer
Ordoez of the University of the Philippines (who introduced me to the Hazard Adams
book). I am also extremely honored to be granted permission by two of the finest
professors in the world, Dr. Louis Markos (Professor of English at Houston Baptist
University) and Dr. Judith V. Grabiner (the Flora Sanborn Pitzer Professor of
Mathematics at Pitzer College) to draw from, adapt, and make use of their lectures in
my classes. At the same time, I want to acknowledge the following Dr. Elizabeth
Vandiver of Whitman College for drawing from her insights in my chapters on Plato,
Horace, and Augustine; Dr. David Roochnik of Boston University from whom I have
drawn many insights in my chapters on Books II, III, and X of Platos Republic; Dr. John
M. Bowers of the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, for lessons learned (and hopefully
assimilated) from his insights on Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Boethius; Dr.
Philip Cary of Eastern College in St. Davids, Pennsylvania, most especially, for his deep
insights on Plotinus, Augustine (especially on the subject of Signs and Sacraments,)
and Hegel; Dr. Darren M. Staloff of the City College of New York for Hegel; Dr. Michael
Sugrue of Ave Maria University in Florida, for Plato and Poetry; Dr. Stephen Erickson of
Pomona College, Claremont, California, for Kant and Hegel; Dr. Willard Spiegelman of
Southern Methodist University, for Wortdsworth; Dr. John Sutherland of the University
College London, for Lyrical Ballads.
These are the masters from whom I have brazenly, liberally, and sedulously
borrowed, and on whose works, if the reader may have come to be familiar with them,
10
Arnold Bennett, Why a Classic is a Classic, A Textbook in Freshman English, pp. 352-4.
my thoughts are heavily vectored. I have stolen their insights because I felt that they
could not be said better, let alone by myself.
If I have also sedulously become the mouthpiece of the gods, like Shelleys
Aeolian harp, it is because some things could not have been said better. I could not
improve on them. So I have resorted to be their mouthpiece.
Finally, I wish to express my gratitude to my student in Latin Sarah Jean Morato
for all the various sorts of technical help that I have received while writing this book.
Because I am a complete idiot in computer technology (I only want to write a book,
dearie, I am not in this world to complicate my life!) this work would never have been
finished without Sarahs technical expertise and infinite patience.
Recommendation
To get the most out of this course, I recommend that you purchase a copy of
Hazard Adamss Critical Theory Since Plato (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College
Publishers). This is the one textbook I believe you should have as companion to this
present book. I have been using Adamss book in teaching Critical Theory ever since the
early 1970s and it is the one companion book I shall be using all throughout the course
in pointing to all the primary sources in this study. In a word, if you have Adamss book,
there is nothing else to buy. This is the one-stop-shop book I recommend to anyone
interested in a comprehensive treatment of the subject of critical theory. If you cannot
purchase the latest 3rd edition, the 1971 or the 1992 revised edition would do just fine.
In fact, in this present study, I sometimes still make use of the 1971 first edition in
excerpting favorite passages; for example, I have used the translation of Horaces Ars
Poetica by E. C. Wickham instead of the 1992 translation by Walter Jackson Bate. Not
that the former is better than the latter, but probably, as professor of Latin, I have
gotten so used to the Wickham version over the decades to feel more comfortable with
it. Or probably, it is age: I am too old to change.
If your funds permit, I would also highly recommend (in the same breath), James
Harry Smiths The Great Critics: An Anthology of Literary Criticism (Third Edition, W.W.
Norton & Co., 1951, Ed Winfield Parks, co-editor). My passion for literary theory actually
began with exposure to this jewel of a book (we used to refer to it back then as the
Smith and Parks) and the passionate manner in which it was taught by the late
Arnoldian critic Dr. Edilberto K. Tiempo, a great critic in his own right, when I took this
course under him at Silliman University way back in June 1970.
After these two books, it would be helpful if one could warm up to the study
by pre-reading what I believe are essential sources by way of preliminaries in getting the
knack and feel of literary criticism:
Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp.11
____________. A Glossary of Literary Terms.
11
The complete publication data of these five books and all other sources cited in this study are provided
for in the bibliography found on the last pages of this book.
10
use. The overall intent was to make the lessons highly interesting and exciting and I
wanted to maintain that excitement all throughout.
Some chapters are long as some are short. I did not allow myself to be confined
to the same number of pages for each chapter. Some deserved long chapters, while in
others, once the point was argued, I felt that there was no need to elaborate further. To
bend my chapters to conform to a uniform number of pages would be to torture the
reader on the bed of Procrustes.
To really enjoy the course, therefore, I suggest that the you read first the primary
sources to be found in Hazard Adamss Critical Theory Since Plato (for example, Book VII
of Platos Republic). Then I suggest you read the outline or chapter I have provided in
this book, while listening to the audio lecture. Better yet, underscore, write marginal
notes, pencil in asterisks, etc. while listening to the lecture. The best yet is to listen to
the lecture while writing on the primary source (Hazard Adamss book) PROVIDED IT IS
YOUR OWN PERSONAL COPY, of course.
We guarantee that this format, if pursued, will stand any student in good stead
in preparing for an examination, and will eliminate the burden of endless re-reading and
re-viewing and sorting through endless information to find which material is or is not
important.
My audio lectures are about half an hour long each. By listening to them even
half an hour a day, I guarantee you can learn the course in a semester. By using this
multi-sense approach to the ancient tradition of classroom teaching, I hope to be able to
bring the excitement of learning critical theory into your home or car or jogging lane.
Why not skip half an hour of junk TV each evening and listen to the lectures
instead. Or if you cannot find a nice movie to watch on a weekend, why not invest
instead in REAL entertainment. I know this course competes with your leisure time, but
by asking you to reach up rather than stoop down, its a savings account for the brain.
Allow me to have one last word about these audio lectures:
About the Audio CD/Download
The audio CD/download that goes along with this book is originally intended to
provide my students with an audio version of my classroom lectures as soon as they had
gotten home. I would usually upload them first thing upon arriving home myself. The
students could then listen to them on the same day they were delivered.
These classroom lectures have been recorded live in order to walk the student step-bystep through the course s/he is enrolled in. They are also meant to help supplement,
focus, and organize the students efforts in reviewing for the final examination.
Although these audio lectures are not meant to substitute for the classroom experience
itself, which cannot be replaced even in an on-line age like ours, they are made available
here to help maximize the students learning experience in an efficient, time-saving, and
frequently effortless way.
I have tried my best to record these lectures in such a manner that while
listening to the audio, the student would feel like Im right there with him in the study
room.
11
Apart from the extensive course guide, I am also providing both a PDF file and an
MS Word file of this book, and the student may choose to download either or both. The
PDF/MS Word files buttress the lessons with extensive added materials like glossaries,
biographies, bibliographies, links to related websites, as well as suggestions for further
study. This book is cross-referenced with Adamss book; it is your Cliffs Notes to his
book.
The student may find it beneficial if she read the particular lesson while listening
to the audio lecture at the same time. In this manner, two sensessight and hearing
are maximized.
Among the benefits you may find in this strategy are the following:
A better focus.
A more organized and time-saving review.
The freedom to study anywhere and at any time. (You may choose, for
example, to transfer the audio lectures into your mp3 player and play it
while on the jogging lane, while travelling, while waiting your turn at an
office, etc.)
When you open my site http://criticaltheory.weebly.com you will find the
banner Critical Thinking instead of Critical Theory. A word about Critical Thinking, and
why it is the streamer in my site:
Critical thinking is not about criticizing other people. Nor is it about passing
judgment on anybody. My premise is that we all make mistakes and we appreciate it
when someone helps us to see them. We appreciate it if someone on the highway, for
example, points out that our car has a flat tire. In that sense. Likewise, we appreciate it
if someone tells us that our theory or claim is unfounded. Your friend will not be doing
you a favor if s/he told you your theory is brilliant when in fact s/he thinks it is actually
rotten. Critical thinking is about learning and understanding; it is about helping each
other, not about winning or putting down somebody else and coming out on top.
Why do we make mistakes? Because we are human, and as humans we are
prone to misjudgment, to oversight, to ignorance, and in my case, to stupidity. Its a safe
bet that the majority of other human beings do not have a right view of things as they
are. Failing to understand things as they are is no crime. The problem arises when
people with un-theorized and mal-informed opinions poorly thought out; people full of
dead theory sanctified by time and naturalized by indolence, people who are jaundiced,
bigoted, biased and naive, ACT on those opinions.
College education addresses these problems and hopes to remedy them. College
thinking IS critical thinking. In college, learning is reached through right reason and
proper investigation, not through authority. We find out for ourselves whether or not a
thing is true on the basis of evidence supported by right reason.
Morton Cronin in his essay What an Intellectual IsAnd is Not describes this
more succinctly by citing the intellectuals important characteristic as the willingness
indeed, the eagernessto subject her views to critical discussion. According to Cronin:
If he [sic] is a good example of this type, he will glow with health and good humor
in an argument. . . . Yet his object is not to score debating points. For him the
pursuit of truth must be cooperative, as well as dialectic, and all the pleasure
12
vanishes when that pursuit turns into a mere contest of wills with his interlocutor.
It is easy for him to say I dont know, and he is impressed when his own
questions evoke that reply.12
A diamond is a diamond and is not diminished by analysis.
Although I have crafted this audio project to serve my students, first and
foremost, I have designed it in such a way that anybody may hop in and join the fun.
Like Professor Louis Markos of Houston Baptist University, I believe that knowledge
must not be walled up in the academy, but must be freely and enthusiastically
disseminated to all those who have ears to hear. Learning is fun. We should not say I
am going to study. Instead, we should say I am going to have fun!
So hop right in.
12
Morton Cronin. What an Intellectual IsAnd is Not. In A Textbook in Freshman English, p. 336.
13
Introduction13
What is Critical Theory?
Hello, my name is Carlos, and I will be your tourist guide in our course entitled
Critical Theory.
First of all, thank you for enlisting in the course. I can assure you that you have
invested your time wisely. Critical theory is an exciting course, and my job is to show you
why it is so.
So what is Critical Theory?
Did I introduce myself as a tourist guide? You bet I did. If you love to travel and
visit strange lands, Critical Theory can be compared to the romance of voyaging through
exciting lands.
What country excites you the most? Is it Spain? Where in Spain? Is it the North
of Spain, in Barcelona, to stroll along the shaded walks of Las Ramblas? Or is it the
South, in Andaluca, to dance the tabla (or flamenco) in the streets of Sevilla?
Or would you rather visit London itself, heart of the British Isles. London makes
us glad to be alive. When a man is tired of London, said Samuel Johnson, he is tired of
life; for there is in London all that life can afford. 14
13
Apart from Keatss extended metaphor, I have borrowed the analogy of travel here from Steven Lynns
Texts and Contexts, xvii ff.
14
The complete words are: "Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London.
No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."
This conversation (with Boswell) happened on September 20, 1777, when Johnson, a man who hated to
spend time alone, was always going out on a stroll and savoring everything London had to offer.
14
Or would you prefer to visit Northern Ireland, with its mist-covered countryside
and 19 century air.
How about Germany? Why dont we visit Konigsberg, where Immanuel Kant
spent his entire life? Kant was a colossus in philosophical thoughtand a man of
incredibly regular habits. His daily schedule was a regular as a regular verb to the effect
that housewives at Konigsberg would set their watches as he went on his daily walk.
We would visit these placesand more.
We will visit the past. We will go to ancient GreeceAthens in the classical
periodthe Golden Age that gave the ancient world its monuments in art, philosophy,
and architecture.
We shall visit Platos Academy, where two of the greatest minds of antiquity
Plato and Aristotlediscussed the Theory of Forms.
We shall visit ancient Rome, where Augustus Caesar, patron of Virgil, made
possible, through Maecenas, the writing of Ars Poetica by Horace.
Later, we shall visit the Royal Library of Alexandria, founded by Aristotles pupil
Alexander the Great and flourished under the Ptolemys, the dynasty that gave birth to
the beauteous serpent of the Nile: Cleopatra.
Literary works, like John Keatss realms of gold, are like exotic places we love to
visit.
Whether one travels alone or with a companion, there is always romance in
voyaging through strange lands. To get the most out of the benefits of these journeys,
however, it is a good idea to travel with an experienced tourist guide.
Let me be your literary tourist guide.
What is a good tourist guide?
1. A good tourist guide will tell you what you should look for.
2. A good tourist guide will provide you a plan (i.e., a map, an itinerary).
Before the end of this chapter, I shall provide you with that map.
3. A good tourist guide will make sure you have a satisfying, rewarding trip. I
have crafted a semesters worth of lectures to ensure this promise. That
is my guaranteeor, as a good salesman would say, your money back!
Literary theory and criticism is no different from the tourist trade in that it brings
order and organization to our experience of the places we love to visit, and in our case,
literary works. It does it in two ways:
1. It brings us to focus our attention on the relevant areas. In other words,
only the highlights, because we have a time-limit.
2. It allows us to make sense of what we see.
Our course is no different from the tourist trade in the sense that it brings order to
our experience of the places we love to visitand in our case, literary works. Likewise,
Critical theories are like the different travel agencies through which the various tour
guides generally work, and they are customized according to our intention and
temperament. This means that different agencies feature different kinds of tours.
1. One agency specializes in cultural tours.
2. Another specializes in historical tours.
3. Others in cultural and artistic tours.
th
15
The Eighth Wonder of the World, the Banaue Rice Terraces, Ifugao Province,
Philippines. Photo courtesy of my student Sarah Jean Morato.
At this writing, in the Philippines, spiritual tours mean guided tours to native healers and healing
shrines.
16
In matters of taste, (let there be) no dispute.
16
The good critic cannot stop with studying poetry, he must also study poetics. If he
thinks that he must puritanically abstain from all indulgence in the theory, the good
critic may have to be a good little critic. . . . Theory, which is expectation, always
determines criticism.
John Crowe Ransom, The Worlds Body
In this book, I shall use the word Poetics both in its expansive sense,
, to denote the concept of critical theory itself, and in its contracted term,
still , to signify the theory of poetry.
Jonathan Cullers definition, in his book, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997, p. 1.
17
18
19
Ibid.
Critical Theory Since Plato (First Edition). See General Introduction. Passim.
18
Finally, we read what these great critics have to say about these questions.
By doing so, it is hoped that you will soon find/discover/formulate your own
poetics.
In order to make the most of our guided tour, rather than attempt an
exhaustive survey of Literary Theory and Criticism, we shall focus our sights by imposing
upon ourselves four limitations: first, we shall confine ourselves to critical appraisals of
poetry only; second, we shall limit the boundary of our study to enclose ourselves within
the perimeters from Plato to Yeats only; third, we shall concentrate on four theoretical
periods (the classical, the medieval, the neoclassical, and the romantic); and fourth, we
shall confine ourselves to close readings of representative primary, not secondary, texts.
Earlier, I promised to provide you with a map, so to speak, of our critical
itinerary. So heres your brochurewith a rundown of the main sections that will
make up our study. We shall be visiting six major, interesting places, thus our brochure
will be divided into six parts.
Part One: The Classical Background. This section will take up the difference between
Plato and Aristotle in the concept of mimesis. Whereas Plato saw poetry as twice
removed from reality, Aristotle saw reality as a process by which the Form manifests
itself through the concrete. The poets mimesis, therefore, is an analogue of this
process. This module shall also examine why Plato banished the poets from his ideal
republic, and why Aristotle refutes this by calling the poet not only an imitator but also a
creator.
Although some critics may disagree with me, I am including Horaces Art of
Poetry and Longinuss On the Sublime in this module, instead of locating them under
the rubric neoclassicists, because although less theoretical than Aristotle and even less
moral than Plato, Horaces practical instructions on the art of composing poetry are
ancient Greek in mindset. Likewise, Longinuss treatment of the sublime balances and
blends inspiration and rhetorical mastery in the tradition of ancient classical
rhetoricians, hence his inclusion, too, in this section.
Part Two: Medieval Aesthetics. This module will take up the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus
(who puts poetry in a much higher position in his system than Plato had done), the
semiotics of Augustine (whose science of sign systems paved the way for later theories
of allegory), the hermeneutics of Aquinas (whose fourfold interpretive system opened
up the possibility of discovering multiple meanings in poems later), and the Platonic
distrust of poets by Boethius (who viewed poetry trivial by comparison to theological
pursuits). It will be interesting to mention here that in medieval times, theology was
described as the highest, the prince, of the sciences. The lowest of the sciences was
poetry.
Part Three: Renaissance and Neoclassical Criticism. Sir Philip Sidneys An Apology for
Poetry defends poetry from traditional attacks: that it is a waste of time, that it is the
mother of lies, and that it teaches sinful thingstraditional complaints that go all the
way back to Plato. Sydney, along with Dryden and Pope, then lays down the rules upon
20
which aspiring poets may achieve excellence, especially as they relate to decorum, or
restraint, catchwords that go all the way back to Horace and Loginus.
Part Four: German Epistemological Roots. This, I daresay, is the most difficult but
rewarding of the modules. We shall take up the theories of Kant, Schiller, and Hegel,
prefacing them with a general outline of the creeds of epistemology in Edmund Burkes
An Inquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful, a seminal work which set the tone for
much of German aesthetics. In Kants Critique of Judgment we shall look into two kinds
of aesthetic judgments, those of the beautiful and those of the sublime, and discuss
how they differ from each other. In Schillers Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man,
we shall learn about two fundamental drives, the sensuous drive and the formal drive,
and why these drives demand reconciliation in a higher drive which Schiller calls the
play drive. In Hegels Philosophy of Fine Art, we shall follow the Idea, or the Geist, as
it travels into concrete form through the symbolic, the classical, and the romantic forms
of art in search of a perfect incarnation.
Part Five: The Romantic Imagination. This module shifts the attention from the
relationship between poem and reader (affective) to that between poet and poem
(expressive). We shall take up the great Romantics Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and
Keatspoets who speak intimately to the reader, speaking not of concepts but of
intuitions of nature and of the self. This module presents the poet as a human being
speaking of familiar things we often overlook, things whose very commonness renders
them invisible. We shall analyze Wordsworths famous Preface, and explore how he
redefines the nature of poetry and the poet as a man endowed with more lively
sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human
nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among
mankind. Needless to say, this is the easiest and the most agreeable of the modules.
Part Six: William Butler Yeatss Poetics in A Vision. I have chosen, instead of discussing
The Symbolism of Poetry that is found in the first edition of Hazard Adams book, to
discuss A Vision because the work is in my opinion the best showcase of a poets poetics
in the fullest display of his powers resulting in a grand synthesis of irony. Yeats turned
his back on 19th century science because of its extreme emphasis on a rationalistic,
determinist, reductionist, and materialist universe. But his excursion to the mystical
furnished him with an architectural structure more comprehensive and sensible than
the science of his day. To anyone who asks me what is meant by finding ones own
poetics, I recommend a cursory glance at A Vision.
Critical Theory is difficult. You will encounter terms which may or may not be too
familiar. But nothing is difficult if you have an experienced tourist guide.
To give an example: Take the word defamiliarization. Wordsworth said that too
often we take for granted familiar people and things because their very commonness
has rendered them invisible. But instead of writing of unfamiliar places and things,
Wordsworth would take his subject matter from nature, from the common, everyday
world of the countryside. He would deal with people and things familiar, the farmers,
21
for example, people we too often overlook because of their ordinariness, their
commonness. And then he would throw over them a poetic insight that would make
us see them in a new light, endowed with dignity.
More, by lending these people and things a charm and novelty of their own, he
would evoke in us a sense of childlike wonder and make us see them as if for the first
time.
How? Consider a sunflower. How many times in the summertime have we
passed by sunflowers and never noticed. But if an artist like Vincent Van Gough painted
a sunflower, suddenly you exclaim, By golly, I never looked at a sunflower like this
before!
Defamiliarization opens our eyes to the wonders of the world, whose mystery is
lost due to familiarity.
Before we leave this topic, why dont we pay Mr. Wordsworth a visit to his
cottage in Northwestern England, the home where he wrote most of his immortal
poems. Or better still, why dont we join him and his famous neighbor Samuel Taylor
Coleridge in one of their regular walks along the beauteous Lake District, and experience
the trees and the sky through the eyes of a child, experiencing the thrill of seeing, as if
for the first time those daffodils over there, which inspired Wordsworth to write:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
22
Plato
Introduction
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is
that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
Alfred North Whitehead
Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here.
Sign on the door to Platos Academy in Ancient Athens
Abstract
A prefatory word about Plato, and why our study of poetics begins with him:
Although Aristotles Poetics is the earliest extant treatise of literary theory, all poetics in
truth begin with Plato (even if Plato himself never used the word poetics). We start
with Plato because he was the first critic to narrow his focus on poetry. Platos incisive
investigation into the nature of poetry formally inaugurates the business of poetics.
Plato, in fact, is the FIRST critic and the first CRITIC of poetry. Though himself a great
literary talent, Plato, when fashioning his ideal Republic, decided it would be best if
poets were banished from his Republic. To find out why, we shall present, in this chapter,
an overview of Platos philosophy as it relates to our question. In the next chapter, we
shall narrow our focus even more and examine Books II, III, and X, which examine why
Plato banished the poets from his Republic.
There is an anecdote, albeit apocryphal, about the first meeting of Plato and
Socrates, which dramatizes why Plato disapproves of poetry.
The story goes that Plato first made the acquaintance of Socrates after the
former had written a cycle of tragedies. The young Plato wanted to enter these
tragedies in the contest that the ancient Greeks held during the Dionysian festivals. He
wanted to win a prize for tragedy.
So Plato and Socrates met. The young Plato excitedly read aloud some of his
tragic poems. Socrates listened and asked questions. Plato answered as best he could.
Socrates asked more questions. At the end of their dialogue, Plato went home, burned
his tragedies and never wrote tragedy again.
What actually transpired in that initial dialogue between Socrates and Plato we
can only surmise. What we do know is that Plato had become Socrates student, and
after Socrates tragic death, founded the Academy in Athens, the first University in the
Western world.20 Plato also paid his teacher the greatest of compliments by making
Socrates the main speaker in everything that Plato wrote hereafter. Alas, the teachers
negative impression of poetry and poets were passed on to the student.
20
The Academy lasted for some 900 years. Aristotle was Platos pupil here for nineteen years. The
Academy was closed in the Middle Ages.
23
Plato has a rather ambivalent attitude towards poetry. Poets are dangerous miseducators of the youth. Socrates was condemned to death because his accusers say he
corrupted the youth of Athens. Plato says no, thats not true: the real corrupters of
youth are these poets who perhaps are divinely inspired but dont really understand
what theyre doing. They have a kind of sacred madness which makes them write things
that they themselves do not understand, and often the harm they do is irrevocable.
To understand why Plato thought lowly of poets, we need to start looking father
back into his theory of the divided line.
Archetypes, Mathematics, and Platos Metaphor of the Divided Line
What are archetypes?
Normally, we see cases of just men and just actions, so we come up with the
idea of Justice. In other words, we know there is such a thing as justice because of the
evidence of just men and just actions that we witness in the world. This is obvious, isnt
it?
No. Plato says the contrary is what is true. The Idea of Justice IS the reality.
Whether or not men were just, Justice remains as a self-existent Reality, independent of
whether or not men were just. We experience justice because Justice existed in the
Ideal World.
The point of view can be extended to any area of everyday experience. Take a
rose, for example. There are many varieties of roses, but there is one archetypal Rose,
the Idea of the Rose.
Everything has an archetype behind it. Take the case of beauty. Why is your face
beautiful? Or your hand, your foot, your legs beautiful? Because each is a window
through which one glimpses the archetype. The nearer it is to the archetype, the more
beautiful it is. The farther it is from the archetype, the less beautiful it is.
The Idea of Beauty is the Form of Beauty. When we think of the Idea of Beauty,
we no longer belong to the Ideal World of Form but to the Concept of Beauty. The
beautiful girl, beautiful rose, beautiful vase that we see are individual beautiful entities.
The painting of a beautiful girl, beautiful rose, and beautiful vase are images or shadows
of the individual beautiful entities, and thus thrice removed from the truth. We shall
return to this central concept in the next chapter when we discuss the reasons why
Plato thought lowly of poets and poetry.
Plato's metaphor of the Divided Line is chiefly derived from the mathematical
ideas of ancient Greek geometry. Plato uses this metaphor to stand for his teachings
about reality, being, and knowledge. Whether or not the metaphor accurately describes
reality remains a philosophical question.
As the name implies (divided line), it is a metaphor borrowed from
mathematics.
By using the divided line, Plato tells us something about the relationship
between the blurry statements we make about the world of sense experience and the
exact statements we could make about eternal reality.
24
To construct Plato's divided line, let us draw a line and divide it into 4 parts (from
right to left): A, B, C, and D. Let the names under A and B pertain to the world of
becoming, and the names under C and D pertain to the world of being.
Platos Divided Line21
World of Being
World of Becoming
21
source: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/rhatch/HIS-SCI-STUDY-GUIDE/0019_platoDividedLine.html
25
If we call the segments (starting from the right) A, B, C, and D, we have these
relationships: A < B < C < D, A/B = B/C = C/D, and (A + B)/(C + D) = A/B. The relationship
between the segments A, B, C, and D corresponds to the differing degrees of reality
on the part of the things the segments represent.
The relationship between C (the objects of mathematics) and B (physical objects)
is the same as the relationship between B (physical objects) and A (images). This
suggests that the sphere is more real than a basketball, because the latter is merely an
image of the sphere, although the basketball is more real than its circular
drawing/image. The objects of the world of sense are subject to continual change, and
statements about them are fuzzy and (a modem person might say) only probable. But
the objects of the world of thought are unchanging and eternal, and therefore
statements about them are always true. There is, however, a difference between the
objects on the third level, the objects of mathematics, and those on the fourth, like the
idea or form of justice or of beauty.
The way we come to the truths of mathematics is hypothetical: They are true
provided that the basic axioms are true. The truths on the fourth level are somehow
reached by dialectic and require no hypotheses.
One ascends the divided line through education, and education is designed to
draw the soul from the changing to the real, the Unchanging Reality. The soul is drawn
from the changing to the real by the study of mathematics, where one may begin by
looking at drawings or physical spheres but where one soon progresses to the actual
objects of mathematics, which can be seen only with the eye of the intellect.
We now ask whether the divided line, as described, can actually be constructed
geometrically. We prove that it cannot. It is clear that Plato knew more than enough
mathematics to be aware of this.
We then ask what the philosophical meaning of this conclusion might be for
Plato, and whether this is consistent with the views we have attributed to him. We can
see from this why Plato placed mathematics at the heart of education.
By experiencing the objects of mathematics, like numbers or circles or triangles,
we come to realize that there is a world of intelligibles, of things that can be grasped
only by the intellect. So, as it is said, the door to Plato's Academy in Athens read, "Let no
one ignorant of geometry enter here.
The Allegory of the Cave
Plato's view of knowing and being in his discussion of the divided line is
elaborated further in his story of the cave. In one of his most famous passages, the
human condition is likened to prisoners chained in a dark underground cave where all
these prisoners can see are shadows on a wall. We will see how Plato uses the cave
metaphor to further illuminate the nature of reality and knowledge. We will conclude
this lecture by discussing how Plato uses the way we learn mathematics and formulate
mathematical ideas as a model for his influential account of the relationship between
everyday experience and reality.
26
The most famous of Plato's metaphors is the story of the cave, where Plato
likens the human condition to being able to perceive only shadows of reality. Here is
Platos famous Allegory of the Cave from Part Seven, Book Seven of the Republic.22 The
dialogue is between Socrates and Glaucon:
Imagine an underground chamber like a cave, with a long entrance open to
the daylight and ahead of them and cannot turn their heads. Some way off,
behind and higher up, a fire is burning, and between the fire and the
prisoners and above them runs a road, in front of which a curtain-wall has
been built, like a screen at puppet shows between the operators and their
audience, above which they show their puppets. as wide as the cave. In this
chamber are men who have been prisoners there since they were children,
their legs and necks being so fastened that they can only look straight.
I see.
Imagine further that there are men carrying all sorts of gear along behind
the curtain-wall, projecting above it and including figures of men and animals
made of wood and stone and all sorts of other materials, and that some of
these men, as you would expect, are talking and some not.
And odd picture and an odd sort of prisoner.
They are drawn from life, I replied. For, tell me, do you think our prisoners
could see anything of themselves or their fellows except the shadows thrown
by the fire on the wall of the cave opposite them?
How could they see anything else if they were prevented from moving their
heads all their lives?
And would they see anything more of the objects carried along the road?
Of course not.
Then if they were able to talk to each other, would they not assume that the
shadows they saw were the real things?
Inevitably.
And if the wall of their prison opposite them reflected sound, dont you
think that they would suppose, whenever one of the passers-by on the road
spoke, that the voice belonged to the shadow passing before them?
They would be bound to think so.
And so in every way they would believe that the shadows of the objects we
mentioned were the whole truth.
Yes, inevitably.
Whats going on here? Book 7 of the Republic describes prisoners chained in a cave,
facing the wall all their lives. Behind them are a fire and a road, and between the fire
and the prisoners, people walk and talk. The prisoners hear the echoes and see the
shadows cast by the fire onto the wall, and mistake these for reality.
22
Translated by Desmond Lee in Plato: The Republic. London: Penguin: 1955, pp. 317ff. Revised 1974.
27
Now heres the point. A prisoner is unchained and dragged out of the cave. At first
he is temporarily blinded by the light. He prefers to return to the coziness of the cave,
his comfort zone. But a friendly hand guides him towards the light.
Out at the mouth of the cave, he sees trees, rivers, mountains, and the sky.
Eventually his eyes get used to the sight and he realizes this is what is real.
Out of compassion, he returns to the cave to save his fellow prisoners. At first he
cannot see clearly in the relative darkness, and his fellow prisoners tell him: "See what
happens when you try to get to higher things." In their eyes, he has become a weirdo,
and if he tried to lead them out of the world of shadows, they would not believe him.
They would not even hesitate to kill him for teaching dangerous things.
In this vein, maybe it is far safer to enter a room filled with gunpowder with a lighted
match than to teach the Thing As It is, because it goes against the grain of the nescient,
unthinking majority.
Or to extend the moral a bit further: When a person does a useless thing, nobody
bothers to educate him; when a person does an evil thing, few seek to restrain him; but
when a person teaches us the way out of our prison caves, the whole world will
condemn him and destroy him. Such is the fate of the worlds great teachers.
The metaphor of the cave enriches our understanding of the process of moving up
the divided line from the changing to the real. The form of the good renders things
intelligible on the top half of the divided line, as the Sun renders things visible on the
bottom half. The process by which we go from shadows to real objects is like the
process by which we go from real objects to the objects of mathematics, and so this part
of the ascent of the divided line draws the soul from the changing to the real.
Education, then, is not stuffing people's minds with information, but turning the soul
in the direction of greater certainty and reality (we moderns might say, like moving from
the study of the probable to the study of the certain). The soul is best drawn from the
changing to the real by studying examples of that which does not change.
Plato here strongly, and influentially, prescribes the study of mathematics for the
philosophers who are to rule his ideal society-and for all of Western education. Indeed,
Plato's curriculum starts with arithmetic, then plane and solid geometry, then
astronomy, then music. This is rather like 1 dimension for arithmetic; then 2 for plane
and 3 for solid geometry; then astronomy, understood not as the study of physical stars
and planets but as the pure mathematical motion of geometrically perfect solids; and
then the harmony that governs it all.
This, through the work of Boethius in the 6th century, became the Quadrivium of
medieval education: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music or harmony. (The
Trivium was Grammar, Rhetoric, and Logic.) So the process by which we move from
seeing the orange, the basketball, and the Moon to understanding the sphere involves
turning the soul more toward the real.
Plato calls the analogous process, which takes us from the hypothetical treatment of
mathematics to grasping the nonhypothetical first principles of knowledge of the forms,
dialectic.
In the dialogue, Plato has Socrates say that he cannot explain exactly how this
works, and that Glaucon, to whom Socrates is speaking, would not be able to follow
28
such an explanation anyway. So, the metaphorsand the central role mathematics
plays in themwill have to do.
Plato
Republic (Books II and III)
The Republic might rightly be called one of the greatest books on politics, on
education, and on justice ever written. If the Middle Ages produced a Divine Comedy,
and the Augustan Age produced an Aeneid, it would be fitting to say that Classical
Greece produced the Republic. Heres a brief background.
Athens at the time of Socrates had no printed books, no newspapers, no mass
media stuff. When people wanted the news, they went to the Agora, a central place, a
market place, where open air parliaments were held. Here lawsuits were tried and
here sentences were meted out by a jury elected by the people. The Agora was also the
venue of kapihan23 groups where congregated the more outspoken, discussing
everything from politics to metaphysics.
The Hellenistic race was interested in everything, from the origin of things, to the
nature of man and the universe.
Into this world entered the sophists, travelling university professors who were
not from Athens but converged in the Agora to instruct and edify anyonefor a fee (we
call them donations today). The sophists were considered smart. Sophs means wise
and sophists is one who makes a business out of wisdom. They commanded a very high
fee. Unlike the Athenians, they were not interested in the big questions, but in the
mechanics of things. In other words, disagreements could not be decided by appeal to
Truth, but by rhetoric. The phrase sophistic reasoning, or sophistry, connotes specious
argumentation used for deceiving someone.
Their bitterest opponent was Socrates, a poor mason and carver who taught but
charged no fee. He wrote nothing and naturally had no publication. In an academic
setting, he would not qualify for tenure. His wife would nag him daily for neglect of
family. Athenians would refer to him as the proprietor of a thinking shop. His aim, he
said, was not to instruct but to bring to birth, to stimulate, through critical thinking, the
thing as it is, the Ding an sich. He was a gadfly. Through question and answer, he would
give the sophists enough rope to hang themselves.
Athens sentenced him to death because he corrupted the young. He was
offered pardon if only he would stop talking. He said he could not stop talking because
the unexamined life is not worth living. The executioner asked him to stop talking
because his incessant talking was preventing the poison to take effect immediately.
Socrates continued lecturing. Your job, he said to the executioner, is to administer
the poison; my job is to talk until the end.
He died as a symbol of free speech, and his martyrdom caused one favorite
student to change his life-goal from politics to philosophy. The students name is Plato.
23
This is akin to a late night talk show, or an informal round table discussion over cups of coffee.
29
Plato, unlike his teacher, was of aristocratic birth.24 After Socrates death, Plato set up
the Academy and taught and wrote voluminouslytwenty extant volumes of
dialogueswith Socrates as main character, teacher, and speaker. One of the more
famous of the dialogues is the Republic.
The Republic is a work that deals with (1) the examination of the Good Life,
because, says Plato, the perfect life can be led only under ideal conditions, and (2) the
education of the philosopher kings. The dialogue occurs in the house of the aging
Cephalus on the occasion of the feast of the goddess Bendis. Plato saw to it that the
characters in this dramawere subordinate to the ideas and arguments of the work.
Books II and III deal with censorship. Book X, the last book of the Republic, is
written by way of an appendix, apparently in anticipation of reactions to Platos ideas on
censorship taken up in Books II and III.
Let us take up Books II and III. Education is the second most important
constituent in Platos Republic. There are two components to education: gymnastics and
music. These are misleading terms in English because each of them connotes a narrow
meaning. For Plato, they carry a broader meaning.
Gymnastics includes the education and care of the body; music includes all forms
of literature, cultural activity in general. The more contemporary connotation of music is
what we think of as the media. It is ubiquitous.
Plato discusses music first. This is because music is fundamental in shaping
young minds which are impressionable. Thus it is imperative for the rulers of the
Republic to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction.25
The music (in the Platonic sense) that the young are exposed to must be
politically correct, i.e., beneficial to the Republic. For example, Hesiods story of the fight
between Cronus and Uranus must not be told in the Republic. Such a story legitimizes
rebellion against authority.
Books II and III are therefore engaged in a massive program of censorship, a
word thats uncomfortable to most of us. Cronos was one of the early gods. Uranos
(Sky) was his father. Cronos was the son of Gaia (Earth). Uranus married Gaia and had
children by her. But Uranus hated these children of his and pushed them into Tartarus.
However, Gaia, grieved at the damage of her gifted children, planned the destruction of
her own husband and his rule as a way to set them and herself free. So Cronos, armed
with a scythe, cut off his father's genitals, throwing them into the sea. From the foam
which gathered round the severed genitals, Venus was born. Plato says this is a weird and
disturbing story. This story must be censored. It is dangerous to young people who
might be encouraged to question, challenge, or even attack authorityand that can
have devastating consequences in the Republic.
Homer tells stories about gods warring against each other. Perhaps the most
famous are the quarrels between Zeus and his jealous wife Hera. Once, as result of their
quarrels, Zeus throws one of his own sons, Hephaestus, from the great height of Mount
Olympus, and as a result the son is crippled. This is a clear case of child abuse and
24
The story goes that Socrates traced his ancestry back to Daedalus, but the claim is precarious to lock it
in alongside other urban legends.
25
Adams, 21.
30
marital strife. This can never be included in the curriculum of the education of the
young. If the father of the gods can treat his own son like this, then that opens the gate
to all illicit behavior on the part of those of us here on earth who hear these stories.
Another objection: Homer depicts the gods as not always doing good. In Platos
version of poetry, the gods must be depicted as good and as always doing good. And the
heroes must be shown as always brave, never weeping or wailing, rolling in the dirt,
calling each man loudly by his name.26 That is the stuff of weaklings. Let us put an end
to such tales, he says, lest they engender laxity of morals among the young.27
Now we may ask: Isnt this a one-sided kind of education? Plato says yes and he
makes no bones about it. The purpose of education in the Republic is the character
formation of the future philosopher-kings. No child should be exposed to evil until her
character was formed. Only then would she be in a position to act rationally.
On last thing: Death must never be depicted as something negative, terrible, to
be feared. Again, Plato scowls at how Homer depicts death. In the Odyssey, Odysseus
goes to Hades and finds it an absolutely awful place. The dead are miserable with no
significant existence. They are mere shades of their former existences. The most
famous statement I would rather be a plowman or a yeoman in the land of the living
than rule over all the dead who have come to naught28 is one obnoxious passage
Plato would want to obliterate.
Republic (Book X)
Supplementary to the reasons given above, Plato has a metaphysical reason behind
his distrust of poets and poetry. Book X is an overtly strapping rationale behind Platos
aversion of art. Here, he not only belabors his issue with poetry by censorship,
regulation, and restriction, but also makes haste to banish the poets altogether from his
Republic.
The metaphysical critique of poetry is grounded on Platos Theory of Forms. Let us
elaborate on this, the first of his two arguments against poetry, found in Book X.
We have been accustomed to assume that there is one single idea
corresponding to each group of particulars; and to these we give the same name
(as we give the idea).
I do.
Let us take, for our present purpose, any instance of such a group; there are
beds and tables in the worldmany of each, are there not?
Yes.
But there are only two ideas or forms of such furnitureone the idea of a bed,
the other of a table.
26
31
The Theory of Forms takes its bearing from language. Take the word table. This
word has a very general meaning. It refers to all the particular tables that exist in the
world. Every single one of them is different from another, but they are united in being a
table.
God produced the Idea,29 in our case the Idea of a table.
A carpenter who imitates the idea of the table builds a particular table.
A painter imitates the table that the carpenter built. The keyword here is
imitationor any form of artistic representation.
Imitation, therefore, is twice removed from Truth. Because of that, Platos
concept of mimesis branded poetry as an unreliable source of truth.
Again, for Plato, there are two kinds of worlds, the World of Being and the World
of Becoming. Our physical world of Becoming is but a shadowy reflection (mimesis) of
the ideal World of Being. Everything in our world, from objects to ideas, is but a pale
copy of the perfect, unchanging originals of the world of Forms. When a poet describes
a table, he is not imitating the Form (tableness) of the table, but presenting us with an
imitation of the ideal Table. Poetry, therefore, because it imitates what is already an
imitation (the carpenters table), is twice removed from reality (the Forms); and as such,
it is an unreliable source of truth.
Poetry appeals to the irrational side of our psyche. Unlike mathematics or
philosophy, which we apprehend by way of our rational (Apollonian) powers, poetry
engages that part of our psyche that is both illogical and irrational (Dionysiac). This
irrational part of the soul is not only unreliable in matters of truth but also dangerous.
The poet, therefore is possessed by a madness and not in control of himself when he
writes.
In Socrates time there was a rhapsode by the name of Ion of Ephesus. A
rhapsode is a song-stitcher, a reciter of songs. He made a living by giving public
recitations of epic poems. The good rhapsodes could hold their audiences spellbound
and move them to laughter or to tears.
Ion was such a one. He was a specialist in Homer. But Ion also lectured, and
Socrates disapproved of this. Socrates suggested to Ion that his skill was due to divine
madness, and therefore his claim to teach rules of conduct from Homer was absurd. He
spoke not by art or skill, but by possession, which is an inappropriate method.
Socrates/Plato, however, eschewed poets and poetry not because they were
ineffectual but because they were effective! With some misgivings, Socrates concludes
that only songs offering innocuous praises to the gods and the state will be allowed. The
rest would be banned.
The idea of a God producing the idea is problematic because it actually contradicts the idea of forms,
because one important feature of the forms is that they have always existed. They do not come into
being.
32
33
Aristotle
Introduction
In the Apostolic Palace of the Vatican, one can witness Raphaels famous fresco
entitled Scuola di Atene. If one focuses in the center of the painting, one can see
Plato on the left and favorite student Aristotle beside him. Plato holds the Timaeus,
while Aristotle his own Nicomachean Ethics. Plato is painted as old, grey, wise, and
austere. By contrast Aristotle is relatively younger, fine-looking, and better dressed.
Both, however, were interested in the same questions. But their answers and methods
were different. What distinguishes the figures, for example, as depicted by Raphael, is
the way in which they gesture. Plato is pointing upward to the heavens, while Aristotle
thrusts his right hand forward with palms facing solid ground. The gestures are
significant because they indicate central aspects of their philosophies, the concepts of
idealism and realism. Plato's upward vertical gesture represents his Theory of Forms,
while Aristotle's horizontal forward gesture represents his empiricist views, with the
latters emphasis on concrete particulars, especially the insistence that the purpose of
learning is practical and pragmatic rather than theoretical or speculative. Aristotle
brought Philosophy back to earth.
Both Plato and Aristotle, however, agreed on the importance of right perception. Its
importance may be illustrated by the example of a person who looks down into a
riverbed whose bottom floats up to the surface. Translucence can make the deep
appear shallow. This wrong perception could cost you your life if you try to walk across
the river.
I think we are born either predominantly a Platonist (idealist, dualist) or
predominantly an Aristotelian (realist, pluralistic) in temperament. It is not a question of
which is the better temperament, but of different ways of looking at the world.
This is best illustrated in the theory of Forms. Plato taught that there were the
Forms and there were the things, the latter being poor imitations of the former.
Aristotle taught that there is only one world and were right smack in the heart of it. If
the Forms were the essence of things, he argued, how can they exist separately? If they
were the cause of things, how can they exist in a different world?
The soul to Plato was non-physical, eternal, and existed beyond the (imperfect)
physical body. The soul was imprisoned in the body. To Aristotle, the soul was a subtle
physical substance, composed of fine gossamer material, substantial, feathery, so fine
that it lacked inertia but which vanished when the physical body vanishes (as the
sharpness of a knife vanishes when melted in fire).
Aristotle studied under Plato and stayed in the Academy for nineteen years. He was
Platos star pupil. He only left it to go to the Greek city-state of Assus after Platos death,
when Platos nephew Speusippus inherited the Academy. Aristotle then founded his
own school The Lyceum in 335 BCE. When Aristotles famous student Alexander the
Great died, Aristotle, no lover of hemlock he, fled the city lest the Athenians should sin
twice against philosophy.
That knowledge should be logically structured, starting with elements and building
up to complexity, is so common that its intellectual originator is so often forgotten. That
34
In looking forward, Aristotle used a concept called the telos, or end, or purpose.
When defining something, you had to look past the thing you saw before you to discern
its end. To use Aristotles famous example of the acorn: the telos of an acorn is an oak
tree. If you want to know what an acorn is, you cant really understand the acorn just by
looking at it. You need to see its potential, to see what it is meant to be. The acorn has
the potentiality of becoming an oak tree, which is the acorns telos. Each individual
substance, therefore, is a self-contained teleological system whose essence does not
change even if its accidents do.
The telos of a human being is to engage in an activity of the soul in accordance
with Virtue (arte). There are two kinds of Virtue: intellectual (subdivided into
philosophical wisdom and practical wisdom), and moral virtue (which is related to
practical wisdom). Moral virtue is the propensity to act in accordance with the golden
mean. The golden mean is the middle way between excess and deficiency. An excess of
30
Haec est ultima perfectio ad quam anima potest pervenire, secundum philosophum, ut in ea
describatur totus ordo universi et causarum ejus. St. Thomas Aquinas. De Veritatae, II.2.
35
31
For example, a random sample is a sample that is not biased is an inappropriate definition. A
suggested appropriate definition that may satisfy Aristotle may be a random sample means equal
probability of selection for each member of the group.
32
What is a fowl? A fowl is a gallinaceous bird.
36
all men are rational. The statements do share a middle term, man, which sits there in
the middle.
A syllogism by negation: "If no B is A, and all C is B; ergo, no C is A." B is the middle
term. For example: No girl plays volleyball; everybody in this room is a girl; nobody here
plays volleyball. Girl is the middle term.
In a demonstrative science constructed by syllogism, the way to a scientific
explanation is always to look for that middle term.
Aristotle taught that human reason, not faith, is the ultimate tool in the search for
truth. This devout trust in human reason was Aristotles legacy that influenced western
thinking for centuries, a frame of mind that became the only way at arriving at truth.
The story goes that sometime in the Middle Ages, at Oxford, there was once a
debate on the question of how many teeth a horse has. Some scholars quoted Aristotle
while others quoted St. Thomas Aquinas. Both gave a different reply. Finally, a young
monk at the back of the study hall suggested that since there was a horse in a stable
outside, why dont they settle the question by opening the horses mouth and count its
teeth. Thereupon, the assembled scholars fell upon him, smote him hip and thigh, and
cast him from the company of educated men.33
Galileo himself relates how a fellow scientist would refuse to take a look through the
telescope because it would only confuse him.34
Aristotle himself did not approve of experimentation as a valid way to gain
knowledge. It never occurred to him to drop two stones of different weight to test his
postulation that the speed of the fall was proportional to the weight of the stone. To
Aristotle, experimentation like this was irrelevant because it interfered with and
detracted from the beauty of pure deduction.35
To Aristotleas hang-over of Platos teachingthe external world is an imperfect
representation of the ideal world, therefore no amount of inductive testing could render
a generalization suitable. If the experiment disagreed with the deduction, then one
ought to adjust the imperfect to the demands of the perfect, which is the ideal
world, and not the other way around. Galileo, father of experimental science, climbed to
the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropped two different iron balls, a ten-pound
ball and a one-pound ball, at the same time. The dull thud of the two balls hitting the
ground at the same time was heard round the world and demolished Aristotle
permanently.
Aristotles method at arriving at truth, however, despite its flaws, does stand in good
stead. An example might be in explaining why the Moon's brightness
increases/decreases in the particular pattern that it exhibits. That means, it does not
always look the same. It goes through different phases. So why does the moons
brightness increase/decrease in this pattern?
We can deduce that pattern if we approach the problem through syllogism and look
for the middle term.
33
37
What is truly exciting in a demonstrative science occurs when the terms connected
by the middle term previously did not appear to have any obvious connection. We learn
38
something new. Newton's discovery of gravity, in which the fall of an apple and the
retention of the Moon in its orbit about the Earth are both explained by the Earth's
gravitation, is a striking example. Before Newton time, no satisfactory explanation for
what caused the motion of the heavenly bodies existed. What caused the moon to go
on orbit around the earth? Newton explained this and the fall of an apple by means of a
syllogism in which the middle termuniversal gravitation (a force, depending on the
masses involved and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between
themrevolutionized the physical sciences forever, with a little help from Aristotle.
Aristotle
Poetics
I propose to treat of Poetry in itself and of its various kinds, noting the essential
quality of each, to inquire into the structure of the plot as requisite to a good poem; into
the number and nature of the parts of which a poem is composed; and similarly into
whatever else falls within the same inquiry. Following, then, the order of nature let us
begin with the principles which come first.
Aristotle, Poetics36
Aristotles Poetics is a walking-lecture about poetry. If Plato made use of the
dialogue to convey his ideas, Aristotle used the lecture as his genre. Aristotles Poetics
inaugurates the lecture as its own genre.
What is art? Why is it so powerful? Why is it beguiling, delightful, amusing,
mysterious, enduring? Why is it that every culture, no matter how primitive, has art?
Rather than eschew these questions, Aristotle instead squarely confronts them.
Poetics is divided into three topics: the origin and nature of art, the experience
of art, and the social and psychological function of art.
Aristotle has an almost engineers way of looking at things, and applies this
mindset in looking at poetry: will the structure hold up? Is it constructed badly or
properly? Aristotle, by starting with a topic, is a categorical thinker using topical analysis
in proceeding with his exegeses. He has a compartmentalized mind. He likes to label
things, put them in their proper order, and once the categories are created, he wants to
examine the contents of those individual categories.
36
Translated by S. H. Butcher. This and other quotations from primary sources, unless otherwise
indicated, are taken from Hazard Adams Critical Theory Since Plato. This quotation is found on page 50 of
Adamss book (1992 edition).
39
The word poetry comes from the Greek word that simply means making or
crafting. A poem is something that is made. It is crafted. Thus it can have a solid
construction or a wobbly construction.
Unlike Plato, Aristotle believed that the artist not just copies nature. He does
more than that: Not to know that a hind has no horns is a less serious matter than to
paint it inartistically.37 Later poets and artists would amplify this very important
concept:
William Blake said that copying from nature is not the job of the painter. If that
were all there was to it, then hers would be no better than ordinary manual labor.
Anybody can do it. It is a work of no-brain.
Czanne would say: I do not reproduce nature; I represent it.
Picasso said: I paint what I think, not what I see.
Not to be outdone, and casting all modesty to the four winds for the moment, I
would, in a past interview regarding my aesthetic theory, say: I do not photocopy
nature; I distort it.
This is so natural in the western way of thinking. If we think in this manner it is
because Aristotle invented this method.
Organic unity
Just like an organism, a poem must have organic unity. Everything must hang
together, everything must be where it belongs, nothing missing, nothing superfluous.
Henceforth this rule will become standard in a successful work of art.
Within the unity of plot, causation is important to Aristotle. Like every good
Greek, Aristotles causation is synonymous with his teleological mindset: he thinks in
terms of the end, the target, the destination to which the plot is moving, the grand
finale, the arrival point, the conclusion. Causation is the centerpiece of his entire
teaching in philosophy, in logic. Everything should be viewed in a sequence of cause and
effect. Every good writer ought to have that in mind, because if he knows where hes
going, then the elements of the plot will all be in place, no going off track.
Aristotle was aware that story tellers created artifacts that were different from
history. He knew that history was a jumble of events that happened all at the same
time, but did not necessarily hook up to make this unified, overarching narrative. Heres
how he compares and contrasts storytellers and historians.
[The plot] should have for its subject a single action, whole and complete, with a
beginning, a middle, and an end. It will thus resemble a living organism in all its
unity, and produce the pleasure proper to it. It will differ in structure from
historical compositions, which of necessity present not a single action, but a
37
40
single period, and all that happened within that period to one person or to many,
little connected together as the events may be.38
Aristotle, by disagreeing with Plato on where to locate reality, brought
philosophy down to earth: there is only one Form, Aristotle says, and were right
smack in the middle of it. If the Forms were the essence of things, he argues, how
can they exist separately? If the Forms were the cause of things, how can they exist
in a different world?
Aristotle is the first critic to attempt a systematic discussion of genres. The idea
that all knowledge can be broken up into discrete little packages (called disciplines,
or majors) comes directly from Aristotle. As a result, he wrote a treatise on every
facet of knowledge.
In Poetics, Aristotle treats poetry as a separate discipline with its own specific
laws, its own unique tools, its own proper ends.
The works we have today by Aristotle were not actually written by him but compiled by
his students (hence their broken up nature).
Aristotle radically redefined Platos version of mimesis. Aristotle says that
mimesis is a positive thing. As children, we learn primarily by imitation. Even as adults,
we delight in recognizing and contemplating copies. We possess an instinctual desire for
hamony. In poetry in general and in the well-constructed plots of the great tragedies in
particular, Aristotle found the perfect food to feed our innate desire for order, balance,
and unity.
It is mimesis that allows the tragedian to construct a unified plot (muthos). The
mimetic process transforms an action or story (praxis) that is long, episodic, and
haphazard into a plot that is focused and unified.
The story of a person begins with his birth and ends with his deathand includes
all the various incidents that occur in between. A plot, however, constructed around
that life story would confine itself to a single day in that life span when all that is most
essential to that life comes to a head. Whereas the events in a story follow each other
in simple chronological order, the events in a plot should move forward in accordance
with (a) necessity, (b) probability, and (c) inevitability.
The plot is life with all of lifes contradictions purged out of it. To imitate life is
not to present life not as it is, but as it should be, not as it manifests itself in an
imperfect world, but how it would appear in a more perfect world where:
There is a necessary link between cause and effect. The stable, meaningful laws
of probability determine action. A sense of inevitability, of a higher controlling fate, is
felt.
How to tell between an episodic play and an Aristotelian plot
38
41
42
The story of Oedipus the man is filled with long stretches during which the tragic
pieces of Oedipus life slowly coalesce; the plot of Oedipus Rex is concentrated into an
intense, dramatic period of less than a day during which all the secrets of his life are
revealed.
The story of Oedipus is a despicable tale about a man who kills his father and
marries his mother; the plot of Oedipus is about a man who discovers late in life that he
has killed his father and married his mother.
Whereas the story of Oedipus is about the committing of a taboo sin, the plot of
Oedipus is about the triumph of self-discovery. In terms of his overall story, Oedipus is
one of the most pathetic of all men, a man trapped by a cruel and evil fate that he
cannot escape; in the confines of the plot, however, he is a noble and courageous man
who chooses to seek out the truth about himself no matter what the consequences.
The story of Oedipus is the raw material for a telenovela; the plot of Oedipus is one of
the great and noble works of all time.
Having defined the nature of the unified plot, Aristotle goes on to enumerate the
many elements that work together to create the perfect plot.
A unified plot has a beginning, middle, and an end.
It is shaped like an inverted V with a series of complications drawing the
plot upward to its climax downwards towards the denouement.
In the best plots, the climax is marked by a reversal and/or a recognition.
The use of a reversal/recognition is what renders a simple plot complex.
A reversal (Greek, peripeteia) occurs when the fortune of the hero moves
suddenly from good to bad or bad to good.
In Oedipus, the messenger thinks he brings news that will free Oedipus from
fear, but that very news leads to his destruction. This is peripeteia.
A recognition (Greek, anagnorisis) occurs when the hero moves suddenly from a
state of ignorance to enlightenment.
In Oedipus, the messenger reveals to Oedipus his true Theban origins.
The best kinds of recognitions are accompanied by reversals.
Deus ex machina
Deus ex machina was a crane-like device, a derrick, that allowed an angel or
heavenly being to descend onto the stage. It was used by dramatists as a way of
resolving from heaven all manner of difficulties and misunderstandings in the play.
Aristotle considered the use of this device as an artificial way to end a plot.
The plot should be strong enough to resolve itself in a manner consistent with
necessity, probability, and inevitability. Oedipus Rex is so well constructed that the final
tragic revelation of Oedipus parentage does not seem contrived; it arises naturally out
of the plot.
Aristotles objection against deus ex machina reveals his strong commitment to a
balanced, rational universe in which all makes sense.
43
Finally, it should be noted that Aristotle argues forcefully that the plot is the
central, most important element of a tragedy.
The plot is both the end and the soul of tragedy.
Modern writers would disagree with Aristotle; we place character at the center
of the play.
This time we shall explore how the tragic character must be good, appropriate,
consistent, and true to life; and how he should be a moral man who yet possesses a
flaw. We shall then explore the nature of Aristotelian catharsis and shall consider how
this well-known word can be translated either as purgation, purification, or clarification.
We will conclude with some other elements of the Poetics that have continued to exert
a marked influence on the history of literary theory down the ages to the present.
Aristotle carefully defines the proper nature of the tragic hero.
The Aristotelian tragic hero must possess four qualities:
1. He must be a good man: he should be neither immoral nor vicious.
2. His character must be appropriate to his station in life.
3. He must possess a likeness to human nature: though heroic, he is a man.
4. His character must be consistent.
5. He should not be a commoner.
Oedipus possesses all of the above characteristics. Though stubborn and a bit
prideful, he is a good king who loves his people, and is devoted to truth and justice.
His love and devotion, as well as his stubbornness and pride, are befitting the nature
and role of a king.
Though larger than life, Oedipus still possesses very human traits.
Both within the framework of the play and throughout his offstage life, Oedipus is
consistently the solver of riddles.
Oedipus is a member of the royal house of Thebes.
This good hero should yet possess a flaw (Greek, hamartia).
Hamartia is usually translated as tragic flaw, but a better translation is error.
Aristotle clearly does not see this hamartia as a vice or moral flaw.
Though readers of Oedipus generally blame the heros misfortunes on his pride (Greek,
hubris), it is really his good qualities that lead to the tragic revelation of his birth.
The full-blown concept of the tragic flaw as a single vice that leads the hero to his tragic
downfall is really more indicative of Shakespearean tragedy. The tendency of readers to
identify tragic flaws in each of the heroes of Greek tragedy seems to mask an innate
desire to blame the victim to gain control.
The best tragedies show a good man who, on account of his error, moves from
good to bad fortune; such a movement elicits pity and fear.
A bad man moving from good to bad fortune evokes neither pity nor fear.
A bad man moving from bad to good fortune merely disgusts us.
A good man moving from bad to good fortune makes us feel happy, but it
does not inspire either pity or fear.
Pity is evoked when we watch a good man suffer undeservedly; fear is
evoked when we realize the same may happen to us.
44
special criteria and mode of imitation. He believed that there was a proper mode that
was natural to each genre, a notion that is at the heart of all later theories of decorum.
He believed that each genre must its own natural, internal laws so that he defended the
presence in poetry of irrational elements if such were befitting the genre.
Coleridge would later call such criticism genial. Ungenial occurs when one
judges a poem by standards outside its genre. He initiated the aesthetic desire to rank
genres in terms of refinement and based this ranking partly on the responses of a
cultivated audience. This foreshadows pragmatic theory. The rankings were tragedy,
epic, and lyric.
Aristotle initiated an organic theory of poetry later revived by Coleridge.
He treated tragedy as a living organism that must be true to its own laws. He felt that a
perfect tragedy was one to which nothing could either be added or subtracted without
affecting the work as a whole. He privileged unified plots in which all parts were related
organically.
Aristotle praises poetry as a synthesis of history and philosophy and held that it
was better than either one.
Like history, tragedy works with concrete particulars.
Like philosophy, however, it expresses universal truths.
Tragedy is a concrete universal that fuses the general with the specific.
The notion profoundly influenced Kant, Coleridge, and the New Critics.
Aristotle includes a brief section on linguistics in this study of poetry.
An Excursion
Eratosthenes, while a librarian at the Alexandrian library, read a papyrus which
said that at noon of every June 21st, being the summer solstice, vertical sticks cast
no shadows at Syene, Aswan, Egypt. Eratosthenes, however, did an experiment at
Alexandria and noticed that here vertical sticks cast shadows at noon of June 21 st,
while at Syene there were none.
If you stuck a stick in Alexandria at noon on June 21 and simultaneously stuck
another stick at Syene on the same day and time, and saw no shadow cast by both
sticks, that is well and good: the earth was flat and the sun was directly overhead.
If the two sticks cast shadows of equal length, that is also well and good because
the earth was flat and the suns rays would incline at the same angle to the two
sticks.
But why was there no shadow at Syene while a shadow showed up at
Alexandria? The earth, therefore, must be curved.
Also, the greater the curve, the greater was the difference in shadow lengths.
Consider the illustration: because of their distance, the suns rays run parallel
when they reach the earth.
46
If two parallel lines are transected by a third line, the alternate interior angles
are equal. Angle B=Angle A. Eratosthenes calculated his results in units called stadia.
We don't know how long Eratosthenes' stadia were, but current estimates suggest that
his value of 252,000 stadia is equivalent to a circumference somewhere between
39,690 and 46,620 kilometers.
47
Horace
Ars Poetica
Abstract
This lesson will take a close look at Horaces verse epistle, Ars Poetica (c. 20 BC). After a
brief introduction to Horaces life and times, we shall enumerate Horaces rules and
regulations for writing great poetry. We shall focus especially on the central notion of
decorum and RESTRAINT in the arts and on the stipulation that poetry must instruct and
entertain. We shall also discuss Horaces views both of the critic and the poet.
Tags: Decorum, Restraint, purpureus pannus, linae labor, ut pictura poesis, delight and
instruct
The suggested essential reading for this course is Art of Poetry by Horace in Adam
Supplementary reading:
Grant Showermans Horace and His Influence.
M. A. Grubes The Greek and Roman Critics, Chapter 14. Wimsatt and Brookss Literary
Criticism: A Short History, Chapter 5. Karl Galinsky, Augustan Culture: An Interpretive
Introduction. Raphael Lyne, Augustan Poetry and Society.
This chapter is adapted from the work of Dr. Elizabeth Vandiver of Whitman College and
that of Dr. Louis Markos of Houston Baptist University.
Part One: Life of Horace
Horace is the second greatest poet of Romes Augustan Age.
This golden age (named after Caesar Augustus) lasted from 27 BC
to AD 14 and included Ovid, Propertius, and Tibullus, and the
greatest of them all: Virgil.
Quintus Horatius Flaccus was born on December 8, 65 B.C., and
died on November 27, 8 B.C.
Horace included many biographical details in his poetry; in
addition, Suetoniuss biography of Horace has survived.
Horace was born in Venusia, where his father, a freedman,
worked as an auctioneer.
Horace received the education typical for an upper-class youth,
first in Rome, then in Athens.
48
50
by John Milton)
Epistle to the Piso boys. An epistle is a long, elegant letter, (as in Pauls Epistle to the Corinthians).
51
52
3. This includes censuring and editing poetry that either uses the
wrong material or handles that material in an inappropriate
way.
4. The laws that dictate what is and is not appropriate for poetry
constitute the central and foundational notion of all
neoclassical art: decorum.
Horace and the rules of decorum.
1. At the heart of decorum is the stipulation not to mix unlike
things. Horace illustrates this rule by scornfully lampooning
the image of the mermaid; such images, he declares, are the
work of feverish minds.
2. Horace attacks poets who mix genres, who use comic subjects
as the basis of a tragedy or vice versa. (If we consider
Shakespeare, we see that he does mix generic elements in
many of his plays, in a very un-Horatian way.)
3. Each genre should have its own style that is natural to it;
there should be an unbroken, clearly defined unity of action,
character, and mood.
4. Indeed, each given genre should have its own specific meter,
a meter with rhythmic sounds that closely mimic (fit) the
sense of the poem.
When writing on a traditional subject, modern poets must be
faithful to the literary precedents set by their poetic forebears.
1. Modern portrayals of Achilles or Orestes of Oedipus must be
consistent with earlier portrayals (in this case, by Homer and
the tragedians). Again, if we consider Shakespeare, we see
that he did not follow precedent in his Troilus and Cressida.
2. Horace here reiterates Aristotles rule that tragic heroes must
be both appropriate and consistent, but Horace further
inscribes this rule within an accepted authority or tradition: a
common trait of neoclassicists.
In addition to the notions of what is appropriate and what is
traditional, decorum also stipulates what is fit or proper to be
shown publicly.
1. Gory, explicit scenes must be kept off the stage; such scenes
of suffering should be related (as they were in Greek tragedy)
by a messenger.
2. This rule was not followed in the theater of Shakespeare (cf.,
King Lear and the blinding of Gloucester).
Related to decorum is Horaces famous comparison of poetry to
painting.
1. As with painting, some poems are best viewed close up, while
others are better when seen from a distance; some best in
shadows, others in light.
53
54
1.
2.
3.
4.
On Decorum
What is decorum? It is order, restraint.
1. Horace illustrates this rule by lampooning the image of a mermaid.
2. Horace attacks poets who mix genres, who use comic subjects as the basis
of a tragedy or vice versa. (Shakespeare did this, and got away with it.)
3. Each genre should have its own style that is natural to it.
When writing on a traditional subject, modern poets must be faithful to the
precedents set by their poetic forebears.
1. Modern portrayals of Achilles or Orestes or Oedipus must be consistent
with earlier portrayals. (Again, Shakespeare did not follow precedent in
his Troilus and Cressida.)
2. Horace reiterates Aristotles rule that tragic heroes must be both
appropriate and consistent, but he further inscribes this rule within an
accepted authority or tradition (a common trait of neoclassicists).
In addition to the notions of what is appropriate and what is traditional,
decorum also stipulates what is fit or proper to be shown publicly.
5. Gory, explicit scenes must not be shown onstage; such scenes of
suffering should be related by a messenger. Medea should not butcher
her children in plain view of the audience, nor the wicked Atreus cook
human flesh in public.
6. This rule was not followed by Shakespeare in King Lear in the blinding of
Gloucester.
Related to decorum is Horaces famous comparison of poetry to painting.
55
7. As with painting, some poems are best viewed close up; others are
better seen from a distance; some in shadows, others in light.
8. In later neoclassical theory, this notion took on greater significance.
Other Horatian rules
The proper end of poetry is to teach and delight. The aim of the poet is to
inform or delight, or to combine together . . . both pleasure and applicability to
life.
The old insist that poetry instruct, while the young want it to delight:
the best poet combines the two. He who combines the useful and the
pleasing wins out by both instructing and delighting the reader.
Poets that do so will win both fame and fortune. That is the sort of
book that will make money for the publisher, cross the seas, and extend
the fame of the author.
To best achieve this goal, poetry should be both concise and realistic.
Horaces rules for the drama
Plays and epics should not begin at the beginning but should plunge in
medias res.
Let your play have five acts, no more no less.
Do not have a deus ex machina intervene.
The chorus should not sing anything that does not fit into the plot.
These four criteria express an organic view of drama.
Each part of the play should be directly and intimately related with all
other parts and with the work as a whole.
Finally, two bits of Horatian advice have entered the English language
Purple patches.
Counsels against promising much but delivering little.
The nature and the duties of the poet, according to Horace.
Genius and art equals an inspired craftsman.
Like an athlete, he needs to have both native talent and discipline.
The artisan poet must labor never to be mediocre; while a mediocre
lawyer may still win his case, the mediocre poet winds up a laughingstock.
The best poets make it look easy.
The role of a poet is a difficult one.
1. He must please an often vulgar crowd while staying true to his art.
2. He must make a living without letting the love of money taint his soul.
56
Longinus
On the Sublime
Abstract
What is sublimity? Where does it originate? Can we access it? How do we tap it? Is there
such a thing as sublimity in the first place? Rather than declaring inspiration as madness,
Longinus inquires how it can best be employed. This lesson will analyze Longinus
pragmatic approach to theory and his influential conception of the ideal audience for
sublime literature. We shall also watch how Longinus launches a direct refutation of
Plato that not only converts the latters negatives into positives, but also transforms
Plato himself into one of the most sublime poets of all time.
On the Sublime, or On the Grand Style, or On Great Writing, or On Excellence in
Literature, is a systematic work in the Aristotelian style which inquires how poetic
inspiration can best be employed.
A. FYI, nothing is known of the life of Longinus. We call him
Longinus because the work is long.
B. In this work, Longinus asks if there is such a thing as sublimity
and then attempts to define its nature, before laying down
methods for achieving it.
C. Sublimity refers to a kind of elevated language flashing forth at
the right moment and scattering everything before it like a
thunderbolt.
Unlike rhetoric, which merely persuades, sublimitys effect
upon an audience is not persuasion but transport.
The sublime has the power to unite contradictions.
A sublime passage can be heard over and over without losing
its impact on the audience.
Sublimity, because of its power to overwhelm, transcends both
time and space. Consider, for example these lines from Richard
11. Old John Gaunt is dying with his heart full of fear for his
beloved England. He is convinced that his land is being
destroyed, and he expresses his love for his country in the
following lines:
This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
57
58
59
Longinus was the first pagan to quote the Bible. Here is an example of what I
consider to be the one of the supreme examples of sublime writing. From the King
James Bible Genesis 1:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the
deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
2
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and
the morning were the first day.
5
Notice there is hardly any adjective or adverb in the piece. Only nouns and verbs, nouns
and verbs govern the whole piece. Notice also the absence of striving-for-effect words
like stupendous, or colossal, or breathtaking, etc. The writing is simple and clear.
Yet the writing is sublime. It is English at its most eloquent.
Sublimity is light years apart from sentimentality. Sublimity is more akin to
Plainchantor the music of Johann Sebastian Bachwhich is overtly dry (to the
sentimental listener) but inertly rich.
In music, Bach is the perfect example of the sublime composer. If you are not
accustomed to his music, you may find it too cerebral. This is because almost all the
music we are used to listening toincluding a lot of so-called classical musicis built
like an arch with pillars of chords supporting a single melody.
The baroque music of Bach is contrapuntal, i.e., melody is piled on melody,
with all the melodies sounded simultaneously, interpenetrating one another.
Bachs genius was demonstrated some years ago in an experiment done when a
pianola roll of Bach music was reversed so that the high notes became bass and vice
versa. The music sounded even more melodious.
60
Bach does not appeal to the sentimental person. The sentimental person expects
to be lifted, to be moved to tears of happiness or sorrow, and is disappointed if his/her
emotions are not aroused this way. These violent emotions are unnecessary and
wasteful.
Again, try it yourself: play any Bach recording, a choral composition, for example,
three times. The first time you do, listen to the soprano only; the second time, try to
separate the bass from the strands of melody; the third time, listen to the middle voices
only. You might find the music you listen to paling in comparison. In fact, you can listen
to Bach a hundred times and each time uncover richness previously unearthed.
The late British author and Theosophist Geoffrey Hodson recounts the time a
group of theological college students asked a very learned professor to read Psalm 23.
He read it very well, as a professor and Bible expert would. Then the students asked a
retired minister to read the same Psalm 23. When the old man had finished there was
not a dry eye in the room.
What was the difference? Both read the same Psalm 23, and yet the learned
professors reading drew no tears. Later, a student asked the professor why he, despite
his great learning, could not generate that profound impact on the audience. Well,
said the professor, I have studied the Bible and I know all about the Shepherd but, you
see, our friend knows the Shepherd.41
The old man had gone through lifes sorrows and pains. St. Augustine said that
there were two ways of knowing how good God was: the first is never having to lose
Him; the second is to lose Him and then to find Him again. The old man must have gone
through the despair of losing God. Perhaps he had even tried committing suicide. When
he spoke, in trembling voice, every fiber of his being vibrated sublimity.
No tears in the writer, no tears in the audience.
Heres the Psalm:
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou
art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my
head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the
house of the Lord for ever.
After admitting that sublimity cannot actually be defined, Longinus then
proceeds to lay down five elements of the sublime:
41
I have taken this incident from The Hidden Wisdom of the Holy Bible (Volume I) by Geoffrey Hodson,
page 19.
61
The first two elements are grounded in the innate ability of the poet to
form great conceptions. Sublimity is the echo of a great soul. Hence, the
poet has vehement and inspired passion. These first two elements,
unfortunately, being innate, cannot be learned. You are either born with
it or not. You either have it or you do not have it.
The other three can be considered features of the poem: due formation
of figures of speech, noble diction, and dignified and elevated
composition. These constitute the craft part that can, through discipline,
be learned. You can take up a course in Creative Writing and be trained.
These sources have to do not with the thoughts and passions
themselves but with how they are embodied in words, syntax, and
poetic figures.
Though quoting and analyzing copious passages from poets like Homer
and Sappho, Longinus shows how the great masters of the sublime
knew how to fit thoughts to words, passions to images.
Longinus, like Horace, helped establish ground rules for the craft of
poetry.
There must be an appropriate, rational, organic relationship between
form and content: high and low, serious and comic must not be allowed
to mix (i.e., decorum).
Poets should attempt to mimic in the sound of their poetry the sense
that they are trying to convey.
The best art conceals.
62
Suppose we churn the water a bit. This time the light is no longer seen clearly as
earlier observed. This time the light is slightly distorted. Suppose we churn the water
some more. We will observe that the more we churn the water, the more distorted the
light becomes. If we churn the water at great speed, we will eventually see, in place of
the lighted bulb, patterns of lights streaking across and within, dissolving, reappearing,
until eventually we no longer see any light at all but only waves and waves in great
agitation.
Now suppose we stop churning the water. Gradually, as the turbulent water
subsides, we see, in a reverse order, at first, patterns of light, next a distorted light bulb,
then the clear-lighted bulb. Finally, if the water is kept very still, as in the first stage, we
will see the light bulb so clearly we may not even be aware of the water itself. This is
what happens to ourselves when we let our emotions (symbolized by the water) distort
our Imagination (symbolized by the lighted bulb). For sentimentality deforms our view
of things.
Sublimity is never sentimental, even if it appears to be so to the uninitiated. It is
the quietest thing in the world.
Longinus turns Plato on his head.
Plato is a master of the sublime. He quotes passages from his prose as models of
sublimity. It is Platos sublime power of imagery that drives home his points.
With irony, Longinus posits as the source of Platos sublimity his near possession
by the spirit of Homer.
The divine madness which Plato exposes in Ion as a form of aberration is actually
a higher form of mimesis. What appears as possession is actually a kind of struggle on
the part of Plato to exceed his poetic master. Harold Bloom calls this artistic and
psychological need on the part of the poet to outdo his influence the anxiety of
influence. For Longinus, this struggle is good; to seek to imitate and exceed an
influence if not plagiarism but a tribute.
The same sublime spirit that passes from Homer to Plato passes down from Plato
to the audience.
For Plato, this is negative (the iron rings). For Longinus, this inspiration is
positive: it ennobles and uplifts the souls of all those who come in contact with it; it
makes them richer, fuller, and nobler.
In conclusion, Longinus not only offers his fullest refutation of Plato, but defines
the greatest threat to cultural refinement.
Longinus laments that his age is no longer conducive to the creation of sublime
art. This feeling of being born too late into a non-poetic, non-heroic age is typical of
literary theorists. As with Aristotles Poetics, one of the purposes of On the Sublime is to
inspire and equip a new golden age of poets. At first, Longinus appears to suggest that
the ultimate threat to sublimity is tyranny. With an unexpected turn, however, he
reveals that there is something worse than the loss of freedom.
The supreme killers of the sublime are materialism and hedonism. The lust for
money and pleasure yields petty, ignoble thoughts; it breeds both vanity and insolence
and kills the sublime spark of the soul. Even political slavery is better than this, because
even the cruelest tyrant cannot crush a soul inspired by sublimity.
63
Plotinus
On the Intellectual Beauty
Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as
does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he
smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown
upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is
crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labor to make all one glow or beauty and
never cease chiseling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike
splendor of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the
stainless shrine.
Plotinus, On the Beautiful42
Abstract
Plotinus, the co-founder of Neo-Platonism, is the last important philosopher of pagan
antiquity, a synthesizer of Platos mystical thought, and a theorist of a form of
otherworldly spirituality that was strongly influential in the Western Christian tradition
(through Augustine). He saw the universe in terms of a deep underlying unity (which he
called the One, and identified it with Platos idea of the Good). But he also thought in
terms of an intellectual vision of Platonic forms (a level of being he called Nous, or the
Mind of God, which he located a step lower on the ladder of being than the One).
Plotinus located the human soul in a fundamental unity of all souls that have as their
interior the intelligible world of Nous, and as their exterior the world of bodies. He also
traced a spiritual ascent of the souls conversion (i.e., a turning inward, an about
turn, to discover its fundamental unity not only with the Soul and the Divine Mind, but
also with no less than the One itself.
***
Plotinus, a Greek-speaking philosopher and co-founder of Neo-Platonism, was
born in Egypt43 in ca. 203 or 204 or 205 or 206 CE.44
He was educated in Alexandria, but was not satisfied with his studies until he
met, at 28, the Greek philosopher Ammonius Saccas, co-founder of Neo-Platonism.
When Plotinus heard him speak, he is said to have remarked: This is the man I was
looking for. Ammonius Saccas is to Plotinus as Socrates is to Plato in the sense that
they had one thing in common: both teachers wrote nothing. Unlike Socrates, however,
we know next to nothing about Ammonius Saccas. He was called Saccas probably
42
64
because he once worked as a porter. He was a native of Alexandria who taught, among
others, Longinus (vide supra) and Origen Adamantius of Alexandria.45
At the age of 40, intending to found Platonopolis, Plotinus went to Rome in the
year 244 and opened a school there where he taught for 20 years.
At the age of 60, he had a pupil by the name of Porphyry (a Pythagorean).
Porphyry was destined to become his favorite pupil, editor, and biographer. Porphyry
edited Plotinus works, dividing them into six books with nine chapters each. Plotinus,
apart from bad penmanship, wrote in difficult Greek. Credit goes to Porphyry for the
tough editing. When they were done, the work was called the Enneads, for the number
nine.46 Thus is given the standard citation of the Enneads Porphyrys division as book
(Ennead), treatise (Tractate), and chapter. For example, IV.6.1.
Like Pythagoras, we cannot call Plotinus simply a philosopher. Neither can we
call him a metaphysical thinker in the real sense of the term. Jacques Derrida in his
Speech and Phenomena47 describes Plotinus system as representing the closure of
metaphysics as well as the transgression of metaphysical thought itself.
Arkhe, that single, originary substance or first principle that accounted for the
existence of the cosmos, has always been the concern of thinkers all the way up from
the Milesians and Pythagoreans. Thales, for example, declared that the principle of all
things was water. Thales is sometimes referred to as the first philosopher, but not
because he said that water was the arkhe but because he was the first to assert that an
origin existed and that it could be determined through observation. Anaximander,
however, disagreed and taught that this first principle was the boundless (the cosmic
soup). Then came Anaximenes who taught that it was air. When Pythagoras arrived, he
said it was number.
Plotinus eschewed this. Derrida writes:
Plotinus emphasizes the displacement or deferral of presence, refusing to
locate either the beginning (arkhe) or the end (telos) of existents at any
determinate point in the chain of emanationsthe One, the Intelligence, and
the Soulthat is the expression of his cosmological theory; for to predicate
presence of his highest principle would imply, for Plotinus, that this principle is
but another being among beings, even if it is superior to all beings by virtue of its
status as their begetter. 48
Plotinus died in solitude in 269 CE at Campania, a generation before Christianity
became the established religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine. He was the
last great philosopher of pagan antiquity. He influenced Augustine and Boethius.
Augustine, reading Plotinus, changed his life-goal from literature to philosophy.49
45
This is the Origen who wrote On First Principles, a book that espoused the doctrine of the preexistence
of souls and the doctrine of apokatastasis, or the restitution of the world to its primordial condition.
46
Porphyrys books were condemned to be burned by the Council of Ephesus in 431 C.E.
47
Northwestern University Press, 1973, p. 128 note. Edward Moore, translator.
48
Ibid.
49
Eventually, Augustine, after reading St. Paul, would change his life-goal from philosophy to theology.
65
The One is the same as the Good of Plato. The One is ineffable. It is called Good
because it is not negative but supremely positive. It is extremely desirable so that it
draws back to itself all that flows out from itself.
The Nous is also called the Intellect or Spirit. It is the first emanation from the
One and is inexhaustible, like the rays of the sun. If the One is the sun, the Nous is the
light by which the One sees itself.
The Soul is also called World-Soul or Nature or Matter, and it is emanated from
the Nous; thus the Soul is the second emanation from the One.
The main difference between Neo-Platonism and Christianity in the theory of the
trinity is that the former is hierarchical (the One is higher than the Nous) while in the
latter, all three Persons are equal (God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy
Ghost are three persons in One God).
Intellectual vision (Nous).
66
50
51
67
Platos fundamental notion is that a kinship exists between the soul and the
forms (Phaedo). The metaphor of knowledge of the forms as seeing with the minds
eye can be found in the Allegory of the Cave.
Aristotles doctrine that the mind or intellect becomes identical with the forms it
knows, separate from matter.
The One is beyond Intellect. Like Plato, Plotinus is convinced that the many must
have its source in the One. Hence, for Plotinus, the origin or first principle of all things
must be the One.
The Intellect or Divine Mind is not unified enough to be the first principle,
because it contains a multiplicity (the forms) and a duality (knower and known, or
intellect and intelligible).
The One is therefore above the forms and the Intellect. Plotinus identifies the
One with Platos the Good which shines like the sun above the world of the forms
(Allegory of the Cave).
Characteristics of the One: simple, super-essential, incomprehensible
The One is absolutely simple, having no parts or structure (like a geometrical
point rather than a geometrical figure). The One is above being (super-essential), i.e.,
above the forms or essences (it lowers the One to say it existsit is beyond mere
existence). It is above knowledge and understanding (because it is above Intellect) and
hence, it is incomprehensible.
Ascending beyond vision to union
Because vision requires a duality of seer (knower) and seen (known), one cannot
have a view of the One, only union with it. This union is possible because the One is the
source of all being and all being returns to itlike coming home.
For the soul to be united to the One is, thus, to be united to the inmost source of
its own being: it is not a new discovery but a return to where it always is.
The place of the soul in the universe
As Intellect is both one and many, soul is both one and many. There is the one
Soul, a World Soul animating the visible world (and causing the movement of the
heavens). Then there are particular souls (wed call them individual souls, but Plotinus
would call them divided, i.e., separated from one another, not unified), which are
related to the one Soul as the many intellects are related to the one divine Intellect.
Just as all intellects are identical with the divine Intellect as they contemplate the
forms, so are all souls one, identical with the one Soul. Soul is located between intellect
and body. What makes Soul different from intellect is that it can be embodied; hence, it
is ignorant, mortal, impure, and vulnerable to suffering.
68
As souls turn away from the intellect, they fall into embodiment. As souls return
to the intellect, they ascend to unity and purity and rediscover their original inward
happiness.
The hierarchy of being in Plotinus
Plotinuss universe is hierarchical, ordered by the notion of unity or identity: the
higher something is, the more unified it is. The least unified are bodies, which are many,
can always be fragmented into parts, and can always perish (only bodily things can
break or die).
The next level is souls, which are fragmented and weak insofar as they are
absorbed in bodies, but unified and powerful as they turn to contemplate forms in the
intellect above.
The next level is the intellect, which eternally and uninterruptedly contemplates
the intelligible forms within it and is, thus, identical with them (intellect = intelligible
world).
The highest level is the One, which is so unified that it cannot even be articulated
as forms or understanding.
Plotinuss concentric universe
The One is the geometrical point at the center, the source of all being and light.
The Intellect is a realm of light revolving around that center, containing a multitude of
illuminated forms.
The Soul is an outer sphere revolving around that inner globe of light. On the
outer side of that sphere are many faces (our individual souls) looking outward into
the dark world of bodies, fragmentation, and death. If a soul turns to look inward, it will
see the inner world of the Forms and see that it is inwardly one with all soulsbecause
all souls share the same interior.
In search of a scientific paradigm
The implicate order is basically a view proposed by David Bohm, Basil Hiley, and
David Peat which allows for interconnectedness at a deep level. David Bohm was a
theoretical physicist who contributed significantly to Plasma Physics and Hidden
Variables. I am borrowing from his Wholeness and the Implicate Order (vide
bibliography), a book on the correlations between subatomic particles and the universe,
to make this little excursion.
The physical universe, according to the implicate order theory, is the explicate
order made explicit from the deep level which implies it. The beauty of this theory lies
in its being classical and non-classical at the same time. It is classical because at a deep
level the theory is deterministic. But because the theory also allows instantaneous
action-at-a-distance, it is as non-classical as quantum theory.
69
Bohms model to test the properties of the implicate order is known as the
Glycerin Dye experiment. Despite its simplicity, I was struck by its implications, perhaps
because the experiment was done at a time I was seeking some mental connections.
(Bohms model, by the way, has been widely ignored by the mainstream scientific
community for reasons I do not know. At the same time, I have not come across any
single experimental evidence to refute it.)
With the right instruments you can try the experiment yourself. All you will need
is a glycerin solution encased between two glass cylinders, one inside the other, and a
drop of dye solution which you let fall into the glycerin. A special jar with a rotating
cylinder with a space filled with glycerin was the one we used in this case.
As soon as you place a drop of ink in the cylinder, you rotate the crank slowly
clockwise. The first thing you will observe is the dye drop threading out into the liquid
and slowly vanishing in the thick glycerin. Turn the outer cylinder some more and the
dye completely disappears. Using a simple scientific term, we can now say that the
distribution of the dye is random, which means that the initially ordered state had
passed into entropy. This, however, is only the beginning of the experiment.
Bohm then
asked: What
would happen if the
cylinder were
rotated
counterclockwise
exactly the same
number of turns it was
rotated
clockwise? If you did this, you would discover that the drop would reconstitute itself.
The drop of ink slowly re-appears first as a long ribbon until it retains its former shape.
In other words, the seemingly random state had not been one of disorder at all but of
an implicit order, only hidden from view. According to Bohm, this is the state of the
universe. When it evolves into form, it becomes explicate; when it involves from form, it
becomes implicate. Bohm goes further to say that the implicate order itself is implied in
an underlying order of pure potential which in turn springs from an infinite pool of
infinite potential, and so on and so forth. If every particle of matter were interconnected
with every other particle, then we all must be interconnected with each other!
Unlike J. S. Bell, David Bohm did not feel that action at a distance was due to
the faster than light signaling process. Instead, its existence suggested a non-local level
of reality beyond the quantum level. What this means, in laymans term, is that what we
perceive as separate particles in a subatomic system are not in reality separate on a
70
deeper level but extensions of one fundamental realityan implicate order which we
just discussed. Particles only appear to be separate on the explicate level. The apparent
separateness therefore is an illusion.
Imagine, he says, a brick wall separating you and an aquarium in which a fish is
swimming.
52
This is analogous to the correlations between two photons in the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR)
experiment..
71
St. Augustine
Semiotics
Among the great figures of the Middle Ages, two personalities loom the largest:
one at the beginning and the other at the close. These are Saint Augustine (the Christian
Platonist) and Saint Thomas Aquinas (the Christian Aristotelian).
Within a span of almost a millennium between them, both exerted commanding
influence on European thought and culture, as both of them represent the most
profound theological thinking of the Middle Ages.
In this chapter, we shall take up Augustine who I consider to be one of the two
greatest medieval Christian thinkers, next only to the Apostle Paul.
St. Augustine lived at a time when classical western civilization experienced its
greatest crisis. During his lifetime, an event that seemed improbable happened: Rome
fell.
Saint Augustine (354-430) is the originator of semiotics, the theory of external
signs and symbols as expressions of internal things. This is our main concern in this
chapter.
For Augustine, a sign is an outward thing used to signify something. (Adams,
108) It is a sensible thing that makes something else come into our thoughts. A sign,
therefore, always has signification. Theres always some thing that is signified.
There are two kinds of signs: natural and conventional. Smoke is an example of a
natural sign. It is a sign of fire. Even if you do not see the fire on the other side of the
mountain, you know theres a fire over there. The smoke that we see brings up fire in
our minds: where theres smoke, theres fire.
Augustine, however, is more interested in the other kind of sign: the
conventional or the communicative sign. Words are used to communicate something;
e.g., a gesture or any thing that I do to communicate my thoughts to you. We give signs
in order to signify what are in our hearts and minds, and then we transport these to
another. It is an external bridge from one inner self to another, and that external bridge
is always some kind of sign: a smile, a frown, a gesture, words, and, in Augustine,
sacraments.
Conventional signs are used to teach things, but we dont really learn things from
signs that signify them, rather we learn what the sign means from the thing it signifies.
We learn the significance of the sign by first knowing what it signifies.
To reiterate, anything I do to communicate my thoughts to yoube it a word, a
nod, a gesture, a frown, etc.is called a conventional sign. I give out signs in order to
signify whats in my mind, whats in my heartand then I attempt to transfer them to
your mind, to your heart.
Among the many kinds of conventional signs, Augustine not unexpectedly singles
out what he calls divinely conventional signs. God, he says, uses signs in order to
communicate with his creation. The most important of Gods conventional signs are the
scriptures and the sacraments.
The signs excuse for being is the urge to communicate. In order to
communicate with each other, we must agree upon what the signs mean. In this way,
signs are conventional.
72
53
Happiness is the name for the thing we seek for its own sake.
73
healthy: it is not doing what its been made to do, which is to see God. Our minds eye
is not pure enough
For Augustine, God (Truth, Supreme Happiness) is ineffable and cannot be
contained as a mental object.
What, then, ought we to do to reach our destinationGod? Augustine
prescribes Faith, the virtue of relinquishing all doubt in the Ineffable One. This sounds
like blind faith, but it is not. Faith, to Augustine, is the means to get to the goal of
understanding. Through Faith, our minds are purified.54
Faith is not based on what you can see with your minds eye; it is based on
authority. Heres where reason comes in. Reason means using your minds eye in trying
to understand, while authority means believing what you are told.
Think of your high school teacher lecturing on the Pythagorean Theorem.
Imagine you do not understand it yet. She writes on the blackboard a2+b2=c2, where c,
she says, as soon as she has written the equation, represents the length of
the hypotenuse and a and b represent the lengths of the other two sides. Thats a sign,
and if you do not understand what it signifies, it does not mean anything to you. You
look at the equation and try to understand it. You do not quite get it, but you do believe
that whats written on the blackboard is truebecause the teacher says so. The teacher
has authority and she knows what shes talking about. She tells you that it means that
the sum of the squares of the sides of a right triangle is equal to the square of the
hypotenuse. She further amplifies: In any right triangle, the area of the square whose
side is the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) is equal to the sum of the
areas of the squares whose sides are the two legs (the two sides that meet at a right
angle). Now that she has told you that, you know what the sign signifies.
You have to understand the thing signified first, because it is from that signified
that you understand the significance of the sign. You learn signs from the things that
signify, and not the other way around, according to Augustine.
This does not mean that signs have no use, but Augustine always goes for the
intelligible thing, the thing you understand, to take priority over the sensible thing.
What you see with your minds eye must come first. What you see with the physical eye
comes second. You have to understand that real triangle
the sum of the areas of the two squares of the legs a and b equals the area of
the square on the hypotenuse cin order to understand the significance of the sign
54
74
a2+b2=c2, where c represents the length of the hypotenuse, and a and b represent the
lengths of the other two sides.55
You are not in a position to understand it yet.
In order to understand that real triangle, the schoolteacher can only teach you
up to a certain point. He cant make you understand. He can write as many equations,
say so many words, but he cant make you understand. So, to go back to Augustines
theology, whats going to make you understand? Whos going to make you understand?
Not an external teacher, says Augustine, but an internal one: Christ. He teaches you.
The City of God shaped the political ideology of medieval Europe. It established
the principle that divine authority is greater than human authority. In time, the City of
God came to be identified with the Church to the effect that the state could only attain
virtue by submitting itself to the guidance of the Church.
Augustine lived at the beginning of what has often been characterized as the
European Dark Ages, a period in which cultural and intellectual activity declined while
violent barbarians destroyed the monuments of classical civilization.
The Romans had lost their civic virtue. They had become unwilling to fulfill their
civic duties, especially military service, and instead had become apathetic. Instead, they
had foisted off their civic duties onto barbarian mercenaries who had become so
powerful that by the 5th century CE, they were able to take control of the empire itself.
The chief characteristic of the Dark Ages, however, was the Fear of Learning. The
True, the Good, and the Beautiful had to go underground lest they suffer the same fate
of Hypatia (b. 370), a woman, a symbol of learning and the last scientist of Alexandria.
The people despised her because of her gender, and because they identified her great
learning with paganism. In 415 while on her way to the great library, parishioners of
Cyril of Alexandria dragged her from her chariot, tore off her clothes, and with abalone
shells flayed her flesh to the bones, before burning her skeleton with her books. Her
name is forgotten. The Church, years later, canonizedCyril of Alexandria.
Despite this, the Church was the sole custodian of classical learning. Throughout
the Middle Ages, monasteries became refuge of scholars. As mass illiteracy prevailed
outside, the monasteries were the antidote, preventing the total extinction of classical
learning.
55
A simpler, laymans way of putting it: The sum of the squares of the sides of a right triangle is equal to
the square of the hypotenuse. An excursion: Pythagoras offered a more elaborate solution than his preSocratic predecessors to the problem of genesis: All, he said, is number. Like the Ionians, Pythagoras
sought to discover the unifying principle of all reality. He identified this principle with number, and for the
first time, departed from the Ionian tradition of designating a material substance (the elements) as the
first principle. If a direct relationship exists between numerical ratios and the harmonies of music, and just
as numbers undergird music, so are numbers the very stuff and pattern of the universe. The natural world
displays numerical order. So what notion of number did Pythagoras have? How did he arrive at this
principle? Like previous thinkers, Pythagoras had observed the dirrerent characteristics of phenomena.
From these observations he saw that these characteristics followed exact mathematical patterns. In other
words, natural phenomena followed an order which could be measured mathematicallythe seasons,
day and night, the year, and so on.
75
Augustine lived to see the total collapse of Roman rule in Africa and the ruin of
his diocese. During the year of his death in 430, the Vandals had invaded that part of the
empire, burning churches, slaughtering bishops and clergy, violating the women,
torturing the laity. His own city of Hippo swarmed with refugees. In the midst of all
these, Augustine fell ill with a fever, and died shortly afterwards. He was buried on
August 28, 430. Hippo was then sacked and burned to the ground.
Thus, Augustines vision of the City of God rising from the ruins of the Roman
Empire was realized in the Church. The Church undertook the gigantic task of converting
to Christianity the barbarian invadersand the Church succeeded to such an extent that
over the next several centuries, the barbarians acknowledged the Roman Pope as the
Supreme Authority in the land.
The year is 452 A.D. The Huns have razed Aquileia, and their leader Attila (406453) stands on top of a hill to watch the city burn to ashes. (He had erased the city from
the map so that there is no trace of Aquileia today.)
Attila is descended from the Xiongnu tribes, known for their cruelty. They had
moved towards Europe because Shi Huang Ti had built the Great Wall largely to keep
them out. All the lands around Germany to the Ural River, from the Danube to the
Baltic Sea, including the Balkans, Orleans, and Gaul in Western Europe have crumbled.
Meanwhile, the vandals have taken North Africa, and the Suevi have captured Iberia.
Britain has fallen too under the barbarian invaders and the Gaels sign a separate peace
with the Goths and the Burundians.
All these prepare the ground for the Huns to invade Northern Italy. Their
intention is to lay it in ruins. Many residents of Italy flee to the Venetian lagoon. This is
how the city of Venice was founded. And now we see the Huns thundering directly
towards Rome, the heart of western civilization. The people of Rome, abandoned by
their own rulers, turn to Leo I (reign 440-461) for help. The pope immediately orders his
cardinals and archbishops to assemble together and lead the people in procession to
Mincio in the vicinity of Mantua, there to meet the barbarian invaders. The Huns
witness a long procession coming out of the city to meet them. Attila is awed by the
strange pomp of incense and stately robes and the singing of sacred hymns led by an
aging pope holding aloft the processional crucifix. As soon as he is face to face with the
invader, Leo I, bishop of Rome and Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church, points the
crucifix at Attila, the Scourge of God, and orders him to depart from Rome. Attila,
confused, turns back and retreats to the Danube, never to bother Rome again.
76
An Augustinian monk who chose as his religious name Augustine had declared that
not only had he read St. Augustine but that he had swallowed him whole. On October
13, 1517, he nailed to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral ninety-five theses.
77
But he had religious reasons as well. First, the Muses were pagan and second that
the arts catered to sensuous and earthly interests. Philosophy, then, not poetry, is the
true medicine of the soul.
56
The Catholic Encyclopedia is the oldest known source where this citation is found. Another eminent
example of prison literature is Viktor Frankls Mans Search for Meaning, a work that is also described as
an example of Holocaust literature.
78
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, a Christian philosopher, scholar, and saint (also
known as Saint Severinus), was born in Rome around 480 CE of a Patrician family. Life
had been good to him.
He was talented. He translated Greek works, especially Plato and Aristotle, into
Latin. His father was a consul. Boethius himself became a consul. His two sons also
became consuls. At the age of 40, he rose to become magister officiorum , or head of all
government and court service of the Ostrogoth ruler Theodoric the Great.
The position was short-lived. Three years later he was arrested on charges of
conspiring with the Byzantine Empire at Constantinople. Boethius was stripped of his
title and wealth and thrown into prison at Pavia. Boethius attributes his arrest to slander
by his rivals who he thought were his friends.
He was executed in 524 by garrote. His head was bound in wet leather straps,
possibly rawhide, and as they dried, the leather shrunk and slowly crushed his skull.
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia:
It was believed that among the accusations brought against him was
devotion to the Catholic cause, which at that time was championed by the
Emperor Justin against the Arian Theodoric. In the eighth century
this tradition had assumed definite shape, and in many places Boethius
was honored as a martyr, and his feast observed on the twenty-third of
October. In recent times, critical scholarship has gone to the opposite
extreme, and there have not been wanting critics who asserted
that Boethius was not a Christian at all, or that, if he was,
he abjured the Faith before his death. The foundation for this opinion is
the fact that in the Consolations of Philosophy no mention is made
of Christ or of the Christian religion.57
Arianism was a heresy that denied the divinity of Christ. According to this
teaching, Christ was created by God. The Incarnation is just a metaphor. Because of this
heresy, St. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, together with 220 bishops, met at the
council of Nicaea and condemned it while formulating the Nicene Creed in 325 CE:
We believe in One God, the Father Almighty, Creator of all things visible and
invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father [the onlybegotten; that is, of the essence of the Father, God of God], Light of Light, very God of
very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father . . .
The Creed that we are familiar with, however, that which is used in our quotidian
liturgy, is the Nicene Constantinople Creed of 381 at the Council of Constantinople.
57
W. Turner, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert
Appleton Company, 1907. Let me offer an explanation in defense of Boethius. Boethius was a keen
student of the classical style and followed to the letter the ancients advice about writing. Horace and
Longinus, as we have seen, for example, advised against mixing genres. In other words, if you write
philosophy, just write philosophy. Dont include scriptural commentaries.
79
80
81
Thomas Aquinas aesthetic theory is the least recognized aspect of his thought.
This stands to reason, because his aesthetics are not found in any one particular work,
but rather spread out throughout a body of works to a degree that we might not at first
suspect.
Although Thomas draws on both Plato and Aristotle, he is more Aristotelian than
Platonic in his definition of art as recta ratio factibilium.58
How does art imitate nature? Simply by moving from simplicity to complexitya
sort of evolutionary movement.
Perhaps his most famous statement on the idea of beauty is his declaration that
beauty must have three requirements: integritas, consonantia, and claritas.59 These
qualities derive from God who is the One (the Good).60
Thomas Aquinass life and context
Thomas Aquinas (1225?-1274) was the son of a south Italian noble house that
was well connected to the ruling dynasty of the Kingdom of Sicily and to the
international European aristocracy of 13th century Western Europe.
Aquinas was the child of the new university system, which had emerged at
Bologna, Paris, and Oxford in the second half of the 12th century. It was designed to
train professionals. Aquinas was also the star of the even newer Dominican Order.
Aquinas was educated at the venerable Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino
near his birthplace; then at the University of Naples, founded (in 1224) by his kinsman
King (and Holy Roman Emperor) Frederick II (there he earned his A.B.); then at the
University of Paris (M.A. and S.Th.D.).
He taught thereafter at Paris, at the itinerant papal university in Italy, and finally
at the University of Naples. He died on March 7, 1274 at the age of 49, author of some
60 to 100 titles.
Aquinass Aristotelianism
Aquinas was the last creative commentator on Aristotles philosophy.
Some key instances of Aquinass creatively critical Aristotelianism are the
following:
1. Aquinass teaching regarding the eternity of the worlda
conviction of Aristotles: Aquinas argued that neither the
58
st
nd
Right reason applied to the making of things. Summa Theologica, 1 part of the 2 part of the prima
secundae of the Summa, Q 57 article 3, this quote taken from his commentary on Aristotles Poetics: Art
Imitates Nature.
59
Integrity or perfection, due proportion or harmony, and clarity or brilliance. The complete text reads
integritas sive perfectio, debita proportio sive consonantia, et claritas.
60
Platos influence is shown here.
82
83
states of his contemporary Italy, which resembled in so many ways the ideal polis of
Aristotle.
In his distinctive doctrine of law, Aquinas combined the main lines of Aristotles
Politics with the Stoic doctrine of natural law and added some original features.
According to Aquinas, four or five major kinds of laws exist: the eternal law of God and
his created universe, the natural law inherent in human nature, divine positive law
specifically legislated for human conduct, human positive law, and human custom (sort
of law in itself if it is not in conflict with natural law). No divine law can be in conflict
with natural law, and any human statute or custom that is inconsistent with natural law
has no forceit is not a real law at all, because it does not conform to human teleology.
Reactions to Aquinass Aristotelianism
Aquinass most Aristotelian teachings provoked a strong negative reaction, even in
his lifetime. This reaction was turned into a movement to condemn Thomism as a
heresy; the leading thinkers of the Dominican Orders main rival, the Franciscan Order,
led this movement. It got as far as inspiring a bishop of Paris and two archbishops of
Canterbury to condemn several of Aquinass teachings, eventually declaring some of
them formal heresies.
The Dominican Order reacted with gusto, leading to Thomass controversial
canonization by Pope John XXII in 1323.
In 1879, Leo XIII issued a papal bull, Aeterni patris, that praised Aquinas as Doctor of
the Church.
Neo-Thomism flourished for roughly a century, but then lost appeal even in Catholic
academic circles. At the very end of the 20th century, however, we have seen what we
might call Neo-neo-Thomism, a philosophical movement recasting Thomism and NeoThomism in the light of such thinkers as Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan. Basically,
though, all forms of Thomism have been inspired by their respect for the thought of
Aristotle.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica Second and Revised Edition, translated by Fathers of the English
Dominican Province,1920. This translation is now in the public domain. See also Opera Omnia, Leonine
edition, volume iv.
84
to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion. Now whatever is in motion is
put in motion by another, for nothing can be in motion except it is in potentiality to that
towards which it is in motion; whereas a thing moves inasmuch as it is in act. For motion
is nothing else than the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality. But
nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of
actuality. Thus that which is actually hot, as fire, makes wood, which is potentially hot,
to be actually hot, and thereby moves and changes it. Now it is not possible that the
same thing should be at once in actuality and potentiality in the same respect, but only
in different respects. For what is actually hot cannot simultaneously be potentially hot;
but it is simultaneously potentially cold. It is therefore impossible that in the same
respect and in the same way a thing should be both mover and moved, i.e. that it should
move itself. Therefore, whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another. If that by
which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in
motion by another, and that by another again. But this cannot go on to infinity, because
then there would be no first mover, and, consequently, no other mover; seeing that
subsequent movers move only inasmuch as they are put in motion by the first mover; as
the staff moves only because it is put in motion by the hand. Therefore it is necessary to
arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be
God.
The second way is from the nature of the efficient cause. In the world of sense we find
there is an order of efficient causes. There is no case known (neither is it, indeed,
possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself; for so it would be
prior to itself, which is impossible. Now in efficient causes it is not possible to go on to
infinity, because in all efficient causes following in order, the first is the cause of the
intermediate cause, and the intermediate is the cause of the ultimate cause, whether the
intermediate cause be several, or only one. Now to take away the cause is to take away
the effect. Therefore, if there be no first cause among efficient causes, there will be no
ultimate, nor any intermediate cause. But if in efficient causes it is possible to go on to
infinity, there will be no first efficient cause, neither will there be an ultimate effect, nor
any intermediate efficient causes; all of which is plainly false. Therefore it is necessary to
admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God.
The third way is taken from possibility and necessity, and runs thus. We find in nature
things that are possible to be and not to be, since they are found to be generated, and to
corrupt, and consequently, they are possible to be and not to be. But it is impossible for
these always to exist, for that which is possible not to be at some time is not. Therefore,
if everything is possible not to be, then at one time there could have been nothing in
existence. Now if this were true, even now there would be nothing in existence, because
that which does not exist only begins to exist by something already existing. Therefore, if
at one time nothing was in existence, it would have been impossible for anything to have
begun to exist; and thus even now nothing would be in existence--which is absurd.
Therefore, not all beings are merely possible, but there must exist something the
existence of which is necessary. But every necessary thing either has its necessity caused
85
answer. Then, one marshals the best arguments from authorities (the big names in the
field) for the view that one rejects. Then, one sets forth ones own view and gives
arguments for it. Finally, one considers the opposing arguments and explains why they
fail.
Perhaps one finds a mistaken premise or logical fallacy in the original argument,
or perhaps one shows that the authority is wrong if interpreted in one way but right if
interpreted in another way.
Aquinas interprets Anselm as holding that the existence of God is self-evident. In
reply, he denies that the existence of God is self-evident in a way that would make a
proof of Gods existence otiose. A proposition is self-evident when one can tell, just by
thinking about the concepts involved, that it is true.
According to Anselm, once we understand the concept of God, we can see that
God exists. Aquinas argues that we cannot, in this life, have the kind of understanding of
God that would enable us just to see that God exists. The objection that the existence
of God must simply be taken on faith takes off from Aquinass response to Anselm. If we
cannot have any direct insight into the nature of God, how are we supposed to prove
that God exists? Aquinas replies by distinguishing between two different kinds of
arguments. In an argument propter quid, we argue from the nature of a thing to its
features; in an argument quia, we argue backwards from effects to cause. Because we
have no direct insight into the nature of God, we cannot have any propter quid
arguments about God. But we can have quia arguments about God by reasoning
backwards from Gods effectssensible thingsto their cause.
Each of the famous five ways begins from some fact that can be observed by
the senses and argues on that basis for the existence of God. The first way argues on the
basis of motion that there must be a first unmoved mover. The second way argues on
the basis of causality that there must be a first uncaused cause. The third way argues on
the basis of contingency (the fact that things are capable of existing and of not existing)
that there must be a necessary being. The fourth way argues on the basis of the degrees
of perfection that there must be a maximally perfect being. The fifth way argues on the
basis of apparently purposive behavior that there must be an intelligent being that
directs all things to attain their ends.
A detailed look at the first way to prove that God exists, which Aquinas calls the
clearest way, offers a glimpse into Aquinass argumentative method and his use of
Aristotelian principles. It is evident to the senses that some things are in motion. In
Aristotelian jargon, three kinds of changes count as motion: change in quality, change
in size, and change in place. Each of these changes involves going from potentiality
(potentially being a certain way) to actuality (actually being a certain way).
Whenever something goes from potentiality to actuality, there must be
something that causes it go from potentiality to actuality. Something that causes motion
is in actuality, whereas something that undergoes motion is in potentiality. For example,
something that is actually hot is needed to heat what is only potentially hot. Because
nothing can be both in actuality and in potentiality in the same respect at the same
time, nothing can move itself. Thus, everything that is moved is moved by some other
87
thing. Because there cannot be an infinite regress of movers and things moved, we must
come to a first unmoved mover.
In an infinite series of movers, there is no first mover. If there is no first mover,
there is no motion. Therefore, there is no infinite series of movers. Whenever
something goes from potentiality to actuality, there must be something that causes it go
from potentiality to actuality. Something that causes motion is in actuality, whereas
something that undergoes motion is in potentiality. For example, something that is
actually hot is needed to heat what is only potentially hot. Because nothing can be both
in actuality and in potentiality in the same respect at the same time, nothing can move
itself. Thus, everything that is moved is moved by some other thing.
Because there cannot be an infinite regress of movers and things moved, we
must come to a first unmoved mover. In an infinite series of movers, there is no first
mover. If there is no first mover, there is no motion. Therefore, there is no infinite series
of movers.
Aquinas and the Problem of Language
Aquinass Aristotelian strategy of arguing from effects to cause allows us to
establish a wide range of conclusions about God, but it also threatens to undermine the
meaningfulness of our language about God. Our language reflects our concepts, and our
concepts are all ultimately derived from our experience of the objects of the senses. But
the objects of the senses fall far short of God. How, then, can the words that we use for
ordinary objects be meaningful when applied to God? Aquinass answer is that created
things resemble or imitate their creator. We can, therefore, use the language that
derives from experience of creatures to speak meaningfully about God, although our
words cannot have exactly the same meaning in theological language that they have in
ordinary language.
Given the fact that God far exceeds our understanding, how can we say anything
true about God? In medieval terminology, how can we have names for God?
Some of Aquinass sources concerning this issue particularly emphasized the via
remotionis or via negativa: that is, the approach to speaking of God that insists that we
can say only what God is not. According to these authors, God is so much beyond the
sensible things that we must use in order to understand him that the best we can do is
to say of him what he is not. Some would even go so far as to say that even the
affirmative names are really disguised negatives.
Maimonides had held that affirmative names for God actually express (a) what
God is not and (b) Gods relation to creatures. Aquinas allows a role to the via
remotionis, but he insists that it can and must be supplemented by the via affirmationis:
the practice of using affirmative names to speak of God. If no positive predications are
possible, there is no reason to call God one thing in preference to another. Although
God transcends sensible things, such things do provide enough clues to his nature that
we can derive positive conclusions about God and express them in affirmative names.
Aquinas develops a general theory about how names work, then applies it to the
case of names for God. The general theory of names, derived from Aristotle, holds that
88
we can name something insofar as we can understand it. Words are signs of ideas, and
ideas are resemblances (similitudes) of things. Thus, words do serve as signs of things
but indirectly: They signify things by means of our intellects conception of the things.
We can, therefore, name God insofar as we can understand God. Given that we
cannot understand God as he is in himself, we also cannot name God as he is in himself.
(In that sense, the proponents of the via remotionis were right.) But because we can
understand God as he is known from creatures, we can name him on the basis of our
knowledge of creatures.
Because God possesses all the perfections of creatures, though in a more
excellent way, we can apply the names for those perfections to Godin the technical
jargon of the day, we can predicate those names of God. If a name implies a perfection
without limitation, we can apply it literally to God. For example, good does not imply
any limitation; thus, we can apply it literally to God, as we apply it literally to creatures.
We can also predicate it in the mode of supereminence, in which case, it applies only
to God. For example, we can predicate highest good of God alone. If a name implies
some limitation or defect, we can apply it metaphorically to God. For example, we can
predicate rock metaphorically of God.
Aquinass main interest is in names that can be predicated literally of both God
and creatures. Even these names are inadequate in a way. As all our names do, they get
their meaning through our intellects conception, and our intellects conception falls
short of the reality of God. Our names for God suggest multiplicity within God, even
though God has no parts of any kind. We have to use a plurality of names, all of which
are signs of the same thingthe divine essencewhich we conceive in a variety of
ways.
For these reasons, such names are predicated analogically of God. Analogical
predication is contrasted with equivocal predication (in which the same word is used
with entirely different meanings) and with univocal predication (in which the same word
is used with exactly the same meaning). In analogical predication, the same word is used
with different but related meanings. For example, the expression my niece is predicated
analogically of my niece and a photograph of my niece. On Aquinass theory, God is the
original of which all creatures are images. Our knowledge of God is somewhat like our
knowledge of someone we know only from a photograph.
89
Ninth Article
Whether Holy Scripture should use metaphors?
Objection 1: It seems that Holy Scripture should not use metaphors. For that which is
proper to the lowest science seems not to befit this science, which holds the highest
place of all. But to proceed by the aid of various similitudes and figures is proper to
poetry, the least of all the sciences. Therefore it is not fitting that this science should
make use of such similitudes.
Objection 2: Further, this doctrine seems to be intended to make truth clear. Hence a
reward is held out to those who manifest it: "They that explain me shall have life
everlasting" (Ecclus. 24:31). But by such similitudes truth is obscured. Therefore, to put
forward divine truths by likening them to corporeal things does not befit this science.
Objection 3: Further, the higher creatures are, the nearer they approach to the divine
likeness. If therefore any creature be taken to represent God, this representation ought
chiefly to be taken from the higher creatures, and not from the lower; yet this is often
found in Scriptures.
On the contrary, It is written (Osee 12:10): "I have multiplied visions, and I have used
similitudes by the ministry of the prophets." But to put forward anything by means of
similitudes is to use metaphors. Therefore this sacred science may use metaphors.
I answer that, It is befitting Holy Writ to put forward divine and spiritual truths by
means of comparisons with material things. For God provides for everything according
to the capacity of its nature. Now it is natural to man to attain to intellectual truths
through sensible objects, because all our knowledge originates from sense. Hence in
Holy Writ, spiritual truths are fittingly taught under the likeness of material things. This
is what Dionysius says (Coel. Hier. i): "We cannot be enlightened by the divine rays
except they be hidden within the covering of many sacred veils." It is also befitting Holy
Writ, which is proposed to all without distinction of persons---"To the wise and to the
unwise I am a debtor" (Rom. 1:14)---that spiritual truths be expounded by means of
figures taken from corporeal things, in order that thereby even the simple who are
unable by themselves to grasp intellectual things may be able to understand it.
Reply to Objection 1: Poetry makes use of metaphors to produce a representation, for it
is natural to man to be pleased with representations. But sacred doctrine makes use of
metaphors as both necessary and useful.
Reply to Objection 2: The ray of divine revelation is not extinguished by the sensible
imagery wherewith it is veiled, as Dionysius says (Coel. Hier. i); and its truth so far
remains that it does not allow the minds of those to whom the revelation has been
made, to rest in the metaphors, but raises them to the knowledge of truths; and
through those to whom the revelation has been made others also may receive
90
instruction in these matters. Hence those things that are taught metaphorically in one
part of Scripture, in other parts are taught more openly. The very hiding of truth in
figures is useful for the exercise of thoughtful minds and as a defense against the
ridicule of the impious, according to the words "Give not that which is holy to dogs"
(Mat. 7:6).
Reply to Objection 3: As Dionysius says, (Coel. Hier. i) it is more fitting that divine truths
should be expounded under the figure of less noble than of nobler bodies, and this for
three reasons. Firstly, because thereby men's minds are the better preserved from
error. For then it is clear that these things are not literal descriptions of divine truths,
which might have been open to doubt had they been expressed under the figure of
nobler bodies, especially for those who could think of nothing nobler than bodies.
Secondly, because this is more befitting the knowledge of God that we have in this life.
For what He is not is clearer to us than what He is. Therefore similitudes drawn from
things farthest away from God form within us a truer estimate that God is above
whatsoever we may say or think of Him. Thirdly, because thereby divine truths are the
better hidden from the unworthy.
Tenth Article
Whether in Holy Scripture a word may have several senses?
Objection 1: It seems that in Holy Writ a word cannot have several senses, historical or
literal, allegorical, tropological or moral, and anagogical. For many different senses in
one text produce confusion and deception and destroy all force of argument. Hence no
argument, but only fallacies, can be deduced from a multiplicity of propositions. But
Holy Writ ought to be able to state the truth without any fallacy. Therefore in it there
cannot be several senses to a word.
Objection 2: Further, Augustine says (De util. cred. iii) that "the Old Testament has a
fourfold division as to history, etiology, analogy and allegory." Now these four seem
altogether different from the four divisions mentioned in the first objection. Therefore it
does not seem fitting to explain the same word of Holy Writ according to the four
different senses mentioned above.
Objection 3: Further, besides these senses, there is the parabolical, which is not one of
these four.
On the contrary, Gregory says (Moral. xx, 1): "Holy Writ by the manner of its speech
transcends every science, because in one and the same sentence, while it describes a
fact, it reveals a mystery."
I answer that, The author of Holy Writ is God, in whose power it is to signify His
meaning, not by words only (as man also can do), but also by things themselves. So,
whereas in every other science things are signified by words, this science has the
property, that the things signified by the words have themselves also a signification.
Therefore that first signification whereby words signify things belongs to the first sense,
the historical or literal. That signification whereby things signified by words have
themselves also a signification is called the spiritual sense, which is based on the literal,
and presupposes it. Now this spiritual sense has a threefold division. For as the Apostle
91
says (Heb. 10:1) the Old Law is a figure of the New Law, and Dionysius says (Coel. Hier. i)
"the New Law itself is a figure of future glory." Again, in the New Law, whatever our
Head has done is a type of what we ought to do. Therefore, so far as the things of the
Old Law signify the things of the New Law, there is the allegorical sense; so far as the
things done in Christ, or so far as the things which signify Christ, are types of what we
ought to do, there is the moral sense. But so far as they signify what relates to eternal
glory, there is the anagogical sense. Since the literal sense is that which the author
intends, and since the author of Holy Writ is God, Who by one act comprehends all
things by His intellect, it is not unfitting, as Augustine says (Confess. xii), if, even
according to the literal sense, one word in Holy Writ should have several senses.
Reply to Objection 1: The multiplicity of these senses does not produce equivocation or
any other kind of multiplicity, seeing that these senses are not multiplied because one
word signifies several things, but because the things signified by the words can be
themselves types of other things. Thus in Holy Writ no confusion results, for all the
senses are founded on one---the literal---from which alone can any argument be drawn,
and not from those intended in allegory, as Augustine says (Epis. 48). Nevertheless,
nothing of Holy Scripture perishes on account of this, since nothing necessary to faith is
contained under the spiritual sense which is not elsewhere put forward by the Scripture
in its literal sense.
Reply to Objection 2: These three---history, etiology, analogy---are grouped under the
literal sense. For it is called history, as Augustine expounds (Epis. 48), whenever
anything is simply related; it is called etiology when its cause is assigned, as when
Our Lord gave the reason why Moses allowed the putting away of wives---namely, on
account of the hardness of men's hearts; it is called analogy whenever the truth of one
text of Scripture is shown not to contradict the truth of another. Of these four, allegory
alone stands for the three spiritual senses. Thus Hugh of St. Victor (Sacram. iv, 4 Prolog.)
includes the anagogical under the allegorical sense, laying down three senses only---the
historical, the allegorical, and the tropological.
Reply to Objection 3: The parabolical sense is contained in the literal, for by words
things are signified properly and figuratively. Nor is the figure itself, but that which is
figured, the literal sense. When Scripture speaks of God's arm, the literal sense is not
that God has such a member, but only what is signified by this member, namely
operative power. Hence it is plain that nothing false can ever underlie the literal sense
of Holy Writ.
92
93
The poet is a maker; whereas all other arts (geometry, music, science)
take their cues and their foundations from nature, the poet alone
transcends and even improves upon the natural world.
The mimesis of the poet is a higher kind of imitation; it transforms
beasts into Cyclopes, men into heroes, bronze into gold.
Indeed, what the poet finally imitates is not nature herself but a more
perfect idea in the mind to which the poet gives shape.
The end of poetry is to teach and to delight; thus it is useful to society.
The imitations of poetry can delight and teach, for they do not merely
copy virtues and vices as they are, but as they should be.
Poetry inspires the soul both to scorn vices and admire virtues;
philosophy, which is too serious to delight, leaves the soul cold.
Poetry unites the universal truths (abstractions) of philosophy with the
concrete examples of history.
Such concrete universals (Aesops fables, Jesus parables) have a
way of impressing themselves in our memory.
The historian is bound to recount a particular event just as it was,
even if that event debases virtue and encourages vice; the poet is free
to alter the particular so as to embody more fully the universal.
Sidneys favorite example is the parable of the ewe lamb that Nathan
used to convict David (2 Samuel 12)
Sidney refutes the four arguments thrown in against poetry.
Poetry is unprofitable; there are more gainful ways to spend our time.
Poetry is, in fact, the most fruitful of all knowledge; it has the power,
through teaching and pleasing, to move the hearers to virtuous
action.
As just stated, poetry does this more effectively than philosophy or
history.
Poetry is the mother of lies.
Poets never lie; in the first place, they never claim their poems to be
the truth.
Poetry, like the stage, offers an illusion: an account of what should or
should not be, not what is; only fools confuse illusions with reality.
Poetry entices and leads to sinful behavior.
It is the abuse of poetry, not poetry itself, that leads to sin.
If we were to accept this argument, then we must also criticize the
Bible, which has often been perverted.
Plato banished the poets from his Republic.
For Sidney, this is the toughest, for he admires Plato.
Nevertheless, it was the poets who taught and guided the
philosophers.
Sidney discovers an anxiety of influence between Plato and Homer;
whereas many cities strove for the honor of being Homers
birthplace, Athens killed Socrates.
94
95
John Dryden
An Essay of Dramatic Poesy
Abstract
This chapter will discuss one of the two greatest inaugurators of English
neoclassicism: John Dryden. The next chapter will take up Alexander Pope. After a brief
survey of the historical background of the period and a glance at some similar trends in
France, we shall analyze closely Drydens Essay by trying to define his central notion of
the three unities. Then we shall use this notion as a way both to explore the relationship
between Drydens age and that of the Ancients and to contrast the distinctions between
French and English neoclassicism.
The Essay of Dramatic Poesy is a succinct overview of the main critical issues
debated at the beginning of the Neoclassical Age.
Like Platos Republic, the Essay is written in dialogue form.
96
Alexander Pope
An Essay on Criticism
An Essay on Criticism is one essay I know that is not an essay. It is rather a verse
epistle in the tradition of Horace. It is decorum set to meter. Pope, also known as The
British Horace, is stricter than Dryden because the former lived in the very heart of the
neoclassical age. In this chapter, we shall discuss Alexander Popes view of the proper
role and nature of the critic and on his insistence that nature is the final source, end,
and test of art. We shall also explore how the very verse from that Pope chose mimics
the spirit of neoclassical decorum.
In his Essay, Pope fully embodies the spirit of neoclassicism.
Like Horaces Ars Poetica, Popes Essay is a verse epistle.
It is written in heroic couplets. A heroic couplet has two lines of
poetry with each line having ten syllables each (five stresses) with an
end stop at the end of the couplet. Though these heroic couplets are
linked together in a series, there is always a strong stop at the end of
each couplet, marked by a period, a semicolon, a colon, or a comma.
Popes heroic couplets read like mathematical proofs that move
logically, step by step, from proposition to proposition to conclusion.
In the movement of his heroic couplets, we feel the balance, the
order, the rationality that the neoclassicists prized so highly.
Pope cannot be read quickly: he demands intense concentration and
a sense of proportion; his poetry is decorum set to meter.
Like Horace, Pope spends time defining the proper role of the critic.
True taste in a critic is as rare as true genius in a poet.
The function of the critic is almost as vital as that of the poet;
indeed, a bad critic is more dangerous to art than a bad poet.
Many critics write not out of love of poetry or out of a fine sense
of judgment, but out of envy and spite; they destroy what they
cannot do.
The critic should serve as the handmaid of poetry; but too often
critics turn against poets and poetry.
Too many critics are like half-breed mules that lack both the
genius of the poet and the taste of the true critic; rather than
accept the limits of their gifts, they elevate themselves at the
expense of others.
The true critic (like the true poet) must learn humility; this is best
learned by exposing oneself to the sacred fire of ancient
literature.
98
The true critic must judge art not on the basis of his own
prejudices but via a close, fair, genial study of a poets age, his
chosen genre and mode of imitation, and the desired end and aim
of his poem.
The best poets and critics look to nature as the source, end, and test of
art.
We follow the Ancients, because in following them, we follow
nature; Virgil himself discovered that to imitate Homer was to
imitate nature.
The Ancients did not so much invent the rules of decorum as find
them, ready made, in nature.
Nature is the best touchstone of art, for it is unchanging and
eternal.
We must never loose ourselves in poetic frenzy; we must never
forget a poets most prized guide-word: restraint.
99
Edmund Burke
A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
This chapter opens Part Six of our course: The German Epistemological Roots of
Romanticism. In this section, we shall take up the German critics Kant, Schiller, and
Hegel. But before we do so, an overture by Edmund Burkes Philosophical Inquiry into
the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful is in order. (Note: You may find this
section on the German critics a bit more challenging than the other sections. It cannot
be helped. Kant and Hegel, for example, are two of the most difficult, albeit influential,
thinkers after Plato and Aristotle.)
Ontology and Epistemology
With Edmund Burke, we shift our perspective from a mimetic-ontological
approach to literature to an affective-epistemological approach.
Ontology is the study of being; it is concerned with determining the quintessence
of things.
Mimetic theorists are ontological critics. Aristotles goal, for example, to define
precisely the proper nature and essence of a well-constructed plot is an ontological
approach. Indeed the Platonic-Aristotelian argument over mimesis is really a debate
over the ontological status of a work of art. What is a poem: does it possess its own
essence (of Reality) or is it just a reflection? Neoclassical poetics is partially affective in
approach, but it nevertheless works within a philosophical framework that is essentially
ontological. Even the rules of decorum and restraint laid down by Horace, and later by
Dryden and Pope, are less concerned with reader response than with what a poem
should be. Even Longinus, who defines the sublime partly in terms of its effect on the
audience, is really concerned with the actual physical, metaphorical, and linguistic
qualities of a sublime poem.
Burkes approach to the sublime is quite different from all of the above. Burkes
approach is epistemological.
If Ontology is the study of being, Epistemology is the study of knowing; it is
concerned not with the thingness of things, but with how we perceive that thingness.
Affective critics are epistemological critics. They seek to explore not just whether
a poem teaches and/or pleases but the mental processes by which that lesson/pleasure
is perceived. These processes are called modes of thought. Beauty does not so much
define a quality that is inherent in a poem as it describes a kind of
mental/emotional/intellectual response that occurs within the mind of the person
experiencing it.
This leads us to a vital distinction that lies at the core of epistemology and of any
theory that takes such an approach: subject/object. In philosophy, subject is a conscious
self that perceives. An object, on the other hand, is an unconscious thing that does not
100
perceive but is, rather, perceived (by a subject). Hence, when epistemologists define
their responses to art as purely subjective, they mean that the experience has nothing
to do with the poetic object per se, but exists wholly in the mind of the subject.
The philosophical use of the word subjective should not be confused with its
modern use to signify a personal, relativistic belief. Beginning with Burke and Kant, it
becomes standard to refer to those who would define group standards of aesthetic
taste as aestheticians. In Burkes introduction to Inquiry, he lays the groundwork for
understanding how we perceive both art and the larger world around us.
Imagination and Judgment
For Burke, the groundwork of all perception and thought is the senses. This
makes Burke an empiricist in the tradition of John Locke. Because all normal persons
have equal access to sense perceptions and because the senses are the great originals
of all our ideas, it is possible to arrive at a universal principle of judgment.
Indeed, says Burke, if we are unable to establish fixed principles of taste and
general laws for that mental faculty we call imagination, then his Inquiry is absurd and
all aesthetic judgment is mere whimsy.
Let us trace how Burke moves from universal sense experience to universal
principles of taste (a movement typical of epistemological theory that betrays a desire
for order and system that is as strong as that of Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, or Pope).
All people perceive external objects in the same way. We all recognize sugar as
sweet and tobacco as bitter, and we all find more natural pleasure in the sweet than in
the bitter. Habit can alter these perceptions, but it cannot abolish our knowledge that
tobacco is not sweet and sugar not bitter. If we do not agree, it means that we are mad
or our senses are impaired. The faculties of imagination and judgment are shaped by the
senses. Imagination (or sensibility) takes the raw material offered it by sense
perceptions and recombines that material in a new way. Although the imagination can
be inventive, it cannot produce anything new; it can only vary what it is given by the
senses. Therefore, whatever affects our imagination powerfully, whatever brings it
pleasure or pain, must have a similar effect on all human beings. Whereas imagination is
linked primarily to immediate perceptions and has about it an almost childlike quality,
judgment is a higher critical faculty that is closely linked to reason. Judgment is gained
through an increase in understanding brought about by a long, close study of the object
of sensation. Still, as it relies on the sense, judgment, too, is common to all men. The
faculty of taste is the mental product of imagination plus judgment. As such, taste is
common to all men; though there are exceptions. Some whose natures are blunt and
cold are deficient in sensibility. If this were the case, or if they have seared their
imaginative faculties through hedonism or avarice, they will suffer from a lack of taste.
On the other hand, if they are deficient in judgment (because they have not thought and
studied hard), they will suffer from bad taste. Taste differs from person to person, not in
kind but in degree. The principles of taste operate the same in all men, but some, due to
a keener sensibility or greater knowledge and discernment, have a fuller, more refined
taste. This view is both democratic and elitist.
101
102
Immanuel Kant
Introduction: The Epistemological Project
Any person is a child until he has understood Kant.
Schopenhauer
To be a philosopher, one must first have been a Kantian.
Hegel
If you dont understand Kant, you cant.
Benito F. Reyes, Founder and late President
World University in Ojai, California
His foremost prerequisite before admitting me
into the Ph.D. program in Philosophy in 1989.
Abstract
Immanuel Kant (17241804) instituted the study we now call Phenomenology, a
movement that turned the eye of philosophy away from the world we seek to know towards
the mind that seeks to know the world. The external universe, according to Kant, remains
ever inaccessible to us; the only information we have available is obtained from the
phenomena, or images, that our mind constructs and interprets from data received and
deduced by the senses.
Not since Aristotle has a philosopher revolutionized the Western philosophical approach
to the world. Kant is the epistemological version of Aristotle (the ontologist). If Aristotle
wrote a treatise on every discipline under the sun, Kant wrote on every single one of our
mental faculties. If Aristotle wrote on politics, ethics, poetry, etc., Kant wrote on and
categorized reason, understanding, imagination and every mode of human perception.
Immanuel Kants work can be called the epistemological project.
Western Philosophy up to Kants time took it for granted that when we looked at the
world, we engaged an objective reality that was out there. The question then was basically
whether or not this engaging with the external universe empirical or rational.
It was empirical if our minds received the data about the world and learned about it in
that manner. It was rational if the mind started off with a picture of the world that was
already implanted within itself.
David Hume, the great advocate of empiricism, disputed the suggestion that we have
any innate knowledge of the world out there. The human mind, according to Hume, was
simply blank, a tabula rasa, at birth, and all human knowledge came to it through
experience. Basic ideas such as cause and effect could not be deduced by pure reason,
because cause and effect could not be proven theoretically; they were merely the sum of
our past experiences.
103
Humes Inquiry Concerning the Human Understanding, where these ideas were written,
reached the desk of Kant, already past middle age, and it roused him from his dogmatic
slumber. Kant felt very strongly that no progress in philosophy could be made until Humes
empiricism had been refuted.
The result is the Critique of Pure Reason (1781).
In this work, Kant shifted his focus from the external world to the mind that comes to
know it. This is known as the famous turn to the subject. These trends led to the
development of a philosophical school called phenomenology.
Kant is the last person whom we should read on Kant. Marcus Herz himself
returned the Critique of Pure Reason manuscript half read fearing insanity if he went on.
Kant disdained giving illustrative examples because he said they would make his book too
long. So he abbreviated it to 800 pages. Only philosophers were expected to read it, and
philosophers needed no illustrative examples.
The word phenomenology comes from the Greek phainomenon, or image.
It is a style of thought that shifts the focus from propositions about the external world
to the image of it in the mind of the subject. External objects are unknowable because
any knowledge of them is mediated to the mind through the senses. The mind receives only
raw sensory data, which it then interprets by forming it into an image and correlating it with
other images and concepts.
The mind is structured in such a way that certain categories of knowing, or ways of
handling the data, are built into it. These categories of knowing, for example space and
time, are not innate knowledge; rather, they are ways of organizing and handling data so as
to create knowledge.
Take this table, for example. It has shape, texture, color, and (if I tap it) sound. The mind
begins by taking in all this data and forming them into a coherent mental image. To do this,
the mind uses inbuilt mechanisms (such as space and time) for constructing images. We
process the image as extending in space and enduring over time, even though in reality no
such thing may be true.
Thus we then have a concept of the table where the image is correlated with memory,
language, and past experience. This complete image is all we will ever know, and so it is
useless to ask whether or not it accurately reflects the world as such.
This approach is neither empirical nor rational. Phenomenology breaks through the
conflict between empiricism and rationalism. The assumption that an objective, external
reality exists is a better hypothesis for understanding the continuity and intersubjectivity of
the world. The basic sameness of the structure of all human minds means that, even though
we do not perceive the Ding an sich directly, we all process the images of them in the
same way, so we can still communicate with one another about them. As a result, our task
is not to understand the world as such, but to understand our experience of the world.
Kant says that there are but two avenues for knowing: reason and the avenue of the
senses.
104
62
Living beings give off infrared radiations because of the warmth of the living body.
105
Not only do our eyes not give us a complete picture of the outside world; our other
sense organs are also unreliable. Sound frequency, for example, is a case in point.
Sound Reception Chart
Frequency in Cycles Per Second (CPS)
Sound is measured in terms of cycles per second (CPS). If the human eye can see only an
infinitesimal portion of the universe, the human ear likewise hears only a tiny portion of the
sounds in the universe. In other words, the human ear cannot hear the majority of all the
sounds going on out there. The outer ear simply picks up sound waves and leads them into
the auditory canal in the direction of the eardrum. Sound vibrations cause the eardrum to
vibrate. This vibration sets up a reaction/s in the malleus, incus, and stapes ossicles (bones)
of the cochlea, which converts the sound waves into nerve impulses. The latter is the
language of the brain.
Mechanical vibrations set up longitudinal waves in matter. When the object vibrates, it
moves the air which pushes the air particles and squeezes them. When vibrating objects
move back, air particles expand. The compression and expansion cause what is known as
the longitudinal wave.
Humans and animals live in different sensory worlds. If you look at the chart above, you
will see that a human being can perceive sounds ranging between 20 and 20,000 cps. The
peaks in this band are what are commonly called sound waves. Sound waves of more than
20,000 cps are called ultrasonic; while those less than 20 cps are called infrasonic waves or
subsonic vibrations. A dogs hearing power ranges between 15 and 50,000 cps. Dogs can
106
also smell at concentrations 1,000 times weaker than humans; that is why they are used at
airports and malls to sniff and detect anything from prohibited drugs to bombs. Your
Halloween Monster costume may scare everybody at a party, but you cannot fool Spot who
will approach you and identify you immediately by the wagging of its tail. Cats have even
keener ears; they can hear sounds 3x better than humans. Cats, however, are color blind. If
your car stops at the red signal of a traffic light, Sultana will wonder what in the world the
matter is.
Bats, whose hearing range reach up to 130,000 cps, squeak in order to deliberately
emit sound waves, and then listen to the reflection. They judge directions and locations of
trees and insects with excellent accuracy by the reflection and the time lag between the
squeak and the echo. They see with their ears. Bats can fly even if they are blind, but not
if they are deaf.
They say porpoises are intelligent aquatic creatures. It has been observed that their
hearing power ranges between 150 cps and 150,000 cps!
Kant offers the notion of unanswerable questions that our senses and our scientific
knowledge cannot comprehend: Do we have a soul? Do we survive after this life ends? Is
there a power beyond usGod perhaps? What happens to us when we die?
Given the limits of my reason and my senses, what can I know and what ought I to do?
What can I hope for?
Is metaphysics possible?
Kant argues that the traditional answers to metaphysical questions like "How can we tell
whether every effect has a cause?" are all wrong. Kant provides a way of classifying types of
statements, with statements like "every effect has a cause" falling into one of his
classifications. Kant asks whether there are any examples of statements that clearly are of
this type. If there were not, maybe the whole program of creating metaphysics is hopeless.
But if there were, we know that some statements with the properties we want for the
truths of metaphysics actually do exist. Will geometry provide examples of such
statements? In this lecture, we will see how geometry provides examples of the existence
of the kind of statements-synthetic a priori statements-required by Kant's view of
metaphysics. We will see that Kant, unlike Newton, locates space in the mind, not in the
outside world. How does Kant establish his view of the nature of space? We will see how
Euclidean geometry is presupposed by him and ask whether Euclidean geometry is
therefore the only one possible. We will raise, but not answer yet, the question of what
Kant's views portend for the philosophy of mathematics, space, time, and human thought.
Finally, we will see how other mathematicians and philosophers of the day also assumed
the necessity of Euclidean space, though in different ways and for different reasons than
Kant did
107
A Philosophic Background
When people think of philosophy, they often think about the branch called
metaphysics.
Metaphysics deals with those questions about reality that transcend any
particular science.
Some examples of metaphysical questions:
1. What exists, if anything, beyond the world of sense perceptions?
2. Are there laws of nature?
3. If there are laws of nature, is it necessary that they be exactly as they are?
4. Must every effect have a cause?
5. What do space and time mean?
6. Do space and time exist independently of our ideas of them?
For the purpose of the present lecture, the most important property of
metaphysical questions is that they are not investigated by the methods of
empirical science.
Near the end of the 18th century, the perceived triumph of Isaac Newton's
physics still left a number of these questions unanswered.
Newton and his followers held that space was real. The reality of space was vital
to Newton's concept of force.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, however, denied that space was real, saying instead
that all that existed was the relations between the physical bodies.
The skeptical philosopher David Hume went so far as to deny that there was
causality in the world.
Kants Prolegomena
Immanuel Kant came down firmly on the side of causality, and he therefore
believed that all events follow determined laws.
Kant's argument for this makes it clear that this is not a question of science, but
a question of metaphysics.
The urgency of the questions about causality motivated Kant to ask whether
metaphysics was possible.
To answer this question, Kant strove to fmd out what kind of statements made
up metaphysics, and whether we had any reason to believe that there were any
statements of this kind.
Kant wrote his Prolegomena [preparatory exercises or observations] to Any
Future Metaphysics to investigate whether propositions that transcend any
particular experience could exist, and if so, how one could come to know their
truth.
We cannot know anything about things in themselves, but the appearances that
constitute our experience.
108
In his writings, Kant focuses on the kind of proposition he calls a judgment, and
he classifies judgments according to how one comes to decide their truth.
A judgment is a statement of the form "A is a B," or as he puts it, subsuming a
particular under a universal. Examples include "The grass is green" or "A
bachelor is unmarried."
We can come to know the truth of some judgments just by analyzing the terms
in them.
Analytic Judgment and Synthetic Judgment
Analytic judgment is one whose predicate is a mere analysis of the subject; in
other words, it is that which truth is determined just by analyzing the terms in it.
Synthetic judgment is one whose predicate contains information not contained
in the subject; or, it is that which truth cannot be determined just by analyzing
the terms so that to decide its truth we must appeal to something ab extra.
To resolve the truth of a proposition whose judgment is synthetic we may appeal
either to sense experience or to something outside sense experience.
A Posteriori Judgment and A Priori Judgment
A posteriori judgments are those we gain from sense experience. They are also
known as empirically based judgments.
A priori judgments are those truths we know independently of sense
experience.
Because there are two sets of two categories, there are now four possible types
of judgments:
1. Analytic a priori.
2. Analytic a posteriori.
3. Synthetic a posteriori.
4. Synthetic a priori.
An analytic a priori judgment exists. It is any judgment that is true by definition.
For example, "A bachelor is not married."
An analytic a posteriori judgment does not exist, because it involves a
contradiction in terms: A bachelor is married.
A synthetic a posteriori judgment exists. It is any nontrivial judgment about the
world of sense experience, albeit requiring an appeal to sense experience. For
example, "The grass is green" or The earth revolves around the sun.
Does a synthetic a priori judgment exist?
Let us turn the question around: "In which of these categories are the judgments
of metaphysics?"
Kant says that they cannot be a posteriori.
For example, we cannot determine whether nature always follows laws by
appealing to experience and observation alone.
109
The judgments of metaphysics are also not analytic, because we do not define
nature as following laws, nor do we define facts as effects that must have
causes. Whether or not they do is precisely the kind of question metaphysics is
supposed to answer.
Ergo, the judgments of metaphysics must be synthetic a priori.
Kant's Prolegomena raises these questions:
1. Do synthetic a priori judgments exist?
2. If so, are there any synthetic a priori judgments whose truth is
unanimously recognized?
3. If so, how do we come to know that they are true, or as Kant puts it,
"How is synthetic a priori knowledge possible?"
4. If there are such judgments, and we can determine their truth by reason,
metaphysics is possible.
Synthetic A Priori Judgments and Geometry
Kant demonstrates that metaphysics is possible by appealing to mathematics.
Mathematics is possible, thanks to the pure intuitions of our faculty of
sensibility.
Mathematics and metaphysics both lay claim to synthetic a priori propositions.
Since mathematics is a well-established field, its synthetic truths are possible a
priori.
It is hoped that this examination will shed light on the possibility of metaphysics
as a science.
Metaphysics must consist of synthetic a priori judgments, and geometry, space,
and time is its province.
Space and time are not things in themselves that we meet with in experience;
rather, they are pure intuitions that help us structure our sensations.
Geometry is not about the empirical world, so its judgments must be a priori,
and not a posteriori.
Geometry comes from our pure intuition of space
Mathematics comes from our pure intuition of timeour concept of numbers is
built from the successive moments in our concept of time.
Are they therefore analytic or synthetic?
To say they are analytic is attractive, since after all, one begins by stating
definitions, and we often analyze the definitions in the course of a proof.
Kant says otherwise: the judgments of geometry are synthetic, and he shows us
why by carefully discussing how we come to know the truth of a particular
110
proposition in geometry: that the sum of the angles of a triangle is two right
angles.
How do we prove synthetically that the sum of the angles of a triangle is two
right angles?
First of all, if this were an analytic judgment, we could have proved it by
analyzing the term "sum of the angles of a triangle."
But you can analyze this term until you turn blue in the face, and what you get is
always three angles (because it is a triangle), three sides (again, because it is a
triangle), and "sum," and we will have no way of breaking that down further into
what that sum is.
Kants synthetic approach to the problem consists in three steps:
1
B
3
C
111
Third, divide the newly-formed exterior angle and create a line through the
corner parallel to the opposite side.
A
4
1
B
5
C
Now, once these structures are created, we can deal with the equality of various
angles, and show that the sum of the angles of the triangle adds up to the sum of
the angles along the straight line at the corner, which form two right angles.
So, what is the essential feature of this proof?
The structure, a feature which we make not on paper but in space.
Space cannot be sensed because it is not empirical.
Space exists in our minds.
We organize our perceptions in space; we say, "To the left" or To the right, etc.
We can imagine a space without objects but we cannot imagine objects without
space.
Space, for Kant, is the form of all possible perceptions.
Space is therefore a pure, unique, a priori intuition of the intellect.
There cannot be any certainty in anything in the world. Even the information
gathered by science depends on our sense organs and instruments. These are
extremely limited and unreliable. The less we know, the more we are certain.
112
Immanuel Kant
Critique of Judgment
113
ocean in a state of tumult; the lofty waterfall of a mighty river, and such like
these exhibit our faculty of resistance as insignificantly small in comparison with
their might. But the sight of them is the more attractive, the more fearful it is,
provided only that we are in security; and we willingly call these objects sublime,
because they raise the energies of the soul above their accustomed height and
discover in us a faculty of resistance of a quite different kind, which gives us
courage to measure ourselves against the apparent almightiness of nature.63
I. The judgment of the beautiful, says Kant, is purely subjective.
A. As in Burke, beauty has nothing to do with the beautiful object per se, but with
the way it is perceived by a subject. In this regard, we might think of Kant as the
epistemological version of Aristotle in his catalogue of the mental faculties.
1. Judgments of beauty are not cognitive but aesthetic.
2. Cognitive judgments presuppose fixed ideas and work to establish fixed
concepts, but aesthetic judgments work through our feelings and neither rest
on any concepts nor seek to generate any.
3. Aesthetic judgments are likewise free of all ends or purposes.
4. Should it seek an end, either in its own subjective perceptions or in the object
perceived, that end is actually an end in itself.
5. Should it seek a purpose, it must be a purposeless purpose.
6. Both subject and object are perceived as being complete and perfect within
themselves: no ulterior end or purpose is needed.
B. Kant clarifies by comparing the beautiful to the pleasurable and the good.
1. Whereas the pleasurable is an interested emotion that seeks some kind
of gratification from the object (eros), the beautiful is purely
disinterested: it seeks nothing from the object and makes no demands on
it (agape).
2. Indeed, it is unconcerned as to whether the object even exists.
3. Whereas the good seeks beauty as a means to some higher end, the
beautiful accepts it, unconditionally, as a finished thing in itself.
C. Though the judgment of beauty is purely subjective, it is, paradoxically,
universally felt: it constitutes a subjective universality. This is a key point in
understanding Kant.
1. What allows the aesthetic to be felt universally is the very fact that it is
purely subjective, untainted by any ulterior interests or inclinations.
2. Because it does not work in accordance with any concepts, because it is a
free and disinterested delight, and because it is even indifferent to the
existence of the object, it is likewise free of all internal prejudice and
external restraint.
3. Both modern and postmodern theorists tend to reject this concept.
4. Modernists deny the possibility of a purely free, disinterested response.
5. Postmodernists deny that any experience of art is universal.
63
114
D.
E.
F.
II.
A.
B.
115
116
64
I have taken this from the book Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic by Immanuel Kant. Edited by
Lewis White Beck. Editors Introduction, p. XXII.
117
Abstract
If Plato is to Socrates, and Aristotle to Plato, and Alexander the Great to
Aristotle, then Schiller is to Kant in the sense that although he carefully preserved the
epistemological slant of his master, Schiller turned that slant by giving a new turn to the
Kantian thesis that the experience of the beautiful is analogous to the experience of the
morally good. Schillers main purpose in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man is
to fuse the Dionysiac and the Apollonian sides of our being, linking these two facets of
our nature to the material (or sensuous) drive (Stofftrieb) and the formal (or spiritual)
drive (Formtrieb), and then uniting these two opposing drives into a third: the play drive
(Spieltrieb). Schiller believes that the state of true aesthetic freedom is achieved only by
the Spieltrieb which acts as mediator between the Stofftrieb and the Formtrieb, thus
allowing both sides of our human nature to be fully developed, integrated and unified.
The Spieltrieb is an aesthetic impulse which allows us to transcend our inner and outer
constraints, thereby enabling us to experience physical, emotional, and spiritual
freedom.
Lastly, we shall see how Schiller links the play drive both to beauty and to culture,
and how he uses this connection to ensure for poetry a position in society that is even
more essential than that of philosophy.
Schiller integrated Kants epistemology and Plato's ontology and as a result came up
with one of the most successful aesthetics theories in critical history. The Letters on the
Aesthetic Education of Man demonstrate the crucial role of artistic experience in
healthy human development, thus allowing for mental health in the individual and
society.
Schiller romanticizes the theories of Kant.
On the one hand, he expands on the epistemological theories of Kant.
Beauty remains a subjective experience that is free and indifferent.
The free play of mental powers is still put at center stage.
The privileging of aesthetic form over didactic content continues.
118
Out of the fusion of these two drives emerges the play drive.
Schillers term is not meant to be derogatory.
Man, he says, is only fully human when he plays.
The play drive, by simultaneously fusing (and transcending) the other two drives, sets us
free from both the physical restraints of nature (sensuous) and the moral restraints of
reason (formal).
The play drive is incarnational; it creates a living form.
The play drive effects a marriage between sensuous and formal, between objective
nature and subjective mind, between the concrete (particular) and the abstract
(universal).
A Biblical analogy: just as our final heavenly form will not be pure spirit but spirit joined
to a glorious resurrection body, so the end product of a play drive is not an abstract,
bodiless idea (Platos Form) but a general timeless form imbued with a particular,
dynamic life.
In that divine, transcendent moment of play, the universal lifts the concrete up into
itself, the form consumes the matter.
The play drive is equivalent to beauty: both are purely aesthetic.
Schiller ascribes a unique role to beauty.
As with Kant, beauty is indifferent; it is neither useful nor didactic.
It teaches us nothing and supplies us with not particular knowledge.
It provides us instead with a totality, a perfect wholeness; within that whole we find all
the faculties existing in a higher harmony.
To experience that wholeness is to enter into a pure aesthetic mood, a state of
suspension beyond the confines of time and space.
In that mood, we experience true freedom, true play, and true unity.
Through beauty (and the sublime) we are empowered to give form to that which is
formless in nature.
When we do so, we gain an epistemological, suprasensible victory over nature that frees
us from our deepest fears.
Still, Schiller is careful (Kant is not) to hold on to physical reality; the contemplation of
form must not be cut off from the feeling of life.
Schillers aesthetics turns Plato on his head.
Beauty proves to us that feeling and thought can occur together.
Ergo, an education in beauty is best able to lead us back to that original, nave unity that
we have lost.
Beauty, because it most fully fuses the concrete and the universal, body and soul, is
better suited than philosophy to heal the disunity within.
It is the poets, not the philosophers, who are best qualified to form whole, integrated
citizens who will know justice and live justly.
120
Abstract
Hegel contended that the whole of world history unfolds according to a divine
and necessary logic. History unfolds dialectically, i.e., according to a logic in
which every conflict is subsumed in a higher unity. This unfolding is the process
by which Geist, the universal Mind or divine Spirit, alienates itself in the external
world, but eventually comes back to itself in self-knowledge. The Christian
religion represents this self-alienation and self-knowledge of the Divine in a
powerful but mythological way, and Hegel thinks his own philosophy is the
subsumption of this mythological representation into a philosophical concept,
through which the divine Spirit becomes fully conscious of itself for the first
time.
Essential reading:
Avineri, Schlomo. Hegels Theory of the Modern State. Cambridge, 1974.
Fackenheim, The Religious Dimension of Hegels Thought, chapters 5 and 6.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Phnomenologie des Geistes.
Introduction, Revealed Religion and Absolute Knowledge (pp. 46-57, 458478, 479-493).
______________. Introduction to the Philosophy of History (trans. Leo Rauch).
Indianapolis, 1988.
Inwood, M. J. (Ed.). Hegel Selections. Macmillan, 1989.
The key term, Geist, means both Mind and Spirit (like French esprit).
121
122
3. Hence the overall dialectic of history: Geist externalizes itself in the world,
then comes back to itself, recognizing itself in the development of historical
self-consciousness.
4. Thus philosophy, which appears to start out treating Geist as object, is
revealed in the end as the expression of Geist as subject: philosophical
knowledge is Geist as subject coming to know itself as object (Hegel calls this
absolute knowledge).
Professor Darren Staloff, of the City College of New York, succinctly sums
up Hegels philosophy of history in four tightly packed sentences. I have
taken the liberty to replace the word Spirit (which Professor Staloff
prefers) with the original word Geist for reasons I have already stated
above.
1. History is the dialectical process whereby Geist comes to know
itself and realizes its Idea.
2. Freedom is the idea of Geist and Geist is Reason in and for itself.
3. The means of this realization, or cunning of Reason, is the
passions of the individual as both subject and object of history,
and its form is the State.
4. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the
dusk.
History is the dialectical process whereby Geist comes to know itself and
realizes its Idea.
1. By history is meant world history as it is philosophically conceived, or
the sum of human experience as understood under a rational
conception. The keyword here is rational: if you looked at the world
rationally, the world looks back at you rationally. The job of the
philosopher of history, therefore, is to search for that rational
explanation of history.
2. Dialectical refers to the inter-relating triad of thesis-antithesissynthesis (terms Hegel himself rarely used). One example Hegel uses
to illustrate his famous triad in the case of the family, civic society,
and the state: undifferentiated unity-differentiated disunitydifferentiated unity.
3. Undifferentiated unity refers to the unity of the family which is bound
by love and affection for one another. It is undifferentiated because
that unity is not broken down into distinct individuals with their own
selfish interests and agendas.
4. Differentiated disunity refers to civic society of the economic market
place where each individual has his own agenda which comes in
conflict with anothers.
123
65
Hegel, Philosophy of Right: Preface. In Hegel Selections. (M. J. Inwood, Ed.). Macmillan, p. 287.
124
125
Abstract
Hegels Philosophy of Fine Art achieves what is perhaps the best refutation of
mimesis (in the Platonic sense) by positing a Platonic Form that, rather than remain pure
and untainted in the World of Being seeks to journey through the spirit in order to
enter into our World of Becoming. This Hegelian Idea moves through three distinct
phases (the symbolic, the classical, and the romantic) in its search of a total and
sensuous incarnation. We shall discover how each of these phases is linked to a specific
artistic medium.
Art is an end in itself. It is never a means to an end. Art is a product of the human spirit.
It serves no utilitarian purpose.
Hegel says that art is not mimesis. The latter assumes that art is lesser than nature. But
art is a product of the human spirit, and being so, art is therefore the truly higher form.
Because art derives itself from the human spirit, and spirit is above nature, it should be
regarded as a higher and more beautiful form than nature itself.
Because of this "journey through the spirit, a work of art stands higher than a natural
product.
The true role of art serves no external purpose, only the internal manifestation of truth:
Art's vocation is to unveil the truth in the form of sensuous artistic configuration, to set
126
forth the reconciled opposition just mentioned, and so to have an end and aim in itself,
in this very setting forth and unveiling. (p. 55)
In art, Hegel perceives the dissolution of opposition, "not in the sense...that the
opposition and its two sides do not exist at all, but that they exist reconciled" (p. 55).
The root of Hegel's high regard for art becomes apparent here, when he perceives in art
the almost holy ability, not to eliminate opposition, but to truly resolve it with what is
true. He sees in art the highest ideal of truth expressed in sensuous form, the spirit
manifest in the physical world.
I.
127
129
130
131
132
Wordsworths and Coleridges plan calls for a new kind of mimesis that
rather than simply imitate or even perfect its object, transforms it into
something rich and strange.
Nature (or super nature) is merely the occasion for the poem;
the poetic act itself (the transformation) is the real point.
It is about the subject, not the object.
It is not the rules of decorum but the imaginative vision of the
poet that determines the shape and end of the poem.
More radically, the plan of Lyrical Ballads carries out a supreme form of
epistemology in which objects (things) take their ultimate nature not
from what they are, but from how they are perceived by the poet.
In this, Wordsworth and Coleridge were certainly influenced
by William Blakes Songs of Innocence and Experience.
In this work, Blake demonstrates how the same images and
events take on a different coloring, form, and reality when
viewed through the eyes of innocence and experience.
The subtitle of his workshewing the two contrary states of
the human soulcaptures perfectly the radical Romantic
belief that things are as they are perceived and that we
half create the world around us.
This concept lies behind the Romantic faith that of the doors
of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as
it is: infinite.
This new, more radical epistemology places the poet and his
perceptions at the center of literary theory; poetry is now
to be regarded as self-expression, as a journal of the
unique perceptions of an individual.
Lyrical Ballads shifted old 18th century notions of decorum that declared
certain subjects unfit for poetry.
The rustics created by Wordsworth would have been subjects
for comedy in the 18th century; Wordsworth ennobles
them.
Lyrical Ballads mixes the realms of the real and the ideal.
Indeed, it sees the ideal in the real, the supernatural in the
natural (and vice versa).
Not only does Lyrical Ballads often take children as its subject,
but it also privileges their nave sense of wonder, their
freshness, and innocence over the refined urbanity and
studied wit of the 18th century.
133
William Wordsworth
Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads
134
1. He rejected the fake poetic diction of the 18th century, with its deliberately
contorted syntax and artificial poeticisms.
2. He adopted a more natural, less affected, style that mimicked the syntax of
good prosethe real language of men.
3. Seventeen years later, Coleridge would object to the above phrase, saying
that Wordsworth went too far in his praise of rustic manners of speech.
4. Wordsworth, however, tempered his expressivism with a mimetic focus by
asserting that the poet should not slavishly imitate the rustic, but, through a process of
selection, purge natural speech of its grossness.
III.
136
Of all the English Romantic theorists, Coleridge was the most erudite.
He possessed a photographic memory. He also spoke Latin, Greek, Hebrew,
German, French, and Italian.
He not only imported German philosophy and theory to England but also
interpreted the finer points of German philosophy and theory to the more pragmatic
English.
Biographia Literaria is Coleridges Poetics, and is very much influenced by
German theory. Indeed, his reading of Kant and Schilling has been so accurate that he
has been accused of plagiarism. Despite a series of almost verbatim paraphrases,
however, his work yet offers a unified, compelling, original synthesis of literary theory
that renders accessible many German abstractions.
At the heart of his philosophical and theoretical views lies a vital distinction
between two opposing yet complementary types of thinkers: the natural philosopher
and the transcendental philosopher.
A. The natural philosopher begins his journey, his theoretical and aesthetic
education, with nature (object) and moves upward toward mind
(subject).
1. His starting point is empirical, a posteriori, observations; his
method of reasoning is induction; and his goal is general laws
and truths.
2. His purpose, he writes, is to effect the perfect spiritualization
of all the laws of nature into laws of intuition and intellect.
3. The natural philosopher who does not complete his journey
risks falling into the dead-end of materialism: the belief that all
that exists is matter and that the spiritual is an illusion.
4. Wordsworth is a true natural philosopher, as evinced by Lyrical
Ballads, because he transforms the natural into the
supernatural, the mundane into the exotic, observation into
mystical perception.
B. The transcendental philosopher begins his journey with a transcendent
mind (subject) and moves downward toward nature (object).
137
II.
139
2. There is no essential link between the idea and the picture: one
simply stands in for the other, with the picture remaining
merely that.
3. In a symbol, however, the abstract notion (the salvific blood of
Christ) is seen in and through they physical symbol (the
communion wine).
4. In the symbol, specific and general, temporal and eternal,
concrete and universal meet and fuse in an almost mystical,
incarnational way.
D. Coleridge, echoing Aristotle and Kant, uses the phrase concrete
universal to denote the highest forms of organic wholes and symbols.
1. To call a poem a concrete universal is to say that, within the
microcosm of the poem, a universal idea has been fully realized
in a concrete form.
2. Just as Christ, via the esemplastic power of the Incarnation,
became both fully Man and fully God, so the concrete universal
effects a full fusion of an abstract, non-physical idea and a
specific, physical image.
3. The mystical, reciprocal relationship that forms within such
poems is timeless; it is as if the concrete image descends and
dwells within the image.
140
John Keats
Negative Capability and the Egotistical Sublime
"....several things dovetailed in my mind, and at once it struck me, what quality went to
form a man of achievement especially in literature which Shakespeare possessed so
enormouslyI mean negative capability, that is when man is capable of being in
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason"
John Keats (1795-1821)
The Romantic poet John Keats formulated the phrase Negative Capability in a
letter to his brothers George and Thomas on 21 December 1817. In this letter he
defined his new concept of writing:
I mean negative capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties,
mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason66
66
141
142
Shelleys Defense of Poetry gathers together all the key Romantic theories.
A. He treats fully the Romantic privileging of imagination over reason.
1. In the 18th century, theorists celebrated analysis for its ability to
study, to calculate, and to discern the differences between
things.
2. Shelly the Romantic championed synthesis for its ability to
shape and color, to perceive value, and to discover and even
create similitude.
3. Shelley also turns Plato on his head by asserting that reason
(analysis) is to imagination (synthesis) as the shadow is to the
substance.
4. It is poetry that is most real, poetry that comes closest to the
infinite; science (reason) is a passing, temporary thing with no
integral unity.
5. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in
man.
B. Shelley describes in detail the nature and ramifications of Romantic
inspiration.
1. The true poet is like an Aeolian harp: a small stringed
instrument that produces natural music when the wind blows
through its strings.
2. In like manner, inspiration blows through the poet, causing him
to create.
3. Though Shelley, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, does state that
the poet modulates the wind of inspiration, he nevertheless
presents the poet more as a passive recipient of imagination
than as an active artisan.
4. No poet can say, I will compose poetry; instead, only when
the unpredictable spirit of inspiration falls upon him can he
create.
5. This, however, causes much angst, for inspiration leaves as
quickly as it arrives; the poet is like a fading coal that burns
out even as it burns.
6. If only we could hold on to that fire, we would be like gods, but
alas, its departure is as mysterious as its arrival.
C. Still, while it lasts, inspiration transforms the poet into a poet-prophet.
143
II.
1. Like all the Romantics, Shelley exalts the poet as a sort of divine
conduit.
2. The poet transforms all that he perceives by bringing it into
harmony with beauty and the good, with the eternal, the
infinite, and the one.
3. He removes the twin veils of mystery and familiarity to reveal
Truth. Thus, Romantic poetry can be called apocalyptic.
4. He does so in solitude, far from the city, yet he is not alone; for
each poet contributes a stanza to the eternal poem that is still
being written.
5. Just as each poet-prophet is linked to this greater poem, so are
all the poets of a given age linked to a single, all-penetrating
spirit.
6. Shelly felt so strongly the influence of this unifying spirit which
he called zeitgeist.
7. Shelley saw himself and his fellow poets as trumpets of this
spirit.
Although not wholly original, he nevertheless incorporates into his Defense
three unique concepts.
A. Shelleys Defense is not just an abstract apologia.
1. He wrote his Defense in direct response to Thomas Love
Peacocks The Four Ages of Poetry, a satirical essay that
argued that the growth and progress of society was slowly
rendering poetry obsolete.
2. Shelly counters by arguing for the moral and social uses of
poetry.
B. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.
1. Poetry, by awakening and enlarging the mind, both leaves us
open and receptive to beauty and love and enables us to move
out of ourselves.
2. It sensitizes us to the needs of others, allows us to put ourselves
in their place (empathy) and see the world from their
perspective (negative capability).
3. He cannot conceive what the moral state of our world would be
had Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton never livedthey are our
true moral teachers.
4. It is poetry that impels us to rise above base and selfish desires,
that inspires in us virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship.
C. Poetry is actually more useful and necessary in an age of progress.
1. At present, we have more political knowledge, more
philosophical ideas, more scientific facts and figures than we
know what to do with.
2. We have bitten off more than we can chew.
144
145
146
mountains, went sailing with local folk, listened to the tales of sailors and fisherboys, and rode the red pony to Rathbroughan to play with the Land Agents
children at sailing toy boats in the river there.69
Later, many of the images in his poetry would draw from the Sligo background.
Pre-Raphaelite Yeats
Before he wrote the major poems, Yeats wrote according to the dying preRaphaelite tradition, his early poetry branching out into two main directions: the
artificial ballads based on Irish folklore and legend
When I play with my fiddle in Dooney,
Folk dance like a wave of the sea;
My cousin is priest in Kilvarnest,
My brother in Mocharabuiee.70
and the densely symbolic personal lyrics, often love poems.71 Notice the
hushed, sleepy tone brooding everywhere in the following poem:
Far off, most secret, and inviolable Rose,
Enfold me in my hour of hours; where those
Who sought thee in the Holy Sepulchre,
Or in the wine-vat, dwell beyond the stir
And tumult of defeated dreams; and deep
Among pale eyelids, heavy with the sleep
Men have named beauty. The great leaves enfold
The ancient beards, the helms of ruby and gold
Of the crowned Magi; and the king whose eyes
Saw the Pierced Hands and Rood of the Elder rise
In Druid vapour and make the torches dim;
Till vain frenzy awoke and he died; and him
Who met land walking among the flaming dew
By a grey shore where the wind never blew.
And lost the world and Emer for a Kiss;
And him who drove the gods out of their liss,
And till a hundred morns and flowered red
Feasted, and wept the barrows of his dead;
And the proud dreaming king who flung the crown
And sorrow away, and calling bard and clown
69
147
148
theories: the poet eventually and inevitably became public only after he had become
private.78 It is probably another way of saying, find your own voice first. When Yeats
found his in Responsibilities (1914)with a little help from Ezra Poundthe style
became drier and more concrete. There were no more Celtic Twilights.
The Background of A Vision
The Victorian Age was a paradoxical age. It was an age of material success, but it
was also an age which saw children wasting away in the coal mines. It was an age of
commercial prosperity, but it saw tubercular women coughing out blood in steaming
sweatshops. It was an age of science and technology, but it was an age that denied
education to all but the rich and influential. It was an age of prosperity and poverty, of
righteousness and hypocrisy, of splendor and squalor. Indeed, it was the best of times, it
was the worst of times.
All over Victorian England and Western Europe, young men of the new thought
began to question the materialistic, rationalistic universe painted by Darwin and
Lamarck. Both men offered little to western man but evidence of his own mediocrity.
The new science that they had introduced disproved all orthodox conceptions of
creation and had threatened every traditional mode of thinking. The young rebelled
against this kind of thinking. Yeats was one of them. At the end of the 19 th century, his
rejection of positivist science was so strong that he hated it with a monkish hate.79
The fact that he could not find the answers in Christianity made matters worse. And
Victorian religion of the Anglican type was just as bad. The old evangelicalism of the
desiccated Church provided nothing but dogmas and pat interpretations that oversimplified the human predicament. To him, the priests were no worse than the
scientists of the day in perverting doctrines to suit their agendas. Priests were
thwarting, instead of satisfying, the true spiritual hunger of men.
Science had failed and religion had failed. Surely there was another way of
discovering the truth. Like the young Goethe, Yeats during this phase of his life was
destitute of faith, yet terrified at skepticism, a zealot in search of a creed.80
The Theosophical Influence
Because science was held suspect,81 and religion itself became demystified,82 a
new doctrine purporting to be an ancient one was being developed by a strange but
remarkable Russian lady who went by the name of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. The
movement called itself Theosophy.
78
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 6.
80
Ellman, p. 42.
81
George Bernard Shaws confidence in Lamarcks contention that the giraffe had secured its long neck by
willing it was shared by a few.
82
Matthew Arnolds pathetic assurances of the adaptability of Christianity had aroused little zeal.
79
149
A this time, Yeats had been reading Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Mallarme,
Baudelaire, and Balzac in the dim hope of finding something in them, but he must have
felt like Keatss watcher of the skies when he personally met Blavatsky in London. She
told him pointblank: Man had never been an ape. Modern science is ancient thought
distorted, and modern religion ancient thought distorted. 83 She attacked modern
Christianity, and accused the priesthood of engendering modern materialism, because
priests denied man the complexity of human experience.
Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. It appealed to him
immediately, because although it attacked materialist science, it used the scientific
method in its pursuit of the truth; although it repudiated atheism, it supported anticlericalism; and although it denounced modern man, it offered man the opportunity to
become god-like.84 Theosophy assured Yeats the validity of his anti-materialist, anticlerical misgivings. But most important, Theosophy accepted the realities of ghosts and
fairies. This time, he could incorporate all the fairy tales and folklores of his boyhood in
Sligo. Now he was equipped with the right weapons for his fight against materialism.
And now he was furnished with an occult tradition much more sensible and profound
than modern rationalist science and Christianity.
What precisely did Yeats find in Theosophy that attracted him to it? First of all,
the society made available to him the hidden side of things. One main reason why it was
founded was because Blavatsky and her group sought to penetrate the unsolved
problems of science and psychology,85 Europe and America being at both extremes too
materialistic and too superstitious. Blavatsky proposed to reorient the West on the
teachings of Eastern Wisdom in order to break the narrowness and rigidities of the
contemporary mental climate.86
Blavatskys contribution to modern thought is acknowledged by Indian author C.
Jinarajadasa, as the first to build a bridge between religion, science, philosophy, and
art, and to construct that intellectual edifice in which thousands live today. 87
Yeats himself would write of her:
A great, passionate nature, a sort of female Dr. Johnson, impressive, I
think to every man or woman who had themselves any richness . . .
almost always full of gaiety that, unlike the occasional joking of those
about her, was illogical and incalculable and yet always kindly and
tolerant.88
Blavatsky gave him access to her Isis Unveiled and to A. P. Sinnetts Esoteric
Budhism.89 He also read Eliphas Levis History of Magic, and pored over these daily
83
150
because they gave him the ammunition to purify himself through meditation. On the
other hand, he simultaneously joined the Hermetic Students of the Golden Dawn in a
effort to quench his thirst for magic through alchemical and psychic experiments90
which Theosophy had denied him.
Parfait Magicien des Lettres
Membership in the Golden Dawn was made available through his friend, Liddell
Mathers, later to become MacGregor Mathers, and finally MacGregor, translator of The
Kabbalah Unveiled. Yeats, who was seriously interested in magic, frequented the
Mathers house at Forrest Hill. The house became in his imagination a romantic
place.91
A word about magic, as Yeats perceived it: The word itself is derived from the
Persian mag, priest. The ancient Persian priests were called Magi, magicians. This
Magian cult of the Zoroastrian order became the nucleus of ancient occultism. Magic in
this sense meant mastery of the occult forces of nature, a term indicating the existence
of such forces, and the possibility of mastery or control of them.92
The Problem of Obscurity and the Problem of Escapism
French Symbolism approximates the convictions laid out earlier above, because
symbolism affirmed that what was reality could not be found in the objective world,
which is just a reflection of the invisible world, but somewhere else. This was Platonism
revived, very well put by Yeats:
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things.93
Plato taught that there were two worlds: the world of Becoming and the world
of Being. We perceive the world of Becoming through our senses, through nature. The
world of Being is the world of ideas, ideals, types, universals, and Forms. It is a
paradigm or pattern crudely reflected by things in the world of Becoming, a Form
(Platos term) which our senses cannot fully apprehend, hence ghostly. Thus nature is
like a foam, or spume, that plays upon an insensible pattern.94
How did the Symbolists proceed in tapping the world of Being?
89
It will be immediately seen that . . . only one *d+ is found on the cover ,of Sinnetts book+. The basis
for this discrepancy lies in the Sanscrit root, Budh- to know, wisdom. The word Budha, means wisdom or
Vidya, divine knowledge.Sinnetts Note to the Wizard Edition of Esoteric Budhism. Vide Bidliography.
90
Unterecker, p. 20.
91
Jeffares, p. 53.
92
William Walker Atkinson, pp. 63-64.
93
W. B. Yeats. Among School Children. Collected Poems, pp. 212-214.
94
Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn.
151
Yeats would answer this question by explaining not what the Symbolists did but
what they avoided. In reacting to Naturalism as being too specific, and Panassianism as
being too clear-cut, the French Symbolists rejected narration, description, and rhetoric
altogether. They differed from their Romantic forebears by avoiding the romantic traps
of sentimentality, didacticism, and direct statements. (Preminger, 836 ff.) Symbolist
poetry was poetry of indirection and of subtlety. The aim was toward indefiniteness of
language, with emphasis on connotation. The objective was not to declare, declaim,
depict, or transcribe, but merely to suggest the complexity and dilemma of human
experience. (Temple, 153)
Two counts were thrown against the Symbolists: that of obscurity and that of
escapism. The Symbolists admitted these consequences. They could not be helped. The
poet, withdrawing from the world in order to communicate unique personal feelings,
because he is expressing a private world, must necessarily be obscure and difficult.
(Brooks, Modern Poetry, 54) To arouse a response deeper than the realm of
consciousness, they used words for magical suggestiveness. The ideas, however, were
not delegated to the background. On the contrary, they believed that ideas were of
primary importance in poetry, except that they ought to be presented through symbols.
Intensity and complexity were to be achieved through syntax and images unified by one
main metaphor. A suggestive atmosphere pervades, as an inevitable consequence, for
one cannot pinpoint any definiteness in a symbolist poem.
Yeats wrote along this vein, and because he did so, he became heir apparent to
charges of obscurantism.
Kabbalistic Experiments and Studies
MacGregor made use of magical symbols and other paraphernalia in his
experiments. Yeats recalls the procedure:
He gave me a cardboard symbol and I closed my eyes. Sight
came slowly imagined it. (Jeffares, 53)
Reconciling Blavatsky and MacGregor, Yeats let his mind swim in a flurry of
images, and the effect on his writing was such that his style became more sensuous
and vivid. (Jeffares, 53)
The following item, taken from the Ten Sephiroth by MacGregor, is an example
of the kind of Kabbalisitc material studied by Yeats during this period.
In their totality . . . Scandinavians. (Unterecker, 21-22)
The one great Tree was the Integral Adam, the Protogonos. (Later Neo-Platonists
would suggest a more coherent system than the one quoted above, but Yeats,
perennially in search of organic unity, would ignore them, as he poured deeper into the
symbolism of the Tree):
The tree which is mitigated (that is, the path of the Kingdom of . . .
good and evil). (Unterecker, 22)
Of what use were such studies? First of all, they gave Yeats a rich stock of
imagery from which to draw for the rest of his life. Stocked with multiple, antithetical,
152
and secret meanings for trees, birds, roses, stars, and wells, Yeats delighted in
constructing puzzles which had not only clear over meanings but which could as well be
rightly interpreted in an almost unlimited number of ways. (Brooks, Hidden God, 44)
Every symbol, every organ of the body had its correspondence in the stars. Therefore, all
occult symbols were attuned to the great universal law, and any interpretation of them
was right. The only danger was the tendency to oversimplify the meanings, to lay
things on the thin line of allegory. Following Aristotle, poetry, to Yeats, was mimesis,
and to imitate life was to reject oversimplifications. Simple, airtight interpretations
carried no universal convictions.
The New Myth
The esoteric readings proved to be both poetically useful and emotionally
satisfying. Henceforth, the mystical life was to become for him the center of all that I
do and all that I think and all that I write. (Jefferes, 22) This was going to be the first
step away from his agnostic fathers intellectual leading strings. (Jeffares, 22)
Studying and struggling to penetrate the secrets of the hidden world, his
obsession now was to search for a philosophy that may prove to our logical capacity
that there is a transcendental portion of our being that is timeless and spaceless.
(Brooks, Hidden God, 45)
Why did Yeats contrive the New Myth?
First of all, he felt that he was robbed of his religion. He wanted a system of
truth that would leave my imagination free to create as it chose. (Brooks, Modern
Poetry, 176) It was a search for a richer and more imaginative account of mans total
experience which will provide continuity with the values and symbols of ancient
worship. He was looking for something more coherent than just a fairy tale, something
more objectively responsible to historical facts than mere subjective reveries.
As earlier stated, Christianity could not provide such an account, because it had
been denatured by Victorian compromises, and directly challenged by Darwin and
Huxley. Yeats himself compared the majority of bishops with bad writers as being
obviously atheists, in the sense that as they tended to oversimplify the poetic
experience, they also denied the mystery of the human predicament, the missed the
drama of the human spirit. (Brooks, Modern Poetry, 174)
After his marriage to Georgie Hyde-Lees, both husband and wife lived for a while
in Ashdown Forest. Mrs. Yeats noticed that her husband was beset by personal worries.
Four days after their marriage, Mrs. Yeats tried to cheer up her husband by attempting
to fake automatic writing. To her astonishment, strange words, phrases, and sentences
started shaping up. The subjects were totally alien to her. Yeats, convinced that she had
tapped on something extraordinary, urged his wife to go on. They devoted some hours
to it daily. (Jeffares, 191) For almost a year, she had filled her notebooks with spiritual
communications. Yeats ceased to worry now, because he was engrossed in interpreting
the messages. After they left Ashdown Forest, Yeats wrote of his wife as a perfect wife,
kind and unselfish. She has made my life serene and full of order. (Jeffares, 192)
153
Later, Mrs. Yeats began to talk in her sleep. Yeats asked questions, codified, and
then arranged the answers. From the hundreds of notebooks, A Vision emerged.
The first edition is dated 1925, but was published in January 1926.
154
155
Yeatss gyre looks like two superimposed cones facing outwards, the west part
being the solar, and its opposite the lunar. The figure above shows this pair of
interpenetrating cones. Here is Yeatss explanation of a gyre in A Vision:
A line is a symbol of time . . . conflict. (A Vision, )
The gyres expand and contract, the zenith of each coinciding with the base of the
other. The cones symbolize the antithetical elements in man: the subjective and the
objective. Each man is to some extent subjective, though he may be predominantly
objective, and vice versa.
Civilization, too, has a simultaneous rise and decline of subjectivity and
objectivity. In the first half of each subcycle, the simultaneous rise and decline a-b and cd would take 500 years. In the same figure, a-b would be equivalent to Phases 1-15 of
the moon which is historically from 1 A.D. to 500 A.D., the Byzantine civilization under
Justinian the Great. In the same manner, c-d is equivalent to Phases 16-28, historically
from 500 A.D. to 1000 A. D., the Middle Ages. The symbolism is repeated in the second
half so that a-b and c-d which take 500 years to complete, and in which a-b is equivalent
to Phases 1-15, and equivalent in turn to the period from 1000 A. D. to 15 A. D., which
is the Renaissance, travels toward the 2000-year cycle which would reach its zenith in
the year 2000.
The poem, The Second Coming (Collected Poems, 184-85) is faithful to the
historical system set out in A Vision. The pattern of the double interpenetrating cones is
worked out more systematically with the inclusion of the paired metaphor of the circling
falconry of the first stanza.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worse
Are full of passionate intensity.
One way to see the poems relation to the historical system of A Vision is to
divide it into two parts: the first part says that great changes are taking place in the
world, and the poet says it in seven different ways. Lines 1-2 are about the metaphor of
falconry. Taken by themselves these lines are not recognizable as metaphor, but the
next line proclaims itself and the previous lines as metaphor, because as the gyre
widens, Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.
This image of the widening gyre is reminiscent of Dantes Divine Comedy.
Movement in Dantes spiritual world is not in a straight line but in a spiral.
156
Figure 3. A Gyre
The Inferno, for example, relates how Dante and Vergil find themselves in the
eighth circle of Hell, seated on Geryons back. The image of Geryon is seen rising from
the dark pith with the body shaped like the path of a gyre upon a cone.96
Yeats, carefully vague, hints at the finality of it all. The falcons getting to where
it cannot hear the falconer is not literally an instance of things falling apart. In the real
world, there is revolution. So it is that the blood-dimmed tide of violence, or tide
dimmed by blood, is loosed unto our world to drown the ceremony of innocence.
Ceremony because only in ceremony are found the vestiges of the sort of order the
speaker knew, because only ceremony opposes all violence symbolized by the blooddimmed tide.
That tide has moved: fanatical men have seized powerthe worst are full of
passionate intensityto rule a world in which the good have lacked all conviction.
Falcons ought not to get out of control, things ought not to fall apart. Anarchy and
bloodshed are abominable, and centers therefore ought to hold. Innocence is a good
thing and ought not to be drowned; the best ought not to lack conviction, and the worst
ought not to be dominated by passion.
The falcon may be interpreted as man himself losing touch with the real
Christianity of two millennia ago. The falconer can be the Christ Himself who began the
2000-year cycle.
The second part says that these great changes are comparable to the changes
brought about by the Advent, the Parousia. Why is the rough beast indifferent to the
desert birds who are indignant? Does this reveal that the Christs first coming was like
a nightmare to the people of 1 B. C.?
. . . but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle . . .
The poem closes with a question: what will these great changes bring?
96
Vide Dantes Vision of Hell in the Inferno, Canto xvii, any edition.
157
What rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to
be born?
A VISION: PSYCHOLOGICAL
Very early in his career, Yeats had already established for himself the following
set of psychological convictions:
1. That the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many minds can
flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single
energy.
2. That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that or memories are a
part of one great memory, the memory of nature herself.
3. That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols. (Wilson,
47-48)
158
metaphors, symbols, and images through which whatever is most morbid or strange is
defined. (A Vision, 64)
Yeats, Giorgione, and many beautiful women fall Under the frenzy of the
fourteenth moon where The soul begins to tremble into stillness,/ To die into the
labyrinth of itself. (A Vision, 65)
The Phase of man, however, does not necessarily coincide with the historical
phase. Yeats, for example, assigns himself to Phase 17, but his historical phase is on
Phase 23. Shelley and Dante likewise belong to this phase. This interplay of tension is
intricate, for Yeats himself gave no tangible guide to follow as to how he would assign a
particular person to a particular phase. The point to consider is the fact that the
psychological system is founded on the conflict of opposites. Ultimate reality could be
found not in any one of them but in their interaction.
The implication of this Yeatsian conception is that man is really two men. There
is the given man, whether by birth or environment, and there is the significant man
made by the first. One proof of this split was the verbal distinction common in the 19 th
century between character and personality, the latter in some way the conscious
product of the former. This splitting up of the personality was dramatized later in
Stevensons Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885) and Wildes Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).
Stevensons distinction between the civilized Dr. Jekyll and the animalistic Mr. Hyde is
similar to that between Doran and his picture. Max Beerbohms Happy Hypocrite (1896)
takes up the same theme of a certain rake named Lord George Hell who falls in love
with an innocent girl and woos her behind the mask of a saint and under the name of
Lord George Heaven.
Not only in their works but in their personal lives was this movement working.
Oscar Wilde, because he was gay, led a double life. He felt the split acutely and founded
much of his art upon the tension between the pose and the real self, the importance of
being and of not being earnest. The first duty in life, he said, is to assume a pose;
what the second is not one yet has found out. (Ellman, 71) Lionel Johnson and Aubrey
Beardsley were poseurs. Even James Joyce, growing up in this atmosphere, felt
compelled to construct the enigma of a manner. (Ellman, 72) Walter Pater, who lived
a cloistered life at Oxford, wrote and rewrote his works so that his finished products
resembled as little as possible to the ones that had come initially into his head. (Ellman,
72) Mallarme fabricated a separate life from perverse syntax and verbal subtlety
divorced from common speech. Paul Valerys Monsieur Teste and Madame Teste (the
former a stylist, mathematician, and symbolist; and the latter the sociable,
commonplace wife who understood him hardly at all) were easily recognizable as the
two parts of Valerys own mind.
Now we may understand the prevalence at this period of the pseudonym, for the
pseudonym symbolized the duality which resulted from the dissociation of the
personality. Many of Yeatss friends adopted pseudonyms: W. K. Magee changed his
Irish-sounding name to the more euphonic English-sounding John Eglinton; Oscar Wilde,
on leaving England, adopted the name Sebastian Melmoth in order to eliminate
amiable, irrepressible Oscar completely; William Sharp became Fiona Macleod, and so
did he fully assume the personality of a woman that he wrote under her name books in
159
a style different from his own, wrote in a feminine handwriting, and almost collapsed
under the strain of a double life; and of course George Russell, whose AE is derived from
Aeon, the name of the heavenly man, a state to which he aspired. (Ellman, 75) George
Bernard Shaw was in no way exempted from this movement, and even if he did not
assume a pseudonym, he approached the matter in another way. In his preface to an
early novel, Immaturity, he said that he was too shy to accept invitations that he had to
hide timidity under an arrogant pose. (Ellman, 75)
Interestingly, Yeats said that the purpose of the Mask was to make known ones
real self. Reality was not to be found in the given me nor in the made me but in the
product born out of their struggle. Extroverts must flee their masks, but introverts must
choose their ideal opposites. In trying to become those impossible other selves, the
result is the dramatic tension from which art surfaces. Yeats puts it down for himself
and for all other artists:
Only the greatest obstacle that can be contemplated without despair rouses the
will to full intensity. (Unterecker, 18)
This is so because
I take pleasure alone in those verses where it seems to me I have found
something hard and cold, some articulation of the Image, which is the opposite
of all that I am in my daily life. (Unterecker, 18)
Yeatss inclination to pose before the world as somebody different from what he
was, to hide his secret self, this sense of a bifurcated self, was not unique. Many of his
more sensitive contemporaries shared it, and if we think of the tendency as a general
one, we can avoid regarding Yeats as an anomaly: he merely systematized the
phenomenon in A Vision.
A VISION: SPRITUAL
Although Yeats achieved unity of image in the Mask, the faculties involved in his
psychological system were not enough to make sense of what to him seemed a complex
and senseless world. Therefore, returning to magic97 again, he sought to locate the
secret pattern he so badly needed.
Another Yeatsian theory of poetic inspiration surfaced: Man, apart from being
influenced by the dead (and thereby being enabled to partake in Anima Mundi) may
also be influenced by the Daemon.98
The soul after the death of the physical body goes through a series of cycles until
it reaches a state of beatitude. If the cycle of human rebirths is not finished, the soul
receives the cup of Lethe and is reborn. This belief of Yeats owes much to his readings in
Platonism. He also held that the dead could communicate with the living under special
conditions. A passage from his essay, Anima Mundi, is enlightening at this point:
97
Yeats had always believed in the evidence of the invisible world as an active spiritual plane, and he
believed further that he had only to tap its resources.
98
The Daemon in Greek Mythology is any one of the secondary divinities ranking between gods and men.
160
There are two realities: the terrestrial and the condition of fire. All power is from
the terrestrial condition, for there all opposites meet and there only is the
extreme of choice possible, full freedom. And there is
where the heterogenous is, and evil, for evil is the strain of one upon another of
opposites; but in the condition of fire is all music and all rest. (Brooks, Modern
Poetry, 191)
In the condition of fire, the soul puts on the rhythmic or spiritual body or
luminous body and contemplates all the events of its memory and every possible
impulse in an eternal possession of itself in one single moment. (Brooks, Modern
Poetry, 191)
The numerous gyrations the soul has to undergo, from the sensual/physical
world to the spiritual world, until it reaches the state of purification, is called the
Purgatorial Dance. Sailing to Byzantium illustrates this.
Byzantium on the Bosporus is the ancient city which was made the capital of the
Roman Empire in 330 A.D. The Emperor Constantine the Great named it after himself
during the time when Rome was being sacked by the barbarians, and called it the new
Rome.
The choice of Byzantium is explained by Yeats: in the Lunar Parable, the zenith of
Byzantine art is expected to reach dead center in the year 2000. Others have
interpreted it differently. R. P. Blackmur presents Byzantium as the heaven of mans
mind, and Cleanth Brooks the heaven of mans imagination. (Brooks, Modern Poetry,
189) Yeats gives his own reason:
I think if I could be given a month of Antiquity and leave to spend it where
I chose, I would spend it in Byzantium a little before Justinian opened St. Sophia
and closed the Academy of Plato. I think I could find in some wine-shop some
philosophical worker in mosaic who could answer all my questions, the
supernatural descending nearer to him than to Plotinus even, for the pride of his
delicate skill would make what was an instrument of power to princess and
clerics, a murderous madness in the mob, show as a lovely flexible presence like
that of a perfect human body.
I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded
history, religious, aesthetic and practical life were one, that architect and
artificersthough not, it may be, poets, for language had been the instrument of
controversy and must have grown abstractspoke to the multitude and the few
alike. The painter, the mosaic worker, the worker in gold and silver, the
illuminator of Sacred Books, were almost impersonal, almost perhaps without the
consciousness of individual design, absorbed in their subjective matter and that
of the vision of a whole people. They could copy out of gold Gospel books those
pictures that seemed as sacred as the text, and yet seemed the world of one, that
made building, picture, pattern, metal-work of rail and lamp, seem but a single
image.
All about is an incredible splendor like that which we see pass under our
closed eyelids as we lie between sleep and waking, not representation of a living
world but the dream of a somnambulist. Even the drilled pupil of the eye, when
161
Sailing to Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
In one anothers arms, birds in the trees
Those dying generationsat their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress.
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in Gods holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
99
162
163
164
It is midnight in Byzantium. The first gong of midnight wafting from the cathedral
hushes the last night-walkers song, and the streets are not emptied of drunkards.
There are two ways of looking at lines five to eight: the dome stands for
perfection. Man is far from being perfect because he is helplessly imprisoned within the
confines of his vacillations. The gyres have determined his naturethat of conflicts
between his subjective and objective emotions. Unlike the dome, man is unfinished. He
is constantly being pulled from side to side by the fury and the mire of human veins.
The dome, standing for purity and coherence, disdains incoherent man.
When the stars are seen clearly, the implication is that there must be no moon.
This is the dark phase of the moon, which is Phase One. The moonlit dome is the full
moon, Phase Fifteen. Phases One and Fifteen symbolize complete objectivity and
complete subjectivity, respectively, and therefore no human life is possible in either
extreme phases, because man is a mixture of both objective and subjective elements.
Man is mere complexities compare with the purity of Phases One and Fifteen; that is
why he is disdained.
The stalking mummy in the second stanza is twice refined from flesh: Shade
more than man, more image than a shade. The image of the bobbin suggests the
purified spirit, formerly like our present state, with a physical body, but now already
unwound by numerous human incarnations so that at last it is freed from drinking the
Cup of Lethe. The superhuman being has neither breath nor moisture in its mouth
because these are the properties of the physical body. To those ready for the Final
Dance, this is the force which would animate the weary souls gyrating on the dancing
floor. It may now free them from the round of metempsychosis.
Whether or not Yeats actually believed in the visions and communications in his
system is inconsequential, for what he was seeking was world view whose object was
imaginative contemplation.103 Belief was a different sort of thing, for when asked of
A Vision as to whether or not he actually believed in his system, he would answer by
asking in turn if the word belief as we used it belonged to our times.104
Until the turn of the 20th century, Yeats lived in the dream-like world of the
Victorian Twilight, as evidenced by some of the poems which bear the hang-overs of the
19th century. Although this temperament had led him to indecisions, he also held fast to
some convictions, one of them being the problem of belief. To gain a better definition of
belief, as Yeats understood it, one has only to examine closely at the manner he had
written his poems, a method which is not unlike those of Blake or Shelley, or even of
Joseph Conrad:
If you suspend the critical faculty, I have discovered either as the result of
training, or, if you have the gift, by passing into a slight trance, images pass
rapidly before you. If you can suspend also desire, and let them form at their own
will, your absorption becomes even more complete and they are clearer in color,
103
104
165
more precise in articulation, and you and they begin to move in what seems a
powerful light. But the images pass before you linked by certain associations, and
indeed in the first instance you have called them up by their association with
traditional forms and sounds. You have discovered how, if you can but suspend
will and intellect, to bring up from the subconscious anything you already possess
a fragment of. Those who follow the old rule keep their bodies still and their
minds awake and clear, dreading especially any confusion between the images of
the mind and the objects of sense; they seek to become, as it were, polished
mirrors.105
This method almost led him at one time to believe that the dream-world was
more
real than the objective world. It was in this dream-world where the images from Anima
Mundi swam in abundance. He obtained such images in this manner:
I had found that after evocation my sleep became at moments full of light and
form, all that I had failed to find while awake; and I elaborated symbols of
natural objects that I might give myself dreams during sleep, or rather visions, for
they had none of the confusion of dreams, by laying upon my pillow or beside my
bed certain flowers or leaves. Even today, after twenty years, the exaltations and
the messages that came to me from bits of hawthorn or some other plant seem
of all moments of my life the happiest and the wisest. After a time perhaps the
novelty wearing off the symbol lost its power, or because my work at the Irish
Theatre became too exciting, my sleep lost its responsiveness. I had fellowscholars, and now it was I and they who made some discovery. Before the minds
eye, whether in sleep or in waking, came images that one was to discover
presently in some book one had never read, and after looking in vain for
explanation to the current theory of forgotten personal memory, I came to
believe in a great memory passing on from generation to generation.106
William Butler Yeats, like Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and even Albert Einstein in his
search for a unified field theory, attempted at a seemingly impossible synthesis in A
Visionto unify art and life into one immense, achieved form, which is boundless yet
logical, complex and organic at the same time; the unity of culture and the unity of
Image: Leda and the Swan, the valley of flowers, the sad shepherd, the cloak, the boat,
the pair of shoes, the little Indian temple in the Golden Age, the peacock, the Stamper
of the skies, the falling leaves, the golden apples of the sun, the silver apples of the
moon, the Rose, the white birds, the fish and the silver trout, the pale brows, the polar
dragon, the hazel tree, the crooked plough, the Great Archer, the arrow, the withering
of the boughs, the green helmet, the great Olympus, the mask, the grey rock and the
105
106
166
spade, Eunuchs running through Hell, the Door of Death and the Door of Birth, the
windy cap, the hour before dawn and the dawn, the witch, the mountain tomb, Father
Rosicross sleeping in his tomb, the child dancing in the wind, the Magus, the dolls and
coats, swans and the rounded towers of Babylon, the fishermen, the hawk, the phoenix
and the drunkard, the squirrel and the worm, the bridge and the cat, Byzantium and the
Cormacks ruined house, Helen and the burning of Troy, the Tower, the Sun and the
Moon in March, the burning house, the cave, the thorn tree and the well, the eagle and
the heron, the sea-gull and the hawk, the blind man and the unicorn, the blind man and
the poet (traditional images which he certified and validated by their alignment with his
life and experiences, resulting in a particular vital quality of multiple and enriched
recurrences and convergence of images)and, like Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Einstein,
did not succeed, as no mortal has yet succeeded, A Vision served its purpose as he had
intended: being a last act of defence against the chaos of the world.107
Epilogue
Every time I am told to conform to mediocrity of the academic jargon so faddist
these days, I cannot help feeling like Mowgli in Rudyard Kiplings Jungle Book who,
when the monkeys told him how great and wise and strong they were, and how
foolish he was to wish to leave them, was told: We are great. We are free. We are
wonderful. We are the most wonderful people in the jungle! We all say so, and so it
must be true.
This is true, the monkeys would all shout together, we all say so.108
107
108
167
Appendix A
The Euclidean Poetry of Alexander Pope
Abstract
I intend to introduce a geometric reading of Alexander Pope. To demonstrate this, I
shall put him side by side with Euclid, the ancient geometrician. My purpose in this
approach is to attempt to open up one more corridor in poetry interpretation. The corpus
of the paper will focus on Popes analytic mastery of the craft of poetry that is nothing
short of the precision of the mathematician. Euclid is chosen because in temperament
and in world-view, he appears to be Popes counterpart. Euclid is the Pope of geometry:
his flat, two-dimensional, static geometry is to Popes closed, end-stopped heroic
couplet. Although both Pope and Euclid belong to dusty, unborrowed books in the
library, a different reading may not only prove that they cannot be ignored, but the
attempt itself may broaden our critical horizons because of the foundations they have
established in poetry and geometry.
Tags: confinement, Euclidean geometry, parallelism and antithesis, sequentiality, exact
language, heroic couplet, phonetic engineering
ALEXANDER POPEs analytical hold on his poetry was nothing short of the precision of
the geometrician. His concern for ordonance (a word he coined from the Latin ordo,
ordinis, a series, a line, a row, an order) was a technical, not a literary, issue. There is
none of the open-ended garrulity of Free Verse in Pope. He wove his words with
mathematical exactness, as exactly as a geometrician would set his lines in order. His
words are precise, technicaland dry.
Pope and Euclid were of the same temperament, except that Pope wrestled with
words and Euclid wrestled with space relationships. If Pope were the Euclid of poetry,
Euclid is the Pope of geometry. To understand Pope is to understand the literary
counterpart of the progression from flat-surface geometry to the concept of the three
right angled triangles on a sphere.
Let me tell you now everything I know about Euclids life.
Nothing.
Like Pope, all we know about Euclid is the fact that his work was his life, and his life
his work. Finding neither time nor inclination to socialize, the only biographical
information we have of him is his having flourished in Alexandria during the reign of the
first Ptolemy (306-283 BCE), and we know this bit of information only because he is
mentioned by Archimedes who was born just before the end of Ptolemy Soters reign.109
Plato, of course, is an obvious influence, as shown in the manner in which Euclid
would arrive at postulates, although Euclid himself does not mention anything about
philosophy. But, surprisingly, Euclid does not mention anything on the nature of the
objects of mathematics either.
109
Edward A. Marziarz and Thomas Greenwood. Euclid and the Elements, page 233.
168
Euclid is credited with the founding of a school in Alexandria where, according to the
historian Pappus, Apollonius of Perga spent a long time with the pupils of Euclid.111
The proverbial story of Euclids reply to Ptolemy that there is no royal road in geometry
brings to mind a man who, like Pope, cared little for royal patronage. Pope, in fact,
repudiated fulsome Dedicators,112 those whose dedications were little more than
servile appeals for patronage. As Alexander Beljame says, Pope was the first man of
letters to achieve financial independence as a result of the sale of his work through
publishers.113 Like Euclid, he was beholden to no one except his work.
110
The statement means a sequence of logically linked statements where for each
statement there is a reason, and that reason can be a definition, an axiom, a postulate, or a
previously proved proposition.
111
Ibid., 233-4.
The quotation is from An Essay on Criticism (lines 592-595):
Leave dangrous Truths to unsuccessful Satyrs,
And Flattery to fulsome Dedicators,
Who, when they Praise, the World believes no more,
Than when they promise to give Scribling oer.
113
This piece of information is taken from Alexandre Beljames Le public et les Homnes de Letres en
Angleterre, 1883 by E. Audra and Aubrey Williams and put in as footnote in their book Alexander Pope:
Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism. Vide Bibliography.
112
169
Euclid was very much like Pope: mathematics was his life, and his life mathematics.
He cared little for self-aggrandizement. He did not even call his treatise geometry, but
described it simply as Elements.114
Euclids Elements, however, was so comprehensive yet inclusive that it displaced
all the earlier works on the elements of geometry, including that of Hippocrates of
Chios.
Pope was like Euclid: he ate, slept, breathed, and drank poetry. If he had not been a
poet, he would have been forgotten, because without poetry, he was nobodya
description that prompted Samuel Johnson to say, of what could he be proud but of his
poetry? (Warren, 43)suggesting that apart from his poetry, Pope was nothing.
Jonathan Swift would later add his complaint that Pope was never at leisure for
conversation, because he had always some poetical scheme in his head. (Warren, 43)
When it came to self-discipline, Pope is the compleat role model. It is recorded how
Pope would sternly require his house helps to set his writing box upon his bed every
morning before he arose. Many a helper would be called from her bed more than four
times on winter evenings to supply him with paper lest he should lose a thought. A
good poet needs time, diligence, and doing something every day, he wrote. Nulla
dies sine linea. (Warren, 45)
Both Pope the poet and Euclid the geometrician took their work seriously. Oddly,
they shared the same style in subduing their craft. Euclid, for example, did not
originate geometry, but it was he who perfected the theorems of Eudoxus and
Theaetetus, bringing to irrefragable demonstration the things which were only
somewhat loosely proved by his predecessors. Pope did not originate the couplet, but it
was he who developed it to such precision that caused it to be well adapted to a
number of rhetorical devices such as paradox, irony, zeugma, syllepsis, and parison.
Pope could well have been defining congruencies in space. His censorious attitude
towards the imprecise was nothing short of acerb. He would not tolerate sloppiness. It
was not acceptable to him for poetry to be crabbed, rough, and ill-proportioned.
(Rogers, 10) A distinct professional competence is required, a solid control of language,
as precise and as exact as mathematics. Note the exact distinctions he draws between
Waller and Dryden, Racine and Corneille, Shakespeare and Otway:
Waller was smooth; but Dryden taught to join
The varying verse, the full resounding line,
The long majestic march and energy divine.
Tho still some traces of our rustic vein
And splay-foot verse, remaind, and will remain.
Late, very late, correctness grew our care,
114
Heath, Sir Thomas Heath (Translator). The Thirteen Books of Euclids Elements, page
5.
170
115
This is taken from Imitations of Horace, Epistle 11, lines 265-281. In Alexander Pope: Imitations of
Horace. (Edited by John Butt) Vide Bibliography.
116
Quoted by W. H. Auden in Alexander Pope. In Alexander Pope (Edited by F. W. Bateson and N. A.
Joukovsky), p. 328. Vide Bibliography.
117
From The Temple of Fame, lines 61-74. In The Poems of Alexander Pope (Edited by John Butt). Vide
Bibliography.
171
Notice how the ideas appear to be forming a queue to gain admittance to the poem.
There is no struggle, no convoluted syntax. The poet makes his moves scientifically, and
with sure steps: he does not make a move unless he knows what the next step is going
to be. This sequentiality ofstructure accounts for this built-in security, this perspicuity.
Obviously, this is no mean feat.
Another happy achievement is the poetic neutrality of the heroic couplet. Because
the form is unassuming and inconspicuous, it could weave between sustained narrative
and epitaph with ease. There is no need for elaborate, formal preparations. The form
took care of that. In Windsor-Forest, for example, we find all these: a topographical
piece, a political panegyric, an economic forecast, a lyrical interlude, an Ovidian
setpiece, etc. (Rogers, 12) The poet could change gears easily because the poem is in
neutral.
Popes heroic couplet, by its very strucrure, is adaptable to a number of rhetorical
devices. According to W. K. Wimsatt, the abstract logic of parallel and antithesis is
complicated and offset by rhetorical figures and rhyme. (Rogers, 13) This is illustrated
in the following:
Then flashd the living Lightning from her Eyes,
And Screams of Horror rend th affrighted Skies.
Not louder Shrieks to pitying Heavn are cast.
When Husband or when Lap-dogs breathe their last,
Or when rich China Vessels, falln from high,
In glittring Dust and painted Fragments lie.118
There is strong but fine satire in the second couplet with zeugma in the fourth line.
But the rime words are echoes of the sense of confusion dramatized by a mock-heroic
approach. Even the primness of the appearance suits the ironists purpose. Predictably,
everything falls into mathematical consistency.
Popes poetry, obviously, is not for dreamy-eyed readers. One has to be active and
awake all the time. The precision is not meant for ornament but to embody all the
intellectual commitment required by the poem. The couplet becomes a machine for
thinking alertly, an arena where one could display ones skills in mastering the tools of
the art.
Popes precision shows in the minute delicacy of his verse movements. He explored
even the tiniest detail. There are no lose-knit metrical schemes. Within twenty syllables,
he could deploy a whole range of artifices. Within twenty syllables, he could contrive
ceaseless variations in order to produce rhythm, tone, and syntaxto surprise and
delight. The secret lay in his scientific, precise frame of mind. Everything just had to fall
into place. No extraneous word exists. In the words of I. Ehrenpeis, Pope made the
couplet a piece of phonetic engineering. (Rogers, 13)
118
The Rape of the Lock, III, lines 155-160. In Alexander Pope: Selected Works (Edited by Louis
Kronenberger). Vide Bibliography.
172
FOR ALL THE PRECISENESS, however, Popes world was, like Euclids a flat world.
Because he cared little for the outside world, his poetry, albeit exact, suffers from the
symptoms of long confinement. Although Pope worked well under this limitation, the
poetry still shows the stiffness and the narrowness of a person too long preoccupied
with only two things: himself and his craft. Pope is no model for versatility. He had
limited himself to a single verse formand a limit of interests. He was not interested in
nature, in love, in visions. (Auden, 330) His poetry is the restrained world of a stuffy
drawing room.
It is interesting to draw parallels between Pope the neoclassic and Euclid the classic in
relation to this idea of confinement. Euclids idealizations, abstracted from
experience, for example, formed a rigid structure of such durability that, when
subsequent sensory experience contradicted it, the tendency was to question the
validity of the sensory data instead of the validity of the idealized abstractions. Once
such set of idealized abstractions were erected in the mind, we superimpose it upon all
subsequent actual and projected data, whether it fitted or not. This is the reason why
Euclidean geometry, the content of most elementary geometry books, was not
expanded for almost two millennia.
Take Theorem Fourteen, for example. According to Euclid, regardless of the shape or
size of any triangle, the sum of the three angles is always equal to a straight angle (180
degrees). Triangles are classified according to their sides. It is a basic theorem of Euclid
that the sum of the angles of any of the triangles below is equal to 180 degrees.
119
The Dunciad, A, III, lines 229-236. In Alexander Pope: The Dunciad (Edited by James Sutherland), pp.
176-177. Vide Bibliography.
173
174
The two lines that intersect the North Pole will form a right angle, but both sides of
the triangle, upon intersecting the equator will also form right angles! So instead of the
180 degrees, we have a triangle that contains three right angles, or 270 degrees.
According to Euclids Theorem Fourteen this is not possible, but here it is. In a word, the
three-dimensional world does not follow Euclids two-dimensional world, however
precise the latter may appear on paper.
One of the scientists to first question the validity of Euclids computations was Albert
Einstein. One of Euclids rules for the circle, for example, says that the area of a circular
ring equals the area of the outside circle minus the area of the inside circle, or A=R2
r2, where R = the radius of the larger circle and r = the radius of the smaller circle.
Here is a sample problem to illustrate this: In a circular ring, the outside diameter is,
let us say, 8 and the inside diameter is 6. Problem: what is the area of a cross section
of the ring?
175
A=
This is the correct, the precise formulation according to the flat, static world of
Euclid. But the world is neither flat nor static. The figure below is my attempt to
represent an inertial coordinate system:
Observe the diagram, paying attention to the two concentric circles again. Now
imagine the circle with the small radius and the one with the large radius revolving
around a common point in the center. Imagine that we are watching these revolving
circles from an inertial coordinate system.120 Over the revolving circles, let us draw two
identical concentric circles in our coordinate system. These are not revolving. In size and
in having a common center, they are the same as the revolving circles. This time, they
are not in motion. Let us then imagine ourselves motionless in our non-revolving circles
in contact with an observer on the revolving circles.
My purpose in giving this example is to show whether Euclids rule mentioned above
is verifiable for both the stationary observer and the revolving observer. So let us
proceed:
Suppose observer A (motionless) measures the radius of his small circle, and later the
circumference of the same small circle, and then notes the ratio between them. Next,
he does the same thing for the large circle. What happens is he will discover that it is the
same ratio that he found between the radius and the circumference of his small circle.
In other words, Euclid is validated here.
Now observer B (in motion) does the same thing. But then he does more. On top of
the two circles of A, he also measures the ratio between the radius and circumference
of his two identical concentric circles. After doing so, he finds all ratios identical save
120
Being in an inertial coordinate system means that our frame of reference is at rest relative to
everything, including the revolving circles.
176
onethe larger circle. When he begins to measure the circumference of his large circle,
his ruler contracts. Also, because the radius of his large circle is larger than that of his
small circle, the velocity of the circumference of the large revolving circle is faster than
that of the revolving small circle. The ratio now of the radius to the circumference of the
small revolving circle is not the same as the ratio of the radius to the circumference of
the large revolving circle. Euclid says this is not possible, but, then, here it is.
A SIMILAR PHENOMENON took place in poetry. Popes flat, static form of the closed,
end-stopped, heroic couplet could no longer limit and restrain the imaginative torrent
and forces of the next century. The Romantic Movement entered the scene, marked by
an eagerness to broaden horizons, to give free play to the imagination. The closed,
heroic couplet could no longer control the enthusiasm seeking expression in all
departments of life: in politics, in science, in art, etc.
This situation was dramatized by John Keats, one of the very first to censure Pope.
How could Pope be so numbAh, dismal sould, Keats would lament
The winds of heaven blew, the ocean rolld
Its gathering wavesye felt it not. The blue
Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew
Of summer nights collected still to make
The morning precious: Beauty was awake!
Why were ye not awake? But ye were dead
To things ye know not ofwe were closely wed
To rusty laws lined out with wretched rule
And compass vile; so that ye taught a school
Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit,
Till, like the certain wands of Jacobs wit
Their verses tallied. (Zillman, 69)
These lines censure Pope and the Augustans for being mere craftsmen, incapable of
freeing their imaginations. A new form was in order. Ironically, the Romantics would
have to look farther back to the Elizabethans, the period immediately preceding Popes,
for inspiration. The inspiration behind Keatss On First Looking Into Chapmans Homer,
for example, is Chapmans (an Elizabethan) and not Popes translation of Homer. Popes
translation had become too confined, too correct, too lifeless, and even if that
translation were the version taught in Keatss school days, the young poet was in search
of a version that could approximate the real feeling of the original. (Zillman, 207)
Keats therefore was elated when his friend Charles Cowden Clarke had lent him the
1616 edition of Chapmans Homer. He had never read anything like it. He read far into
the night, and then wrote his famous sonnet.
It is not easy to compare this enthusiasm unless we compare Pope and Chapman.
Here is Popes translation of one of Keatss favorite episodes, the shipwreck of
Odysseus, in Book V, where the wandering hero is cast upon the shores of Phaeacia:
177
178
Appendix B
Course Syllabus
Lectures
Note: These lectures have been recorded live and may be downloaded at
http://carlosaureus.blogspot.com
1. Introduction: What is Critical Theory?
2. Plato: Introduction
3. Plato: Republic (Books II, III, and X)
4. Aristotle: Introduction
5. Aristotle: Poetics
6. Horace: Ars Poetica
7. Longinus: On the Sublime
8. Plotinus: On the Intellectual Beauty
9. St. Augustine: Semiotics
10. Manlius Severinus Boethius: Consolation of Philosophy
11. St. Thomas Aquinas: Aesthetics and Hermeneutics
12. Sir Philip Sidney: An Apology for Poetry
13. John Dryden: An Essay of Dramatic Poesy
14. Alexander Pope: An Essay on Criticism
15. Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our
Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
16. Immanuel Kant: Introduction
17. Immanuel Kant: Critique of Judgment
18. Friedrich von Schiller: Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man
19. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Introduction
20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: The Philosophy of Fine Art
21. The Romantic Imagination
22. William Wordsworth: Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical
Ballads
23. Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Biographia Literaria
24. John Keats: Negative Capability and the Egotistical Sublime
25. Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Defense of Poetry
179
Biographical Notes
Abrams, Meyer (Mike) Howard. (born July 23, 1912) is an American literary critic known
for works on Romanticism, in particular his books The Mirror and the Lamp and Natural
Supernaturalism. Under his editorship, the Norton Anthology of English
Literature became the standard text for many undergraduate survey courses.
Aquinas, St. Thomas (12251274). One of the two giants of the Middle Ages (the other
is Dante) whose Summa Theologica combines the philosophical rigor of Aristotle with
the theological consistency of the Roman Catholic Church. His notion of the four levels
of meaning greatly influenced Dantes Divine Comedy.
Aristotle (384322 BC). Greek philosopher who studied in ancient Athens under Plato
and wrote treatises on nearly every department of human life.
Augustine, St. (354430). Born in North Africa, Augustine is the most influential of the
early Church Fathers. In his theological writings, which included meditations on
language, rhetoric, and allegory, he fused the ideals of Christianity and of Plato.
Blake, William (17571827). British Romantic poet who was also, I firmly believe, the
greatest painter Britain has yet produced. His deceptively simple Songs of Innocence and
Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (1789, 1794) had a
strong influence on the Romantic belief that things are as they are perceived.
Boileau-Despraux, Nicolas (16361711; pronounced bwa-LOW). French poet and critic
of the neoclassical period whose Art of Poetry helped set down the rules of decorum
for his age and had much influence on Popes Essay on Criticism.
Bloom, Harold (b. 1930). American professor and literary critic, long at Yale, who does
not fit neatly into any theoretical category. Author of The Anxiety of Influence.
Brooks, Cleanth (b. 1906). American professor and critic who perhaps most fully sums
up (and certainly is most fully identified with) the goals and methods of new criticism.
Author of The Well-Wrought Urn.
Burke, Edmund (17291797). British statesman, essayist, and literary theorist; one of
the first great critics of the French Revolution. Author of the influential Inquiry into the
Sublime and the Beautiful.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (17721834). British poet, essayist, and literary theorist; a
major figure of British Romanticism. One of the most learned men of his age, he is
credited with explaining German philosophy to the British. Co-conceived and wrote
Lyrical Ballads with his friend William Wordsworth; author of Biographia Literaria.
180
181
Pope, Alexander (16881744). British poet whose literary tastes (expressed most fully in
his Essay on Criticism) helped set the standards for British neoclassicism.
Racine, Jean (16391699). French neoclassical playwright who most perfectly embodied
in his tragedies the artistic rules and decorum of classical drama.
Rousseau, Jean Jacques (17121778). French philosopher and man of letters, an
innovator in the political, ethical, and educational spheres. Arguably the true father of
the modern world, Rousseaus autobiography (Confessions) may be seen as the
founding document of Romanticism.
Schiller, Friedrich (17591805). German poet, dramatist, and theorist whose Letters on
the Aesthetic Education of Man and On Naive and Sentimental Poetry have had a lasting
influence on the history of literary criticism.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (17921822). British Romantic poet whose Defense of Poetry is
not only a key Romantic text but synthesizes nearly all the elements of literary theory
from Plato to Coleridge.
Sidney, Sir Philip (15541585). British poet and courtier; the very embodiment of the
Elizabethan Age. His Apology for Poetry is one of the great defenses of both the divine
power and social utility of poetry.
Wordsworth, William (17701850). British Romantic poet who co-authored Lyrical
Ballads with his friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge; his revolutionary Preface to Lyrical
Ballads helped to hasten the demise of neoclassical tastes and to usher in a new slate
of Romantic theories, methods, and concerns.
182
Glossary
Aeolian Harp: (Named after Aeolus, the Greek god of the wind) A wind-powered
musical instrument. A tiny wind harp made of silk threads stretched across an arched
twig like a bow. Hung in a windy spot, the strings give forth natural musical sounds
depending on the power of the wind. It is used as a metaphor for the way in which
inspiration blows over the poet and causes him to create. This view depicts the poet as a
passive recipient of imagination, rather than as an active craftsman.
Anagnorisis (Recognition): A moment in a play when the hero makes a critical discovery,
the defining moment when the hero moves suddenly from a state of ignorance to a
state of recognition.
Anagogical: see fourfold interpretive system.
Anima Mundi. Yeats anticipated Carl G. Jungs Collective Unconscious when he talked
about a World Memory or Anima Mundi from which he drew his images (Jung would
later call them archetypes).
Anti-essentialist: see essentialist.
Antithesis: see dialectic.
Anxiety of Influence: A phrase coined by modern critic Harold Bloom to define a specific
kind of artistic struggle (or agon) that he sees as underlying and propelling the history of
literature. Blooms thesis, influenced strongly by the Oedipal theories of Freud, is that
each new poet must overthrow the strong poet who has preceded him: a dialectical
view of poetic history that yet resists falling into the pit of Marxist materialism. Blooms
thesis is both compelling and disturbing.
Apollonian: In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche makes a distinction between two
philosophical-spiritual-aesthetic orientations that he calls the Apollonian and the
Dionysiac. The Apollonian (named for Apollo) is rational, intellectual, balanced, and
stoic; the Dionysiac (named for Dionysus) is intuitive, emotional, creative, and ecstatic.
Whereas Western metaphysics has traditionally privileged Apollo over Dionysus,
Nietzsche inverts this privileging, even as he calls for a higher fusion of these two sides
of man.
Archetype: A symbol which connects one poem with another and, by so doing, helps
integrate our literary experience. Archetypes are associative clusters, words or
images or rituals that carry with them a wealth of connotative meanings and emotions
that far exceed their denotative, scientific, descriptive meanings. Some well-known
examples are the pastoral archetypes of shepherds and gardens; the cyclical archetypes
of sun, moon, and harvest; and the heroic archetypes of quests and dragons. George
Lucass Star Wars trilogy abounds with archetypes as does Eliots Waste Land. In the
criticism of Frye, archetypes do not so much link poetry to the external world as they
link one poem to another in a complex series of literary allusions. For Frye, archetypes,
though polysemous in nature, all point back to a transcendent, logocentric center, an
aspect of Frye that has been criticized by both modernist and postmodernist theorists.
184
Bathos: A term first coined by Longinus, it refers to a ludicrous descent from the
exalted or lofty to the commonplace. It is the sudden appearance of the pedestrian in a
writing that pretends itself to be sublime, but is in fact insincere, sentimental, mawkish,
trite, trivial, and bombastic. Not to be confused with Pathos (vide).
Beauty: Until very recently, beauty has been prized as one of, if not the, most vital
element of a work of art. Viewed ontologically, beauty has traditionally been defined as
a kind of higher harmony or balance or proportion: a reflection in our world of the
greater harmony of the cosmos. Viewed epistemologically, beauty is a mental response
to certain objects that produces within us sentiments of tenderness and affection. (Cf.
sublime.)
Canon: The Great Books of the Western world (i.e., those by Homer, Sophocles, Virgil,
Dante, Shakespeare, etc.) that have traditionally formed the core of humanistic studies.
Canonical critics believe that the works of the canon are aesthetically and essentially
superior and possess an inherent value that transcends the time and place in which they
were written; non-canonical (generally postmodern) critics view the canon as a product
of socio-political forces (cf. discourse) that determine what is acceptable (status quo)
and what is not.
Catharsis: In the Poetics, Aristotle argues that a well-constructed tragic plot will so move
our feelings of pity and fear as to produce in us a catharsis of those emotions. The word
catharsis may be translated in at least three ways (as purgation, purification, or
clarification), each of which suggests a slightly different understanding of the nature of
what might be termed the proper tragic pleasure. According to the purgation theory of
catharsis (most famously described in Miltons brief preface to Samson Agonistes),
tragedy works on us like an enema or an emetic, cleansing us of our emotions of pity
and fear and leaving us more fit and able to face the rigors of life. According to the
purification theory of catharsis, tragedy does not so much purge our emotions as purify
them. Thus, whereas the former theory is therapeutic in nature, the latter is more
spiritual, suggesting that tragedy, like suffering, can strengthen our faith and resolve by
testing and trying them like gold in the fire. Finally, according to the clarification theory
of catharsis, tragedy sparks in us an intellectual response, a searing moment of perfect
clarity in which ill-defined emotions are carried up into a mystical realm of balanced,
harmonious rationality. The connections between the seemingly arbitrary chaos and
suffering of our world and the higher patterns and forces of the cosmos are made
suddenly visible in this realm.
Center: see decenter.
Close Reading: A method of explicating (or opening, unpacking) a poem that was
developed, taught, and propagated by the American new critics. All close readings rest
on the new critical assumption that the greatest poems do not present their ideas
directly, but through a complex deflection of meaning. The close reader, rather than
attempting to simplify or reduce a poem to its narrative and/or didactic meaning (its
185
paraphrasable core), seeks to uncover its essential ironies, paradoxes, and ambiguities.
The best close readings reveal how, within the ironic synthesis of the poem, even ugly or
discordant elements can be so brought into equilibrium to form an eternal work of
aesthetic beauty and truth.
Concrete Universal: The aesthetic history of this paradoxical phrase can be traced from
Aristotle to Kant to Coleridge to the new critics. Put simply, to claim that a certain poem
is a concrete universal is to say that within the microcosm of the poem, a universal idea
has been fully realized in a concrete form. This notion is, of course, profoundly
incarnational and logocentric; like Christ (the ultimate Logos), who was both fully Man
and fully God, the concrete universal effects within itself a fusion of the physical and the
non-physical, the specific and the general, the image and the idea. Indeed, at its boldest,
the notion of the concrete universal asserts an aesthetic and metaphysical reality that
has since been problematized by modernists and rejected by postmodernists. This
notion is that, within the space of the poem, signifier and signified enter into a
relationship that is not only essential and timeless (as opposed to arbitrary and languespecific), but profoundly, almost mystically, reciprocal: i.e., the signifier is carried up
into the signified, even as the signified descends and dwells in the signifier. (Cf. symbol
and organic whole.)
Daemon. In Greek mythology, the Daemon is any of the secondary divinities ranking
between gods and men. Man, aside from being influenced by the Daemon, may also be
influenced by the dead, and thereby partake in Anima Mundi (q. v.).
Decorum: A concept central to neoclassical art (especially that of Pope). The poet who
possesses decorum understands intimately the proper relationship (or fit) between form
and content. He prefers a serious, rational type of art that does not inappropriately mix
the high and the low, the serious and the comic. When Romantic poets and theorists
began to advocate the production of serious, meditative poems about low and rustic
subjects (as Wordsworth did both in his poems for and his Preface to Lyrical Ballads),
they rang the death knell of neoclassical decorum.
Defamiliarization: A term used to describe that mystical moment when the Romantic
(Wordsworthian) poet rips away the veil of familiarity from the everyday objects of
our world and thus allows us to see them afresh, with child-like eyes of wonder. Most
men, says Coleridge (paraphrasing Isaiah 6), have eyes but do not see; defamiliarization
opens our eyes to the mystery and beauty that surrounds us. The term was later used by
a theoretical school known as Russian Formalism.
Deus ex machina: God from the machine, was a crane-like device used in classical
Greek theater that would allow an actor to descend onto the stage in the guise of a god
or goddess. This device was used by dramatists as a way of resolving from above all
manner of difficulties and misunderstandings; thus, after weaving a veritable Gordians
knot of relationships in his Ion, Euripides has the goddess Athena descend in a basket
186
and unravel everyones true identity. (Note: the phrase deus ex machina is also used to
refer generally to any situation in which the identity of a character is discovered in the
nick of time by an implausible or at least contrived means; e.g., a scar, a birthmark, a
childhood pendant, even a footprint.) Aristotle strongly disapproved of this device for he
felt it was an artificial way to end a plot; the plot, he felt, should be strong enough to
resolve itself in a manner consistent with necessity, probability, and inevitability.
Indeed, one of the reasons Aristotle favored Sophocles over Euripides was that the
latter made much use of the deus ex machina (although it should be noted that
Sophocles makes brilliant use of the device in his Philoctetes). Moliere offers a serious
parody of the device in his Tartuffe.
Diachronic: see Synchronic.
Dialectic: In the philosophy of Plato, dialectic refers to a process of question and answer
through which false notions are stripped away and the truth is revealed. In the
philosophy of Hegel, the conflictual nature of Platos dialectic is retained, but the whole
process is systematized and placed in a historical (diachronic) continuum. For Hegel, an
original idea (or thesis) produces, over time, its own opposite (or antithesis); these two
ideas then, through a process of struggle, transformation, and fusion, produce a new
and higher idea, called the synthesis. A generation later, Marx would co-opt the
Hegelian dialectic for himself, reducing Hegels historical yet transcendent approach to a
strictly historicist/materialist one. The resulting process, known as dialectical
materialism, preserves the movement from thesis to antithesis to synthesis, but
reinscribes it in a material continuum of economic forces and class struggle. Thus,
whereas for Hegel it is primarily aesthetic and transcendent ideas that progress through
the dialectic, for Marx, such ideas are but products of socio-political realities that are
themselves produced by a dialectical process in the economic strata of society.
Dionysiac: see Apollonian.
Disinterested: Disinterested, as opposed to uninterested, signifies an approach to
criticism (whether aesthetic or otherwise) that is removed, objective, and free from all
political agendas or ideologies (today, we would say non-partisan). The word was made
famous in Matthew Arnolds definition of criticism as a disinterested endeavor to learn
and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world. (Note: the phrase the
best that is known and thought is central to the traditional understanding of the
canon.) Objective theorists in general, and the new critics in particular, are great
advocates of Arnolds notion of disinterestedness. To modern and especially postmodern
theorists, however, the whole concept of disinterestedness is an illusion; all poets and
critics create and write out of a reigning discourse and cannot achieve the necessary
aesthetic distance to speak disinterestedly. To the historicist, a claim of disinterestedness
is merely a veiled way of asserting the hegemony of the status quo. The historicist
faith that everything is political is diametrically opposed to the objective faith that
187
certain great writers (e.g., the authors of the canon) can so transcend their time and
space as to achieve the timeless state of disinterestedness.
Dissociation of Sensibility: According to T. S. Eliot, during the seventeenth century, the
great metaphysical poets and writers of Britain (especially John Donne) were able to
fuse within their lives and their art the emotional and the intellectual. After the
seventeenth century, however, Britain (and Europe in general) fell into a dissociation of
sensibility: i.e., their intellectual and emotional sides began to pull away from each
other, producing either an overemphasis on the former (the eighteenth-century Age of
Reason) or the latter (the nineteenth-century Age of Romanticism). Schiller traces a
similar division in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man.
Egotistical Sublime: In the letters of Keats, the egotistical sublime is a quality possessed
by artists like Milton and Wordsworth whose poetic vision is always mediated through
their own strong, dominant personalities. Coleridges incisive comment that, in his
poetic studies of other people, Wordsworth is always a spectator ab extra (from the
outside) reinforces Keatss notion that egotistical poets, though they may have great
sympathy, are lacking somewhat in empathy. (Note: Keats does not use egotistical in a
pejorative sense.) Keats contrasts Milton and Wordsworth with Shakespeare, that
chameleon poet who could lose himself completely in the lives of his characters.
Generally speaking, the opposite of egotistical sublime is negative capability.
Formalist: To call a critic a formalist is to identify him with a theoretical orientation that
privileges form over content and that discovers in the aesthetic form of a poem
something that borders on the perfect and the transcendent. Mimetic formalists (like
Aristotle) believe that certain poetic forms are superior for they most fully capture and
embody higher truths. Pragmatic (epistemological) formalists (like Kant) hail form as a
pure, timeless end in itself, the ideal object for aesthetic (subjective) contemplation.
Expressive (Romantic) formalists (like Coleridge) champion form as a sort of altar on and
through which is enacted the marriage (fusion) of subject and object, concrete and
universal. Objective formalists (like the new critics) consider a poems form, rather than
its content, to be that which transforms the poem into a self-contained, eternal artifact.
Forms: In the metaphysics of Plato, the Forms are a series of unchanging, transcendent
Ideas that exist (pure and invisible) in the heavens and that serve as the patterns for all
earthly, material realities. The Forms exist in an unseen World of Being that cannot be
perceived by our senses, but can only be contemplated by the minds eye. All things that
we behold in our physical, sensual World of Becoming are, in fact, imitations of these
perfect Forms; they have no essential truth or reality of their own. (Cf. mimesis, logos,
and logocentrism.)
Four Faculties. Yeats has four faculties, or terms, in his psychology: the Will, the Mask,
the Creative Mind, and the Body of Fate. These four faculties are divided into two sets,
each member of the pair being opposite the other. The Will is anchored in the memories
of the present life; the Mask, from memories of exaltations in past lives; the Creative
Mind, from memories of ideas displayed by actual men in their past lives or in their
spirits between lives; and the Body of Fate, shaped from the Daemons memory of
events of past incarnations.
Fourfold Interpretive System: In the medieval church (and especially in the theories of
Thomas Aquinas), nearly every verse of scripture was believed to work on at least four
simultaneous levels of meaning: the literal (or historical), the allegorical, the moral, and
the anagogical. In Dantes Letter to Can Grande Della Scala, for example, we see
Dante using this system as one of the bases for writing his Divine Comedy. When Israel
came out of Egypt, and the house of Jacob from a people of strange speech, Judea
became his sanctification, Israel his power. Taken literally, he writes, this verse refers
to the departure of the children of Israel from Egypt at the time of Moses; allegorically,
it signifies our redemption wrought by Christ; morally, it describes the conversion of the
soul from the grief and misery of sin to the state of grace; and anagogically, it foretells
the departure of the holy soul from the slavery of this corrupted body to the freedom of
eternal glory. Though this method of analyzing literature is spiritual in origin, the
concept of multiple levels of meaning working simultaneously has been used in all forms
of prosody.
189
Gyres. Yeatss image of the gyres resemble two superimposed cones facing outward,
the west portion being the solar, and its opposite the lunar. Here is my own
representation of this pair of interpenetrating cones:
These stand for the antithetical elements in man, the subjective and the objective.
Hamartia: see Tragic Flaw.
Hermeneutics: The theory and practice of interpretation.
Imagination: Though critics sometimes use the words imagination and fancy as
synonyms (as does Edmund Burke in his Inquiry), the Romantics (especially Wordsworth
and Coleridge) forged an important distinction between the two. The fancy, they
argued, was clearly the lesser power: though it does possess the ability to conjure up
fanciful objects, it must finally, writes Coleridge, receive all its materials ready made
from the law of association. The fancy, that is, works within fixed parameters; it plays,
but on a limited field. The imagination, on the other hand, is freer, more vital: it can
recombine ideas and images at will to create new and higher unities. Unlike the fancy,
which can only shift images around into new patterns, the imagination has both the
perceptive power to see similitude lurking within dissimilitude, unity in the midst of
multeity, and the synthetic power to fuse and reconcile opposites into one. It is
primarily this esemplastic power that enables the imagination to create organic wholes
and concrete universals.
Imitation: see Mimesis.
Incarnation: Though often used to refer specifically to the Christian belief that, in the
person of Jesus Christ, God took on human flesh (John 1:14), the word incarnation is
used more generally by logocentric aestheticians to refer to the power of physical,
temporal works of art to capture, encapsulate, and contain truths that are non-physical
and eternal.
190
This is the Moon as Queen of the skies and the archetype, in her different aspects, of all the ancient female
th
deities, as seen in this 17 century woodcut by Athanasius Kircher in Obeliscus Pamphilius (1650). Public domain.
191
realized his poetic purpose nor achieved a complete fusion of parts and whole. The
concept of the organic whole dates back to Aristotles Poetics. (Cf. concrete universal.)
Peripeteia (Reversal): In a well-constructed Aristotelian plot, peripeteia is a reversal of
fate, when the fortune of the character moves suddenly from good to bad or from bad
to good. The best kinds of reversals are accompanied by recognitions.
Play Drive: see Spieltrieb.
Plot: In the Poetics, Aristotle makes a famous distinction between the story (praxis) and
the plot (muthos). Whereas the story, let us say, of Oedipus, concerns all those events
that took place from his birth to his death, the plot of Oedipus the King focuses on a
single day in the life of Oedipus when all the loose strands of his life come together in a
climax of great power. The story of Oedipus is a long disunified string of events that
moves through a series of disconnected episodes (i.e., it is episodic); the plot of Oedipus
is a unified poetic artifact in which each scene follows the previous scene in accordance
with necessity, probability, and inevitability. The playwright arrives at the plot, by
running the story through the mimetic process. For Aristotle, the plot (rather than the
characters) is the most vital part of a tragedy; indeed, it is the very soul of the play. (Cf.
in medias res, deus ex machina, unities, reversal, recognition, catharsis, tragedy, tragic
flaw, and mimesis.)
Polysemous: see Four Levels of Meaning.
Pragmatic Theories: One of the four types of critical approaches defined in M. H.
Abrams The Mirror and the Lamp. Pragmatic theories explore the relationship between
the work of art and its audience. Pragmatic theorists are concerned with the social,
didactic functions of art (with how it teaches and pleases), with the aesthetic rules for
poetry (see decorum), and with the intellectual and visceral impact of literature (see
catharsis, sublime, beauty). A gradual shift from ontological to epistemological concerns
may be seen in such theories. Both classical and modern studies of the nature and
status of rhetoric are pragmatic in orientation, as is the postmodern school of readerresponse criticism.
Primary Imagination: In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge makes a famous distinction
between the primary and the secondary imagination. According to Coleridge, the
primary imagination is a repetition in the finite mind of the
eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The primary imagination establishes a
passive link between absolute self-consciousness (the I AM of God) and our own
individual self-consciousness. Artists who make use of this creative power are essentially
divine ventriloquists, poet-prophets who (like an aeolian harp) receive direct
inspiration from above and respond passively with a song or a poem. The secondary
imagination, on the other hand, is active: it dissolves, dissipates, diffuses, in order to
recreate. That is to say, the secondary imagination takes the raw material given it by
194
inspiration, breaks it down, and then reshapes it into a new and vital form. (Cf. the
Aristotelian notion of mimesis.) Though Coleridge, like all the Romantics, often defined
himself as an aeolian harp inspired from without (see both his poem Kubla Khan and
his preface to that mystical product of the primary imagination), he also knew that it
takes the active, shaping force of the secondary imagination to create symbols, organic
wholes, and concrete universals. Indeed, in their autobiographies (The Prelude,
Biographia Literaria), both Wordsworth and Coleridge define the growth of the
poet/philosophers mind as moving from the primary to the secondary imagination:
from the passive reception of sensation to the mature recollection (Wordsworth) and
methodizing (Coleridge) of those sensations.
Purgatorial Dance: In Yeatss mythology, the soul, immediately after the transition
called death, goes through a series of cycles (dances) until it reaches a state of
beatitude. Here is my schematic diagram of this movement:
Purpureus Pannus (Purple Patch): A phrase coined by Horace in his Art of Poetry to
describe passages that are overly extravagant, ornate, or flowery so as to distract the
reader from the overall context and instead draw attention to the said passages.
Recognition: see Anagnorisis.
Reversal: see Peripeteia.
Secondary Imagination: see Primary Imagination.
Semiology: a synonym for Semiotics.
Semiotics: The science of sign systems.
195
There is no inherent link between the idea and the picture: one merely stands in for the
other. In a symbol, however, the abstract notion (the salvivic blood of Christ) is seen in
and through the concrete, physical symbol (the communion wine). In the symbol,
specific and general, temporal and eternal, concrete and universal meet and fuse in an
almost mystical, incarnational way. (Cf. concrete universal and organic whole.)
all the laws of nature into laws of intuition and intellect. If both philosophers
successfully complete their journeys, they will meet in the middle: at a metaphysical
nexus point of the general and the specific that is exactly parallel to that self-contained
aesthetic realm that Coleridge labels, variously, as a symbol, an organic whole, or a
concrete universal. Transcendental philosophers who do not complete their journey
toward the natural risk falling into the abyss of idealism; natural philosophers who stop
short of the transcendent risk the even greater temptation of yielding to materialism.
Coleridge, in his poetry and criticism, was a confirmed transcendental philosopher;
Wordsworth, on the other hand, was the quintessential natural philosopher. Indeed, in
the diverse poems they contributed to Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge betrays his orientation
by choosing subjects of a supernatural character, then attempting to render them
natural. Wordsworth, on the other hand, betrays his orientation by selecting subjects
from nature, then presenting them in such a way as to throw over them the aura of the
supernatural. (Note: Coleridges distinction between the transcendental philosopher and
the natural philosopher may be fruitfully compared with Schillers distinction between
the formal drive and the sensuous drive.)
Tropological: see Four Levels of Meaning.
Two Realities: Yeats believed in two realities: the terrestrial and the condition of fire. All
power is from the terrestrial, for here all opposites meet. Evil is also in the terrestrial,
for evil is the strain of opposites. In the condition of fire is all music and all rest. After
all rounds of metempsychosis (q. v.) have been met, the soul goes to the condition of
fire where it puts on another body.
Unities: The Aristotelian notion of plot, which prescribes all great dramatic works to
adhere to the three unities of action, time, and place. It also prescribes focusing the play
around a single main action, a single location and a single intensely short time-span of
not more than twenty-four hours.
Willing Suspension of Disbelief: A phrase coined by the poet and critic Samuel Taylor
Coleridge to justify the use of fantastic, non-realistic elements in literature. Coleridge
suggested that if a writer could infuse a "human interest and a semblance of truth" into
a out of this world tale, the reader would suspend judgment concerning the
implausibility of the narrative. The phrase might also be used to refer to the willingness
of the audience to overlook the limitations of a medium so that these do not interfere
with the acceptance of those premises: the audience tacitly agrees to provisionally
suspend judgment in exchange for the promise of poetic experience.
World of Becoming: Plato taught that there were two worlds: the world of being and
the world of becoming. The world of being is the real world, the world of ideas, ideals,
198
universals, the world of the Platonic Forms. The world of becoming is a reflection of the
world of being. It is the world of the senses, of shadows, of illusion, this world we live in.
World of Being: see World of Becoming.
Zeitgeist: German word which means the spirit of the times or "the spirit of the
age" refers to the general cultural, intellectual, ethical, spiritual, political climate within
a nation or specific groups, along with the general ambience, morals, and cultural
direction or mood of an era. Its nearest English meaning is mainstream or trend.
Zeitgeist is also used to define a belief that, during certain ages, there exists a life force,
a fresh perspective that can be felt and perceived in the works of artists living at that
time.
Bibliography
One: General
Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th edition. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1999.
_______________. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical
Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953.
Adams, Hazard (Editor). Critical Theory Since Plato. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1971.
_____________. Critical Theory Since Plato. Revised edition. New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.
Princeton University Press, 1968.
199
Bate, W. J. (Editor). Criticism: The Major Texts. Enlarged edition. New York: HBJ,
1970.
Beardsley, Monroe C. Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism. Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1981.
Benets Readers Encyclopedia. Third edition. New York: Harper & Row, 1987.
Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster
(Touchstone Books), 1987.
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. London: Oxford University
Press, 1973.
Daiches, David. Critical Approaches to Literature. New York: Norton, 1956.
Guerin, Wilfrid L., et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. Fourth
edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Holman, C. Hugh, and William Harmon. A Handbook to Literature. Sixth edition. New
York: Macmillan, 1992.
Kaplan, Charles, and William Anderson (Editors). Criticism: The Major Statements.
Third edition. New York: St. Martins Press, 1991.
Popper, Karl. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Editor, Ted Honderich. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Wimsatt, W. K. and Cleanth Brooks. Literary Criticism: A Short History. Two Volumes.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1957.
Lynn, Stephen. Texts and Contexts: Writing About Literature with Critical Theory.
200
Plotinus. The Enneads. Translated from the Greek by Stephen MacKenna. London: P. L.
Warner, 1917.
Turner, W. Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New
York: Robert Appleton Company, 1907.
Continuum, 1986.
___________ . Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic. Edited by Lewis White Beck.
New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1950.
Luther, Timothy C. Hegels Critique of Modernity: Reconciling Individual Freedom and
the Community. New York: Lexington Books, 2009. (413 pages)
Schiller, Friedrich. Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On The Sublime.Translated by
Julius A. Elias. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1966.
___________. On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters. Translated by
Reginald Snell. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1954.
Solomon, Robert C. Continental Philosophy Since 1750: The Rise and Fall of the Self.
Volume 7 of the History of Western Philosophy series. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1988.
Wellek, Ren. Confrontations: Studies in the intellectual and literary relations between
Germany, England, and the United States during the nineteenth century.
Princeton University Press, 1965.
Westphal, Kenneth R. (Editor). The Blackwell Guide to Hegels Phenomenology of
Spirit. West Sussex, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2009. (352 pages)
204
Temple, Ruth Z. The Critics Alchemy. New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1953.
The Theosophical Society Leaflet Number Two. Quezon City: Theosophical Publishing
House, n.d.
Unterecker, John. A Readers Guide to William Butler Yeats. New York: The Noonday
Press, 1959.
Wilson, Edmund. Axels Castle. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1969.
Yeats, William Butler. A Vision. New York: Macmillan, 1961.
_________________ . Autobiography. New York: Macmillan, 1969.
_________________ . The Celtic Twilight. London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1902.
_________________ . Collected Poems. Toronto: Macmillan, 1956.
_________________ . Essays and Introductions. New York: Macmillan, 1961.
_________________ . Explorations. New York: Macmillan, 1962.
_________________ . Mythologies. New York: Macmillan, 1970.
Insertions later:
Aristarchus of Samos ( 310 BC ca. 230 BC) is the first known person to present a
heliocentric model of the solar system, but his astronomical ideas were often rejected in
favor of the geocentric theories of Aristotle and later Ptolemy until they were
successfully revived nearly 1800 years later by Copernicus and extensively developed
and built upon by Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton.
208