O for a muse of fire

YOUR VALENTINE

From your Valentine, scratched the prisoner

in Rome, young martyr-to-be.

To daughter of Asterius – maybe

a Morning Star? – love to configure

with philosophy, so (269 a.d.).

Skull crowned with flowers

along with more & divers

relics (Santa Maria in Cosmedin)

– & some of them in Dublin, too

(Whitefriar St.).  Ante-

dating troubadours & Dante

with his severed head & body (rue

the day with smoke of juniper, acacia)

he died young, for liberty

of conscience – thought is free;

fled upon wind, Asterius (Astraea).

The epileptic heart dances offbeat.

Dante & Beatrice

found simplest way

to unity – their cosmos whole, complete

in charity.  So ran my Yeatsian effusion

from the green island;

these pipes, my steely friend

summon her countertop restoration

in the green night of Dante’s neighborhood

where phosphorus gleams

amid Franciscan tombs

like camouflaged green acorn (woo’d

                        *

from wood) to be kingdom come

in your creaky dreambed

Ophelia (Juliet, Cordelia…)

– O rondure of love’s gentle realm!

& poetry burbles of it night & day

to multitudes in their sleep

compartments, while the creep

of despotism creeps from sordid victory

to victory (absolutism corrupts

& empowered absolutism

corrupts with most extreme

prejudice).  So the public servant sups

alone in his cold cell, & the journalist

languishes for speaking truth

in cellars of Pharaoh Badnooth

& enemies of human happiness request

your presence in the Furious Throne Room

where kids die miserably

every day, for lack of liberty

& prison sing-song will pronounce your doom.

O for a muse of fire, cried Hen’s herald –

who solders every soul

with mettle from the molten

whole.  Who clears the air, to yield

a solidarity of understanding

in the sheepfolds of Jerusalem

& Greece… Gregorian hymn

with ocarina harmony (Cahokian thing).

2.14.20

invisible, indivisible

Have been reading a couple books by Borden P. Bowne lately (Metaphysics, and Personalism).  Bowne was a professor of philosophy at Boston University a little over 100 years ago.  Involved (I believe) with the philosophical circle known as "Boston Personalism".  Apparently the group and the school of thought influenced the young Martin Luther King.

Not easy reading for me.  I'm not well-versed in philosophy.  The mind tends to wander.  But Bowne's perspective seems to chime with my own vague hunches about the nature of things.  I've always thought of poetry as a counter-force against positivism, materialism, determinism - the supposedly "objective" dehumanization and disenchantment of reality.

In fact Bowne provides a pretty forceful rational and philosophical defense of theism and "personhood".  I'm a little surprised his writings are not better known today.  He's not merely a Berkeleyan idealist.  Nor is he some kind of American pragmatist.  Rather he finds a middle way between "common sense" pragmatism (ie. all our knowledge ultimately derives from - and involves a rational abstraction from - ordinary experience) and Kantian idealism (ie. human consciousness orders & thereby interprets any and all experience whatsoever - the mind's insight is what we know).

Experience is not merely a phantasm of consciousness (as in Berkeley).  Things are real, things have concrete reality.  But mind is not a "thing" : and mind provides the only continuity, freedom, and truth that we know.  Bowne posits a sharp (a "metaphysical") divide between invisible mind (or soul, or spirit, or personhood) and the phenomenal world of things.  And yet he doesn't presume to define or theorize how "things" came into being.  His Occam's razor shreds (satirically) a lot of pretentious theorizing about "being" and "phenomena" etc.  He posits a strict difference between the finite and the infinite.  And yet he proposes a kinship between limited, finite human mind (consciousness, spirit) and the infinite creative personhood (consciousness, spirit) which must be the creative origin of things.  Nothing else will do.

Bowne is not a tendentious apologist for theism : instead, he slowly explores the origins of determinism, positivism, and materialism in our "common sense" response to the apparent "thickness", the substantiality, of things.  We are sensualists.  We extrapolate from physical, material, bodily experience, and leap to universals and generalizations about how "things must be".  We tend to evade the difficult (and very ancient) question about how anything exists at all - how things happen to be (from nothing).

Again, Bowne doesn't presume to answer this question.  He just finds a rational way to propose that an infinite creative Mind or Spirit is the only plausible source of what we call reality.

Philosophy can get you thinking, musing.  Perhaps we tend to avoid God because she's actually so close to us.  There's no "space" between the roots of our own personhood (our "soul", let's say) and the infinite person - except that dividing line (and it's a thick one) between finite and infinite.  But the primal analogy is there, the imago Dei.  Bowne demonstrates how what we understand by "personality" or personhood is really invisible, immeasurable - our core identity, our rational, emotional, actively volitional personhood, is an invisible intelligence - a soul, a spirit, a heart & mind.  & then Bowne demonstrates how the most rational description of the source or "world-ground" of reality as a whole is none other than some infinite (immeasurable, unlimited) form of this invisible intelligence (heart & mind).

Think of the eloquent poetry of Martin Luther King's analogies (between the spirit of divine Agape and the troubled spirits of an earthly people).

This text from the Book of Joel (2:28) seems apropos : "And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions..."

We're close here to the fusion of a very archaic vision of reality (eg. we are all children & beneficiaries of Manitou, the "Great Spirit"), with the most contemporary understanding of the same.

Maybe we're at the beginning of a new cultural sense, or common understanding, of reality - which is not that different from a very old sense.

None of this "proves" (philosophically) the specifically Christian declaration (the "good news" of "Father & Son & Spirit").  The Christian declaration is more radical than philosophical argument per se can propound : ie. Jesus is the personal manifestation of God.  This is rather an article of faith.  But Bowne is one of those thinkers and writers who provides a general, philosophical framework or ground for an approach to (or rational evaluation of) the obscure "witness" of religious (theological) expression.

(p.s. I know I'm not being completely fair to George Berkeley here.  This is Bowne's critique and distinction, not mine.  Berkeley, to my mind, seems actually very close to Bowne in his "metaphysics".)

A sigh is the sword of an angel king

I

Love, love... Valentine's Day.  The main legend (and it is only a legend) of the first St. Valentine portrays someone whom we would call a "prisoner of conscience".  Jailed, and eventually executed, for his religious activities by the Emperor Claudian, the hagiography tells how Valentine sent a note (or notes) to a loved one, signed "your Valentine".

We are quite familiar with prisoners of conscience these days.  Think of the young Iranian poet Hashem Shaabani, recently tortured and hanged for speaking out against abuses of power.  Just one example among thousands.  The globe today, a battlefield of exploitation, fanaticism, brutality and violence.

Sad thoughts on Valentine's Day.

II

I was never much for philosophy.  The teachers, textbooks put me in a drowse.   When you don't really study a subject, it's likely you'll produce banal travesties of ideas which have been stated (or refuted) with greater exactitude and force in years or ages past.  In other words you won't discover or relate anything new.

Have been playing catch-up, a little bit, reading a very absorbing book by Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination.  Explores the changing notions of "imagination" through the history of Western philosophy, from ancient/classical Greek and Jewish thought, through the Middle Ages, into the modern age (Kant, Romanticism, Existentialism... to the present).

My knowledge of German idealist philosophy has not really been knowledge at all, just sketchy third-hand references (say, in texts on Coleridge's philosophical background).  Kearney's book puts aesthetic issues in the larger context. 

Kant was pivotal : the origin of Romanticism.  His theory of the imagination - so radical that he himself drew back from it (in the revised 2nd ed. of Critique of Pure Reason) - shifted the ground in a fundamental way.

Ancient philosophy was rooted in theology.  Plato's idealism was structured around the assertion of a universal Being, a first principle, the cosmic Logos, the source of reality in a divine realm of living Ideas, a transcendental Mind.  In similar (though not congruent) fashion, Jewish monotheism asserted a transcendental, invisible Creator- and Sustainer-God.  The imagination, for both cultures, was corroded by sin and revolt : for Judaism, the heart's turning away from its source led to destruction; for the Greeks, feeble mortals required the aid of a rebellious Titan, Prometheus (avatar and scapegoat for all human capability).

The Medieval era synthesized the legacy of Athens and Jerusalem, but the basic theocentric cosmic design remained.  The human imagination was a fallible instrument, a likely source of (moral and intellectual) error.

The Renaissance, followed by Reformation and Enlightenment eras, began the transposition from theocentric to anthropocentric worldviews.  Kant revolutionized philosophy by bringing this slow development to a theoretical summation.  The imagination was the vital center of human being, the root of both experience (perception and sensibility) and knowledge (intellect and understanding).  Moreover, the imagination was transcendental : not in a theocentric sense of divine, or heavenly, but in the sense of prior or formative.  Imagination shapes all human knowledge and experience : we, in this sense, make our world.  The "logocentrism" of a prior, exterior cosmos no longer holds : Man is the origin of his/her own reality.

Kant himself drew back from some of the epistemological consequences of his own critique.  But his most radical position was the basis for the entire Romantic movement. Human creative subjectivity was now the world-fashioning source of all experience; the ultimate order was rooted in the human mind.

The history of western philosophy since Kant is a tale of the shattering of Romantic idealism.  Naturalism, Existentialism and the various strains of Postmodernism express the belief that, although God is no longer relevant, and human consciousness is the center of experience (just as Kant asserted), nevertheless, that consciousness is faced with an external actuality, a real world of chance and meaninglessness, which is beyond human comprehension or control.  The mind's constructs are fictions, founded in nothingness (Nietzsche, Sartre).  Creative idealism is not a source of nobility, but rather of moral evasion and betrayal (Kierkegaard, Marcuse).  We may recognize God's presence only in the absurd, by an irrational leap of faith (Kierkegaard, again) - everything else is rationalization, complacency, bad faith.  There is only heroism and fellow-feeling in the stoic acceptance of our mutual fate, in a random, absurd cosmos (Camus).  Symbolism and Modernism attempted to salvage aesthetic experience by constructing an autotelic world of art; but the shadow (or the joke) of the actual world (of injustice, pain and absurdity) always impinged.

This then is my rough, amateurish travesty (courtesy of R. Kearney) of the philosophical background to our own time, the Postmodern era.  Maybe you can characterize Postmodernity as the absorption of both the lessons of 20th-century history, and of existentialist thought.  The autotelic engine of the modernist imagination broke down about 50 years ago.  The strongest intellectual trends which replaced it involve either various modes of historicism or historical materialism, or various forms of neo-Nietzschean thought.  Derridean deconstruction, for example, is a sort of parodic Platonism, a Plato in an inverted mirror.  The cosmic Logos of rationality is inverted by universal non-identity, by a rational structure of irrationalism (very Nietzschean in spirit).  Even the disillusioned heroism of Existentialism is rendered impossible, since the human imagination is no longer merely absurd or futile, it is not itself.

There are also distinct, perhaps more "positive" trends - the paradoxes of Lacanian psychology (desire grounded in the imaginary presence of another) or the tentative affirmations of Levinas (ethics grounded in an unknowable divine Interlocutor).  The landscape is appropriately confusing.  But the history of imagination seems to present a central plot.  The ethical/ontological fences around the imagination - whether Judaic, Platonic, or Christian - were knocked down.  The formative capacities of the rational comprehension of experience are faculties of human subjectivity.  Man assumed many of the ordering functions once assigned to God.  Then, in Acts Two through Four, the authority of that human subjectivity was thoroughly dismantled.  Relativity in all modes reigns supreme (block that metaphor!).

III

Professional philosophes & knowledgeable people must forgive the howlers embedded in the above.  It's my naive subjective take on a wonderful book (Wake of Imagination) which I haven't finished reading.  But what is my response to the basic plot, so rashly hammed together here?

I'm going to improvise.  It's Friday afternoon.  (There will be no rationally-secured syllogisms, unfortunately.)

The mind : is it a lamp or a mirror?  It's a lamp in a mirror (as in a lighthouse).

Kierkegaard's extremity seems rooted in the idea that God is strictly unfathomable, that the paradox of the God-Man is inherently absurd.  More than absurd : it is abjection, it is scandal.  He believes in God, but it requires a leap of faith to even begin to believe.  There is no synthesis of reason and faith.

Yet I can hear the distant trumpets of affirmation in both Kant's optimism and Kierkegaard's pessimism.  Kant affirms mankind's noble freedom and power; Kierkegaard sets a limit to human pride and self-delusion.

Kant's transcendental imagination, capable of fusing sensibility and understanding, and logically prior to experience, is like Aristotle's definition of the soul, but in a modern mode.  Kierkegaard's iconoclastic leap of faith, his anguish reaching out a hand, is an intuition of the ultimate ground beneath the scintillating, shuttling clay of Mind.

That ultimate ground (or firmament) is Love.  Under the aegis of love, we can comprehend the conjunction of logical opposites, the "absurd" incarnation of the God-Man.  And here is when we need to remember : the imagination is only a faculty, a power, a capability, of a more fundamental entity : the Person.  The imagination is not yet the "form of forms" - the person comprehends this form in an integral totality.

It is this assertion, combined with a recognition of the historical actuality of Jesus, the God-Man, which allows us to build a synthesis of experiential reality on solid ground.  How so?

The mind is both mirror and lamp.  We must apply the lamp, in order to see ourselves (less darkly) in the mirror.  What does Jesus himself, that historical individual, say about God?  Jesus suffuses the "concept" of God in personhood, relationship, love.  We cannot see God, we cannot understand divine infinity : yet, using the lamp, we can form a conjecture, construct an hypothesis.  This is beyond Kierkegaard's absurd leap in the dark.  Yet it's not merely abstract philosophizing.  We acknowledge the irreducible historical actuality of the particular human person; at the same time, we hypothesize the benevolent personal nature of the divine source of all experience.

Christianity proposes a Trinity.  In the Gospels, Jesus is "anointed" Son of God under the auspices of the Holy Spirit (in the form of a dove, the ancient symbol of love).  Jesus, in his "official" role as Messiah and Son of God, posits a Father-Son relation of absolute authority.  But the Holy Spirit is a legitimate third Person in this design.  The Holy Ghost is designated as "the Spirit of Truth" in the Gospel of John.  And the Truth is made known to us only gradually.  What if we think of the "monarchical" design of monotheism as an imaginative projection, a partial figuration of something more complex?

I speculate that Judaism developed in a dialectical opposition to ancient monarchy (Egyptian, Babylonian).  The kingship of Yahweh is an anti-kingship.  The "royalty" of Jesus is another twist in the pattern.  Jesus is the anti-king : the servant of servants : the humble, the rejected one.  Jesus is the human being who overcomes all the violent powers of worldly kingdoms.  He is killed - and rises from the dead.  He is the ultimate sign of life defeating death : of the actual Power lurking in the human soul (and in the human imagination).  Everyman as spiritual hero : God as the author of divine tragicomedy.

How can God be personal?  Observe the vast dark cosmos of galaxies.  How can God be personal?  Use your imagination.

We think we know what "persons" are, don't we?  We depend on them : they are the most integral entities we know (starting with our own subjectivity, and that of all those persons who affect our lives).  Yet we see as in a glass, darkly.

Kant's imagination is transcendental, a priori, like Aristotle's soul.  Yet I'm saying the imagination is a faculty of a more integral entity (the Person, the "incarnate" soul).  Why is the soul incarnate?  Why do persons exist?  Because our life, our world, is caught up in a kind of obscure drama.

Imagination : Persons :: Faith : God

This is an imperfect diagram.  What I'm trying to suggest is that, just as the imagination is a transcendental faculty of persons, who are embodied, individual, existential actors - so faith is a transcendental act of such integral persons.  It's transcendental, in that this act of choice, of commitment to a hunch, cannot really be explained.  Not merely an absurd leap, however - but a reasonable hypothesis, grounded in gathered evidence, synthesized by the imagination's own sensibility & understanding.

Conceptualism... blah

I have this animus against the "Conceptual Poetry" phenomenon.  It's not reasonable, it's not informed, it's just a visceral dislike.  My attitude reminds me of my attitude back in the '90s toward Language Poetry.  It's not fair, it's just there.  So, being so terminally bored by the ponderous pronouncements of Kenneth Goldsmith & Vanessa Place - bored enough not to read much of it at all - I probably have little light to shed on this matter.  But I just thought I'd vent a little.

The whole movement seems to stem genetically from philosophical discourse.  The attitude of amused contempt displayed by the Conceptuals toward ordinary "poems" seems similar to that of Plato.  Plato's worldview was fundamentally binary and divided.  Mind was separate from Body; the material Cosmos is an imperfect reflection of the perfect, immaterial, transcendent, shaping Ideas which formed it.  Poetry, that unaccountable verbal what-not, that irrational chaos, that disturber of Plato's perfect (authoritarian) Philosopher's State, was to be dismissed, shunned, outlawed.

The Conceptuals don't want to outlaw poetry.  But they seem to have a parallel bias toward intellectual constructs over actual works of art.  Their progress through the authorizing institutions of Poetryland resembles Plato's dream of a philosophical coup, a take-over of ordinary this-world governance.  King Kenny & Queen Vanessa, the Conceptual Royals, institute their theoretical reign over the last tattered vestiges of the post-Romantic "lyric I".

Plato considered art to be fundamentally a matter of imitation, a mirror (a tarnished mirror).  But it's possible to conceive of other framing analogies.  One does not have to accept Plato's dualistic cosmos, split between matter and mind.  Instead, one can imagine a more holistic universe, an "incarnational" cosmos, in which mind and body, spirit and matter, may indeed be valid ontological distinctions - but not irreconcilable divisions.  Reality may be less like a system, and more like a story.  Poetry may be less like a mirror, a reflection, and more like a building - a construct rising out of the primal process of naming.  The act of giving a name to something involves more than reflection, mirroring.  Wallace Stevens called poetry "the sanction of life".  I think this gets closer to essence of the process of verbal shaping and ordering, its final purpose, than Plato's formulae.

The Conceptuals would like us to believe they have a special theoretical angle on poetry.  They apply a pseudo-radical tactic :  debunk the hoary Romantic concept of poetry, as subjective, lyric expression, by attacking the notion of personal identity itself.   Replace composition with the functionalism of meaningless, evacuated "text".  They might do better by recognizing that poetry is an integral activity which surpasses its own (or the philosophers') theoretical abstractions.  The Romantic theory that lyric expression is the essence of poetry - a theory which also stems from philosophical speculations, in this case those of J.S. Mill - may be long out of date.  But their attempt to replace poetic "substance" by theoretical concept, combined with an attack on personal subjectivity itself, seems more like a promotional gimmick than a real change in poetry or poetics.

Jesus Thoughts (5) : fields of Messiah

Context is everything.  The framework, the field of the message-in-embryo nurtures its meaning, forms the protective husk of the traveling pigeon-signal.  Thus when we think & talk about Jesus we have to envision the wider field, the landscape, the ground upon which the Messiah-figure stands. 

We could start with the meaning of "Messiah" itself.  The root of the messianic phenomenon lies in the character & nature of Yahweh, the High God, the only God, as presented in Hebrew monotheism, the beliefs and practices of Judaism.  Two characteristics, it seems to me, distinguish Yahweh from other ancient mythologies of the divine.  First, is the monotheistic concentration of all power and benevolence in the one God, a creator-God, apart from whom nothing exists at all.  Second, is the active, personal character of Yahweh : as narrated in the Bible, God intervenes in history in a way that can be chronicled.  Yahweh is a saving God, coming to rescue the poor and oppressed, raining down judgement on the wicked - in this life, in this world.

This narrative depiction of Yahweh, as an actor in history as well as all-powerful Creator, lays the foundation for the prophetic expectation and reception of a Messiah : one who comes to fulfill all the promises of justice and salvation made by God to Israel (and through Israel, to the world).

And this is the context, I believe, in which we have to build a mental sketch (merely a conjectural hypothesis!) of Jesus's self-understanding : how he himself comprehended his vocation, his mission in life.  He believed himself to be the Messiah : the one called upon to fulfill the messianic expectations of the people of Israel.  From this original position flows the application of all of his spiritual, intellectual, charismatic and rhetorical gifts, and the expression of decisive moral choices, as he faced up to the consequences of his vocation.

Let's think about this for a moment in a yet wider context.  The Jewish "fulfillment of Scripture" in the embodiment - the personhood - of a Messiah shows imperfect parallels with the rhetorical denouements found in other philosophical & religious cultures.  Buddhism was embodied by the Buddha.  Platonic philosophy culminated (theoretically, as befits Plato) in a "philosopher king" who would implement, in the real world of history, the ethical paradigms of Platonism.  Aristotle, Plato's pupil, inculcated a living ruler - Alexander the Great, no less - with the precepts of his own philosophy.  What I'm looking at here is what might be (in my admittedly very sketchy and unsystematic review) a general tendency : the expressions of religious world order tend to become personified, embodied, expressed in action by representative figures (ie. the prophet Daniel's messianic "Son of Man").

With this in mind - this sense of Jesus shaping his mission as a messianic fulfillment - perhaps we can appreciate his message itself in greater depth.  His message, to put it simply, is that he is opening the door to God.  God as the universal, ever-living fulness of an overwhelming love, wisdom & mercy : as the eternal cosmic Mind of creative lovingkindness, out of which all creatures have emerged.  Thus, in this vision, we are re-shaped, "reborn", as "children" of this God - children, with Jesus, of his divine "Father".  & so we begin to share a new life in this new, divine-human nature.  Moreover, Jesus aims to create a community in which "we shall all be one."  Through the recognition of our common "creaturehood" - offspring of a divine Mind - we begin to live together according to the precepts of such an understanding - the original Logos, what "was from the beginning."

The message is challenging, radical & strange.  It is also rooted in ancient worldviews & conceptions which we sometimes fail to grasp today.  But it is "possible, possible"... when we go back to the original comprehension or insight : that is, when we ask ourselves, "why is there something at all, rather than nothing?"  When we consider : "What if human consciousness and action, as we know it on this planet, represent a ratio, an analogy, a proportion - ie., a Logos - with a universal Consciousness from which reality proceeds (is given)?"

Have been reading Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, one of those great things you should have read in college... & have Peter O'Leary to thank, by circuitous way of his comments on poet Frank Samperi...

the labyrinthine/byzantine Neo-Platonic/Christian theological history of late antiquity is something I'd like to know more about... those old complex speculations, articulated by Plato & Aristotle, on God, Being, Nature, Person actually might have some relevance for literary criticism, & the idea of developing a "General Criticism" for US poetry world...

(of course it's all old hat for the Postmoderns...)

say for example the Aristotelian idea that individual things (including persons), in their individuality, are, strictly speaking, unclassifiable... - this might have some relevance for the way a critic would want to evaluate an individual poet...

But we have a homegrown school of criticism (The Chicago School, 1950s-60s - R.S. Crane, Richard McKeon, Elder Olson & others) who did some profound exploring in this area - researches on method, & the relation between criticism, literary history & philosophy...

might provide a basis for a new "General Criticism"...

Reading (slowly) Jay Parini bio of Robert Frost (since I was up Franconia way a few weeks ago). His time at Harvard, classes with Santayana, interest in philosophy of W. James, others.

Got me thinking in desultory way today about how nations & cultures slowly work around (or don't work around) certain intellectual problems or impasses. U.S. philosophy seems mainly about achievement of inner freedom & realism (Emerson's self-reliance), large dose of scepticism about religion (James, Santayana, Royce, many others). Maybe kind of a cousin to British empiricism. (I'm no expert, that's for sure : not well-read at all... just speculatin' here.)

This modern philosophy (secular, pragmatic, humanist, sceptical) runs counter to the older American strain of Protestant religious piety & enthusiasm. & you can see poets like Stevens & Eliot & Frost wavering & pondering at the crossroads of this deep intellectual/spiritual divide - ambivalent, cautious, crafty... (Crane, on the other hand, boldly, brashly, perhaps naively, rashly...) trying to work things out for themselves. Same can be said for their great precursors (Emerson, Dickinson, Whitman, Melville).

I see in my own poetry an unresolved obsession with this problem of faith & scepticism as well. I'm always trying to "figure it out". The mystery of it all, that is. I've come to some provisional conclusions (oxymoron there, moron).

I think I float somewhere between Eliot & Crane. There's this medieval sense that there is something uncannily canonical & authoritative in the Judaeo-Christian prophetic scripture & religion(s). But there's a stance, with me, against Eliot's reactionary authoritarianism - in fact a strong swing in the direction of Crane's Blakean-antinomian-poetic-Romantic kind of originary vision.

I think for me the resolution comes by way of an idea about the nature of religious language. For me, the Biblical record is - underneath all the hard-to-identify-with cultural archaism (& primitivism : see the amazing "Song of Deborah", for ex.) - strangely factual & historical (& despite the layers & layers & layers of storytelling & thematic editing & manipulation). There has been some kind of prophetic intervention of a powerful divine Word, the nature of which we don't yet rightly understand.

But - & here is my humanistic caveat : this Word, from the beginning, has aimed toward universalism. It is a fundamentally dramatic presentation, of a representative reality. This is epitomized in the title Jesus applied to himself : "the Son of Man". He used it in a double sense, and interchangeably, to refer 1) to himself personally, and 2) to humanity in general. As I understand this, he was intentionally setting himself forward as a kind of "actor of a general sign". This is an awkward way of putting it - I mean as a representative figure. You might think of this action as a kind of equalizer : a democratic limitation on the authority of that same Word. What I mean is, what is being implied by this kind of verbal formulation, is that the scriptural witness, the whole Biblical narration, is to be taken as some of the Epistles take it - as allegory, as typology : "in a spiritual sense". In other words, the historic act of divine intervention, narrated in the Bible, is intended to be understood as an "illustration" of universal human experience.

This is in no sense put forward, here, as asserting a limitation on the moral, experiential, spiritual motivation & meaning - the diverse forms of religious sustenance - which are and can be drawn from this scriptural & sacerdotal source. My thoughts here represent just one among many ways of drawing out the implications of the Biblical event(s). For me, anyway, this vague direction seems to offer a possible means of reconciling faith & humanism, religion & the secular.

& further... it must be kept in mind that the "Son of Man" is characterized by Jesus as someone subsisting always in (close) relationship with the Spirit of God. It's an irreducibly binary or triune mode of existence (leading ultimately to unity & oneness). Here is where humanism & faith part ways. Jesus relates in the Gospels that "all Power & Authority" have been granted to the Son of Man; indeed, the Biblical "illustration" of truth may have even emerged originally from Man; but what is the substance of this illustration, exactly? It is the manifestation, & the record, of the unaccountable activity of divine Spirit - understood as guiding humanity toward its own ultimate goal. Sacred history is a strange sort of two-step... conscious/unconscious... reason/nature... sort of like the action of poetic/prophetic inspiration (O Muse of fire...)

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : consciousness (label : subject/consciousness).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)


Related topics (there are many others): icon, Peirce, subjectivity, "J"...

Here's a lecture (sound recording) by my neighbor Nancy Kendrick on Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz. (Sound values not so great : adjust volume down...) Kendrick is chair of philosophy dept. at Wheaton College.

There was a recent book on the personal/professional relationship between Spinoza & Leibniz - will try to find reference (OK, here it is : The Courtier and the Heretic, by Matthew Stewart). A revisionist-historicist's view(?). Want to find out.

The description of Descartes' proof of God's existence (God = "that which must be", etc.) - reminds me of the passage in the Gospel of John where Jesus says "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life." (That which must be = Truth.)

When I was a teenager I thought the fundamental problem in the universe was this : what is the basis of reality - consciousness or matter? I came down on the side of consciousness. I have a clear memory of walking away from camp one evening, on a remote lake in Canada (1967 or so) - looking out at the water, thinking about this.

Re-reading Swinburne's thesis, I do what comes naturally, which is play devil's advocate. This is simply a way of testing arguments, I guess.

Swinburne proposes that there are three options : scientific explanation, personal explanation, or no explanation at all. Science is limited in that it cannot explain why things exist, or why they are so coincidentally ordered & unified. As he goes on to show, personal explanation - extrapolated to a supreme being - provides (amazingly) a pretty strong explanation for the nature of the universe.

But what has been playing in the back of my mind is a notion, perhaps akin to that of Eastern religion : that there might be another mode of explanation, which we could call the impersonal.

What if the ultimate characteristic of the universe of objects and things is, indeed, not chaos, but order? What if the artificial ordered creations that conscious beings (humans) produce - works of art, technology, etc. - are not so much analogous to the acts of a divine Maker, but rather simply acts of alignment, on a smaller scale, with the original, universal Order? "Conforming with the Tao", so to speak?

This also seems akin to some recent physics theory (I can't remember the name of the author) about the "algorithmic" nature of reality. The universe shuttling automatically into new formal formations.

One might then expect the philosophical alternative to a "new theism" would be a counter-movement - toward a "new Taoism", or something like that.

I don't happen to agree with this view, but I can see its appeal. I think that, aside from the "cosmological" or "design" arguments for theism, the evidence from consciousness and "personhood" weighs the scale on the side of theism, as opposed to this sort of spiritualized materialism or impersonal Way. (I do believe in "the Way", or universal law : but I also believe in the Person as its original and ultimate expression.)

(Between the unknowing of the intellect faced with God, and the following of the everlasting Way, there is probably a lot of complimentary common ground. But they are not the same. The belief that the ultimate ground of reality is impersonal is... rather impersonal, I guess.)

p.s. & I wouldn't be surprised if somebody like Swinburne could look more closely at the evidentiary logic of chaotic things and events, vs. the vast prevalence of order, and suggest that my "impersonal" explanation is simply the same as the "no explanation" option. What is the probability of a universe self-ordering itself, by chance (because if it is not by chance, then you have to accept a motivation of some kind - which brings God back into the picture)? In fact, the analogy, between conscious intention producing small-scale forms of order, on the one hand, with cosmic intentionality, on the other - ie. small-scale ordering acts as examples or replications of a universal-metaphysical act - remains pretty persuasive to me...

Richard Swinburne's book (The Existence of God) is like a well-built, deep-drafted seagoing vessel. His command of the logic of evidence, probability - "confirmation theory" - allows him to re-open old arguments toward God's existence - from cosmology, from design, from "Providence", etc. - in new and remarkable directions. His discussion of the kind of universe a good God would create (the chapter on Providence) - one which allows for conscious beings with a capacity for freedom of choice of good and evil, intellectual and moral growth - I found quite moving. Nor does he sidestep the "problem of evil" or the presence of suffering and death.

The rational investigation of the possible existence and nature of God seems to me to be one of the most important cultural developments of any society, because it allows for the possibility of reasoning about and "reasoning-with" a reasonable God. It is an exercise in free thought. It counters the text-idolatry and intellectual tyranny of the fundamentalist and "traditionalist" attitudes, present in all three of the monotheistic faiths.

Slogging through some turgid & pedantic chapters in Richard Swinburne's The Existence of God. When philosophers decided, about 100 yrs ago, that they should sound like scientists, and put all their reasoning into logico-symbolic equations ("where event E is folded into hypothesis H via prior knowledge K we get probability P divided by..." blah blah)... this was a huge mistake. It's worse than the most dried-up medieval scholasticism. All this stuff should be in the footnotes at the back.

& yet the book's stylistic weaknesses are rendered just about moot by the fabulous logical intelligence at work here.

We have a general mythical-historical notion of a gradual dimming away, in the West, of rational belief in an omnipotent creator-God. This book is perhaps the best evidence that such an historical picture is mistaken. Swinburne walks in no fear of Kant or Hume. & his arguments are cumulative and very strong.

p.s. & I should say that most of Swinburne's book is clear, simple & direct. (He apologizes for the symbology in the intro.)

sorry to be so garrulous this morning.

& I know I repeat myself many times over.

Certain basic philosophical dilemmas are recurrent, because they're so interesting, so hard to resolve... because they dangle there like keys to the maze.

& these dilemmas spin out a history over time, of different allegiances & emphases, as we try to resolve them again & again.

This history is crystallized in complex responses (composed, struggling, beneath multiple simultaneous pressures & necessities) - which are works of art.

Then these crystallizations become models of resolution, for our own contemporary dilemmas : challenges, mountains to climb, summit views to behold - choices to negate & revise.

Reading a good essay by Richard McKeon, "Philosophic bases of art and criticism", in my Chicago School anthology, Critics & Criticism (publ. back in late 50s).

McKeon is comparing Plato, Kant, Tolstoy, Horace, Aristotle, Bacon on their approaches to poetry & criticism. Shows how the same basic problems recur, but that different emphases lead to opposing or contradictory usage of the same terms.

(Plato, Kant & Tolstoy take a thematic approach, considering what poetry is in the context of basic issues such as truth, consciousness, nature; Aristotle, Bacon & Horace analyze poetry pragmatically, as a unique thing-in-itself, with respect to how the poet best achieves its unique purposes.)

This probably sounds very dry & abstract. But if the critic isn't aware of basic principles & methods, he or she simply reiterates the biases & blind spots of the past. The Chicago School provides a map for anybody who wants to attempt literary criticism with a general foundation in the fundamentals. & the only way to get beyond a terribly parochial and utilitarian (sub)critical milieu (the current state of poetry criticism in the US), would be to revisit the basic problems of approach.

George Berkeley spent a couple years living in the "Paradise" neighborhood of Newport, waiting for the loans and grants to come through for his fantastic, visionary scheme to create a College for the Americas, for anglos & natives alike, in Bermuda. The money never materialized, & eventually he sailed back to England. But while in Newport, he composed some of his major philosophical dialogues. He liked to look out at the Atlantic from a cleft in a large puddingstone outcrop, known to locals as "Berkeley's Seat".


Was Irish philosopher George Berkeley an extreme idealist? A realist? A transcendentalist? He wrote against contemporaneous currents in science & philosophy which posited something abstract called "matter", a kind of substrate of reality upon which fleeting surface "phenomena" enacted their changes. For Berkeley, "esse est percipi", or "what is, is what is perceived". An Anglican bishop as well as philosopher & dabbler in scientific speculation (the benefits of "Tar-Water", etc.), his worldview is grounded in theism & a notion of creation. Thus the holistic Reality which we perceive and experience, is so perceived by a means somehow analogous to the divine Imagination which conceives it, imagines it, dreams it.

Berkeley is one of several local avatars in Stubborn Grew, where along with painter (& fellow "Paradise"-dweller) John LaFarge, he sort of sanctions the fiction-making, the fantastic elements, of this "local history" poem.

from the "Once in Paradise" chapter :

16

Aloft there on shale shelf, in cave mouth,
Berkeley's eyes drifted out to sea.
A pair of dicey gypsy barks
gambling on the shepherding waves.

You have your materialist peasants
nattering pedantically along with your
libertine idle blank-eyed statuettes O
London - and this jovial pleasant

noncholeric collared Irish bookish Dean
waves the Vico key in your face. And waits.
Waits for your double crosscheck, mates -
your doubloon that never comes - keening,

why have you forsaken me? In RI? Heaven's
not some dull neuteronian mechanical.
It's providential - and recreational!
A dream, again! - again! - Bermudian!

It can be argued that the age of science, enlightenment, & rationalism set poetry free to enter its proper sphere of pure play. & if you accept that play is a central & "serious" human activity, there is some truth to this. But if play/poetry/childhood is framed as part of a duality in which work/seriousness/reality-principle is the more important or essential half, then poetry has been assigned to a play-pen & will be coddled, tolerated, & held in fond contempt.

I would realign these relations, with the claim that science & rationalism cannot, & will never, provide an adequate description of reality. Philosophy reaches a little closer, but its discursive abstractions are still inadequately communicative. Only the arts provide a sufficiently vivid affective-intellectual image of experience & reality. Poetry can span the distance between philosophical concepts on the one hand, and dramatic immediacy & actuality on the other. (Philosophy for its part aspires toward the condition of dialogue & drama.)

I offer these admittedly unoriginal notions to follow up on previous posts. How can poetry assume its full powers, then? I would think one critical measure in this regard would be a poetry's expressive wholeness - its willingness to patiently present & clearly "argue" - or logically defend - its sensuous, affective, or experiential subject-matter & the underlying rhetoric of same. This is what I see, for example, in the tightly-knotted & expressive sentence-structures of Keats' sonnets and odes : these poems display a striking, a startling, fusion of song & statement. Expressive logic or wholeness - as opposed to the poetry of half-statement, deflection, intimation, pose, predetermined attitude, rhetorical inflation-for-effect.

Closer to our time, Wallace Stevens reaches in this direction, with his fusion of philosophical reflection & rhetorical play. Robert Lowell simultaneously argues & suffers with contemporary history. But these are just 2 examples among many, not meant as representative figures; my purpose is to focus on a way of interpreting poetic value.

Wallace Stevens' poetry is sometimes orotund, coinciding with the general repleteness & rotundity of WS, as in similar modus William Shakespeare offers a mighty graceful Globe;

and as WS oftentimes mentions the poetry to be found in philosophers,

so, I recommend Nicolaus Cusanus, or Nicholas of Cusa, whose interest in roundness surpasseth all others;

quotes to follow -

Therefore the edge of the world is not composed of points, but its edge
 is roundness [rotunditas], which consists in one point. 

 
Roundness cannot be composed out of points for, since a point is indivisible 
and does not have quantity or parts or a front and back or other differences,
it cannot be joined to another point.

 
Only length and width can be seen.  But in roundness nothing is long or wide
or straight.  Roundness is a kind of circumference, a certain convexity led
around from point to point whose top is everywhere.  And its top is the atom,
invisible because of its tininess.

 
The round world is not that roundness itself than which no roundness can be
greater, but that roundness than which nothing can actually be greater.
Absolute roundness is not of the nature of the roundness of the world, but is its
cause and exemplar; the absolute roundness of which the roundness of the world is
the image.  I see the image of eternity in a circle where there is neither a beginning
nor an end since there is no point in which it would be the beginning rather than
the end.  [italics mine]

Listen to this subtlety :

Moreover unity is more perfect and simple to the degree that it is more uniting.
Hence the Trinity, which is one in such a way that it is also in three persons, each of
which is one, is more perfect.  And unity would not be most perfect in any other way.

similarly :

Consequently you must open up the gaze of your mind, and you will see that God
is in all multitude because he is in the number one, and in every magnitude because he
is in the point.  From this it is established that divine simplicity is more subtle than the
number one and the point which gives the unfolding power of multitude and magnitude.
Hence God is a greater enfolding power than that enfolding power of the number one 
or of a point.

Edward J. Butterworth (rotund moniker) has a perfectly succinct essay in the book Nicholas of Cusa in Search of God and Wisdom (Brill, 1991), clarifying these concepts & relating them to the earlier Alan of Lille, who wrote : Deus est spaera intelligibilis, cuius centrum ubique, circumferentia nusquam. Moreover, Lille :

The creature is called the center because, as time, compared to eternity, is thought
a fleeting motion, so the creature, compared to God, is a central point.  Therefore, the
immensity of God is said to be the circumference, because it disposes all things in
such a way that it encompasses them and enfolds all things within its immensity.

It's possible to find only word games & rhetorical sleight of hand here. But not if you take into account Cusanus' commitment to the (negative-theological) absolute otherness of God. Mathematical terms are applied to simplicity, while concrete (physical) terms are applied to multiplicity (as in Alan of Lille). Yet otherness and the physical universe are joined, related to one another, by shared geometrical terms & analogies (in a relation of material actuality, on the one hand, and ineffable, invisible & infinite (yet intelligible) perfection, on the other). Alan of Lille's "Intelligible Sphere".

Leading (Butterworth illuminates, partly via Einstein) (& around again) to Cusanus' limpid, rotund contradiction :

Therefore the edge of the world is not composed of points,
but its edge is roundness, which consists in one point.

(All Cusanus quotes from
De Ludo Globi (The Game of Spheres))

what's that Dickinson line? "My circuit is circumference" [?]

At the end of previous post, I contrasted both bohemian poetics & postmodernism with the poetic capacity of the "visionary".

It may be that the meaning of visionary here hinges on a concept of philosophy, and on how we conceive the relation between poetry & philosophy.

Postmodernism generally seems to posit a kind of Dionysian or Nietzschean "irreality" which de-centers both reality itself, and the philosophical language which aims to delineate it.

Olsonian-derived Projectivism seems to represent a genuine effort to "envision" reality in a holistic way, but it's accompanied by a kind of magico-mysterium hierophantic attitude which tends toward elitism & obscurantism.

"New American" poetry generally seems derived from a poetics more than a unified philosophy : a poetics of expressive free engagement rather than traditionalist formalities, codes & idioms.

A "serious" poetics as opposed to a "minor" poetics would maybe be grounded in some form of realism, by which I mean the assumption by both Plato & Aristotle, both the philosopher of formal beauty & the philosopher of natural energeia, that there exists an objective Reality which humans can and should aim to interpret as rightly as possible.

The battles between philosophy & poetry I think about in terms of the Western integration of "Hellenism" & "Hebraism". Hellenism asserts the human capacity to objectify the True & the Real in philosophical/scientific signs. Hebraism emphasizes the underlying & mysterious subjectivity of phenomena, grounded in a Creation which is the artifice of a divine Nature which is itself imaged in human beings (as the "faces" or facets of a geometrical figure approach the continuum of the circle). This subjectivity I align with the poetic (as differentiated from the discursive-philosophic) tradition of the Psalmist & the prophets. Poetry asserts a certain vividness of expression which is more truly mimetic of the ultimate Reality than discursive reasoning can achieve. So these two are always in creative rivalry, the one tending toward irrational magic & superstition, the other tending toward dry & dehumanized rationalism.