Thursday 27 January 2011

TS Eliot vs Matthew Arnold in The Use of Poetry

Eliot's main target in 'The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism' is Matthew Arnold's view (echoed by I. A. Richards) that poetry ought to be a substitute for religious faith. To summarise crudely, Eliot seems to offer two main arguments against Arnold.  Firstly, following Jacques Maritain, he claims that Arnold's attitude leads one to expect too much from poetry, engendering arrogance in the poet, and mystical extravagance in the poetry, instead of classical restraint. Second, he thinks Arnold fails to consider that religious poetry is at its best when it has a background in a genuine, stable religion (like Eliot's Church of England). Such a background not only provides a proper religious context for any spiritual nourishment the poetry provides, but also gives the religious poet more room to focus on the formal excellence of his poetry. In sum Eliot claims that Arnold's view leads to bad poetry, and bad religion.

Though I find Eliot's overall case to be powerful, these explicit arguments seem to me rather weak. On the issue of formal excellence, one can respond by pointing out that even if Arnoldian poetry is at risk of tending toward extravagance, this surely leaves open the possibility of good Arnoldian poets who write formally excellent verse with the appropriate restraint. Indeed, one of the cornerstones of the post-Eliot critical defence of romanticism is that the romantics were good Arnoldian poets - avant la lettre - in precisely this sense. On the issue of spiritual nourishment, on the other hand, Eliot simply begs the question against the Arnoldian, who is interested in a substitute for religious faith precisely because he no longer wants to be embedded in a Church of any kind. Arnoldian poetry may indeed be the worse, in nutritional terms, for operating in a spiritual void, but for most of us that void is one from which there is no escape.

Friday 21 January 2011

George Steiner, Real Presences and Liberal Scepticism

In Real Presences, George Steiner "argues a wager on transcendence" (214). The wager is, more precisely, that the fundamental aesthetic act is an imitatio of an original, divine, act of creation that transcends empirical proof. Steiner clearly hopes to tempt at least some of his readers into making the same wager themselves. At the same time, however, he emphasizes that his proposal - "that there is some fundamental encounter with transcendence in the creation of art" (228) - is unacceptable to "the prevailing climate of thought and of feeling in our culture"(228). It is unacceptable to deconstruction, with its contrary presumption of immanence and absence. It is unacceptable to "logical atomism" and "logical positivism" - and by extension to most contemporary anglophone philosophy - because it exceeds the bounds of empirical or logical argument. Among the most pervasive sources of opposition to the purported encounter with transcendence, is "liberal scepticism" (227). With this tag - he also refers elsewhere to 'sceptical positivism' and 'sceptical rationality' -  Steiner presumably aims to refer, not so much to a particular philosophical school or tradition, but to a widespread intellectual mood: sceptical, rational and suspicious of transcendence.

    How, then, does Steiner hope to convert the late twentieth century sceptic? Steiner's overall rhetorical strategy in Real Presences can be seen as a sustained attempt to use the sceptic's own suspicions against him. Deconstructive nihilism, he concedes, cannot be refuted "on its own terms and planes of argument"(132). To the sceptical empiricist, moreover, he concedes that his convictions concerning transcendence are 'verification transcendent'. But for Steiner these sceptical tendencies do not go far enough. It is precisely because verification transcendence "marks every essential aspect of human existence" that one must, in confronting great art, take something like a leap of faith. Moreover, it is precisely "in the light or, if you will, in the dark of the nihilistic alternative" represented by deconstruction that one supposedly finds further motivation to take Steiner's wager.

    However, this rhetorical strategy seems to me to exaggerate the distance between Steiner and the liberal sceptic. For one thing, the key step in Steiner's argument, the recognition of pervasive verification transcendence, is one many liberal sceptics would presumably be happy to take. Moreover, although it might seem that Steiner's next step - the irrational wager itself - marks a decisive break from scepticism, I suggest that even here Steiner is closer to the liberal sceptic than he appears to think. After all Steiner is careful not to present his 'wager' as a return to dogma - he is not a postmodern dogmatic theologian. Indeed it is precisely because he is extremely reluctant to present his convictions as a matter of straightforward empirical belief or propositional assertion that he resorts at key points to such terms as 'wager', 'conjecture', 'affirmation'. At this point, Steiner should perhaps have drawn on the liberal scepticism of I. A. Richards, with his distinction, for example, between intellectual and emotional belief. Placing himself within this ultimately Coleridgean sceptical tradition might have served not only to clarify his views, but also to tone down his antagonistic stance toward 'the prevailing climate of thought and of feeling'.