Isaiah Berlin and Romanticism

One of a handful of intellectuals in Britain with a deep sympathy for the golden age of European culture known as German Romanticism, Isaiah Berlin nevertheless resisted what he thought of as the intoxicating effects of the more extreme Romantic ideas. (The handful would surely also include the literary critic George Steiner - like Berlin, an émigré of Jewish descent). The end result of the “passionate, fanatical, half-mad” doctrines of Romanticism, he concludes in his study The Roots of Romanticism, is an understanding of the plurality of values and therefore - paradoxically - “liberalism, toleration, decency and the appreciation of the imperfections of life”.

This sane and erudite liberalism naturally also colours Berlin’s readings of Russian intellectual history (e.g. in the volume Russian Thinkers from which the quotes that follow are drawn) - which arguably constitute his other main contribution to British intellectual life. His understanding of German romanticism makes him uniquely able to discern its massive impact on 19th century Russian thought, allowing us to conceive the then emerging Russian intelligentsia - more than the French or American, and certainly more than the English - as the true heirs of the ideas of Herder, Schelling and Hegel.

Central to German Romanticism, Berlin perceived, was a recognition of the limitations of the mechanistic understanding of the universe which the European Enlightenment had brought to the fore, and a consequent exploration of non-scientific modes of understanding the world. While enlightenment thinkers sought to extend the methods of natural science to understand culture, the romantics sought a generalised hermeneutics modelled on the intuitive, unformalisable way we understand works of art, or each other. No longer a giant machine composed of separate parts, the universe became “a single spirit, a great, animate organism, a soul or self, evolving from one spiritual stage to another”. Understanding such a universe was therefore closer to aesthetic experience or mystical vision than a patient accumulation of facts and a formulation of laws.

Though sympathetic to these ideas, Berlin rejects them not merely because of the harmful political consequences he identifies them as having, but because they “vastly exaggerated the power and reliability of this kind of intuitive and poetical insight”. The romantic programme, despite important kernels of truth such as “the notion that the many activities of the human spirit are interrelated”, is ultimately “a fantasy, or at any rate a form of highly subjective poetry in prose”. Such judgements echo those of the logical positivists (with whose work Berlin would have been thoroughly familiar - he was a lifelong friend of A J Ayer, for example) who dismissed the entire history of metaphysics as literally nonsensical, or at best a form of poetry misunderstanding itself as philosophy.

There is, however, an air of confusion in this criticism of German romanticism. For if, as Berlin recognises, the romantics consciously modelled their epistemology on aesthetics, the idea that their theories can be seen as a product of ‘fantasy’ (a word whose greek etymology points towards imaginative insight, despite the negative connotations of the term in modern usage), and a form of ‘poetry in prose’ should be highly congenial to them: far from being a criticism of their theories, it could be seen as their consequence. Berlin half-recognises this problem in qualifying the term ‘poetry’ with the phrase ‘highly subjective’ - as if recognising that his criticism would be weakened if the poetry were of a more universal kind. A non-subjective, universal poetry, one that expresses the ‘spirit of the age’ and ultimately “the spirit of the universe conceived pantheistically as a kind of ubiquitous divinity” was of course just the kind of poetry Berlin accurately describes the romantics as striving for.

So the crux of this particular criticism of German romanticism is whether such a universal, non-subjective poetry (Progressive Universalpoesie was Schlegel’s definition of romantic poetry) is possible, or whether attempts to realise it inevitably degenerate into something purely subjective. And this question in turn depends on how we understand the distinction between subjectivity and the universality it is supposed to lack. On the romantic conception of subjectivity or selfhood, subjectivity and universality are not necessarily opposed. The idea of a ‘merely subjective’ poetry presupposes an enlightenment ideal of scientific objectivity whose pretensions the romantics sought to deflate. 

Berlin is ready to grant that “the French philosophes may have exaggerated the virtue…of the application of the criteria of the natural sciences to human affairs”. Perhaps not surprisingly, a proper evaluation of German romanticism hinges on understanding the precise extent to which modern man has exaggerated the power of science to bring ‘objective’ knowledge of the world, as opposed to merely providing the tools to transform it.

Berlin concludes The Roots of Romanticism with the claim that the romantics were “hoist with their own petard” because their ideas lead naturally to a sceptical, pragmatic liberalism, despite the romantics’ intentions. Perhaps the truth is exactly the opposite: a sceptical, pragmatic liberalism leads naturally to a scepticism of exaggerated claims to scientific objectivity, and therefore a renewed appreciation for the ‘subjective’ powers of the romantic imagination.

Occultism and ‘the Movement’

In considering the relation between twentieth century British poetry and the occult tradition it is natural to think first of the occult leanings of the great modernists: the Frazer-inspired occultism of ‘the Waste land’; the ‘mythic method’ of Joyce’s Ulysses; Ezra Pound and the mystical psychology of the troubadours; the ‘strange gods’ of Yeats’ supernaturalism; not to mention Lawrence’s Paganism, or HD’s mythic Hellenism… the list goes on. All this seems at first sight to contrast sharply with ‘the Movement’, often thought of as responding to the excesses of Dylan Thomas and ‘the new apocalyptics’ with a sober and sceptical return to the ordinary.

But on closer inspection there are surprising survivals of occult tradition in the Movement. For one thing, there is Elizabeth Jennings, one of the poets included in the famous ‘New Lines’ anthology. Throughout her life Jennings was involved in a complex and passionate engagement with the more mystical stream of Catholicism, an engagement that resulted in a book-length investigation of the relation between poetry and mystical experience, Every Changing Shape (which perhaps significantly takes it’s title from Eliot’s early work ‘Portrait of a Lady’).

It would be easy to write off Jennings as an exception, were it not for a mystical strain reaching to the heart of the poetics of the Movement. Donald Davie’s essay ‘Purity of Diction in English Verse’ is often thought of as the closest thing the movement had to a ‘manifesto’. The term ‘purity of diction’ is ultimately defined by Davie in reference to the still under-rated work of Owen Barfield. Davie is discussing Barfield’s claim that figurative language is essential to true poetry, a claim that may seem antithetical to the Movement’s admiration for the ‘virtues of good prose’. Barfield writes:

If you take away from the stream of European poetry every passage of a metaphorical nature, you would reduce it to a very thin trickle indeed, pure though the remainder beverage might be to the taste. Perhaps our English poetry would suffer the heaviest damage of all.

Davie points out, however, that by Barfield’s own criteria, even poetry that takes the form of simple and literal statement can be profoundly figurative, due to the activation of dead metaphors in apparently literal language. Consequently, for Davie, the ‘purity’ mentioned by Barfield can be seen as a virtue. Far from damaging English poetry, purity of diction for Davie becomes a means of purifying the language by reviving its hidden powers.

Part of the reason for Barfield’s continuing neglect, of course, is his long and sincere association with Rudolf Steiner’s Anthoposophy, perhaps the most refined expression of modern occultism. Though Barfield underplays the connections in the work (Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning) discussed by Davie, the connections are there. The notion of reviving dead metaphor, for Barfield is closely connected to the Anthoposophical understanding of the history of the soul. As Barfield tells it, the development of human powers of rationality in modernity can be seen as having eroded our intuitive sense of the connection between, among other things, the natural and the spiritual world. Barfield gives a scholarly and logical argument for seeing the history of language as one in which single meanings - meanings embodying what from our current point of view appear as intuitive syntheses of key dichotomies: nature vs spirit, abstract vs concrete - tend to split up into a number of separate and often isolated concepts. The dead metaphors in our language, for Barfield, are thus often linguistic remnants of a primordial conceptual and perceptual holism. It is not much of a stretch, therefore, to see Davie’s program of purifying the language by reviving such earlier meanings as running in parallel with the occultist program of bridging the gap between nature and the world of spirit.

Schellenberg's Skeptical Religion: thoughts on 'belief in' vs 'belief that'

In his book The Will to Imagine: A Justification of Skeptical Religion, Schellenberg offers a neat set of concepts with which to approach the old problem of the relation of faith and reason. For Schellenberg, religious skepticism - by which he means, neither believing nor disbelieving religious propositions - is fully justified. His proposal, however, is that the religious skeptic may nevertheless have religious faith. Specifically, he may have propositional faith in religious propositions, defined as follows:

Propositional faith involves voluntary asset to a proposition, undertaken in circumstances where one views the state of affairs it reports as good and desirable but in which one lacks belief in the proposition. In thus assenting to a proposition, one adheres to a certain policy: a policy of mentally going along with its content in relevant contexts (as opposed to questioning or criticising or ignoring it, or simply keeping it at arm's length) - of imagining the world to oneself as including the relevant state of affairs and mentally endorsing this representation ( in thought 'taking its side', aligning oneself with it, deciding in favour of it, selecting it to guide one). (p3)

One can have propositional faith in regard to any of the world's great religions, but Schellenberg argues that the best object of propositional faith is a sort of generalised religion he calls 'Ultimism': the view that "what is deepest in reality (metaphysically ultimate) is also unsurpassably great (axiologically ultimate) and the source of an ultimate good (salvific)" (xii) This kind of general faith is to be recommended over particular faiths on the basis of an intellectual virtue religious skeptics will readily recognise - the virtue of openness, understood as encompassing 'intellectual vigilance', 'evenhandedness', and the 'readiness or willingness to accept' the widest possible range of significant religious propositions.

The idea that ultimism is to be preferred in this way is plausible, since being open to the widest possible range of religious propositions will naturally lead one to want to leave open one's commitment to any one such proposition by committing instead to the most general version of such propositions. But it could be argued that the momentum of this argument actually takes one even further than Ultimism. For the extreme openness of the genuine religious skeptic will naturally lead him to doubt, not only whether ultimism is true - which is strictly irrelevant to the question of the adoption of propositional faith - but precisely whether it is the best object of propositional faith. For instance, she will be driven to consider whether a version of Satanism (in which what is axiologically ultimate is not also salvific) or naturalism (in which what is metaphysically ultimate is not axiologically ultimate or salvific) might not be better objects of propositional faith than Ultimism. Note that if she is a religious skeptic, neither believing nor disbelieving in religious claims, the fact that these views imply atheism do not make them inappropriate as objects of propositional faith - since for such a skeptic atheism is just as much a matter of faith as religion.

Perhaps a more significant way in which the openminded skeptic will be led to question Ultimism, however, relates to the very concepts in which Ultimism is formulated. Genuine openness would surely include openness to other ways of conceptually formulating and expressing the ultimate object of one's propositional faith. It would include, for instance, vigilance regarding the intellectual histories of such words as 'axiological' and 'salvific' (and the terms with which such words are explicated), and regarding whether such words might have undesirable or unwarranted metaphysical or Christian connotations. What this suggests is that there may be a problem with the propositional aspect of propositional faith: for in being tied to a particular proposition - a particular logical concatenation of particular concepts - propositional faith seems to lack the fluidity required by skeptical openness.

It is interesting in this context to recall the distinction between 'belief that p' and 'belief in X'. H H Price argued that some uses of 'belief in X', and in particular belief in God, are not reducible to 'belief that p', i.e. to any combination of propositional beliefs. Schellenberg implicitly draws an analogous distinction in his account of propositional faith, which is essentially 'faith that p' rather than 'faith in X'. But if belief in X is not necessarily reducible to belief that p, then 'faith in X' may not always be reducible to 'faith that p' (and observe that this latter is by far the less natural idiom). Consequently, the fact that skeptical openness involves an openness to the variety of possible propositional formulations of the object of faith, suggests that the object of this skeptic's faith may be best expressed in the idiom of 'faith in X'. The phrase 'faith in God' , for instance, might be said to possess the same combination of maximal generality with specifically religious content as Schellenberg's Ultimist proposition, while avoiding the limitations of being tied to specific propositional commitments. (Note that an assumption being made here is that the skeptic avowing this kind of 'faith in God' will not understand the word 'God' in such a way as to commit himself to the kinds of propositional claims affirmed in specific religions).

The move from propositional to non-propositional mental attitudes also threatens to undermine Schellenberg's fundamental distinction between faith and belief. For a key point about propositional faith, for Schellenberg, is its compatibility with the absence of propositional belief. But if belief in God is quite distinct from believing some range of propositions about God, there may be no need for the religious skeptic to make a leap from belief to faith, in order to avoid commitment to particular propositions; instead, all that may be required is a move from avowals of 'belief that' to avowals of 'belief in'.

Aphorism

Automatic writing is to poetry what Jazz is to composition.

Freedom and Transgression: Sontag on Artaud and Breton

That Artaud found Breton's thinking shallow - that is, optimistic, aesthetic - follows from the fact that Breton did not have a Gnostic style or sensibility. Breton was attracted by the hope of reconciling the demands of individual freedom with the need to expand and balance the personality through generous, corporate emotions; the anarchist view, formulated in this century with the greatest subtlety and authority by Breton and Paul Goodman, is a form of conservative, humanistic thinking - doggedly sensitive to everything repressive and mean while remaining loyal to the limits that protect human growth and pleasure. The mark of Gnostic thinking is that it is enraged by all limits, even those that save. (Susan Sontag, 'Introduction' to Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings)

Susan Sontag's sensitive portrait of the difference between Artaud and Breton only slightly exaggerates Breton's often unacknowledged sympathy with ideas of human development often located within the more romantic strands of liberalism (Hegel, von Humboldt, to a lesser extent J S Mill). And the question at issue, of whether the ideal of developing one's creative faculties may be in tension with a profound kind of freedom, must seem crucial in our libertarian age.

One way to doubt whether there really is a tension here may be to ask why it seems so appropriate to describe the Gnostic opposition to limits as a matter of rage. Might not such rage, even while it provides the energies required for a transgression of limits, involve experiential limitations of its own, in particular by closing off the pleasures of growth? And granted that a certain kind of fidelity to growth and pleasure also involves intrinsic limitations (and perhaps it is precisely these that particularly enrage the Gnostic Artaud) is it not precisely the function of such loyalty to open up more choices than it closes off?

Bataille wrote that in Surrealism "the accent is placed not on the fact of choosing but on the content of the choice proposed". Although the fact of choosing must remain central to anyone deeply concerned with freedom, the issue between Artaud and Breton may indeed come down to the concrete structure of freedom: not how many limits should be transgressed (for how, in any case, should they be counted) but which limits - and what it is that lies beyond them.

Bataille and Surrealism: Skepticism and Optimism

"Too many fucking idealists". In the age of Auschwitz and the Gulags, where a black pessimism can seem the only rational response to one's historical situation, it is easy to identify with George Bataille's well-known condemnation of the Surrealists' aim of synthesizing dream and reality. Likewise, if the underground stream nourishing modern thought since Descartes is an increasingly thorough skepticism, Bataille's atheistic mysticism of non-knowledge can seem more absolument moderne than the Surrealist preference for mythic imagination over reason.

But what this condemnation fails to recognise is the way the surrealists had already lived through the pessimism and skepticism of modernity in the form of Dada. That the skepticism of Surrealism was at heart more profound than that of Bataille can be judged from their more complete renunciation of logical argumentation. While Bataille cannot rid himself of the need to explain himself (as he ruefully observed with regard to the sociological impetus of The Accursed Share), the surrealist manifestos are free of anxieties of justification, their criticisms of the age ultimately personal, rather than rational.

Surrealism in fact shows how the most profound skepticism triumphs even over pessimism. Far from being the consequence of his skepticism, Bataille's rigorous refusal of hope, both personal and political, can be seen to result instead from a residual addiction to the idea of being constrained by the bleak truth of reality, a reality in which the surrealist Icarus will be cast back to earth by the dark sun of necessity. By contrast, the Surrealists understood that if nothing is true, everything is permitted - even optimism.

Aphorisms

How often, when reading a work by X, we think to ourselves, "if only X had read Y - Y deals with exactly this point but more lucidly, profoundly etc." The art of wide reading lies in being able to diminish such reactions in readers of one's own work.

Video art is to film what poetry is to the novel.

From Heidegger to Hölderlin: Modernity, Homecoming and Adventure

Die Wanderschaft in der Wegrichtung sum Fragwürdigen ist nicht Abenteuer sondern Heimkehr. 
The wandering toward that which is worthy of being questioned, is not adventure but homecoming (Heidegger).

Heidegger emphasises the importance of homecoming over adventure because he sees the impulse to adventure attaining dominance in the modern world - a world in which man feels increasingly homeless. But what if modernity's impulse for adventure were as valid and essential to humanity as the impulse to find one's way home?  What if modernity were in fact constituted by a dialectic of these impulses? What if Hölderlin saw further than Heidegger, when he wrote (in Hyperion), "If the life of the world consists in an alteration between opening and closing, between going forth and returning, why is it not even so with the heart of man?"

Poetry, Strangeness and Ideology

The living core of poetry is the intense strangeness of canonical experience (Bloom) in which a slit is made in the umbrella of civilization (Lawrence). It is this strangeness, this rending of the veil of ideology that makes poetry intrinsically political.

An ideology of canonical strangeness is a contradiction in terms. Individual poetic movements, poetic techniques, poetic forms can be ideological, but poetry as such is intrinsically opposed to ideology.

Communion with nature, experiential profundity, sublime intensity, romantic passion - these elements of romanticism become ideological at the point at which they cease to be strange. Likewise with extreme 'formal' innovation - which always also means, or ought to mean, innovation of experience - e.g. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, objectivism, etc.

The definition of ideology assumed here, like all definitions of ideology, is a partisan one.

Modernism: a Historical Schema

1. German Romanticism = Poetic modernism + Sociopolitical anti-modernism

2. Rimbaud, Baudelaire = Poetic modernism + Sociopolitical modernism.

3. Eliot, Pound, Williams, Stevens... = Poetic modernism + Sociopolitical ???

Terrence Malick The Tree of Life

High-tech Hollywood meets high art: Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life is historically significant for being the first film to combine the most recent high-budget special effects with formal innovation and the most serious artistic ambition. In terms of formal innovation, it is not the high-quality special effects in themselves that are most interesting (the fusion of astronomical imagery with abstract representations of the divine is almost a sci-fi staple) but the fact that they form part of a disjunctive structure that departs from Hollywood's narrative conventions. Not that the film eschews narrative entirely - indeed I would suggest that it's most important formal innovation is precisely the way it combines standard narrative techniques (enabling us to enter the protagonist's Texas childhood with genuine emotion) with genuinely poetic, 'avant-garde' juxtapositions.

One juxtaposition in particular dominates the film: images of deep space and deep geological time side by side with a narrative of human loss. The epigram from Job with which the film begins (together with certain whispered voiceovers, and the sermon that occurs within the narrative) clearly suggests that we interpret this juxtaposition as an attempt to evoke the strangeness and at times cruel incomprehensibility of God through the strangeness and incomprehensibility of His creation. Understood in this way, the attempt may be judged successful; on the other hand, a more radical film might have refrained from overdetermining this interpretation and instead allowed the images and narrative to speak for themselves, thereby secularizing the strong Christian metaphysics.

However, the film's biggest failure is its lack of irony. It is not so much that great works of art must be ironic (though many are), but that a film so self-consciously sincere in pressing high-tech Hollywood techniques into the service of high art ought to have been more conscious of the meaning of such a strategy. Like the gleaming monuments to corporate America in which the protagonist moves (and of which he, and Malick himself, is clearly critical), The Tree of Life cannot help but appear as a slick, high-definition monument to Hollywood's big-budget culture industry (which it implicitly affirms by its mode of production, its use of special effects and its star Hollywood actors). Had this theme been raised and explored within the film, it might have been a great work of art (following on from my previous suggestion about secularizing the Christian metaphysics, one might imagine a similar film in which Hollywood special effects were themselves presented as a successor to religious art in a non-religious age). As it is, however, the film appears ignorant of its own preconditions and thus to some extent both pretentious and naive.

Benjamin, Baudelaire and a Dilemma of Contemporary Aesthetics.

Contemporary artistic practice can seem to face the dilemma of a choice between an antiquated aesthetic of meditative contemplation (postmodernism as neo-romanticism) and a fruitless skeptical fragmentation (postmodernism as intensification of modernism). In Walter Benjamin's terms, a purely contemplative aesthetic is antiquated because it aims at an experience of aura that no longer has a place in post-industrial capitalism, while a skeptical aesthetic is fruitless because it merely reflects this loss of aura.

One way to escape this dilemma is suggested by Benjamin's essay on Baudelaire. For while, for Benjamin, "the disintegration of the aura makes itself felt in [Baudelaire's] lyric poetry", it does so in such a way that the lived experience (Erlebnis) of this loss, is "given the weight" of auratic experience (Erfahrung). Unlike, say, Eliot's 'the Wasteland', in which the loss of aura is experienced only in the mode of skeptical fragmentation, Baudelaire's experience of loss (both as nostalgia - 'ideal' - and pessimistic clarity - 'spleen') attains metrical, thematic and thereby contemplative coherence.

Heidegger on Poetry and Thinking

Poetry and thinking meet each other in one and the same only when, and as long as, they remain distinctly in the distinctness of their nature. (Heidegger, '...poetically man dwells...')

The profundity of Heidegger's thinking about poetry (or 'poetic thinking' as Heidegger's 'Dichten' can also be translated) lies in his sensitivity to the possibility that the essence of poetry might simply be inaccessible to thinking - even postmetaphysical or meditative thinking, i.e. 'Denken'. Heidegger recognizes that 'Dichten', as the spiritual activity or thoughtful journey of the poet might be such that it can only be fully understood 'from the inside', in the same sort of way that swimming can only be fully understood by someone who has actually learned to swim. If this is true, and the spiritual journey involved in 'Denken' is radically distinct from 'Dichten', it would follow that 'Denken' could only ever approach an understanding of poetry indirectly and externally. Not only would a philosophical definition of the nature and purpose of poetry be unattainable - even a philosophical account of the relation between philosophy and poetry, between Dichten and Denken, would face significant limits. Indeed it is not clear why Heidegger's claim that poetry and thinking can 'meet....in one and the same' does not overstep these limits, in that it brings the kinds of spiritual activity together under the roof of 'the same' as this is understood by 'Denken.

Richard Rorty and Conversational Philosophy

According to Richard Rorty's definition, doing 'conversational philosophy' requires us "to give up the goal of getting things right, and substitute that of enlarging our repertoire of individual and cultural self-descriptions". This fits in with his pragmatist view that the point of philosophy "is not to find out what anything is 'really' like, but to help us grow up - to make us happier, freer, and more flexible".

Rorty does not seem to want us to read too much into his use of the term 'conversational', but it strikes me that there is indeed a close connection term between the goal of enlarging a repertoire of descriptions and the art of conversation. Among other things, a good conversationalist ought to be able to engage and impress a wide range of potential interlocutors, which could be said to require a sympathetic grasp of the wide range of life-stances these interlocutors might hold.

Following this train of thought, we might say the conversational thinker ought to be interdisciplinary, as it would be a poor conversationalist who only felt comfortable talking to those working in her own discipline. In particular she ought to have a grasp of literary as well as scientific culture, in order to be able to converse skillfully with members of each.

An implication for literature and the arts - which Rorty sees as important voices in the 'conversation of mankind' - might be that the best art is that which attracts the interest and admiration of people with a wide range of different intellectual positions; and that the best artists will have the breadth of intellectual sympathy required to do this (even if this remains at a relatively intuitive level - Shakespeare?).

Reading Rorty, one sometimes has the feeling that his ideal 'liberal ironist' is a little too happy, too untroubled by doubts and fears in her intellectual life, to be a flesh and blood human being. After all, when one has given up trying to get anything right, what is there left to worry about, intellectually? But, again, the term 'conversational' suggests a way of putting flesh on the bones. The would-be conversational thinker will naturally worry whether she is really as good a conversationalist as she takes herself to be - there is always the possibility that the next person she meets (or the next book she reads) will say something that blows her mind or shakes her foundations, converting her to a radically new outlook. Indeed the next person she talks to might even convince her to give up conversational philosophy and return to classical epistemology.

Not that what fundamentally worries the conversational thinker is the shame of meeting a superior conversationalist. For the underlying worry is that one's current outlook is not sufficiently flexible and open-minded, that it has not been informed by a wide enough range of perspectives, and that consequently, one is not as happy or as free as one would like to be. Despite avoiding the anxieties associated with the traditional ideals of truth, it is quite possible for a conversational thinker to be driven, in his quest for an ever wider range of intellectual sympathies, by the kind of anxious, unsatisfied desire for fulfilment most of us recognize.

Heidegger and Wallace Stevens on Poetic Thinking

Is there a specifically poetic way of thinking? Heidegger thought there was. In his later writings he  distinguishes poetic thinking from meditative philosophical thinking. For Heidegger these two styles  of thinking are in some ways alike - both require the thinker to abstain from logical-scientific (or what Heidegger would call 'technological') thinking in order to be able to approach the 'holy  mystery' of being. But Heidegger also emphasizes that they are distinct. Just what the distinction is  Heidegger found difficult to say. As he put it, the dialogue between poetry and thinking is a long  one, and is only just beginning.

Julian Young (in his book 'Heidegger's later Philosophy') suggests the following interpretation of  Heidegger's distinction. Meditative thinking is discursive, while poetic thinking is intuitive and  direct. Meditative thinking is thus limited to pointing to being in a negative way, while poetic  thinking enables the thinker to actually set foot within the realm of being.

A problem with this way of drawing the distinction is that while experientially direct access to the  realm of being may be the successful outcome of poetic thinking, only the most optimistic and  mystical of poets would think of such access as characterizing their everyday way of thinking.  Perhaps Holderlin, in his final days of madness, was granted a more or less continuous vision of  being; most poets' everyday way of thinking is a more meandering, less ecstatic affair, only occasionally punctuated by moments of poetic vision.

Wallace Stevens' account of the poet's way of thinking (in the lecture 'A Collect of Philosophy') is  more realistic in this respect:

"The probing of the philosopher is deliberate, as the history of the part that logic has played in  philosophy demonstrates...On the other hand, the probing of the poet is fortuitous..Up to the point  at which he has found his subject, the state of vague receptivity in which he goes about resembles  one part of something that is dependent on another part, which he is not quite able to specify...It  may be said that the philosopher probes the sphere or spheres of perception and that he moves about  therein like someone intent on making sure of every foot of the way. If the poet moves about in the  same sphere or spheres, and occasionally he may, he is light-footed. He is intent on what he sees and  hears and the sense of the certainty of the presences about him is as nothing to the presences  themselves. "

Here Stevens is describing, not the moment of poetic vision itself, nor the process of poetic  composition, but the everyday way of thinking of a poet in search of a poem. Moreover, the  description not only differentiates the poet's way of thinking from logical-scientific thinking, but  also suggests a difference betweent the poet's way of thinking and Heidegger's meditative thinking.  Despite the fact that, according to Heidegger, it involves a turn away from willed deliberation, there is after all  something deliberate, slow and cautious about meditative thinking that contrasts with the easy, 'light-footed' and 'fortuitous' approach of Stevens' poet. Although both may involve a  state of 'vague receptivity' ultimately directed at what Heidegger calls Being, or what Stevens calls the 'supreme fiction' (in 'A Collect of Philosophy' he suggests that 'the idea of God is the ultimate poetic idea'), Heidegger's 'Gelassenheit' differs from the relaxed, playful way of  thinking Stevens seems to be after.

A Brief History of Literary Skepticism.

The birth of philosophical skepticism in ancient Greece was accompanied by an awareness of the natural affinity between such skepticism and imaginative literature. The founder of Pyrrhonism, Pyrrho of Elis, was fond of quoting Homer; indeed, the latter, according to Diogenes Laertes, was even called the founder of skepticism 'since he at different times gives different accounts of the same circumstance, as much as any one else ever did; and since he never dogmatizes definitively respecting affirmation'. Pyrrho's pupil, Timon of Phlius, wrote poems satirizing non-skeptical philosophers. Dee Clayman has argued that he initiated an 'aesthetics of skepticism' that persisted through such hellenistic poets as Callimachus and Theocritus. The key elements of this hellenistic literary skepticism are 1) an awareness that imaginative literature is, for purely formal reasons, particularly appropriate for the expression of philosophical skepticism, since the 'speech-act' involved in literary writing is different from the mere assertion of beliefs of any kind, and 2) the actual expression of specifically skeptical ideas as part of the content of literary writing (see Clayman's account of specifically skeptical ideas in Timon, Callimachus etc.)

The rebirth of philosophical skepticism in Renaissance Europe does not seem to have been immediately accompanied by a rebirth of this particular literary skeptical tradition - though it could be said to re-emerge in the 18th century of Pope and Sterne (see, for instance, Fred Parker's book Scepticism and Literature). Instead, we find the sporadic development of a different, more playful kind of literary skepticism. The Catholic Pyrrhonism of his 'apology for Raymond Sebond' does not lead Montaigne to the ancient skeptic's goal of 'ataraxia' or intellectual tranquillity, but instead to the Essays' playful recollections of self and history. The 18th century poet Charles Churchill expresses, perhaps for the first time, the connection between skepticism and a new kind of intellectual freedom:

Opinions should be free as air;
No man, whate'er his rank, whate'er
His qualities, a claim can found
That my opinion must be bound,
And square with his.

Only a little later, the imaginative religious skepticism of Hume's dialogues very likely influenced (as Christos Pulos has argued) Shelley's skeptical mythopoetic poetry, and his skeptical identification of philosophy with poetry in the 'defense of poetry'. Modern literary skepticism becomes yet more self-conscious with Nietzsche's call for an 'experimental' skepticism opposed to the 'lethargy' of Pyrrho's 'Greek Buddhism'. The modern literary skeptic, therefore, does not merely recognize that literature is particularly suitable for expressing skeptical ideas; he understands the literary exploration of fictional and historical worlds as part of a distinctively skeptical form of intellectual activity. Instead of pragmatically accepting the moral cultural norms of his time, as the ancient skeptics did, the modern literary skeptic recognizes that he might equally well live by freely imagined alternative norms. Instead of the emotional stability of ataraxia, his goal is a kind of intellectual and experiential self-transformation that does not depend on belief or knowledge.

Drawing on Hegel's claim that Shakespeare's characters are, for the first time in history, 'free artists of themselves', Harold Bloom has argued that Shakespeare (with the help of Montaigne) invented the modern idea of self-transformation through 'self-overhearing' (which I interpret as a species of aesthetic self-interpretation). This would make Shakespeare central to the modern tradition of literary skepticism here outlined.

Imaginative Liberty

Imaginative liberty is freedom of imagination - with imagination understood as the capacity to conceive, picture, and inhabit worldviews (ethical, political, artistic, religious, philosophical). Imaginative liberty is developed by acquaintance with the ideas and experiences of historical periods and geographical regions other than one's own; by anything, in fact, that enriches one's storehouse of worldviews, and of the feelings, concepts, etc. that go to make up such worldviews. It is fostered by Coleridge's 'suspension of disbelief', by Keats' 'negative capability', and by Schleiermacher's and Dilthey's hermeneutics. It is fostered by talking to the most varied and interesting people one can find. It is freedom from one-sidedness in the life of the mind - though it is compatible with political or religious commitment. It is a natural extension of the principle of 'freedom of religion' - it is the capacity to choose between broad ethical or religious commitments with as much autonomy as is possible in our post-enlightenment age. It is a species of 'positive liberty', but it is compatible with 'negative liberty'. It is a possible foundation for a romantic liberalism.

Richards and Eliot on Poetry, Belief and the Waste Land.

For I A Richards, Eliot's 'The Waste Land' was exemplary in effecting a "complete severance" between poetry and belief. In his appendix to The Principles of Literary Criticism, Richards sees the obscurity, ambiguity and fragmentation of the Waste Land as a useful barrier to a traditional 'overintellectual' approach to poetry - one which tries "to catch [the poem] in an intellectual net or to squeeze out a doctrine". The Waste Land thus becomes a model for a poetry of the future in which poetry will not compete with science on the territory of belief, but will do the more important work of ordering our impulses and generating emotional attitudes in the service of life.

Eliot was sufficiently intrigued by Richards' view that he responded to it on several occasions, including a brief 'note on poetry and belief' in The Enemy (1927), a long footnote in his 1929 essay on Dante, and in Ch. 7 of The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933). The thrust of his response is that the interpretation of poetry can never be fully 'detached from the beliefs of the poet'. In the specific case of the Waste Land, Eliot suggests that if the poem expresses a sense of desolation, doubt, uncertainty, futility, this is 'not a separation from belief'; rather 'doubt and uncertainty are merely a variety of belief'. Perhaps more precisely, the expression of a sense of desolation and doubt in a poem cannot be separated from the poet's wider beliefs, e.g. concerning the decline of Western civilization, and the erosion of religious belief.

This aspect of Eliot's response does not quite get to the heart of the issue, however, for it is open to Richards to question whether the poet's 'beliefs' about Western civilization and religion are really beliefs at all, and not rather emotional attitudes.

Richards follows the logical positivists in drawing a strict distinction between beliefs and emotional attitudes, between fact-stating and emotive discourse, with science on one side and poetry on the other (while inverting the logical positivists' conclusion that emotive, poetic discourse ought to be jettisoned). Richards might thus seem to be vulnerable to the classic criticism of the logical positivists, namely that they were unable to say whether their own assertions about discourse were fact-stating or emotive. Eliot almost makes this point in The Use of poetry... when he quotes a passage in which Richards discusses emotive 'pseudo-statements' , and writes tersely: 'I submit that this is itself a pseudo-statement, if there is such a thing'. But this is more of a challenge than a refutation - it leaves room for Richards to respond by either staking out a middle ground between fact-stating and emotive discourse in which to locate his brand of literary criticism, or to follow German romanticism, strands of French 'theory', or the 'Yale school' in accepting that literary criticism is itself a kind of literature, and so not scientific or fact-stating.

I suggest that to make progress with the question of poetry and belief we focus instead on an issue raised briefly in Eliot's footnote in the essay on Dante. Eliot writes: 'The theory of Mr. Richards is... incomplete until he defines the species of religious, philosophical, sientific, and other beliefs, as well as that of 'everyday' belief'. Eliot is exactly right, I suggest, to point to the variety of types of belief, though he may be wrong to suggest that there are radically different species here. It may be that all we need is a distinction between the degrees of belief with which an educated person may reasonably hold different types of belief. Everyday beliefs ('the post has arrived') and some types of scientific belief ('this aeroplane will fly safely') are reasonably held with a high degree of belief, while many religious and philosophical beliefs (and even some scientific beliefs - e.g. quantum theory is reconcilable with relativity) are most reasonably held with a very low degree of belief, given the divergence of expert opinion.

It seems to me that this distinction between 'high' and 'low' degree beliefs allows us to see the partial truth in the positions of both Eliot and Richards. We can affirm, with Eliot, that even on issues concerning the value and fate of Western civilization, it is not unreasonable to speak of belief, as long as we bear in mind the differences between different types and degrees of belief. At the same time, we can maintain something like Richards' distinction between emotional attitudes, and scientific belief. Richard's category of scientific belief translates into the category of beliefs that are reasonably held with a high degree of certainty. His emotional attitudes, on the other hand, can be understood as complex and compound psychological states involving (among many other things) philosophical, religious and other beliefs that are distinct from scientific and everyday beliefs in that it is unreasonable to hold them with any great degree of certainty. This enables us also to preserve the idea that it is a key function of poetry (perhaps, we might add, along with philosophy, theology and literary criticism) to generate and impact on emotional attitudes of this sort; and more specifically, that it is a key virtue of 'the Waste Land' that it does so.

Aphorism 1

1. Poetry today is postmodern in the same way that Victorian poetry was postromantic.

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.