Extrication

Philosophy extricates "it" from the world of science and makes it "mine". Poetry extricates "us" from our political history and makes us "me". This amounts to extricating the concept of the thing and the emotion of the person respectively.

Personal, Possessive

We might say that while poetry is "personal", philosophy is "possessive". Both virtues can be corrupted into vices, of course.

To Have and to Want

In its reflection upon what is "in each case mine", philosophy helps us to appropriate what we already have. It is always already ours, we might say, but we need to make it our own. This entity that is ours to begin with but yet in need of our appropriation is called existence, i.e., Dasein. Here, then, is one sense we can give to Heidegger's "event of appropriation" (Ereignis), i.e., the experience of making the world one's own. (Which, as I have said before, amounts to doing one's own thing.) Philosophy is interested in how we appropriate our existence.

Poetry has a complementary mission. It cultivates inspiration not existence (duende not Dasein) and its theme is therefore not what I have, i.e., what is mine, but who I am or, more accurately, who I may become. If there is something tautological, unnecessary, or even wholly futile, about appropriating something you already own, i.e., taking ownership of your property, then in poetry a different kind of futility rules. Here, we must renounce (or disown) something we will always lack, i.e., we must refuse something we will never have.

Philosophy always seeks the occasion for the event of appropriation, the moment when we can make things our own, take what is given. Poetry, by contrast, is the recusal of ownership—it acknowledges the duende as the true owner (the dueño). The poet gives himself to what he is taken with. The mind of a philosopher-poet is therefore a strange place ... in a strange time. It finds its composure at the very point where its clarity about what is mine is balanced against the intensity of who I want to become.

It is not altogether wrong to interpret "want" here as "need" or "lack", but the poetic recusal is precisely the act of doing without that which I do not have, so that I may become that which I am destined to be.

Pronouns

"It" is to science as "we" is to politics. "Mine" is to philosophy as "I" is to poetry.

When philosophy asks the fundamental question "What is it?" it is really asking "How is it mine?" (We owe this insight to Heidegger: the entity to be analyzed is "in each case mine", je meines.) The "objects" of our scientific theories do not belong to us, but the things we experience are ours before we discover a single scientific fact.

Poetry, likewise, traces the fundamental question of who we are becoming back to the question of how I got here. We do not become the "subjects" of our political practices, but the people of our experience are themselves before we decide upon a single political act.

The Insubordination of the Flesh

"Pleasure is preceded by a certain appetite which is felt in the flesh like a craving, as hunger and thirst and that generative appetite which is most commonly identified with the name lust, though this is the generic word for all desires." (Augustine)

I've always had great respect for Catholic moral psychology, though not much love for Catholic ethics. So, for example, I agree about the mechanics of "proximate occasions" of sin, but not that we should avoid such occasions. This does not mean I think we should sin, but that we should be open to the situations where sin, and therefore virtue, is possible.

I have a feeling that Augustine's views on lust and pleasure have to be part of my own canon on this subject (they are of course just part of the the canon on the subject.) I've said that pleasure is the immediate satisfaction of desire in the act, unmediated by an emotion (intellectual pleasure is the immediate satisfaction of belief in the fact, unmediated by a concept). But I have also argued, following Kierkegaard, that this still requires an "image", which just is the immediate presence of the act (or fact) in experience.

Augustine does not (at least here) mention the important work of the imagination in shaping and indeed civilizing (or humanizing) lust. Pleasure is not just the satisfaction of a "craving". It requires the formation of an image (the passage from craving to imagining) and it is here that our "spiritual" lives begin. What Pound described as "a form of stupidity not limited to Europe, that is, idiotic asceticism and a belief that the body is evil", is this substitution of the idea that images arise in the human body with the notion that man is created in the image of God. After the fall, the body is construed as merely "insubordinate". Spinoza was very right to suggest that "we don't yet know what the body can do." And to make this the basis of sane ethical inquiry.