Poetry and/or Philosophy

Kasey says,

The poetry/philosophy distinction, like most such distinctions, dissolves at various points along a spectrum of overlapping objectives and methodologies. Wittgenstein is perhaps an exemplary case of someone who exhibits considerably equally balanced traits of both species. Various language poets and objectivists and William Wordsworth and Lucretius carry mixed bags as well.

Jonathan says,"I'm not that interested in this particular distinction. That is to say, I'm interested mainly in texts in which this distinction isn't so easy to make."

Taken along with the comments from Jay, Stower and Laura on the post I made just before I took that break, I've got something to think about this week and I'll report back on the weekend.

There is no doubt that I would prefer for there to be two distinct systems of notation, two distinct textual operations, what have you, one called poetry, the other philosophy, and that each would set out specific tasks, define specific professional specialties, etc. I feel the same way about science and politics, for example. It is both a normative and an empirical issue for me. I think people should specialize and I think people largely do specialize. There really are poets and philosophers, politicians and scientists, and there also should be. Individual people may of course do a variety of things, but they do and should do this quite specifically and intentionally. Or that's what I have believed up til now, or thought I was assuming.

I'll be thinking about it, like I say.

Paraphrase III

Jonathan Mayhew got us started on this question of what Kasey has been calling "the meaning of poetry". Mayhew asked us to consider "the idea that poetry is a distinctive kind of thinking, that cannot be replaced by paraphrase." That's his emphasis, but I would have added it if he hadn't. Regulars will know what I'm about to say. No it's not. Poetry is a distinctive kind of writing, and in so far as it involves a spiritual operation, it is not thinking but feeling.

Poems are 'about' feelings, but the problem is that nothing can be about feelings properly speaking. You can represent a body as a person (as lawyers do) or as things (as doctors do) but you can't represent their feelings. The closest we come is to notice an emotion and poetry is the distinctive form of writing that helps us to do this. It is emotional notation.

Philosophy is conceptual notation in the same sense, i.e., thoughts cannot be represented. They can be given presence, and this will always involve noticing a concept or set of concepts. Philosophy is the form of writing that occasions such awareness.

It is because paraphrase represents the text that is being paraphrased that it is incapable of doing philosophy, though it may have something to say "about" a philosopher.

Consider Wittgenstein's "private language argument". These three words name a whole series of famous paraphrases of (normally) §244-271 of the Philosophical Investigations. But none of these accomplish what Wittgenstein did, and all make the mistake of supposing that Wittgenstein was simply "dressing up" some of his philosophical opinions.

But Wittgenstein is really (just?) giving us an occasion to do "a distinctive kind of thinking", namely, philosophizing, and this activity is never represented in a paraphrase of his theses (which he explicitly said he didn't have, cf. §128). The urge to think otherwise depends on believing that we know what Wittgenstein "means", or that the relevant struggle is to "get his meaning". Like poetry, I think philosophy makes different demands of us when reading.

This is one way of understanding what Wittgenstein meant when he said, "I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own" (PI, preface). One can almost imagine T. S. Eliot saying "I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of feeling." This is actually debatable, but he certainly would not want to do so by having readers replace their feelings with his.

Philosophy provides us with texts that occasion conceptual awareness and therefore not only stimulate thought, but makes our thinking more effective. Poetry makes us aware of our emotions, stimulating feeling . . . and making us "feel better" (i.e., more effectively, more efficiently). Both mean nada.

Paraphrase II

The idea that poetry cannot be paraphrased is, to my mind, a sound one. I think Kasey has been doing a good job of showing us what is at stake. I especially like his point that something can of course be learned by paraphrasing. Getting students to paraphrase Shakespeare is a perfectly respectable critical activity.

Paraphrasing, Kasey says, is somehow related to the 'propositional content' of a poem. This leads me to the following suggestion: poetry cannot be paraphrased, but poems can. I take 'paraphrasing' always to be a matter of writing a series of prose sentences that say 'what the poem says' in other words (prosaicly rather than poetically). One thing that is necessarily lost in paraphrase (or only accidentally retained) is the prosody of the poem, and I would add that along with this (but not just because of this) its poetry is also lost.

Poems do have propositional content but that is not what poems are essentially 'about'. In fact, the problem here is that poems are not essentially (only accidentally) about anything. They find themselves willy-nilly representing things and people along the way, but that is not what they are trying to do. They are acts of pure presentation.

A paraphrase can summarize the presentational 'effects' of a poem. Pound's suggestion to read for 'phanopoeia' (imagery), 'melopoeia' (sound), and 'logopoeia' (argument) is one useful example. So you can image a paraphrasing that amounts to a catalogue of effects presented as a series of propositions.

Suppose a poem casts a red wheelbarrow on your visual imagination. Well, a paraphrase might describe the wheelbarrow in greater detail, indicating how it works, how many wheels it has (one), the handles, the principle of the lever it is based on, etc. This paraphrase may also cast a red wheelbarrow onto the visual imagination. But it will be a different wheelbarrow. It will also have been less efficiently projected into your imagination, i.e., it will have been less poetic.

The paraphrase is about the poem and about a wheelbarrow. But the poem is not about the wheelbarrow. Indeed, much talk about the wheelbarrow may actually be an interpretational error, for "this is not the thing. In the galvanic category of-- The same things exist, but in a different condition when energized by the imagination," as Williams says. Nothing depends on the wheelbarrow or the chickens; what is at stake is the image.

A paraphrase is like the map that is never the territory, except when it stops being a map. It will often have too little of one kind of detail and too much of another. Paraphrasers often wonder whether they shouldn't just quote the whole poem, but then remember that they are trying to draw attention to parts of it for specific reasons.

A paraphrase says what a poem does, but it does not do it. And only ever partly.

The next step is to show that this holds also for philosophy.

Paraphrase

Kasey has been writing some very interesting posts lately about the value of paraphrasing poetry. I'll try to comment on them in detail on the weekend, and pick up again on the related question of the difference between poetry and philosophy. As a prelude to that, here's a reprise of something I did back in November.

The last sentence of Heidegger’s essay “The Turning” as it appears in William Lovitt’s translation from The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (p. 49) reads

"May world in its worlding be the nearest of all nearing that nears, as it brings the truth of Being near to man’s essence, and so gives man to belong to the disclosing bringing-to-pass that is a bringing into its own."

When I first started this blog I offered what I thought of as a "reading" of this sentence, but which is really a kind of paraphrase, a series of paraphrases, a serial paraphrase. The trick is to try to replace bits of the sentence one at a time with less metaphysical and more ordinary formulations more or less in accordance with Heidegger's terminology in Being and Time.

Watch what happens. Is this what Heidegger "meant"?

May the world in its worlding be the nearest of all nearing that nears, as it brings the truth of Being near to man’s essence, and so gives man to belong to the disclosing bringing-to-pass that is a bringing into its own.

May things be the nearest of all nearing that nears, as they bring the truth of Being near to man’s essence, and so give man to belong to the disclosing bringing-to-pass that is a bringing into its own.

May things be in hand as they bring the truth of Being near to man’s essence, and so give man to belong to the disclosing bringing-to-pass that is a bringing into its own.

May things be in hand as they bring disclosure near to man’s essence, and so give man to belong to the disclosing bringing-to-pass that is a bringing into its own.

May things be in hand as they bring disclosure near to man’s accomplishments, and so give man to belong to the disclosing bringing-to-pass that is a bringing into its own.

May things be in hand as they bring disclosure near to man’s accomplishments, and so allow man to appropriate the disclosing bringing-to-pass that is a bringing into its own.

May things be in hand as they bring disclosure near to man’s accomplishments, and so allow man to appropriate the open accomplishment that is a bringing into its own.

May things be in hand as they bring disclosure near to man’s accomplishments, and so allow man to appropriate the open accomplishment that is an acquisition.

May there be equipment that brings disclosure near to man’s accomplishments and so allows man to appropriate the open accomplishment that is an acquisition.

May there be equipment that works and so allows man to appropriate the open accomplishment that is an acquisition.

May there be equipment that works and so allows man to acquire that which is in each case his.

May real things be given and so allow man to acquire that which is in each case his.

May real things be given so man may acquire that which is in each case his.

May real things be given so man may take what is his own.

May man take of the real things that are given what are his own.

May man do things that are his own.

Do your own thing, man.


This is a slightly retouched version of my original attempt. You can see it here along with some attempts to explain each step. I may return to this soon an clean those notes up as well.

In and Out of the Blue

I'm going on vacation tonight and I should be packing. The Pangrammaticon will be resting for two weeks (should be back with something on the 16th). I have a lot of things still to deal with.

Phil and Kasey have gently tested some recent posts of mine, which I can see now could have been much more precise.

I have said that poetry, in principle, answers the question "Who am I?", which is to say, it presents an unambiguous moment of pure subjectivity (more or less successfully). If the subjectivity presented is ambiguous, as it often is, that is part of the poem and the moment of presention remains an unambiguous presentation of the ambiguous subject. (This kind of sentence calls for a vacation.)

Kasey responds that "poetry, it seems to me, is different: poetry's job seems to be to create such questions, sometimes out of the blue and for no real reason (though the reason may emerge after the fact)."

I think it is too much to demand of poetry that it "create questions". Kasey characterizes my view of philosophy as "analytic" and this may have something to do with my hesitation in the face of people who say that philosophy "creates concepts" (as Deleuze argues). I think the questions are there and that philosophers and poets can only hope to deal with them. Philosophers note concepts down in order to deal with the perpetual presence of the question, "What is it?" Poets deal with the question "Who am I?" by noting down the emotions that organize specific passages of desire into feeling. They do not produce desire or need, they note the structural contingencies of their passage into and out of the problems of living.

Also, the idea that poems come "out of the blue", strikes me as too naive to be useful to us, while "for no real reason" is right only because poems are generated by ideal passions (real reasons are the generative stuff of philosophy).

Finally, I want to emphasize that I see myself as a friend of both philosophy and poetry, not as one who hopes to expose poetry through philosophy. And with that I will go on vacation.