The Age of Science and Politics

I think I need to restart this blog. I need to consider, again, the particular problems of poetry and philosophy and the place they meet, namely, the imagination. Ezra Pound began his ABC of Reading by announcing that “We live in an age of science and abundance,” a statement which is probably more true than is commonly recognized. All things considered, it is surprising that we seem to be living in an “age of austerity”. As Pound was fond of pointing out, whatever local scarcity we may experience in the supply of particular goods and services, the problem is not one of production, but distribution.

We also, I would point out, live in age of science and politics, rather than an age of philosophy and poetry. (William Carlos Williams was concerned that we might be living in an "age of philosophy and science”. Things have gotten worse.) While the word “science” continues to be held in general esteem in the popular mind, politics is only generally celebrated in the highly idealized form that travels under the banner of “democracy”. (Here at the Pangrammaticon, we think of distinctly “modern” politics as being broadly democratic, and modern science as being largely experimental.) But there can be no question that the quality of our lives is determined by the quantities that our scientific and democratic processes produce.

While scientific processes make discoveries and political processes make decisions, and thereby determine the content of our perceptions and our actions respectively, we cannot deny that, as contexts in which our lives go on, politics also shapes our desires just as surely as science shapes our beliefs. This formative influence is experienced as a kind of pressure to believe certain things in certain ways, and to desire certain people in certain ways. It is both thought and felt by us.

Yesterday something occurred to me, and this is what has caused me to take this blog out of retirement. Imagine if all your beliefs were scientifically correct and all your desires were politically correct. Now, the record of both science and politics over the past century or so by no means suggest that this tantamount to imagining that all your beliefs are true, nor that all your desires are just. (Truth is to knowledge as justice is to power.) So one will imagine, actually, only that one's beliefs and one's desires are constantly evolving according to the progress that science and politics are making, and that one is, as it were, “keeping up” with these “Joneses”.

That is, I am asking you to imagine that all your beliefs are supported only by the methods of modern science, and all your desires are supported only the mandates of modern politics. When the scientists change their mind, your beliefs change. When the politicians have a change of heart, your desires follow suit. It is not so much that you are scientifically and politically correct but that you have to be. When “progress” is made, you will simply experience a kind of difficulty in sustaining your presently held beliefs about, say, the global climate, or your desires, say, about the local women. There will be a kind of pressure. That pressure will be what it is like to be alive in the age of science and politics.

And that pressure, that difficulty, from now on, is what this blog is about. The instruments we use to gauge it are called “concepts” and “emotions”, and the arts by which we engage with it are called philosophy and poetry. It is their grammar that we are trying to understand. The effort will involve all the usage in the world.

Spring and What the Fall Is

"Sometimes I speak of imagination as a force, an electricity or a medium, a place. It is immaterial which: for whether it is the condition of a place or a dynamization its effect is the same: to free the world of fact from the impositions 'art' ... and to liberate the man to act in whatever direction his disposition leads." (William Carlos Williams)

This is the last post at the Pangrammaticon, marking exactly ten years of blogging. I'm grateful to everyone who has been following along.

Early on, I invoked Wittgenstein's Tractatus. The key to that book lies in the proposition "We make ourselves pictures of the facts". What Wittgenstein does not tell us is how; he merely asserts that we do. The relevant faculty is, of course, imagination, Einbildungskraft.

Rereading that post now, I notice, with pleasure, that it closes with a reference to Williams. It was no doubt the lineation of the "The Red Wheel Barrow" that I was referring to there, but it wasn't until a few years ago that I finally read Spring and All. The shock of its symmetry with the Tractatus is hard to describe. It was a vindication of everything I've done here.

Imagination is both a force and a craft. (The German word "Kraft" can mean force, or strength, or skill.) Forces are of nature as crafts are of culture. Suffering is where they meet. We call the joint by its Latin name. Art. Beauty is difficult.

"Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist," said Wittgenstein. "The world is everything that is case," or, perhaps, "all that is befallen." History is everyone who's on my case, or, all kidding aside, all that's happened. In any case, spring was beautiful this year. The summer was long. And the fall, too, has been delightful. Thus, in any case, as the weather goes.

Be reasonable! the philosopher demands. Be passionate! suggests the poet. I've tried to use this blog to find my grammatical composure. "All the usage in the world." I don't know how far there is to go, but I feel I've made some progress. Let us be reasonable and passionate. Let us be as articulate about our reasons as our passions. Let us put these beautiful bodies where our mouths are.

The Enigma of Departure

Giorgio de Chirico.
The Enigma of Arrival and the Afternoon, 1911-12.

After almost ten years, I've decided to retire this blog. It has become clear to me that if this line of thinking is ever going to amount to anything it will have to become a book of some kind. I will keep my notes about poetry and philosophy to myself while I work on it.

There's a lot of stuff in the archives and I'm going to leave it up for anyone who's interested. I'm grateful to everyone who has followed along and commented on my ideas, both online and off. You have helped me to find whatever precision—clarity in regard to concepts, intensity in the grip of emotion—these pages may provide.

This is not quite my last post. It's only an announcement. As an official tenth-anniversary/retirement party on November 17, I'm going to post a kind of summary of what I think I've been doing here and what I may have accomplished.

Notes on Michael Andrews

I've written about Michael Andrews before. This morning, calling him to mind as I got out of bed, and using him for "reassurance", I reread his "Notes and Preoccupations" (X 1960, volume 1, number 2, pp. 137-141). He describes "the activity" of painting as "the most marvellous, elaborate, complete way of making up [his] mind". Which is what writing should be for me. What it isn't often enough.

"The painting episode is the real situation imagined. Re-enacted and rehearsed until its performance is the best possible. There is nothing like it in public life …"

"The painting episode is a rehearsal of behaviour in which I go through the motions again and again until it seems the best possible … The ultimate exultation is one feels is that of having done something at the top of one's form. The dispiritedness is like disgust."

This is what I must learn, i.e., to have writing "episodes". To see writing as a private "rehearsal" of behaviour that cannot be subjected to such obsessive repetition in public.

"Every aesthetic adjustment reflects an ethical preference."

In writing, too, we make "aesthetic adjustments", which means that the aim is, as in painting, to "materialize" what is on one's mind, however vague and approximate it seems. "You're now physically close to what was once in imagination." But such adjustments also have an "epistemic" dimension, reflecting its reference, perhaps. Here the writing serves to idealize what is in the world.

"Ethics have to do with self-consciousness, aesthetics with unself-consciousness."

The pangrammatical supplement is something like: epistemology has to do with it-consciousness, aesthetics with un-it-consciousness. (Or just, perhaps, unconsciousness?)

"Mysterious conventionality."

"When suddenly you are out of sympathy with someone you feel your own disposition most strongly."

There's something here too. "Every day there'll be problems and vague and incomplete fragmentary visions … Terrible anxiety to keep things in mind to realize them to the full."

But one imagines Andrews sitting down to work. To rehearse the relevant behaviors. Perfect them. "You cannot force repetitions of a situation [in public life] at the speed of rehearsals on a painting."

Nor in writing. But do we practice enough?

P.S.

"One must believe, desire, love (and not be embarrassed out of loving) the atmosphere one creates—that is best."

That's good advice. It reminds me that there is a special use of the word "wise" in English, albeit only in conjunction with the preposition "up". As a verb, I mean. We can "wise up". We must not be embarrassed about this either, we must wise (v.) the atmosphere (i.e., "get wise" to it); we must not be embarrassed out of "wising".

Zuhandenheit

"The reader is presumed to be subjectively engaged with an anxious problem, the problem of his existence, which is also the problem of his suffering." (Nanavira Thera, Notes on Dhamma)

"I am entitled to assume that you are never at a loss for an authentic model to study." (Oliver Senior, How to Draw Hands)

About a year ago, I was dealing with similar issues in distinguishing between existence and existentialism, the mystical and scholarly approach to things. This set off a series of posts in which I compared Hemingway, Ramana Maharshi, Henry Miller and Douglas Harding, looking at how literature and mysticism deal with the problem of existence, the reality of death. It was very illuminating for me, and I'm going to spend a bit of time rereading and reworking those posts, perhaps into the essay they should obviously become.

Looking for an English translation of the French translation of Heidegger that Cyril Connolly cites in the Unquiet Grave (mentioned in passing in my last post), I stumbled on the life and work of Nanavira Thera, who has been completely unknown to me until now. It looks very interesting. And it was a fortuitous find. Nanavira also read Connolly, and, if we leave out his reflections on the inadequacy of scholarship*, we get telling invocation of reality that resonates nicely with the remark of Connolly's that I cited. First Nanavira:

The reader is presumed to be subjectively engaged with an anxious problem, the problem of his existence, which is also the problem of his suffering. […]* Only in a vertical view, straight down into the abyss of his own personal existence, is a man capable of apprehending the perilous insecurity of his situation; and only a man who does apprehend this is prepared to listen to the Buddha's Teaching. But human kind, it seems, cannot bear very much reality: men, for the most part, draw back in alarm and dismay from this vertiginous direct view of being and seek refuge in distractions.

And here, again, is Connolly:

Both my happiness and my unhappiness I owe to the love of pleasure; of sex, travel, reading, conversation (hearing oneself talk), food, drink, cigars and lying in warm water.

Reality is what remains** when these pleasures, together with hope for the future, regret for the past, vanity of the present, and all that composes the aroma of the self are pumped out of the air-bubble in which I shelter.

It is, I would say, the same "reality" that they are here talking about. That of suffering and illusion. "Distraction". And this is where Heidegger's notion of "care" comes in. I can't shake the suspicion that both the scholar and the sage, the writer and the mystic, suffer, not from too much reality, but too little. They do not engage with experience in a practical way, they don't take their situation "in hand". As Oliver Senior puts it:

If ... the artist finds himself constrained, by any consideration of expression, treatment or style, or by his deference to the peculiar nature and limitations of his tools and materials, to adopt or invent a convention or a symbol and to substitute the semblance of a bunch of bananas or a bent fork for a representation of the human hand, then the particular problem dealt with in this book does not arise.

Senior may be right that the problem of drawing a hand is notoriously difficult to solve. The problem of existing is of course much, much more difficult. But I think Senior's is approach is exemplary. Both writers and sages have a tendency toward conventional and symbolic solutions, to substitution of a "semblance" of existence for actually being there, and doing the work.

I, too, of course, suffer from this tendency. But just as we all have a hand that we can use as a model, and therefore are always in a position to practice drawing one. And just as that is the only way to get past the difficulty, so we all have a life, which we can take in our own hands, and by this means become as good as we ever will at "existing". It's not easy, but there's no other way.

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*Here's what I've left out: "There is therefore nothing in these pages to interest the professional scholar, for whom the question of personal existence does not arise; for the scholar's whole concern is to eliminate or ignore the individual point of view in an effort to establish the objective truth -- a would-be impersonal synthesis of public facts. The scholar's essentially horizontal view of things, seeking connexions in space and time, and his historical approach to the texts, disqualify him from any possibility of understanding a Dhamma that the Buddha himself has called akālika, 'timeless'."

**It is worth connecting this remark to Wittgenstein's Tractatus: "...solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality coordinated with it." (T5.64) (Cf. also William Carlos Williams).