11-17-2013, 04:16 AM
Milo,
Here we go again.
I am excited that you have a contrary opinion to offer, and an informed one at that. Speaking of Nietzsche, it is the agon that is the most fun in all of this. And yet, with Nietzsche in mind, don't we have to concede that finding truths of a disinterested nature is not in some respect and to some degree impossible? This is just to suggest that for our discussion to bear fruits, we need to be open to the thought that prejudices of certain sorts inform our varied perspectives. Anyhow, I'll leave that issue aside for now, as a promissory note.
I'm a little disconcerted with the hasty judgment you come to on Cassirer's position. Admittedly, you didn't read the whole book, but it seems to me that you rushed through the substantive discussion/context I tried to offer. You may think all that was crap. But you're still obliged to read it carefully if you expect me to do the same with what you're offering.
That having been said, the man never takes the prescriptive voice you ascribe to him. Rather, he is at pains to distinguish properly (and primitive) religious discourse from properly poetic discourse. The task is admittedly specious, but it's philosophy, after all.
Again, it would serve you better to pay close attention to the context, especially the tidbits I offered about the spell and shadow of language. Cassirer's own metaphor at work here is "the mythic word picture of gods and daemons." He spent an entire book elaborating on what this means, and it's a far cry from what you seem to think it means. Cassirer is not saying that poets don't write about gods and daemons. What he writes, in fact, is that poetry doesn't express the mythic word picture of gods and daemons. On my reading, this is as much to say that poetry doesn't have the same sort of thrall over man's imagination as the earliest religious and mythic sorts of discourse. There was a time, in other words, wherein the distinction between image and symbol was not so ready and apparent; wherein art, religion, myth, and language were as of yet undifferentiated. Take the Lascaux cave paintings, for instance, a series of art objects that seem to connote worship, hunger, the desire to hunt and to communicate, all wrapped up into one little polyvalent package. Clearly, poetry as we know it today shares some real similarities to this kind of art, but is also a different sort of animal than this.
As another and favorite example, classicists speak to the Oresteia, for instance, as one of the first manifestations of a discourse that occupies the place of poetry proper, per Cassirer's conceptualization of it. Namely, something that partakes of the evocations, the opacities and immediacies of religious discourse, while at the same time attempting to overcome all the superstition, the barbarism and provinciality that goes hand in hand with such language qua its function as religion. Poetry, then, is illusion that actively attempts to free itself from the ignorance of its own status as illusion. It is image contemplating its own contingency and finitude, evocation that refuses to dominate (as in the case of primitive religion or unreflective myth). This really isn't so different from what Nietzsche thinks in regards to "living artfully," is it? The point of poetry, then, per my reading of Cassirer, is to be able to swim in the illusion of selfhood and not drown.
On that note, I think there is something remiss in your response. Namely, the assumption that by "self-revelation," Cassirer means to speak about an "inner self." "Self-revelation" can mean something besides this. It can mean the dissolution of the thought that there is a distinction between self and world, or even a dissolution of whatever impedes the fluidity that the great poet achieves in his or her observations and metaphors of his or her world. The poetic act, on my understanding of Cassirer, is just this kind of unconcealment, where the chthonic and occult aspects of the meaning that informs the poet's life are revealed -- not as "inner" attributes, per se, but as unconscious valences that constitute the spiritual substance from which the sculpture, so to speak, is assembled. This disclosure, however, takes the form of an interaction between self and world, wherein one is free to re-imagine the world. Thus poetry's status as the illusory, imaginary space in which the poet plays.
Cassirer might be rolling in his grave at such a Heideggerian appropriation of his position. Nonetheless, I think it makes his position viable, against the alternative you suggest.
Here we go again.
I am excited that you have a contrary opinion to offer, and an informed one at that. Speaking of Nietzsche, it is the agon that is the most fun in all of this. And yet, with Nietzsche in mind, don't we have to concede that finding truths of a disinterested nature is not in some respect and to some degree impossible? This is just to suggest that for our discussion to bear fruits, we need to be open to the thought that prejudices of certain sorts inform our varied perspectives. Anyhow, I'll leave that issue aside for now, as a promissory note. Quote:With cassirer's thinly disguised hatred for poetry and, especially the modernists, it isn't surprising to hear him attempt to redefine it in a box he finds more palatable. You poets shouldn't write about your faeries and demons and their disgusting mythos, it isn't correct art. Not surprisingly clinging to his neo-kantian logical aesthetic principles on universal beauty long after nietzche usurped them.
I'm a little disconcerted with the hasty judgment you come to on Cassirer's position. Admittedly, you didn't read the whole book, but it seems to me that you rushed through the substantive discussion/context I tried to offer. You may think all that was crap. But you're still obliged to read it carefully if you expect me to do the same with what you're offering.
That having been said, the man never takes the prescriptive voice you ascribe to him. Rather, he is at pains to distinguish properly (and primitive) religious discourse from properly poetic discourse. The task is admittedly specious, but it's philosophy, after all.
Quote:". . .but you have to put this in its context: about a century or so before
Pope would reiterate Locke's sentiments of language being the dress of
thought. The paripatetic notions of truth and beauty in poetics had not yet been overhauled by Nietzsche and post-structuralism's notion that all
writing is equally metaphoric (Nietzsche lauded the Sophists for admitting
what Socrates did not, that all language, even Socrates's modest diction, is an exercise in rhetoric) and truth a complex 'lie' constructed from
effective and agreed upon arrangements of tropes."- Aidan Tynan defending kant
And then we get cassirer's retort that we are not writing about faeries and demons anyway but about our inner selves. Bollocks! It was poetic justice that killed him before the confessionals would render his irrelevant damning of poesy a dialectic retrospect!
Again, it would serve you better to pay close attention to the context, especially the tidbits I offered about the spell and shadow of language. Cassirer's own metaphor at work here is "the mythic word picture of gods and daemons." He spent an entire book elaborating on what this means, and it's a far cry from what you seem to think it means. Cassirer is not saying that poets don't write about gods and daemons. What he writes, in fact, is that poetry doesn't express the mythic word picture of gods and daemons. On my reading, this is as much to say that poetry doesn't have the same sort of thrall over man's imagination as the earliest religious and mythic sorts of discourse. There was a time, in other words, wherein the distinction between image and symbol was not so ready and apparent; wherein art, religion, myth, and language were as of yet undifferentiated. Take the Lascaux cave paintings, for instance, a series of art objects that seem to connote worship, hunger, the desire to hunt and to communicate, all wrapped up into one little polyvalent package. Clearly, poetry as we know it today shares some real similarities to this kind of art, but is also a different sort of animal than this.
As another and favorite example, classicists speak to the Oresteia, for instance, as one of the first manifestations of a discourse that occupies the place of poetry proper, per Cassirer's conceptualization of it. Namely, something that partakes of the evocations, the opacities and immediacies of religious discourse, while at the same time attempting to overcome all the superstition, the barbarism and provinciality that goes hand in hand with such language qua its function as religion. Poetry, then, is illusion that actively attempts to free itself from the ignorance of its own status as illusion. It is image contemplating its own contingency and finitude, evocation that refuses to dominate (as in the case of primitive religion or unreflective myth). This really isn't so different from what Nietzsche thinks in regards to "living artfully," is it? The point of poetry, then, per my reading of Cassirer, is to be able to swim in the illusion of selfhood and not drown.
On that note, I think there is something remiss in your response. Namely, the assumption that by "self-revelation," Cassirer means to speak about an "inner self." "Self-revelation" can mean something besides this. It can mean the dissolution of the thought that there is a distinction between self and world, or even a dissolution of whatever impedes the fluidity that the great poet achieves in his or her observations and metaphors of his or her world. The poetic act, on my understanding of Cassirer, is just this kind of unconcealment, where the chthonic and occult aspects of the meaning that informs the poet's life are revealed -- not as "inner" attributes, per se, but as unconscious valences that constitute the spiritual substance from which the sculpture, so to speak, is assembled. This disclosure, however, takes the form of an interaction between self and world, wherein one is free to re-imagine the world. Thus poetry's status as the illusory, imaginary space in which the poet plays.
Cassirer might be rolling in his grave at such a Heideggerian appropriation of his position. Nonetheless, I think it makes his position viable, against the alternative you suggest.
“Poetry is mother-tongue of the human race; as gardening is older than agriculture; painting than writing; song than declamation; parables,—than deductions; barter,—than trade”
― Johann Hamann
― Johann Hamann