[Andrew Frisardi]

Michael, I don’t dispute your point about whole experience and emotion/thought, but I still think that what Vendler says—“the poet creates a new and unique reality, non-existent until his words bring it into being”—is nonsense. If it were really unique and previously non-existent, no reader would find himself/herself in it. Poetry would be onanism in the dark [ok, it often is . . . ], and there would not be the actually quite narrow range of subject matter people have been obsessed with since literature began. A unique take on a shared reality is what “makes it new” and so makes literature.

Besides, Schopenhauer also wrote, “That which knows all things and is known by none is the subject; and for this subject all exists.” Helen Vendler has no hint of anything so transcendental. Schopenhauer’s World as Representation is closer to the Maya of the Upanishads, which are in fact one of his main inspirations. Vendler’s “new and unique reality” comes from her materialist theory of perception.

The idea of organic form (and I’m not especially attached to the theory per se) wouldn’t mean a thing if there were no intrinsic connection between the mind and the things it knows. The gap between knowing subject and known object is a humongous blind spot of post-Enlightenment thought, which people like Coleridge and Emerson were trying to fill. Coleridge’s notion of organic form is an instance of that Romantic rebellion against positivist thought, and I’m ever grateful for any attempt to rattle the bars of what Goethe called the empirico-mechanico-dogmatic torture chamber of modernist epistemology.


Chris, that must be the alphabetical autobiography of Duncan; the organic one, I hear, is all pulp.

[Michael Ferris]

Andrew, thank you so much for the considered response. Lord, I feel some cobwebs being swept away!

I think we are largely in agreement. Though I find solipsism deliciously irrefutable, I am no solipsist. I agree that HV’s rhetoric is overblown – and I hadn’t known she was a materialist in matters of perception.

I also agree that Schopenhauer took over from Kant the transcendental categories of cognition. The real novelty in S’s philosophy, as I recall it and read it, was in its moral import: he sought to free men from suffering, as much as he could, by changing how men thought about reality. That's why I quoted him with LW: a large portion of the work of both philosophers was focused on practical matters, that is, not just how we conceive the world, but how that changes the world, and what difference it makes in how we live.

I further agree with you that art, great art, must orbit around universality and uniqueness, as a planet orbits a binary star, its two suns. How exactly it does this is mystery to me; but I am one who is content to abide a bit in mystery.

I agree on the rejection of mechanical empiricism, as you call it. I'm with Rorty. Language, learned concepts, do, in fact, mold reality. And, literature can change your world...or, at least, that's my true belief.

Again, thanks for the engagement. I, for one, found the subject v. interesting, and even... a bit fun.

M

[Allen Tice]

Very droll, Chris.
Maybe Duncan frequently channeled his neighbor's truffle hunts?