Wittgenstein's remarks on idols reminded me of Blackmur's comments on
doctrinaire thinking in his "Critic's Job of Work" essay I've been
reading:
"Thought is a beacon not a life-raft, and to confuse the functions is
tragic. The tragic character of thought - as any perspective will show -
is that it takes a rigid mold too soon; chooses destiny like a Calvinist,
in infancy, instead of waiting slowly for old age, and hence for the most
part works against the world, good sense, and its own object..."
Apparently the possible "harmony" that poetry orients itself toward
has to do with the way it yokes the impersonal, universal quality of
knowledge - as Michael described - with a force that is not knowledge,
not thought, but word taking on the attributes & pressure of a thing,
a force, an action, an object, a vivid particular, an individual
person or soul. & because the philosophical effort devolves into an
effort at (necessarily) "poetic" formulation or expression, the two projects
are always circling around each other... (since poetry also strives for
something "definitive")...
To address Robin's comments & Candice's: yes, it's a pretty loose way
of using the word to say the troubadours were philosophical - I was
simply arguing that they use knowledge & philosophy in ways similar to
JG in her "Surface" poem - as a starting-point or conceit which can either
remain on the level of an amusing blasphemy, or delve into deeper emotional
tones dramatized by actual dilemmas, which philosophy can only adumbrate
in an abstract, general way.
Henry
Michael Heller wrote:
>In this view, it is only a weak and corrupt usage of philosophy to speak of
>Leibnitz's ideas or to say that "Kant proclaims." Where philosophy is writ
>large, there can be no idolatry of the personal kind.
> If we look more closely, we can speculate on what troubled
>Wittgenstein--that, as with Oppen later, he could no longer accept the rest
>or surcease provided by the strictures of form under which he was required
>to write. To the extent that one attempts to separate tone from knowledge,
>to deny the rhetorical force of knowledge (or, in Oppen's case, to deny the
>rhetorical or tonal dimension of imagism), is to go against one's own self-
>knowledge. What burdened Wittgenstein was his un-saying, the silences which
>were more important than his utterances. Indeed, what he could not say or
>write to fit into the marked off or taboo-ed boundaries of the logical
>positivists both mocked and, at the same time, made 'poetic' the rhetorical
>engines of the Tractatus and later, even the bewitching nets of the
>Philosophical Investigations. Somewhere, the self-sufficiency, the
>propositional intertextuality of the philosophy no longer assuaged.
>Wittgenstein wanted a philosophy of "kindness," he also told Norman Malcom,
>not one of "truth," of instrumental reason. "All that philosophy can do,"
>he was to write (and how much a poet's words these are), "is to destroy
>idols. And that means not making any new ones--say out of 'the absence of
>idols.'" (DOG 325)
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