You know, this site, plus the other one, has been talking obsessively about
categories and identities and "the split" for, I don't know, at least ten
years now, without beginning to satisfy itself. I thought the best remark
came from Geoff Squires in the form of a question: "Why are we locked into
this dualism?" And the only answer I can think of to that is, perhaps we're
not, unless we choose to be. It might be one of those prisons where nobody
ever thought of trying the door.
There was supposed to be a philosophical connection. A long time ago I was
told that we (us in Cambridge so to speak, though I wasn't there) were
opposed to "English empiricism", a dreadful thing, which must I suppose be
embodied in people like Ayer and Moore and Russell and was an unconscious
informant of "mainstream" poetry. Instead we followed exciting, visionary,
Continental philosophy, post-Hegelianism, phenomenology (I'm still very
interested in Merleau-Ponty), and so on (nobody mentioned Marx at that
time). But I notice that recent philosophical discussion has suggested that
the contrast or opposition between English empiricism and Continental
movements in philosophy has been exaggerated, and they have important
features in common. Most of these attachments seem now like tentative
impositions which never really meant very much. As far as I can see most of
the poets these days who take philosophy seriously as something integral to
their task read nothing much but Adorno, which must suit them.
I respect Tim's intuitive belief in the dichotomy, and many others who
evidently need some sense of militancy to support their creative energy,
which is natural, though I don't know how it is experienced as more than a
construction of expediency in a competitive literary field. I don't know how
it can be a personal event. And if something is "split" it must at one time
have been a whole. And where do we locate that?
PR
|