Wasn't going to, but I will reply to Peter's very interesting post, not
specifically yet -- though his notion of origin certainly fascinates me --
but generally enough to open out the topic a little more.
On form and phenomena:
I distinguish two particular kinds of novelty in thinking or in poetic
practice. The first understands mainly that an attack can now be mounted on
certain doctrines or poetic practices of the past. It informs itself as
fully as possible about the terms of the attack but since the past doctrine
(e.g., Husserl's transcendental ego) is now "outmoded" it understands that
doctrine only through the lenses of the attack. It has that constant bias,
often without realising it. This approach assumes, therefore (and often out
of a fear of being judged reactionary) that the attack is successful and that
a new stage has now been reached in thought/poetry. So it quotes the
terminology of the attack freely as if each term were now unproblematic.
Glib kinds of avant-gardism worry me like that, even though they often do
permit an interesting extremism to which I don't at all "object" -- I mean,
why should I if they're interesting?
But the wisest thing I retained from reading Kierkegaard was that lower forms
of the dialectic persist in the higher dialectical resolutions (a
truthfulness, it seems to me, even when thinking is not conducted
dialectically).
This makes me believe that a better kind of novelty in thinking and poetry
retains past doctrines within the novelty and doesn't just reject them out of
hand. This my problem, for example, with versions of modern French
philosophy which pretend to have ended this or that phase of intellectual
development (even if those phases are millennia-old). For example, if an
attack is successfully made on Husserl's phenomenological attempt to found
certainty of truth in an eidetic, transcendental, pre-objective ego as
*origin* or as *origin-as-essence*, a shallow approach is to believe that
Husserl's whole phenomenological apparatus has been overturned at the same
time. Now we can use the term "phenomenological" as an old-fashioned
expression. Most particularly, Husserl's sense of the eidetic realm is
forgotten, as it often is today. But the eidetic in Husserl is profound and
rich. Agreed, you can't, without contradiction, found certainty on it.
Agreed, Heidegger and modern physicist mathematicians and poets have directed
us to variously interesting senses of our immersion in the world. But you
can still find something of your own deep artistic experience in Husserl's
eidetic vision.
Most especially, I don't see how one can have a profound experience of form
without affects at eidetic level. And I don't see, therefore, how language
can keep entirely on surfaces or how a re-emphasis on form can presume to
ignore its phenomenological affects.
And, yet again, I don't see that we need necessarily tie in "transcendence"
with presence or essence: it's very important to understand that the
insistence that we must do so (because for Western millennia that connection
has been made) was a strategic move by philosophers or poets who happen to
have expertise at surfaces and at collapsing them. It enabled them to claim
that they themselves had won free from those millennia of tradition by
understanding its paradoxes, but that no one not accepting their definitions
could be deemed to have done so. Despite classical Western tradition,
"transcendence" does not necessarily have anything to do with gods or
essences; it can just mean a sense that our present level of discussion has
higher levels we haven't yet reached, for example. The dispute then becomes:
"Are those levels indeed higher or is all really the same discursive
surface?" If "higher", what does that mean and where does "higher" stop if
not in gods or infinities? Admittedly, a grand problem which has to be
addressed within the whole complicated question of infinities and I confess I
just don't understand the answer. But if not "higher", how does the great
swim across the ocean surfaces of meaning acquire its passions and
desperations? Fear of drowning in meaninglessness? Well, precisely. Then
why fear, if it is not fear of sinking? And if sinking, why not fear of
"higher" too? How do we retrieve an explanation of emotion that is not
simply centred entirely on death or "well-being" or "social well-being" (as
if we understood those terms)? Again, I confess I don't understand that
answer either and I have found the writings about emotion perhaps the most
unsatisfactory of all aspects of modern philosophy.
Hmm
Doug
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