This is Blake:
"if it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic
character the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of
all things, &
stand still unable to do other than repeat
the same dull round over again"
which is the epigraph to a piece I wrote five or six ars ago on the lyrical
and philosophical vis-a-vis Oppen, Stevens and Wittgentstein (with a soupcon
of Bakhtin and Perloff--in a back issue of SAGETRIEB, but I'd be glad to try
to send it as an attachment to anyone--back channel please, about 28 pp. in
length).
My discussion revolved around how the lyrical and the philosophical
interanimate each other in such a way that at some point one can not be
distinguished from the other. Here's a passage:
Which brings us back to Perloff's instructive description. Wittgenstein's
inability or reluctance to connect one proposition with another but rather
to leave logical blanks in the spaces of his thought, is deemed a "poetic
power." We know, if we may speak of inclinations and pressures, that the
philosophical tends toward form, that it must ultimately rest, not on
personality but on the idea that the sessions of thought are also instances
of no one "snapping a picture," that at the closure of a philosophical
argument, the rest is indeed silence. The author of a thought, by
philosophy's law of generality, has been excluded. Certainly Wittgenstein
seems to have held such an idea. He is reported to have lectured in Norman
Malcolm's presence that
[d]oubt, belief, certainty--like feelings, emotions, pain,
etc--have certain characteristic facial expressions. Knowledge does
not have a characteristic facial expression. There is the tone of
doubt, but no tone of knowledge (LWAM92).
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)
