Poetry and Metaphor and Aquinas (or, which of these things is not like the other)
Dwight and I have been having an email conversation about this topic which he has kindly allowed me to share. Enjoy!
From: Whiskey
To: Dwight
not necessarily, and anyhow, not germane to my essential point, which is that everything which is objective can be said non-metaphorically, but (at least sometimes) what is personal and subjective cannot be said except metaphorically. [that was my initial and hasty response to D's comment on the blog.]
From: Dwight
To: Whiskey
Sorry. I was cut off (had to go to class) half way through my answer online. I think I agree with you that everything objective can be said non-metaphorically. I would simply say that, in practice, the subjective and objective are right there together, and "the height of the tomato season" will always trigger echoes, distant or otherwise, in the mind, of other things that have "height." So yes, objectively, "height" has a 1-to-1 relation to object in that sentence, but lived experience is not always (or even usually, I would say) a matter of 1-1 sign/signified relationships. I suppose that was what I was thinking of in our original conversation.
To push further: why don't you want to say that a poem communicates something in a way that no other words would communicate it? I guess I think that, in a poem, the subjective and objective meanings are not divisible to the same extent they are in, say, dialectic, and this is part of why we hate to see them brutally parsed--"we murder to dissect." No?
From: Whiskey
To: Dwight
I think you're right that in practice the subjective and the objective are right there together. It bothers me for different reasons, some personal and stupid, and some more grounded. On the one hand, I often get frustrated when I sense a lack of understanding in poets of the value of discursive knowledge. That's the personal and stupid reason. But more substantially, I think there is a real danger in making the poetic act normatively good, rather than subjecting it to an external measure of goodness. In other words, if the poem is the only way that something can be expressed, then there is no way beyond itself to measure it against what is; hence, the poem itself is seen as either immediately true or false through a sort of poetic intuition which is self-justifying. And on the basis of this, I think, people can be lead to think things about the world which are false. What do you think?
From: Dwight
To: Whiskey
First, I'm with you on this: I too am weary of people claiming that one or another poem is somehow beyond judgment in discursive speech, and consequently, I've been putting a lot of thought into what makes a poem good/true/beautiful or bad/false/ugly, and, among recognized good poems, what makes one or another of them "great." I too suspect any man-made thing taken to be normatively good on unknown grounds. This kind of presentation can be misleading, and, even more often, can be a way of simply avoiding the rationality of God's creation.
About judging a poem discursively: I think you can, to some extent, enunciate what the poem is "about" in prose. Usually it will be about some sort of important, multi-faceted experience, and in a good or great poem that experience will be universal, i.e. recognizable and important to all or most. If the poem is "about" an argument or rational assertion, then it's probably not a poem, strictly-speaking, but verse (i.e. prose put into verse, which can be a wonderful thing).
So what does the true/false question mean in this context? I guess that, if the experience at the heart of the poem is true for most people, then it's true.
Telling whether it's good is harder, but still answerable: is the frame of the poem moral, i.e. corresponding to the objective norms of good and evil in the world? If not, the poem may not be good, in the sense that it presents a view from beyond morality, or from another morality--this is to say, it's unreal to us. Nonetheless, the poem may be good as the presentation of a certain persona and his view of the world, a view from which we have something to learn. If, for instance, the poem is told from amoral point-of-view that is nonetheless common--e.g. nihilism--it may be good as a presentation of this, but not universally good. But you know this.
The hardest one is beauty, but I think there are still a few helpful criteria, some of which you've heard: does the form fit the content? And is the music of the poem a kind of song that everyone would want to sing? I.e. would you repeat it to your child going to bed, even though she doesn't understand it?
But you either know all this, or have heard it from me before. More to the point is the question, is the above judging process everything? No, of course not: Even once you've qualified and quantified whatever you can about the poem, there will still be its life remaining--the dynamic relation of its whole to its parts, and this, I think, really is beyond simple judgment. That's not to say that the poem is self-justifying: you can strike it out for any of the above reasons, but you can't express in prose its essential life, or force.
Two explanations, one theological, one from authority. My own view is that good and great poems are subincarnations insomuch as they more or less embody the paradoxical, beautiful image of the Triune God in nature and human life. That is, they participate in the truth-telling of Christ, the Eternal Word, who told the most complete truth about the most perfect Being. Obviously we can't talk of the Trinity outside analogy. So, there comes a point at which anything alive (and I want to say that good poems have some kind of life of their own) is ineffable, in the sense that it's whole and parts are united in a truly marvelous way. You can say many things about them, but there will always be something unexplained because the image of God is, at bottom, inexplicable.
Second, I think it was St. Isidore of Seville, the great encyclopedist, who laid out the following categories as a way of thinking about knowledge: Given the categories of scientific (i.e. yes/no, black/white, etc.), dialectical, rhetorical, and poetic knowledge, we can say that they grow less precise as you proceed down the list (from scientific to poetic), and yet more profound. They're all valid, but the terms of their availability and definition differ.
OK. I've gone on long enough. What say you?
From: Whiskey
To: Dwight
This is fun.
So, you are right that we've talked about these things before, and in a sense, it's these discussion which has prompted my thinking about this. My question is regarding the last thing you say here.
Let me talk about this for a moment from a different point of view. Aquinas says in De Veritate 1.9 that the intellect knows truth only insofar as it knows that it is the sort of thing able to know truth, but this requires that the intellect know its own nature. Now, commentators have pointed out that this would result in an absurd position if Aquinas meant that the judgment could only be known as true if and only if it were preceded by a judgment about the nature of the intellect (that is to say, there are two judgments: first, for example, "Trees are rather large plants" and then, "The intellect is adequate to make that judgment"). For if judgment does not give truth necessarily, then it doesn't give truth even if the judgment is about the intellect itself.
So, Charles Boyer says that Aquinas means that in one and the same act, the intellect knows something as true (the tree one) and knows its own nature (the intellect is adequate ...). Not two judgments, but one. So, in my dissertation, I'm arguing that the object of the judgment is the formal content judgment, but that simultaneously the subject is present to itself as the subject of that judgment and hence as adequate to it. This subjective self-presence is what moderns would call consciousness (though I think that the moderns are nutty about what counsciousness really is). And this subject is not known in the same way that the object is known. It is present it itself as the subject of an act. The object is present as the object of the act. These are two modes of presence which are radically different.
So, on the side of the subject are the acts of meaning which constitute for us the world in which we live, along which all the other parts of lived experience: emotion, desire, and so on. All these are involved in any act of the subject, but the subject as subject remains forever divided from the object. The subject intends, but the object is intended. I don't by any means deny that we frame the object differently when it is intended in different ways, but we are still intending an object.
So, poetry (I think) captures concretely in speech the experience of what I have just described abstractly. Prosaic expressions do not capture that. In a prosaic expression, the intending subject is masked and the intended object is revealed.
Way too much, but that's where I'm coming from.
From: Whiskey
To: Dwight
not necessarily, and anyhow, not germane to my essential point, which is that everything which is objective can be said non-metaphorically, but (at least sometimes) what is personal and subjective cannot be said except metaphorically. [that was my initial and hasty response to D's comment on the blog.]
From: Dwight
To: Whiskey
Sorry. I was cut off (had to go to class) half way through my answer online. I think I agree with you that everything objective can be said non-metaphorically. I would simply say that, in practice, the subjective and objective are right there together, and "the height of the tomato season" will always trigger echoes, distant or otherwise, in the mind, of other things that have "height." So yes, objectively, "height" has a 1-to-1 relation to object in that sentence, but lived experience is not always (or even usually, I would say) a matter of 1-1 sign/signified relationships. I suppose that was what I was thinking of in our original conversation.
To push further: why don't you want to say that a poem communicates something in a way that no other words would communicate it? I guess I think that, in a poem, the subjective and objective meanings are not divisible to the same extent they are in, say, dialectic, and this is part of why we hate to see them brutally parsed--"we murder to dissect." No?
From: Whiskey
To: Dwight
I think you're right that in practice the subjective and the objective are right there together. It bothers me for different reasons, some personal and stupid, and some more grounded. On the one hand, I often get frustrated when I sense a lack of understanding in poets of the value of discursive knowledge. That's the personal and stupid reason. But more substantially, I think there is a real danger in making the poetic act normatively good, rather than subjecting it to an external measure of goodness. In other words, if the poem is the only way that something can be expressed, then there is no way beyond itself to measure it against what is; hence, the poem itself is seen as either immediately true or false through a sort of poetic intuition which is self-justifying. And on the basis of this, I think, people can be lead to think things about the world which are false. What do you think?
From: Dwight
To: Whiskey
First, I'm with you on this: I too am weary of people claiming that one or another poem is somehow beyond judgment in discursive speech, and consequently, I've been putting a lot of thought into what makes a poem good/true/beautiful or bad/false/ugly, and, among recognized good poems, what makes one or another of them "great." I too suspect any man-made thing taken to be normatively good on unknown grounds. This kind of presentation can be misleading, and, even more often, can be a way of simply avoiding the rationality of God's creation.
About judging a poem discursively: I think you can, to some extent, enunciate what the poem is "about" in prose. Usually it will be about some sort of important, multi-faceted experience, and in a good or great poem that experience will be universal, i.e. recognizable and important to all or most. If the poem is "about" an argument or rational assertion, then it's probably not a poem, strictly-speaking, but verse (i.e. prose put into verse, which can be a wonderful thing).
So what does the true/false question mean in this context? I guess that, if the experience at the heart of the poem is true for most people, then it's true.
Telling whether it's good is harder, but still answerable: is the frame of the poem moral, i.e. corresponding to the objective norms of good and evil in the world? If not, the poem may not be good, in the sense that it presents a view from beyond morality, or from another morality--this is to say, it's unreal to us. Nonetheless, the poem may be good as the presentation of a certain persona and his view of the world, a view from which we have something to learn. If, for instance, the poem is told from amoral point-of-view that is nonetheless common--e.g. nihilism--it may be good as a presentation of this, but not universally good. But you know this.
The hardest one is beauty, but I think there are still a few helpful criteria, some of which you've heard: does the form fit the content? And is the music of the poem a kind of song that everyone would want to sing? I.e. would you repeat it to your child going to bed, even though she doesn't understand it?
But you either know all this, or have heard it from me before. More to the point is the question, is the above judging process everything? No, of course not: Even once you've qualified and quantified whatever you can about the poem, there will still be its life remaining--the dynamic relation of its whole to its parts, and this, I think, really is beyond simple judgment. That's not to say that the poem is self-justifying: you can strike it out for any of the above reasons, but you can't express in prose its essential life, or force.
Two explanations, one theological, one from authority. My own view is that good and great poems are subincarnations insomuch as they more or less embody the paradoxical, beautiful image of the Triune God in nature and human life. That is, they participate in the truth-telling of Christ, the Eternal Word, who told the most complete truth about the most perfect Being. Obviously we can't talk of the Trinity outside analogy. So, there comes a point at which anything alive (and I want to say that good poems have some kind of life of their own) is ineffable, in the sense that it's whole and parts are united in a truly marvelous way. You can say many things about them, but there will always be something unexplained because the image of God is, at bottom, inexplicable.
Second, I think it was St. Isidore of Seville, the great encyclopedist, who laid out the following categories as a way of thinking about knowledge: Given the categories of scientific (i.e. yes/no, black/white, etc.), dialectical, rhetorical, and poetic knowledge, we can say that they grow less precise as you proceed down the list (from scientific to poetic), and yet more profound. They're all valid, but the terms of their availability and definition differ.
OK. I've gone on long enough. What say you?
From: Whiskey
To: Dwight
This is fun.
So, you are right that we've talked about these things before, and in a sense, it's these discussion which has prompted my thinking about this. My question is regarding the last thing you say here.
Even once you've qualified and quantified whatever you can about the poem, there will still be its life remaining--the dynamic relation of its whole to its parts, and this, I think, really is beyond simple judgment.My question is, what is the status of the "remainder." To use a mathematical metaphor, what do you get when you divide a poem by its prosaic expression? So, to go back. In speech, there is the one intending and the one intended. Is there something lost on the side of the one intended? And if so, why can't it be expressed prosaically? That's essentially my question. I admit that lots is lost on the side of the one intending.
Let me talk about this for a moment from a different point of view. Aquinas says in De Veritate 1.9 that the intellect knows truth only insofar as it knows that it is the sort of thing able to know truth, but this requires that the intellect know its own nature. Now, commentators have pointed out that this would result in an absurd position if Aquinas meant that the judgment could only be known as true if and only if it were preceded by a judgment about the nature of the intellect (that is to say, there are two judgments: first, for example, "Trees are rather large plants" and then, "The intellect is adequate to make that judgment"). For if judgment does not give truth necessarily, then it doesn't give truth even if the judgment is about the intellect itself.
So, Charles Boyer says that Aquinas means that in one and the same act, the intellect knows something as true (the tree one) and knows its own nature (the intellect is adequate ...). Not two judgments, but one. So, in my dissertation, I'm arguing that the object of the judgment is the formal content judgment, but that simultaneously the subject is present to itself as the subject of that judgment and hence as adequate to it. This subjective self-presence is what moderns would call consciousness (though I think that the moderns are nutty about what counsciousness really is). And this subject is not known in the same way that the object is known. It is present it itself as the subject of an act. The object is present as the object of the act. These are two modes of presence which are radically different.
So, on the side of the subject are the acts of meaning which constitute for us the world in which we live, along which all the other parts of lived experience: emotion, desire, and so on. All these are involved in any act of the subject, but the subject as subject remains forever divided from the object. The subject intends, but the object is intended. I don't by any means deny that we frame the object differently when it is intended in different ways, but we are still intending an object.
So, poetry (I think) captures concretely in speech the experience of what I have just described abstractly. Prosaic expressions do not capture that. In a prosaic expression, the intending subject is masked and the intended object is revealed.
Way too much, but that's where I'm coming from.
posted by Whiskey at 9:08 AM
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