Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Saturday, October 21, 2006

 
The eastern cemetery at Highgate is a comparatively obscure and undertstated affair when compared to its grandiose rival in the west. However, it does boast one monument that is rather more imposing, namely the grave of Karl Marx. Orginally, this was as understated as theose that surround it until the Soviet Union decided that the Holy Father could no more be allowed to languish in obscurity that could the worms be allowed to have their sport with Lenin's flesh. Today, a ponderous bust of Marx looks out across the cemetery atop a plinth that bears the legend 'the object of philosophy is not to understand the world but to change it.' Recently, I've found myself wondering to what extent the act of depicting or interpreting the world is actually distinguishable from an attempt to sway it. I was particularly reminded of this by this article on Hans Christian Anderson and Kierkegaard;

"As far as Kierkegaard was concerned – and he argued the point at length in a remarkable dissertation for Copenhagen University, called "The Concept of Irony, with continual reference to Socrates" – the recourse to laughter went back to the very beginnings of philosophy, in ancient Greece.

Philosophers have always recognized Socrates as the founder of their tradition, but according to Kierkegaard they have had a blind spot when it comes to his peculiar sense of humour. Socrates was, as everyone knows, an ironist, and his teaching operated in the gap that irony opens up between inside and outside, or between real meanings and ostensible ones.... Socrates himself had never put his own opinions on display, preferring to offer himself to the citizens of Athens as a universal intellectual sparring partner and an all-round ironist. It was as if he had no particular point of view, and no personal convictions or beliefs, but only a repertory of dialectical dodges and feints with which he would lead his conceited challengers on till they ran out of words and had to confess that they had no idea what they were talking about. The Socratic ironist, Kierkegaard reminds us, denies his real self in order to "produce himself poetically" and keep the flame of doubt burning bright. The true philosophy of Socrates, like the true religion of Jesus, depended on losing the illusion of self-sufficiency; and "if we need to be wary of irony as a seducer, we must also praise it as a guide".

The young Kierkegaard wanted to be an ambiguous teacher just like Socrates, except that he was going to work through literature rather than the spoken word. He would devise writerly techniques for upsetting people’s prejudices, leaving trapdoors through which he could make his escape and leave his readers baffled as to who he really was or what his own opinions might be. "Having an opinion is both too much and too little for me," he wrote."


The immediate argument at hand, that in certain respects Kierkegaard's claim to be considered as an artist is as good as, or greater than, that of Anderson, is one I happen to agree with. Much of Kierkegaard's work, Either/Or in particular has a Bakhtinian novelistic quality that seemed somewhat lacking when I read Anderson's stories. However, there are a number of obvious difficulties with the interpretation being outlined above. Irony does not only open gaps between apparent and suggested meanings (thereby creating an ambiguity between the propositions being expressed), it can also be a means of reinforcing a single meaning. It's this that leads to the further difficulty, whether Socrates is the disinterested ironist described above, or whether this simply serves as camouflage for a philosophy that is quite different to the one described above, disdaining empirical experimentation and observation in favour of a focus on the causes of causes, disdaining the body as a prison and which distinguished itself in opposition to sophistry's concern with descriptions of the world that meet our needs rather than conceptions of absolute truth. Throughout Plato's Dialogues, Socrates repeatedly scorns those who deal in paradox, viewing their arguments as being concerned with power rather than with truth, but is far from reluctant to marshall sophistical violence in his own arguments. The obvious place to turn for a countvailing argument is Richard Rorty:

"By "Platonism" I mean the idea that great works of literature all, in the end, say the same thing-and are great precisely because they do so. they inculcate the same eternal "humanistic" values. They remind us of the same immutable features of human experience. Platonism, in this sense, conflates inspiration and knowledge by saying that only the eternal inspires-that the source of greatness has always been out there, just behind the veil of appearances, and has been described many times before... For a functionalist, it is no surprise that some putatively great works leave some readers cold; functionalists do not expect the same key to open every heart. Whereas essentialists take canonical status as indicating the presence of a link to eternal truth, and lack of interest in a canonical work as a moral flaw, functionalists take canonical status to be as changeable as the historical and personal situations of readers."


From a personal perspective, I find myself basically in accord with Rorty's distrust of the metaphysical and preference for the existential and situational. As with my earlier post, on the difficulty I find with reading the religious aspects of medieval literature, Rorty holds that in a post-Nietzschean, post-philosophical culture, many of the older literary texts are simply obsolete (Plato’s dialogues and scripture amongst them) because they no longer serve to transform us; we are a different sort of people than the ones those texts appealed to (in much the same way that Scott meant a great deal to the Victorian but little to most readers now). To Rorty, literature serves a greater value than philosophy since it simply inspires private projects of self-creation, with novels serving to teach us to appreciate social solidarity and "the other," as with the role of empathy in the novels of writers like Dickens and Eliot, or indeed the extension of sympathy that can easily be found in Anderson's stories but is repulsively absent from Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling.

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posted by Richard 12:21 pm