Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics

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Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Volume 42

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Number 1

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Spring 2019

This Issue felicitates Prof. Jonathan Culler, an Honorary Member of our Editorial Board, on his 75th Birth Anniversary.

A VISHVANATHA KAVIRAJA INSTITUTE PUBLICATION

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS JONATHAN CULLER is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His published works are in the fields of structuralism, literary theory and criticism. His Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature is an outstanding book of criticism. His contribution to the Very Short Introductions series, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, received praise for its innovative technique of organization and has been translated into 26 languages.

DIDIER MALEUVRE is Professor of Comparative Literature and French Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art (1999), The Religion of Reality: Inquiry into the Self, Art, and Transcendence (2006), and The Horizon: A History of our Infinite Longing (2011) and The Art of Civilization: A Bourgeois History (2018).

JAMES WETZEL is Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University and the first permanent holder of the Augustinian Endowed Chair in the Thought of Saint Augustine. He is the author of Augustine and the Limits of Virtue (CUP, 1992), Augustine: A Guide for the Perplexed (Bloomsbury, 2010) and Augustine's City of God (CUP, 2014).

JEROLD J. ABRAMS is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Creighton University, USA. He specializes in American Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Philosophy of Film. He is the editor of The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick (2007).

YANPING GAO is Associate Research Fellow at Institute of Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing. She has translated Susanne Langer’s Feeling and Form and Richard Shusterman’s Act and Affect into Chinese. She is an editor of the Journal of International Aesthetics and author of Winckelmann’s Vision of Greek Art. MATTI ITKONEN is a cultural philosopher and Adjunct Professor at University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He writes on the philosophical questions involved in literature and cultural education.

MICHEL DION is Full Professor and Chairholder of CIBC Research Chair on Financial Integrity, Université de Sherbrooke, Canada.

PRABHA SHANKAR DWIVEDI is Assistant Professor of English at IIT Tirupati, India. He has published research articles in comparative literature and linguistics. His book Epistemology and Linguistics is published by Motilal Banarasidass.

ARKADY NEDEL is Associate Professor of Philosophy at L’Université de Strasbourg, Paris. His books include Husserl & the Philosophy of Immortality (French), Oscar Rabin: Painted Life (Russian) and Consciousness Arises in India: Buddhist & Phenomenological Theories of Ultimate Knowledge.

ROCCO A. ASTORE is Adjunct Lecturer of Philosophy at Borough of Manhattan Community College, New York. He has published several papers in metaphysics, philosophy, ontology, etc.

KHEDIDJA CHERGUI is Assistant Professor of English, L’Ecole Normale Supérieure de Bouzareah, Algeria. She researches in African history and literature, postcolonial studies, comparative literature and intercultural studies.

SYLVIA BORISSOVA is Assistant Professor of Aesthetics at Institute for the Study of Societies and Knowledge, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

Her dissertation is titled Limits of the Aesthetic Consciousness (2011). Her monograph, Aesthetics of Silence and Taciturnity (2019) reflects her lasting interest in negative aesthetics. She works in philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, philosophical and cultural anthropology, philosophy of mind, etc.

AMINA HUSSAIN is Assistant Professor of English at Khwaja Moinudin Urdu Arabi-Farsi University, Lucknow, India. She works in Islamic feminism and cultural studies.

SOLOMON OLANIYAN & GABRIEL OLANIYAN are Assistant Professors of English at University of Ibadan, Nigeria.

SHOUVIK NARAYAN HORE is pursuing PhD in English from University of Hyderabad.

ANKITA SUNDRIYAL is pursuing PhD in English from EFLU, Lucknow, India.

NANDAN ROSARIO is pursuing PhD from IIT, Delhi. He is an MA in Literary Arts and his research area is Graphic Narratives.

SUNAINA ARYA is a Doctoral Research Scholar at Center for Philosophy, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, India.

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Contents

ANANTA SUKLA As We Know Him

ARTICLES

JONATHAN CULLER Lyric, Language, Culture / 1 DIDIER MALEUVRE Bougainville Against the Tide / 17 JAMES WETZEL At the Crossroads of Contentment: Variations on an Augustinian Theme / 30 JEROLD J. ABRAMS Philosophy of Prehistoric Painting and Cinema: Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams / 44 MICHEL DION Rousseau and Goethe: Developing Ethical Leadership and Promoting the Right Balance Between Reason and Sentiment/ 49 PRABHA SHANKAR DWIVEDI Ontology of Dialogic Inquisition: A Study in Relation to Kena and Praśna Upani=ads, and Bergsonism / 64 YANPING GAO Between Matter and Hand: On Gaston Bachelard’s Theory of Material Imagination / 73 ARKADY NEDEL The Limits of the Circle: Master, Slave and Death in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit /82 KHEDIDJA CHERGUI Know Thyself: Patterns of Anagnorisis in the Dramatic Expression of Euripides, Shakespeare and Wole Soyinka / 91

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SOLOMON OLANIYAN & GABRIEL OLANIYAN The Trope of Pensioners’ Plight in Gabriel Marquez’ No One Writes To The Colonel and Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s Trafficked / 108 MATTI ITKONEN The Quintessential Kalastajatorppa: A Cinematic Journey into a Time and a Space / 118 ROCCO A. ASTORE Arguments Contrary to Spinoza’s View of Time and Free-Will through the Philosophy of Henri Bergson / 131 AMINA HUSSAIN Theorising Post-Truth: A Postmodern Phenomenon / 150 SHOUVIK NARAYAN HORE Henry David Thoreau and the Metaphysics of Imagination / 163 ANKITA SUNDRIYAL Admiration to Love, Love to Matrimony: A Russellian Reading of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice / 172 FROM THE ARCHIVES HAROLD OSBORNE Aesthetic Perception / 182 (JCLA Vol. 1, No. 1, Summer 1978) BOOK REVIEWS PRABHA SHANKAR DWIVEDI A Student’s Handbook of Indian Aesthetics. By Neerja A. Gupta / 189 SYLVIA BORISSOVA Politics and Aesthetics of the Female Form, 1908–1918. By Georgina Williams / 192 NANDAN ROSARIO & SUNAINA ARYA A Philosophy of Autobiography: Body and Text. By Aakash Singh Rathore / 194

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Lyric, Language, Culture1

Jonathan Culler

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ne of the most striking changes in the critical scene in recent years is the decline in the importance of lyric poetry. Poetry was once central to literary experience and the consideration of the nature of lyric or of poetic language was once central to critical theory: for the Russian formalists and theorists such as Roman Jakobson who linked Russian formalism and French structuralism. This is no longer the case today; when literature is important for theory, it comes in the guise of narrative. Why should this be? The obvious answer might be that not enough people read poetry, but such empirical matters never stopped theory before. Who reads Lacan except theorists? The simple answer might be that in an age of critical demystification, poetry seems embarrassing. Theorists can make claims about the fundamental importance of fictional narrative to the construction of the individual subject, to desire and identity, to the imagined communities that are nations, and so on. It’s harder to imagine making such claims about lyric. The blatantness of its rhetorical devices and the perverseness of lyric address — to birds, urns, flowers, or the dead — create discomfort for serious theorists. In his definition of performative language, “How to Do Things With Words”, the English philosopher J. L. Austin famously stipulates, “I must not be joking, for instance, or writing a poem.” 2 Poetry is set aside as non-serious, a parasitic or etiolated use of language. In “Passions: An Oblique Offering”, Jacques Derrida writes, “No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy”,3 but can we imagine claiming “No democracy without lyric”?

In fact, poetry has often been the abject of theory, to use a term from Julia Kristeva: what theory needs to reject, put beyond the pale, in order to constitute itself. Plato referred to the old quarrel between poetry and philosophy, for which he may be largely responsible, but in modern times one could start with the case of Marx, for whom Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Vol. 42, No. 1 (1-16) © 2019 by Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute

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accession to the condition of theorist came with his rejection of the poetry he had written as a young man, even the burning of poems in progress. He becomes Marx by rejecting poetry. Two famous texts, the letter to his father of November 10, 1837, and the “Reflections of a young man on the choice of a profession”, set out the oppositions: in poetry everything real becomes hazy, and to gain clarity and seek foundations in the real, he must flamboyantly abandon poetry.4 Mikhail Bakhtin enables himself to call the novel fundamentally dialogical — comprising competing socially-marked discourses — by labeling poetry as monological and setting it aside without examination.5 A poem is supposedly monological, controlled from a single point of view and thus ultimately deluded or authoritarian.

This is one version of a general structural operation where an opposition between something like poetry and prose is set up and qualities that can then be linked with poetry can be eliminated from consideration by the abjecting of poetry. The object of theory thus gets constituted by the setting aside of lyric. The classic gesture in JeanPaul Sartre’s Qu’est-ce que la littérature? identifies poetry as self-conscious play with language, a refusal to use the “language-instrument” properly, i.e. as transparent signs.

Setting aside poetry permits Sartre to focus on the problems of representing the world and bearing witness to it.

Roland Barthes’ first book, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture, the beginning of a major trajectory for modern theory, was a rewriting of Sartre, a response that never actually mentions Sartre while arguing that, on the contrary, reflection on language in avantgarde literature has political significance. Reversing Sartre’s account of prose by linking its political valency to its experimentation with language, Barthes nevertheless preserves Sartre’s abjection of poetry. Prose experiments with language in radical, politically promising ways, but poetry attempts to transcend or destroy language and therefore can be ignored. These two opposed theorists join in attaching what they see as wrong attitudes to language to poetry so that this attitude and the dimensions of language and language use to which it responds can be eliminated from consideration.

Poetry is not central to theory these days, nor to literary education, at least not in the English and Francophone world. In US universities these days we get many students studying English or foreign literatures who claim that they don’t like poetry, or don’t get it, so they tend to enroll in courses that focus on the novel or on cultural studies.

Since students tend to avoid poetry, as something unfamiliar and unfriendly, literature departments, in their quest to gain more students, make poetry less central to their programs. But if the study of poetry is no longer at the heart of literary study, that has dire consequences, for close attention to language and to artifice are no longer central, and thematic and ideological concerns encounter little resistance as they take over.

And once themes are all that count, why not study movies and TV programs rather than literature, which requires reading, attention to language, rather than viewing or scanning?

What has happened in literary studies is paralleled by the developments in language

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study that have vastly reduced the role played by the reading of literature. The communicative approach to language learning stresses real world exchanges; and the interactive view, seeing language as a vehicle for the creation and maintenance of social relations, focusing on patterns of moves, acts, negotiation and interaction found in conversational exchanges, has little place for written texts emerging from what is seen as a marginal social practice. In the United States, the National Standards for Foreign Language Learning, elaborated by a group representing the major foreign language teaching organizations in the context of federal education initiatives, scarcely mention literature, even though these are supposed to be broad compromise standards that allow divergent approaches. Standard 1.2., “Students understand and interpret written and spoken language on a variety of topics,” does mention comprehending “fairy tales, and other narratives based on familiar themes,” as an example, and, at a more advanced level, speaks of “understanding of the cultural nuances of meaning in written and spoken language as expressed by speakers and writers of the target language in formal and informal settings.” 6 But the standards addressing culture make clearer the orientation of language teaching: standard 2.1 explains, “Cultural practices refer to patterns of behavior accepted by a society and deal with aspects of culture such as rites of passage, the use of forms of discourse, the social ‘pecking order,’ and the use of space,” — conventions in which things like literature are not included. Standard 2.2 concerning cultural products, declares “Products may be tangible (e.g., a painting, a piece of literature, a pair of chopsticks) or intangible (e.g., an oral tale, a dance, a sacred ritual, a system of education). Whatever the form of the product, its presence within the culture is required or justified by the underlying beliefs and values (perspectives) of that culture, and the cultural practices involve the use of that product.”

In this perspective, chopsticks are a better choice than a piece of literature as a product that illustrates the widespread practices of a culture.

Now I am not proposing that we to revert to the old days, when foreign language students focused on literature: translating it and basically studying living languages the way same way one studied Latin, for example, but I do think something important is lost when the reading of poetry is eliminated from foreign language instruction, in the name of communication or social interaction. That is my subject here.

First of all, some of the most salient characteristics of lyrics, their brevity and memorability, are very relevant to the process of language learning. In a wonderful little aphoristic work, “Che cos’è la poesia?,” [What is Poetry?], a text written in response to this question from an Italian journal, Jacques Derrida approaches poetry as what strives to be memorable, to live in memory: “Apprends-moi par coeur, dit le poème.” The poem addresses you —“je suis une dictée, prononce la poésie, apprendsmoi par coeur, recopie, veille, et garde moi » [I am a dictation, says poetry. Learn me by heart, copy out, watch over and preserve me.]7 As memorable language, lyrics seek to be taken in, cathected — that is, emotionally invested, as a piece of otherness that can become part of you, available for responding to or thinking about experience —

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not only, Derrida says, “ce qu’on apprend par coeur,” but “ce qui apprend le coeur.” [not only what one learns by heart but what teaches the heart]. Poetry in Western culture has taught us the heart, taught us what is the heart. La Rochefoucauld declared that no one would fall in love it they had not read about it, and certainly poems of tragic love, of impossible or disappointed passion, are central to our cultures. When we hear “Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche” [I can write the saddest verses tonight], we know they will be about the heart.

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche Pensar que no la tengo. Sentir que la he perdido Como para acercarla mi mirada la busca Mi corazón la busca, y ella no está conmigo.

Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.

[Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

My sight tries to find her, as though to bring her closer My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.]8

Lyrics offer memorable language, asking that we repeat them, and may help engage learners in or with a language: as the language invests them, inscribes its formulations in mechanical memory, learners may become invested in the language, in rhythms they repeat as they repeat poems. In the process of learning a mother tongue, speech rhythms come first, before semantics, and while one cannot reproduce for second language learners the situation of learning a first language, one may in some small part simulate the condition of the child with poetic rhythms, nursery rhymes, simple lyrics. Derek Attridge, a British critic and metrical theorist, notes that even young children who may have trouble with the pronunciation of words can easily get the meter right for English nursery rhymes. (It helps, of course, that nursery rhymes are isochronic, with a regular chanted beat.) “There is nothing remarkable, therefore, about a twoyear-old chanting the following rhyme with perfect metrical placing of the syllables,” Stár líght stár bríght, The fírst stár I sée toníght, I wísh I máy, I wísh I míght, Háve the wísh I wísh toníght.

even though this requires “knowing” — I put the word in quotation marks — that each word in the first line takes a stress, whereas in the third line only every second word is stressed. It is upon this edifice of shared ability, a rhythmic competence, that is built the whole English poetic tradition. The four-by-four formation, four groups of four beats, is in English “the basis of most modern popular music, including rock and rap, of most folk, broadside, and industrial ballads from the middle ages to the 20th century, of most hymns, most nursery rhymes, and a great deal of printed poetry.”9

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One can very early learn simple verses in a foreign language, even if some of the words and constructions remain opaque, and this lays a foundation for cultural competence that will extend beyond lyrics themselves to the tradition of song, including and rap and popular music — a topic to which I will return. One can easily learn simple verses that are far more significant accomplishments of the language than the bits of communicative or phatic dialogue that are central to the interactive approach: “Bonjour monsieur, comment allez-vous? Très bien merci, et vous? Ah, très bien, et votre mère, elle se porte toujours bien ? » One could instead recite: Les sanglots longs Des violons De l’automne Blessent mon cœur D’une langueur Monotone.10

The long sobs Of the violins Of Autumn Wound my heart With a monotonous Languor.

Less useful when encountering a Frenchman, perhaps, but perhaps more likely to get one interested in the language. Let me remark, parenthetically, on the cultural significance of Verlaine’s poem, which is not only taken to exemplify the musicality of the French language but was used during World War II to signal to French resistance forces that the Normandy invasion was imminent: when transmitted on a BBC broadcast “Les sanglots longs des violons de l’automne” meant that the landing would come in two weeks, and then “blessent mon coeur d’une langeur monotone,” meant it would come in 48 hours. The combination of memorability and the primacy of sound makes these phrases a good code — words that could not get spoken accidentally by an announcer when talking about something else.

There are vast numbers of poems, less historically significant, with relatively simple vocabulary and syntax that might engage students’ attention and seem sufficiently exotic that they would make attractive additions to their mental repertoire. I recall when I was learning German being quite taken by a little poem from Bertold Brecht’s “Alfabet” of 1934.

Reicher Mann und armer Mann Standen da und sahn sich an.

Und der Arme sagte bleich: Wäre ich nicht arm, wärst du nicht reich.

Rich man and poor man Stood there and looked at each other And the poor man blankly said : ‘Were I not poor, you were not rich.’11

This is memorable and pretty straightforward. It is also of interest in that it gives a learner recondite verb forms, the imperfect subjunctives ich wäre and du wärst, used for contrary fact conditionals. Even if one is a beginner with no interest in learning the imperfect subjective, a quatrain like this provides a really efficient way storing in memory versions of this strange tense in case one ever advances to it. It is neat to have something at once so simple and so complicated in one’s head.

English is rich in simple poems that a relative beginner can successfully take in. For instance, Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”:

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Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.12

“Stopping by Woods” wonderfully illustrates the stress patterns of English, which is an accentual language, and the four-by-four verse so common to its cultural products, but is also culturally significant in a different way. It is a poem that for North Americans offers an important mythical image — made especially attractive as the cold of winter is elided by “the sweep/ Of easy wind and downy flake,” a splendid line. This image of New England woods in the snow, with sleighs and a horse with bells on his harness is something few of us may have ever seen but many of us regard as quite normal, the imagined furniture of the world. The mythic association of snow with sleep and death is something not shared by all cultures, though more widespread is the contrast between the world of practical affairs, here interestingly represented by the horse said to think stopping in the woods is queer, and a silent natural world taken to be more elemental.

Where does the human speaker most belong?

But I don’t think that simple vocabulary and syntax is necessary for poems – after all, all over the world young people acquire a good deal of English by repeating the lyrics of pop songs, which may be obscure and complicated. (They can also be very simple, of course: “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah!”) Failure to understand them or even to identify the words exactly is historically no obstacle to pleasure and cathexis.

In fact, successful language learners are those who develop a taste for new words, strange formulations, who can cope with not understanding everything but learn to repeat. I would love for students to experience the eerie fascination of the resonant but perplexing juxtapositions and odd vocabulary of poems like W. H. Auden's “The Fall of Rome,” which is almost nonsense verse, a series of disconnected images, vaguely decadent or sinister, but above all strange.

The Fall of Rome The piers are pummeled by the waves;

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In a lonely field the rain Lashes an abandoned train; Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns; Agents of the Fisc pursue Absconding tax-defaulters through The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send The temple prostitutes to sleep; All the literati keep An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic13 Cato may Extol the Ancient Disciplines, But the muscle-bound Marines Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double bed is warm As an unimportant clerk Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity, Little birds with scarlet legs, Sitting on their speckled eggs, Eye each flu-infested city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss, Silently and very fast.14

Here are weird images, like the little birds “unendowed with wealth or pity” (who would expect wealthy birds!). “Altogether elsewhere” is marvelous, and I would like students of English to recall reindeer moving “silently and very fast,” over “miles and miles of golden moss.” But it is hard to explain the appeal of these lines. There is a hint of the mathematical sublime, with the unmasterable natural image — vast herds, miles and miles of golden moss — where you might expect a reference to barbarian hordes, so that the indifference of those reindeer moving silently and very fast makes them an unmasterable reality, — the antithesis of decadence — evocative of a larger framework that makes civilization in its decline seem trivial and not just sinister. In cases like this I recall Wallace Stevens' dictum: “A poem must resist the intelligence, / Almost successfully.”15 That resistance helps produce the power and fascination of poetry.

It is hard to know how to balance the attractions of the puzzling and exotic, on the one hand, and that of the simpler yet highly resonant, on the other. My basic suggestion here is that the communicative or interactive approach to language learning is not

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necessarily a winning one. Certainly in the United States, it has become harder to make a compelling argument to students on communicative grounds, claiming that “you need to take more years of French or German or Spanish in order to be able to communicate with people in that language.” The reluctant prospective student is likely to reply, “well, I was in France (or Costa Rica or Serbia) last year, and lots of the people I encountered spoke English, so that I didn’t have trouble getting along.”

Now I recognize the asymmetry of the world linguistic situation: the communicational argument may be determinative for speakers of other languages who need to learn English, but it seems not to be working very well for English speakers. Nor is the interactive model an easy sell, since unless one attains really remarkable fluency, one will always be interacting awkwardly as a foreigner who does not have the intuitions and reactions of a native speaker. I would also mention that from the point of view of the interactions that are most likely to be important for young people — namely, encounters that might lead to an amorous relationship — a large dose of foreignness has never been an obstacle but has usually been an added attraction — the cute accent, the adorable linguistic mistakes, the need for assistance, the awkwardness that you can help to overcome — all are stimuli to amorous encounters and undercut the idea that the goal of interacting like a native is a necessary one. Increasingly, what seems necessary for sustained foreign language learning is an actual fascination with some aspect of the language, — I have spoken of “cathecting” the language — investing emotional energy in the language or becoming emotionally invested in it. This can come from films, from popular music — from anything that makes you want more of that language – but can also come from poetry. A line like “Dolce color d’oriental zaffiro…” from the beginning of Dante’s Purgatorio might spark a desire to learn Italian.

Lyric poems have the virtue of being short, so you can take the whole in quickly, all at once, can reread them, recite them, even learn them by heart, deliberately or by dint of rereading that will lead some of their lines to stick in your mind and make you want to learn the other lines. You don’t need to understand all the words — I knew that little quatrain of Brecht’s for years without worrying about the precise meaning of “bleich” — “Und der Arme sagte bleich.” [And the poor man says…]. Having learned it means “deathly pale” or “wan,” I ignore the meaning, since bleich is there for the rhyme. I am not greatly interested in studying Spanish phrase books to learn how to ask the way to the hospital or how to change money, but I would like to be able to recite La princesa está triste.. Qué tendrá la princesa?

Los suspiros se escapan de su boca de fresa, [The princess is sad. What ails the princess ?

The sighs escape from her strawberry mouth]

without sounding as if I were speaking Italian with a lisp. But since Rubén Darío’s “Sonatina,” with its sentimental ending, is less to my tastes than the mystery of some other famous poems, something like Lorca’s “La Luna Asoma” is more likely to lure me into Spanish:

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Cuando sale la luna se pierden las campanas y aparecen las sendas impenetrables.

Cuando sale la luna, el mar cubre la tierra y el corazĂłn se siente isla en el infinito.

Nadie come naranjas bajo la luna llena.

Es preciso comer, fruta verde y helada.

Cuando sale la luna de cien rostros iguales, la moneda de plata solloza en el bolsillo.16 [When the moon rises The bells die away And impenetrable Paths come to the fore.

When the moon rises Water covers land And the heart feels itself An island in infinity.

No one eats oranges Under the full moon.

It is right to eat Green, chilled fruit.

When the moon rises With a hundred faces all the same, Coins of silver Start sobbing in the pocket.]

This is another poem that teaches the heart. Here, I am very taken by the confident positing of a cultural norm in the third stanza: it is right to eat “fruta verde y helada� rather than oranges when there is a full moon. I hope this is indeed the norm in some Hispanophone societies.

Especially important for me is the fact that poems initiate students into a different relation to language, where it not something supposedly transparent but manifestly opaque and haunting. They introduce the possibility of possession by language, fascination with it, as something to explore, to live with and live in. Poems are not an exchange of information but forms ritualistically available for repetition, musing, and indirect use in various contexts. Quoting a line or lines from a poem is not just an act

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of communicating but also an act of situating oneself in a culture as one takes up its fragments. If lovers quote lines of poems or of songs to each other, it is not because the verses formulate the speaker’s thought more precisely or aptly than the speaker him- or herself, but because these emotions or affects are thoroughly cultural — even to say “I love you” is something of a quotation — and lines from a poem or a song provide a cultural objectification, a participation in something larger than yourself, a process, a heritage.

It is important that lyrics are not just the expression of a poetic subject’s personal affect — though poems often suggest that this is what they do: Yo soy un hombre sincero De donde crece la palma, Y antes de morirme quiero Echar mis versos del alma.17

José Marti’s opening stanza evokes a poetry of the heart: “I am a sincere man / from where the palm tree grows;/ and before I die I want / to loose my verses from my heart.”

But this long poem by the Cuban poet and patriot is above all a communal statement, a work of rich cultural significance which evokes Cuban resistance to Spanish oppression and furnished words for Cuba’s national song, “Guantanamera”. Indeed, the expressive theory of the lyric of the Romantic era seems increasingly inadequate, not even apt for the poems of the age to which it supposedly especially applied, and certainly not to others: the whole Petrarchan tradition, for example, is less one of expression of a personal emotion than an exploration of rhetorical possibilities of affect. And of course much 20th century verse sought explicitly to escape the expressive model. But neither should lyric be treated as the fictional imitation of a real-world speech act — the model which currently dominates lyric pedagogy in the US — in which we posit a speaker-character whose situation and motives for utterance readers are supposed to reconstruct. I could say more about the inadequacy of these models of lyric, which distract attention from everything that is most distinctive of lyric — ritualistic rhythms, formal structures, indirect address, intertextual relations — but fortunately, neither model need arise in the context of language teaching, where the lyric is above all a splendid, engaging instance of the language.

I mentioned earlier that many students today say they don’t like poetry or are not interested in poetry, but since young children still respond eagerly to rhyme and rhythm, I think in teaching poetry we must have been doing something wrong to produce dislike, and I am inclined to blame interpretation — the presumption in schools and universities that what you are supposed to do with poems is not recite them or memorize them but interpret them, tease out meanings. We do not behave this way with pop songs — we might occasionally argue with a friend about what a line means but usually we argue about whether it is a good song or not — and people become connoisseurs of their music without spending any time on interpretation. Moreover,

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students manifestly do respond to rap and other forms with intense verbal patterning, which might provide links back to lyrics of the poetic tradition. In songs, as in examples in linguistic exercises, language is determined by something other than the communicative intentions of a speaker — for instance, by rhyme as a generative device.

Listening to Bob Dylan the other day, I imagined the linguistic exercise of trying to continue one of his songs, by continuing to repeat the rhyme. Consider “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” for instance. Many people know the most famous lines from this historic song: “You don’t need a weatherman / To know which way the wind blows.”

Here are two sequences: Look out kid Don’t matter what you did Walk on your tip toes Don’t try no doz Better stay away from those That carry around a fire hose [x] Keep a clean nose [x] Watch the plain clothes You don’t need a weather man To know which way the wind blows

and again Look out kid They keep it all hid Better jump down a manhole Light yourself a candle Don’t wear sandals Try to avoid the scandals [x] Don’t wanna be a bum [x] You better chew gum The pump don’t work ’cause the vandals took the handles.18

The rhymed poem, as it turns on itself, bespeaks a strange order that surprises us, a manifestation of an order in and of language other than that of meaning, the manifestation of a system that is not that of human meanings. Rhyme as a device generating meanings gives a sense that all this fits together somehow, that there is a relation between the handles taken by vandals and abjuring your sandals and scandals.

But above all this is language made memorable by the rhythms and poetic form.

The unexpected rise of rap, a form of heavily rhythmical language that relies on rhythm and imagery, and its enormous persisting popularity among the young of all social strata, suggests a hunger for rhythmic language that might find some satisfaction in lyric, if poems were conceived and presented differently. The fact that in rap rhythmic language could to some extent replace melodic language in the affections of the young seems to me a sign of the profound appeal of rhythmically-patterned language — and

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perhaps a monitory lesson for modern poetry that in English at least, has frequently abandoned the more explicit forms of linguistic patterning, including meter and vigorous rhythm. A greater foregrounding of rhythm as central to lyric might enable the teaching of poetry to regain some of the ground lost in recent years and also might lead to a different sort of poetics. One could thus imagine an approach more connected with evaluation, which has not been central to literary studies recently: what works and what doesn’t? What engages our attention, our corps de jouissance [ecstatic body] — to use Roland Barthes’ term — and what does not?

But I have somewhat slighted the third term of my title, “culture”. Of course, poems are culture, but for much language teaching today they are deemed less important culturally than chop sticks. I do think, though that in addition to their undoubted role in the culture of the past, they have in many cultures an important function in the present — in what even the most present-minded language teachers would regard as the culture. I have argued that poems are better than most things one might learn as way to cathect a foreign culture, to come to have some stake in it. But poems that become important to the national imaginary also convey something about the culture, as I mentioned when discussing “Stopping by Woods” and José Martí’s “Yo son un hombre sincero.” The case of Rubén Darío’s “Sonatina” seems to me a very interesting one. I understand this is very resonant and evocative for many speakers of Spanish, who may have learned it by heart in school. To outsiders it seems sentimental: the beautiful princess trapped in a golden cage of her privilege, but who, the fairy godmother promises at the end, will be rescued by a knight who has conquered death. What it is about this poem that gives it an important cultural function?

La princesa está triste... ¿Qué tendrá la princesa?

Los suspiros se escapan de su boca de fresa, que ha perdido la risa, que ha perdido el color.

La princesa está pálida en su silla de oro, está mudo el teclado de su clave sonoro, y en un vaso, olvidada, se desmaya una flor.19 [The princess is sad…What is wrong with the princess? her sighs are escaping from her strawberry mouth, which has lost all its laughter, which has lost all its color.

The princess is pale on her golden divan, the keyboard is mute on her resonant harpsichord; And a flower, forgotten, has swooned in a vase. ]

More seductive than the fairy story of princess and knight may be the resonant images of aspiration to freedom: ¡Ay!, la pobre princesa de la boca de rosa quiere ser golondrina, quiere ser mariposa, tener alas ligeras, bajo el cielo volar; ir al sol por la escala luminosa de un rayo, saludar a los lirios con los versos de mayo

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o perderse en el viento sobre el trueno del mar.

[Alas! The poor princess with the rose-colored mouth Would rather a swallow or a butterfly be, And under the heavens would fly on light wings, Would rise to the sun on the luminous ladder of beams, Would greet every lily with the verse of May, Or be lost in the wind on the boom of the sea.]

The poem ends with the godmother’s promise and the image of the prince who will come galloping to the rescue on his charger: -«Calla, calla, princesa -dice el hada madrina-; en caballo, con alas, hacia acá se encamina, en el cinto la espada y en la mano el azor, el feliz caballero que te adora sin verte, y que llega de lejos, vencedor de la Muerte, a encenderte los labios con un beso de amor». [“Hush now, hush now princess.” Says the fairy god mother, “On a horse with great wings, he is coming for you, With a sword in his belt and a hawk on his arm, The goodly knight who adores you unseen, And who comes from afar, having overcome Death, To light up your lips with the kiss of true love.” ] (Trans. Arcereda and Derusha.)

What is the cultural role of this myth of the kiss of the knight, conqueror of death?

Or does the resonance of the poem depend less on this promised rescue than on the image of princess imprisoned in her privilege, wishing she could fly away as a golondrina or mariposa — with the poem itself as both a golden cage and an appeal to everything that lies beyond?

Let me in concluding consider a poem where I can say something about its cultural significance: Du Bellay’s “Heureux qui comme Ulysse”. This 16th century sonnet about nostalgia for one’s native land has had a remarkable fortune in French culture, as it became one of the most frequently memorized poems in the French canon — an example of the way in which particular poems may quite unexpectedly take on a powerful cultural function.

Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage, Ou comme cestuy-là qui conquit la toison, Et puis est retourné, plein d'usage et raison, Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son âge!

[Happy the man who, journeying far and wide As Jason or Ulysses did, can then Turn homeward, seasoned in the ways of men, To live life out, among his own again!]

Quand reverrai-je, hélas, de mon petit village Fumer la cheminée, et en quelle saison

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Reverrai-je le clos de ma pauvre maison, Qui m’est une province, et beaucoup davantage?

[When shall I see the chimney-smoke divide The sky above my little town: ah, when Stroll the small gardens of that house again, Which is my realm and crown, and more beside?]

Plus me plaît le séjour qu'ont bâti mes aïeux, Que des palais Romains le front audacieux, Plus que le marbre dur me plaît l'ardoise fine.

[Better I love the plain, secluded home My fathers built, than bold façades of Rome; Slate pleases me as marble cannot do.]

Plus mon Loire gaulois, que le Tibre latin; Plus mon petit Liré, que le mont Palatin Et plus que l'air marin la doulceur angevine.

[Better than Tiber's flood my quiet Loire, Those little hills than these, and dearer far, Than great sea winds the zephyrs of Anjou.20] (Trans. Richard Wilbur)

This is in effect a poem of choice of life as well as nostalgia. In a way that seems particularly characteristic of French culture, it performs the powerful ideological operation of presenting attachment to the nation and implicitly to the primacy of French culture as attachment to landscape, to the countryside, which is figured as home for even the most cosmopolitan — for Du Bellay, living in Rome, and for later generations of Parisians. As such, one critic writes, “it may well function as France’s most powerful political poem of all.”21 And it may help foreign students of French, who may have no idea what the landscape of Anjou looks like, to form similar if attenuated attachments, as their mental equipment incorporates the notion of that the modest French countryside is in principle preferable even to the proud Roman metropolis. Penser ainsi, c’est devenir un peu français. (To think in this way is to become a little bit French.)

I have sought to explain why I think the use of lyric can be a way of encouraging students of language to become invested in the language, not as a utilitarian tool but as rich verbal surroundings of real cultural weight. This will be possible, I think, only if we treat poems as we treat popular music, as something to be valued, repeated, imitated, but not necessarily interpreted. Educational and philosophical tradition, since Plato at least, distinguishes good memory from so-called bad memory, Erinnerung from Gedächtnis, the memory of understanding and assimilation from the memory of merely mechanical or rote repetition. On the one hand there is what you have made your own and can reformulate; on the other what you repeat, parrot-like, as something foreign that has become lodged in your mind, a piece of otherness. Novels belong on the side of Erinnerung — as writing you assimilate; if you remember a novel you recall, in your own words, as we say, what happens; but poems go with Gedächtnis: to

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remember them at all is to remember some of their words, isolated phrases, perhaps, which stick in your memory, you don't know why. The power to lodge bits of their language in your mind, to invade and occupy it, is a salient feature of lyrics, a major aspect of their being. Poems seek to inscribe themselves in mechanical memory, ask to be learned by heart, taken in, introjected or housed as bits of alterity which can be repeated, considered, treasured or ironically cited.

I think students of every language need to have bits of language stick in their heads: learning a foreign language involves the mechanical storage of formulations that incarnate foreignness, and it is better, I would argue, for this to be memorable formulations of poems than scraps of dialogue about how to get to the Prado. Willy-nilly, pop songs will lodge in our students' minds; there ought to be some poems there as competition for song lyrics and instantiation of the resources of the languages in which we dwell.

Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA

Notes This paper began as a plenary lecture for a conference on the teaching of foreign languages and literature at the University of Costa Rica. I am grateful to Gilda Pacheco Acuña and her colleagues for the invitation and their hospitality.

2 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words, Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1954, p. 9 3 Jacques Derrida “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering,’’’ On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit, Stanford, Stanford UP, 1993, p, 28.

4 Karl Marx, letter to his father of November 10, 1837: http://www.marxists.org/archive/ marx/works/1837-pre/letters/37_11_10.htm 5 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans.

Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson, Austin, U of Texas P, 1981.

6 These standards are available at http://www.actfl.org 7 Jacques Derrida, “Checos’è la poesia?” in Between the Blinds: A Derrida Reader, ed. Peggy Kamuf, New York, Columbia UP, 1991, pp. 222-3.

8 Pablo Neruda, Poema 20, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, trans W.S. Merwin, New York, Penguin Books, 2006.

9 Derek Attridge, Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1995, pp.

43, 53-4.

10 Paul Verlaine, “Chanson d’automne,” Oeuvres poétiques, Paris, Garnier, 1969, p. 39.

11 Bertold Brecht, “Alfabet,” in Ein Kinderbuch, Berlin, Kinderbuchverlag, 1965, p. 62.

12 The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Robert Latham, New York, Holt, 1969, p. 224.

13 Of a shy and intellectual nature.

14 W.H. Auden, Selected Poems, New York, Vintage, 2007, p. 188.

15 Wallace Stevens, “Man Carrying Thing,” Collected Poems, London, Faber, 1955, p. 350 1

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Federico García Lorca, “Cuando sale la luna,” Canciones (1924), Madrid, Alianza,1982.

José Marti, “Yo son un hombre sincere,” Versos Sencillos (1891), Houston, Arte Puìblico Press, 1997.

18 [x] marks a silent beat. Bob Dylan, from Bringing It All Back Home, 1978. Lyrics at http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/subterranean-homesick-blues 19 Reuben Dario, Selected Poems of Rubén Darío, ed, Alberto Acereda, Lewisburg, Pa., Bucknell University Press, 2001, pp.118-123 20 Joachim DuBellay, Les Regrets et autres œuvres poétiques, Geneva, Droz, 1966, p. 98.

21 Mary Lewis Shaw, Cambridge Introduction to French Poetry, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 2003, p. 111.

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Bougainville Against the Tide

Didier Maleuvre

T

he late critic Hayden White said, and this was forty years ago, that “the theme of the Noble Savage may be one of the few historical topics about which there is nothing more to say.” 1 Indeed it is no groundbreaking news to say that eighteenth-century explorers of the Pacific were cloaked in an ideology that clouded their perceiving, or even their wish to perceive, newly found societies.

The conquistadores of the sixteenth century sailed on a wind of ideology called the Sword and the Cross, and the voyagers of the eighteenth did so in a cloud of Rousseauism. The former ideology held that they, the savages, were benighted while Europeans carried the light and the truth; the latter ideology, that they in their pristine state had it right while civilized Europeans were hopelessly mislaid. Neither orthodoxy had much to do with the facts on the ground, and whether noble or ignoble, the native was largely a blank on which Europeans drew their homegrown fixations. Yet there is an important difference in the operative fields of these two intellectual schemes: the Christian right of conquest was a self-evident fixture of closed societies; whereas Rousseauism spread in a modernizing civilization that was at least able to recognize its modalities of thought as just that—systems that are subject to scrutiny. In such a disputative society it was at least possible to resent the impertinence of an ideology dictating what one should think and profess. Such a man who refused to profess was, after a fashion, the French navigator Louis Antoine de Bougainville. He was like everyone else the inmate of his time; but far-flung travels, in which he was uniquely experienced, also gave him a vantage point from which to gauge the hypnotic power of the ideas he shared with contemporaries— and among these ideas, the system of assumptions I describe as Rousseauism.

Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Vol. 42, No. 1 (17-29) © 2019 by Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute

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Bougainville’s name is hard to disentangle from the exoticism that usurped his name, by way of Diderot’s Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville (1772). Yet his rightful exploit is his circumnavigation of the globe from 1766 to 1769 and the remarkable account he made of it in his Voyage around the World of 1771. This account is extraordinary for many reasons, chief among which are the adventures and exotic locales described in it. But it is extraordinary also for the intellectual adventure therein.

This adventure I would describe as that of navigating the parlous straits of doublethink and contradiction—the contradiction that consists of having to advance a philosophical system that stands in contempt of one’s own observations; or, more simply, of reconciling what one is supposed to have seen with what one did actually see. How Bougainville’s observations collided with the orthodoxy, and how he presented this collision in his published Voyage around the World is the story I wish to consider here.

A brief sketch of Rousseauism, whose organizing idea is probably as old as the historical imagination. It is the idealizing mix of nostalgia and primitivism that envisions life to have begun in some garden of Eden, an orchard of the Hesperides, a Golden Age, or a state of nature that was all peace and prosperity until some moral cataclysm hurled humankind into recorded history.2 Though philosophers, pagan and Christian, flirted with this mirage (there are traces of it in Plato, for example in The Statesman), it belonged mostly with myth and religion, it being understood that philosophy, as per Socrates, was in the business of demonstrating its claims and, as per Aristotle, of matching them with observation. Moreover, modern philosophy championed the humanist idea that human beings can and must reason their way to a better life. To lump all happiness and perfection in some fabled past when man had not yet learned to reason amounted to betraying philosophy’s confident premise.

This betrayal is, one can fairly state, the doing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau used the language of philosophy to dignify the pessimistic myth of antediluvian human perfection. “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains:” 3 this is not a thesis which he strove to explain, argue, illustrate, and prove; it is a first principle—to mean, not what logically comes first, as in ancient or medieval philosophy, but what Rousseau intuitively believed to be the starting point of the matter, his heartfelt conviction, the idée fixe from which every fact follows and to which every conclusion returns. This emotional, intuitive apriorism bred fateful habits of the pen in Rousseau, who had no equal in asserting truths for which his readers learned to expect no verification.

“Nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state;” 4 “Society and laws… irretrievably destroyed natural liberty:”5 these are ideas which, first emitted as hypotheses, have a knack of transforming into truths universally acknowledged within the course of a few sentences. Rousseau is so confident in the world-making power of philosophizing that he avows it openly. It is, he says, “within the province of philosophy…to establish facts” and “these things [i.e., the origin of society, the felicity of savage man, the progress of inequality, etc.] can be deduced from the nature of man by the light of reason alone.”6 In other words, we know that primitive man was happy, hale, and free

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because philosophic reason says so. This is the histrionic, though characteristically metaphysical position that reality can be deduced from theory. “Let us begin by laying all facts aside, as they do not affect the question,” begins Rousseau who, if he did not invent this metaphysical a-priorism, turned its characteristic disparagement of reality into a pessimistic dismissal of civilized existence. 7 The three volumes of Rousseau that earned him fame, and did most to shape the exotic imagination that concerns us here are the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750), which declared knowledge, technology, science, craft, commerce, books and libraries, theaters and cities, material affluence and art to have debased humankind, and made Europeans an especially unhappy, sickly, crabby, devious, and stunted branch of the human family. By Diderot’s report, the essay made a sensation “beyond all imagining” in Paris.8 Its author upped the antes four years later with the Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality (1754) which maintained that man’s malevolence and unhappiness wax in tandem with socialization: the more civilized we are, the more wretched we grow. Out of the thesis that knowledge corrupts and innocence dignifies, Rousseau forged a treatise of pedagogy, Émile or On Education (1762), which lays down “the incontrovertible rule that the first impulses of nature are always right” and therefore charges the educator to withdraw the child from society, his family and relatives, and withhold from him the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of civilization for as long as possible.9 What is extraordinary about these theories is not that they were incredible (even Rousseau disavowed them even as, by the time of Émile, he appeared to profess them).

The extraordinary part is their immense influence in the eighteenth century and the modern world at large. It is hard to overstate this influence. By the 1760s Rousseau was well on his way to confirm what Hippolyte Taine said about him later, which is that the eighteenth century belonged to him.10 The Jacobins of 1791 harkened to his gospel of corruptive luxury and natural equality; Napoleon was a passionate admirer, and generations of writers from Goethe, Kant, Herder, Schiller, Schopenhauer, Coleridge to Tolstoy declared themselves his votaries. Rousseauism enflamed romanticism and transformed entire disciplines from economics (Marx) to education (Dewey), psychology (Piaget), anthropology (Levi-Strauss, who called Rousseau the father of anthropology), sociology (Durkheim) and history (Foucault, for whom every step taken by Western civilization is a tightening of the noose of “systemic” oppression).

Rousseau’s mania of emotional authenticity practically patented existentialism, and he seems to have done more to christianize social policy, now governed by virtuous empathy, than eighteen centuries of St. Paul.

At the time of Bougainville’s journey, in 1766, the Rousseauist blend of doubt and dismay for the civilized, and patronizing wonder for the primitive certainly was the tone struck by intellectual society.11 It is, to take us back to our subject, the cultural haze that wrapped around Bougainville’s ships as they approached Tahiti in April 1768.

Bougainville himself was a man of practical sense—a military commander, an admiral, an explorer with 400 hundred souls under his responsibility. But he was also a creature

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of salon society, a man of words and ideas who had been schooled by d’Alembert in his youth, became a jurist, and cut a good figure at the salon of the Marquise de Pompadour (whose other protégés included d’Alembert and Diderot) where he conversed in the latest doctrines. We know from his travel journal and from the published Voyage around the World that his intellectual navigation followed a Rousseauist map, a map on which France and Europe were the lands of shame, guilt, hypocrisy, tyranny, foul blood, and superstition, while elsewhere, in the blue yonder, one found health, happiness, individual liberty, wisdom, and sexual innocence among men and women who had not partaken of the tree of knowledge called civilization. For the more detailed markings of this intellectual map, we need go no further than Diderot’s famous Supplement to Bougainville’s “Voyage” which, though written three years after Bougainville returned to France, is really a preamble, so well does it draw the intellectual horizon under which the voyage set sail.12 Tahiti quickly became the fata morgana of this philosophic horizon. There, in the happy isles of the Pacific, were men and women who, Diderot assured his readers, “follow the pure instinct of nature,” are “innocent and happy,” “uphold the right of individuals,” and possess “customs that are wiser and more decent than ours;” for ours indeed are “shackles” of “useless knowledge,” “follies and vices,” that tend to make others “as corrupt, as vile, as wretched as we are.”13 The men of letters aboard Bougainville’s ships, men who had been recommended by various scientific academies, and in one case by the encyclopédiste Buffon, travelled by the same intellectual compass. In fact, the writer Charles Fesche, the historian Louis-Antoine de Saint-Germain, and the botanist Philibert Commerson were all dyedin-the-wool Rousseauists to whom it was self-evident that there is such a thing as natural man, and that he is superior in every moral way over civilized man. After three years at sea, three years over which only a man deprived of eyes and ears could have failed to notice that not all primitive people basked in bliss, Commerson returned with his conviction intact. Tahiti especially was a lightning rod for the enlightened. As he wrote in his Postscriptum sur l’isle de la Nouvelle Cythère ou Tayti (1769), Tahitian folks are “born essentially good, free from all bias, and follow without suspicion and without remorse the gentle impulse of an instinct that is always sure because it has not yet degenerated into reason.”14 Tahiti, Commerson continued, is “the only place on earth where people live without vice, prejudice, need and disagreement.” He rhapsodized on such philosophic figments as “their honest treatment of women who are in no way subjugated, their fraternity, their horror of spilling blood, and their hospitality to foreigners.” The other intellectual on board, Charles Fesche, further praised Tahitians for their lack of religion, and for their “simple, soft, quiet life, free from all passions” which knew nothing of “the corruption of our morals.” 15 It’s been said of these intellectuals (men of “philosophic attitude,” as Diderot praised Bougainville) that they transformed the reality of Tahiti into a literary fiction. 16 But in truth, the fiction antedated the encounter with real life and insured that the voyage made landfall on an island of the imagination. For these enlightened men it was as with

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medieval scholastics: credo ut intelligam, I believe so I may understand, and most of what they understood indeed derived from the book.

Now, Bougainville too was an intellectual, and as such permeable to the fashionable ideas that surely sprinkled his mess-table talk, and with such men as Commerson, Fesche, and Saint-Germain on board, conversation must have been rich in Rousseauist obiter dicta. But the royal administration had not send Bougainville around the world to be an intellectual but a navigator, a surveyor, an ambassador, a collector of observations, a man of sharp perception and good practical judgment who could keep a straight record of the journey. This record, he kept in his captain’s Journal which, generally matter-of-fact and empiric, takes no sentimental turn with the job of staying alive amid the incomprehensible and the unpredictable. There are passages in it that show Bougainville questioning the then fashionable anti-civilization pabulum, and mocking Mr. Rousseau’s idealism and scolding his presumptions to tell navigators how to see the world. Noting the wretched life of Patagonian Indians, he remarks that if this is the wonderful state of nature that enthuses Rousseau, then he will gladly take civilization on any day.17 Elsewhere he scoffs at men of letters like Abbé Prevost who write confidently about sea voyages but have never seen a ship deck. It is safe to think that, having fought alongside Iroquois Indians some years before in Ontario, Bougainville knew that the bon sauvage lived only in the imagination of litterateurs.

Given this commonsense realism, however, we gauge something of the spell of group-think in noting that, especially during the nine days that his ships moored at Hitiaa Bay in Tahiti, Bougainville’s Journal succumbs entirely to Rousseauist moonshine. Then Bougainville the philosophe then truly gets the better of Bougainville the navigator. Though this way of putting it isn’t quite right: better to say that Bougainville erects a cognitive barrier between the navigator and the philosophe, so that nothing of what the former sees interferes with what the latter believes. Thus when the navigator chances on facts which the theory predicts do not exist, such as people who are primitive and despotic—despotic, that is, in spite of being primitive, or primitive and avaricious, or primitive and violent, he does not take his inner Rousseau to task. On one page, the philosopher insists that “these people breathe only rest and sensual pleasures” (63) and “the soil liberally grants them its fruits without any cultivation” (74); a page further, the navigator observes that they are otherwise “very industrious and would soon reach the level of European nations if we brought them our craft” (67)—a sentence that is a pit of heresies, like the idea that natural man works, is ambitious, and would not be diminished by European technology. Elsewhere the navigator notes that Tahitians keep slaves (64), which doesn’t bother the theorist’s conviction that Tahiti is the best of worlds. With his philosopher’s hat, Bougainville declares that Tahitians “follow [the laws of nature] in peace and make up what may be the happiest society in the globe” and live in “the greatest amity” (72). Then the navigator notes that their “chief rules despotically”, cows his people with a mere glance, and enforces social ranks (64). The two facts cohabit with no apparent awareness of

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contradicting each other. They are “the best people in the world,” and hardly know anything about property, we read in one page; “they are cleverest thieving scoundrels in the universe” (66), says another. Here they are the healthiest people alive (63); there they have smallpox (73). One of the functions of ideology is to disable the ability to contrast theory and fact, and so the oppositive conjunction “but” or “yet” doesn’t obtain between Bougainville’s contradictory remarks. Why industrious slavery on the isle of easy living? Why thieving if there is no property? Why despotic chieftaincy if easygoing universal friendship rules? These questions do not arise. The Journal braids together philosophic conviction and devastating contrary observation, yet the twain never do touch.20 From the memoirs of other men on board we know that Bougainville’s two ships left Tahiti not a day too soon, that relations had soured dangerously between islanders and visitors. Yet Bougainville’s last entry sounds this note: “Farewell happy and wise people, may you always remain what you are. I shall never recall without a sense of delight the brief time I spent among you, and as long as I live, I shall celebrate the happy island of Cythera. It is the true Utopia” (74). Who was Bougainville trying to convince? Was he already honing the myth he knew would charm the salons? It beggars belief that Bougainville did not speak with his own staff, for example with his own surgeon François Vivez who, against Bougainville’s rose-dyed notion that Tahitians lived in peace and fellowship, observed that war was rampant among them, that female infanticide and human sacrifice were rife, and that the population lived under the tyranny of idolized despots—all of which are noted in Vivez’s journal. This leads us to suppose that, in his Tahitian chapter especially, Bougainville chose not to know. But since earlier entries of his journal show that he knew and resented the presumptions of Rousseauism, we may conclude that Bougainville knew that he did not want to know. “Lawyers and philosophers, come and see here all that your imagination has not been able even to dream up,” he prattles (72). In truth, there was no need to take the journey: the lawyers and philosophes had fully drawn up the map, and Bougainville understood he had to follow its directions.

Then Bougainville returned to France, and became the darling of the salons, the cynosure of aristocratic houses, and even regaled the Kind and Queen at Versailles with tales of Aphrodite’s playground, the island of love and laughter and plenty. 21 Two years thereafter he leveraged his journal into a volume fit for general publication titled Voyage around the World. Though we might expect the Voyage to play down the contradictions, and play up the popular Rousseauist line, the opposite in fact happens: it is even more contradictory than the Journal, so glaringly indeed that we should even suppose Bougainville to want us notice and ponder the incongruities.

Its Tahitian chapter invites the reader to theexpected set pieces—the happy state of nature, “the garden of Eden,” “the Elysian fields,” “the New Cythera,” “the peaceable life exempt from cares,” the “hospitality, ease, innocent joy, and every appearance of happiness,” the absence of “private hatred” and “personal property”, the “unquestioned sincerity” of Tahitians who “live continually immersed in pleasure.” We even meet the

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old wise sachem who knows that the arrival of Europeans cannot but doom “those happy days which he and his people have spent in peace.” Indeed we find just about everything the theory predicted, and Bougainville shows himself fully possessed of the fact that the first law of publishing is to give readers what they are determined to receive. It is the aspect of Bougainville’s voyage which kowtows avant la lettre to the spirit of Diderot’s Supplement, and in the next decades inspired a cottage industry of Pollyannaish literature like Joséphine de Monbard’s Lettres Tahitiennes (1786), JeanCharles de la Roche-Tilhac’s Histoire des révolutions de Tahiti (1782), MoutonnetClairfons’s Les Isles fortunées (1778), Taitbout’s Essai sur l’île de Tahiti (1779), Guillaume-André Baston’s Narration d’Omai (1790), Nicholas de la Dixmerie’s Le Sauvage de Tahiti aux Français avec Envoi au philosophe ami des sauvages (1770) Restif de la Bretonne’s Dédale français (1781), and Guillaume Grivel’s Ile inconnue (1783)— all writers who, though they had never gone so far as Cherbourg, were well equipped to speak philosophically about the felicities of Pacific islanders.

By an ironic twist of events, however, it is thanks to these authors, some of who took to their pen even before Bougainville wrote his account, that his Voyage takes the interesting turn I would now like to consider—a turn so jarring as to offer the confession of a mind newly disenthralled from an ideology.

In the foregoing I described Bougainville as a man who knew that he did not want to know. His return to France threw him in the company of people similarly skilled in the art of brushing off contrary evidence. 22 Perhaps the spectacle of such willful ignorance led him to some soul-searching. In the event, this soul-searching causes his published chapter on Tahiti to break in two. The first half is boilerplate Rousseauism.

The second half, as we shall see, pretty much demolishes the rosy picture drawn hitherto. What precipitates this sharp turnabout? It hinges on the proleptic introduction of “the Taiti-man”, the adventurous son of a Tahitian chief by the name of Aotourou who asked to sail with the white explorers and came with Bougainville to Paris.

Bougainville takes a page out of his Tahitian observations to recount how Aotourou fared in the capital.

From the way Bougainville spared no expense for Aotourou’s comfort, and spent a third of his fortune to charter his passage back to Tahiti, we know that the navigator was fond of his Tahitian friend. He admired Aotourou’s intelligence, pride, boldness, and curiosity. And it is Aotourou’s reception by intellectuals, especially their polite incuriosity towards his person, which stirred Bougainville from his usual courtesy and, I would venture, brought him face to face withhis own learned ignorance. “The desire of seeing him [Aotourou] has been very violent,” he notes; but equally virulent has been the “idle curiosity” of it all and the determination not to listen. Here Bougainville seems to have had in mind the example of Bricaire de la Dixemerie who, never having asked Aoutourou for his opinion, made him the spokesman of the Rousseauist animadversion against civilized life in Le Sauvage de Taiti aux Français of 1770. The real Aotourou was intrigued and mystified and amused by European society; as ventriloquized by Dixemerie, he rants about how odious, corrupt, fallen, and unhappy

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the white man is. This non-too-subtle silencing of the savage whose side one pretends to take irked Bougainville. He pauses his travel story to deplore people“who have never gone beyond the capital, have never examined anything, and being influenced by errors of all sorts, never cast an impartial eye upon any object, and yet claim to speak with magisterial severity, and without appeal.”23 Bougainville, by the way, received the same treatment. He was entertained by persons who, he says, “honored me with questions” but turnedon their heels the moment he answered them. It causes him to remark that “it is common in a capital to meet with people who ask questions, not from an impulse of curiosity, or from a desire of acquiring knowledge, but as magistrates who are readying their judgment. And whether they hear the answer or not does not prevent them from ruling on the matter.” We could say that on his return stay in Paris, Bougainville saw multiple manifestations of the art of keeping one’s mind infallibly made up. It led him to repent of his own discoursing on the Aotourou’s of the world without first consulting them.

But Bougainville did consult with Aotourou, and learned from him, and gauged something of the moral gulf between theorizing about the Other, which even under the best intentions produces an identikit, and listening to the Other. To his honor Bougainville sided with Aotourou, and it is at this juncture of his narrative, after the episode of the Tahiti-man in Paris, that he pens the string of observations that demolishes the Arcadian fairytale.

“I shall now give an account of what I have learnt in my conversations with him, concerning the customs of his country.” Thus Bougainville begins, and from then on nothing stops the truth commission. “I have mentioned above, that the inhabitants of Tahiti seemed to live in an enviable happiness. We took them to be almost equal in rank amongst themselves; or at least enjoying a liberty that was subject only to the laws established for their common happiness. I was mistaken.” This “I was mistaken” is both humble and defiant. Defiant because Bougainville couldn’t be mistaken on this point without dooming the fashionable consensus about the innate goodness of primitive man and the inveterate corruption of Europeans. His tone is unrelenting: The distinction of ranks is very great at Taiti, and the disproportion very tyrannical.

The kings and grandees have power of life and death over their servants and slaves, and I am inclined to believe, they have the same barbarous prerogative with regard to the common people, whom they call Tata-einou, vile men; so much is certain, that the victims for human sacrifices are taken from this class of people. Flesh and fish are reserved for the tables of the great; the commonalty live upon mere fruits and pulse.

Kings, grandees, petty sovereigns, servants, and slaves: this begins to sound like the ancien régime in loincloth, with human sacrifices thrown in. Which puts paid to the anti-clerical dream according to which Tahitians were natural deists, blissfully free of priests, rituals, and idols. “The priests have the highest authorities over them,” Bougainville says bluntly, and their world abounds in “divinities and genii.” What about superstition, which according to the theory festers only when civilization suppresses

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natural wisdom? “As Aotourou made very intelligible to us, they positively believe that the sun and moon are inhabited,” records Bougainville. What about the famed mildness and beneficence of the children of nature?

They are almost constantly at war with the inhabitants of the neighboring isles […]

They make war in a very cruel manner. According to Aotourou's information, they kill all the men and male children taken in battle; they strip the skins, with the beards from the chins, and carry them off as trophies.

Bougainville also recalls Aotourou’s advice when they came across unknown Samoans farther to the West: slaughter every ugly, contemptible one of them. But wasn’t Bougainville loath to leave the happy island of Cythera which, in his Journal, he vowed to celebrate to his dying day? Here is his farewell remark at the moment of weighing anchor: “Danger and alarms followed all our steps to the very last moments of our stay.” From which may be surmised that, once stocked in fresh food and water, the expedition was happy to repair to the relative calm of the high seas. But if not entirely happy and peaceful, then was there not something to salvage about the superior wisdom of natural man over the enfeebling arts and technologies of civilized man? In an episode, Bougainville recalls that a crewman fell deathly ill from a snake bite. Over the ministrations of the ship’s surgeon, Aotourou informed the Europeans that in his country everyone who is thus bit dies of the wound. Bougainville continues: The Taiti-man was surprised to see the sailor return to his work, four or five days after the accident had happened to him. When he examined the productions of our arts, and the various means by which they augment our faculties, and multiply our forces, this islander would often fall into an ecstatic fit, and blush for his own country, saying with grief, aoucou Taiti, alas poor Taiti.

If this is a European preening himself over the efficacy of his technology, there is no reason why it isn’t also an intelligent Tahitian who understands the important gradation between efficient and less efficient knowledge. There exists a kind of knowledge that cures snake wounds and which, on balance, enhances wellbeing. We may suppose Aotourou’s reaction to tell us that this was commonsense in Tahiti, even if Rousseauist Paris affected to deny it.

An ethnographer will congratulate Bougainville for his scientific integrity; a moralist will praise him for upholding the inconvenient truth. Yet the reader with a taste for coherence will wonder why Bougainville left his published Voyage in such conceptual disarray. One side of it plays a rococo recital of songs and scenes where “Venus is the goddess of hospitality” and the appearance of “ease, innocent joy, and happiness” greets the visitors everywhere they turn; the other side deals an unredacted refutation of the myth. I would like to venture some explanations for this glaring dissonance.

One reason is that Bougainville wasn’t a systematic thinker, and that he wrote his Voyage mostly to entertain the forearmed curiosity of saloniers. Captain Cook’s writings earned the interest of geographers and scientific societies; Bougainville’s appealed to the men and women of letters who were consumers of general ideas, not complicated facts. By the time he sat down to write the Voyage, the Parisian scene was abuzz with

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news and pamphlets about the happy isle of Tahiti, with which Bougainville wasn’t inclined to polemicize. To argue in earnest was bad form among noblemen of his time—though the influence of Rousseau was to change that, and make the voicing of strong righteous positions a badge of vertu.

But there is perhaps also a moral edge to Bougainville’s decision to leave his Tahitian narrative so achingly dissonant: it is as though he wanted posterity to notice the discrepancy. Here was, on the page, an intelligent man who said one thing while observing the opposite. The Enlightenment believed that true knowledge would dispel false belief. But Bougainville knew first-hand that philosophers love their theories more than the real world. From his own experience he understood that it is possible to know something, yet believe contrariwise. Kant famously defined the Enlightenment as the project of shaking the intellect from self-imposed immaturity. Bougainville may have guessed how much immaturity is craved even at the heart of the great clarification (Aufklärung). Certainly he felt the tug of conformity, and gauged how much the will to belong is stronger than the will to know. The power of belief is in fact the subject of his “Introduction” to the Voyage. There he confesses his vexation but also his resignation before the tide of Rousseauism. A passage, in particular, is worth quoting in full.

Lastly, I neither quote nor contradict anybody, and much less do I pretend to establish or to overthrow any hypothesis; and supposing that the great differences which I have remarked in the various countries where I have touched at, had not been able to prevent my embracing that spirit of system-making, so peculiar in our present age, and however so incompatible with true philosophy, how could I have expected that my whim, whatever appearance of probability I could give it, should meet with success in the world? I am a voyager and a seaman; that is, a liar and a stupid fellow, in the eyes of that class of indolent haughty writers, who in their closets reason in infinitum on the world and its inhabitants, and with an air of superiority, confine nature within the limits of their own invention. This way of proceeding appears very singular and inconceivable, on the part of persons who have observed nothing themselves, and only write and reason upon the observations which they have borrowed from those same travelers in whom they deny the faculty of seeing and thinking.

To paraphrase: I do not wish to antagonize anyone and their theory. My experience of the manifold world warns me against comprehensive top-down philosophic schemes; I have come across people and observed facts that roundly disprove prevalent philosophies; yet I have not constructed a countervailing system out of my observations.

This would be fruitless. I am only a “stupid” seaman and even stupid seamen know better than to sail against the tide of armchair philosophy. In other words, Bougainville knew that the pea of a fact would not trouble the cushioned sleep of encyclopédistes— and he was right.

Nothing of what he did write, nothing about his observations of kingly privilege, human sacrifice, infanticide, religious tyranny, and atrocious warfare among Pacific islanders argued the intellectuals out of their conviction. His Voyage did not abate the

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inky flood of tracts of which Diderot’s Supplement is now the more famous, in which Tahiti stands as the land of “abundance and happiness” and a “spectacle of innocence and bliss.”25 Bougainville knew that his account would be supplemented out of existence, and so it was. There was indeed too much at stake in reading it in toto. It struck at the heart of the anti-civilization orthodoxy by suggesting that social stratification is primary, and possibly inherent in human life; that religion and a priesthood of some kind are integral to societies; that conflict dwells inside the human soul and breaks out with or without the meddling of “society.” If Tahitian man is man in a state of nature, then man in a state of nature is not free, good, or content; and if man is not born good and free, then the removal of chains will not return him to a state of goodness, for society isn’t the source of all ills.

This brings us to the posterity of Bougainville’s Voyage. If he could not expect to be heard then, what of his chances now? For most of the nineteenth century and the better part of the twentieth, the Voyage remained well-nigh synonymous with what Diderot wanted us to glean from it. When early ethnography began criticizing the Arcadian myth, it blamed it squarely on the explorer. In his Grands navigateurs du dix-huitième siècle (1880), Jules Verne scolded Bougainville’s naïve myth-making, as though the navigator hadn’t written pages that shatter this purported naiveté. 26 A survey of twentieth-century readers of Bougainville also reveals relative lack of interest in the fact-bound side of the navigator. The cultural historian who recently writes that “Bougainville’s published accounts of the island unashamedly painted it as paradise regained” is a typical sample of the Diderot-vetted version of Bougainville. 27 Some scholars concede that not everything was rose-dyed in Tahiti though in the end it is Bougainville’s embellishing job that retains their attention, presumably because literary critics are more comfortable in the role of demystifying fictions. 28 The more myths, the more there is for a critic to undo. Other scholars acknowledge that Bougainville countered his own romanticism with observations on “the struggles of actual life,” which somehow doesn’t capture the serrated edge of cannibalism, slavery, warmongering, and human sacrifice, and thereby misses the chance, which I have taken here, of pondering why Bougainville put his Rousseau and anti-Rousseau side by side. 29 To be sure, the selective reading of Bougainville answers changing imperatives. Back in the eighteenth century, the reason for overlooking his unromantic passages—for, as he put it, denying him “the faculty of seeing and thinking”—was to sign onto the Enlightenment agenda for social reform. You could not convince people to jettison religion, inherited customs, authority, competition, and hierarchies unless it was an axiomatic truth that man was happier without them. Hence the bon sauvage. In the post-colonial, Levi-Straussian twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the reason for overlooking Bougainville’s de-mystifying passages is bundled in a Manichean idea of history that made it impolitic to say that victims of colonization lived in suffering and injustice of their own before Europeans imported their brand of harm. To suggest that the last of the Mohicans wasn’t a paragon can be seen as legitimating the civilizing

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mission, and this is no moral subtlety the scholar is inclined to juggle. To suggest that native populations may have benefited from contact with the West (as the descendants of Aotourou benefited from snake venom antidote) is to run the risk of guilt-by-association: since missionaries of the nineteenth century emphasized the depravity of Pacific islanders to justify Christianizing the islands, any frank depiction of pre-colonial life may be accused of playing the missionary trick. Safer it is to enlarge on the romantic Bougainville.30 But of course Bougainville forces difficult questions. He is an example of ambivalence, a figure of both timidity and defiance. Timidity because he had no desire to antagonize a republic of letters that feted him for retailing a utopian Tahiti; defiance because he had his duty to truth, and truth in this instance wore a human face, that of his friend Aotourou to whom he, unlike the many who professed to speak on his behalf, listened. Bougainville’s fault, if there must be one, is that he played both sides.

He has been paying for this coyness by losing his name to exoticism. But this need not be the closing act. Equally can Bougainville’s self-contradictory account tell us about the pressures that weigh on the supposedly liberated intellect in the supposedly post-religious, post-inquisitorial, enlightened age. Though it was not supposed to happen, the Enlightenment bred intellectual conformities—conformities that are perhaps more insidious for appearing to be the offspring of reason and demystification.

Thinkers of Bougainville’s era congratulated themselves for seeing through the veil of religion, customs, and authority. Seeing through the veil, however, can weave a veil of its own, which incites us to overlook or twist the facts that run counter to the theory (the theory, in the instance, that a just and happy society is necessarily one without religion, customs, and authority). Bougainville is of interest today not so much for what he got right or wrong about ancient Tahiti; he is of interest because he holds a mirror to intellectual life whose orthodoxies sometimes make our pen betray what our eye plainly sees.

University of California, Santa Barbara, California, USA Notes Hayden White “The Noble Savage Theme as Fetish in Tropics of Discourse,” in Essays in Cultural Criticism(Baltimore, John Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), 183.

2 See Arthur Lovejoy and George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1935).

3 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract [1762] in Political Writings (New York: Norton, 1988), 85.

4 Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality [1755] in Political Writings, 39.

5 Ibid, 44.

6 Ibid, 34; 57.

7 Ibid, 9.

8 Rousseau, The Confessions (London: Norse, 1923), II, 32.

1

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Rousseau, Émile (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1966), 56.

Hippolyte Taine, The Ancient Régime (New York: Holt, 1891), 271.

11 Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), X, 152-170; 887-894.

12 See ÉricVibart, Tahiti: Naissance d’un paradis au siècle des Lumières (Brussels: Complexe, 1987).

13 Denis Diderot, Supplement to Bougainville’s “Voyage”[1772] in Rameau’s Nephew and Other Works (Indiana: Hackett Publishing, 1956), 187;188;196;187.

14 Commerson,“Postscriptum sur l’isle de la Nouvelle CythèreouTayti”[1769] in Étienne Taillemite, Bougainville et sescompagnonsautour du monde (Paris: Imprimerienationale, 1977), 506-10.

15 “The Journal of Fesche,” in Bougainville,The Pacific Journal, 260; 263; 257.

16 Sonia Fassel“Le Mythe de Tahiti, ou comment uneréalitédevientune fiction,” Comité de documentation historique de la marine (Vincennes, 1995), 211-32; and Visions des îles: Du mythe à son exploration littéraire (XVIIIe-XXe siècles) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006); Serge Tcherkézoff, Tahiti 1768: Jeunesfillesenpleurs: La face cachée des premiers contacts et la naissance du mythe occidental (Pape’ete: Au vent des îles,2004), 114-235.

17 Louis Antoine de Bougainville The Pacific Journal of Louis Antoine de Bougainville (London: The Hakluyt Society, 2002), 28.

18 Ibid, 24.

19 See Daniel Margueron, Tahiti dans toute sa littérature (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989), 49-57.

20 See Elliott, 240.

21 On Bougainville’s hour of fame, see contemporary descriptions like Louis de Bachaumont Mémoiressecrètes (London: John Adamson 1777), 244.

22 See Bougainville’s own Voyage around the World and Anne Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 115-18.

23 Bougainville, Voyage around the World, trans. John Foster (London: Nourse, 1772).

Accessed July 2018.

24 Observations that Aotourou held the “ugly” islanders of other nations in “great contempt” are in Bougainville’s Voyage; Aotourou’s insistence that all be killed is recorded in Vivez’s Journal in Bougainville, The Pacific Journal, 236.

25 Taibout, Essai sur l’isled’Otahiti et sur l’esprit et les moeurs de ses habitants (Avignon, 1779), 51-52.

26 Jules Verne Les Grands navigateurs du dix-huitième siècle [1880] (ArvensaÉditions, 2014), 111.

27 Roy Porter, “The Exotic as Erotic: Captain Cook at Tahiti,” in G. S. Rousseau and R. Porter, eds., Exoticism in the Enlightenment (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1990), 119.

See also Robert Nicole, The Word, the Pen, and the Pistol: Literature and Power in Tahiti.

Albany: SUNY, 2001; Benoit Dillet, “Finitude before Finitude: The Case of RousseauBougainville-Diderot,” in Garth Lean, ed., Travel and Representation (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017), pp. 83-101.

28 For example, ÉricVibart, 1987.

29 Andrew Martin, “The Enlightenment in Paradise: Bougainville, Tahiti, and the Duty of Desire,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, Volume 41, Number 2, Winter 2008, pp. 203-216.

30 A notable exception is anthropologist Nicholas Thomas’ Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2010).

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At the Crossroads of Contentment: Variations on an Augustinian Theme James Wetzel Prelude: The Perfectionist’s Lament t is a downhearted Augustine that we meet at the outset of Confessions, book 7.

The idiocies of his younger days are dead to him, but he has little confidence and a great deal of worry about the adulthood into which he is heading (conf.

I

7.1.1):

The older I became, the more repulsive the emptiness (vanitas) that kept me from conceiving of anything as real unless it were the sort the thing that my eyes customarily see.1

Emptiness of heart, for Augustine, is intimately connected with an overly conservative and empty way of seeing—a way of seeing that objectifies everything and reflects the heart’s immature fixation on objects of desire and their relative permanence.

At the end of book 6 of the Confessions, Augustine gives us our best sense of why a certain kind of materialism hasn’t been working out for him. He has been living in Milan and working as a professor of rhetoric in the pay of the imperial court. He doesn’t like the work much—basically he is being paid to flatter—but he sees no alternative to the advancement of his secular ambitions. To move up in the world, he will need to ingratiate himself with the rich and powerful senators who live in the city, and that will require money. He resolves to break with the woman who has been living faithfully at his side for most of that dead youth of his and send her back to her native Africa; she is the mother of their son, Adeodatus, and Augustine’s love, but not his wife. Her departure will free him to marry a society woman, one who brings a big dowry and a family name.

His mother, Monnica, the mater familias in his household, soon finds him a suitable candidate, but the girl is only ten years old, too young even by Roman standards to be taken in marriage; he will need to wait a couple of years before marrying.

Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Vol. 42, No. 1 (30-43) © 2019 by Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute

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Augustine poignantly describes the heart-rend of his parting from his natural partner (conf. 6.15.25): The woman with whom I used to share my bed, who was now an impediment to my marriage, was torn from my side; the heart in me, where once she was joined, was cut and wounded, leaching blood.2

But he is not so cut up that he refrains from bringing an intermediary woman into his household, a woman to tide him over from one woman to the next: Because I was a slave to lust and not a lover of marriage, I got myself another woman, not a wife to be sure, but a means, as it were, of sustaining and drawing out my soul’s disease, at its usual strength or worse, and of bringing my retinue of long habit into a wife’s domain.

He speculates that at this time in his life he would have defined his life’s end as the secure enjoyment of uninterrupted bodily pleasure (a bastardized Epicureanism; conf.

6.16.26), but it is not pleasure that he recalls feeling. His method of seeking object permanence dulls his pain but increases his desperation.

The chastened sensualist who wonders in Confessions 7 whether his thinking will ever escape the orbit of bodily images and imperfect goods is, a bit beneath the surface, the perfectionist who laments the dissipation of his desire. Augustine wants his heart’s desire to be for incorruptible goodness, the goodness he believes God unimaginably to be, and he wants to be incorruptibly at one with his desire. He clings nevertheless to a career he no longer wants, and he forsakes a woman he has never stopped loving.

His worry here is in part that he doesn’t love very well—that he loves the wrong things, and that he loves against himself. But even more deeply than that, he worries that he has fallen outside the wisdom that would elevate his perspective and plant his affections, his mind’s feet, on tractable, if not quite earthly, ground. He knows enough to know that his dissipated perspective is not piecemeal wisdom but a wall of ignorance, and he knows enough to know that true wisdom requires more than a dismantling: it is seeing in invisible light (or what Anselm will call lux inaccessibilis). Now he will have to do what perfectionists have the hardest time doing: be open to the messiness of an unexpected wisdom and resist tailoring the offering to the cramped integrity of a perfectionism that no longer serves.

In the second half of Confessions 7, following some ineffectual lamentation over his oddly unmotivated freedom to will what is evil and reject the good, his own included (see, e.g., conf. 7.3.5), Augustine describes the experience of having had his perspective unexpectedly revolutionized, from the inside out. These sections of the Confessions, from 7.10.16 through 7.21.27, have generally been taken by Augustine’s professional readers to be the best window for framing his qualified embrace of Platonism, the philosophy he consistently credits with having managed not to confuse God, the source of all being, with a body of some sort. But in terms of what he actually describes in Confessions 7, the Platonists are not the agents of his change in perspective.

While still in the thick of his existential funk, he does begin to read through a compendium of Platonist literature, a gift of spiritual self-help from a man, likely a

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wealthy pagan Platonist, whom he rather ungratefully calls “a monstrous windbag” (immanissimo typho turgidum; conf. 7.9.13). And at some point in his reading, he heeds an admonition, though he doesn’t say how, to return to his true self (conf.

7.10.16; redire ad memet ipsum). But from there God enters into and dominates the picture, a divine Virgil to a disoriented Dante, and Augustine descends into his most intimate depths (in intima mea), where he will discover—this is his first surprise— that he originates out of love’s invisible light. He has no other root. Then, just as he professes a first recognition of who God is, he finds himself—this is his second surprise—suddenly pained by divine light; blinding rays violently beat back the infirmity of his sight and leave him shaken in his love. When he is able to see again, a return in some measure of ordinary light, he notices that he is in an unfamiliar place. He calls it, echoing Plotinus, “a place of unlikeness” (regio dissimilitudinis; conf. 7.10.16).

It is unlike where God is, who, though not limited to a place, calls to Augustine from afar—in a securing voice: “always, I am who I am” (Exod. 3:14; conf. 7.10.16). It is unlike where creation is, whose all-inclusive beauty, seen from without, is both perfect and exclusive. Here is how Augustine puts the two paradoxes of unlikeness together, in an implicit confession of sin (conf. 7.13.19): “With you, there is absolutely no evil, and not only with you but with the entirety of your creation: for nothing can break in from the outside and wreck the order you have imposed upon it.” If the perfectionist insists on living outside the perfection that he seeks, or, alternatively, on breaking into it, then he is neither with God nor with the created order, and this leaves him literally with no place to be.

I am especially interested in how Augustine imagines his exit from his unlikely place of unlikeness. He describes, more or less in the same breath, perfection and its apparent undoing (conf. 7.17.23): It astonished me that I already loved you, not some figment in your place, and I was not standing firm in my enjoyment of my God; I was snatched away to you by your beauty and just as quickly snatched back by my weight. I crashed with a groan into all-too-familiar things (in ista). That weight was the habit of my flesh.

At a first read, it would seem that Augustine is describing, first of all, his brief but astonishing enjoyment of a state of sublime contentment. He already (nothing further to do) loves the one being the love of whom should always be enough. When it proves not to be enough—familiar habits of desire, lodged in laborious flesh, make a fuss— Augustine finds himself, once again, caught up in the perfectionist’s lament. He has what he wants, God’s love, but not in the way that he wants it, securely. But it is far from clear, given the sublimity of what he has already realized, what it would mean for him to have added some missing security component.

Do we imagine him someday receiving—perhaps in a postmortem life—a supernatural dose of will-power, enabling him to shake off his mortal coil for good and achieve true perfection? That would be one way to take up his talk of humility, his insistence that the pagan Platonists know where they need to go, to God, but not how to get there (conf. 7.21.27), his reverence for the full presence of God in Christ, also

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the man of perfect obedience. If humility is to surrender your will to the absolute will of God, creator of all things ex nihilo (wills included), then what chance does your labyrinthine flesh have against your perfected but alien virtue? (The humility that you will is not humility; the humility that you don’t will is not yours and so alien—at least as a virtue.)

I want to explore a different arc of possibility. Suppose that Augustine is not giving voice to the perfectionist’s lament in his striking conjunction of divine love and its refraction through mortal flesh. Suppose that perfection is not the goal of his life’s labor but is instead its point of departure. Suppose that a human and divine conjunction—mortal flesh and immortal spirit—is less an ideal of containment, a territory with secure borders, than a crossroads: in one direction there is the absoluteness of will that fuels the perfectionist’s lament; in the other there is, well, something like a true incarnation, a perfectly imperfect life in the flesh. I am being tentative here because I am aware that I cannot travel along an arc of possibility simply by piling up suppositions. I will need to enter more fully into conceptual spaces that entertain a sublime contentment—human without, God within—and end up articulating a crossroads.

I will briefly venture two such forays in what follows: one into Descartes and his postulation of a divine/demonic dematerializer (a creator ad nihilum), the other into Anselm and his reasonable mystery (sola ratione) of a will made flesh. It is not entirely useless to think of Descartes as Augustine’s modern alter ego and Anselm as his medieval one. But I am conscious here of the temptation to overplay the antithesis between medieval and modern. It may be more modern than medieval to venerate will-power and more medieval to acquiesce to flesh, but at the crossroads of a sublime contentment, both directions are always in play.

Perfectionism Perfected: A Cartesian Exorcism It takes Descartes a good twenty years before he is fully able to disentangle his authority as an adult knower from the murky dream revelations of his early twenties.

He describes in a notebook that he was keeping at the time a sequence of three dreams, all of which take place on the night of the tenth of November 1619. 3 The dreams convince him that his path in life is to forgo becoming a lawyer, the expected route of males in his family, and stake out a path that leads to demonstrative knowing, this being the work of the true philosopher. (In his dedicatory letter to the Sorbonne, Descartes characterizes the philosophers of his day as those who believe that “everything can be argued either way” and so pursue winning more than they do truth4; presumably he would not have had a higher opinion of lawyers.)

When Descartes drafts the Meditations on First Philosophy, his escape plan from the things of childhood, he never mentions his debt to dreams, but he does, in the first sentence of the first meditation, explain why he has been feeling so stuck: “Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood [ineunte aetate], and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice

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that I had subsequently based on them.”5 It is one thing to know, in retrospect, that you have believed too quickly or trusted too readily; it is quite another to know, looking forward, how you can become secure in your knowing. To have the first knowing but not the second is to be stuck in a cognitive adolescence, where skepticism teeters on the edge of regress: back to childhood credulity, but minus the innocence.

Descartes seeks, through cathartic meditation, to scaffold a way forward.

Dreams still have a place in reconstituted knowing, but they are less nakedly prophetic. Their first function for Descartes—though, I think, not their most important one—is to undermine the credibility of the senses for those who, like the melancholic Augustine prior to his awakening, negotiate the world largely by the dim light of their animal sensibilities. (Begin with appetite, add the senses and a pinch of reflectiveness, and then stir.) Descartes assumes that these benighted empiricists still have it within them to know that when they are dreaming, they do not perceive things as they are but only as they imagine them to be. Because the ability to distinguish dream from reality, shadow from substance is not, for Descartes, an empirical matter, there are grounds for hope; no reasoner is doomed to live in a phantasy world, where imagination bleeds into and thoroughly contaminates sense. To the obvious rejoinder—that most of us most of the time are sensibly aware of the difference between dreaming and being awake—Descartes shows at most a glancing interest. Yes, he concedes the point, but most is not all; there are times, let them be rare, when a person gets confused by an especially vivid dream. “I see plainly,” Descartes is already prepared to conclude, “that there are never any sure signs [certiis indiciis] by means of which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep.”6 The conclusion would be underwhelming for any sense-guided reasoner just trying to make it through the day. The normal signs, juiced with a bit of caffeine, more than suffice. But Descartes’s interests are not mundanely practical. They are not even skeptical; doubt, apart from a clear path to knowledge, is child’s play. It is really his adult drive for perfection that disposes him to disregard the degree of difference between the occasionally spotty borders between sense and imagination and a fullblown phantasy world. For the perfectionist, it is enough to discredit a mode of knowing (or of living) to point out its inherent imperfection, however slight—as if imperfection were itself a species of original sin or a fall from grace. When Descartes speaks of the fallibility of his senses, he might as well be talking about his lying eyes: “From time to time I have found that the senses deceive, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once.”7 There can be no forgiveness in a transgressed relationship—one with border issues—unless it comes from on high.

In the case where the senses have impinged upon the mind and clouded its vision, deliverance will come in the form of a knowing that both reinforces sensible perception and transcends the senses altogether.

A dream-tainted sensibility, admitting to only the barest possibility of things being other than as they seem, is enough to drive Descartes to seek deliverance. He comes to his meditations with little doubt about where to look. In the simple sciences,

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paradigmatically arithmetic and geometry, where truth-seeking is not fundamentally a negotiation with material realities, there is no possibility of a gap between how things seem and how they are. The appearing just is the reality and without raising the worrisome prospect that something real, in some abyss of being, remains hidden from view—perfectionism’s spoiler. It turns out that the primary function of dream skepticism is not to darken sense perception (its limitations have never been hard to notice) but to highlight the transparency of truth: “For whether I am awake or asleep,” Descartes writes, “two and three added together are five, and a square has no more than four sides.”8 The beauty of such truthful, transparent simplicity is that it is both a world onto itself, perfect and eternal, and the support structure (or, to change metaphor, the inner life) of lesser, materially laden, worlds. To illustrate, and to oversimplify, let’s say that I own a vase of great beauty. It is one thing, and it is a material thing. In a distracted moment, I accidentally knock the vase off its pedestal, and it breaks neatly into two separate pieces. Whereas before I had one thing, a beautiful vase, now I have two, or perhaps two halves of one thing. I can speak intelligibly of these two possibilities—the thing divides, the thing multiplies—because in the simple, supporting world of arithmetic truth, oneness is not diminished by division or augmented by multiplication. Such constancy is true of all numbers and not just the number one; numbers enter into innumerable relations with one another and yet they remain, individually, wholly and simply what they are. (We express this miracle of oneness by way of equations.) That I can make use of arithmetic and geometric truths to frame the ambiguous history of my vase does not of course imply that my “real” vase exists eternally preserved in some immaterial realm. I am still looking at a broken vessel and wondering about its beauty.

Materiality, to the frustrated perfectionist, is more punishment than world; it is a thing, like brokenness, to be endured or overcome, but not embraced. When Augustine first wonders what has prevented him from staying fixed in his perfect love of God, a love wholly free (supposedly) of fantasy, his thoughts turn to his residual but remarkably stubborn attachment to sexual generation, to a life that ties him to the bodies of women. He speaks near the beginning of Confessions 8 of having been too “tightly tied” (tenaciter conligabar; conf. 8.1.2) to his origins ex femina to feel fully at home in God’s house on earth: the Church. His is the perfectionist’s lament over mortal life and its desperate investment in further flesh.

Descartes, no less than Augustine, is anxious to inhabit a perfect world as a knowing self and without the troublesome residuals. But what would it mean for a knowing self, when faced with beauties that break or bleed, to see only the eternally sunlit world of the simple sciences, and rightly so? The question already understates the challenge.

If I am a perfectly knowing self, or a known one, it says too little to say that I am, in my essence, fundamentally unlike the self that I materially appear to be. The truth is that I don’t make an appearance at all in a world where it is possible to confuse reality with appearance.9 I am already more real than this so-called “world” could ever be.

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Descartes tests for the possibility of simple selfhood against the idea of an absolute agential power over materiality, or what he takes to be, by and large, the traditional idea of God. He resolves to think of this God, not as good or benevolent (the other part of the traditional idea), but as malicious, some kind of “evil genius” (genium aliquem malignum).10 If he can resist consenting to any of the representations of the evil genius, he will be left in possession of his essentially unimaginable self.

Let’s be clear about what kind of deceiver the Cartesian Satan is. This is not Iago or Richard III or the serpent in the Garden. The Cartesian Satan deceives by being able to represent nothing as if nothing were something. You look outside: you think you see grey skies, a smattering of snow on the ground, your Chihuahua chasing a squirrel.

But in reality you see nothing at all: “there is no earth, no sky, no extended thing, no shape, no size, no place.”11 This is odd, even for a metaphysical fantasy. Deception is normally a form of a deliberate misrepresentation, but what is being misrepresented here? Nothing. The closest that the Cartesian Satan comes to being a recognizable deceiver is in its malign attempt to get the doubting self to represent itself in some way. This self, being the absolute will to self-assert negatively, has an inviolable prerogative to refuse any and all offers of self-representation. If it surrenders that prerogative of its own will, it ironically creates a world wherein genuine misrepresentation is now possible—for it is itself something that can be misrepresented, albeit by being represented at all. Such a surrender would be the Cartesian equivalent of original sin.

Think of the doubting self as a perfectionist. It refuses to know what it knows until it has (in its mind) legitimately ruled out even the most fanciful possibilities for error. It picks out knowledge to perfect not because it wants only a partially perfected life but because it finds the other aspects of its existence—notably its material bonds with others—to be messy and time-consuming and impossible to perfect. It has come in any case to think of its perfectible self as its true and only self. The thing that gets defined by a mind-body conjunction is fit concern for a mechanic, but not a philosopher-scientist. So far this self ’s perfectionist efforts have resulted in a drastic simplification of its world. There are two beings there: the perfectionist self itself, living within the walls of a radicalized doubt; and whatever other being it is whose life’s mission is to breach the integrity of those walls.

Now think of the Cartesian Satan, the so-called malignus genius, as a benevolent being and not the monster that the doubting self, in its perfectionist paranoia, has been misrepresenting it to be. It has been furnishing the austere doubting self with thickets of sensuous representations not to ensnare its alter ego in an alien and empty reality but to evoke wonder and open the door to collaborative representation: the space for new material. But the genius soon realizes that the doubting self is not about to relinquish its perfectionist imperatives and so it radically alters it mode of dialectical offering. It continues to send sensuous representations, but now fully under the expectation that these will be deemed materially false and not to be trusted.

Along with these (and this is the really important part), it sends logical scripts, arithmetic equations, and geometric drawings, all of which evoke in the perfectionist the sense of

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an abiding structure that exists independently of a material order while still at every moment informing that order’s intelligibility. The perfectionist is free to limit its acceptance of material reality to such an intellectualist editing, leaving heaps of residuals on the cutting floor; at least the genius and the perfectionist will have a common knowledge of what the editing has spared. This is dialectic lite, to be sure, but perhaps also the promise of a more reasonable discourse to come.

For Descartes the only real difference between the malignant creator who creates out of nothingness and the benevolent one is that the latter is not in the deception business. It is weakness, thinks Descartes, that moves a rational being, finite or otherwise, to deceive. If I intend to deceive you, I conspire to get you to accept an alien perspective, the one I create for you, as your own; I lack the courage, the wisdom, or the charity to be able to collaborate with you on a common vision of truth. Perhaps I just don’t trust you. As a finite reasoner, limited by the opacities of material existence, I am as subject to your deception as you are to mine. Against a reasoner who lacks such limitation, a powerful creator ex nihilo, I am likewise subject to deception, but lack a corresponding power to deceive. The true God wouldn’t want to deceive me, or couldn’t, if deception is the weakness that Descartes says it is. Either way I am left with the thought, not entirely reassuring, that God is one with me even as I am one with God. Descartes, anxious to perfect his perfectionism, is ready to look past the opacity of that conjunction: “If I restrain my will so that it extends to what the intellect clearly and distinctly reveals, and no further, then it is quite impossible for me to go wrong.”12 Perfectionism Transfigured: Anselmian Irony If Descartes is primarily concerned not to lose cognitive control of his world and thereby risk being pulled unawares into another being’s fiction, Anselm is more worried that he will become a prisoner in his own house. The Proslogion, written while he was still abbot at Bec, is his attempt to send forth words of invocation into the inaccessible light (lux inaccessibilis; 1 Tim. 6:16) that stirs and chastens his cloistered consciousness.

If his words go begging and remain ambassadors of nothingness, with nothing to offer, then Anselm faces a fool’s fate. The fool in the Psalms, a corrupt creature who consumes people as if people were bread, has said in his heart (in corde suo), “There is no God” (Ps. 14:1, 53:1). The fool in the Proslogion—the senseless insipiens—has no access to his heart and so finds it impossible to consummate that world-annihilating denial.13 But it is not better to be Anselm’s kind of fool. If you have become insipiens in his sense of that perdition, then you haven’t a clue about just how thoroughly you have managed to identify yourself with the emptiness of your desire. You will have become the paradox of an insignificant signifier, a word without reference, and as such you can never meaningfully enter into the prayers of others. Hell, for Anselm, is to be the perfect solipsist.

When Anselm, like Augustine before him, temporarily diverts his attention from his familiar preoccupations and is drawn into the most intimate of his inner spaces, the bedchamber of his true intelligence (in cubiculum mentis; Mt. 6:6, Proslogion I), he is

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looking for love and for new illumination. Augustine feels for the first time the invisible, but not inaccessible, light of love, but then is startled to discover that he has to relearn not who God is, but where. Anselm emerges from his inner bedchamber, having sought for days to call to mind there the name of his beloved with these unbidden words (they come to him when he stops trying so hard): “something than which nothing greater is conceivable” (aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit; Proslogion II).

It is admittedly a tag that seems more suited to the austerities of logic than to a love story, but despite its venerable place in the history of the ontological argument (a favorite among theologically inclined logicians), I insist on the love part. That this is the invocation of a beloved and, more fundamentally, of a lover is absolutely determinative for the “one argument” (unum argumentum) that Anselm expects will give him access to whatever he would want to believe about God. I am not speaking of argument here (and nor is Anselm) as a rule-governed application of rules on unquestioned premises, resulting in doxastic rectitude, or properly fixed belief. I am speaking of argument as a well focused meditative practice that serves to release belief from unnecessary fixation. (Descartes might have gone this way, but his horror of error got the better of him.)

In the spirit of that kind of argument, I would ask you to focus on the inner logic of this Anselmian (if not quite Anselm’s) invocation: “Dear being greater than which no being is conceivable, I humbly ask you to step outside of inaccessible light and inform me of your presence.” Notice that I am invoking what I take to be a conceivable being. A being greater than which no being is conceivable lies at the limits of conception but is still conceivable. I conceive of God as the greatest being I can possibly imagine, but I also want, as any good lover would, to love a beloved who exists apart from my imagination, a being that, in its inalienable greatness, draws me out of myself and my solipsistic knock-off of inaccessible light. I crave material presence; without it I am insipiens, stupid, senseless when it comes to love—and knowledge.

Anselm does not speak of material presence in the Proslogion; he speaks of inconceivability. The being whose greatness limits of my world must also transcend it.

This too is part of the inner logic of a sacred invocation: “Therefore, Lord, not only are you that the greater of which cannot be conceived; you are also something greater than can be conceived” (quiddam maius quam cogitari possit; Proslogion XV). The implied logic of that “therefore” (ergo) is in one sense clear. Suppose that you or I or some being of exponentially greater power, like an archangel, were to work through all of the yet-to-be conceived things about God’s greatness and arrive at perfect knowledge; even were this to take an infinite amount of time, as it surely would, we would each still be in the business of not needing God. The conception will do. (Such a schema makes us out to be mentally appetitive, pseudo-rational beings—or fools in the making in the realm of mind.)

But there is also a deeper, less apparent logic at work. Let me begin with the inconceivability of God. Too late, I have already cheated. I have used the word ‘God.’ A proper name, even. Really bad. I’ll drop the God-talk and confine my attention to

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the something greater than which nothing is conceivable; that is a being that is, by Anselm’s reckoning, both conceivable and not. I will still want to be able to derive conceivable being from a logically prior inconceivability. How could I not if (sorry) God is to be more than my mind’s greatest fiction? But now I face the sublime mystery of condescension from on high. Let’s say that the inconceivable, through an exercise of kenotic love, lends itself to conception. Surely it is not the case that all of my conceptions of a great, world-constituting being are spirit-filled; I am, in many ways, very much the mentally appetitive creature that I so causally invented in the previous paragraph. I hunger for a conception, but feed on emptiness. So what is it that makes a conception of God, for me or for any of my kind, true?14 The contemplative logic that takes in this question now nudges me out of the Proslogion, the great prayer of Anselm’s cloistered years, and into a dialogical work of less leisurely spirituality, Cur deus homo, written during his unsettling tenure in the See of Canterbury and marked by a heartache (magna cordis tribulatione; CDH preface) that he forbears to specify. In Cur deus homo (Why God is a human being), Anselm and his trusted student, Boso, chip away at the mystery of the incarnation, put thusly (CDH 1.1, my emphasis): “By what logic, what necessity, did God become human and by his death, as we believe and confess, restore life to the world—when he could have done this either through a surrogate, angelic or human, or simply by willing it (sola voluntate).”

Anselm makes it seem as if there were a real choice here: either God remains abstract and wields the power of absolute will to render imperfect things, like the human sinner, perfect, or God consents to origination ex femina, enters the world as one particular human being, Jesus of Nazareth (nothing abstract here), and spends the better part of his life trying to love beings who have a very hard time, apart from miraculous side-shows (cf. absolute will), seeing his kind of love as a form of power, much less the ultimate one. But Anselm’s choices, when it comes to ultimate things, are rarely what they appear to be. Either call out to God, sola ratione, with your naked will to relate, or give up on gaining access to inaccessible light. That seems to be the choice that the Proslogion frames. But when I disincarnate my reason and imagine that as an act of humility, am I really alone with something, my reason, and is this something truly to be my offering to another? (Recall Augustine’s unlikely experience of perfect love, for God and without other people, and his distress over being returned to his flesh.) The fool stalks the Proslogion; we should be careful about what we assume we can imagine.

In Cur deus homo, Anselm invites us to imagine God remoto Christo (CDH preface; 1.10), literally God “with Christ removed,” more liberally God as infinitely remote from the perspective and the life-experience of a particular human incarnation. As I try to imagine my way into a relationship with such a remote divinity, I mentally remove myself from the particulars of my life—particulars whose significance has never been mine fully to determine—and arrive at pure will to will communication, consent or dissent, no development, no forgiveness. Anselm invites Boso to entertain this scenario (CDH 1.21, on the weightiness of sin): see yourself in God’s sight, and hear a voice

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telling you to “look over there” (aspice illuc), away from divine illumination; also hear God telling you, like an undercurrent in your hearing, “I absolutely do not want you to look” (nullatenus volo ut aspicias). You search your heart in vain for a reason to look (quaere te ipse in corde tuo), and then you look. Anselm intends this scenario—a choosing of the nihil over God—to dramatize the divergence of two absolute wills, each sovereign in its own house. As the sinner in the scene (and each of us at every moment is the sinner in the scene), you will not be forgiven.

But this is not because infinite will is perverse or hard of heart. The block to forgiving out of mercy alone (sola misericordia; CDH 1.12) is, on the face of it, coolly logical.

You enter into life not as a sinner but as a perfect innocent, cradled within a seamless pocket of divine regard; then absurdly you will your exit into unlikeness, a place void of love and creative light. Your sin is annihilating, and necessarily so, because there really cannot be two absolute wills—God’s and that of some res volens—but only the one. Logically it is too late for you to undo your birth; your redemption from the void just is and never has been anything other than your creation out of nothingness. God sees nothing else. (Recall Augustine’s vision of creation at conf. 7.13.19; there is no breaking in or breaking out.) The struggle with sin, tedious and titanic, that you have been calling your life cancels out in the divine-human equation.

Now entertain a new scenario. The world is full of sinners, save for one, well, maybe two: Jesus, born of Mary, never takes that look away from God and into the void. He lives out his mortal life wholly within the seamless pocket of divine regard: he and the Father are one. His perfect humanity renders his brutal, but freely chosen death on a cross a superabundant offering—that of a release of life, where before there was only payment. His divinity, sourced out of his Father’s will, gives him leave to distribute the wealth to the lot of us imperfectly loving but perfectly loved children of God, languishing in the shadows of inaccessible light. Christ is nothing if not forgiving.

Most traditional readers of Anselm will be able to detect in my scenario some gesture toward Anselm’s exit from God, remoto Christo. I am myself unsure of where, or whether, that exits comes. With Anselm’s Christ, I find myself perpetually at a crossroads, not a plentitude—or a void. There is God’s will in Christ, and Christ’s will in God. In one direction absolute will voids flesh, in a preemption of crucifixion; in the other I remain remarkably identified with my mundane reckonings with love and loss, hate and despair. The irony of this particular crossroads is that there has only ever been one road to travel along.15 Postlude: A Sanctuary for Grief What does perfection have to do with grief?

Augustine and Monnica are leaning against a window overlooking the garden of their temporary lodgings in Ostia, Rome’s seaport. For months the two of them have been waiting for a naval blockade to end—yet another spasm of imperial power—and for a chance, along with a few African friends and fellow sojourners, to return home.

But they are not thinking about worldly deliverance now. Their thoughts tend toward

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eternal life and the delights that overwhelm mortal memory and release it from fixation on time and place. While still in communion with one another (though their words are hard to imagine), mother and son ascend in ardent affection to “the thing itself ” (in idipsum; conf. 9.10.24), where, with “a pure thrust of the heart” (toto ictu cordis), they touch upon the wisdom that makes all things.

Augustine again gets a lesson from on high about the stubborn gravity of material loves, but now he has his mother with him on both sides of the equation. Together he and Monnica relinquish to heaven “the first-fruits of the spirit” (primitas spiritus; Rom. 8:23), the parts of themselves—sacrificed—that have always known perfection; and just as quickly the two of them are returned to the noisy music of mortal struggle.

But Monnica tells her son that she is done with earthly matters. Her hopes for Augustine, whose conversion has been her life’s work, have been more than met, and so, she wonders, “What am I doing here?” (quid hic facio?; conf. 9.10.26). Five days later she lapses into a fever and dies. Augustine tries, uselessly, to restrain his grief.

What I have been calling “the perfectionist’s lament” is mainly just frustrated perfectionism. Maybe that is what is on display here, in the ecstatic aftermath of Ostia, at least in part. It is admittedly with a sigh (suspiravimus; conf. 9.10.23), with a touch or two of regret, that mother and son have left their perfected selves captive in paradise.

They look forward to returning there one day and remaining forever fixed, this time, within a triune, relational harmony that is eternally friendly to origination ex femina and former prodigal sons. Monnica can’t wait and is soon taken up; Augustine still has years and years of work ahead of him. But this is not, I think, what makes him sad.

When he recalls his mother’s world-weary question to him—“What I am doing here?”—he speaks to us, his unknown and less than fully trusted readers, through a son’s discretion (conf. 9.11.17): “I do not well recall what I said to that.” I am not inclined to press here. What could he have said to her, after all? Yes, you are done with your life, well done, move on. No, you are not done, much is unfinished, I am unfinished, stay put. At times we may just want to convey to those we love, however imperfectly we love them, that their lives are not the projects they take them to be, that success and failure are indeed relative things, and that beauty is what everyone begins with. The free of heart convey these truths through innocent delight; the rest of us, cautious and more ragged in our affections, resort to the belated wisdom of grief.

What does perfection have to do with grief?

The perfection that is non-perfectible, that renders time into an immaculate conception, is grief ’s sanctuary.16

Villanova University, Pennsylvania, USA

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Notes Translations of Augustine are my own. For the Latin of the Confessions, see O’Donnell (1992).

2 Augustine’s language here suggests he is alluding to the parting of the woman from the man in Genesis 2:21-23. But there, of course, there is no wounding, and the parting itself is party to a new intimacy. For an extended (and quite brilliant) reading of conf. 6.15.25 along these lines, see Shanzer (2002).

3 The Little Notebook is now lost and along with it the dream-account that Descartes had titled, “Olympica” (Olympian matters), but we still have the French paraphrase from Adrien Baillet, Descartes’ biographer. For the relevant excerpts from hisVie de Monsieur Descartes, see Adam and Tannery (1996), pp. 179-188. For a concise and non-dismissive philosophical analysis of the Olympica, see Sebba (1987).

4 Descartes (1986), p. 5.

5 Descartes (1986), p. 12.

6 Descartes (1986), p. 13.

7 Descartes (1986), p. 12. Near the end of his classic study of Cartesian reasoning, Harry Frankfurt remarks: “Descartes cares less about the correspondence of his beliefs to ‘reality’ than he does about their permanence and constancy. What he wishes above all to avoid is not error, in the sense of non-correspondence, but betrayal.” I am not sure about the first part, but Frankfurt is surely right about the betrayal. See Frankfurt (2008), p. 249.

8 Descartes (1986), p. 14.

9 I think here of a famous passage from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “If I wrote a book called The World as I found it, I should have to include a report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book.” See Wittgenstein (1961), proposition 5.631.

10 Descartes (1986), p. 15.

11 Descartes (1986), p. 14.

12 Descartes (1986), p. 43.

13 See Proslogion IV. Translations of Anselm are my own. My source for Anselm’s Latin is Schmitt (1946).

14 The ready answer, “God does,” is formally correct but, at this point in the argument, none too helpful.

15 I believe that this irony is Anselm’s, and that he is, as much as anyone can be, in control of it. In my reading of Anselm I have been gratefully and deeply influenced by Burcht Pranger (2003).

16 Many thanks to Miroslav Volf and the Yale Center for Faith and Culture for the opportunity to present a version of this essay in February of 2017. I would especially like to thank my respondent, Tomas Sedlacek, for his discerning comments.

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References Adam, Charles and Paul Tannery (1996). Œuvres de Descartes. Vol. X. Paris: Vrin.

Descartes (1986). Meditations on First Philosophy. Trans. John Cottingham. Bound together with selected Objections and Replies. Introduction by Bernard Williams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Frankfurt, Harry (2008). Demons, Dreamers, & Madmen: The Defense of Reason in Descartes’s Meditations. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. This is a reissue of the 1970 study, originally published by Bobbs-Merrill.

O’Donnell, James J. (1992). Augustine: Confessions. Introduction and Text. Oxford Clarendon Press.

Pranger, Burcht (2003). The Artificiality of Christianity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Sebba, George (1987). The Dream of Descartes. Journal of the History of Philosophy Monograph Series. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Schmitt, Francis, ed. (1946). S. Anselmi Opera Omnia. 2 Volumes. Edinburgh: Nelson & Sons.

Shanzer, Danuta (2002). “Avulsa a Latere Meo: Augustine’s Spare Rib.” The Journal of Roman Studies. Vol. 92: 157-176.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1961). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. Pears and McGuinness, London: Routledge.

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Philosophy of Prehistoric Painting and Cinema: Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams Jerold J. Abrams

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erner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) is a 3D documentary film about the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc Cave on the Ardèche River in Southern France.1 Discovered by cave explorers Jean-Marie Chauvet, Éliette Brunel, and Christian Hillaire in 1994 “a few days before Christmas”, the cave contains the oldest known paintings on earth, “paintings dating back some 32,000 years”. (Recent radio carbon-dating sets some of the works to 36,000 years ago.)

20,000 years ago a massive rockslide covered the entrance to the cave sealing and protecting the interior, which is “about 1,300 feet long.” A “pristine” and “perfect time capsule” of prehistoric culture, the cave is “one of the greatest discoveries in human culture.” So upon its discovery, authorities immediately resealed the entrance with a “steel door like a bank vault.” Only a handful of scientists may enter and only under the strictest conditions. But the French Minister of Culture granted unprecedented access to Herzog and a small crew to film the cave for their documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

For any viewer expecting to be pleasantly charmed by primitive stick figures inelegantly scratched upon the interior walls of the cave, those expectations are immediately dashed with the breathtakingly gorgeous Panel of the Horses in the Hillaire Chamber-North. As Former Head of Scientific Research of Chauvet Cave Jean Clottes declares, “It’s one of the great works of art in the world.” Herzog similarly comments on the incomparable importance of the paintings: “It was not a primitive beginning or a slow evolution, it rather burst onto the scene like a sudden explosive event. It is as if the modern human soul had awakened here.” In an interview with Archaeology Magazine Herzog reiterates this point: “No doubt in my heart that this is art, and it’s some of the greatest that the human race ever created, period. It can’t get any better, and it hasn’t gotten much better. That’s a great mystery.”2 A century ago, T. S. Eliot in Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Vol. 42, No. 1 (44-48) © 2019 by Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute

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“Tradition and Individual Talent” (1919) similarly claimed that “art never improves” but springs into being fully formed, and appears in this form even as far back as the “rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen.” 3 The Magdalenian Era in Southern France dates from 17,000 to 12,000 years ago, which is at least 20,000 years after the Chauvet Cave paintings.

But if art does not improve through history, and appears fully formed in the Chauvet Cave, neither does the art of the cave appear to change in style over thousands of years. As Herzog comments: “By comparing all the paintings in the cave, it seems certain that the horses of this panel were created by one single individual. But in the immediate vicinity of the horses there are figures of animals overlapping with each other. The striking point here is that, in cases like this, after carbon-dating, there are strong indications that some overlapping figures were drawn almost five thousand years apart.”

From the perspective of the present, this difference in modes of temporal selfunderstanding appears to be unfathomable. As Herzog comments: “The sequence and duration of time is unimaginable for us today. We are locked in history, and they were not.” The people of the region appear to inhabit a more cyclical and almost otherworldly dimension of time, even as they occupy the very height of artistic genius.

Herzog asks, “Will we ever be able to understand the vision of the artists across such an abyss of time?”

But despite this “abyss of time” the cave artists also seem to speak directly to the modern mind. “The painters of the cave seem to speak to us from a familiar yet distant universe.” The world of the cave is “familiar” partly because of the freshness and brilliance of the paintings, but also and perhaps especially because the paintings appear to have been created to be viewed as if they were moving. Herzog casts artificial light upon a panel and comments.

“For these Paleolithic painters the play of light and shadows from their torches could possibly have looked something like this. For them, the animals perhaps appeared moving, living. We should note that the artist painted this bison with eight legs, suggesting movement, almost a form of proto-cinema. The walls themselves are not flat, but have their own three-dimensional dynamic, their own movement, which was utilized by the artists. In the upper left corner, another multi-legged animal, and the rhino to the right seems also to have the illusion of movement, like frames in an animated film.”

The walls of the cave appear to function like screens for proto-cinematic animated films, but unlike modern rectangular two-dimensional film screens, the walls of the cave have their own three-dimensional waves and rifts and turns. The artists scraped and smoothed these waved walls at eye level, with close attention to their natural movements, and then painted with mastery of line and shading vivid three-dimensional animals in motion. Herzog filmed Cave of Forgotten Dreams in 3D precisely to capture this three-dimensional effect of the animals and the walls, which also renders the film

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a three-dimensional film about three-dimensional prehistorical films. In the Panel of the Horses the horses appear to be running with their necks extended and manes aloft, while a bison is painted with eight legs instead of four to convey motion. In the End Chamber a rhinoceros appears with a long horn, and two further horns of the same shape and length appear layered in front of it, and four of these horns appear layered just behind it. Seen in the flickering firelight the rhinoceros may have appeared to run and run thrust its horn, or perhaps the horns evoked the scene of a stampede.

The experience of the films may have been something like a 3D animated motion picture or even a prehistoric version of virtual reality.

In the Venus Pendant in the End Chamber a Minotaur appears embracing a woman.

“This is the only partial representation of a human in the entire cave,” notes Herzog.

Archaeologist Dominique Baffier, who serves as Curator of Chauvet Cave, also comments on the image: “And here we are, some 30,000 years later, with a myth that has endured until our days. We can also find this association of female and bull in Picasso’s drawings of the Minotaur and the woman.” The twisting and turning and tunneling corridors, and the several hidden chambers of the dark cave concealing the Minotaur, may have also rendered the cave a vast underground cinematic labyrinth.

No less strange than the presence of the Minotaur is the absence of figures of human beings, for one may reasonably have expected to see a painting of a man hunting a bison or a reindeer. But perhaps human shadows interacted with the moving pictures, even as the animals interacted with one another upon the walls. As Herzog comments in Archaeology, “There is a row of fires which was used for illumination, but placed in a way that when you are close to the Panel of the Horses your own shadow becomes a part of the image, apparently as an integral part of the staging.” Perhaps children sat on bison fur skins and observed a shadow of a man approaching the horses, or stalking bison or reindeer, while a sage woman narrated the action in voice-over, and an old man played flute, like the flute found near the cave and shown and played in the film.

If others with heavy wooden instruments pounded the ground to mimic fleeing horses or bison or reindeer, then these sounds would have been felt in the ground and heard echoing through the cave as a vast resonating chamber, deepening the immersive cinematic and virtual reality experience.

The most haunting and beautiful panel in the cave is the Panel of the Lions, found in the End Chamber. In Archaeology Herzog comments: “The lions in particular are just incredible because a whole group of lions is looking, is stalking something. The intensity of their gaze, all looking exactly at something, focusing on something. You don’t know exactly on what they focus and it has an intensity of art, of depiction, which is just awesome.”

At the top of the Panel of the Lions, two lion’s heads (with their necks) seem to extend from the base of one lion’s neck. One of these lion’s muzzles points to the ground, and the other points forward. Even if these two lion’s heads belong to two separate lions, in the firelight they could have appeared as one lion lifting its head and

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sighting its prey, with a kind of motion analogous to the motion of the eight-legged bison. Another and more striking form of motion appears at the back of the Panel of the Lions, and here too the motion appears to be perspectival. All of the lions in the panel appear in profile, all moving in the same direction, hunting, and many appear layered one over another to convey motion, so that for any lion only one eye appears (appropriately). But the two most beautiful and detailed and otherwise most realistic lions, seen at the back of the panel (and possibly the one beneath them), appear with two eyes each. The combination of a profile image of one lion and two eyes creates an opposition within the image, so that the lion would appear to look forward toward its prey, and then outward toward the viewer. In the same chamber of the Panel of the Lions, the End Chamber, a bison appears with its head turned to sight the viewer, as if sighting a hunter, though seemingly without the appearance of animation. But here in the Panel of the Lions the two lions appear to sight the viewer by slightly turning their heads, and the animation of shifting perspective appears to be achieved entirely by distortion of the eyes. Following Baffier’s insight into the relationship between the cave Minotaur and Picasso, the image of the deranged eyes of the two lions may also recall Picasso’s Portrait of Dora Maar, or Maya With Her Doll, or Guernica. Only here, in the cave, the distortion of the eyes would be seen in firelight and the lions would shift their gaze.

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Lions often hunt in pairs, maintaining one another in their sights, while stalking their prey, much like the two lions at the back of the Panel of the Lions. A reindeer turning its head toward its tail to sight two lions behind it would see not two eyes but four and know the danger, while a reindeer seeing only one eye of a lion would know far greater safety. Any Paleolithic man of the region sighting two sets of lion’s eyes would also know grave danger, while the same man seeing two lions in profile and one eye for each lion would know far greater safety. In the cave, however, the viewer seeing the two lions in profile, and then the same lions with two eyes each, might experience an alternation of safety and danger. This seeming alternation of the perspectives of the lions also suggests a philosophical dimension of the cave films, and the people of the region. The cave viewers in viewing their films would have employed concepts of appearance and reality, and apparently possibility in the form of subjunctive conditionality as they projected the action of the animals in time within their imaginations, as well as somaesthetic appreciation of the paradoxical emotional experience of real fear at unreal things. But perhaps most importantly the viewers would have possessed philosophical insight into the reflexive (or self-conscious) quality of their animated films. For if the viewers saw moving pictures of lions turning their heads to see and know they were being watched, the moving pictures would seem to break with their own representationalism, effectively challenging that representationalism, and raising questions about the very nature of the medium of film within the cave, such as What is the nature of an animated cave film, after all? And if shadows of men and women reacted to the alternating gaze of the lions, then the cave films may have achieved an additional layer of philosophical complexity and selfconsciousness in an already highly complex form of art. While art appears to spring into being fully formed in the Chauvet Cave over 30,000 years ago in the form of a synthesis of painting and cinema, philosophy itself also appears to spring into being at this time and to take its earliest form in prehistoric cinema.

College of Arts and Sciences, Creighton University, USA Notes Photograph by Arnaud Frich (http://archeologie.culture.fr/chauvet/en).

1 I presented a version of this essay at the American Philosophical Association meeting in Denver (February 20, 2019). I thank Richard Nunan, Daniel Wack, and William Barnes for helpful discussion, and my Philosophy of Film class (Creighton Univesity, 2019) for helpful discussions on the film.

2 Zach Zorich, Archaeology, vol. 64, no. 2, March/April 2011.

3 T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and Individual Talent,” Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1975), 39.

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Rousseau and Goethe: Developing Ethical Leadership and Promoting the Right Balance Between Reason and Sentiment Michel Dion

D

eveloping ethical leadership in the organizational setting is not an easy task. The scope and depth of the challenge will largely depend on the way the ethical component of leadership is defined. Even if we could use philosophical (ethical) theories to circumscribe what’s ethical leadership all about, we are facing multiple theories. Each of them is opening a very different perspective for considering ethical issues and resolving ethical conflicts and dilemmas. The development of ethical leadership could contribute to build up an ethically-based work environment (Mayer et al. 2010, 13). So, developing ethical leadership could have very concrete effects on the organizational life and culture. That’s why organizational members should cautiously identify moral paradigms that could fit to the way they are dreaming about the future of their organization.

The Age of the Enlightenment probably extended from 1630s (Galileo and Descartes) to Hegel’s death (1831). It focused on reason as the primary source of authority (reason as the power for moral autonomy), and thus reduced the social and political influence of heteronomous institutions (such as the Roman-Catholic Church).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was one of the leading figures of the Age of Enlightenment. Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) was also an influential author of the Age of Enlightenment. Goethe was agreeing with Rousseau about three basic concerns. In each case, we will see how such topics could be applied in the organizational setting, particularly in the organizational life and culture: making Goodness-itself and human good interconnected (re-defining organizational ethics), unveiling the process of becoming-who-we-are (in the workplace), and describing the continuous search for human happiness (in the organizational life).

Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Vol. 42, No. 1 (49-63) © 2019 by Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute

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Making Goodness-Itself and Human Good Interconnected: Re-defining Organizational Ethics Rousseau strongly believed that human being is naturally good. It implies that kind passions should be much more influential than negative passions, at least in the natural state (Rousseau 1971a, 249). That’s why the civil (social) state has to be strictly linked to the natural state: education could help us to develop kind passions and better control negative passions. However, Rousseau acknowledged that society we are living in is perverting us (Rousseau 1966a, 308). Historical records are usually focusing on social and political evils rather than the basic goodness of humankind (Rousseau 1966a, 308). Realizing good deeds is the way to become a good person (Rousseau, 1966a 325). Practicing virtue is much more important than knowing what it’s all about.

Practicing truth, temperance, and courage makes us virtuous persons (Rousseau 1971, 120). Being virtuous requires to be prudent at any time. Physical courage could always be enlightened by the basic virtue of prudence. Moral courage also implies to remain morally prudent. Moral courage is linked to one’s moral convictions: being morally courageous is being able to safeguard our moral convictions, when facing ethical conflicts and dilemmas. Being morally prudent requires not to embrace a given moral paradigm without unveiling its advantages, challenges, and weaknesses. Ethical leaders who have moral courage (when facing ethical dilemma and conflicts) could reach a more fulfilling psychological development level. They could serve as moral role models.

They could even reduce organizational deviance and strengthen organizational ethics and culture (Goket al. 2017, 271).

When we are putting social virtues into practice, we are expressing our love towards humankind. We are loving social justice. We are then proving that we are ready to improve ourselves. Social justice is the virtue that contributes most to common good (Rousseau 1966a, 325, 328-329, 362). The sentiment of justice is innate: it is an integral part of humankind (Rousseau 1966a, 362). Justice cannot be isolated from goodness.

Something that is good cannot be unjust (Rousseau 1966a, 367). Consciousness is the innate principle of justice and virtue we are using to judge our own actions as well as others’ behaviors (Rousseau 1966a, 376). Every sentiment that is innate has to be strengthened and developed through educational means (Fermon 1994, 434).

Educational practices as well as activities of ethical raising consciousness in the workplace could benefit from Goethe’s intuitive approach of knowledge processes (Franses and Wride 2015). If the sentiment of justice is really innate, then it is necessarily involved in all aspects of our own existence. Why are there so many expressions of injustice, if the sentiment of justice is really innate? Such contradiction undermines one’s capacity to put the innate sentiment of justice into reality. We naturally feel what is just or unjust. But various causes and conditioning factors could distort such sentiment, so that someone could feel comfortable (or not), when facing social, economic, political, and religious/spiritual injustice. Moral education in the workplace could unveil such discrepancy between the innate sentiment of justice and the various manifestations of injustice in the daily organizational life.

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Justice is the highest virtue (Goethe 2011, 224, Faust II). The Just as well as the Evil cannot give birth to really just outcomes: most of the time, we are not living ‘in the depths of our self ’ (Goethe 2010, 84-85). However, the Good is always good (Goethe 2010, 88). We are never quite sure if we are actually behaving in the right way.

We are aware of our wrong conducts and words. But we do not have any certainty about right actions and words (Goethe 2010a, 608). The main motive for realizing the good should be our love for the Good (Goethe 2010, 98). Love is a great virtue, since it is eternal (Goethe 2010, 56, 59). It is a voluntary gift of our self (Goethe 2010 61).Loving someone is already preparing our mind and heart to lose him/her (Goethe 2011, 245, Faust II). Love is strengthening itself (Goethe 2010, 131). Love is life, and our spirit is the life of love (Goethe 2010, 132). We do not have an innate knowledge of good and evil. Reason could be helpful to distinguish good and evil, in given situations. But loving good is an innate sentiment (Rousseau 1966a, 378). We are undertaking our judgment before knowing the real import of good and evil (Rousseau 1966a, 382). Some actions could be wrong in themselves, while having quite good effects on the whole reality. Rousseau acknowledged that the annihilation of particular evils in some situations could raise the level of the general (common) good. In other situations, such particular (and existentially-based) evils could be useful to the whole itself, and even more useful than the good we could try to impose (Rousseau 1971a, 245-246). Everything is good (Rousseau 1966a, 35). It then means that there is no original sin (Cassirer 2012, 55). What is intrinsically good (Goodness-itself) and intrinsically beautiful (Beauty-itself) can be intuitively felt throughout internalization processes. Vanity makes us considering that the qualities we don’t have are worthless (Rousseau, 1988, 32). The good is the beautiful that is put into action (Rousseau 1988, 32-33). Goodness-itself cannot be isolated from Beauty-itself. We always love Beauty, although we cannot define it (Rousseau 1966a, 374). Beauty is indivisible (Goethe 2011, 384, Faust II). The Beautiful (or Beauty-itself) is emanating from God (Goethe 2010, 84). The essence of the Beautiful comes from its self-emergence and becoming. We can enjoy beautiful things, beings, and phenomena. However, the Beautiful overcomes the power of human mind. Beauty-itself can never be an object for human mind. We are unable to ask “Why is such thing beautiful?”, since we cannot compare those beautiful things with Beauty-itself (Goethe 2011a, 593-594). We can feel that some things, beings, or phenomena are beautiful. But we cannot make any rational connection between such limited beauty and the Beauty-itself. The sense of honesty and beauty can help us to overcome ourselves (Rousseau 1988, 72-73). Being honest is focusing on social utility and justice (Rousseau 1988, 452). If loving good is an innate sentiment and if we cannot naturally distinguish good and evil, then what is the real function of the innate sentiment of good? Rousseau did not explain his paradoxical assertion. However, we could certainly say that the innate sentiment of good looks like the innate sentiment of justice. What is innate is the sentiment itself, but not its object (justice, good). Moral education in the workplace and thus ethical leadership could be put into practice, insofar as organizational members keep such

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distinction in their mind. The innate sentiment of good and of justice expresses the basically natural character of good and of justice. It does not guarantee that it will be optimally actualized in every situation. Ethical leaders have the capacity to bridge the gap between the innate sentiment of good and of justice, on one hand, and the hardly definable frontiers between good and evil, on the other hand.

Unveiling the Process of Becoming-Who-We-Are: Self-Identity in the Workplace Existing is seeing our heart and reason competing with each other: becoming-who-we-are (Rousseau) Being human implies that heart and reason are always competing with each other.

Infinite desires are promises of future pain (Rousseau 1988, 63, 527).It is easier to beoneself in every situation than to raise oneself beyond humankind (Rousseau 1966a, 95).Human being can only become who-he/she-can-be. Our own nature can only be improved by education (Rousseau 1988, 552). Human being could improve himself/ herself. It means that everybody could also contribute to social and political evils, particularly social inequality (Cassirer 2012, 94). We are who we want to be (Rousseau 1966a, 435). We must always be who-we-are, in every situation (Rousseau, 1966a, 458).

Rousseau was thus emphasizing freedom as free agency (Neuhouser 2013, 199).

Freedom implies not undertaking any action we do not want to accomplish (Rousseau 1967, 114). All of us are ignoring who-we-are. Self-understanding is always quite relative (Rousseau, 1966a, 348). In order to remainourselves authentically, there must be an intrinsic connection between our words and our actions (Rousseau 1966a, 40). Our own actions in the daily life help us to understand others’ actions (Rousseau 1988, 222, 471). If we remind that self-understanding is always relative (and thus fragmentary), we should presuppose that such principle could be applied to all organizational members, regardless of their hierarchical status. The relative character of organizational members’ self-understanding opens the door to various sense-making activities, such as values clarification workshops. Sense-making activities in the workplace should be opened to all organizational members rather than only to managers. In doing so, there could arise a sustainable connection between self-identity and organizational identity.

Existing is searching for the meaning of our human existence: remaining-who-we-are (Goethe) Being-itself is our eternal concern: finding out Being-itself beneath the surface (Goethe 2011, 199, Faust I; 251, Faust II). The basic worth of human being is its ultimate concern: everybody is his/her own ultimate concern (Goethe 2010a, 144).

Everyone is existing without really knowing the meaning of human existence itself (Goethe 2011, 28, Faust I). Being without any meaning of life is living in nothingness (Goethe 2010a, 91). Human being is wandering as long as he/she searches for something that makes him/her troubled (Goethe 2011, 33, Faust I). If the source of our philosophical questioning does not lie in our heart, then we will be unable to have any

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satisfactory (and preliminary) response to such questioning (Goethe 2011, 42, Faust I). Heart is the source of faith, faithful love, and eternal fervour (Goethe 2011, 140, Faust I). Every word must imply a given set of specific meanings (Goethe 2010, 5152). Words are used to build up systems of ideas, values, and beliefs (Goethe 2011, 89, Faust I). Every word (and action or judgment) must be understood out of its historical origin (Goethe 2011, 311, Faust II; Goethe 2011a, 193). We always remain who-weare (Goethe 2011, 83, Faust I). But who-we-were is not exactly the same as who-weare-now. In any present self, there is a power of self-transcendence, so that the future self is a projection made by the present self (Goethe 2010a, 44-45). However, remaining-who-we-are is safeguarding what is essential in our own self (our basic nature: Goethe 2010a, 364-365). Being unable to remain who-we-are makes us losing everything (Goethe 2010, 127). Self-confidence is a prerequisite for well-being (Goethe 2011, 91, Faust I). In every self, there is a world of desires and hunches (Goethe 2010b, 48-49).

But for knowing who-we-are, we must learn to live with others. Our mind and heart should focus on others’ qualities and talents rather than on our own self(Goethe 2010a, 604, 675). Living with others learns us very important things about human life, others’ self and our own self (Goethe 2011a, 531). Ethical leaders are altruistic and humble. They are always caring for others’ wellbeing (Mahsudet al. 2010, 565; Hassan et al. 2013, 136). Ethical leaders are favouring the wellbeing of all stakeholders.

However, in doing so, there could be a discrepancy between the way ethical leaders are perceived by their subordinates and the way top managers and directors are perceiving them. Both perceptions of the ethical character of leaders do not necessarily coincide (Kalshovenet al. 2016, 510). Organizational life is always a mix of contradictory perceptions and interpretations, because of the presence of various systems of meanings and symbols. The decisive test is the extent to which such contradictions are widespread in all organizational units and departments. Every organizational member could have his/her own truth claims. The way organizational members could deepen the sense of altruism and humility depends on their capacity to adapt themselves to multiple truth claims. The most efficient way to address such challenge could be to focus on others’ qualities and talents. We should be able to acknowledge others’ a priori beliefs as being potentially humanizing viewpoints.

Self-love Everybody is emphasizing his/her self-love (Goethe, 2010, 89). Self-love does not imply that we are searching our own self-image everywhere (Goethe, 2010, 148). When our natural needs have been satisfactorily met, then our opinions are determining our decisions, words, and behaviors (Rousseau 1967, 54). Self-love is focusing on our natural needs and on self-preservation, while self-esteem implies that we are favouring ourselves and expecting that others will prioritize our own well-being. Self-esteem is born from the way we are comparing our own self to others’ self. Kindness, generosity, and love follow from self-love. Hatred and jealousy come from self-esteem (Rousseau 1966a, 276-277). Self-love could be changed into self-esteem (Rousseau 1966a, 306).

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It is particularly the case when the good is perverted: it then opens the door to jealousy, envy, vanity, cruelty, and (social) inequality (Cladis 1995, 196). Rousseau believed that any socially-based inequality in the civilized society could never be justified (Niimura 2016, 893). Self-esteem is a social construct (Thomas 1991, 207). Self-esteem could be changed into virtuous behavior, insofar as it is extended to others (Rousseau 1966a, 329). A very high level of self-esteem makes impossible to be hurt by others’ contempt.

Whoever is good and honest is not adversely affected by others’ judgment (Rousseau 1988, 132). Human being is characterized by self-love. Self-love does not depend on circumstances, customs, and laws. It is always determining the way the individual thoughts, speaks, and behaves (Rousseau 1988, 475). Natural social identity does not exist at all. That’s why a social contract could arise (Inston 2010, 402). Knowing the best way to distinguish self-love and self-esteem is an important issue for every organizational member, since it could improve his/her existential possibilities to be altruistic, regardless of his/her social, economic, political, and even religious/spiritual status. So, ethical training sessions could define self-esteem as a distortion of self-love.

Acknowledging the worth of self-love does not mean that self-esteem is morally justified.

Criticizing the way self-esteem is arising and deploying itself in the organizational life and culture could help organizational member to look at self-love in a more realistic way.

Freedom Freedom has to be acquired everyday (Goethe 2011, 479, Faust II). Freedom lies in our heart (Goethe 2010b, 49). People who strongly believe to be free are much less free than others who do not have such belief (Goethe 2011a, 218). We are the masters of our own life (Rousseau 1988, 168). The laws of one’s heart are those laws that the individual has imposed to himself/herself (Rousseau 1988, 188, 304).When the excellent and the worst are mixed together in a given situation we are confronted with, we are facing a really difficult and important choice (Rousseau 1988, 281). The real origin of moral evil lies in human freedom (Rousseau 1988, 582; Rousseau 1966a, 366). Evil is actualized and built up by human beings. There is no other evil than the evil we are creating through our actions. The Universe is characterized by a unified order, so that there cannot be any holistic evil (Rousseau 1966a, 366; Cladis 1995, 187). Denying the existence of evil would justify anybody who undertakes wrong and harmful actions (Rousseau 1971a, 245). Being free is choosing actions that could favour our selfinterest. Every action depends on the will of a free being. Our actions make us free beings (Rousseau 1966a, 365). Freedom is not something we hold forever. Freedom is rather always acquired through actions that are rooted in given (existentially-based) situations. Understanding existentially-based freedom could help organizational members to better circumscribe the required conditions for exercising their freedom in the organizational setting.

There is no action (effect) without will (cause): acting requires the will to act. The (Divine) will is moving the whole Universe. We can only observe the will (to do something) through given actions (Rousseau 1966a, 355, 360). Being free implies the

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will to do what we can really do (principle of reality) as well as the fact that we are doing what is pleasant for us (principle of pleasure) (Rousseau 1966a, 99). Being free implies acting, comparing (and judging), and choosing (the good or the evil) (Rousseau 1966a, 357, 364-365). Being free is choosing actions that are not dependent on God’s Providence (Rousseau 1966a, 365). We only love what is pleasant for us (Rousseau 1966a, 304). Doing what we want to do does not necessarily make us happier: if we are self-sufficient, it could produce happiness. But if we depend on others, then actualizing our wills would not necessarily make us happier, since our needs exceed our powers and skills (Rousseau 1966a, 100). We could be dependent on things (Nature), or on people (Society). Being dependent on things does not have any moral dimension (vices or virtues), so that it does not impact our own freedom. Being dependent on people has a deep moral dimension, since it could open the door to vices or virtues. Such dependence could radically influence our own freedom. Morality then favours virtues rather than vices. Rousseau asserted that national laws and international treaties/ conventions could transform Society (dependence on people) into Nature (dependence on things) (Rousseau 1966a, 100-101). But the only way to realize such paradigmatic change is to raise morality to the ultimate level of unconditional virtue. Ethical leaders should be able to modify their leadership style in order to increase mutual trust in the organizational setting (Tuan 2012, 143). Rousseau strongly believed that the wisest do not need any law and regulation (Rousseau 1966a, 109). Ethical leaders do not need laws and regulations. They know how they should behave, in every situation. But such wise people seem to be quite rare. That’s why Rousseau believed that morality is basically involved in the social contract (Vauléon 2014, 101). Thus, there is an interconnectedness between politics and ethics (Pignol 2010, 47).Our money we actually own could be used to exercise our freedom, while the money we would like to get is the way for self-subjection (Rousseau 1963, 70).Giving up our own freedom is renouncing our own duties as well as the rights of humankind (Rousseau 1966, 46). A will which is not basically free does not have any moral dimension. Then, every action that is grounded on such will is expressing moral indifferentism (Rousseau 1966, 46). Power and freedom are the first tools for ensuring our self-preservation, and thus self-love (Rousseau 1966, 50).

Reason, sentiments, and passions Rousseau was enhancing the right balance between reason and sentiments. Reason is the basic characteristic of human being. In the daily life, our thoughts, words, and actions are rather impregnated with sentiments (Rousseau 1988, 299). Reason is deceitful. Only consciousness (and thus sentiments) could be a reliable ground for our way of thinking, speaking, and acting (Rousseau 1966a, 372). Human beings are acting and thinking, but they also are loving and sentient beings. Sentiments and emotions are the means to perfect human reason (Rousseau 1966a, 264). We need both reason and consciousness (and thus sentiments) (Rousseau 1971, 119). Sentiments depend on ideas (Rousseau 1988, 628-629). Philosophizing is using our consciousness (Rousseau 1966a,

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535). Consciousness is acting through sentiments rather than through judgments (Rousseau 1966a, 377). The moral character of our actions lies in our judgments. If moral goodness is complying to our own nature, then any form of wickedness is distorting such goodness. But if moral goodness is not complying to human nature, then we are naturally wicked people, so that any expression of goodness would deny our own nature (Rousseau 1966a, 373). Ethical consciousness-raising activities in the organizational setting cannot avoid the search for the right balance between reason and sentiments, since both reason and sentiment are basic components of human life.

Excluding sentiments may be as harmful as denying the worth of rationality. Sentiments are not totally subjected to the judgment of reason. Reason is not a simple tool for highlighting good sentiments. Rather, the balance of reason and sentiments could depend on the particularities of the situation. That’s the way Rousseau was addressing the issue.

Existing is being sensitive. Sentiments precede ideas and opinions: self-love, fear (to suffer and to die), desire (for better well-being) are basic sentiments of human life (Rousseau 1966a, 377-378). The primary component of human reason is built up by sensitive perceptions. Intellectual reason follows the way sense organs are perceiving reality (Rousseau 1966a, 157). Sense organs are the primary tools of knowledge (Rousseau 1966a, 333). We can learn to exercise our sense organs so that our sensations could rightly orientate our judgment (Rousseau 1966a, 167). Sensations are not deceitful. Only the way we are judging our sensations could be deceitful. Our mistakes and errors come from our judgments, and not from our sensations (Rousseau 1966a, 265-266). Evils come from errors and mistakes (about our acquired knowledge: ‘what we think we know’) rather than from our ignorance (‘what we actually do not know’) (Rousseau 1971a, 242). However, leaders could fall into the trap of moral mistakes, because of their wrong beliefs either about what is morally right, or about the socalled ‘members of the moral community’ (Price 2000, 180). Personal judgments are primarily ‘fore-judgments’, that is, judgments which are undertaken before having all required and relevant information. Being aware of our sensations implies to judge them (Rousseau 1966a, 269). In his/her ‘fore-judgments’, human being could change given sensations into appearances. Sensations do not express anything else than what is perceived by sense organs. But when we are changing sensations into appearances, we are falling into an illusory interpretation (Rousseau 1966a, 267). Sense organs are naturally producing sensations that have to be ‘a priori true’. Truth is in the (material) things, beings, and phenomena which are perceived by our sense organs. It is never expressed in our own judgments. However, we could (a posteriori) criticize the import of such sensations (Rousseau 1966a, 352). Appearances are sensations that have been subjected to fore-understanding. They open the door to prejudices. As long as forejudgments are taken, they are justifying any prejudice to deploy itself in our mind and heart. Appearances do not provide us any knowledge about others’ happiness/ unhappiness (Rousseau 1966a, 315). Other beings are the objects of our own sensations, and thus cannot be identified to our own self (Rousseau 1966a, 350). Sensations could produce prejudices (or fore-judgments). In the organizational setting, ethical leaders

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could enhance the best way to check the truthfulness of given fore-judgments.

Organizational members could learn to make such assessment so that they could avoid the trap of stereotypes.

The basic weakness of human being comes from the imbalance between his/her strengths and his/her desires and passions. Our desires and passions require a huge amount of energy that our own strengths cannot provide. That’s why Rousseau recommended to reduce our desires in order to increase our own strengths (Rousseau 1966a, 211). Our natural passions are the main tools for our self-preservation, since they are contributing to make us free beings. That’s why we must never try to get rid of them (Rousseau 1966a, 274-275). Self-love is the real basis of our natural passions, and is thus intrinsically good (Rousseau 1966a, 275).All passions are grounded on sensitiveness. Our imagination can change some passions into vices (Rousseau 1966a, 284). Morality is at stake only when our passions involve others. As long as our sensitiveness is focusing on our own self, it does not have any moral dimension (Rousseau 1966a, 285). Morality begins when we reach the realm that is beyond our self. Morality is linked to interpersonal relationships, social relationships, relations with Nature (and its ecosystems and natural beings), and even relations with the Infinite/Unconditional (or God). Everything personal that does not affect our relationships with others, social groups and the whole society, Nature and natural beings, or even the Infinite/Unconditional (or even God) does not have any moral dimension. The main ethical challenge is identifying the most efficient ways to assess such an impact. It is particularly important for ethical leaders, since in the organizational life every decision or action could adversely affect those types of relationships.

Goethe believed that reason should lead our goodwill and that goodness is the real ground of every heart. Human being uses his/her reason so poorly that he/she is acting as an animal (Goethe 2011, 32, Faust I). Reason leads our good will (Goethe 2011, 227, Faust II). Perfecting the use of our reason implies having made errors and mistakes in the past (Goethe, 2011, 339, Faust II). When our passions are too strong and powerful, they could make us losing our rational reflection (Goethe 2010b, 98).

Passions could destroy what reason has built up for a more or less long period of time (Goethe 2010a, 428). Sentiments are everything (Goethe 2011, 160, Faust I).Goodness is the ground of every heart (Goethe 2011, 225, Faust II). Searching for the good requires to have good thoughts, attitudes, words, and behaviors (Goethe 2011, 232, Faust II).We should always be able to rationally explain the basic motives of our actions and decisions (Goethe 2010a, 695). What can affect others’ heart comes from one’s heart. Ethical leaders make their subordinates more satisfied with their job. In doing so, they are increasing subordinates’ performance and good citizenship behaviors (Sharif and Scandura 2014, 191; Yang 2014, 521). Our heart replaces what the universe cannot produce (Goethe 2011, 404-405, Faust II). Goethe has unveiled the fact that goodness is the dynamic center of our heart. It means that anything that arises from our heart must cross the prism pointing towards goodness. Over the years, organizational ethics is built up on a narrative basis. Organizational members could

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‘read’ it as a quasi-text, that is, as a construct that shares some components with written texts. Insofar as goodness remains at the midst of organizational ethics, it will determine the real contents of main organizational values and norms of behavior.

Knowledge We can know nothing at all. Our ignorance is unavoidable (Goethe 2011, 35, Faust I). We should clearly know our unavoidable ignorance. Even part of our knowledge remains useless in our own life (Goethe 2011, 57, Faust I). Human being could believe he/she is a whole, while he/she is only a small part of reality (Goethe 2011, 67, Faust I). It is a way to confuse human being with Divine being (Goethe, 2011, 82, Faust I).

It is a phenomenon of self-idolatry (Goethe 2011, 377, Faust II). In our existentiallybased situation, we are learning what we can actually learn (Goethe 2011, 90, Faust I).

Situations should never determine who-we-are. We should rather control the way various situations are influencing who-we-are-becoming (Goethe 2010a, 501). The attachment to our cultural knowledge produces an attitude of pride that implies a very high level of egocentrism and a strong certainty to hold ultimate truths (Goethe 2010a, 531, 535; Goethe 2011, 113, Faust I). The patterns for acquiring and enhancing cultural knowledge vary from a societal culture to another, and even from a religion/spirituality to another. Ethical leaders should address the issue of cultural (and religious/spiritual) knowledge in unveiling the plurality of worldviews and systems of meanings and symbols. Ethical leaders do not necessarily embrace moral relativism, because of the contents of their cultural identity (Hrenyk et al. 2016, 71). People could jointly search for the Unknown as soon as they agree about objects, beings, phenomena, and events that are clearly known (Goethe 2010a, 608; Goethe 2011a, 59). It is particularly the case if the Unknown is the Infinite/Unconditional. We should know the world as it really is (Goethe 2010a, 669). Goethe was concerned with phenomena, since phenomena are expressing life as it is. Zemplén (2003) explained how Goethe was looking at the whole universe of phenomena as implying the interconnectedness between all phenomena. Our intuition could help us know the reality of such interconnectedness, while being ignorant of its intrinsic meaning (if it has any intrinsic meaning).

For Goethe a single phenomenon, a single experiment can prove nothing; it is a member of a great chain, and is significant only within this context. In modern science the experiment is used to test or extend a theory or a theoretical proposition. The phenomena are merely given, the theory is that makes sense of them, gives them order.

For Goethe, however, phenomena have intrinsic importance, and they bear certain affinities and relationships to other phenomena (Zemplén 2003, 269).

Our own knowledge is as much limited as human intellect actually is. All our knowledge could be either false, or useless, or even used to maximize our pride. There is little knowledge that nurtures our well-being (Rousseau 1966a, 213). Bewilderment comes from what-we-believe-to-know (Rousseau 1966a, 213). Indeed, the most important thing we should know is our huge ignorance. Rousseau thus endorsed the basic Socratic principle (Rousseau 1966a, 270, 348). The more we know, the more we

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should know the extent of our ignorance, and the more we should be humble. Rousseau asserted that the less people know, the more they want to share their knowledge with others. The more we know, the less we want to share our knowledge. We then know the scope of our ignorance (Rousseau 1966a, 440; Rousseau 1971, 81). Rousseau (1971, 93) defined four types of ignorance: (1) blunt ignorance: it arises from a bad heart and mind; (2) criminal ignorance: it neglects our duties towards humankind and develops multiple vices. Reason is impaired. Those criminally ignorant people are like beasts; (3) reasonable ignorance: it is limiting our curiosity to our natural faculties and capacities; (4) modest ignorance: it requires to love virtues and focuses on everything that could improve human heart and mind. It is not concerned with other issues, such as others’ opinions (Rousseau 1971, 93). Ignorance could favour either the good, or the evil. It is only the natural state of human being. Acquiring more knowledge could make us losing our moral norms and virtues (such as honesty, integrity, and authenticity).

Integrity is linked to the continuity between leader’s words and behaviors (Crews 2015, 44). Integrity, honesty, fairness, caring and authenticity are usually considered as basic virtues of ethical leadership (Engelbrecht et al. 2017, 369; Lawton and Páez 2015, 641). If acquiring knowledge opens the way for criticizing the ultimate worth of virtues, then it is building up a corrupt state of things (Rousseau 1971, 103-104). The passion for acquiring more knowledge could be nurtured either by a high level of pride (and thus by the desire to get public renown), or by a naturally-based curiosity which provokes an innate desire for well-being, although such desire is never totally satisfied (Rousseau 1966a, 214). Signs are representing given objects. They absolutely require a fragmentary idea about the represented objects. Otherwise, they would be empty and meaningless (Rousseau 1966a, 135). What is meaningless can only provoke the reflex of revolt (Rousseau 1988, 129). So, organizational ethics should favor meaningful experiences in the daily life. If not, organizational members could conclude that their organizational leaders are morally impotent, when designing and applying organizational ethics.

Describing the Continuous Search for Human Happiness in the Organizational Life Human Happiness is Always Relative (Rousseau) Being deeply wise would make virtues useless. We need to develop virtues, because we are not alreadywise people (Rousseau 1963, 108-109).Wisdom without sensitiveness is useless. Sensitiveness without wisdom could be self-destructive. We should develop as much wisdom as sensitiveness (Rousseau 1966a, 450). Pleasures should be sacrificed to the profit of our collective duties towards humankind. That’s the only way to be happy (Rousseau 1988, 94). Hope is the real expression of happiness. When we actually get the object of our desires, we are much less happy than when we were still trying to get it (Rousseau 1988, 681). We do not know what is happiness, or unhappiness. In human life, pure sentiments do not exist. Every sentiment or emotion is mixed with other sentiments and emotions. Being happy is bearing a very low quantity of pains, while being unhappy implies a very low quantity of pleasures. Suffering provokes the

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desire to be released from it, while pleasure is creating the desire to maximize it (Rousseau 1966a, 93). The happiness of ‘natural man’ is to avoid suffering. Being happy is then being healthy and free. Our basic needs are then being met. The happiness of the ‘moral man’ cannot be identified to that of the ‘natural man’ (Rousseau 1966a, 229). Their needs are not similar (Rousseau 1966a, 267). Human happiness is always relative. Only God is absolutely happy (Rousseau 1966a, 287). God cannot search for happiness. God is infinitely, and thus unconditionally happy. Searching for happiness at every moment of our life makes us unhappy (Rousseau 1966a, 344). We feel something pleasant when we want to feel it in that way (Rousseau 1966a, 463).

Human being is searching for happiness, since he/she is finite and conditioned being.

Existential finitude makes the quest for happiness possible. Human being is always relative and thus fragmentary and conditionally-oriented being. In the organizational setting, any search for happiness could be strengthened by ethical leaders. However, ethical leaders cannot consider such quest as a tool to improve employees’ performance.

The search for happiness is an existentially-based quest. It should never be used as a tool for another (organizational) end.

Happiness lies in the present moment (Goethe) Wise people are unable to face novelties, since every phenomenon or event seems to be identical to what they have lived in the past (Goethe 2011, 301, Faust II).Wise people do not have any propensity to favour novelties rather than traditions (Goethe 2010a, 357). How could we become wise persons without knowing how to be wise ‘in God’? How could we show universal and unconditional love without feeling the presence of the ‘God of Love’ (Goethe 2010, 69)? The Good and the Beautiful are emanating from God (Goethe 2010, 84).Goodness-itself and Beauty-itself are then grounded on the Infinite/Unconditional. Goethe believed that God is the ultimate ground of life: every living being is thus inherently connected to God (Goethe 2010a, 483). The connection between human being and God is unveiling the gap between the finite/conditioned and the Infinite/Unconditional. Divine happiness arises from eternity (as the absence of the flow of time), while human happiness lies in the present moment (Goethe 2011, 394, Faust II; Goethe 2010b, 40). Everybody could build up his/her own happiness, out of the present moment. There is no innate capacity for happiness.

There are various roads to happiness. We have to learn how to reach happiness in our own daily life (Goethe 2010a, 110). Being happy is behaving in a just and good way. It also requires to relativize our desires, goals, and expectations (Goethe 2010a, 557, 674). Goodness and justice are not enough. We must never absolutize our own desires, goals, and expectations. Otherwise, we would look at us as if we were absolute beings, that is, gods. The present moment is so powerful and magnificent that any hope is useless (Goethe 2010, 161, 201, 203).The present moment is impregnated with so many possibilities-to-be that any absolute focus on the future could be useless. The present moment could nurture any process of change, internally and externally. The Peace of God makes every soul full of (religiously-/spiritually-based) happiness. Our

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reason cannot provide us such deep happiness. This is not an absolute happiness, but rather a finite happiness that is connected to the Infinite/Unconditional. The meaning of the Unnamed/Unlimited lies in our heart (Goethe 2008, 51, 53, 99). Every being who want to be united with the Infinite Being (God) has to dissolve himself/herself into nothingness (Goethe 2008, 103). That’s the only way to extend our finite happiness beyond its existential frontiers. In cross-cultural and inter-religious dialogue between business partners, such possibility to extend human happiness beyond its intrinsic limitations could be quite helpful. It could favour mutual understanding and make us opening our mind to other systems of meanings and symbols.

Conclusion Organizational ethics does not necessarily make Goodness-itself and human good interconnected. Indeed, it is rarely the case. However, such interconnectedness could be realized through a religious/spiritual paradigm (Good-itself is then identified to God), or through philosophical lenses (Good-itself as the infinite ground for every human goodness). Human beings have an innate sentiment of justice and goodness (Rousseau). However, they can hardly define the frontiers between the just and the unjust, between good and evil. Rousseau made us quite aware that the sentiment is innate, while its object is continuously moving: justice and goodness do not have fixed meaning and import. So, the most important ethical challenge is to distinguish justice and injustice, good and evil. We can never be sure that we have actually identified the right meaning and import of justice and goodness. Rousseau emphasized our huge ignorance about reality. Being finite and conditioned means being ignorant about the various components of reality. It implies the impossibility to grasp the whole reality as well as its meaning. Everything that is existentially-based expresses our deep ignorance about beings, things, events, and phenomena.

Rousseau and Goethe made two apparently opposite components of self-identity coexisting: becoming-who-we-are is as much important as remaining-who-we-are. It means that becoming-who-we-are cannot imply to deny essential aspects of our selfidentity. The essential self is the self that should always remain the same over the years. However, there is room for continuous becoming at the midst of the self, but around the realm of the essential self. The realm of the self-in-becoming requires selflove (but not self-esteem), freedom, and the balance between reason and sentiments.

Organizational identity should never shake the foundations of the essential self. It could only favour the development of the self-in-becoming. Living-in-the-organization is searching for (finite and conditioned) happiness. Every organizational member could only find out the present moment as the relative source of his/her happiness. Every present moment is a possibility of self-transcendence. Although human happiness is quite relative, it could be a real opportunity to be connected to the Infinite/ Unconditional (Goethe).

UniversitĂŠ de Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada

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Ontology of Dialogic Inquisition: A Study in Relation to Kena and Praçna Upaniñads, and Bergsonism Prabha Shankar Dwivedi

T

he idea of inquisition is integral to dialogic intuition where the instinct of inquiry may emerge from logical reasoning or irrational logic, but in either of the cases, dialogical thinking is common. Dialogic engagement, basically, relies on logical inquiry, that, on the other level, serves to be an incessant source of processed knowledge. It can be witnessed in all the foundational texts— be it from Greek antiquity or Indian classical knowledge system. The primary texts of the Western philosophy are written in the form of dialogues where philosophical postulations are the responses to the sheer philosophical inquisitive interchanges. Plato’s dialogues are written in the form of contentious discourse, based on question-answer methodology to elicit critical responses. The outstanding method in Plato's earlier dialogues, says Richard Robison, is the Socratic elenchus. 'Elenchus' in the wider sense means examining a person with regard to a statement he has made, by putting to him questions calling for further statements, in the hope that they will determine the meaning and the truthvalue of his first statement. Most often the truth-value expected is falsehood; and so 'elenchus' in the narrower sense is a form of cross-examination or refutation. In this sense it is the most striking aspect of the behaviour of Socrates in Plato's early dialogues. He is always putting to somebody some general question, usually in the field of ethics. Having received an answer (let us call it the primary answer), he asks many more questions (78).

This method of dialogism is known as Socratic or elenchus method. It shows that inquiry purports to further the dialogues, and the content in the dialogic thinking is either a question or an answer to some question. Also, in the Vedic tradition of knowledge, it is well known that the Vedas sustained through the dialogic pedagogy, initially in the oral forms, and then later in the written scripts. The relation of processing Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Vol. 42, No. 1 (64-72) © 2019 by Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute

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of knowledge in all possible forms is associated with dialogism that mainly relies on inquiry. This paper intends to explore and understand the being of inquisition through Praśna and Kena Upaniñads, and certain Bergsonian concepts dealt by Gilles Deleuze in his Bergsonism. The Kena and the Praçna Upaniñads illustrate certain basic principles of the Indian tradition of knowledge where it is laid down that the knowledge seekers must be exasperated and examined through a certain period of time, during which they must exhibit the real aspiration with austerity, chastity, faith and devotion towards learning, and the method to be adopted for teaching should be the question and answer method, means, disciples should be taught through explaining the answers to their questions. The questions should also be tested on the scale of being real and genuine for bringing into discussion the topic or the issue that may lead to the exaltation of life.

The very first aphorism itself of the Kenopani ñad emphasises on the fact that the question doesn’t lie beyond the periphery of its answer. A question arises from at least its primitive answer which gets shaped as per the suitability in the aftermath of the fully developed question. For the question to take its proper form, its answer is indispensable that exists somewhere in the background. A question is also seen as a further investigation for the clearer delineation of an existing fact that may be partially known or wrapped in complete ignorance. Let us consider the first question asked in the Kenopani=ad, where the very first word of the first verse is ‘kena’, an interrogative pronoun, which may mean ‘by whom? with whom? by what? or with what?’ This interrogative pronoun ‘kena’ puts the phenomenal worldly activities to a question asking the factor or commanding force or the regulatory authority behind all this. It asks, “keneñitaà patati preñitaàmanaù kenapräëaù prathamaù praitiyuktaù/ keneñitäà väcamimäà vadanti cakñuùçrotraàka u devo yunakti. 2.I.581.” (By whom/by what the mind is set to motion? Who does couple the first life-breath to give a start to the life?

By whom/by what does this speech move? who is that god who yokes the capacity to see and hear together?). The question that is asked is a fundamental question of philosophy that seeks to know the governing force behind all transactions of this world. The answer that is recorded to this question does satisfy the spirit of the immediate question, but raises further query in the same line. It says, ‘That which is the ear of the ear (çrotrasya çrotraà), the mind of the mind (manaso mano), the speech of the speech (väco ha väcaà), the life-breath of the life-breath, is the eye of the eye, too. The constant pursuers transcend themselves from this world and attain immortality.1 Here, the answer certainly satisfies the question asked, but simultaneously raises another question about the identity, existence and realm of that which is addressed as the ear of the ear and the eye of the eye. The answer continues, also addressing the indirect questions lying within the answer, explaining the inexplicable Being that lives there where neither goes the eye nor reaches the speech nor even the mind. It is that which we do not discern and we do not apprehend; it is beyond our cognizance. We do not know and cannot devise the way how to explain this Being. We heard from our predecessors that it is other than the discernible and beyond the undiscernible.2 This

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Upaniñad puts forth the best example of dialogic inquisition where the conception of the dialogue or dialogic thinking progresses from a question that arises from the phenomenological facts perceptible to every eye, and seeks its relation to the ultimate reality of the world that is believed to be the governing force. But the response that comes forth as the answer professes many more inherent questions which further need answers, and thus continues the process of dialogic intuition on the foundation of contentious inquisition.

The relation of a question to its answer is very much poststructuralist in nature where the meaning of a code is another code and that of another is another one; this process of postponement of desired objective that is meaning in the case of deconstruction is loosely termed as Différance3 by Derrida. So is the case of a question and answer; an answer to a question leads to further question, and similarly the process can go on furthering the dialogical responses. The Kenopaniñads explains this argument more clearly with the appropriate examples, where all the answers/explanations being given to satisfy the query pertaining to the Being and existence of Brahman leads more to his inexplicable Being that is beyond measures and is unfathomable. We can also observe a particular pattern here in the answers; the argument in response to the question stimulates curiosity by putting forth many other questions which have the single common answer by the use of more than one pronoun to refer to a single noun.

Let us examine the further responses to the very first question along with many other tutelary questions raised from the preceding answers. It says, ‘That (yad) which is not revealed by speech but by which the speech is revealed, that truly is Brahman not the one that is worshipped here. That which is not conceived by mind but by which the mind is conceived, that truly is Brahman, not the one that is worshipped here. That which is not discerned by the eyes but by which the eyes are discerned, that truly is Brahman, not the one that is worshipped here.4 ’ Further, we can notice here that the question is employed as an instrument to establish the greatness of the thing or person that remains in the centre of discussion.

In Gilles Deleuze’s Bergsonism, we come across the similar theoretical propositions in respect of the Being of a ‘question’. Deleuze, unlike the Kenopani ñad, puts forth the theoretical notions of Bergson with regard to the various aspects of ‘inquisition’.

He, at the outset itself of the first chapter ‘Intuition as Method’, starts disinterring the existence of a question in terms of its validity. He, in place of evaluating the answer on the scale of true or false, argues to weigh the question. It’s true that we never adjudge a question on the scale of its being true or false as we do in the case of an answer or a solution that never has its own independent existence disentangled from a question. The accuracy of an answer is more the matter of the level of the understanding/intelligence of the person who is attempting to satisfy the question; it always has an objective though sometimes poses to be an enigmatic entity, properly shaped in abstraction. Now, different persons attempt to achieve the goal of concretising the abstract shape that already exists overtly to those who are informed in the field, and covertly to those who attempt to answer it without having sufficient

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ground in the area from where the question emerges. Deleuze, in this regard, writes, We are wrong to believe that the true and the false can only be brought to bear on solutions that they only begin with solutions. This prejudice is social (for society, and the language that transmits its order-words (mots d’ordre), “Set up” [donnent] readymade problems, as if they were drawn out of “the city’s administration filing cabinets, and force us to “solve” them, leaving us only a thin margin of freedom) (15).

Deleuze sees the relation of raising a problem with the power of invention as it brings forth something that was not existing earlier, but the relation of the problem and its solution is very clearly mentioned in Bergsonism in the following words: “. . . the effort of invention consists most often in raising the problem, in creating the term in which it will be stated. The stating and solving of the problem are here very close to being equivalent. The truly great problems are set forth only when they are solved”(1516). He, probing the validity and accuracy of an answer, keeps on exploring the unquestioned entity of a question that governs the answer by exercising control over its genesis. We can also see it otherwise that a question is evolved with its answer.

Deleuze, citing Bergson, says, “Humanity only sets itself problems that it is capable of solving”(16). So, we can see that formulation of a question mere depends on its solution, first the solution is sought and understood whether it can be resolved or not, if the answer is affirmative then only the problem is posed. Deleuze, explaining Bergson’s remark, says, “In neither example is it a case of saying that problems are like the shadow of pre-existing solutions (the whole context suggests the contrary). Nor is it a case of saying that only the problems count. On the contrary, it is the solution that counts, but the problem always has the solution it deserves, in terms of the way in which it is stated. ” (16). Here, Deleuze’s argument, stating the Bergsonian notions in the same context, is establishing novel approach to understand a situation in this world where prejudices dominate the minds. People, most of the time, think in a set predetermined fashion unknowingly and unintentionally, as the traditional way of thinking was instilled in the very beginning stage of the shaping the inquisitive mind.

The inquisition that formulates the basics for searching for a solution considers problem to be infallible; its abstruseness and being unanswerable posit it as a stronger question.

While as per Deleuze’s argument, such questions themselves should be evaluated on the scale of being true or false, because the question decides its answer, and further, a lucid material of discussion/argument that is capable of being an answer to many questions serves to be the foundation of many questions consisting their answers in it. Deleuze’s claim is not such that it can be validated only by Humanities, but he says that the whole history of mathematics supports the contention that Bergson ensues.

If we approach this discourse from the point of view of a historicist who studies the history of humanities, we’ll find that this human world has been rolling off doing two things– the first is of constructing a problem and the second is solving it investing the complete power in doing so.

The Kenopaniñad brings into discussion a question that is very complex in nature, and the answer to this question, as per the text, is never complete; it always will be

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partial, because one who claims to have known Brahman doesn’t know Him. The third verse of the second section of the text says that the Brahman is known to him, who knows that he does not know Him, He is not known to the one, who claims to have known Him. He is not discerned by him who claims to have discerned Him, but he is understood by him who understands that he does not understand Him. 5 This verse shows the insufficiency of human mental capacity which can understand the worldly objects but not that is beyond. Here, the question being discussed brings into light a different sort of question that belongs to the core of philosophy i.e. mystic by nature.

Here, the verse indicates towards the fact that when one is able to realise the fact that Brahman is not a material object that can be known with the help of sensory organs, and therefore, he cannot understand Him, is the answer to the question about knowing Brahman, contrary to it those who claim to understand Him, actually fail to answer the question as He is beyond comprehension. He is not to be understood instead to be felt being approachable only as intuitive experience.

The Kenopaniñad, beginning with a question, moves forward with certain motives.

It intends to establishing Brahman over all other Vedic Gods and Goddesses, that too, using question as an instrument for the purpose. It, in a very thorough manner, proves the point that posing question or asking someone to solve a problem may lead to the superiority of the questioner. In this Upani ñad, the Brahman, who succeeds Vedic Gods proving His superiority over them not by fighting (as disharmony among the defeated can never lead to the victory that claims devotion) but by questioning the core of their superiority, makes them concede to His supremacy. He asks the Vedic Gods, who were having the established existence overcoming all sorts of problems crossing their ways, to solve some seemingly insignificant problems that even a common man can solve if posed by some other common man. But if the same problem is posed by someone who can invest his power/knowledge in it to make it tricky, it will be equally complex and difficult. Look at the following: tadabhyadra vat tamabhyavadat ko'sityagnirvähmasmityabrav éjjätavedävä ahamasméti. 4.III.588.

(He hurried towards Him and He asked him, “Who are you?”

He answered, “I am Agni,” “I am one who knows all that is begotten here.”) tasmiàstvayikià véryamityapédaà sarvaà daheyaà yadidaà påthivyämiti. 5. III.588.

(He further asked, “What power do you have?” Agni answered, “I have power to burn anything on this earth.”) tasmaitåëaà nidadh ä vetaddaheti tadupaprey ä ya sarvajavenatanna śaś ä ka dagdhuàsatataevanivavåte naitadaśakaà vijñätu yadetadyakñamiti. 6.III.588 (Then He put a blade of grass in front of him and asked him to burn that; He went towards it with all his power but could not burn it, and then came back saying that he could not know what power it is (that defeated him).)

In the similar manner, Väyu and Indra who like Agni had surpassed all other Vedic gods were put to solve some problems that finally they could not, and consequently,

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were bound to accept the supremacy of Brahman. This section of the Kenopani ñad very clearly shows that the difficulty or complexity of the problem more lies with the person who is posing/assigning it, when the problem is more associated with the superiority of the person who is posing it, the question should seem to be simple but more unsolvable while approached for solving. Here, Brahman to make Himself known with His superiority to the Vedic Gods and those of their devotees puts forth some problems of very common nature but with his implicit power which none of them could solve and indirectly lost their superiority to Him. In Praçnopaniñad, through certain references, it is emphatically laid down that to ask questions, one has to have greater concentration which one can attain by the austere practices, chastity, knowledge and faith. To make the sons of sages ready to receive the answers they were seeking and to equip them with more inquisitive minds, Sage Pippaläda asked them to stay with him for one more year with austerity, chastity, and faith as they were not found ready to receive the answers. Let us further understand the nature of questions through Praçnopaniñad where the sons of the great sages ask questions, which sage Pippaläda considers to be transcendental. If we pay close attention to the questions that are asked by Kausalya–“Whence is this life born? How does it come into this body? How does it distribute itself and establish itself? In what way does it depart? How does it support what is external? How does it support what relates to the self?”6, we can understand that the questions are very basic and are directly related to the topic of discussion i.e. ‘life’. So, the questions asked are not transcendental; however, it is the answer of the question that makes it transcendental or mystical. And beyond this, if we observe, we’ll come to know that the answers to the questions are ultimately and mainly concerning Brahman, who in the Upani =ads is proposed to be greater than all the Vedic gods through the abstract powers he possessed.

All the questions in the Praśnopaniñad are mainly concerned with ‘life’ i.e. the principal object of discussion in this Upaniñad but, we, eventually, find that all discussions lead only to the stronger affirmation of Brahman projecting ‘life’ i.e. the masculine element in the creation of a being, the principal agent making something alive synonymous with Brahman. When we look at the third question asked in the Prasnopani ñad, we find that in his answer to the series of questions asked by Kausalya, the son of Asvala, revered Pippaläda brings a very significant point to the notice when he says, “atipraśnän påcchasi, brahmiñöho’séti tasmät te’ham bravémi” (2.III.658). (You are asking questions that are highly transcendental. Because (I think) you are the most devoted to the Brahman, I will tell you). Here, we can understand that to ask grave and true questions one has to be very well grounded in the subject, one has to have sound knowledge of the subject. A question is always a two way process and also it can be asked by both the person involved/engaged in conversation. The teacher also asks a question to test the knowledge of the students, to check that to what extent the students could learn what was taught by the teacher; there is no other method to test the outcome. Further, the questions are also asked by the students to explore the unrevealed sides of the subjects being discussed. As the question is of transcendental nature, the answer would

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certainly be transcendental, complex; and to understand complex answer, one has to be ready before hand. This was the reason that sage Pippal äda asked all the Åñi Kumars to stay with him for one more year to be tuned to the subject more thoroughly to reach the stage where easily they can understand the answer to their questions.

The answers given by Pippaläda to the questions of various Åñi Kumars (sons of sages) explicate a very subtle relationship of a question with its answer. The question without its answer cannot be evaluated to be significant, crucial or completely meaningless as the answer bestows the status of being great or very significant to the question. This can very well be understood from any of the questions asked by the sons of sages. For instance, we can consider the question asked by Sukesa that was actually asked to him by the prince of the Koçala kingdom, “Bharadwäja, do you know the person with sixteen parts?” which sounds so common and seems that it can be answered in one word but when we look at the answer given by Pippal äda, we can understand the gravity of the question. He says, “Even here within the body, O dear, is that person in whom there sixteen parts arise . . . . He created life; from life, faith, ether, air, light, water, earth, sense organ, mind and food; from food, vital vigour, austerity, hymns, works, worlds and in the worlds name”7 and then he keeps on adding to this, and eventually, he concludes with the final answer to all the six questions asked by different persons, “Only this far do I know of that supreme Brahman. There is naught higher than that”8. Thus, we see that the questions relating to Brahman which were of both direct and indirect nature, were answered in detailed manner to make the readers or listeners understand about Brahman, who finally gets established as controller of this world and also as the creator of living and non-living beings through dialogic inquiry.

If we look at things in general context, we’ll find that life of a human being actually revolves around the problem and its solution. If solution to some problem emerges, we immediately raise some complex, and further more complex problems to spend the whole life in providing solution to it, and whole process is such that we are not aware of the fact that we are the only progenitors of these problems which require our whole life to solve them. Deleuze in this regard says, “The history of man, from the theoretical as much as from the practical point of view is that of the construction of the problems. It is here that humanity makes its own history, and becoming conscious of that activity is like the conquest of freedom” (16). Coming back to the point of discussion where the testimony of question was to be evaluated on the scale of true and false, we can easily understand that all the true problems arise from the solution while the false question disguised as a true question misleads the contestant for searching its answer which seems to be unprocurable while actually the contestant should understand the root of the question to question its validity for him. If we apply this formula in our day to day life, we’ll find that we spend our lives in finding out the solutions to most of false questions which actually and finally don’t lead to any substantial answers, but being ignorant of the fact that we also have the capacity to question the entity/testimony or validity of the question, we keep on searching for its non-substantial answers which at a point of time seem to have been procured but if we

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actually try to consider these as substantial answers to the questions, we fail to satisfy the questions. This point can well be understood from the following instance from our own lives. The most prevalent problem in our lives is, “How can we be incessantly happy?” In finding out a solution to this problem, we spend our whole life, but if we ponder over the validity of the problem, we’ll find that the question itself is false because “happiness” is a flickering state of mind that can never be constant as its existence itself rests in its opposite. In the words of Bharatamuni, ‘happiness’ is a ‘transitory state of mind’ vyabhicäri or sancäribhäva that comes and goes, we cannot make it stable by doing anything. So, in place of searching for the solution of such a problem, it would be better to evaluate this problem on the scale of true and false and realize its falsity. Deleuze finds prejudice as the main reason behind why we do not question the validity of a question. He writes, “Moreover, this prejudice goes back to childhood, to the classroom: It is the school teacher who “poses” the problems; the pupil’s task is to discover the solutions. In this way we are kept in a slavery. True freedom lies in a power to decide, to constitute problems themselves. And this “semidivine” power entails the disappearance of false problems as much as the creative upsurge of true one.” (15). We hardly go against what is instilled in us from the beginning making us slavish not to question the master, one who dominates us, commands our mind and thus we refrain from questioning the question to reach its real solution. If the falsity of question is understood by the solver or the questioner himself then the majority of the hindrances in solving problems will automatically be removed from the way. It is the false question that appears to be true and engages the solver the most and finally leaves him with no solution and the solver finds himself deceived eventually. Deleuze, in this context, writes, “This is how many philosophers fall into circular arguments: conscious of the need to take the text of true and false beyond solutions into problems themselves, they are content to define the truth or falsity of a problem by the possibility or impossibility of its being solved.” (16-17).

This circular argument that Deleuze here is referring to doesn’t allow anyone to go beyond its purview. It holds the power of being unquestionable due to long-existing prejudices, and keeps the person engaged with one after the other false questions which need to be questioned rather than making attempts to solve them.

Thus, we see that the processing of knowledge takes place through dialogic inquisition in all the systems of knowledge – be it Indian or Western. The paper surveys the nature of the being of inquisition or inquiry in the classics of both the traditions of knowledge, and shows clear similarity in the instrumentation of the question for the acquisition or dissemination of knowledge. In Plato’s writings, the dialogic inquisition was the principal technique of bringing forth the philosophical postulations, and therefore, all his writings are known as ‘dialogues’. Indian Knowledge system, from very beginning, sustained through dialogic method of processing and furthering of knowledge. Teacher and student remained important in this system as they were actually the agents of processing and furthering of existing and evolving knowledge through dialogic inquiry as we saw in the case of the Praśnopaniñad. Deleuze, discussing

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the Bergsonian idea of true and false problems, very closely works out what both the Upani=ads followed in principle, and simultaneously relates it to the practical part of human life. This paper, essentially, sees the dialogic inquisition in the centre of the evolution of any agency of knowledge. Here, in the paper, it has very lucidly been argued that irrespective of the difference in the tradition of knowledge, the foundations or basics of knowledge whether ancient or modern are laid on the same principles.

Significance of question as an indispensable instrument of knowledge processing is the same be it Vedas, Upani=ads, Plato, Bergson, or Deleuze.

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Tirupati, India Notes Śrotrasya śrotraà manasomano yadväco ha väcaàsa u präëasyapräëaù cakñuñaścakñuratimucyadhéräù pretyäsmällokädamåtä bhavanti. 2.I.581.

2 natatracakcurgacchatinaväggacchati no manaù/ navidmonavijänémo yathaitadanuśiñyät.

Anyadevatadviditädathoaviditädadhi/ itiśuśrumapürveñäh ye nastad vyäcacakñire. 3.I.582.

3 It does not function simply either as différence (difference) or as différance in the usual sense (deferral), and plays on both meanings at once. Translator’s Introduction, Writing and Difference.

4 Yadväcänabhyuditaàyenavägabhyudyate/ Tadeva brahma tvaà viddhinedaà yadidamupäsate.

5.I.582. Yanmana sänamanute yenähurmano matam/ Tadeva brahma tvaà viddhinedaà yadidamupäsate. 6.I.583. Yaccakñuñä na paśyati yena cakñüàñi paśyati/ Tadeva brahma tvaà viddhinedaà yadidamupäsate. 7.I.583.

5 Yasyämataà tasya mataà mataà yasya na veda saù/ Avijñätaà vijänatäà vijñätaà avijänataà. 3.II.585.

6 Eña präëo jäyate kathamäyätyasmiñśaréra ätmänaà vä pravibhajya katham pratiñöhate kenotkramatekathaà bahyamabhidhate kathamadhyätmamiti.1.III.658.

7 Ihaiväntaùśarére sobhyasa puruño yasminnatäù ñodaśakaläù prabhavantéti. 2-4.VI.667.

Sapräëamasåjatapräëäcchraddhämkham väyur jyotiräpaùpåthi véndriyamanaù annaman nädvéryamtapomanträù karmalok älokeñu ca näma ca. 4.VI.667 8 Tänhoväcaitä vadeväha metatparam brahma veda | nätaù paramastéti. 7.VI.668.

1

Works Cited Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. USA: MIT Press, 1988.

Principal Upanisads, translated and edited by S. Radhakrishnan. New Delhi: Harpercollins, 2006.

Robinson, Richard. Elenchus. The Philosophy of Socrates, edited by Vlastos G. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1971.

Ghosh, M. Bharatamuni’s Natyasatra: Translation in English. Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1951.

Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass. London and New York: Routledge, 2012.

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Between Matter and Hand: On Gaston Bachelard’s Theory of Material Imagination Yanping Gao

S

truck by the neglect of the material cause in aesthetic philosophy, Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962), the significant French thinker, wondrously contributed his penetrating search upon how matter engages our imagination and mind in the significant way, after his successful career as a scientific philosopher. His relative works on this subject bear such titles as The Psychoanalysis of Fire (La psychanalyse du feu, 1938), Water and Dream: An Essay on Imagination of Matter (L’eau et les rêves, 1942), Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement (L’air et les songes, 1943), Earth and Reveries of Repose: An Essay on Images of Interiority (La terre et les rêveries du repos, 1946), Earth and Reveries of Will: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter (La terre et les rêveries de la volonté, 1948), etc. In his later time, especially after his phenomenological turn, Bachelard explored the poetic images and its becoming in our subjective sense, in The Poetics of Space (La Poétique de l’Espace, 1958) and The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos (La poétique de la rêverie, 1960), which can be regarded as a supplement of his theory of material imagination.

This article will try to firstly explore how Bachelard deals with matter and materially in his theory of material imagination, then through an analysis of the metaphor of “hand” to explain and present the characteristics of material imagination, towards the end this article will show how the special “cogito” in our dreams as well as in material imagination makes us more connect with the material world again.

Material Imagination and Materiality When investigating the imaging power of our mind, Bachelard distinguishes two very different axes, or different types of imaginations, “One that gives life to the formal cause and one that gives life to the material cause—or, more succinctly, a formal imagination and a material imagination” (Bachelard 1999, 1). When a work just arises Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Vol. 42, No. 1 (73-81) © 2019 by Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute

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from feeling and heart, and at the same time possesses “verbal variety and ever-changing life of light”, formal imagination comes into being. It is joyful, playful, but with “perishable forms and vain images” and “perpetual change of surfaces”, never hits the “substance” of the matter beneath the object. The superficial images “play on the surface of an element without giving the imagination time to work upon its matter” (Bachelard 1999, 10-11). For Bachelard, formal imagination floats on the surface of matter, because the images “get their impetus from novelty; they take pleasure in the picturesque, the varied, and the unexpected” (Bachelard 1999, 1). Even at the very initial period, formal imagination flees away from the matter which initially inspires it.

This is because formal imagination appeals to fascination and joy, thus is more intrigued by form and color, variety and change, the result is inevitably that it “deserts depth, volume and the inner recesses of substance” (Bachelard 1999, 2).

However, material imagination takes root in the substance of matter. It “plumbs the depth of being. They seek to find there both the primitive and the eternal” (Bachelard 1999, 2). Material imagination seeks for consistency within the matter, and draws power from the substance itself. Material imagination doesn’t come from the surface, but goes for the hidden matter image beneath the object and meanwhile excludes the transient and changeable parts in the resultant image. As Bachelard puts it, “many attempted images cannot survive because they are merely formal play, not truly adapted to the matter they should adorn” (Bachelard 1999, 3). Therefore he argues the historically eternal created images and “system of poetic fidelity”, could not come from the formal imagination, but material imagination. The latter creates images stemming “directly from matter” and represents the individualizing power of matter. It plugs into the depth of the matter and marches towards the essence of the matter. Thus the images arising from material causality bear the mark of a deep impregnation by substantial properties of the matter.

In the case of our imagination of water. A playful poet, or rather, formal imagination “likes water in its yearly cycle, from spring to winter, easily, passively, lightly reflecting all the seasons”, while the more profound poet, or material imagination “discovers enduring water, unchanging and reborn, which stamps its image with an indelible mark and is an organ of the world, the nourishment of flowing phenomena, the vegetating and polishing element, the embodiment of tears” (Bachelard 1999, 11), such as, the poet Edgar Allan Poe expresses the heaviness of water, Shakespeare imagines the dead Ophelia floating on the waves of a river. Here instead of the fluency and dreaminess from the superficial play of waters, the heaviness and the association of death evokes the depth of water. Similarly, when meditating beside river, the Chinese philosopher Confucius compares water to time: “Time lapses like the river!” Water runs forward without any rest and never returns, just like time does.

Bachelard defends the poetics of symbolism and surrealism. Although the images conceived by the symbolists and surrealists usually have no apparent affinity to reality, they probably represent the interiority of matter. Like in Jacques Audiberti’s poem,

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“Snow composed to water is black, despite our eyes.” What credit that snow could be black? As Bachelard puts it, “black will be the that color’s substantial solidity, black will be the substantial negation of all that attains the light” (Bachelard 2011, Earth, 20). He persuasively cites Hegel, black is “the inherent nature of white”, the “initself ” of white. It worth mentioning that material imagination is actually in some sense close to what John Ruskin refers to by the term “imagination penetrative” (Ruskin 1900, 132-133).

Through material imagination, Bachelard tries to show that matter strongly determines the imagination, and attributes the substance, principle and character to the poetic image. As a (pre)scientific philosopher, Bachelard believes each kind of matter has its individualizing power and its individuality, “an individuality in depth that takes matter a totality, even in its smallest divisions” (Bachelard 1999, 2). As he writes in Water and Dream, “a material element must provide its own substance, its particular rules and poetics” (Bachelard 1999, 3), or he similarly expresses in Air and Dreams, “A material element is the principle of a good conductor that gives continuity to the imagining psyche” (Bachelard 2011, 8). In material imagination, matter so much engages our imagination that it shapes whatever from the imagination, and its ontologically individual existence inevitably dyes our imaginations and dreams. That is why some images come into archetypes in different cultures. Although Bachelard and J. C. Jung meet on this same plane, the difference is the latter explains it as “collective unconscious”, but Bachelard, who learned Jung quite late after he already established his own theory (Christofide 1962, 271), thinks it originates from the power of matter which acts on our imagination.

Bachelard’s way of exploring the matter from the depth, partly comes from his experience as a scientific philosopher. According to him, natural science takes effort to approach the depth of matter, and pierces through the surface of object. But his contemporary philosophers are so much engaged in “phenomena” and therefore prevent themselves from reflecting upon the “thing itself ”. As for the arts, most painters deal with the appearance of objects and rarely hit on the essence of the matter.

As for the so-called aesthetic contemplation, basically disinterested contemplation, the perceivers are supposed to look into the essence of the matter, but Bachelard points out insightfully that so-called contemplation is nothing but a consistent gaze upon appearance of matter and eventually can’t touch the substance of the matter, which is supposed to be unfixed, flowing and silent. Bachelard tells we only can find the depth of matter in some poems where, different from philosophers, poets are approaching “thing itself ”, the bottom of matter.

The dualism of matter and form is quite obvious in Bachelard’s thought. While the idealism tradition regards form as a conscious and prior existence, and matter the passive and transient one, Bachelard defends that which is primary is the matter but not the form. Bachelard expresses that matter is more eternal than form, “form reach completion. Matter, never” (Bachelard 1999, 113), form would change, but matter

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would survive, and moreover, matter is the basis and unconscious state of form, the possibilities of form are essentially imbedded within matter.

Bachelard argues all the imaginations or dreams come from the four elements, i.e., earth, air, fire and water, or their combinations. But it is worth stressing that not every element embodies materiality in the same degree. According to Bachelard’s notion of matter and materiality, paste as the mixture of water and earth, is an ideal matter, a “prototype” of materiality, a “perfect earth, exemplary compound”, “the fundamental schemes of materialism” (Bachelard 1999, 104), etc. In the preface of Water and Dreams, he writes, “paste is thus the basic component of materiality; the very notion of matter is, I think, closely bound up with it” (Bachelard 1999, 13). He even claims explicitly, “For the material imagination, the exemplary compound is a mixture of water and earth” (Bachelard 1999, 13). Elsewhere, in Earth and Will, he says, “It seems indispensable from the viewpoint of material imagination of the elements to study mesomorphic reverie, intermediate between water and earth” (Bachelard 2002, 56), or, “Perfect earth [pâté] is thus the basic material element of materialism, as the perfect solid is the basic formal element of geometry” (Bachelard 2002, 61). “Perfect earth” here refers the paste. That’s why in the preface of Air and Dreams, he admits because air is very thin matter, with which, “movement takes precedence over matter”, so “My research will be limited as material imagination is concerned” (Bachelard 2011, Air, 8).

Why could “paste” [pâté] be the exemplary matter or the pattern of materiality?

Firstly, only the ambivalence can trigger active imagination and invite the whole soul engaged, “Matter that does not provide the opportunity for a psychological ambivalence cannot find a poetic double which allows endless transportation”. As a mixture of water and earth, paste has the dual quality of fluidity and solidity, thus arouses “a dual participation of desire and fear, a participation of good and evil, a peaceful participation of black and white” (Bachelard 1999, 11). Or, as he says, the paste is “a perfect synthesis of yielding and resistance, a marvelous equilibrium of the forces of acceptance and refusal” (Bachelard 2002, 61). Secondly, paste is a combination and has unfinished and indeterminate shape. “Formal imagination needs the idea of composition. Material imagination needs the idea of combination” (Bachelard 1999, 93). Without solid or composed shape, the paste wouldn’t invite formal imagination instantly as other matter with solid form and composition. The paste, “in which shape is supplanted, effaced, dissolved”, “relieves of our intuition of any worry about shape. The problem of form is given a secondary role” (Bachelard 1999, 105), so that it wouldn’t easily lead to formal imagination, while usually “this visualizing of the finished work leads naturally to the supremacy of formal imagination”(Bachelard 1999, 13). In brief, paste’s formlessness makes it much engaged by material imagination, rather than formal imagination.

Hand: A Metaphor of Material Imagination The ideal matter such as paste, not only arouses our whole dual activities and material imagination, for Bachelard, it is also “evident to the hand as the perfect solid to the geometer’s eye” (Bachelard 2002, 59). It means, the fundamental matter should share

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a kind of attribute that invites the sense of touching. He also uses “hand” to explain poetic creation, he writes, “if poetry is to reanimate the power of creation in the soul or help us relive our natural dreams in all their intensity and all their meaning, we must come to understand that the hand as well as the eye has its reveries and poetry. We must discover the poetry of touch, the poet of kneading hands” (Bachelard 2002, 60).

Here we can see that there is dichotomy between eye and hand, the former is for the geometers, the latter for poets, the former prefers solid, clear and finished matter, the latter prefers the paste, the indeterminate being. For Bachelard, the visual images before our eyes are so clear and widespread, that they prevent us from any participation in the primitive, dynamic images; the visual images “assert their primacy” (Bachelard 2002, 60) and seclude us from material imagination. But, hand “helps us to understand matter in its inmost being” (Bachelard 1999, 107), “The dynamic hand symbolizes the imagination of force” (Bachelard 1999, 108). Bachelard borrows the image of manual workers’ labour, where through rubbing, smashing, pressing, grasping, twisting, beating and welding. hands penetrate the substance and interiority. They make slippery and floating matter substantial and solid, and thus establish a deep relationship with the matter through their positive engagement.

Hands here are not only figurative or rhetoric. Bachelard seriously treats hands or touching as his subject of philosophy. He suggests that, in contrast to manual workers, philosophers, especially those of French existentialist, seem to have different attitude of their hands. In Earth and Will, Bachelard criticizes Sartre’s existentialism as far as his attitude to the viscosity is concerned. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea, in a single paragraph, Sartre shows the hero in the process of gathering “chestnuts”, “old rags” and later, “heavy and sumptuous papers, probably soiled by excrement”, yet Roquentin recoils from contact with a pebble on the beach—a pebble washed clean by the sea. For Roquentin felt unpleasant and sick from the pebble, “it was a sort of sweetish sickness”, “a sort of nausea in the hands”. For him, “Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them, put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of being in contact with them as though they were living beasts” (Sartre, 1993, 20). For this, Bachelard explains, “Such hands, which perhaps have not been given a clear task to accomplish at the proper moment, nor a pleasant substance to work with, rarely succeed in coming to terms with the material world” (Bachelard 2002, 87). And he further explains, “Roquentin is sick even in the realm of material images, that is to say even in his attempts to establish a viable relationship with the substance of things” (Bachelard 2002, 86).

That means, for Roquentin, matter is dead and lifeless, and his hands are passive, the work of hands “is a soft and yielding action, a moist and feminine sucking” (Bachelard 2002, 88). Bachelard argues this is because existentialist merely lingers on the phenomena, but the objects, such as the pebble in Roquentin’s hands, or paste, are not essentially comprehended only by their appearance, but through action.

Roguentin stops himself from looking into the depth because of his failure to get a

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viable connection to the substance. Before Bachelard published his Earth and Will, Sartre discussed the ontological significance of the slimy and the sticky, though a bit different from the slippery, such as the pebble in the last chapter of Being and Nothingness (1943), where he actually praises Bachelard’s great theory of material imagination. From Sartre’s point of view, the sticky is “inert”; “To touch the slimy is to risk being dissolved in sliminess. Now this dissolution by itself is frightening enough, because it is the absorption of the For-itself by the In-itself ” (Sartre, 1993, 610). For Sartre, these kinds of matters are either inert or dangerous, for they delay or destroy the For-itself by the dominating In-itself.

However, for Bachelard, the matter under the manual workers’ hands is totally different. Here the matter is potentially dynamic, and “Viscosity, then, is only a passing offense, a skirmish between reality and the labourer in which the dynamism of the latter ensures victory” (Bachelard 2002, 88). Moreover, facing the viscosity, the manual workers would not feel anxious and sick, but feel excited by the possible construction and creation. The manual workers never rest on phenomena, but use their hands to work on the matter and approach its depth. In the same way, poets harbour no fear for the flowing and unformed matter, because the indeterminate matter evokes their fantasy and dual activities, as I already mentioned above around the concept of paste.

For instance, Seamus Heaney, an Irish poet, when reflecting upon the origins of his own poetic creation, traced it back to his addiction to paste, clay, marsh and other wet and soft things from his childhood. Bachelard himself writes, “In the loneliness, with a dough in our hands, dream begins” (Bachelard, 2000, 212). For the poets, “the material imagination of soft substances is essentially concern with labour” (Bachelard 2002, 88), material imagination is active and dynamic. Thus the poets and workers can venture to claim, “We are demiurges. We determine the destiny of matter” (Bachelard 2002, 88), “Material imagination has a demiurgic tone” (Bachelard 2011, Earth, 19). Obviously, the ideal matter is not the object to observe, probe or transcend, but that invites our mind to dream, imagine, absorb and melt with, then material imagination is not passive at all, but rather as active and dynamic as the manual working.

“Cogito of Kneading”: Between Matter and Hand Bachelard is a dream believer. In terms of its occurrence, dreams or reveries precede perception, thinking and contemplation. Especially, for Bachelard, matter is dreamed and not first perceived. In the preface of Earth and Will, he criticizes positivist philosopher for their argument that “it is the perception of images that determines the process of imagination” (Bachelard 2002, 2). Dream also precedes contemplation.

He claims “Dream comes before contemplation” or “Material reveries precede contemplation” (Bachelard 1999, 4). Dreams or reveries have their big roles in Bachelard’s philosophy. If what Bachelard formulates in Water and Dreams emphasizes the precedence and actuality of matter in poetic images, then in The Poetics of Reverie and The Poetics of Space, Bachelard explores how deep our consciousness would be through the imagined connection with the matter, with the aim of “consideration of

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the onset of the image in an individual sense” (Bachelard 1994, XIX), which can be regarded as an extension or supplement of theory of material imagination.

Bachelard uses “dream” in the sense of “reverie”. It is very different from nightdream. He points out that night-dreamer loses his subjectivity and his existence, “the night-dreamer is the shadow without self; but in the centre of reverie, if he has the philosophic disposition, arises a ‘cogito’ ” (Bachelard 2000, 189). The night dreamer has no “cogito”, the night-dream “kidnaps our existence”, (Bachelard 2000, 8). In contrast, the reverie somewhat keeps the twilight of consciousness, “cogito” has never been absent in a reverist.

But the subtlety of this “cogito” is different from “cogito” in Descartes’ sense.

Thus Bachelard invents this new cogito based on reverie and names it as “cogito of kneading” (Cogito pétrisseur). If Cartesian Cogito is about mere self-knowing and the more active kind of self-recognizing, “cogito of kneading” is within reverie and imagination. Just as “paste” is set as the ideal of materiality, “kneading”, as an action typically towards paste, is posited as the image of existence of cogito, especially cogito in material imagination or dreams. Bachelard separates kneading from modeling, for modeling is shaping into a form, but kneading “tends to destroy form” (Bachelard 2002, 71). Kneading is in some sense the anti-thesis of modelling. Bachelard explains “the certitude of equilibrium between hand and matter” as “an excellent example of the cogito of the kneader” (Bachelard 2002, 61). It means, cogito of kneading contains a subtle equilibrium between subject and object, and it makes world and mind intimately entwined. If Cartesian Cogito separates itself from the world by the attentive, arrogant and sharp contemplation, “people who reverie upon the world do not look the world as their object” (Bachelard 2000, 182). In this sense, Bachelard extols that dream not only elevate the dreamer to the level of universal consciousness, but also “to the metaphysical level of an I-Thou relationship” (Bachelard 2002, 63), “I-Thou” presents the relation between dreamer and world, subject and object, hand and matter.

“Cogito of kneading” helps us understand the world through its intimacy with the material world. When studying on Bachelard, Joseph Chiari explains, we couldn’t understand the existence just through reason, but through the changeable senses cultivated by imagination, our senses usually operate on the edge between existence and non-existence, and out of unconsciousness and non-existence arises the understanding which is not improved by reason, but is trailed by the shadow of matter and rooted by the matter (Chiari 1987, 163). In contrast, consciousness of a Cartesian thinker operates like the sunlight at noon and violently dispels any shadow the objects could project, therefore only pure reason remains there. But only in the humble “cogito” permeated by the matter can let matter present itself. “Cogito” twined with matter is embedded by the image of material; whenever matter meets the consciousness, it shapes the consciousness. Thus just as paste, the prototype of matter in Bachelard’s sense is a something “between” water and earth, cogito of kneading shares the similar “in-between” character and plasticity.

While “a cogito of kneading” brings matter’s image into the consciousness of a poet, it is also the same process that the riverist explores and deepens himself through

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the gentle struggle with matter, accompanying occasionally by the seeming self-loss.

As Georges Poulet explains this point, “Our self flows into the matter and its images…while matter smoothly engages in the thought-deepening progress, thought fluidly flows into and involves the matter” (Poulet 1997, 175). It seems a poetically reciprocal process between the matter and ego. In some way, “The ‘Cogito’ of a dreamer is something like: I reverie, so the world exists just like what I reverie” (Bachelard 2000, 199). So the promise of depth of matter, as we have in our poetic imagination, could be only manifested in the infinity of mind.

In other words, depth of matter invites or resides the depth of man, and thus beneath Bachelard’s seeking for the universality of material element, exists the actuality that man pursues the infinity and the special university in his soul. Bachelard examines the origin of the images in the phenomenological way, claiming that images have their subjectivity, which means the images would never been divorced from our intention towards the matter. The images expressing the depth of matter occur only in the soul of depth. It is the repercussions in the depth of soul that give the depth of existence to us (Bachelard, 1994, XXII). “Our existence is deep-going. We hide ourselves under the appearance, under the semblance, under the mask, etc. We hide ourselves from others, and even hide ourselves from ourselves…but we could descend into our bodysoul … into our own mystery” (Bachelard, 1994, XX). Bachelard says, our depth lies in the anima, i.e., unconsciousness, the feminine and deep part in our soul. Our depth implies our secret and eternal happiness. The dwelling of our soul for Bachelard definitely wouldn’t be situated at “clearing” or “off the beaten track” (Holzweg) in Martin Heidegger’s sense, but at the intimate and imagination-inviting space such as nests, shells and corners, where we are always surrounded by the material world even when we dream.

So far we can conclude, that for Bachelard, poeticity is characteristic of “between” and connection, paste is something between water and earth; material imagination sharing the attributes of the worker’s hands weaves the matter into our heart; “cogito of kneading” in our dream never leaves the material world behind and rather connect the world and our existence together. Moreover, matter and material imagination invite us to seek for the depth of the world and ourselves when we confront ambivalence and indeterminacy, and consequently they bring us activity and engagement. In this sense, Bachelard’s theory can also afford inspirations to the currently trendy concept of “performance”, which shows a mentality differing from the contemplative, idealistic aesthetics or pure reason.

Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China

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Works Cited Bachelard, Gaston. Water and Dreams: An Essay on Imagination of Matter, translated by Edith R. Farrell, Texas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture Publications, 3rd edition, 1999.

Bachelard, Gaston. Earth and Reveries of Repose: An Essay on Images of Interiority, translated

by Kenneth Haltman, Texas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture Publications, 2011.

Bachelard, Gaston. Earth and Reveries of Will: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, Texas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture Publications, 2002.

Bachelard, Gaston. Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, translated by Edith Farell & Frederick Farell, Texas: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture Publications, 2011.

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space, translated by Maria Jolas, Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Riverie: Childrenhood Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, translated by Liu Ziqiang, Beijing: San Lian Publishing House, Beijing, 2000.

Ruskin, John. Modern Painters: A Volume of Selection, London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1900. Satre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel E. Barnes, Washington Square Press, 1993.

Chiari, Joseph. Twentieth Century French Thought: From Bergson to Levi-Strauss, translated

by Wu Yongquan, Cheng Jingxuan & Yi Dayi, Being: Shangwu Publishing House, 1987, p.

163.

Poulet, Georges. Critical Consciousness, translated by Guo Hongan & Bai Hua, Literature and Art Publishing House, 1997.

Christofide, “C. G. Bachelard’s Aesthetics”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Spring, 1962). pp. 263-271.

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The Limits of the Circle: Master, Slave and Death in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit Arkady Nedel

W

hen in his classic work Death and Symbolic Exchange (1993) Jean Baudrillard describes the relationship between labor and death, he mainly refers to Hegel who had elaborated the pattern of the interaction between the master and the slave, the pattern of the intersubjection between two different and identical consciousnesses that come to play one with another through a medium of material things and the process of production. Medium, through which two consciousnesses or, rather, the two stages of consciousness begin to play, signify and negate each other, is a space of production that indeed replaces the space of death with itself. Death, in the Hegelian circle, functions not like a terminal point, but also as the generative machine of negation which is required by the production and reproduction of the total power. The system of things, taking on material shapes and appearing in the process of production, is nothing more than the symbolic replacement of death itself. Baudrillard writes: “[T]his is the violence the master does to the slave, condemning him to labor power. There lies the secret of power (in the dialectic of the master and the slave, Hegel also derives the domination of the master from the deferred threat of death hanging over the slave). Labor, production and exploitation would only be one of the possible avarts of this power structure, which is a structure of death.”1 I think that Baudrillard is right only partly. His interpretation of Hegel’s master–slave model does not explain one essential question: if, through the system of production, the master and the slave push each other to death, or expose each other to “the slow death,” as Baudrillard calls it, why don’t they resist it? Reading Baudrillard we realize that power, in Hegel, is a sort of production structure that defends one from being dead. It differs and differentiates one’s death from his life in order to give this life to somebody (to the other) who intends to use it as a disposable gift, but who Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Vol. 42, No. 1 (82-90) © 2019 by Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute

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does not want to terminate this life sooner than it has produced the maximum volume of commodity and so dissolves itself in the process of production. According to this logic, the master does not really want to kill his slave and stop his life at one moment, he attempts to make the slave’s life a permanent dying, a dying for the sake of material things whose nature should not enter into the master’s competence; in other words, the master puts the slave’s life on the altar of the sterilization of power which, for Hegel, the master wishes to reach as the highest instance of his own negativity. Briefly, this is what Hegel has left for us as the enigma of the master–slave dialectical relation and this borrowing from Jean Baudrillard is, I think, a good example of the postmodern reflection of it.

Being stuck in the Hegelian circle of the fighting consciousneses we are unfortunately not any closer to solving of this problem than, perhaps, Hegel himself who has drawn the phenomenon of self-consciousness as the highest negative instance that comes to itself only through the full negation of the preliminary stages of consciousness. Like the master and the slave, these conflicting structures, passing through the medium of death, must annihilate each other in order to inaugurate the pure power of self-consciousness. In his examination of dependent and independent consciousness, Hegel calls for the reciprocal destruction of both levels of consciousness—the master and the slave—which only point to the limited character of their existence and consequently their predestination is to be erased by the very development of the phenomenology of spirit. However, I am repeating this, why does Hegel construe the instance of self-consciousness as the structure of the closed-double suicide: the master eliminates himself by use of the slave’s production and the slave destroys his life through “the slow dying,” into which he is put by the production machine? In short, for what reason does Hegel constitute such a double-suicidal structure of self-consciousness?

Hegel says: “Es ist für das Selbstbewußtsein ein anderes Selbstsbewußtsein; es ist außer sich gekommen. Dies hat die gedoppelte Bedeutung; erstlich, es hat sich selbst verloren, denn es findet sich als ein anderes Wesen; zweitens, es hat damit das Andere aufgehoben, denn es sieht auch nicht das Andere als Wesen, sonderen sich selbst im Anderen.”2 The sublation of the other is a crucial feature of self-consciousness, it cannot become or recognize itself without snuffing out the instance of the other consciousness, and this recognition is not only an act of relief and negation but also the way of self-consciousness to restore its self (sein selbst) as itself (sich selbst) through the identification of its self (sein selbst) with the difference of the other. The restoration of self-consciousness as an independent substance goes through the identification of its self (sein selbst), its being with a difference which it receives from the other consciousness and within such a difference self-consciousness destroys itself as the consciousness of somebody else and finds its selfness in the ontological distinction from the other. As Raymond Plant aptly puts it: “certainly Hegel¼s sympathies were very much with Fichte. He agreed that harmony between subject and object, or man

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and the world, could only be achieved in so far as the objective world, the world of experience, could be shown to be central to the development of self-consciousness and the powers of the human mind <...>”.3 In this dialectical circle, self-consciousness identifies itself not with the phenomenon of the other consciousness, but rather with the difference from any other consciousness that should be destructed and eliminated in the act of the verification and existentialization of self-consciousness as such. So, the true phenomenon of selfconsciousness does not actually discern the instance of the other, but it just discerns or identifies the difference of its own with all the preliminary stages of consciousness which must be sublated as the past traces of spirit. Paradoxically enough, Hegel writes that in order to attain the terminal position of the dialectical development, selfconsciousness identifies itself with difference, with a difference which leads it to the ontological synthesis of its phenomenon with itself. Self-consciousness is restored through the space of differences that, in its turn, should be squeezed or erased by the very identity of self-consciousness, of the consciousness of self. Thus the dialectical circle, which Hegel imbues with the structures of the phenomenological thought, starts and ends and starts again ad infinitum with the similar and distinguished concepts which are always at play: the self of consciousness and the consciousness of self. Or: self becomes consciousness, consciousness becomes play, both of them transform one into another and such a reciprocal transformation simultaneously passes through and destroys the difference which still marks a certain dependence of these constituents one on another at some early levels of the phenomenology of spirit.

By all means, Hegel postulates the concept of difference or even the ontology of difference which is exigent to the restoration of self-consciousness at the stage of the independent instance of the phenomenology of thought. So far, self-consciousness is constituted as a difference, as the identification of difference or as the acts of difference marking not the otherness of consciousness and self-consciousness, but rather the radical distinction of self-consciousness from its own nature. Self-consciousness is structured as a total difference which identifies its self (sein selbst) with itself (sich selbst) only inside this difference, and it is a suicidal feature of self-consciousness. Selfconsciousness annihilates all and so replaces the concepts of thought with the acts of difference within which it attains the modus of pure negativity, of the negative abstraction. Hegel tells us: “Die Darstellung seiner aber als der reinen Abstraktion des Selbsbewußtseins besteht darin, sich als reine Negation seiner gegenständlichen Weise zu zeigen, oder es zu seigen, an kein bestimmtes Dasein geknüpft, an die allgemeine Einzelheit des Daseins überhaupt nicht, nicht an das Leben geknüpft zu sein...

[I]nsofern es Tun des anderen ist, geht also jeder auf den Tod des andern. Darin aber ist auch das zweite, das Tun durch sich selbst, vorhanden; denn jenes schließt das Daransetzen des eignen Lebens in sich.”4 As we can see, for Hegel, self-consciousness is a purified negative phenomenon that reaches and recognizes itself through the demolition of the other, through the death of the other which signifies the full release from somebody else’s consciousness.

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Similarly, self-consciousness snuffs out the other and fills up the totality of being with itself, it transforms the figure of the other into an object or into a space where there is nothing outside self-consciousness and its phenomena. Hegel trains us to understand self-consciousness as the medium of differences eliminating all the extremes and absorbing it in itself as the phenomenal traces of its own development. It destroys not only the existence of the other but also the place of the other that should be ineluctably sublated by the phenomena of negativity and then dissolved in the completeness of the power of self-consciousness. That is, through the phenomenological reduction to itself—in the history of its structure—selfconsciousness removes all the extremes and extremal positions from the field of negation whereof it elicits and where it acts. By doing so, self-consciousness loses the structure of sublation, we even can say that it disseminates itself in the acts of negation, and thus mutates into a pure negative medium, or into the space of nonotherness. Self and consciousness, attaining each other at the specific stage of mind and amalgamating one with another in the mutual concept “self-consciousness,” break through to the pure self-conscious acts, to the acts without sedimentation, to the acts which only refer to themselves. So, the nature of self-consciousness is to destruct the field of sedimentarities, the traces of its self (sein selbst) and erase the referential space of the extremes which install the presence of the other into the totality of self-consciousness and don’t allow this totality. Consequently, self-consciousness is not the ontological substance of spirit (I allow myself to remind you that Hegel is afraid of applying such words as “ontology” and “being” to the phenomenon of self-consciousness), but it is a pure act or action that by its actness extricates any presence of the other from itself and not only as an instance, but as a place which this presence signifies. Hegel implicitly leads us to the conclusion that self-consciousness is not really the stage of mind but an act, or the pure act of power which exists and could be recognized only at the moment of its action and as such action that resides in itself and is for-itself (Akt-für-sich-selbst).

In other words, self-consciousness is structured as a difference production mechanism, or this is a mechanism of self-desire which identifies the act of difference with self-consciousness as the only moment of the reality of this desire. Selfconsciousness is the totality of the desire of itself. And within such totality selfconsciousness destroys its self (sein selbst) by transforming itself (sich selbst) into the infinite object of the desire of its own, into the being of the desire that does not exist because of the objectlessness of self-consciousness.

Following Hegel, we start realizing that self-consciousness mutates into the fundamental desire of difference, an object of which is unknown; put simply, it becomes an object of phantasm; the modality of the desire of self-consciousness exists only as an act and therefore could not be attained and grasped as a being. This differentiating act, which is neither the master’s consciousness nor the slave’s and which could be identified only with the moment of an act, marking the moment of desire itself, Hegel calls “the middle term” that is situating in the dialectic of the other minds as an

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interposition splitting the desire and object into two phenomenological instances of spirit. Hegel points out: “Die Mitte ist das Selbstbewußtsein, welches sich in die Extreme zersetzt; und jedes Extrem ist diese Austauschung seiner Bestimmtheit, und absoluter Übergang in das entgegengesetzte. Als Bewußtsein aber kommt es wohl außer sich, jedoch ist es in seinem Außersichsein zugleich in sich zurückgehalten, für sich, und sein Außersich ist für es. Es ist für es, daß es unmittelbar anderes Buwußtsein ist und nicht ist.”5 Here, I think, Hegel is much closer to the comprehending of a suicidal nature of self-consciousness. It divides itself into two extremal positions: the position of the master and the position of the slave and by such a division self-consciousness presents its negative economy requiring the infinite exchange of life and death.

According to the law of negative economy, life and death become the moments of the negation and sublation which relate to each other and increase the entropy of abstraction of the dialectical circle where power, reaching its highest point of presence, sublates itself as the objectless structure of reality. The negative economy, involving the master and the slave into the play of sovereignty and servitude, of sacrifice and arrogance, consists in the total embezzlement of all the positive elements of the two consciousnesses that draw the referential circle of death. In Hegel, the negative economy terminates the possibility of reservation itself, thus a reservation transforms into the technique of negation of what it needs to reserve. Reservation becomes sublation. Hegel seems to realize his own macabre discovery, but it is too late to amend it, he himself is already interwoven in the process of the generation of the historical structures with the suicidal anamnesis.

Self-consciousness (and Hegel’s in particular), being implanted onto the process of history, turns into the suicidal mechanism of this process, it is not a kind of an eschatological vision of the human development, but it is that history which destroys the historical consciousness itself. The economy of history reduces the feeling of history to the text of history, to a text, where the historical consciousness, entering the field of negativity, becomes the self-consciousness of life for the sake of death.

Self-consciousness negates the history of its own, it destroys the substance of history as its other because history is always the other, and then self-consciousness leads us to the immense power of simulacra, the simulacra that replace the mechanism of history with themselves. History transforms into the simulacra of desire, the discourse of desire is no longer historical, it becomes the suicidal structure of dominance. So, the negative economy of self-consciousness constitutes or de-constitutes the institute of history in terms of the death-reservation: death is a real goal of the master, he awaits death not as a self-negation, but as the approval of his absolute power over the slave.

Glenn Magee points out that for Hegel “the man who achieves the Selbstbewusstsein is the man who becomes selbstbewusst: confident, self-actualized, no longer an ordinary human being.”6 For the master, the figure of the slave is not a real history, it is not rooted in the process of history, but it is the history of his (the master’s) desire, the history of the

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stretched death. Therefore, death itself is that situation in which the master sublates the history of the other and attains a pure act of dominance. Death is an act of power which is released from history. The master reserves the slave’s life because it is the history of death, the only reality that evaluates the presence of dominance and therefore an act of dominance is homological to an act of death; in other words, power is structured as the self-consciousness of termination, as the discourse of death. I would say that Hegel creates the referential field of negativity or, more precisely, the field of embezzlement where the constitution of the master wastes the object for the sake of the desire. The master wants to reach the self-consciousness of desire, i.e., when an object of desire will be dissolved in the negative totality of desire itself. Then desire (the desire of the master) mutates from the discourse of desire, having a certain object and being directed at it, into an act of desire, into a purely self-conscious act, which erases itself by the very actness of its existence. To put it another way, the selfconsciousness of the master commits suicide when it economizes its sacral desire in the death of the slave, because the slave’s death signifies the fact that the selfconsciousness of the master is irreal. It is just a phantasmatic scoria, left behind the processing of reality by the slave. The slave cultivates a thing, he creates the sphere of reality and dissipates his life on material subjects, taking his life as the positive element of the general negation. Contrary to the master’s self-consciousness, the selfconsciousness of the slave is not phantasmatic, it is not defined by the determinism of pure desire, unlike in the master.

The position of the slave in the Hegelian dialectical circle is double, if not to say ambiguous: on the one hand, the slave attains the reality of self-consciousness by the embezzlement of his life in things, and, on the other hand, he economizes his life in the system of things that he makes. I think, Hegel attempts to show us that for the slave, the system of things, paradoxically economizing the embezzlement of his life, does not enclose him in the boundaries of that negativity, into which the master is imprisoned by the discourse of his desire. Simply speaking, the system of things ablates the desire of the slave and reserves his life as “the deferred death;” this ablation totally reduces the slave to reality, to self-consciousness as the structure of reality which is different from the master’s self-consciousness as the structure of desire. On the scene of servitude, the ablation of desire reifies the slave and transforms his body to the sedimentary structure of dominance. Now the distance between the slave and thing is destroyed, the ablated desire of the slave replaces subject with itself, ablation displaces presence and inaugurates the discourse of the negative; in other words, the slave mutates into the place of the negative transplantation of his self-consciousness to the selfconsciousness of the master. The desire of the master to be self-conscious comes in the space of absolute negation. And this is the most dangerous gesture in the history of dominance. Power annihilates a subject of power. The law of the negative economy becomes universal. From the ontological essence of power it moves to the pure act of power. Power without an object is the highest form of sovereignty. Power becomes

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self-consciousness. This is why self-consciousness is suicidal. Because the pure act of power slays the structure of dominance itself. Steven Houlgate provocatively says that “the possibility of self-consciousness may be implicit in thought but self-consciousness for Hegel is not the most basic feature of thought.” 7 The total dominance is possible only in the absence of serfdom. This is what Hegel had encoded for us in the hidden and displayed history of spirit, and when Georges Bataille says that “[H]e, Hegel, even did not recognize to what extent he has been right,” 8 Bataille has probably borne in mind this ciphering openness of Hegel’s discovery.

In short, for Hegel, self-consciousness is a splitting; its essence consists in the division of itself. Such an essence of self-consciousness leaves to the extremal terms to be split and opposed to each other and, owing to that, self-consciousness represents itself as the sphere of the negation of the extremal terms, the sphere which performs the negative opposition but which cannot be performed in terms of itself. The negative has no language, it exists as a place where language deploys its labor; topologically speaking, the negative exists in the spans between the language of dominance and the consciousness of subject. Just within these spans, the structure of a suicide, of self is shaped. Therefore, self is always the reflection of the negative. Hegel is precise when he writes that the master’s consciousness relates to itself through the instance of the slave, and only through this ‘slavization’ the master attains a true negative relation to his self. But in this relation the master needs to sublate and erase the slave as the constituent of his own consciousness and enter the pure space of dominance in which the ontological substance of the slave will be transformed into the infinite acts of negation reducing the master’s self to an object of his desire. That is mortal for the master. Because self-consciousness wants to reach itself in the modus of absolute dominance, to wit, the dominance over itself, that dominance where there is no object of dominance. It is a sort of asthmatic breathing, one who suffers from the respiratory illness often suffocates from the inhaled air, such a person cannot be satisfied even by the fresh air because there is always a lack of it.

Hegel leads us to the sacral place of the circle: the self-consciousness of the master annihilates itself in the objectless totality of its being, for which it has striven and which is given to self-consciousness as the absolute desire. The master not only murders the slave, embezzling his life for the augmentation of his (master’s) own negative field, but he also commits suicide by replacing an object of dominance with the desire of the infinite act of dominance, with the self-conscious act of dominance which makes the master the victim of phantasm. In the objectless space of power, in which the master’s consciousness was placed by its negativity, the master becomes the simulacrum of an object that he himself destroyed. His self-consciousness becomes the mechanism of simulacrization, his death is more horrible then the slave’s one, he dies in the total presence of desire which is brought to him by the modality of pure dominance.

For now, we can only repeat quite definitely: the structure of self-consciousness is suicidal. It wastes itself in its universal striving for desire; self-consciousness fashions

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itself and its life in terms of this desire which remains, so to say, ‘undemanded,’ because there is nobody who can do it. The subject of desire, its producer is destroyed by the objectlessness of the desire itself, it always remains the phantasm of difference that could not be understood and identified with a subject, at which this difference is directed. The slave is not differentiated from the master not because he is not the other, but because he does not exist, he is erased; in other words, in the master’s selfconsciousness there is no place for the slave. His place is occupied by the desire of the master ‘to totalitarize’ his own I and do it as much as possible in order to contemn his (master’s) life, to transform it into a fetish, into an ordinary incident in the process of the self-development and self-termination of spirit. Nevertheless, why does Hegel so scrupulously and gradually make us sure that the constitution of self-consciousness is suicidal? why was it necessary to start up the production of the gigantic metaphysical machine, like Hegel’s system, in order to explain this sufficiently simple fact? But, perhaps, this fact is not a case in point. The point is that the suicidal pattern of selfconsciousness is the only thing which until today construes the mental space of our existence, this is a unique language and value, and also the fundamental concept that constitutes our presence in the world. The essence of this self-consciousness consists in the constructing of self-consciousness as the dominance of history, in the fact that history itself, being structured as dominance, should be eliminated by the totality of dominance that probably will be the last historical fact. History will mutate into a pure dominance. Hegel understood it, yet encoded the sense of such transmutation in the concepts of a historical being, in the language of historical notions. So, selfconsciousness exists as the system of dominance that erases its own history through the destruction of subject and leaves the phantasmatic forms of desire that always remains unrealized. For self-consciousness, the discourse of history is real only as a deferred sense, as the shapes of desire striving for the totality where the sense of history will be whittled away. Desire will replace history in the absolute act of power, history will be no longer the field of senses.

It seems to me that Hegel has seen the mortal encounter between this dominance and history, he also realized that it will not come to a consensus. Therefore, Hegel has made the inconceivable attempt to reconcile this dominance and history in his system, where dominance would take the form of history and history would be imbued with the structures of dominance. Let us imagine that Hegel did succeed in such a laboratory work. But Hegel’s system, being itself interwoven into the discourse of history, discloses the terrifying economy of this encounter and how these fundamental structures of existence penetrate each other. Dominance becomes historical, history becomes dominating. And, there is no system, including Hegel’s, which can reframe the explanation of this economy within its limits, because any limits are historically determined and dominance strives for the transgression of these limits. The nature of dominance is to become a quasi-historical and objectless entity. Thus, in order to be recognized and achieve its terminal self-consciousness, the structure of dominance

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must annihilate history as the sedimentary field. Dominance should vanquish history as its object, like Hegel’s system had conquered spirit at the level of the absolute sense. Perhaps we are not aware of the fact that we already stand on the threshold of this victory.

L’Université de Strassbourg, Strasbourg, Alsace, France Notes Baudrillard, 1993: 40.

Hegel, 1964: 141.

3 Plant, 1973: 84.

4 Hegel, 1964: 144.

5 Hegel, 1964: 142-143.

6 Magee, 2001: 12.

7 Houlgate, 2006: 24.

8 Cf. also Ezekiel Goggin, 2018.

1 2

References Baudrillard, J. (1993). Symbolic Exchange and Death, (trans.) I. Hamilton Grant, London: Sage Publications.

Ezekiel Goggin, W. (2018). “Hegel and Bataille on Sacrifice,” Hegel Bulletin, vol. 39, issue 2 (Hegel and Twentieth-Century French Philosophy), 2018, pp. 236-259.

Hegel, G.W.F. (1964). Phanomenologie des Geistes, (Hrsg.) J. Hoffmeister, Berlin: AkademieVerlag.

Houlgate, S. (2006). The Opening of Hegel’s Logic. From Being to Infinity, Indiana: Purdue University Press.

Magee, G.A. (2006). Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001, 12.

Plant, R. (1973). Hegel, London: George Allen & Unwin.

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Know Thyself: Patterns of Anagnorisis in the Dramatic Expression of Euripides, Shakespeare and Wole Soyinka Khedidja Chergui I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker And I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat and snicker, And in short, I was afraid1

T

he general understanding perceives of literature as an aesthetic and imaginary reaction to certain historical and sociocultural patterns particular to certain societies. The need, however, to explore what is beyond the particular and the local gave birth to fertile literary affinities cutting across diverse regions and histories.

A search for the esoteric, the peculiar, the other, the different and a desire to climb scales into opposite realms defined, and still do, many literary works across the world.The boundlessness and limitlessness of the human creative insight informed the possibility of overbridging particular and thinly defined literary contexts towards a mundum universum of an outflowing and inconstant global interliterariness. It is the ‘collective unconscious’ of inherited psychic realities in need of adjustment and adaptability to suit the human desire of trying what is beyond the customary and usual. This understanding pipes with Edward Said’s argument that a literary text can serve as an “exilic, extraterritorial, and unhoused” 2 dynamic which renders more comprehensible Man’s, or the writer’s, search for relevance while giving more fresh rhythms to the idea of bringing what seems culturally asymmetrical to a point of negotiation and dialogue. This desired for and ethereal, yet unremittingly refreshed and purged, interconnectedness of the old and the new, of the local and universal and of the self and other constantly recurring in many notable literary spaces, with the dramatists under study being an epitome, tallies not with Terry Eagleton’s assumption of the modern dramatic expression as a “rebellious adolescence” which is in “rupture Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Vol. 42, No. 1 (91-107) © 2019 by Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute

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with its parentage”3 for reworking and/or updating the classics in both thematic and style and the dehiscence of one’s philosophy of approaching experience to other writers have always been a trend in groping for life’s polyphonic dimensions.

A cross- literary negotiation that brings three major dramatists who defined the world stage with their aesthetic and theatrical refinements is what the present paper is trying to throw light on. While the turning moment in a piece of drama defined as Anagnorisis tends to be often associated with classical Greek and Shakespearean tragic postulations, this paper takes it over to a contemporary scene and to an African context to reveal its manifestations as they prevail through Wole Soyinka’s drama. Drawing on Aristotle’s concept of Anagnorisis as defined in The Poetics and philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s idea of the ‘acquired character’ in Counsels and Maxims, this paper articulates universal literary affinities emerging between Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Euripides’ Orestes and some of Soyinka’s tragic characters notably Elesin Oba in Death and the King’s Horseman and Iman in the Strong Breed , with the intention to show how they present patterns of self-knowledge of Man in general knowing that Soyinka is greatly influenced by both dramatists. Regardless of the roles they occupy or the kinds of duties bestowed upon them, these characters share moments of indecision, churning thoughts and conflicting passions in carrying out their tasks, precluding them from managing the scheme of things. Equally impressive is that these moments, however belatedly and abruptly grasped, turn out to be the obstacles these characters need to achieve self-knowledge and recognition. This reflects the three dramatists’ literary ‘universalizability’ and their concern with exploring the complexities of the human psyche, whether in ancient Greece, Medieval/Renaissance Britain or modern Nigeria.

Accordingly, the present paper veers towards the understanding that the modern literary expression continues to negotiate with the classics yielding in innovative patterns of projecting human nature in its complexities and nuances. While each responding to the sociocultural structure and logic of his time and enjoying his own solipsistic and aesthetic peculiarity, the humanist bent of Euripidean, Shakespearean and Soyinkan literary outputs is manifest in the way the three dramatists weave into their texts a human quest for self-knowledge as experienced by both individuals and societies. While Euripides’ theatricality, symbolic and allusive in tone due to its ‘air of skepticism’ and the rebelliousness in interest it had against the general eschatological rhythms of the drama of his contemporaries, negotiated with the plights of both highlypositioned and under-represented segments of ancient Greece spotlighting an existential angst fostered by an ill-conceived social conventionalism, Shakespeare’s drama brought new and fresh insights to the Elizabethan stage for it responded to the emerging Renaissance spirit which called for the centrality of Man and his aspirations and driven by such dictums as ‘know thyself ’, ‘the good individual in the good society’and Man as ‘the measure of all things’. Soyinka’s ‘drama of essence’, as it is labeled, resonates with its precedents and speaks to the universal while being entrenched to its African

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Yoruba gnosis and frames of reference. Soyinka named a “Philosopher of the Gap, or Abyss” for his concentration upon Man’s contemporary negotiation of his nihilism,invested the African dramatic scene with an aesthetic vivacity which insists upon the plurality in the African experience and the need to reach for the universal to make sense of the particular.

On Anagnorisis Reflecting on whether he would be daring enough ‘to force the moment to its crisis’4, Prufrock, in the epigraph, experiences internal anxieties and conflicts of a powerless man striving to come to terms with a reality that denies him all means to control the circumstances around him, let alone making a decision whether to act or not. He is frustrated, lacking self-comprehension or recognition and feeling paralyzed like an ‘etherized patient’ who perceives his surroundings in faint images and actions. Eliot’s poem was written in an era during which man’s desire to come to terms with his loss and inertia was in resonance with his fellows’ melodramatic and stymied cri du coeur fluctuating between a past that held false promises and a present inability to reverse the course of events. Such an in-betweeness rendered the task of understanding the self like what Laurence Senelick calls “propinquity”5; a feeling of intimacy and familiarity with the surrounding context, yet, feeling existentially distanced and unapproachable.

Be that as it may, being a crucial element in the development of a tragic character into a stable individual able to make wise decisions both personal and communal, anagnorisis (translated as self-revelation or self-knowledge), according to Aristotle, has to be experienced by the character to understand what went wrong and why. As defined in The Poetics, anagnorisis refers to, ‘a discovery, a change from ignorance to knowledge, and thus to either love or hate, in the personages marked for good or evil fortunes”6. The fully aware character is the one who, after experiencing pain and falling prey to wrong choices and turnings, becomes able to determine the proper course of action that would allow him to maintain his social standing and apprehend the intricacies that made him restless or undecided towards an action that is vital for his and the wellbeing of others. According to philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, acquiring some degree of self-knowledge translates into a new version of character, previously unexplored, now acquired to help the individual assume a new stance that will give meaning to his experience; this moment of his individuality that manifests itself to him shows him his aspirations and their limitations. In his worldly philosophy and his concept of the “acquired character” in Counsels and Maxims and in the context of Aristotle’s theorization about anagnorisis, Schopenhauer says: …Although a man is always the same, he does not always understand himself, but often fails to recognize himself until he has acquired some degree of real self-knowledge.

In this way, an insight into that which alone of all he wills and is able to do by dint of his individuality, is made difficult for him. He finds in himself the tendencies to all the various human aspirations and abilities, but the different degrees of these in his individuality do not become clear to him without experience7. (emphasis added)

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The idea of the ‘acquired character’ breeds transformation, self-discovery and a questioning of one’s own traits in the face of the unexpected.In his philosophy of self and character, Schopenhauer posits that, passing through moments of introspection, of self-examination, these characters, however beleaguered and restless, would appear in another light as persons capable of taking and effecting decisions; they would start afresh as transformed individuals ready to act upon their own circumstances to transmute all feelings of hesitation and restlessness into a firm assertion of the self.

They will end up thinking out new ideas for themselves and those in need of their insight and newly- acquired knowledge.

Wole Soyinka’s Drama of Essence: an African Version of the Universal In an interview with Karen L. Morell (1974), Soyinka said: First of all, I believe implicitly that any work of art which opens up the horizons of the human mind, the human intellect is by its very nature a force of change, a medium for change8.

This was the answer of Wole Soyinka when he was asked about the ethics of his theater. It is the answer of a writer with a sensibility towards not just the Nigerian African condition but also the entire human condition as one of his primary concerns.In his characterization, Soyinka portrays figures that fit our understanding and interpretation of the ambiguities of human nature. We get across characters whose ultimate lust for power and domination making use of the positions they are entrusted with to serve their personal purposes usually at the cost of the communal good, (Kongi‘s Harvest), others experiencing internal tensions in pursuing their noble goals when those around them welcome their ideas with reluctance and ridicule (The Strong Breed). We also confront characters facing serious hostility in trying to undertake actions relevant to the wellbeing of their societies; societies that, in most cases, turn out to be a hindering factor instead of supporting and upholding new ideas (The Swamp Dwellers). As odd as it might seem, we meet some other exceptional characters who have chosen for themselves a different path; whereas some might estrange themselves to escape societal pressures to search for truth and live life as they see appropriate, others may definitely reject any future conformity to societal norms creating for themselves codes of conduct that allow them the possibility to act for themselves (The Road). In this regard, and in relation to Soyinka’s plays, Oyin Ogunba maintains that: Today‘s African may be a little more bizarre than his contemporaries, but he still has the same essence. Thus, it is universal human nature that is explored in these plays, only the setting is particularized in time and space. We are confronted with the same problems, the same intensity of feelings and the same conventional solutions or lack of solutions9.

Howbeit our backgrounds are, we find in these characters some aspects that we can identify with, qualities that we do sympathize with and inadequacies and flaws that we justify as being mere reflections of the complexities of human nature. Ogunba, in commenting on the universal character of Soyinka’s dramatic expression, further asserts:

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This is why he is able to recognize a sameness of disposition in characters as apparently different as the ancient Helen of Troy, the medieval Madame Tortoise and the modern Rola. This is also why he regards Oba Danlola and Kongi as kindred spirits and finds the same cunning tendency in the Biblical Serpent and the serpent of the Swamps. Human crimes or foibles are outsidetime and place and so there is no need to upbraid some while extolling others10.

It is always thought that the corresponding side of Soyinka’s “rootedness is his cosmopolitanism”11 in the sense that the Yoruba and African roots that form the crux of Soyinka’s writings do equally manifest as his human universal roots. Reading Soyinka’s plays often calls to mind the settings and themes of the plays of Euripides, Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, Bertolt Brecht and Jean- Paul Sartre. This purports to the fact that the task of projecting the human experience in its entirety, of bringing to center stage the paralyzed condition of man and his constant search for a convenient source of salvation cuts across cultural boundaries. Wherever in the world, we hear of individuals and societies striving under the grip of the same situations of desolation and hopelessness inciting their artists and writers to respond with fine literary productions. In the following passage, NgugiWaThiong’O comments on the fact that whatever tropes a work of art would assume, the ideas it furnishes would basically cling to one shared universal essence: The universal is contained in the particular just as the particular is contained in the universal. We are all human beings but the fact of our being human does not manifest itself in its abstraction but in the particularity of real living human beings of different climes and races12.

Soyinka’s plays, therefore, embrace the bonds of universal human thought in terms of human suffering and the human quest to attain salvation and regeneration. Although he sets his works in Africa, with the African character lending them a local color, Soyinka gives his works a modern universal twist in trying to keep up with the cycle of universal human values. He sees an affinity between the types of experiences his characters project and those projected in world literature. This is due to the fact that Soyinka prioritizes the role of tragedy in broaching the question of human nature and essentially its paradoxical propensities, and this justifies the way he relates his writing experience to that of world literature. His mechanism of initiating change in society reflects the modernist impulse that works towards the perfection of the individual as it also operates within the bounds of the existentialist frame of thought. Equally evident in Soyinka’s plays is the notion that evoking the urgent needs of the modern Nigerian predicament means giving a possibility to approach the universal; a universal reality that makes any effort at reforming the human condition a shared experience in world literature. In the dramatist’s words: I have been preoccupied with the process of apprehending my own world in its full complexity, also through its contemporary progression and distortions ... For after (or simultaneously with) an externally directed and conclusive confrontation on

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the continent must come a reinstatement of the values authentic to that society modified only by the demands of a contemporary world 13.

Soyinka makes his characters’ attempts at self-knowledge extend to reflect the whole society’s desire to achieve understanding and recognition. He relates his writing experience to that of world literature as he probes into an entire human condition through valuing the role of tragedy to understand human nature and its often paradoxical inclinations. Soyinka’s characters, the ideas and thoughts they cherish negotiate with some other major characters representative of the world stage finely enacting the human predicament and man’s need for self-comprehension and change.

Elesin Oba and Hamlet: Staccato Pathways to Self-knowledge In Soyinka’s plays, the characters’ struggles for self-knowledge have several frontiers.

I have suggested in an earlier research that the tragedy of a certain character comes about when he tries to strike a balance between personal desires and the desires of the collective especially because the figure of the hero is often associated with the idea of salvation that limits his freedom of choice. In his plays, Soyinka gives his characters opportunities to experience moments of introspection so as to explore their drives and their limitations. The plays are rife with feelings of guilt, escapism, confession and remorse that shape the process by which his protagonists end up identifying themselves and realizing their inadequacies and flaws. In DKH, Elesin’s attempt at self-knowledge manifests itself in the way he wavers amidst his thoughts of responsibility to take action and the justifications he forwards so as to make others understand that he is apt for the task accorded to him and that his sense of desire has not failed him. From the outset, Elesin speaks of himself as one who is greatly trusted to hold the potential of his people in his hands. Over and above, he muses with others’ incapacities for such a great task judging their merits and defects, and this gives him more self-assurance and conviction of distinctness: Elesin: My rein is loosened.

I am master of my fate. When the hour comes, Watch me dance along the narrowing path Glazed by the soles of my great precursors.

My soul is eager. I shall not turn aside Women: You will not delay?

Elesin: Where the storm pleases, and when, it directs The giants of the forests. When friendship summons Is when the true comarade goes.

Women: Nothing will hold you back?

Elesin: Nothing. What! Has no one told you yet?

I go to keep my friend and master company.

Who says the mouth does not believe in “No, I have chewed all that before?” I say I have14.

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Soon after this assuring self-praise, Elesin starts to give space to the possibility that his task might be distracted. As if he wants others to understand that he might fall prey to outward influence and that it is not a matter of imperfection in his character.

He tells the market women: Elesin: I embrace it. And let me tell you, women I like this farewell that the world designed, Unless my eyes deceive me, unless We are already parted, the world and I, And all that breeds desire is lodged Among our tireless ancestors. Tell me friends, Am I still earthed in that beloved market Of my youth? Or could it be my will Has outleapt the conscious act and I have come Among the great departed?15(emphasis added)

The two above exchanges project Elesin in a mood of self-assessment: conflicting passions between assuring feelings of eagerness and readiness to fulfill his task of performing the last ritual dance that would assure the link of this world with the world after according to the Yoruba understanding of reality on the one hand, and the evasive possibilities he creates that he might be beguiled by one reason or another, on the other. In his essay, “The Dualism of Human Nature and its Social Conditions”, Emile Durkheim forwards the idea that inner contradiction is a feature that is inherent in any social being. He stresses the fact that human beings have the tendency to desire one thing and desire its opposite even though one side often tends to be hidden to the outward world and which the others cannot easily perceive. He opines that: We cannot pursue moral ends without causing a split within ourselves, without offending the instincts and the penchants that are deeply rooted in our bodies.

There is no moral act that does not imply sacrifice, for, as Kant has shown, the law of duty cannot be obeyed without humiliating our individual….how can we belong entirely to ourselves, and entirely to others at one and the same time 16.

Within the same line of thought, the modernists also speak of achieving salvation through experiencing damnation in the sense that the one who is destined to experience the final joy of salvation is the one whose spirit suffers the pains and mysteries of damnation. The existentialists, on their part, theorize about the paradoxical dimension of human nature through bringing the idea of understanding in confrontation; only after a confrontation between our inner desires on the one hand, and a confrontation with the outward environment that in most cases refuses to accommodate our ideas on the other, that one can end up understanding his purpose in life and his stance in it.

This is what is often termed in psychoanalysis as ‘ambivalence’; a kind of shuttling of emotions or a fluctuation between desiring one thing and desiring its opposite. In many literary works, we get across characters exhibiting contrasting views and conflicting passions in their stands towards themselves or towards others and this often results in a kind of a friction between various factions in society, for every

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faction thinks its desires have to be favored whatever outcomes this might entail on society.

Elesin, hence, emerges as an individual who knows his path, one who is aware of his duty and of the retributive implications the failing of which might finally entail. He strives to find a middle way between the promise he made to his people and the beauty of life he can no longer resist.While Elesin is hindered by the constraints of his desires and propensities, he always uses his inner positivism and resourcefulness to draw a positive and strong image of himself in the eyes of those around him. Even though he finds earthly pleasures irresistible, he strives to remain firm so as to prove worthy of the glorification heaped upon him and that he is no kind of those who fear to enter the unknown. About this state of mind, Carl Jung comments: In the realm of consciousness we are our own masters; we seem to be the factors themselves. But if we step through the door of the shadow we discover with terror that we are the objects of unseen factors. To know this is decidedly unpleasant, for nothing is more disillusioning than the discovery of our own inadequacy17.

This is the difficult task of questioning one’s own inadequacies in the face of external communal as well as cosmic demands. Elesin wants to satisfy his inner call for life pleasures; at the same time, he wants to show his allegiance to his society’s need for continuity and rejuvenation. In the eyes of those around him, however, Elesin’s hesitation puts him in a guilty position. Iyaloja attests to his desperation and says: You have betrayed us. We fed you sweetmeats such as we hoped awaited you on the other side. But you said No, I must eat the world’s left-overs. We said you were the hunter who brought the quarry down; to you belonged the vital portions of the game. No, you said, I am the hunter’s dog and I shall eat the entrails of the game and faeces of the hunter18.

Sharing much of Elesin’s hesitations and distractions, Hamlet’s tragedy is caused by his complex and constantly restless state of mind. Hamlet’s character here is approached according to his role as a prince and reformer of Denmark. The picture of Hamlet that we, all readers, perceive from the overall character of the play is that he is a prince of great insight, one who enjoys great power for reflection, and a character who constantly meditates on the secrets of human destiny and the mysteries of the unknown. In each of his soliloquies, Hamlet moves from one state of mind to another, never ceasing to conjure up man’s fate in the face of outward conditions and demands19.This ambitious and knowledgeable man who values the beauty and serenity of life is called upon to avenge a dead father which compels him to measure life again with a different lens. Nevertheless, before Hamlet meets his final destination with death being finally killed, he passes through hard moments in trying to inflict death on those he wants to take revenge from. He experiences the task of inflicting death on others before he himself receives it at the end. Seeking a balance between these conflicting emotions lies at the heart of Hamlet’s tragedy. Hamlet’s agitated state of mind is emphasized by many critics. In the words of Dr. Samuel Johnson:

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…A lovely, pure, noble, and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden which it cannot bear and must not cast away. All duties are holy for him; the present is too hard. Impossibilities have been required of him; not in themselves impossibilities, but such for him. He winds, and turns, and torments himself; he advances and recoils; is ever put in mind, ever puts himself in mind; at last does all but lose his purpose from his thoughts; yet still without recovering his peace of mind20.

Hamlet’s monologues are very relevant to inform his complex and tormented state of mind: Yes, you poor ghost! From my memory, I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All advice from books, all past pressures That youth and observation put there.

Your commandment alone shall live Within my brain, unmixed with lesser Matter21.

The above soliloquy rightly reveals Hamlet’s state of mind when he was addressed by his father’s ghost that reminds him of the duty that lies ahead. Hamlet’s words show his readiness to embrace his responsibility, he seems to have a firm belief in his task and that no force in the world would stand in his way. And as a prince of Denmark, to preserve the throne from being usurped, he assures his father that he would “wipe away all trivial fond records.” Soon after these self-affirming and assertive words, Hamlet’s wavering mind starts to manifest itself. He starts to speak of himself as unfit for the avenging task and that he is no more different from those from whom he is seeking revenge. He scorns and rebukes himself and he seems that he lost trust both in his capacity to accomplish the task and in the outward circumstances that, according to him, grow just to be more disturbing and paralyzing. He contemplates: Oh, what a rogue I am! Am I a coward?

I must be, or I would have fed all the birds With the king’s body—that bloody villain!

Oh, revenge!

I, the son of a dear father murdered, Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must unpack my heart with words22.

This feeling of hesitation, of passivity and inability to take a step forward keeps him in a state of constant questioning. Whereas things seemed clear and worth sacrificing himself for, now he blames the circumstances for turning against him and blocking his way to revenge. This calls to mind the way Elesin starts to accuse his surroundings for delaying his dance to death except of himself. But, the more we get across instances of Hamlet delaying his action, the more we can understand how much he really values his task and how much he is preoccupied with his role. Life, for Hamlet, seems a mystery and that any attempt at understanding its enigmatic nature would lead just to further

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confusion and self-remorse. Resolving the secret of life, Hamlet seems to tell us, would make a skeptic of every one of us. Therefore, the form of self-knowledge that Hamlet experiences at the end of the play reveals itself in the fact that he becomes able to draw some conclusions about human nature and destiny, the most insightful of all is that the quest for the meaning of life is trivial if we are not able to understand our role and purpose in it. After a long time of indecisiveness, Hamlet, at last, approaches his task but only after a true conviction of its importance in changing the scheme of things. While Elesin Oba looks at death as a step into a new life, a crucial beginning into a spiritual communion with the forebears and a point of honor for the living, Hamlet considers it as having little dignity, as the great equalizer that makes all men equal. In Hamlet, as in DKH, the issues of individual responsibility and destiny do overlap to lead Hamlet to his tragic end in a graveyard setting and Elesin Oba in a prison cell chained and disgraced Iman and Orestes: Actuating Consummation in Estrangement In The Strong Breed, Eman’s questioning stance of his people’s values and customs leads him to a transformation, yet this does not keep him from experiencing emotional conflict and pain. TSB dramatizes the tale of Eman, a teacher and at the same time a descendant of the “strong breed” of persons who have always inherited the responsibility of ‘carrying’ the community’s sins on their shoulders in acts of selfsacrifice. Reluctant to perform the duty in his home village, Eman escapes but naively volunteers for the role in a strange village unaware of the differences between the custom for which he has been trained and the one for which he has volunteered. The play opens with an annual end of year when a purification ritual has to be enacted to banish the evil of the previous year and to approach the New Year with a sense of purging. In the village in which Eman is a stranger, and as custom demands, strangers are used for this purging task. There are two strangers in the village: Eman, the school teacher, and Ifada, the idiot who is the apparent choice. Regarding the play and the ritual, Soyinka said in an interview: This is another play (The Strong Breed) in which I have used these African ceremonies where the town is cleansed in the new year where you have sort of a carrier….these people go through the town and the real meaning. The significance of it is that they sort of take away a lot of evils from the town 23.

Eman’s father in the play insists on the greatness that lies at the heart of Eman’s duty that distinguishes the strong breed from the rest of humanity. Unprepared, however, to take the responsibility bestowed on him by his inheritance, Eman flees his home village to find himself stepping forward as the year’s scapegoat in a strange village and, overtaken by his blood, lays down his life on behalf of a community that is not his. From the outset of the play, we are made to understand that Eman finds solace in being strange, he likes to be strange. The following exchange between Eman and Sunma overtly refers to this:

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Sunma: I am not trying to share your life. I know you too well by now. But at least we worked together since you came. Is there nothing at all I deserve to know?

Eman: Let me continue a stranger- especially to you. Those who have much to give fulfill themselves only in total loneliness.

Sunma: Then there is no love in what you do.

Eman: There is. Love comes to me more easily with strangers.

Sunma: that is unnatural.

Eman: Not for me. I know I find consummation only when I have spent myself for a total stranger24.

Eman knows very well why he prefers living as a stranger. This estrangement gives him a space for contemplation and reflection that he becomes able to learn much about the petty feelings of those around him. It helps him to see in others what they are unable to understand about themselves but, at the same time, it tortures him as it deepens his fears of others who are blind to truth and who are unable to understand him or welcome his ideas. He says to Omae: A man must go on his own, go where no one can help him, and test his strength.

Because he may find himself one day sitting alone in a wall as round as that. In there, my mind could hold no other thought. I may never have such moments again to myself. Don‘t dare to come and steal any more of it. 25

By constantly evading the task of the carrier in both his home village and the new one, Eman wants others to understand how much hollow and useless is the custom they are valuing and for which disabled ones like Efada, or enlightening individuals like Eman are wastefully given. In the play, Eman seems to hold the view that this carrier custom has been performed in the village for ages but people seem not to be purged and that their spiritual state seems stagnant about the task being approached unwillingly by the carrier. Thus, he wants to stress the point that for the purging task to have the transforming results desired out of it, the carrier has to feel the burden of the duty and he ought to perform it with a sense ofresponsibility. Only in that way can this custom be said to hold a potential for the community’s rejuvenation. This motivates us to ask, are there any signs that do inform the villagers’ transformed state of mind or make us assume that they are undergoing a process of self-apprehension and recognition? At the end of the play, Jaguna says that “women could not have behaved so shamefully. One by one they crept off like sick dogs” 26. The villagers, mainly the leaders, are now seen going back to the village with hearts full of pity and remorse of what happened. Hence, we might argue that Eman’s clashing views with the villagers helped produce a sense of awareness on both sides. As in Soyinka’s line of thought, Eliot similarly thinks that the most important recognition and self-knowledge that we constantly experience are most of the time constructed by our interactions with the outward world that does reveal to us things we cannot easily perceive on our own: The self, we find, seems to depend upon a world, which in turn depends upon it; and nowhere, I repeat, can we find anything original or ultimate. And the self depends upon other selves; it is not given as a direct experience, but is an interpretation of experience by interaction with other selves.27

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Eliot grants a crucial role to the environing circumstances to have a hand in our process to get knowledge about our strengths and weaknesses. This is what can be clearly revealed about Eman’s character in that it could develop through time due to the pressures of duty he lives under and which both his home village and the new village exercise upon him; as a descendent of the strong breed in his home village and a stranger in the new one. Having such an enlightened spirit, Eman tries to set himself as an example to be emulated, being dissatisfied with the role of a preacher.

Euripides’ Orestes, sharing most of the previous characters’ restless intellect, has often been approached for the mutability and lack of constancy that characterize his character. Euripides is thought of as a tragedian who “exhibits a more sympathetic concern for the currents of intellectual challenge in the fifth century B.C.E., currents of skepticism, impiety, and secular humanism”28. The Euripidean character often tends to be conscious and skeptical of everything surrounding him looking at the world with a critical eye. Of all the tragic characters that Euripides created on stage, Orestes is said to be the most representative. In the traditional tale that Euripides adopts in his play Orestes, Orestes is presented as faced with a moral dilemma unable to make the right choice about a seemingly impossible action; that is the killing of his mother.

Orestes faces an impossible choice here: in order to avenge his father, he has to kill his own mother, Clytemnestra29. While Orestes knew the dreadful implications of the blood crime he committed; he feels obliged to fulfill a religious duty required of him by his patron god Apollo, because of a messenger sent by the god in Delphi ordering him to accomplish the murder and to which Orestes took an oath. Orestes decides then to follow his patron’s wish and to kill Clytemnestra: “As the slayer of his mother, Orestes may be open to condemnation, but he is praiseworthy as the avenger of his father”.30 Owing to the matricide he commits and the difficult and agonizing state of mind he is put in, between an avenger and a killer, Orestes is presented,from the outset of the play, as a maniac, suffering from mental disorder and being taken care of by his sister Electra. His sister Electra describes his state of mind as follows: Electra: After that poor Orestes grew so ill.

Infected with a savage wasting sickness, he’s collapsed in bed and lies there, driven into fits of madness by his mother’s blood.31

Although diseased and unconscious, in his lonely monologues, Orestes seems to be well aware of the gravity of his act and its future implications: Menelaus: What’s wrong with you?

What’s the sickness that’s destroying you?

Orestes: It’s here—in my mind—because I’m aware I’ve done something horrific.32

In adopting the same story of Orestes that Euripides adopted in his play, J.P. Sartre, in his novel Les Mouches (Flies, 1943), speaks of Orestes as an existential man describing him to be the ‘guilt stealer’ in Argos as he thinks that through trying to fill the void within himself, because of feeling rootless and strange, Orestes is driven to ‘steal’ the

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guilt of the people of Argos making it his own 33. In Euripides’ play, though Orestes sees the task of avenging a slayed father a decisive one, Euripides projects him in an incessant attempt to atone and purge his soul of his crime. He says to Electra: If we could get just one thing, we could get lucky—some way to save ourselves despite all expectations might fall our way from somewhere, so we’d kill and not get killed ourselves. I pray for that.

It’s sweet to talk about what I desire in words with wings which cheer my spirit and don’t cost anything.34(emphasis added)

As it is clear from his words, he finds a joy in revealing his inner feelings and talking about his desires of having a purged soul because as he says this would “cheer my spirit”: Orestes: Menelaus, I am Orestes—the man you asked about. I’m willing to reveal all the suffering I’ve been through.35

Much like Eman who finds peace in estrangement, Orestes, being under a heavy torment, found solace in the penalty imposed on him by the people of Argos even though he feels rootless belonging nowhere. Before being reintegrated into the city of Argos according to the solution proposed by Apollo at the end of the story, Orestes feels alienated with a strong sense of depravity. He says to Menelaus: “Wherever I go, doors are shut to me.”36 Besides, and in like fashion with Hamlet, Orestes takes on the duty of avenging a murdered father from a slaying mother. Be that as it may, Orestes has been often compared to Hamlet and which reflects Euripides’ direct influence on Shakespeare. In many respects, they share scenes of indecision, self-doubt, both being deeply pained and concerned about a father who has to be avenged: Orestes is very much like Hamlet in other ways as well: he doubts himself and hesitates to take action; he fears that the god who commands him to take revenge may be an evil spirit in disguise; and he is given to expressing himself with soliloquies.37

He, like Hamlet, restores his energy for action, however infected by feelings of helplessness and exhaustion, by the end of the play to carry his plan against Helen and her daughter. He experiences a sudden act of awakening and awareness towards responsibility: His feebleness, still visible at his approach is reinvigorated by the fatal forces of fever and madness; exhaustion is replaced by activity, energy, violence, and finally by strength more than natural, while the organ of thought proportionally fails, and at last is utterly overthrown.38

After a series of pains and torments for committing an abominable act, after experiencing estrangement, after his wavering feelings of despondency and delusion,

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Orestes eventually and abruptly wakes up from his long sleep with a new sense of positivism towards crisis. He no longer harbors fears of the furies, the Argives or even the gods themselves, and emerges with a clear and assuring state of mind recognizing the duty bestowed upon him and firmly says: You fool!

Do you think I could stand to stain your neck, make it bloody? You weren’t born a woman and don’t belong with men. I left the house to stop you making such a noise. Argos is quick to move once it hears the alarm.

But still I’m not afraid of matching swords with Menelaus.39

The best kind of self-knowledge or recognition, according to Aristotle, is when a kind of situation reversal takes place leading the character to realize his transition and gives him a capacity to compare his past and present states. This takes place when the character faces the opposite of what he expected, and this would either uplift the way he looks at himself or destroys his image in the eyes of those around him.

Conclusion: Matching Cords Primordially Issued Wole Soyinka was very often criticized by his fellow critic Chinweizu that, in his works, he tries to impel his characters as well as readers to a kind of pure individualism, and that he divorces his works from any mass character of action. As a response to this, Soyinka asserts that, as we have clearly demonstrated, that the African experience cannot solely be thought of within the bounds of mere events particular to specific people, he instead insists that a work of art would have no appeal if it tries not to reach the mysteries of human nature. This can come about, according to Soyinka, through universalizing the particular and enriching the particular from what can be delicately reaped from the universal human experience. This attitude springs from Soyinka’s belief that cultures, however different, in the process of their evolution, cross-fertilize each other for the sake of generating one lived universal reality. In his respect, Soyinka opines that “in order to transmit the self-apprehension of a race, a culture, it is sometimes necessary to liberate from and relate this collective awareness to the values of others”.40In absorbing the western literary idiom into his drama, Soyinka is well aware that, for his project of change to achieve the desired improvement he aims at and to inspire the masses to whom it is destined, it has to work towards the elevation of the individual through creating dramatic spaces to measure the desires and aspirations of his heroes/characters within the insurmountable restrictions and obstacles of the real world.Out of this conflict, emerges the individual with a new way to sense the events and to pass it over to the others in his society.

Depending on each of the three dramatists’ philosophic proclivities on human nature, the process of Anagnorisis or self-knowledge finally makes one realize that all human beings, despite their varied personalities and intentions, bear similar universal features.

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The human spirit is the same, and it is this spirit with its desire for self-apprehension which has to be tapped for societies to progress in a positive direction.

L’Ecole Normale Supérieure de Bouzareah, Bouzareah, Algeria

Notes T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,. In., Collected Poems 1909-1962, (London: Faber. 1963) p. 6.

2 Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 10-11.

3 T. Eagleton, The English Novel: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 7. Cited in, David Krasner, A History of Modern Drama, Volume I, (Blackwell Publishing, UK, 2012) pp.

1-2.

4 T.S. Eliot, Ibid., p. 6.

5 David Krasner, Ibid., p. 115.

6 Leech, Clifford, Tragedy. (Routledge, London and New York, 1969) p. 64.

7 Cited in Norman Stinchcombe, Understanding Ourselves: Character and Self-knowledge in Conrad and Schopenhauer, (Department of Philosophy, College of Arts and Law, The University of Birmingham, September 2010) p. 43.

8 Interview with Karen L. Morell, in Karen L. Morell (ed) In Person - Achebe, Awoonor, and Soyinka at the University of Washington. Seattle: African studies Program (Seattle: University of Washington, 1975) pp. (78-83) p. 78.

9.

Ogunba Oyin, “The Traditional Content of the Plays of Wole Soyinka”, In. African Literature Today, (ed), Eldered Durosimi Jones, (Heinemann Educational Books LTD, London, 1971) (106-115) p. 115.

10 Ogunba, Ibid., p. 114.

11 Phrase borrowed from a lecture delivered by the American Professor Robet Elliot Fox in Lagos entitled “From Tigritude to Transcendence: The Conscience and Conscientiousness of Wole Soyinka”, (Sunday Magazine, 15 July 2012).

12 Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom, section ‘3’,”The Universality of Local Knowledge”, pp. (25-30) (James Currey Ltd., London, 1993) p. 26.

13 Soyinka Wole, Myth, Literature and the African World. (Cambridge: CUP, 1976) p. ix.

14 Soyinka Wole, DKH., op cit., p. 14.

15 Ibid., p. 18.

16 Emile Durkheim, “Le dualisme de la Nature Humaine et ses conditions sociales”, Scientia XV (1914) pp. (206-21), “The Dualism of Human Nature and its Social Conditions”, Emile 1

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Durkheim et al: Essays on Sociology and Philosophy, (ed), Kurt H. Wolff, translated by Charles Blend, (Harvard college Library, 1960) pp. (325-340) p. 328.

17 Jung, Carl Gustav, “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious”, (1934). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.Trans. R.F.C. Hull.Ed. Sir Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler, and William McGuire. Bollinger Series XX. 2nd ed. (New York: Princeton University Press, 1968) (3-41) p. 23.

18 DKH., p. 68.

19 Likening him to Dionysus and what he calls the “Dionysiac man”, Nietzsche says that both Hamlet and the Dionysiac man “have gazed into the true essence of things, they have acquired knowledge and they find action repulsive, for their actions can do nothing to change the eternal existence of things, they regard it as laughable or shameful that they should be expected to set to rights a world so out of joint. Knowledge kills action.” F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p. 40, quoted in David Krasner, Ibid., p. 13.

20 Quoted in John Russell Brown, The Shakespeare Handbooks: Hamlet, (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2006) pp. 160-161.

21 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, adapted by Tom Gorman, (Saddleback Educational Publishing, 2003) (Act 1, Scene 5) p. 23.

22 Ibid., (Act 2, scene 2) p. 40.

23 Mphahlele, Ezekiel (1975) “Interview with Wole Soyinka”, African Writers Talking. (Eds) Dennis Duerden and Cosmo Pieterse. (London: Heinemann Educational Books) p. 28.

24 TSB., p. 125.

25 Ibid., pp. 138-139.

26 TSB., p. 146.

27 Eliot, Thomas Stearns, The Sacred Wood, (London: Methuen, 1969) p. 146.

28 David Damrosch and David L. Pike (eds.), The Longman Anthology of World Literature (Second edition) (Longman: Pearson Education, Inc., 2009) p. 61.

29 Euripides, Orestes (Translated from Greek by Ian Johnston Vancouver, Island University Nanaimo, BC Canada), (Richer Resources Publications Arlington, USA, 2010).

30 W. Verrall, Litt.D. Essays on Four Plays of Euripides: Andromache, Helen, Heracles and Orestes, Chap 4: “A Orestes: A fire from hell” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905) p. 204.

31 Orestes, (Lines: 30-50), pp. 6-7.

32 Ibid. (Lines: 453-457), p. 22.

33 In Leech Clifford, Tragedy, p. 51.

34 Orestes, (Lines: 453-457), p. 22.

35 Ibid. (Lines: 1433-1440) p. 60.

36 Ibid. (Line: 430) p. 25.

37 Earl Showerman, “Orestes and Hamlet: From Myth to Masterpiece: Part I”, (The Oxfordian, Volume VII, 2004), p. 105.

38 Four Essays, opcit., p. 245.

39 Orestes, (Lines: 1830- 1837) p. 76.

40 Myth, Literature and the African World, op cit., p. viii.

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References Damrosch David and L. Pike David (eds.), The Longman Anthology of World Literature (Second edition) (Longman: Pearson Education, Inc., 2009) Durkheim Emile, “Le dualisme de la Nature Humaine et ses conditions sociales”, Scientia XV (1914) pp. (206-21), “The Dualism of Human Nature and its Social Conditions”, Emile Durkheim et al: Essays on Sociology and Philosophy, (ed), Kurt H. Wolff, translated by Charles Blend, (Harvard college Library, 1960) Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) Eliot, T. S., The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,. In., Collected Poems 1909-1962, (London: Faber. 1963) —. The Sacred Wood, (London: Methuen, 1969) Euripides, Orestes (Translated from Greek by Ian Johnston Vancouver, Island University Nanaimo, BC Canada), (Richer Resources Publications Arlington, USA, 2010).

John Russell Brown, The Shakespeare Handbooks: Hamlet, (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2006).

Jung, Carl Gustav, “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious”, (1934). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. Ed. Sir Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler, and William McGuire. Bollinger Series XX. 2nd ed. (New York: Princeton University Press, 1968).

Krasner David, A History of Modern Drama, Volume I, (Blackwell Publishing, UK, 2012).

L. MorellKaren (ed) In Person - Achebe, Awoonor, and Soyinka at the University of Washington.

Seattle: African studies Program (Seattle: University of Washington, 1975).

Mphahlele Ezekiel, “Interview with Wole Soyinka”, African Writers Talking. (Eds) Dennis Duerden and Cosmo Pieterse. (London: Heinemann Educational Books,1975).

OgunbaOyin, “The Traditional Content of the Plays of Wole Soyinka”, In. African Literature Today, (ed), Eldered Durosimi Jones, (Heinemann Educational Books LTD, London, 1971).

Soyinka Wole, Myth, Literature and the African World. (Cambridge: CUP, 1976).

Stinchcombe Norman, Understanding Ourselves: Character and Self-knowledge in Conrad and Schopenhauer, Department of Philosophy, College of Arts and Law, (The University of Birmingham, September 2010).

W. Verrall, Litt.D. Essays on Four Plays of Euripides: Andromache, Helen, Heracles and Orestes, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905).

Wa Thiong’O, Ngugi, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedom, section ‘3’, “The Universality of Local Knowledge”, pp. (25-30) (James Currey Ltd., London, 1993).

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, adapted by Tom Gorman, (Saddleback Educational Publishing, 2003).

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The Trope of Pensioners’ Plight in Gabriel Marquez’ No One Writes To The Colonel And Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s Trafficked Solomon Olaniyan & Gabriel Olaniyan Introduction rom time immemorial, literature has been instrumental in the diagnosis of social maladies and restoration of normalcy in human society. Over the years, pensioners have been subjected to pains, frustration, endless hopelessness and death. Meanwhile, writers do not turn a deaf hear to the cry of this set of people.

Such writers include Gabriel Marquez and Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo. This study, therefore, interrogates pensioners’ plight as depicted in Marquez’ No One Writes to the Colonel and Adimora-Ezeigbo’s Trafficked with a view to examining various challenges pensioners battle with when they are supposed to drop the ‘sword’, having laboured laboriously to serve their fatherland. The novelists employ their literary prowess to carry out a surgico-literary operation on the sickly human society where pains, frustration, despair, hopelessness, lack, sickness, leadership irresponsibility and non-responsiveness, moral decadence, poverty and spacelessness have become the characteristic features. Pensioners’ plight is not a new phenomenon in the world.

Contemporary world literature has enthusiastically dwelt so much on issues relating to human condition, history and political landscape of the cultural milieu in which those literary works are set. Moreover, the social commitment of the contemporary African artists (writers) cannot be overstressed. This synchronises with Achebe’s (1975) position that artists live and move and have their being in society, and create their works for the good of the society. Breyten Breytenbach (2007:166) describes a writer and sums up his social responsibilities in the following words:

F

…he is the questioner and the implacable critic of the mores and attitudes and myths of his society…he is also the exponent of the aspirations of his people. In Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Vol. 42, No. 1 (108-117) © 2019 by Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute

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the poor and colonised countries (like Nigeria) the writer plays a more visible role: faced with acute social and economic iniquities he is called upon to articulate the dreams and the demands of his people…And from this flows the impossibility of the writer ever fitting in completely with any orthodoxy. Sooner or later he is going to be in discord with the politicians.

Therefore, it is not possible for a responsible writer not to write in the interest of the cultural milieu. In the opinion of Terry Eagleton (1977), a writer does not need to foist his own political views on his work because, if he reveals the real and potential forces objectively at work in a situation, he is already in that sense partisan. Partisanship is inherent in reality itself; it emerges in a method of treating social reality rather than in a subjective attitude towards it. In other words, writers should objectively present issues as they relate to society without being biased.

Literature is usually committed to the socio-political incidents in the polity. This goes in line with the atavistic definition of literature as the mirror of the society; thus, literature is ontologically, in service of the human society as it portrays all forms of happenings. One of the contemporary issues facing humanity is that of the plight of pensioners or retirees.

Retirement is an event everybody would experience after working for a specified period of time. Most prospective retirees dread the phenomenon, perhaps due to erroneous beliefs attached to it. Retirement in the past had been associated with loss of finance, self-esteem, social security, emotional instability and old age related diseases.

Pensioners complain of corruption associated with different pension schemes in Nigeria.

The plights of the pensioners include quit notice from landlords, selfish governance, non-detailed mechanism in the management of funds, pension scams and arbitrary pilfering of pension funds. For instance, the probe on the military pension scheme by the Nigeria’s National Assembly indicated that the sum of N156 billion could not be accounted for (Omoni, 2013).

The concept of pension is viewed from different angles by various scholars.

Munnichs (1980) refers to it as the sum of money one receives after concluding one’s working career. He sees pension as an aftermath of retirement which he defines as a withdrawal from the workforce that is socially sanctioned through the provision of public pension. This relates to the Latin word “pensio”, meaning refunds of money one is entitled to, considering the work done. Haver and Siegal (1986) explain the term as a twentieth century phenomenon that has accompanied the process of industrialisation in most developed societies characterised by declining industrial employment and increasing white collar service sectors.

In the opinion of Friedman and Havighurst (1986), retirement accompanied by good pension is no longer perceived as radical transformation but as the end of the instrumental apart of one’s existence in favour of an extension of the expressive part which is the leisure time.

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Painful Experience of Pensioners in Marquez’s No One Writes to the Colonel and Adimora-Ezeigbo’ Trafficked Gabriel García Márquez is a Colombian author of more than fifteen highly acclaimed books. He is a Nobel laureate and a major proponent and master of magical realism in the world literature. As a matter of fact, he remains one of the most widely read and critically acclaimed contemporary authors in the world today. His best-known work is One Hundred Years of Solitude. When One Hundred Years of Solitude was published, it shook apart the literary scene in Latin America, and soon its impact reverberated around the world. His other works include The Autumn of the Patriarch, No One Writes to the Colonel, and Love in the Time of Cholera, as well as his memoir Living to Tell the Tale. García Márquez, who has become a symbol of contemporary Latin American literature, has had a great impact on the state of literature in both Latin America and abroad, influencing writers around the world. As a socially committed writer, Márquez often predicates his works on the socio-political happenings within his milieu. Thus, even though he is a fiction writer, his works are not without elements of fact or verisimilitude. In the novel under discourse, though it was written about six decades ago, what the author depicts is down-to-earth when one relates it to human experience in contemporary society. No One Writes to the Colonel is a story of an impoverished and retired Colonel, a veteran who continues to wait for his pension that has been promised to him for some fifteen years. The novel is set in Columbia at a time where Martial law prevailed. The Colonel has served his country but he has got nothing as his reward; rather, he lives in a state of despair.

Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo, on the other hand, is one of Nigeria’s most illustrious writers. Her first work of fiction for young readers, The Buried Treasure, was published

by Heinemann of UK in 1992. Since then, she has been making significant and incomparable contribution to literature by writing novels, short stories, and children’s books. She was declared one of the two winners in the NLNG Prize for Literature for her children’s novel My Cousin Sammy in 2007. Another novel, House of Symbols, won four medals. Two of her books were shortlisted for the ANA Prize this year, one of which (Heart Songs) won the Cadbury Prize for Poetry. On top of all that, she is one of the most visible gender and feminist writers, theorists and critics in Nigeria today.

Written at different times and from different polities, the two texts relay the same story of pains, hopelessness, spacelessness, waiting, frustration, despair and suffering.

Whereas the nameless Colonel in Marquez’ narrative is the main character in the text, Adimora-Ezeigbo’s main character is Nneoma. However, this study is not about Nneoma but about her father, Ogukwe. Nneoma is a victim of human trafficking who is trapped due to unfavourable living condition in her milieu. Thus, in her attempt to escape the harsh reality, she falls into a more deadly gulf. Meanwhile, her father’s financial challenge is one of the many factors that push her out. Hence, Nneoma’s experience is closely linked with her father’s (Ogukwe’s).

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In Adimora-Ezeigbo’s Trafficked, Ogukwe is a pensioner who hopelessly waits for his pension. Ogukwe is supposed to be the breadwinner, unfortunately, he cannot help the situation. All these make Nneoma opt to travelling out in order to escape the pangs of penury. Ogukwe hears a strange rumour that the Federal Government is going to pay outstanding gratuities to retirees. The source informs him that those that have waited for up to five years would be attended to first. This seems to be the fulfilment of his age-long dream. However, Ogukwe’s daughter, Mma, expresses pessimism saying that: This is cheerful news. But let’s not rejoice until the money is in your hands. I don’t trust our government. Look at the teachers’ strike, nothing has been done about it.

We have forgotten very thing we learned in school. No one knows if we will ever go back (110).

This is nothing but a down-to-earth picture of Nigeria. Nigerians have been disillusioned as their hope in the government seems to be unfulfillable. From Mmba’s speech, it could be deduced that the falling standard of education is another factor responsible for the fuelling of human trafficking and indiscriminate immigration of Nigerians. Akanle (2009) maintains that a lot of Nigerians that immigrate into the United Kingdom are the educated, young and ambitious who consider their chances of furthering at home irrelevant and needless since they do not twist the educational system is known across Nigeria to be of standard among the best in the world.

The financial quandary of Ogukwe’s family is a serious one. Ogukwe is not paid his retirement gratuity and his pension. He has to travel to Enugu always, though fruitlessly to try to get his money. Unfortunately, he descends into depression as he takes solace in alcohol. When Ofomata proposes to Nneoma, it seems like good news to the family.

Ogukwe appeals to his daughter not to turn down his proposition saying: “My little mother, think of what this will mean to us, land-starved as we are in this family! I can build a house on the land” (71). Thus, Nneoma’s positive response would be a cushion to the family’s financial tension. The foregoing is a clear indication of what happens to disillusioned pensioners all over the world. Perhaps the only means to an end for Ogukwe is the marriage of her daughter with Ofomata, who comes from a well-to-do family. Thus, in order to get out of his socio-economic entanglement, he opts for “commodifying” her daughter by marrying her off to her rich family. Appealing to Nneoma, Ogukwe says “my little mother, think of what this will mean to us, landstarved as we are in this family”…. “I can build a house on the land” (71).

Moreover, the Colonel’s condition becomes an allegorical representation of the status of man in postcolonial society. The Colonel lives in continued hope while he awaits his pension. Although the Colonel is hopeful, when his condition is critically viewed, he becomes helpless and hopeless. The Colonel’s expectation is neither met nor fulfilled. The narrator vividly depicts the high level of the Colonel’s poverty. For instance, he has to scrape the inside of the coffee can to get some coffee. The narrative is graphically presented in such a way that one feels for the victim-protagonist, who is

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a veteran Colonel who has worked all his life and is now expecting a reward from the authority at the “close of time”. The Colonel is in his mid seventies and he and his wife are down to their very last money, selling off family heirlooms to eat. They are waiting for his pension to begin, and in-between this wait, they must confront hunger both physically and metaphorically, a wait in anticipation of letter which will announce the commencement of the Colonel’s pension that will invariably bring them the income for life to which he is entitled (Akujobi, 2009).

He has a bedridden wife who suffers from asthma. However, despite his poor and pathetic state, he cares for his wife. He lies to his wife that he has taken his own coffee whereas he gives everything to her. Thus, it is observed that though the Colonel is financially incapacitated, he is responsible. However, he would have been more responsible if not irresponsible and non-responsive government that is blind to the plight and deaf to the cry of the pensioners.

Contrary to the normal practice when parents leave inheritance for their children, it is Augustin, Colonel’s deceased son that leaves an inheritance for the parents. As a matter of fact, the Colonel here is a representative of the oppressed retirees in the world. Pensioners across the globe are subjected to abandonment by the government which they have served all through their life time. In other words, these aged and vulnerable pensioners are deserted by the government. Thus, government’s refusal to cater for the physical and emotional needs of the retirees further aggravates their ageing pains (Patience Edirin Ukiri Mudiare, 2013). He prepares to go out to check his mail on Friday. He wears his shoes that “are already to throw out” (11), whereas his wife asks him to wear the patent-leather shoes. This portrays the level of his lack.

Ordinarily, an employee should be able to build a house while at service. However, most workers’ take-home cannot take them home. Although some workers often spend recklessly, there are many who desire having a house of their own but for their little pay. In the case of Ogukwe, he is unable to build a house throughout the course of his service though his retirement is premature. Shelter is one of the basic needs of man. It is not a luxury but a necessity of life. Lack of shelter here metaphorises insecurity as the pensioners are usually roofless and routeless. Thus, they are exposed to all forms of abuse in the community. Ogukwe has quarrel with his brother, Ezeozo Eke, who is supposed to ensure that a place is ready for him and his family to live in his mother’s quarters. Ogukwe’s wife laments the narrowness and inconvenience of the hut where they to put their heads: “Now we’re having to move into tiny hut on a little patch of land. It’s not even big enough for two people” (Trafficked, 69).

Furthermore, the living room where Marquez’ Colonel lives together with his asthmatic wife is described as being “too narrow for an asthmatic’s breathing” (No One, 4). This emphasises the spacelessness and narrowness of life. The only source of hope for the Colonel and his dying wife appears to be the fighting cock which he treats like a child. According to him, “We’re rotting alive” (6). The major advantage of the public sector over the private sector is that public sector employees often enjoy

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greater security of tenure and job security with a guaranteed entitlement to both a pension and gratuity. In contrast to the public sector, private sector employers tend to have the right to hire and fire at will, with or without providing any explicit reasons (Olanrewaju Emmanuel Ajiboye, 2011). It is, however, disheartening to state that the kind of hope that public workers have is more or less a mirage as their working and living conditions both before and after retirement are not enviable.

Furthermore, Marquez emphasises abject poverty which characterises the life of the pensioners as represented by the Colonel. According to the narrator, Because of his wife’s asthma, his white suit was not pressed. So he had to wear the old black suit which since his marriage he used only on special occasions. It took some effort to find it in the bottom of the trunk, wrapped in newspapers and protected against moths with little balls of naphthalene ( No One 5).

This shows that the man is in lack. He has to take care of his wedding suit like baby since there is no alternative. In other words, since the present condition does not give him joy, he relies on his past. For most pensioners, the only joy they can share is in the past when they were still in service.

Ideally, retirement ought to be a time to indulge in activities or extended holidays that a life time of work could never manage, not a time to contemplate returning to work. However, in underdeveloped and developing countries today, retirement poses serious financial challenges that would require pensioners to come out of retirement almost immediately. This is not unconnected with some factors. Pension payments (gratuity and lump sum) are irregular and sometimes months and even years pass by before payments are made. In the same vein, pensioners are still breadwinners and, therefore, pension incomes are spent on the family including the extended families.

The two victim-characters in the texts (Colonel and Ogukwe) endlessly wait for their gratuity which they are never granted. Unlike the Colonel who only has his dying wife to look after, Ogukwe has other many mouths to feed including children and wife. It is this financial incapability that pushes Nneoma, Ogukwe’s daughter out to search for a greener pasture abroad where she is trapped into prostitution.

In order to solve their plights during retirement, pensioners take their own destiny in their hands. According to Mohammad Mahdi Kashani Lotf-Abadi (2011), the Colonel experiences his freedom to choose and gain subjectivity when he tries to make a decision. The Colonel seems to be stocked in a dilemma: on the one hand, he does not want to bid farewell to the glorious past and what he had done in the civil war, and on the other, he does not prefer to do something else rather than just waiting for receiving a letter containing his pension. When he meets the lawyer, he murmurs: “well, I’ve decided to take action.”( No One 24). Yet, the decision of the Colonel in doing an action is again seems to relate to the background of his beliefs: waiting. When the lawyer asks about his decision, the Colonel replies: “to change lawyers” (No One 24). It shows how much the Colonel feels optimistic toward the

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government that after passing fifteen years waiting still hangs on the bureaucratic solutions. The lawyer tries to confirm him that what he is going to do “will take centuries”(No One 27). However, the Colonel decides to choose waiting, so he says: “it doesn’t matter. If you wait for the big things, you can wait for little ones” (No One 27).

The Colonel finds it difficult to take off his mind from his past. He tries to recount when he is put on the rolls: August 12, 1949. Out of frustration, the Colonel voices out his repressed emotion: “This is not charity”, he said. “It’s not a question of doing us a favour. We broke our backs to save the Republic.” (24) What Marquez depicts here is high level of insensitivity to the plight of aged pensioners and act of ingratitude as expressed by the lawyer who says “human ingratitude knows no limits” (24). As a result of government refusal to pay retirees’ gratuity, many of have very little choice other than returning to some form of work usually in the informal sector where they engage in after-retirement business activity (e.g. trading and agribusiness) in order to provide for their family (Ezi Beedie, 2014). While many of his colleagues are not fortunate to be alive as they many die during war, the Colonel who seems to be the remnant is not in any way better off considering his poor living condition.

While carrying out the postmortem analysis of the old pension scheme in Nigeria for historical archival documentation (1979-2000), Stephen Ocheni, Moses Atakpa and Basil C. Nwankwo (2013) maintain that the purpose of a pension scheme is to provide the employees of an organisation with a means of securing, on retirement, a standard of living reasonably consistent with that they enjoyed while in service. In effect, it is the totality of plans, procedures and legal processes of securing and setting aside of funds to meet the social obligation of care which employers owe their employees on retirement or in case of death. A good scheme serves as an incentive to new employees and helps to hold back experienced staff. It is, therefore, the responsibility of a good employer to articulate and design a good pension plan that will motivate staff.

One of the flimsy excuses often given for the non-payment of pensioners’ entitlements is change in leadership. According to the lawyer, “But the officials have changed many times in the last fifteen years.”…. “Just think about it; there have been seven Presidents, and each President changed his Cabinet at least ten times, and each Minister changed his staff at least a hundred times.” (26). The foregoing is a realistic portrayal of political instability in many nations. Thus, it is usually cited as the reason for not paying pensioners what belongs to them. A government that inherits assets should not find it difficult to accept debts or liabilities.

It is a fact that many retirees today live on credit. This has reduced them to mere object of humiliation in their neighbourhood: He had to grit his teeth many times to ask for credit in the neighbourhood stores, “It’s just until next week,” he would say, without being sure himself that it was true. “It’s a little money which should have arrived last Friday.” (29)

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The narrative presents the Colonel as a hopeless and helpless who continues to hope and wait for a better tomorrow that is never in sight. Waiting is portrayed as an important characteristic of human condition in that people always wait for one thing or the other and so life itself is simply made of waiting suspended between eternity. In waiting, what is known as meaning is subverted and one is left with nothing but hope that one day things will get better very much like the Colonel who, in spite of his age sees the need to wait and hope but the awfulness of this situation is a symbol of the human existential predicament (Akujobi, 2001). His indescribable financial quagmire is responsible for his poor mien as the wife describes him: “You’re nothing but skin and bones” (29). Ajiboye (2011) posits that the experience of people has been long queue of pensioners waiting for their pension or demonstration lack of payment of such. The conditions of living of older people who worked in informal sectors of the economy are even more precarious when compared with their counterparts who worked in the formal sector. This is because they have the opportunity of receiving pension at the end of their retirement from active service. Those who worked in the informal sector have no access to pension, and hence, their livelihood depends on the remittance from the adult children and extended family network. This further compounds their condition.

The plight of the aged pensioners who have spent their active years serving their fatherland should not only be worrisome, it should also be unacceptable. As a matter of fact, when pensioners are allowed to suffer is shows lack of regard for the committed senior citizens and insensitiveness to the wellbeing of this set of people.

The characters in Marquez’ narrative bear no real name except for Augustin, the Colonel’s son who is deceased. The idea of namelessness makes the characters stand as a representative figure for the men in the society. On the other hand, the namelessness could also be seen in terms of the insignificance of the disadvantaged people. The Colonel and his wife have been orphaned by their son who is killed for political reasons.

Here, the natural order of life becomes subverted as the son who symbolises the family’s posterity is no more. This becomes a threat to the continuity of the Colonel’s generation as that spells his extinction.

The Colonel and his wife are sickly. The Colonel has a feeling that ‘fungus and poisonous lilies were taking root in his gut’ (3), while his wife is asthmatic. The couple suffers from ill-health as they are not adequately taken care of. The Colonel wife says, ‘we are rotting alive, everything’s that way’ (6). The Colonel spends several sleepless nights as he is being tormented by the whistling of the asthmatic woman’s lungs. They have no money to get drugs. The Colonel’s wife puts stone in the pot to boil so that their neighbours would not know they are not putting their pot to use, she also makes clothing from patches or pieces of cloths of different colours, while the roof of the house that they live in leaks. In short, they lack good basic amenities, in terms of food, clothing and shelter. This depicts their deplorable condition especially, in a postcolonial society, which is seen in terms of their disillusionment.

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All of the Colonel’s comrades have died while waiting for their mail. They have all broken their back to save their country but get nothing as the reward for their labour.

Every Friday, the Colonel hopes that he receives a letter, but all the while, he returns home with empty hands. Concerning his war pension, it takes eight years to prove his claim and another six years for his name to be included on the rolls, however, that was the last letter he receives.

Marquez portrays how the government has contributed to man’s deprivation such that his situation is worsened. The Colonel is affected by the political instability that exists in his society as reflected in the governmental policies and systems such that the Colonel’s war pension becomes affected because his document seems unnoticeable and unattended to by the government officials that are being changed several times.

The sustenance of the Colonel’s family appears to be hinged on the rooster that the Colonel prefers to feed with the remaining food in the house, because the rooster brings in money for them through gambling as it is being engaged in a cockfight.

However, the providence from the rooster would soon vanish as it would soon be sold off. The rooster also stands as a reminder of the Colonel’s dead son since the rooster belongs to the son, ‘their son who was shot down nine months before at the cockfights for distributing clandestine literature’. (11) The image of death looms in the narrative. At the beginning of the narration, the Colonel is seen preparing to attend a funeral of a town musician whose death is natural and uncommon, since over the years, many has died because of disease, hunger, war and other societal inflicted mishaps. When the Colonel meets the postmaster, he tells him that he has come for his letter which is sure, but the postmaster tells him that death is the only sure thing.

No One Writes to the Colonel and Trafficked become universal narratives with their preoccupation about what seems common to man. The Colonel and Ogukwe never get what they are promised at the end of their services while they endlessly wait and hopelessly hopeful. The narratives are a kind of national allegory as they narrate realistic situations whereby some pensioners die while waiting to get their pension on a long queue under the scorching sun.

Conclusion The marriage between literature and society cannot be divorced as writers make use of their works to diagnose the various ailments confronting humanity. In other words, there is close link between the context and the text. Though writers rely on their imagination, their imagination alone cannot do much without ‘images’ from society.

This paper has, therefore, examined the picture of society as depicted in the selected novels. The novelists employ their literary prowess to carry out a surgico-literary operation on the sickly human society where pains, frustration, despair, hopelessness, lack, sickness, leadership irresponsibility and non-responsiveness, moral decadence, poverty, and spacelessness have become the characteristic features. Pensioners’ plight

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is not a new phenomenon in the world. Marquez’ novel was published in the twentieth century, while Adimora-Ezeigbo’s was published in the twenty-first century. This shows that writers have been critiquing the unpalatable experiences of aged and dying pensioners who have no one to cushion their pains. All government pension scheme reforms perpetually deform pensioners as a result of unwholesome practices, such as bribery and corruption, embezzlement, misappropriation, and wickedness. Marquez’ Colonel and Adimora-Ezeigbo’s Ogukwe are, therefore, representatives of suffering, oppressed and dying pensioners across the globe. Hence, it is the collective responsibility of everyone to ensure that life is liveable for pensioners who have sincerely served their fatherland. Pains should not be gain of their service to their nations.

University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Oyo, Nigeria

References Achebe, C. 1975. Morning Yet on Creation Day. London: Heinemann.

Adimora-Ezeigbo, A. 2008. Trafficked. Ibadan: Literamed Publications (Nig.) Ltd. Ajiboye, O. E. 2011. The Pension Reform Act 2004 and Wellbeing of Nigerian Retirees: A Sociological Evaluation of its Provisions. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science.

Vol. 1 No. 21 [Special Issue - December 2011]. 315-325 Akanle, O. 2009. Immigration Cultism and the Nigerian Migrants: Tidal Dynamism in the age of Globalisation. Globalisation and Transnational Migrations: Africa and African in the Contemporary Global System. Eds. Adebayo, G. A. and Adesina, C. O. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.181-200.

Akujobi, R. 2009. Hunger and waiting in third world literature. Lagos papers in English studies Vol. 4: 38-44.

Barry, Peter. 1995. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory.

Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

Beedie, E. 2014. Retired but not Tired: Linking Retirement and Informality of Labour. Asian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences (AJHSS) Volume 2, Issue 1, February, 2014. 37-46 Fanon, Frantz. 1961. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. 1963. New York: Grove.

Friedman, E.A. & Havighurst, R.J. 1986. The Meaning of Work and Retirement. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Márquez, G. G. 1979. No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories. New York: Harper and Row. Munnicks, J.M. (1980). Old Age and Finitude. Karge, Besset.

Ocheni, S; Atakpa, M; & Nwankwo, B. C. 2013. Postmortem Analysis of the Old Pension Scheme in Nigeria for Historical Archival Documentation (1979-2000). International Journal of Capacity Building in Education and Management (IJCBEM), Vol. 2, No 1, Dec., 2013. 19-31.

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The Quintessential Kalastajatorppa: A Cinematic Journey into a Time and a Space Matti Itkonen

By Way of Introduction space can open or close. So a space may, through its own opening, close itself. Or, indeed, the reverse is possible: a closed space may have the ap pearance of an open space. It is here that a human being comes face to face with the poetry of lived space. When a particular place feels snug and comfy or like home, the space has allowed that person to step into its essence. Then the person also arrives next to himself, contiguously close. He doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t think or feel that he owns the space: his existence is not about owning but about being. When a person then forgets the being way of being, it is owning that determines his worldly self-fulfilment. He becomes a vagrant, a beggar, in the midst of his being in the world. Simultaneously then, perhaps he also actually stops being.

Helsinki, Munkkiniemi, the Kalastajatorppa restaurant and the film Kuollut mies kummittelee (The Ghost of the Dead Man Walks) directed by Jorma Nortimo: a fresh breeze of internationalism wafts across Finland. The war is over and a period of vigorous reconstruction is in the offing. The beautiful Armi Kuusela is crowned Miss Finland and Miss Universe. The long awaited and wished for Helsinki Summer Olympics take place. The year is 1952. Why does narrative use the present tense and not the past? The answer is simple: because I, the philosophical time-traveller, am reporting things and the sequence of events from here, on the spot. As a narrator, then, am I reliable or unreliable? I am at least unashamedly omniscient. Very few things escape my notice. So I notice things. But I take notice of things in my own unnoticeable way.

This is something I should bring to the notice of my audience. At this stage I have nothing further to say.

A

Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Vol. 42, No. 1 (118-129) Š 2019 by Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute

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A Preliminary Itinerary Who plays the lead? Joel Rinne, Colonel Sarmo 1 or Inspector Palmu2? Or is the title role played by Itkonen, the formal creator of the text? Or is it, after all, the writer’s omniscient narrator’s voice that is the crucial figure in this description of a journey? And what about the potential reader, does he or she have a place in the story at all?

Could the script possibly mean we are following hard on the heels of the Dead Man and Inspector Palmu on their way to Kalastajatorppa? If the answer to the previous questions is positive, then why isn’t there any mention at all of the 1960s in the introduction? The answer is simple: “As an omniscient narrator I can act as I see best.

There’s nothing whatsoever anybody can do to me.”

Or it could be that the somewhat supercilious assertion made in the previous paragraph doesn’t tell the whole truth. Inside the narrative, i.e., a cinematic journey, I am able to be omniscient and omnipotent. However, there also exists a reality outside the narrative which the reader controls. It is possible for him to treat me as rudely as he wishes: leaving my text totally unread. For him, if he so decides, I have no existence whatsoever. So, I suppose we also have to talk about the omniscient reader.

What is needed in addition to verbality is pictoriality, pictures as well as words. It has to be possible to reach across from the exterior to the interior: from the noncinematic to the cinematic. To make transitions and change angles of view we have to construct a door which, when opened, allows us to enter into film reality. This leap means that we become part of the film, part of its narrative and the flow of events.

Things are set in motion in 1939 when the portents of the impending great war are already visible. Nevertheless the inviolability of being still prevails: the unbroken chain of days of peace. It is this changing time and space that sees the early beginnings of our national journey, a time when the Finnish ‘we’ spirit is also tinged with shades of internationalism. At this stage the key factors taking shape are the perceptions of the ‘we’ spirit; in other words, of the collectivity of national sentiment, the essential character of the age and the importance of place. By examining these it is possible to penetrate into the very core of those lived moments. After all, the goal of these investigations is to find the answer to the question of what Kalastajatorppa is, what it’s like, this place of fleeting events and episodes. (For cultural philosophy, see also e.g., Itkonen 2009; 2012a; 2012b; 2015.)

Theoretical Basis In his The Fate of Our Intellectual Culture (Henkisen kulttuurimme kohtalo, 1948), Dr. Eino Krohn writes illuminatingly about national sense of community and the relationship of the private individual to the community. His thought-provoking ideas create the fundamental theoretical basis for an analysis of these matters: “Relationships between the individual and the collective community are marked by considerable nuances and variations and it is precisely these relationships that largely determine the character and level of intellectual culture. This derives from the fact that the

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individual and the collectivity cannot be placed in opposition, as entities independent of each other. The individual has grown out of the soil of the collectivity and he has inherited not only specific individual tendencies and talents, but also an enormous number of ways of living and modes of being that have arisen and developed in society: ideals and aspirations, relational attitudes, which are in fact simultaneously the property of the collective consciousness. Furthermore, a collectivity is not constituted from individuals in the sense that they are atomic parts of it, their sum total.

Individuals are, as (J. E.) Salomaa observes, the more or less organic members of a collectivity through which collective awareness functions and who themselves affect the contents and direction of this collective awareness.” (Krohn 1948, 58–59.)

An important factor, in addition to the cultural dimension, is also time: lived time and the spirit of the time. Then it would be possible to regard Krohn’s characterizations above as the existential partners of temporality, which describe the spirit of place and the actualised idea of lived space. To further clarify this matter we require two perhaps somewhat surprising works. The first is Martti Rapola’s 1959 novel Grandad’s Landscape (Vaarin maisema). Its subheading is “an elegiac story”. It is also the concluding part of the Tavast Trilogy (Hämäläinen trilogia). Rapola reflects on the topic philosophically and poetically: “Time does exist after all. Every year it grows a layer on top of the previous layer. Just a moment ago he saw the time of his childhood spruce.

If he were a better naturalist, he would be able to examine the thickest plants and distinguish the lines marking spring and autumn. Surely the annual growth rings can’t have been laid down in jerks and jolts like the hands of huge clocks, which leap forward a minute at a time. If we could look at time through a magnifying glass, an astonishing experience would await us: how time speeds on and on, how a tree grows and grows. Somewhere, no doubt in a fairy tale, we’re told how a boy presses his ear to the ground and hears the grass growing.” (Rapola 1959/1971, 27–28.)

Rapola goes on to give an accurate and compact summary of the relationship between time and the Experiencing I: “Time hasn’t ceased to exist. It walks with Grandad.

It‘s part of the landscape, even a vitally important part. This is new for Grandad. Back in the old days he had no understanding of the landscape’s time. Because he hadn’t even noted the time flowing through his own consciousness, and forming layers.” (Ibid. 28.)

A second important work at this point is art historian Göran Schildt’s travel book A Dream Journey (Toivematka). The book appeared in its original Swedish version in 1949 and the Finnish translation was published already in the following year. The journey through post-war Europe and France can also be seen as a symbolic transition between two periods: it is like the passage from hate to love and from war to peace.

For some of the time Schildt was accompanied on his travels by his good friend George Henrik von Wright. Disembarking from the yacht Daphne, von Wright then travelled on to Cambridge University where he had been appointed professor of philosophy and the successor to the famous Ludwig Wittgenstein. The young doctoral duo carry on an interesting dialogue about time, the present and eternity: “I (Schildt) was trying to express these musings of mine to Georg Henrik. ‘It’s right that we are capable of

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living outside the present moment to a far greater extent than present-day man imagines in his own mind’, he (von Wright) replied. ‘According to our way of looking at things time is constructed from the sum of all present moments, whereas in contrast for Cistercians it was obviously made up of small fragments of eternity. There are two different ideals involved, which give rise to two very different ways of living. One of them reaps entire harvests out of the blink of an eye: ‘nobody can deprive me of the happiness I enjoy’, whereas the other accommodates itself to eternity: ‘a sin expiated is a sin expunged’.’” (Schildt 1952, 182.)

Now is the right moment to begin the actual journey to investigate the essence of Kalastajatorppa as well as of Finnishness and of the particular time period. Changing viewpoints will ensure the investigation is carried out with sufficient thoughtfulness and profundity. First, we must travel from the outside inwards, and after that return from the inside out. In this way the observant gaze will circle the object, examine it from all sides and see into its very core. Perhaps in this way the result will also be an overall understanding of the subject and how things stand. At least, we must regard this as our unequivocal goal.

From Outside In Here I stand, all those long years of war still with me and alongside me. I am an individual but at the same time also a part of some greater community. I have memories of my own and memories of a collective nation. I press my ear against the film poster for The Ghost of a Dead Man Walks. I hear the bygone: suddenly I’m with the Architect magazine photographer standing next to the brand-new Kalastajatorppa. I hear the past and in its murmur there are voices from 1939 and 1940. Existence as an individual has all but vanished, replaced by existence as an undivided nation. The quality of intellectual culture and everyday life are coloured by the ideals of tenacity, steadfastness and working together. You don’t abandon another person who’s in trouble. Everybody who needs help is helped. Following Krohn we could perhaps also be talking about the Finnish collective consciousness. And so it is possible to regard the individual as inheriting the community. In other words, he could not be an individual without the community.

This 1952 film poster is also a time-door or time-gate through which it is possible to move back and forth from one present moment to an- Photograph 1. Poster for the film The Ghost of the Dead Man Walks. other. This whirling hum of bygone days had ac-

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tually made me close my eyes and, in my imagination, leap back into a present moment from over a decade ago. And yet I’ve still got to become a concrete part of the existential roar that I hear. Then I could be both behind the film and at the centre of the film’s flow of events. This will work only by going inside Kalastajatorppa. I step through the poster door and its dark green glow and enter a summer landscape with its all-pervading perfumes. In front to my right there is a restaurant building, beautiful and ample in its form language.

As I set off and walk towards the steps, I can feel time growing, in the same way as the grandad narrator in Rapola’s novel: with each pace forwards I hear the years laying themselves down on top of each other to form a stratified experiential landPhotograph 2. Once, in the summer, at scape. And even more than that, the Kalastajatorppa. scent of the pines and the land signifies memory of the land. The land can be fruitful and abundant, but also productive in a figurative sense. The quintessential manifestation of its symbolism is probably food, through which it is possible to reach into the very core of being. It seems justified as well to talk about the tastes or flavours of a period. They, too, are a core component of the collective consciousness mentioned by Krohn. Are humans capable, then, of tasting time in their food as well, time-food?

An idyllic peacefulness surrounds Kalastajatorppa. And yet, in my inner being, I feel the weight of existence: my insides are being gnawed away by the disappointment caused by the Olympic Games that never arrived, as well as the fears and sorrows created by the wars. I am an individual but nevertheless I carry with me the pain shared by the community. Within the rotundity of Kalastajatorppa are hidden the vintages of lived time, the rings of moments. Moments of happiness and sorrow are hollowed out in those twisting threads of temporality. What kind of taste, then, does this actual present moment have? Perhaps in this context I might make playful use of the expression ‘mealtime taste’.

As I climb the steps and enter the building, the words of the Muonituslotan käsikirja (Provisioning Lotta’s Handbook) well up in my mind. They link up with the question of mealtime taste which I have posed and have been thinking about. The book had originally been published as long ago as 1928. The fifth impression appeared in 1939.

How we present or provide a person with the opportunity for mealtime taste is no small matter: “Food fulfils its purpose only when during its eating it is capable of awakening and sustaining the appetite. It is by no means the case that only food that

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tastes good can achieve this, but something else is also required. Food must always be served neatly and pleasingly so that even the simplest preparations feel like delicacies.

Good results can be achieved using simple means: the table on which the food is served must be covered with bright, clean greaseproof paper and oilcloth runners, the serving dishes clean and well-arranged, and the Lottas themselves should have clean hands, a clean apron and their head scarf should be properly tied up.” (Malmgren 1939, 58.)

I’m standing inside Kalastajatorppa and looking out on a scene of simply breathtaking elegance: a fenestral work Photograph 3. Fenestral art. of art. Seeing harmony arouses the feeling that existence is flawless. At precisely this point the individual and the community must be a single undivided unit. There is no other way of explaining the character of this moment. There behind the window are the years of war, slowly receding. The whole of time – with its stacked and interlocking layers – is present in this window view. It’s as if the zenith, the moment of the highest day, is presenting itself: shadowlessness when the great hands of humanity are precisely aligned one on top of the other. Perhaps somebody properly immersed and concentrating might find it possible to hear temporality and the decades evolving. Time lives and breathes alongside me, and I am part of this Kalastajatorppa magic window time. Before me an appetizing time-meal is spread out: life has constructed an existential food totality that is both delicious in taste but also simply attractive in appearance. Flowers, trees and water make up the sparklingly clean service table and cleanliness of living hands mentioned by Elli Malmgren. This is the right moment for the happy years to arrive. After all, one period of darkness never leads to another, but rather into light – the dawning of a new day.

Gradually I’m beginning to approach the period of reconstruction. The existential ideals of these years are diligence, modesty and forthrightness. This is a period of uncompromising hard work and an unshakeable belief in the future. On the horizon there is a lingering image of the vanishing days of war, reflected in the straightforward advice given in the Farming Women’s Keitto-opas (Cooking Guide): “Healthy, varied and cheap food – those are the nutritional and economic watchwords of the modernday wife. Whether food is healthy or not is determined primarily by the correct choice and handling of the ingredients. The wife can add the necessary variety to a meal by using all the products suitable for household use offered by economic self-sufficiency and by nature. The question of cheapness is most advantageously solved in each situation if the wife gives pride of place in her household to nutritious, cheap, homely products and handles all the ingredients carefully and sparingly.” (Maatalousnaiset 1944, 7.)

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The present moment is now the beginning of the 1950s. The war years have receded into invisibility. Of course, they continue to come back as memories. And then the Olympics finally take place as well. They are undoubtedly as big a celebration now for the whole nation as they would have been 12 years earlier. The Farming Women’s practical advice is just as necessary in this changed situation: healthiness, homeliness, variety, affordability, thriftiness and attentiveness are key issues when hosting and catering for Olympic guests. Perhaps the concluding words of the official guide welcoming visitors to the Olympic Games can be regarded as a concrete demonstration of this being everybody’s business and of the idea of collective consciousness raised

by Krohn: “We hope you’ll take a walk round our city and look at everything that interests you. Every citizen of Helsinki is ready to give you their assistance, help you find your way and offer guidance if you have any problems.” (Helsinki 1952, 5.)

From Inside Out I lean on the railing and look down from up here. I really have to nod my head in agreement and accept that the presentation in the Olympics guidebook is correct.

The description it gives is exactly right: “Kalastajatorppa, Finland’s most beautiful restaurant amidst the picturesque scenery of Munkkiniemi. Dancing every evening.”

(Helsinki 1952, 166.) The whole of the Fazer advertisement is elegant and quite simply lures you into making a visit.

The circular dance floor is like a metaphor for life’s circles where each passing decade has left its groove. That symbolic disc of being also includes Kalastajatorppa’s cinema age or its cinematic period. That time is in no way vanishing, rather it is there in the light, nimble steps of all those generations of dancers, present Photograph 4. A time of life’s rings. and future.

In the film The Ghost of a Dead Man Walks there is a time telephone which makes it possible to phone the future. In Kalastajatorppa cinematic time something quintessential happens on the stroke of 36.42. It is then that viewers are introduced to the time telephone kiosk. Can a human being really make a call from one film to another, talk with his own self waiting ahead of him in decades as yet unarrived? Perhaps Colonel Sarmo does indeed phone from 1952 and reaches Inspector Palmu in 1969 and gives him some helpful advice on constructing the character role stylishly and convincingly. Since Joel Rinne is both Sarmo and Palmu, would the phone call then mean that he is talking to himself or with himself? This is something that merits deeper deliberation.

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cause it is then that the elegant and modern main entrance makes its appearance. This scene, too, is about some kind of time door, whose meaning becomes clear later. Nevertheless, what is more central to the two aforementioned moments is the knowledge of the time phone and the audio link between two asynchronous ongoing moments. When Palmu answers the phone in the future, he hears the buzz of a bygone era in Sarmo’s voice. During the call the whole of time is present in both presents. Sarmo can also hear the hubbub of the future in Palmu’s voice. What is present is the time landscape of Kalastajatorppa, of Finnishness and of the cinematic. It courses through Joel Rinne and builds up in layers, forming rings of life on the dance floor. The parquet blocks are moments recorded into existence: the essential ingredients of a shared national memory. Then suddenly the time door opens for a second time.

Photograph 5. 1960’s poster for the film Suddenly, there in front of me, are the Vodka, Inspector Palmu.

1960s, saturated in all their dazzling colour. I am aboard a helicopter. We are approaching Kalastajatorppa. The cinematic clock shows 1.29,59. The helicopter is landing on the shore at Kalastajatorppa. Everywhere there is the lush green of summer. The roundness of the building’s design conceals the days of yesteryear within its depths. The cone-shaped roof is reminiscent of a castle whose very being and existence has had time recorded into it. At 1.30 the helicopter has landed. A reporter reaches out his hand with a microphone in front of Inspector Palmu and enquires whether he would like to say something to the viewers. Through the medium of television, Palmu asks his wife to warm up the sauna. In reality, though, Inspector Palmu is making a time call to Colonel Sarmo and to the year 1952. At 1.31,24 the helicopter takes off and we are given a bird’s eye view of Kalastajatorppa’s rotundity. Palmu leaves with the helicopter. Perhaps he is indeed on his way to meet Sarmo and his own past self.

In the cinematic time of Kalastajatorppa nothing is impossible.

By Way of Conclusion The idea of coming full circle is also connected with the structure of this essayistic cinematographic journey: at the end we return to the beginning. In other words, at the end there is the beginning, and at the beginning the end. Yet it is not a matter of a space closing and the endless repetition of the same beginning. Rather the question is about an existence of being, not an existence of owning. For this reason there is no basis for

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assuming that this circular movement indicates the possibility of a vicious circle and its never-ending rotation. Each completed cycle adds something new to the totality.

This is why a more precise expression in this context would indeed be an antivicious circle: a non-cycle of existence, i.e., a circulus antivitiosus. (For more, see Itkonen 1993, 36–39.)

I have once again passed through a time door and arrived in an outdoor space that is verdant, leafy and filled with the scent of pine. I am at the intersection of time levels.

What we have is a moment of tastes, tastes of epoch-making periods and turning points. The thoughts about eternity expressed in the work Dream Journey befit an examination of this stratified present. Is the time of tastes the sum of all present moments, then, or a totality constructed of tiny fragments of eternity? Are we capable of somehow expiating the evil events of wartime and expunging them? And can we think that nobody can deprive me of this jackpot of taste that marks this age? Is Kalastajatorppa time concave or conPhotograph 6. Back to the beginning. vex in character?

It is easy to begin answering these questions by unambiguously stating: “Kalastajatorppa time is both concave and convex.” Pictures four and six, which are like mirror images of each other, are suitable expressions of this fact. Picture four indicates a concave interior view into time. There again, picture six is a convex exterior view into time. From the perspective of the person experiencing it, the experiencer, Kalastajatorppa time – and cinematographic time as part of it – means both of these: the experiencer will reap, to use the words of von Wright, “entire harvests out of the blink of an eye”. When, for example, the experiencer has received the taste of the age and made it part of his experiential property, it is impossible for anybody to take that away from him. At this turning point where I now am, the end points of the linear timeline bend into a bow and join together. Inside the fold or bend so produced are heard the constantly resounding words of 1950s and 1960s cinematic time tastes. There the expert descriptions in Vera Tornérhielm's book Tiny Treats have an everlasting impact on her listeners: “Among the tiny treats that make up the most traditional smörgåsbord are cold and warm dishes made with Baltic herring and anchovy, even if they perhaps involve using slightly unusual ingredients. There are also many marinated and au gratin dishes, as well as chargrilled meat and fish. If you're someone who doesn't consider fish liver or roe as delicacies, then use this booklet to try out these relatively inexpensive foods. And it's not just gratins and croquettes that help conjure

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up something new from leftovers, you can do the same with butter pastries.”

(Tornérhielm 1952, 3–4.)

The 1960s have added nuances of straightforwardness and practicality to cinematic time taste vocabulary. The instructions given in The Home Cook's Sandwich Table can clearly be heard within this fold of time even now: “We can divide sandwiches into sandwiches for snacks, decorated sandwiches and warm sandwiches. Snack sandwiches are for eating in school, at work and on outings; decorated sandwiches are served with tea and coffee or as an hors d’oeuvre at lunch, dinner or supper. Warm sandwiches are served at lunch, at supper, as an accompaniment to broth and with tea.” (Kodin neuvokki 1967, 6.) I am simultaneously playing the role of both omniscient narrator and time travel guide. As part of concave Kalastajatorppa time I am in the midst of the flow of events and existence. In convex time I am outside the flow of existence and yet I am aware of what is happening in concave time. As a time travel guide I would like to try and accompany my prospective guest customers and offer them precisely this kind of Kalastajatorppa experience. Only in this way can you get a glimpse into the essence of Kalastajatorppa.

A cultured visitor is capable of hearing the timeless cultural language of Kalastajatorppa: the tales he tells make him part of the place’s existential narrative.

Sophistication can be heard In the rhythm with which the tale is told, the cadence of Kalastajatorppa. This is also precisely what is meant by a cinematic journey into a time and a space. The author of the novel Grandad’s Landscape, professor Rapola, succeeds in expressing something fundamental in his essay “The Language of Culture” contained in his work The Field Remains Behind: “Taking a scornful attitude to what stays behind is nevertheless a curtailed form of thinking, it is unthinkingness. The bygone has not ceased to exist because its most conspicuous manifestations have become buried under those of today. Once the light of a shooting star is extinguished, we can once again affirm that Mars and Venus pursue their unwavering trajectories close to us. Culture is always about the long term. The name itself says that time, the temporal element of depth, belongs to the essence of the matter, that a tree has not grown without soil and roots. For as long as we have had knowledge, the Latin cultura has meant and still means tilling and turning the soil, cultivating, developing, processing.

If we remove these semantic components from the concept of culture, then we lose the concept itself. In culture there always lives something which has existed in an earlier cultivation, as itself or as a seed: in a field as basic soil, in language as original root vocabulary, in art as a rhythm and as stylistic markers of times past. Without this it is not culture.” (Rapola 1965, 19.)

A whole hundred years or more of today: it is precisely these things – an awareness of its roots, vigorous participation in new modernities and an indefatigable reaching out into the future – that define the historical and cultural essence of Kalastajatorppa.

For this reason it also means a profound philosophy of hospitality. In the spirit of

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such a place there resides the feeling of being at home. Which is why it is always safe to return there.

University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland (English translation by Glyn Hughes)

Comments and Notes 1. The name Colonel Sarmo (Rtd.) refers to the 1952 film The Ghost of a Dead Man Walks directed by Jorma Nortimo. Joel Rinne appeared in the role of Rainer Sarmo in the three Dead Man films. The first two, A Dead Man Falls in Love and A Dead Man Gets Angry, were completed during the Continuation War, in 1942 and 1944. The underlying inspiration for all three films was provided by the writings of Simo Penttilä. The moniker "Dead Man" came about because Sarmo was called "Döttman" abroad, i.e., dead man. In this, the last of the series of films, the other roles were played by Reino Valkama, Hilkka Helinä and Mai-Britt Heljo. The director of the first two films was Ilmari Unho. The production company for The Ghost of a Dead Man Walks was Suomen Filmiteollisuus SF Ltd. (For more on the topic, see especially http://www.elonet.fi/fi/elokuva/123173; http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Kuollut_mies_kummittelee; for Joel Rinne, see also Itkonen, V. 1944. Hiljaisuus – kuvaus – kamerat. Suomalaisia elokuvanäyttelijöitä sanoin ja kuvin. [Lights, camera, action. Finnish film actors in words and pictures]. Helsinki: Tammi, 125–129.)

2. Joel Rinne is probably best known for his portrayal of Detective Inspector Frans J. Palmu, although he is most often referred to simply as Inspector Palmu. Vodka, Inspector Palmu was the fourth and final film in the Palmu series. It premiered in 1969. The first three parts, Inspector Palmu's Mistake, Gas, Inspector Palmu! and The Stars Will Tell, Inspector Palmu appeared in 1960, 1961 and 1962. The first three films are based on novels by Mika Waltari.

The concluding film was made without Waltari and the screenplay was by Matti Kassila and Georg Korkman. Kassila also directed all four films. Other leading roles were played by Leo Jokela and Matti Ranin. The production company for Vodka, Inspector Palmu was FennadaFilmi Ltd. (For more on the topic, see especially http://www.elonet.fi/fi/elokuva/117781; http://fi/wikipedia.org/wiki/Vodkaa,_komisario_Palmu; for Joel Rinne, see also Itkonen, V. 1944. Hiljaisuus – kuvaus – kamerat. Suomalaisia elokuvanäyttelijöitä sanoin. [Lights, camera, action. Finnish film actors in words and pictures]. Helsinki: Tammi, 125–129.)

Sources Helsinki 1952. Virallinen opas. XV olympiakisat Helsinki 1952. [Official guide. XV Olympic Games Helsinki 1952]. Helsinki: XV Olympia Helsinki 1952 organising committee.

Itkonen, M. 1993. Minulta teille? Fenomenologinen analyysi käymättömästä keskustelusta. [From me to you? A phenomenological analysis of a conversation that did not take place]. Publication 17A of the Tampere University Teacher Education Department. Tampere: Tampereen yliopisto, opettajankoulutuslaitos.

Itkonen, M. 2009. Kulttuurikuvia kotomaasta. Filosofisia tutkielmia ajan ja paikan hengestä.

[Cultural pictures of a homeland. Philosophical investigations on the spirit of time and place].

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Publication 80 of the Jyväskylä University Student Union. Jyväskylä: Kampus Kustannus.

Itkonen, M. 2012a. Aikaikkuna 1930-lukuun. Filosofisia tutkielmia suomalaisuudesta ja varkautelaisuudesta. [A time window into the 1930s. Philosophical investigations into being Finnish and from Varkaus]. Jyväskylä: Jyväskylän yliopisto, opettajankoulutuslaitos.

Itkonen, M. 2012b. Kulttuurimatkalla maailmassa. Filosofinen tutkielma ajasta, olemisesta ja suomalaisuudesta. Mielin kielin kaupungissa. Esseitä ruoka- ja matkailukulttuurista. [On a cultural journey in the world. A philosophical study of time, existence and Finnishness. Thoughts and flavours in a city. Essays on the culture of food and travel]. Edited by M. Itkonen and V. A. Heikkinen. Helsinki: Haaga-Helia ammattikorkeakoulu, 137–193.

Itkonen, M. 2015. Minä, kameleonttikuluttaja. Tutkielma toden ja tarun rajamailta.

Kameleonttikuluttajan paluu. Aikamatkaaja kotiseutua, maailmankylää ja elämystä etsimässä. [I, the chameleon consumer. A study of the borderlands between truth and fiction. The return of the chameleon consumer. A time traveller in search of his home, the global village and experience].

Edited by M. Itkonen, V. A. Heikkinen and S. Inkinen. Helsinki: Haaga-Helia ammattikorkeakoulu, 15–105.

Kodin Neuvokki 1956/1967. Kotikokin voileipäpöytä. Neljäs painos. [The home cook’s sandwich table. Fourth impression]. Edited by K. Wartiainen and K. Tolvanen. Kodin neuvokki 3.

Helsinki: Yhtyneet Kuvalehdet.

Krohn, E. 1948. Henkisen kulttuurimme kohtalo. [The destiny of our intellectual culture].

Jyväskylä: Gummerus.

Maatalousnaiset 1935/1944. Keitto-opas. III painos. [Cookery guide. Third impression]. Publication 230 of the Central Association of Agricultural Societies. Publication 20 of the Farming Women. Helsinki: Maatalousnaiset.

Malmgren, E. 1928/1939. Muonituslotan käsikirja. Viides painos. [The provisioning lotta’s handbook. Fifth impression]. Lotta-Svärd publication n:o 10. Helsinki: Lotta-Svärd.

Rapola, M. 1965. Pelto jää taakse. Esseitä ja impressioita. [The field remains behind. Essays and impressions]. Helsinki: WSOY. Rapola, M. 1959/1971. Vaarin maisema. Uudistettu painos ynnä Omat maisemani. [Grandad’s landscape. Revised edition including My own landscapes]. Helsinki: Otava.

Schildt, G. 1949/1952. Toivematka. Toinen painos. [Dream journey]. Second edition. Finnish translation by L. Hirvensalo. Helsinki: WSOY. Tornérhielm, V. 1951/1952. Pikkuherkkuja. [Tiny treats]. Assisted by A. Lampe. Finnish translation by home economics teacher K. Olsonen. Photographs R. Crispien. Edited by L. Sundström. Helsinki: Kuvataide.

Picture Sources Museum of Architecture, Helsinki Photographs 3, 4 and 6. Photographer Heinrich Iffland.

Photograph 2. Museum of Architecture picture archive. Photographer A. Währn.

National Audiovisual Institute, Helsinki Photograph 1. Jorma Nortimo: Kuollut mies kummittelee 1952 © KAVI / Suomen Filmiteollisuus SF Oy. Finnish Broadcasting Company, Helsinki Photograph 5. Film poster for the film Vodkaa, komisario Palmu, produced by FennadaFilmi Oy, 1969.

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Arguments Contrary to Spinoza’s View of Time and Free-Will through the Philosophy of Henri Bergson Rocco A. Astore Introduction ssues of Time and free-will appear to be staples in philosophical literature throughout the ages. As understood by Spinoza, because Time’s fixity is not due to people, or modifications of God, or Nature, and since God, or Nature is solely determinant, and also eternal, what people colloquially understand by Time, and free-will, are, in fact, farcical. Opposingly appears the philosophy of Henri Bergson, whose intuitive approach to the problem of Time, and critiques of determinists and those who ultimately treat Time statically, like Spinoza, helps to make room for the possibility of free-will.

This essay will begin by exploring some central aspects of Spinoza’s God, or Nature, his understanding of temporality, and the problem of free-will arising from his comprehension of Time. Afterward, this essay will explicate Bergson’s assertions regarding intuition and analysis, varieties of Time, the fallacies of determinism, and lastly arguments in support of Bergson’s take on Time and free-will over Spinoza’s account.

Some Main Points on Spinoza’s God, or Nature As understood by Spinoza, God or Nature is the only self-reliant, infinite, and eternal substance, who alone bears attributes, and exudes modes, or affections of itself.1 First, by attributes, Spinoza understands that which we as modes, or indefinite, malleable, and finite beings, could perceive as constituting the essence of God, or Nature.2 Now, to Spinoza, since people always perceive life as extended, we may assert that Extension must be one of the eternal and infinite attributes of God when viewed as Nature.3 For, no other being could sufficiently entail the power to explain the infinite extensity of the physical universe but the Almighty itself.4

I

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That is, as infinite, God, under the guise of Nature, bars anything from existing beyond the unending expanse of the corporeal cosmos, which, in the end, ties to what Spinoza calls the conatus, or our bodily instinct, to persevere, for we can never fail to be ultimately reliant on Nature, to subsist.5Thus, since we may assert that it is Nature alone that is ultimately requisite for our corporeal preservation, we may better comprehend the Spinozistic view that Nature does not require any greater being, aside from itself, to explicate its total self-sufficiency. 6 At the same time, we may address God, as that absolute notion, requiring no grander concept, to clarify the knowability or conceivability of the Deity. 7Accordingly, if we assume Spinoza’s position, and declare that God’s essence or power is that which alone could exude the eternalness of Thought, to explain reality, and humanity’s neverending flow of ideas, then God is eternal, and nothing is thinkable, or conceivable outside of God.8 One reason why Spinoza attributes Thought, as only being in the power of an eternal God to possess, is that, logically, nothing thinking could precede reality itself, which always sustains our ability to think.9That is, if we follow Spinoza’s understanding of God, as that solely eternal substance necessarily maintaining the endless continuity of all thinking found in the universe, we could only assert that God, alone, everlastingly ensures the sustenance of reality.10 Now, since nothing is outside of God, or Nature, for no greater idea or corporeal body could determine, fix, or be mandatory for the Deity’s conceivability or existence, we may claim that nothing is essentially prior, or ontologically antecedent to God, or Nature.11Hence, God, or Nature, Spinoza would believe, as the only cause, eventually leading to the arrival of all life in the cosmos, is ultimately that which alone could fix the parameters of all that is thinkable and doable in the universe. 12 Consequently, since nothing is exempt from ultimately relying on God, or Nature to continue to be, or be conceivable, either essentially or ontologically, we may assert that no unconditioned, uncompelled, or unswayable being or entity, bares existence or reality in Spinoza’s sketch of life, aside from God, or Nature. 13 At the same time, Spinoza also declares that God or Nature is not inexplicably free, for it would be an absurdity to believe that the Almighty’s nature should bend to favor, remedy, or alternate for the whim of any.14 Thus, although the Almighty is under no compulsion, God or Nature still bears a nature, that exists in such a way that even as the only Deity, who alone ultimately fixes all that was, is, or could be, God or Nature still cannot be ungodly, or unlike itself.15Finally, from this, we may assert that in Spinoza’s philosophy, modifications, or affections of God or Nature, such as people, are ultimately void of free-will. 16 For, our actions, as occurring in what we call Time, if real, could only be able to eternally depend on the Deity, like all other aspects of the universe, and thus, furthering us from the Almighty.17

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Problematizing Time in Spinoza’s Philosophy First, Spinoza’s problem of time begins with the fact that God, or Nature, as the only substance in existence, must be unique, and thus, apart or removed from humanity, in distinguishing ways.18That is because, it would be impossible for the Deity, as the only substance to produce another substance, for the reality and nature of life reveals that “whatever is, is either in itself or in another,” only.19In other words, only God, or Nature could be “in itself,” since the Deity necessarily precedes and antecedes all modes, like people, rendering the Almighty alone, to be the endpoint of thinkability and existence.20 Now, if we assume the position that God is Nature, we may claim that for any life to arise, it is ultimately, Spinoza’s materialized God, who must distinctly precede all that is.21For the Almighty alone, when perceived as the infinite extendedness of the universe, necessarily possesses the extensity required to surround all corporeal, or extended beings, at once.22 Hence, because God, when viewed as Nature, is all-encompassing, it is only Nature itself, that all things reside in, which renders the Deity alone to be ontologically premier.23 At the same time, we may also assert that this same Spinozistic notion of “whatever is, is either in itself, or in another,” could apply to the one realm of ideas, or that unique house of all conceptual reality that Spinoza calls God. 24 That is because if Nature, as God, is that only entity, free of needing a greater concept for one to think of the Deity, then God alone “fits the mold,” so to speak, of being that which must be at the highest degree of reality.25 As such, all things are at a lower degree of reality than God, making it impossible for anything to be thinkable beyond the Almighty, rendering only the Deity to be conceptually prime, in the logical order of reality. 26 Now, because God as Nature, and Nature as God, precedes all that was, is, or could be, we may assert that God or Nature is necessarily timeless, or eternal, in Spinoza’s metaphysical and ontological view of reality and existence.27That is because God or Nature is that which ultimately causes and surrounds all that is and is conceivable, including what we perceive as motion and change, or that which enables our perception of so-called Time.28 Lastly, Spinoza believes this to be so, for no entities, or objects, are exempt from existing in God, or Nature, rendering all the events we partake in, to necessarily ensue in God or Nature.29 Also, we may claim that because nothing could be, or be conceivable outside of the Deity; nothing could bound or limit the Almighty, rendering God, or Nature to be infinite.30Thus, because the Almighty is infinite, we may assert that God or Nature is immutably absent of change and motion, leaving us to further declare that God or Nature is eternal.31 For, nothing can curb the range of the Deity’s lifespan, leaving us only to claim that what we take to be Time, as necessarily sheltered by God, or Nature is illusory to the Almighty.32 Additionally, Spinoza also implies that the Almighty must also be in continuous activity, to facilitate the conditions needed for the continuity of all happenings,

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occurrences, and events, to unravel.33However, to Spinoza, this must leave the Almighty to be immutable, or unchanging, for God, or Nature, as in necessarily endless activity, can only be that which we could assert possesses the capacity, or power, to forever maintain what we could refer to, as stowed in the “past,” happening in the “present,” or arising in the “future.”34 Consequently, because God or Nature is necessarily immutable, we may continue to assert the Spinozistic notion that the reality of material change, or motion, is reducible to a non-existent status when contemplating the natural order from the perspective of the Deity.35 However, the reality of Time as involving physical change is perceptible and registerable, by us, which draws a distinction between God as infinite and everlasting, and people as finite and durational modes. 36 Nevertheless, Spinoza still wishes to retain a startling claim, that although people bare a durational existence, we can nevertheless still perceive ourselves as eternal. 37For, Spinoza even asserts that “we feel and know by experience that we are eternal,” indicating that we experience life, in such a way that we know our essence coheres with the essence of the Deity, rendering both humanity and God to be everlastingly conceivable.38 Problematically for Spinoza, if we could perceive bodily movements, then how could it be that we, as possessing an immutable, eternal essence, and the Almighty, as eternally immutable too, could ever witness motion, while the Deity cannot. 39In other words, if people, who ultimately derive from the conditions set by the Deity, partake in eternity, and God, or Nature, is eternity itself, how could it ever be that we could recognize change, via our perceptions connected to Time, while Time is unreal to the Almighty. 40 Although puzzling, Spinoza’s point of view is that Time, is ultimately reducible to God, or Nature’s eternalness, for the eternalness of the Almighty, led to the conditions for what we take to be Time, to arise, rendering Time to be, in the end, unreal. 41 Hence, because God or Nature is uniquely eternal, infinite, and immutably fixed by solely itself, we may assume that Time, change, and motion must be absent, when viewing the universe, as Spinoza asserts, under the aspect of the eternity, of the Deity.42Accordingly, we could claim that since Time is illusory, all events, occurrences, and happenings that we had, have, or will have, bear a determinant mark, and as such, we may continue to claim that without time, the reality of free-will is nil too.43 Spinoza’s Problem of Free-Will Next, the problem of free-will, to Spinoza, involves the query of how it could be that we could think of ourselves as free, while at thesame time, residing in God, or Nature whose overarching power, or potency, alone predetermines, or fixes the conditions necessary for all rational powers, like willing, to emerge. 44 At the same time, Spinoza declares that when we believe ourselves to be acting freely, it is just because we adequately understand our actions as arising internally, without anything externally forcing our conduct.45 That is, it is not that God or Nature

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fails to bracket or encompass the domain in which all our supposed free volitions happen;instead, it is we who fail to contemplate that the Deity is mandatory for those events to manifest when we comprehend ourselves as acting under no compulsion. 46 Now, let us investigate the problem of free-will, as connected to Time in Spinoza’s thinking. First, to Spinoza, the eternal essence of God, or Nature translates to be that which possesses the utmost Being, or that the Almighty is without limits, and thus negation does not apply to the Deity; instead, negation is a byproduct of the Deity.47As such, we may claim that in Spinoza’s view, because God, or Nature alone is all-powerful, and we people, as mere modifications of the Deity, dependent on God, or Nature, can never surpass the ability of the Almighty, leaving us to be forever unfree. 48 One reason for why it is that people could never reach or go beyond the power of God, or Nature, is that there could be simply no substanceaside from God, or Nature.49 That is, we, as only determinate expressions of God, or Nature, could never possess the formidableness of theAlmighty, because we are not absolutely eternal or infinite. 50 Hence, because only the Deity could genuinely assume the title of “substance,” and we as merely durational and finite modes, could never possess the ability of God, or Nature.51Finally, from this, we may assert that all our so-called free choices, can only occur in God, or Nature since we can never be free to outlive the Almighty. 52 For, the Deity alone is absent of indefiniteness and duration, and as eternal, we may only attribute God, or Nature as that which could set the conditions for all occurrences, of all ephemeral beings, like us, to arise.53 Consequently, because our understanding of our supposed freedom and volitions manifests, as necessarily and ultimately a derivative of the Deity’s power, we may claim that God, or Nature at the utmost level of freedom, always was, is, and will be inaccessible to us.54 Lastly, this unattainable ability to be maximally free, or to exists as the one substance, was, is, and will be for all time, for the Almighty as necessarily eternal shall never fail to be that which limits or negates our freedom. 55 Next, let us look at Spinoza’s assertion that “the order and connection of things follow the same as the order and connection of ideas,” and how it relates to free-will and Time.56 Now, if moving things in God, or Nature, such as our bodies are motive continuously, and if our ideas necessarily trek the same path, albeit in a cognizable way, then, to Spinoza our minds and bodies form a unity or seamlessly coherent parallelism.57 Thus, we may claim that to Spinoza, the mind and body are a determinate unity, which we could neither change alone nor defy our minds’ and bodies’ as being in impeccable synchronicity.58Lastly, this Spinozistic notion of the mind’s and body’s determinant and completely synchronic coherence causes a rift in Spinoza’s system.

For, how could we explain our ability to understand ourselves as perfectly equipped for life, or our power to freely attribute ourselves as those who enacted our volitions, without appeal to God, or Nature, directly, if the Deity forever determines us all? 59

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Bergson on Intuition and Analysis As understood by the philosopher Henri Bergson, intuitive approaches to philosophical inquiries, are requisite to embrace, for only our intuition, as the “intellectual sympathy” of our minds, helps us to peer into what is inexpressibly unique to objects.60 That is, intuition allows us to penetrate things intellectually, or imaginatively inspect them from within, as if we inhabited them, ourselves. 61 Now, although only the immediacy of our intuitions enables us to grasp what is at the root of objects, let us first begin by addressing problems associated with what is opposite of Bergson’s embrace of intuition. 62 That is, let us investigate the errors of definitional, formulaic, or rational methods of analyses, as well as empirical, or sensorybased forms of the same.63 First, let us entertain that we are attending to an object, by our senses alone. Now, when we start to examine our object, we must initially admit that we could only possess a relative knowledge of our thing because we can only view it from its position, as related to us.64 Next, even if we choose to encircle our object so that we can try to witness all of its many facets better, simultaneously, we could only come to find that it is impossible to possess absolute knowledge of it. 65 For, we could only fail at capturing our object’s oneness by using just our senses.66 As such, we may claim when we inspect our object, via mere sense perception, we miss something that reflects what our intuition immediately tells us; namely, that there appears an object before us, that we can comprehend as a unity or singularity, that is distinct from its identity as an array. 67 Unsurprisingly, we may believe that we ought to turn to rational forms of analyses, or those attempts to fix, or render a multiplicity into something that captures our underlying assumption, that a quality of uniqueness is inherent to our object, since we cannot deny that we recognize our object as a singularity, removed from us.68 However, by embracing rational analyses, which only could produce static definitions, or immutable concepts, as found in language, and stationary formulae, as found in mathematics, we mistakenly nullify the fact that our object is viewable from multiple vantages which our experience of life sufficiently verifies. 69 Thus, Bergson would assert that because, neither fixed concepts nor lifeless definitions, nor the failure of experience alone, to capture an object as a one and many, at once, renders us required to embrace intuition, to attempt to grasp the distinct unity and plurality of our thing, simultaneously. 70 For, Bergson would assert that intuition alone could imaginarily place us in our object as if we were within it, and therefore, we would be able to know it absolutely, as necessarily monadic and multifaceted, at the same time.71 Now, if we embrace intuition, as our paradigmatic attitude, we find that we could genuinely intuit what the essentiality of our thing is.72 That is because, only our intuition could explain the way we immediately grasp our object, as it appears before us, in its raw form, as a multiplicity and a unity, but neither at the same time, when we rationalize or account for it by our senses, alone.73

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In other words, Bergson believes that it is solely an intuitive approach that is most promising, to achieve total knowledge of our thing, because intuition alone, immediately presents and maintains how our object appears before us, which is truly impossible to depict by mere sense-perception or conceptualization accurately. 74For, only our intuition does not “other” our thing from how we could focus, or attend to it, as it presents itself to us in life; namely, as a necessary synthesis that could never be genuinely describable, representable, or experienceable as a full multiplicity and unity, at once. 75 Bergson on Time From these shortcomings of rational and empirical analyses, and our need to ascribe to intuition, arises another aporia in Bergson’s philosophy, which concerns two ways of treating two varieties of Time.76These two types ofTime, Bergson refers to as pure duration, which ties to intuition, and scientific, or mechanical Time, which links to analyses.77 First, Bergson believes that those who attempt to depict Time, scientifically and accurately, via adherence to the static byproducts of sensory-based analyses and formulaically-focused treatments of temporality, always fail at capturing a complete account of Time.78Now, to depict this problem of the scientific treatment of Time, or why it is that neither an empirical nor rational approach to temporality can ever depict Time as we understand it in our lives, let us imagine the moving hands of a watch.

To begin, let us assert that the second hand of our watch completes what we refer to as a half-hour by traveling around a full circle of sixty second-markers, thirtytimes. Next, we can enumerate our half-hour in two ways; namely, by either counting each fixed second-marker, thirty-times, for a total of one-hundred-eighty counts on our watch, or by watching the second hand of our watch, traverse our timepiece as it appears movingly.

Now, if we count every individual second-marker, on our watch, we are merely treating time inertly, failing to capture the lifelikeness of its motion or the facticity of its progressiveness.79 At the same time, if we only attend to our watch as it appears to move around our timepiece, we are guilty of imposing space onto Time, and thus, tainting the purity of Time, by rendering it reliant on extensity, for it to be registerable by us.80 Antithetically, if we view time more intuitively, by comparing it to a continuous ray of light, passing through a glass gradient, illuminating intensifying variations of the same color, as it progresses, revealing the multiplicity of aspects of that single spectrum of the one hue it brightens, simultaneously, do we approach a closer depiction of Bergson’s pure duration.81That is because, what Bergson coins as pure duration, is akin to an illuminated, intensifying gradient of colored glass, with each tone of that one shade appearing to fade into the next,allowing us to more adequately visualize a less discrete multiplicity of different aspects of a singularity. 82Finally, although this example comes closer to an accurate depiction of pure duration, we must recall that it is merely akin to it and that this example more correctly helps us to envision what Bergson calls a succession.83

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Now, Bergson would claim that pure duration, is akin to the rhythm of a tune; however, we may also liken it to something such as a human pulse. 84 Now, the intuition of our pulse is not that of a strict multiplicity, for that would imply it occurs outside of us, in space, which our intuition refutes since we can never intuit, or imaginatively place ourselves in another person and claim to feel that individual’s pulse, unfold in extension.85 This predicament leaves us to claim that pure duration is not entirely understandable as a succession.For, we never can speak of pure duration as unraveling, accurately, unless we dilute it with spatial terms leading us to the conundrum that pure duration relies on extensity. That is because, we can only describe pure duration as an unfolding sequence, when we mistakenly link it to a mere occurrence in space. 86 At the same time, our pulse is not that of a unity, for that would imply it is static, which the experiential fact that our pulse throbs, evidently repudiates. 87 Accordingly, we may claim that a pulse by neither being a full unity nor complete multiplicity, can only be anecessary synthesis of the two, just as pure duration is the synthesis of our intuitive grasp, but inability, to express time as a complete unity, while also a total multiplicity, at once.88Thus, like our pulse, it would be more accurate to call pure duration a necessary synthesis, that we also happen to all rely on, since if our pulse or pure duration were absent, or were to fluctuate, our understanding of ourselveswould change, instantly.89Lastly, we may assert that rhythms of existence, like time’s pure duration, or even the human pulse, attach a distinct dimension to temporality, on which we all rely.90 In sum, unlike the scientific treatment of time, we do not need to forgo our immediate grasp of the mobility of Time, when we more intuitively understand temporality.91Next, by likening pure succession to a ray of light that brightens an entire range of one color, in a way that allows us to better eviscerate the infinitesimal variations we analytically discern as constituting a lesser or greater intensification of that same shade, do we help to do away with complications arising from static ways of treating Time.92Lastly,byexplicating Bergson’s example of pure duration, by tying it to something such as the human pulse, we may better understand how pure duration is independent of the problems of scientific accounts of Time. 93For, pure duration, like our pulse, is knowable via intuition, and thus knowledge of either does not depend or require us to understand them as just fixed unities or to account for them as only detailed multiplicities.94 Bergsonian Arguments against Determinism From these considerations, we may now enter Bergson’s philosophy of free-will, which Bergson explores by critiquing psychological and physical determinism.95However, let us consider Bergson’s explication of the rivalry between mechanistic and dynamic takes on freedom, first.96 As understood by Bergson, mechanistic theorists of free-will tend to believe that the laws of nature arrange the experiential data, we encounter in our lives, such that we can organize those facts, and thus, render free-will, rule-bound.97That is, mechanistic

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theories of freedom place a higher priority in natural laws, than in the simplicity of something such as our ability to be spontaneously free. 98 For, if what we take to be scientific explanations of freedom, as involving us as necessarily having to conform to the influence of the natural order, like all other lifeforms and things, then we, as part of natural life, would only be able to deny freewill.99However, since mechanical theorists of free-will must give an account as to why something like the spontaneity of freedom, must be nil, they fail to admit that they are tacitly acknowledging the apparentness of freedom, a fact familiar and confirmable by us all, including those who treat free-will mechanically. 100 Opposite this mechanical take on free-will, are those who invest in a dynamic approach to freedom and claim that the spontaneity, and the immediacy of voluntary action that we experience in the world, helps to justify the common knowledge we all possess of ourselves as free. 101 That is, to dynamic theorists of freedom, the apparentness of knowing ourselves as free, renders free-will to be a self-sufficient intuition, for freedomâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s apparentness matches the immediate intuition we possess of our free-will.102 Thus, we need not engage in immensely complex, or less intuitive arguments, if we embrace our intuitive knowledge of ourselves as free.However, there nevertheless continues to be the theories of psychological and physical determinism, that we can use, albeit to Bergson, failingly, to deny free-will.

Now, to Bergson, physical determinism, or the theory that the cosmos is a bunch of material that is analyzable, by symbolizing the measurements of the various velocities of perpetually moving particles, fails to damage the possibility of freedom, despite the so-called determinant power of these governing bodies. 103That is because, on the one hand, we never immediately cognize the motion of these atoms composing us, as we do our understanding of ourselves as free. 104On the other hand, if intuition allows us to live like others, imaginarily, as if we were within them, then we would still find ourselves immediately knowledgeable of our free-will as given, without the need to know about the molecular activity that allegedly determines our free choices. 105 Also, physical determinists draw from the principle of the conservation of energy, or the law of physics proclaiming that only a certain amount of energy exists in the universeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s closed system, making it exempt from depletion or excess, as a means to debase freedom.106Now, determinists who rely on this law of energy upkeep, Bergson would claim are wrong, for a fixed share of energy erroneously implies an ultimately static universe.107 That is, Bergson would claim that if the conservation of energy in the universe were indeed an unswayable law, then all moving entities, like peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bodies, would necessarily return to precisely the same physical state, they were in, after moving.108However, our physical bodies, as housing a plethora of ever-changing chemical combinations, are so variously affectable, that the physical determinist idea of bodies returning to the same previous state they were once in, lacks complete verification.109

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Next, we may enter Bergson’s critique of psychological determinism. First, Bergson asserts that psychological determinism is the philosophical position that our prior conscious states pave the way for our present conscious states, and thus every idea necessarily leads to the emergence of our next idea. 110 However, Bergson points out that there nevertheless remains some uniqueness or distinguishableness harbored by each idea that arises from within us.111 That is because, there exist qualitative differences between ideas such as ones associated with pain, arousing a discomforting feeling when recalled, and others of hope, inspiring us to be our best, justifying that our ideas are not easily reducible to one another. Accordingly, if our ideas never precisely match, as implied by our conscious experience of never thinking of the same idea, in the same way, forever, then the belief that we could reduce our present ideas to our previous ones, utterly and undeniably, is not as easily justifiable as psychological determinists proclaim. 112 Bergsonian replies Tospinoza’s Problems of Time and Free-Will From these Bergsonian understandings of time, coupled with Bergson’s critiques of physical and psychological determinism, we can now embark upon a path to debunk Spinoza’s understanding of time and free-will.

First, let us begin with a critique of Spinoza’s view of time, stating that temporality is ultimately an illusion, at best.For, God, or Nature as in everlasting and ceaseless actuality, who alone explains the constant activity of life is necessarily exempt from any duration and is rather absolutely eternal.113 Now, by duration, Spinoza understands that time during which some modification of Nature, or affection of God, perseveres, or persists in its being. 114However, this Spinozistic idea of duration Bergson would oppose, wholeheartedly.One reason why Bergson would disagree with Spinoza is that Spinoza erroneously ties duration to the conatus or our bodily strivings.115At the same time, Spinoza also admits that the body cannot be aware; let alone of something like its duration, allowing us to assume that Spinoza misunderstood crucial aspects of Time. 116 For, Spinoza removes duration from what Bergson would call its “psychical nature” barring us from being able to intuit duration, purely, if we assume our intuition of time inseparably links to our bodily persistence, alone. 117That is because, if pure duration were solely reliant on our natural strivings, then pure duration would have to flux when the duration of anyone’s body ceases to persist.

However, even when we ascribe to intuition, and abandon our senses, and imaginarily place ourselves in another, we cannot intuit that person as genuinely believing that if only one person did not exist, then Time and its pure duration, would alter, or change, necessarily.118 Instead, it is pure duration, which our bodies and even our minds, ultimately rely on, for pure duration alone dictates how we intuit, reason, and understand Time, not the persistent nature of our bodies, alone. 119 Additionally, Bergson would assert, that Spinoza erred when he mismatched the Deity as being eternal, while also proclaiming that all other things as residing in God,

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or Nature, are indefinitely durational.120 That is because, if the Deity existed forever, without beginning, middle, or end, then Bergson would assert that the Almighty is lifelessly immobile.121In other words, if God or Nature were an immutable, eternal substance, as Spinoza indeed maintains, then the continuity of life, the flow of all modes, and the impermanence of our existence would necessarily be completely “other,” to the Deity.122Thus, we could only fail, to assign the various varieties of the innumerous occurrences that arise in our lives, to God, or Nature, if the Almighty were immutable, which is a claim, Spinoza wishes to keep.

However, by maintaining that God or Nature is unchangingly eternal, Spinoza implies that the Almighty must be at a standstill, and thus, what we take to be the continuity or flow of life must be stationary too, which our senses could never affirm. 123For, when we witness the dynamism of life, we attend to a multiplicity of sense-datum, inciting our perceptions, which would be impossible, if we were in an utterly stationary reality, as implied by Spinoza’s understanding of eternity. 124 Moreover, Bergson would disagree with Spinoza’s belief that motion and change in Nature are ultimately non-occurrent, for it would fail to match the Nature of eternity with how we intuit and understandTime as people. 125Now, if we adhere to Spinoza’s view that motion and change are illusory under the aspect of eternity, then how can we explain what Spinoza also asserts; namely, that under the aspect of duration, we can perceive motion and notice alterations in Nature.126Accordingly, Bergson would assert that this is an aporia in Spinoza’s philosophy, for how could Spinoza, on the one hand, deny change and alteration, while maintaining a static God, or Nature, to whom mobility is ultimately void.127 Moreover, even when we try to intuit or apply our ability to view reality from the aspect of God, or Nature, we can never do so in a way that is genuinely absent of Time and pure duration.128That is because, God, or Nature which is a unique, and necessarily immutable substance, is unanthropomorphic, as Spinoza asserts, which renders us only to claim that we can never intuit Time or pure duration as God or Nature would, adequately.129Unfortunately for Spinoza, if we could never intuit Time or pure duration as the Deity, then how could we surely assert that God or Nature ultimately paved the way for the conditions for Time and pure duration to arise? That is, if two things possess nothing in common, then one cannot be the cause of the other, as Spinoza would claim.130Finally, we may also accuse Spinoza of downgrading the power of the Almighty. For, how can we intuit, or apply our imaginative power to place ourselves in another, to capture Time and pure duration, absolutely, if God, or Nature, as static and impersonal, can never do the same?

Also, if we follow Spinoza’s lead that experience provides us with knowledge of our eternalness, then how can the immediate intuition of our bodies, as possessing the power to move, bear any reality, if, at the same time, our inner essence is forever, and thus, stationary.131That is, if our eternalness helps to constitute an eternal truth, determined by God, or Nature, as outlined in Spinoza’s Ethics, we would then have to

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treat essences as immutable points, mismatching our psychical vitality, which involves our powers to discern, reflect, and assign different qualitative features to the various ideas associated with the many moments in our lives. 132 Furthermore, if we adhere to Spinoza’s view that the order and connection of ideas must follow the same as the order and linkage of things, then we may assert, like Bergson, that our power to differentiate ideas, shatters Spinoza’s claim. 133 That is because of the psychical fact that we discern between our ideas, which implies that we acknowledge our ideas as bearing qualitative differences, providing us with evidence that we can never entirely reduce our ideas to our previous ideas. 134 As such, this bars Spinoza’s notion that when we go from bodily movement to rest, our minds must return to their previous psychical state, too, indubitably. 135Lastly, this helps to defy Spinoza’s understanding of Time, because it shows that mental progression does not indubitably cohere with physical existence, which would necessarily be if our mental and physical lives were in absolute synchronization.

Moreover, Spinoza, who equates infinity to eternity, is ultimately guilty of confusing space with Time, which Bergson would find to be problematic. First, Time and its pure duration are only that which intuition can best explain, and a purely rational treatment of Time and its pure duration, would only leave us with an inadequate understanding of temporality.136For, our rational powers, to express the lifelikeness of Time and its pure duration by signs, such as “”,” is wrong because this symbol merely statically depicts the livingness of Time and pure duration, which misrepresents the dynamic quality of temporality.137 Next, if Time and pure duration were genuinely infinite, each would be visible in space as a never-ending unfolding sequence.138However, our intuition, or our imaginative ability to place ourselves in Time and pure duration, to better comprehend either, would always fail because we never genuinely witness Time and its pure duration unfolding in the world.139In other words, if infinity is indeed eternity, then eternity would necessarily continue without end, rendering it findable in space, perhaps as an endlessly unraveling continuum that would necessarily be incomplete, forever. 140As such, if we can never reach the end of an utterly infinite series, like God, or Nature, then we can never declare that God or Nature is eternal.For, Spinoza, who mistakenly equates infinity with eternity mismatches the unending extensity of the former, with what would have to be the unchangeableness of the latter.

Now, if we recall Bergson’s critiques of physical and psychological determinism, we may now explore how Bergson would debase Spinoza’s denial of free-will. That is, to Bergson, something such as Spinoza’s idea that the actions of our bodies and the ideas of our minds necessarily and ultimately follow the same path, and thus, reciprocally determine one another, denies freedom, erroneously. 141 First, Bergson would assert that our ability to distinguish between the various qualitative differences of our ideas displays that our bodies’ fail to rein in our minds, when our bodies return to their previous states, before physical movement. 142 One

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reason why Spinoza’s view fails is that the order and connection of ideas and things are not strictly the same. That is, Bergson would assert that Spinoza fails to explain how our minds never backtrack to a previous idea in the same way as our bodies do, upon going from motion to rest.143 Hence, a Bergsonian reply to Spinoza’s belief in the mind’s and body’s necessary unitedness is that it implies that Spinoza failed to acknowledge that we can account for intervals in our thinking.144For, our ability to attach qualities to our ideas, like those we understand as sorrowful or joyous, displays our power to recognize separations between conceptualizations, as well as understand our minds’ as housing a temporal aspect, which our bodies do not.145That is because, by recognizing separations between our ideas, we can never claim that our minds unfailingly fallback to one core idea, as do our bodies, when they go from motion to rest. 146 Also, the inability of our minds to return to one static idea, always, would allow Bergson to continue to claim that our capacities to assign and contrast ideas from how they were, to how they are, and to how they will be in the future, refutes. 147 As such, we may claim that, to Bergson, our power to assign temporal dimensions to our conscious lives, helps to depict a type of independence each of us possesses, emerging from our ability to discern between ideas, defying how we understand our physical existence.148 Accordingly, we may assert that one way, to maintain the conditions for free-will, is to recognize our ability to distinguish between ideas, which leads to our power to temporalize our ideas.149 Lastly, this keeps freedom intact from solely relying on the order and connection of things. For, we can never access past moments or future states of our physical lives, in the same way, that our minds can freely recall the past, focus on the now, or contemplate the future.

Another way Bergson would debunk Spinoza’s claim, that the order of our bodily movements must be in perfect synchronization with the order of our ideas, to make room for free-will, is that we cannot attend to each aspect of our bodies, all at once, implying that our bodies possess a certain amount of freedom from our minds. 150 That is because, not even intuition, or our ability to imaginatively place ourselves within another, could yield absolute knowledge of our, or that person’s bodily states. 151 As such, we may claim that it is not that the body fails to be affectable in numerous ways, it is instead our minds which can never adequately explain the nature of the body, which is a claim Spinoza would find agreeable.152 However, our lack of conscious ability, to know all facets of our body, entirely and continuously, helps to damage Spinoza’s understanding of free-will, for it shows that even the body may be in some ways, independent, which is a claim Spinoza would never accept.153 Finally, from these complications of Time and free-will in Spinoza’s philosophy,we may claim that Bergson justifiably leaves open the possibility of free-will, as well as the reality of Time. For, neither Time and pure duration, nor the immediate intuition of our freedom are fully depictable if we adhere to Spinoza’s system, alone.

ARGUMENTS CONTRARY TO SPINOZA / 143

Conclusion This piece began with a brief overview of Spinoza’s God, or Nature, his denial of the reality of time, and his focus on the absence of free-will. Next, this article guided readers through Henri Bergson’s methodological framework of intuition, how it differs from mere analytic paradigms, and the implication of both on Bergson’s theories of Time and freedom.

Afterward, this essay, by applying Bergson’s criticisms of those who deny the existence of Time, as well as those who deny the reality of free-will, like Spinoza, set the stage for readers to reconsider these topics. Lastly, by demonstrating how Spinoza fallaciously understood Time and freedom, this article intended that a different understanding of these issues could emerge, with the help of Bergson’s philosophy of Time, allowing us to declare that the conditions for the possibility of free-will could still be.

Borough of Manhattan Community College The City University of New York, USA Notes Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 1d4, 1d5, 1d6, 1p8, 1p14, 1p17, & 1p19.

2 Ibid., 1d4, 1d5, 1p28, 2d5, 2a4, 2L7, & 3p8.

3 Ibid., 1p8, 1p10, 1p11, 1p19, & 2p2.

4 Ibid., 1p8, 1p10, 1p11, 1p19, 1p20, & 2p2.

5 Ibid., 1p29, 3p6, & 3p7.

6 Ibid., 1d3, 1p15, & 1p29.

7 Ibid., 1d3, 1d6.

8 Jaspers, Karl. Hannah Arendt, ed., [from] The Great Philosophers Vol. II: Spinoza (New York: Harvest Books., 1966)., 28, 37-38, & Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 1d3, 1d6, 1p10, 1p11, 1p15, 1p20, & 2p1.

9 Ibid., 1p1, 1p19, & 2d6.

10 Ibid., 1d1, 1d3, 1d6, 1p1, 1p14, 1p15, 1p18, 1p29, & 2d6.

11 Ibid., 1d3, 1p1, 1p17, & 1p20.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid., 1p15, 1p17.

14 Ibid., 1p17, Appendix Bk. 1, 5p17, & 5p19.

15 Ibid., 1p17.

16 Ibid., 1p32.

17 Jaspers, Karl. Hannah Arendt, ed., [from] The Great Philosophers Vol. II: Spinoza 1

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(New York: Harvest Books., 1966)., 14-15, 20-21 & Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 1d3, 1d7, 1p1, 1p6, 1p14, 1p15, 1p21, & 1p29.

18 Ibid.

19 Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 1a1, 1d1, 1d3, & 1p6.

20 Ibid., 1p1.

21 Jaspers, Karl. Hannah Arendt, ed., [from] The Great Philosophers Vol. II: Spinoza (New York: Harvest Books., 1966)., 14-15 & Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 1p1.

22 Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 1p8, 1p15, 1p20, & 2p2.

23 Ibid. 1p1, 1p8, 1p15, 1p20, & 2p2.

24 Ibid., 1a1, 1p15, 2d6, & 2p1.

25 Ibid., 1d1, 1d3, 1d6, 1p1, 1p14, 1p20, & 2d6.

26 Ibid.

27 Jaspers, Karl. Hannah Arendt, ed., [from] The Great Philosophers Vol. II: Spinoza (New York: Harvest Books., 1966)., 20, Russell, Bertrand. The History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster., 1972)., 573-574, & Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 1d6, 1p15, & 1p19.

28 Ibid.

29 Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics(New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 1d6, 1p15, 1p17, & 1p19 30 Russell, Bertrand. The History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster., 1972)., 571 & Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 1d6, & 1p8.

31 Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 1d6, 1p19, & 1p21, 1p32, & 2L1.

32 Russell, Bertrand. The History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster., 1972)., 573-574 & Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics(New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 1d8, 1p8, & 1p14.

33 Jaspers, Karl. Hannah Arendt, ed., [from] The Great Philosophers Vol. II: Spinoza (New York: Harvest Books., 1966)., 12, 38 & Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics(New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 1p17, 1p33.

34 Jaspers, Karl. Hannah Arendt, ed., [from] The Great Philosophers Vol. II: Spinoza (New York: Harvest Books., 1966)., 12, 22, Russell, Bertrand. The History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster., 1972)., 573- 574, & Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics(New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 1p18.

35 Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 2d5, 5p30.

36 Ibid., 37 Ibid., 2d5, 5p23, & 5p30.

38 Ibid., 1p8, 1p19, 1p20, 1p23, 2d5, 5p23, & 5p30.

39 Jaspers, Karl. Hannah Arendt, ed., [from] The Great Philosophers Vol. II: Spinoza (New York: Harvest Books., 1966)., 15, 20, 37-38, 113 & Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 1d6, 1p19, 2L1, & 5p30.

ARGUMENTS CONTRARY TO SPINOZA / 145

Ibid.

Jaspers, Karl. Hannah Arendt, ed., [from] The Great Philosophers Vol. II: Spinoza (New York: Harvest Books., 1966)., 113.

42 Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 1p8, 1p17, 1p19, & 5p30.

43 Russell, Bertrand. The History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster., 1972)., 574 44 Jaspers, Karl. Hannah Arendt, ed., [from] The Great Philosophers Vol. II: Spinoza(New York: Harvest Books., 1966)., 46-48, 51, & Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics(New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 1p15, 1p17, 1p31, 1p34, 2p48, & 2p49.

45 Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 2p35 & 2p49.

46 Ibid., 1p17, 1p31, 1p32, Appendix Bk.1, 2p35, 2p48, & 2p49.

47 Ibid., 1d6, 1d7, 1d8, 1p8, & 1p19.

48 Ibid., 1d5, 1d7, 1d8, 1p8, 1p15, 1p17, 1p19, 1p28, & 1p34.

49 Ibid., 1p14.

50 Ibid., 1d5, 1d6, 1p14, 2d1, 2d2, & 2d5.

51 Ibid., 1d5, 1p8, & 3p8.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid., 1d6, 1d8, 1p8, 1p11, & 1p28.

54 Ibid., 1p8, 1p19, & 1p20.

55 Ibid., 1p8, 1p17, 1p19, & 1p20.

56 Ibid., 2p7.

57 Jaspers, Karl. Hannah Arendt, ed., [from] The Great Philosophers Vol. II: Spinoza (New York: Harvest Books., 1966)., 18-19, & Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics(New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 2p7, 2p12, & 2p13.

58 Jaspers, Karl. Hannah Arendt, ed., [from] The Great Philosophers Vol. II: Spinoza (New York: Harvest Books., 1966)., 18-19, & Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 1p17, 1p27, 1p31, 1p32, 2p7, 2p12, & 2p13.

59 Ibid.

60 Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999)., 23-24.

61 Ibid., 23-24, 36-37.

62 Ibid., 23-24.

63 Ibid., 35-36.

64 Ibid., 21, 49-50.

65 Ibid., 21.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid., 21-22, 38 68 Ibid., 21, 23-24.

69 Ibid., 21-22, 40, & 49-50.

70 Ibid., 21-22, 23, & 30-31.

71 Ibid., 21-22, 24, & 46.

72 Ibid., 30-31.

73 Ibid., 30-31, 46, & 48-49.

40 41

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Ibid., 21, 30-31, 35, & 46.

Ibid., 24, 46.

76 Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness(Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 113-114, 115.

77 Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999)., 21-22, 23-24, 26-27, & Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness(Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 113-114, 115, & 119.

78 Ibid.

79 Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness(Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 104-105, 111, & 119-120.

80 Ibid., 104, 98-100, & 107-108.

81 Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999)., 26.

82 Ibid.

83 Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999)., 26 &Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness(Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 57-58, 89, & 90-91.

84 Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 105-106.

85 Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999)., 23-24, 26, 27, 36-37, & Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 94-95, 98-100, & 119-121.

86 Ibid.

87 Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999)., 26, 30-31, & 49-50.

88 Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999)., 23-24, 30-31, 49-50, & Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 129-130.

89 Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness(Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 116-117.

90 Ibid.

91 Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999)., 23-24, 30-31, 49-50, & Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness(Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 94-95, 114.

92 Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999)., 26, 30-31, & Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness(Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 114-115, 119.

93 Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999)., 26, 30-31, & Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: 74 75

ARGUMENTS CONTRARY TO SPINOZA / 147

An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness(Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 114-115, 116-117, & 127-128.

94 Deleuze, Gilles. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam ed., Bergsonism(New York: Zone Books., 1991)., 45.

95 Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness(Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 143, 155.

96 Ibid., 140.

97 Ibid., 141.

98 Ibid., 140, 141-142.

99 Ibid.

100 Ibid.

101 Ibid.

102 Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999)., 55, 61-62.

103 Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness(Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 143-145.

104 Ibid., 141-142, 148.

105 Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999)., 23-24, 36-37, & Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and FreeWill: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness(Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 147-148.

106 Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 149-150.

107 Ibid., 153-154.

108 Ibid., 151-153.

109 Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness(Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015).,143-145, 152-154&Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics(New York: Penguin Books., 1996).,2a4, 3Post.1.

110 Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness(Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015).,155-156.

111 Ibid., 156-157, 161, & 163-165.

112 Ibid., 155-156, 156-157, 161, & 163-165.

113 Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 1d3, 1d6, 1p14, 1p19, 1p34.

114 Ibid., 1d2, 2p30.

115 Ibid.

116 Ibid., 2p27, 2p28.

117 Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999)., 45 118 Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999)., 23-24, & Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness(Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 116-117.

119 Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999)., 23-24, 40-43, 46, 47-48, & Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time

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and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 116-117.

120 Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 1d3, 1d5, 1d6, 1p7, 1p19, & 2d5.

121 Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999)., 24-26, 30, & 40.

122 Ibid., 24.

123 Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999)., 21-22, 49-50, & Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 1d6, 1p19, & 2L1.

124 Ibid.

125 Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999)., 37-38, 40-41, & Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 1d6, 1d8, 2d5.

126 Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 2d5, 2A’1, & 2L1.

127 Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999)., 49-50, 30, 40 & Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 1d8, 1p19, & 2d5.

128 Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999)., 26-27, 30-31, Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 114, 130, & Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 2d5, 2A’1, & 2L1.

129 Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., Appendix Bk. 1.

130 Ibid., 1p3.

131 Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999)., 40, Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 114, & Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 1p25, 1p27, 1p29, & 5p23.

132 Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 97, 121, 123-124, & Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 1p25, 1p27, 1p29, & 5p23.

133 Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 97, 121, 123-124, & Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 2p7.

134 Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 155-156.

135 Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 2p7.

136 Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999)., 21-22, 26, 36, & 42.

ARGUMENTS CONTRARY TO SPINOZA / 149

Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999)., 21-22, 26, 36, & 42, & Deleuze, Gilles. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam ed., Bergsonism (New York: Zone Books., 1991)., 106-107.

138 Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999)., 26, 30-31, & 49-50.

139 Ibid.

140 Ibid.

141 Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 2p7.

142 Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 153, 155-156, & Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 2p7.

143 Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 153.

144 Ibid., 30-31, 35, 142, & 155-156.

145 Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 155-156, & Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 2p7.

146 Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 30-31, 35, 155-156, & Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)., 2p7.

147 Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999)., 49-50, Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 3031, 35, 155-156, &Deleuze, Gilles. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam ed., Bergsonism (New York: Zone Books., 1991)., 51-54.

148 Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015)., 30-31, 35, &155-156.

149 Ibid.

137

References Bergson, Henri. T.E. Hulme trans., An Introduction to Metaphysics (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1999) Bergson, Henri. F.L. Pogson trans., Time and Free-Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Connecticut: Martino Publishing., 2015) Deleuze, Gilles. Hugh Tomlinson & Barbara Habberjam ed., Bergsonism (New York: Zone Books., 1991) Jaspers, Karl. Hannah Arendt, ed., [from] The Great Philosophers Vol. II: Spinoza (New York: Harvest Books., 1966) Russell, Bertrand. The History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster., 1972) Spinoza, Benedict De. Edwin Curley trans., Ethics (New York: Penguin Books., 1996)

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Theorising Post-Truth: A Postmodern Phenomenon Amina Hussain In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.

—George Orwell Introduction ny discussion of post-truth implies an assumed understanding of truth. In order to analyse post-truth, one has to at first grapple, with the notion of truth. Does truth refer to facts and evidence? Can we access an objective truth and if there never was any ‘real’ truth and only truths, then what is this sudden fuss over post-truth and what are its implications? These questions in themselves pose a very postmodernist scepticism about the truth in general.

If truth then is so precarious, then what are the theoretical groundings of the post –truth. In my paper I will critically evaluate the phenomenon of post-truth and its relationship with postmodernism, accentuated with the rise of social media. There has been an evident surge in the academic publications on post-truth with writers like, Michiku Kakutani, Lee McIntyre and Ari Rabin-Havt along with Palgrave Macmillan anthology on Post-truth and contemporary society shows the urgency of the posttruth debate.

Post-truth today as it exist, is an extreme manipulation of the fertile grounds laid by postmodern theories. Both cultural critic Kakutani and McIntyre hurriedly trace Trump era post-truth politics which has had a ripple effect through out the world,with the rise of the right wingers to the postmodernism. Trump or other right wing politicians may not quote Foucault, Derrida or Lyotard but as McIntyre writes “the germ of the idea made its way to them.” The paper will analyse the “germ” in the more nuanced perspective of the major postmodernist theories and its direct or indirect bearings on the present post-truth scenario.

A

Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Vol. 42, No. 1 (150-162) © 2019 by Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute

THEORISING POST-TRUTH / 151

With contenders like “Brexiteer” and “Altright”, post-truth won the race for 2016 word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries. Given the politcal undercutting of the words in the list, it is clear that post-truth translated the tenors of the time. The two historic decisions namely, US presidential election and the Brexit vote in the recent history were dominated by sensational lying and obfuscation of facts, undermining the notion of truth. During the Brexit vote, many buses carried false statistics that UK sends 350 million euros a week to EU, while Trump famously lied about almost everything.

These two landmark events in ways more than one, shaped the present century and signal the advent of the era of post-truth, where post does not necessarily means that we are past the era of truth but rather the prevalent marginalisation and trivilisation of truth.

According to the Oxford Dictionaries “post-truth” is explained as“relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Before “post-truth” took over, Stephen Colbert had coined a new term called truthiness to capture Donald Trump’s persistent reliance on his “guts” and instinct in his grave decisions. Truthiness refers to the “feeling of truth” for a person, unsupported by any evidence or facts. The post-truth reality is alarmingly reminiscent of the cold war propaganda of 1945-1950.

Hannah Arendt reflects in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

As well predicted, today facts have become fiction, with the ever increasing lexicon of post-truth, words like “truth decay”, in the strategic denial of facts and more words like “fake news” and “alternative facts”. The word “fake” has entered in every aspect of our lives. “Fake science” is the science produced by climate change deniers. “Fake history” in the form of the holocaust revisionist. “Fake followers” and even “fake likes” and “shares” in the facebook, twitter and instagram, generated by dots (computer programming).

Post-Truth: Propaganda and Social Media Aristotle defined truth in Metaphysics as “to say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true” (Metaphysics 1011 b25). Aristotalian view of truth is a philosophical and metaphysical understanding of the ‘real’ and ‘truth’ which essentially runs on the logic of “correspondence”. Plato’s object based truth relied on the subject-predicate structure of the sentence and led to the famous problems of the falsehood because according to Plato in a sophist argument, one cannot judge falsely. In order to judge falsely, one has to judge what is not, but one cannot judge what is not and hence false judgment is impossible. The fact based view of truth came up in 20th century with philosophers like David Hume (Treatise), John Stuart Mill (Logic), G. E. Moore (Truth and Falsity)and Bertrand Russell (The Nature of Truth) and is also perhaps the

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most pragmatic view of the truth. Moore and Russel forcefully advocated fact based truth as ,“thus a belief is true when there is a corresponding fact, and is false when there is no corresponding fact” (Problems of Philosophy, 1912 129). However, with the onset of post-truth politics, meaning of truth has tranformed from fact to fiction, from reason and logic to rhetoric and emotions. This disturbing shift is dangerously manifested in the rise of populism and fundamentalism worldwide. Lets analyse the post-truth reality with an example.

For e.g., if it is said that “Mughals never ruled over India”, this statement is contrary with the statement like “Mughals ruled India from 1526 to 1857”. Both statements cannot be true and in order to ascertain the truth, we need to find out about the Mughal rule in India. Once we determine the fact, the statement contrary to it is either wrong or a deliberate mispresentaion of the truth/fact by someone who should know better or is simply lying to manipulate the audience.

Welcome to the post-truth era, here the assertion that Mughals never ruled India will incorporate the whole system of documentation to be used as facts, opinionated experts to educate the masses about its veracity and the hired section of members of the archival network who will reiterate the claim along with the social media machinery with millions of likes and shares to prove its authenticity. So the statement that Mughals never ruled over India becomes “true” because of this “network/nexus of agreement” and if any dares to question the claim, it is interpreted as an attack on the whole system of knowing and not the statement itself. Thus posttruth is not just about alternate facts as the other side of the story (as it is often projected using postmodernist logic)or the misrepresentaion of facts, falsification of data, unintentional lying, deceiving or political spin. In a clear refutation of the objective facts, post-truth challenges not just the idea of knowing truth but the very existence of truth is gasping for oxygen.

Michiku in her latest book, The Death of Truth defines post-truth as “where truth increasingly seems to be in the eye of the beholder, facts are fungible and socially constructed.”

When Trump called the climate change, a Chinese hoax to ruin the American economy, the point to note is that the climate change deniers will negate the fact that don’t conform to their ideology and hence no climate change. It is not just the careless disregard or the complete abandonment of facts, the post-truth thrives in the manipulation of the process and the corruption of the machinery by which facts are gathered and then used to shape people’s opinion about issues. And post-truth flourishes as people cherry pick only those facts which suits their beliefs, generating information silos. News silos are created on social media not only with the sharing of the stories but also with the ‘trending stories’ phenomenon which will display only those stories that one is more inclined to watch, according to its recorded history of likes and shares. This creates fragmentation and polarisation of views, “an endless you loop.” Hence the whole machinery(of network of agreement) is employed to manufacture facts that suits the political interests. Post-truth is thus more like a an

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“ideological supremacy” in compelling and convincing people to believe in something without any reliable evidence for it. Using the emotive power, it oftens appropriates the cultural and nationalist language to generate consensus. In his TED talk in 2011, Eli Pariser, left-wing internet activist working against the web personalisation accurately cautions, “if they’re going to decide what we get to see and what we don’t get to see,then we need to make sure that they’re not just keyed to relevance but that they also show us things that are uncomfortable or challenging or important, other points of view.” (3) Al Gore in his Assault on Reason reprimands Bush’s disastrous decision to invade Iraq on the false pretext of WMD “the persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massisve and well-understood evidence to the contrary.” The Iraq war was based on the same post-truth logic of orchestrated intelligence to support “preconceived idees fixes” using the rhetoric of America’s ‘war on terror’. Ari Rabin-Havt in his Lies Incorporated unravels the hidden nexus between the economic interests and post-truth politics, by demostrating that the corporate funding and lobbying determines the political positions on topics like global warming, abortion, guns, immigration and even healthcare.

Post-truth has become synonymous with political control. After all, blatant lying or misrepresentation of facts or deceiving or beguiling masses is nothing new. Hitler’s close associate and the Propaganda Minister of Nazi, Joseph Goebbles, known for his virulent speeches, not only engineered the Final Solution but also convinced the Germans of its urgent necessity. Deborah E Lipstadt, a renowned American historian asserts in Denying the Holocoust, the dangerous implications of post-truth where “no fact, no event, and no aspect of history has any fixed meaning or content. Any truth can be retold. Any fact can be recast. There is no ultimate historical reality.”

What has given the post-truth its credibilty and what are its tools on which it operate so succesfully? Why is it that truth and reason have become such an endangered species?

What has made the people normalise their indifference to truth?

In order to understand the tragic demise of truth and the evolution of post-truth, we have to go back to the postmodernism as a philosophical theoretical understanding of the world that permeated in the art, history, culture, literature and even clothes and architecture, post-world wars. Post-truth gets its legitimacy from the postmodern premise of the impossibilty of any objective truth.

Postmodernism: The Rise of Multiple Truths Postmodernism emerged as a seminal concept with Jean Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge in 1979 where he describes the postmodern era as the disillusionment with the grand claims of the meta narrative on “reason”, “truth” and “progress”, which were the hallmarks of the Enlightenment Project. The modern period began with the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason, famously called in Britian. Espoused by thinkers like Kant in Germany, Voltaire and Diderot in France and Locke and Hume in Britain, the Enlightenment project believed

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in reason and logic to be the foundations on which human progress can be laid.

Enlightement also coincided with the scientific vision undermining slavish obedience to the religions and traditional practices in glorifying the primacy of reason in the human civilisation. The French Revolution and its successful ideals were the ultimate litmus test for the Enlightenment theory of progress and justice. Jurgen Habermas makes a very careful connection between the modernism and post-modernism in his insightful essay entitled as “Modernity: An Incomplete Project” in 1980, where he reprimands Derrida and Foucault in their attack on reason, clarity, truth, and progress.

The end of the modernism and the beginning of the post-modernism can be traced in Beckett’s waiting for Godot, where Godot, the God or any totalising discourse remains present/absent and Vladimir and Estragon are endlessly waiting for the Godot who never appears in the play but is constantly evoked. The bare and minimal props and confusing cyclical game of language signals the transition from the modernism to post modernism. The emphasis on impressionism, subjectivity, the theme of fragmentation and alienation, discontinous narrative, blurring of the distinction between genres and increasing tendency towards reflexivity are common to modernism and post modernism. While in the modernism there is a feeling of nostalgia and lamentation towards the lost order of progress and rationality, the post-modernism seems to celebrate the collapse of fixities, as a liberating escape. W. B. Yeats famous poem “The Second Coming” Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Written in 1919, the poem mourns the loss of order and justice in the present world, the situations in Europe escalating to the World War. The poem has been recently used in many newspaper articles by editors in the aftermath of Trump’s presidency as it captures the new reality. Significantly, Yeats poem is modernist and not postmodernist.

The poem harks back to “the ceremony of innocence” and the “best” who “lack convicton”. The poem reminds the readers about the birth of Christ to save the humanity as its saviour but ends in the birth of a “rough beast” slouching “towards Bethlehem to be born”? In The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, the narrator similarly mourns “these fragments I have shored against my ruins” in despair and nihilism. The decentering of the grand narrative also deconstructed identity as always in the state of being and a socially constructed entity which is not static and is determined by the prism of gender, race, ethnicity and other local contexts.

Lyotard in the Postmodern Condition uses the Wittgenstein's model of language games (uses in speech act theory) in his critique of science and advocated that science works on the same precarious model of creating knowledge like art and literature.

According to him, the text is the amalgamation of two different language games namely

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an ‘expert’ and a ‘philosopher’. While an expert knows what he knows and what he doesn’t, philosophers knows nothing and merely creates doubts with question. Thus their projection of knowledge “makes no claims to being original or even true,” and that his hypotheses “should not be accorded predictive value in relation to reality, but strategic value in relation to the questions raised” (Lyotard 1984 , 7). For Lyotard, the narrative of knowledge is disintegrated into “clouds” of linguistc combinations of numeorus heterogenous language game. The break of continous meta-narrative leads to multiple subjectivities denying any coherence to form stable identity. By questioning the process of legitimation as one of the language game, Lyotard considers performativity as new criterion of legitimating and in the instantaneous communication technologies, whatever that cannot be dissesiminated as information is either deligitimised or excluded. Lyotard suggested this model of knowledge system requires paralogy, paradoxical language games with the continous reinvention of the “new” and denied any system of knowledge based on “progressive development of consensus”.

Thus paralogy becomes a source of legitimation in the postmodern society. According to Lyotard, science as a meta-narrative also uses its own rules, invention, theories and experiments in the language game of paralogy to produce new knowledge. Christopher Butler summarises the postmodernist stance on science as, “seen as no more than quasi narratives which compete with all the others for acceptance. They have no unique or reliable fit to the world, no certain correspondence with reality. They are just another form of fiction.” (15) The dethroning of science in the heydays of scientific discoveries led to the serious academic debate between the sciences and the humanities.

Another major development in the literary theory that pivoted postmodernism into the mainstream discourse from being an avant garde or experimental, is Derrida’s deconstruction which is also analogous to the rise of poststructuralism. Structuralism derived from linguistic, essentially inherited a confident scientific outlook which believes in method, system , reason and reliable truth. Poststructuralism takes it bait from philosophy. Neitzsche’s famous remark “There are no facts , only interpretations” sets the mood for the poststructuralist which intensifies the philosophy’s scepticism and deride the scientific confidence of ever knowing truth as misleading.

Ferdinand de Saussure was a key figure in the development of linguistics in 1960’s.

He emphasised that words(signifier) and objects (signified) have no logical connetion.

The meanings thus produced is arbitrary (unscientific)and is established by conventions. Based on such arbitrary system of signification, language is not the mirror of the world or of the experience, rather language shapes the world for us. Saussure further explained that meanings of the words are ‘relational’, or in association with other words and no word can be explained in isolation. Furthermore Saussaure emphasised that words don’t have any intrinsic fixed meanings. For example, terrorist for some could be a freedom fighter for others.

Poststructuralist exploited the arbitrariness of language into creating a universe of radical uncertanities insurrecting anxieties about possibility of achieving any knowledge

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or meanings through language. According to Derrida, “all identities, presences, predications, etc., depend for their existence on something outside themselves, something which is absent and different from themselves.”

Reality according to Derrida is a “free play” of difference (word coined by Derrida) and identities are not real or fixed, rather they are primarily a linguistic construct.

Since meanings are relational and always changing (diferral), the reality is always postponed and delayed (deferred). Following the “decontructivist” approach, the postmodernist call all worldviews into question because the meanings that constitute that world view canot be ascertained objectively. Knowldege, meaning and identity are all contextual since they are determined by the race, gender, nationality, tradition, culture and hence reality itself is relative. Derrida finds this “free-play” of meanings without any fixed centers as liberating much like Roland Barthe’s joyous declaration of “The Death of the Author”. Steven Connor traces the development of postmodernism from the period of “accumulation” in 1970 to the “syncretic period” in 1980 to the 1990’s, In this decade, “postmodernism” slowly but inexorably ceased to be the condition of things in the world, whether the world of art, culture, economics, politics, religion, or war, and became a philosophical disposition, an all-too-easily recognizable (and increasingly dismissable) style of thought and talk…entered popular lexicon to signify loose, sometimes dangerously loose, relativism. Now its dominant associations were with postcolonialism,muticulturalism and identity politics. So whereas Postmodernism had expanded its reach in the academic discussion, it had shrunk down into a casual term of abuse in a more popular discourse. Postmodernism had become autonomous from its objects. (7)

The uncontrollable technological mediation transformed the postmodern human experience into series of images and codes developing the idea of reality as representation. Jean Baudrillard introduced the concept of ‘hyperreality’ signifying the loss of real with the infinitude of images from television and now social media has substituted the real without any external referent. Thus in a nut shell, what is represented is the representation of it. Baudrillard in his essay “Simulacra and Simulations” foregrounds the culture of hyperreality where any distiction between the real and imagined or reality and illusion or surface and depth is completely eroded.When a sign which is a signifier of an object is no longer an index of the signified reality, then the whole system of signification becomes a simulacrum and a sign reaches to a point where it bears no semblance with the reality and the sign tranform “its own pure simulacrum.” (Baudrillard 1981, 6) The hyperreal according to Boudrillard is “that which is always already reproduced.” (Baudrillard 1976, 73) Hyperreal as endless circle of simulation simulating itself.

The loss of the real made Baudrillard to conclude in his essay “The Gulf War Never Happened” in 1991 and what was seen were just images conforming to the hyperreality.

While Baudrillard was much criticised for his postmodernist apathy for the suffering and the victims of the war in his complete denial of the war, his concept of hyperreality

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can be easily noticed in the post-truth era where fake twitter and facebook accounts operating as robots. In the continous dissemination of the selected images which are completely divorced or even just the contrary to the verifiable fact, Baudrillian simulations create alternate reality. The hyperreal culture in the form of morphed and photoshopped images of the self and the world operates in the narcissitic denial of the real. These technologically mediated images and the experiences (hyperreal) with its “viral” effect has been used and misused to programme and monitor people, their behaviour and choices. Baudrillard gave the example of Disneyland in America to show how a sign conceals itself, today one can think of online gaming or virtal games with its life like semblance, simulates the human experience as virtual existence so much so that individuals who are addict, gets disoriented and cannot differentiate between what is real and illusory.

Postmodernism under Attack: Reclaiming Truth or Moving towards Post-Truth The postmodern discourse came under severe scanner with two major incidents in the academia. The Alan Sokal hoax and Paul de Man’s wartime writings. Paul de Man scandal arose in 1987 when a young Belgian scholar working on Paul de Man discovered that de Man had authored more than 100 pro-Nazi articles for Le Soir during the Second World War, de Man’s apparent anti-semitic writings came under severe ire but the real threat to the postmodernism erupted in the Derrida’s defense of de Man’s war time collaborationist writing as ambigous. Derrida used the same decontructive approach to absolve de Man of any moral responsibility. Paul de Man’s irrational defence by the deconstruction school spearheaded by Derrida (seen as a threat to deconstruction itself), is one of the lowest point that led to questioning of the postmodernism and its intellectual vacuity. Another event in the academia that polarised the sciences with humanities was Alan Sokal’s denunciation of postmodernism.

Alan Sokal, the Physics professor at New York University in 1996 wrote a hoax article “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” and send it to Social Text, a leading journal of postmodernism.

Sokal was convinced that if he sounded inexplicable and full of jargons, he would get it published. Sokal’s article was accepted and published. Sokal on the same day published another article in another journal revealing the hoax and therby showing the hollowness of the postmodernist theory. Ironically the hoax article was published in the edition that was dedicated to “The Science War”. Sokal explains his hoax as: a pastiche [of] Derrida and general relativity, Lacan and topology, Irigaray and quantum gravity—held together by vague references to “nonlinearity”, “flux”, and “interconnectedness”. Finally, I jump (again without argument) to the assertion that “post modern science” has abolished the concept of objective reality. Nowhere in all of this is there anything resembling a logical sequence of thought; one finds only citations of authority, plays on words, strained analogies, and bald assertions”

Sokal’s satire on postmodernist theory was due to his anger on postmodernist’s glorification of the mystification and obscurantism in place of clarity reason and logic.

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Sokal further contends:

Theorizing about “the social construction of reality” won’t help us to find an effective treatment for AIDS or devise strategies for preventing global warming.

Nor can we combat false ideas in history, sociology, economics, and politics if we reject the notions of truth and falsity.

However, neither the Sokal hoax nor the Paul de Man controversy dissipited the postmodernist theory, rather it now became a handy tool for the far right (politicians and corporations) in order to deny the scientific truths especially the climate change debate. Judith Warner in her aticle “Fact Free Science” claims that questioning facts and “revealing the myths” which was the practice of left has shifted base to radical right now in questioning the global warming. In consensus with Judith Warner, Lynch Connor explicates in an article: If there are really no facts and only interpretations, and if millions of Americans are ready to unthinkingly embrace your perspective, then why bother adhering to a rigid line that separates fact from fiction? If you interpret a period of cold weather as evidence that climate change isn’t happening, and if millions of other people agree with your point of view, then climate change is a hoax. If your subjective experience perceives record attendance at the inauguration, then there was record attendance—aerial photographs that prove otherwise are simply illustrating another perspective.

Lee McIntyre in his recent book on Post-Truth raises similar questions “how can we be sure that postmodernism has made the jump from right-wing science denial to the full-blown, reality-bending brand of skepticism that is post-truth (270)?” Here the role of internet and social media is very crucial in using the postmodernist doubt into post-truth Baudrillian hyperreality. McIntyre explains “One cannot understand the rise of post-truth (or Trump) without acknowledging the importance of the alternative media. Without Breitbart, Infowars, and all of the other alt-right media outlets”. (272) Did Postmodernism Lead to Post-Truth?

However Aaron Hanlon in his article, “Postmodernism didn’t cause Trump. It explains him.” in Washington Post ,provides an astute analysis where he claims that the writers blaming postmodernism for the rise of “Trumpism” and alt-rite relativism fail to provide any link and in their insistence behave themselves more like postmodernist (Kakutani and McIntyre). Hanlon accepts that “populist right employs relativist arguments”, “But simply because this happens after postmodernism doesn’t mean it happens because of postmodernism”. McIntyre documents in detail the toboccao Industry alternate research programme with right wing think tanks and the corporates to fight against the scientific claim that tobacco causes cancer. He concludes “So it’s a massive category error to call Trump’s post-truth politics “postmodernist.” It’s just the say-anything chicanery of the old-fashioned sales pitch”. Hanlon makes a very nuanced distinction between Cernovich and Postmodernist theorist. Mike Cernovich is right wing ideologue, conspiracy theorist,Trump supporter who has been credited

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with the steady stream of “fake news”. He famously generated Hillarys Health tweets that she was dying, with 250,000 twitter followers, he is believed to have significantly influenced people’s views. Here Hanlon criticises the devaluation of postmodernist theory as: Cernovich may—if he’s not lying to sow yet more discord—draw on postmodernist theory to fuel misinformation, but Fredric Jameson’s reflections onconspiracy theory “the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age”) aren’t what’s convincing people to believe that climate change is a hoax.

However, the same Cernovich in an interview in NewYork Times in 2016 contends,“Look, I read postmodernist theory in college. If everything is a narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominant narrative. I don’t look like a guy who reads Lacan, do I?” (Marantz, “Trolls For Trump”), a facile statement in itself, clearly destabllises Hanlon’s argument.

In a clear defence of postmodern theory, Hanlon dismisses the post-truth as related to postmodernism, and reduce it to the the political dissimulation which is as old as the recorded history,but one can argue as presented in my analysis that post -truth is more than just deliberate falsehood, it’s the widespread acceptance of that deliberate falsehood which is a cause of concern as it gets warped under “point of view” logic of postmodernism. Danial Dennet, a famous American philosopher who is also a cognitive scientist and has done extensive research in the philosophy of mind agrees in an interview given to the The Guardian in 2017, that postmodernism is to be entirely blamed for post-truth.

Philosophy has not covered itself in glory in the way it has handled this [questions of fact and truth]. Maybe people will now begin to realise that philosophers aren’t quite so innocuous after all. Sometimes, views can have terrifying consequences that might actually come true. I think what the postmodernists did was truly evil. They are responsible for the intellectual fad that made it respectable to be cynical about truth and facts. You’d have people going around say: “Well, you’re part of that crowd who still believe in facts.

Although postmodernism is today seen as a threat to the truth and has been exploited by the far right to manipulate the possibility of alternate discourse, one cannot fail to point out that postmodernism is also the Godfather of postcolonial studies and the questioning of the grand narrative of white’s man burden, an imperialist/colonial enterprise. Postmodernism has made valid the truths and realities of the marginal and the subaltern by acknowledging the existence of mini narratives of resistance and protest.

Postmodern theories are the product of various thinkers from different disciplines, Hayden White uses postmodernist discourse in history. In “Historical text as a literary artifact”, White argues that historical writing uses techniques of literary writing and it derives meaning from its “narrativity” thereby eliminating any claims of objective or scientific history. In other words using postmodernist discourse he revealed the

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“textuality of history”. In literature, it led to postcolonialism and decolonial studies countering the western hegemony as the Empire begins to writes back. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) is a groundbreaking analysis of deconstructing the western hegemony and the “orientals” as a western consruct. It is through postmodernist discourse of deconstruction that Aime Cesaire would rewrite Shakespeare’s The Tempest in inspiring decolonial movements where the enslaved Caliban becomes the hero aspiring for freedom from Propero, the Coloniser. Similarly, Achebe’s rejection of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with the apparent racism interrogated the western canon of literature. The rise of the Dalit literature and autobiographies supported the Dalit movement in India, advocated by B. R. Ambedkar, essentially led to the rise of political parties like Bahujan Samaj Party(BSP) in Uttar Pradesh by Mayawati.

In the Feminist theory, 1960s is the most radical period, empowered with the postmodernist ideologies of questioning the patriarchy, French feminist like Helene Cixous argued for ecriture feminine (feminine writing) in order to celebrate the female body. And recently the LGBT studies emerged in the gender discourse with critics like Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble opened the debate on the ‘third gender’ and the concept of gender (different from sex) as social construct that lies in its ‘performativity’.

It led to such far reaching imapct like the invalidation of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code and subsequent decriminalisation of homosexuality by the Supreme Court in 2018. Owning to the environmental concerns of the present century, postmodernism also incorporated the ecosystem in a unique and innovative study of the environment and literature called ecocriticism. It led to the ‘Association for the Study of Literature and Environment’ in 1992. Postmodern manifestation can be seen in art, paintings and architecture, it led to dissolution of boundaries with multiple creative expressions.

Thus, one can contend that postmodernism is not a monolith. As a nuanced and complex discourse, its significance cannot be rejected in the aftermath of post-truth debacle as maintained by Kakutani and McIntyre. In its absolute repudiation of the any objective truth, it played in the hands of corporations and politicians, with vested interest to manufacture alternate truth, seeking popular support through social media campaign. Post-truth, however, is most certainly not the logical outcome of postmodernism which originally emerged to protect the rights of poor, marginal and vulnerable by resisting the authority. Post-truth is the exploitation of postmodernist tendencies that has made people receptive of their predisposed beliefs and ideologies, causing information silos and further polarisation of views which is quite the contrary of the postmodern ideals.

I will conclude by asserting that though post-truth can be traced to postmodernism, in its theoretical manifestation of denying objective truth, yet the bizzare and surreal outcomes of post-truth politics are the exact premises which the postmodernist theories resisted. Postmodernism was the product of its time (cultural, social and political changes in the Europe) and its corruption in the form of post-truth is the new reality of virtual times(internet, social media and fake news). One can resist and negate post-

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truth but one can not deny or undo the possible changes and the progress made by the postmodernist theory in all aspects of our lives.

University of Lucknow, Lucknow, India

Works Cited Andrew Marantz, “Trolls for Trump,” New Yorker, Oct. 31, 2016.

Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, 1973. pp 474.

Barry, Peter, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory.Viva: New Delhi, 2010.

Baudrillard, Jean, Symbolic Exchange and Death, Ian Hamilton Grant (trans.), London: Sage Publications, 1993.

–––, 1981, Simulacra and Simulation, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Butler, Christopher, Postmodernism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp15.

Cadwallader, Carole “Daniel Dennett: ‘I Begrudge Every Hour I Have to Spend Worrying about Politics,’” The Guardian, Feb. 12, 2017.

Connor, Steve. The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism. Edinburgh: Cambridge University Press, 2004. pp 7.

Derrida, Jacques, Speech and Phenomena and other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, translated by David B. Allison, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.1973, 1974 [1967], Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Gore, Al. The Assault on Reason. New York: Penguin Press, 2007, pp 1.

Habermas, Jürgen, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, translated by Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1987.

Harris, Roy. Reading Saussure. London: Duckworth. 1987.

Hanlon, Aaron. “Postmodernism didn’t cause Trump. It explains him”. The Washington Post. 2017.

Havt-Rabin, Ari, Lies, Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics, New York: Anchor Books, 2016.

Kavanagh, Jennifer and Michael D. Rich, Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Public Life, Rand Corporation, 2018.

Kakutani, Michiko “The Death of Truth.” New York: Penguin, 2018.

Lipstadt, E. Deborah. Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. New York: Free Press, 1993.

Lyotard, J.-F., The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1984.

Lynch, Conor. “Trump’s War on Environment and Science Are Rooted in His Post-Truth Politics,” Salon. 2017.

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McIntyre, Lee. Post-Truth. London: Cambridge, 2018.

Pariser, Eli, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, New York: Penguin Press, 2011, pp 3.

Russell, Bertrand. (1912), Problems of Philosophy, reprinted at Oxford: Oxford University Press 1971.

Sokal, Alan, “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” Lingua Franca May-June,1996.

–––“Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Social Text 46–47 spring–summer 1996: pp 217–252.

Warner, Judith “Fact-Free Science,” New York Times Magazine, Feb. 25, 2011.

White, Hayden. “The Historical Text as a Literary Artefact”, The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding, edited by R. Canary and H. Kozicki, 1978, pp 41-62.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, New York: Macmillan,1953.

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Henry David Thoreau and the Metaphysics of Imagination Shouvik Narayan Hore I

I

Life gives Power. – Chaandogya Upanishad

n a paper previously published, I had asked four questions pertaining to the creation of imagination: “What is the metaphysics of Imagination? What brings the reader into imagination? What fuels it? (…) Can Imagination judge?” (143).

I have tried to answer all questions to some effect, but it has only complicated the questions further. The imagination which was the center of my cogitation was Creative Imagination or ‘Secondary Imagination’ which, in Coleridge’s words, “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate;” (Wu 525). One crucial question remains in all this–What is it that imagination dissolves and dissipates? Coleridge says it is the “Living power and prime agent of all human perception” (525), but it complexifies the question further – What is that agent, or what constitutes human perception?

I think it is high time one acknowledges that there is something quite critical that is anterior to all discussions on imagination, something that has been taken for granted and left undiscussed. If Coleridge talks of ‘Creation’, it must have been created out of a former creation, which can or cannot be rationalized, but it must certainly have existed, and still exists, as the Chaandogya Upanishad brilliantly puts forth, “How could that which is, come from that which is not?” (Yeats 84). What has been a reason behind the creation of substance becomes subject for rationalizing, and what can be reasoned must have been hypothesized as possibly true. Since my concern is Secondary Imagination, my concern is secondary or second-hand truth, I differentiate it from the primary which is hand to mouth truth born through first-hand experience, mostly physical.By the experience of second-hand truth, I mean the truth born through second hand experience, nestled in cogitations of the mind and thoughts on a different or the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Vol. 42, No. 1 (163-171) © 2019 by Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute

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same individuals’ firsthand experience, and therefore subject to apperception. Either ways, anterior to Imagination is the experience of truth borne in first or second-hand experience. Truth, as one knows, is and can be known prior to experience, and validity of truth is relative to experience, so I delete the term validity as partially true for the time being. If truth is independent of experience, and if it can be known prior to experience, then such creative truth is an intuition. But since imagination has to be subject to ‘human perception’, what kind of perception is intuition that is anterior to imagination?

Intuition is a difficult term to define; it is more difficult to develop an urge to define, since it has become a natural response with ones who have experienced it.

Both Eastern and Western philosophies have understood intuitions rightly, but it has still not been defined with clarity. In the Second Book of the Katha Upanishad, Nachiketa is made to understand the Self by Death: As fire, though One, taking the shape of whatsoever it consumes, so the self, though One, animating all things, takes the shape of whatsoever it animates, yet stands outside.

(Yeats 33) I understand by this, that the intuition takes the shape of imagination, yet intuition is not imagination. But this locates and positions intuition, and is the beginning of a definition, not definition itself. On the other hand, Immanuel Kant defines Intuitions as “always required to verify the reality of our concepts.” (Meredith ed. 221) By concepts, Kant means reason or idea, yet it does not define intuition. It is a requirement, but what is it? Berkeley, in his Principles of Human Knowledge, makes a worthwhile and subtle distinction: Spirits and ideas. (…) The former are active, indivisible substances: the latter inert, fleeting, dependent beings, which subsist not by themselves, but are supported by, or exist in minds of spiritual substances. (Woolhouse ed. 86) This must be in accord with Eastern philosophy, and the Spirit may be accepted as an intuitive thing. Yet, the definition is still evasive.

However, it is not in the literature of philosophy that I have found a tentative definition. The one that evokes a response is part of detective literature, if its purpose be pedagogical at all. In Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Caroline blurts out an answer to this, “Women observe subconsciously a thousand little details, without knowing they are doing so. The subconscious mind adds these little things together– and they call the result intuition.” (195).

I cannot say if this is female specific, for I am not a woman. Adding to this is the possibility of intuition being very near gut feeling if one goes strictly by this definition.

I am in a position to say it is not so, but the definition is a remarkable attempt. What then is intuition? In order to drive home my point, I shall invent an incident so as to illustrate what human perception intuition predominantly effects.

Imagine a man travelling through a dense forest. He has well equipped himself with both a map and the spirit of adventure; he is replete with both the feeling of enthusiasm

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and ratiocination. But the forest has proven to go beyond his cartography. What he thinks is the end of the woods is only a delusion, as he finds out. It fills him with a sense of insufficiency, and both enthusiasm and logic run out of fuel. What then is to be done? There can be two ways for the person – either yield to the dark, or seek the light of civilization. The latter, if taken as prospective, means a new enthusiasm has to be generated, from which shall be generated the need for new logic. This febrile, feverish state can be roughly called the need for a new truth as opposed to inevitable death. What can be the reason for opting this and not yielding? Perhaps it is the validity of similar past experience, or the necessity of carving out a future that has not been imposed, under whatever circumstances. For both the causes, what the man has is only a powerful premonition of the truth he believes is there (and therefore the essence), and the trust he puts on the light of day, visibly fragile in the woods. All this is, to stress, a creative feeling built upon proven faith, urge for essence, and trust in the knowledge of the light of day. Thinking of all this, he sets out with his eyes on the sky, and his ear and hand on his heart.

An Intuition is an emotion; to be more precise, it is a creative emotion. It has its roots in second hand experience, and is therefore a forceful foreknowledge of the future that is subject first to feeling. Intuition is different from gut feeling because it is compulsorily based upon experience and is true, and gut feeling is not.This places before us the question of idea and its functionings. I think that Berkeley’s elucidation is valid, and it should be right to quote Kant’s definition of an idea: “An idea signifies a concept of reason.” (Meredith ed. 76) Idea is different from an Intuition then; an intuition is a creative feeling, called an emotion, whereas an Idea is a concept or reason. Human perception is starkly at crossroads here. Also, an idea originates from an intuition, but is very different from it. Although I have used the word ‘Idea’ technically here, I shall use the word ideation in a non-technical manner, since not much research has gone into its independent being. Ideation, simply speaking, is the process involving the tangible effects of reason and nothing more.

I move on to the next question–What is an imagination? Is it different from both intuition and idea? Is it a conflation of both or none? Early in the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer had hinted at a subtle distinction between idea and imagination: “Strength of imagination is not evidence of genius; even men with little or no touch of genius may have much imagination.” (Payne ed. 187) For those who are familiar with the writings of Kant and Schopenhauer, genius is synonymous with idea, and idea is not the same as imagination as proven above. Is imagination an intuition then? Apparently not. At least on one occasion, Kant refers to imagination as “a powerful agent for creating” all right, but it also follows “principles which have a higher seat in reason.” (Meredith 176). Thus, imagination is by no means pure intuition. What then becomes of imagination?

In a famous essay entitled “On Poetry in General”, William Hazlitt, a literary philosopher, makes an important commentary on the constituents for poetry (which

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here I judge a most dominant faculty in all literatures living or dead): “Poetry is the language of the imagination and the passions.” (Zeitlin ed. 251) Further, he goes on to say: “The imagination and the passions are a part of man’s nature”(Zeitlin 254) Since all imaginations, however abstract, is always thought of with relation to ‘man’s nature’, and since man’s nature is nothing if not passionate, imagination can rightly be said to be passionate; and since imagination is concerned with creative passion, and by creative passion I mean emotion (intuition), imagination can rightly be said to incorporate intuition.

Imagination, as Schopenhauer says prior to making a distinction between genius and imagination, is an essential constituent of genius. Going far back from him, one finds Longinus saying, “Grandeur is particularly dangerous when left on its own, unaccompanied by knowledge, etc.” (Winterbottom 144) By grandeur I understand genius, and by genius I have proven that is a concept, an idea, or a reason as differentiated from passion. Since imagination is driven (under varied circumstances) by both idea and intuition more or less, it would be right to say that imagination is a conflation of both, and it is an intuited thought.

One question lies underpinned to all these scheme of things: what kind of intuited thought can be defined as genius, and what kind qualifies as talent? This explanation requires extract readings more than anything else, and I shall, as always, take to the highest form of all literature, Poetry. Consider this passage from Spenser’s Faerie Queene (Book One): ‘In greene vine leaves he was right fitly clad, For other clothes he could not wear for heat; And on his head an yvie garland had, From under which fast trickled downe the sweat. Etc.’ (Canto I ll. 190-94)

For someone being clad in clothes is proof of his earthliness, but here it is more out of an unease with the earth and influences upon the Earth that he wears green. It speaks of a ‘he’ who is green and evil rather than being green and peaceful. Adding to this is the camouflage of being wreathed by Earth, being incapable of throwing it all away in spite of a terrible inner malaise. This therefore speaks of a man on Earth, dressed as Earth, but unearthly beneath its garb. What is it?

Spenser calls it gluttony. I have cited this example to show how imagination disguises genius by threading it in its intricate form. To put it in technical language, intuition synthesizes ‘raw’ idea (of gluttony) into imagination, so that idea manifests imagination without screaming for itself. An assimilation of the perfect kind, to be simple. Adding to this is Spenser’s originality, of which I make no mention separately. This is what I call genius, where imagination is a perfect synthesis of the intuition and idea, maintaining an originality of both.

On the contrary, I quote a section from Hood’s well known piece on autumn: O go and sit with her, and be o'ershaded Under the languid downfall of her hair: She wears a coronal of flowers faded 50 Upon her forehead, and a face of care; — (Hayward 422)

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First and foremost, these lines are in concordance with Keats’s lines in ‘To Autumn’.

The imagery is lifted almost directly from his better master, and is not a work of original emotion. Adding to this is the truth that when the poem ends, one is left with no reason or idea, original or otherwise for all these. Such kinds of poetry which carry duplicate intuition or duplicate thought in a different form so as to give an impression of originality in composition is what I call verse, and verse is an execution of talent, not predominantly genius. Talent therefore is imagination resulting from duplicate intuited thought. Thus have I shown the validity of genius and talent in terms of imagination.

Taking to the question of the origin of genius, most philosophers have defined it as being obscure and untraceable except for external details. The great German philosopher Kant has defined genius as “the innate mental aptitude through which nature gives the rule to art.” (Meredith 168) Theoretically, it should mean that genius manifests talent smartly, and idea manifests imagination. But when it comes to the definition of the origin of genius, Kant is tacit: “Where an author owes a product to his genius, he does not himself know how the ideas for it have entered into his head, nor has he it in his power to invent the like at pleasure, or methodically etc” (Meredith 169). This is a fine suggestion to evade the question. Hegel goes on to make an important deduction in his Philosophy of Fine Art, claiming that“Talent is specific, and genius universal capability”. (Inwood ed. 31) What Hegel says of its origin will be discussed later, but among the many interesting opinions on the origin of genius, Schopenhauer’s is shocking, “They (the genius) are inclined to soliloquize, and in general may exhibit several weaknesses that actually are closely akin to madness” (Payne 190). Now, this is a truth that sanity would refuse to acknowledge. David Hume, in his Of the Rise of the Arts and Sciences, very efficiently comments on the ‘beginning of genius’ as “much unknown to himself as to others; and it is only after frequent trials, attended with success, that he dares think himself equal to those undertakings, in which those who have succeeded have fixed the admiration of mankind” (Copley and Edgar ed. 75). It should rightly mean that genius is obscure and obscurity is synonymous with experiments in genius, but it is not an answer either.

What I propose to do now is to provide a possible solution to the metaphysics of genius and talent, how they originated, or why their origin has always been a question of great importance to us. Since Kant has told us that “God, freedom and immortality of the soul are the problems to whose solution (…) all our metaphysics is directed” (Meredith (Part 2), 147), I shall study its metaphysics along those lines.

What I propose as a possible solution to the question of the origin of genius and talent is a conceptualization of two phrases, near external and far external. By near external, I mean those disciplines of knowledge that can be known purely and perfectly from its existent environment. If a child is feverish, it is expected of the doctor to say that he has been out in the cold, or has taken a late bath, or is susceptible to such and such a thing; one does not expect him to say that because it is very cold in Pluto, and

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because Pluto has an especial influence on Earth this week, the child could have had cold from a possible susceptibility of its influence. Now, it would be foolish of the doctor to say this, and he shall be a laughingstock; nor is it required. The lack of its requirement does not make him a genius at diagnosing either, but at least it is an alternate theory not in its right place. What I propose by near external is an ability to make a full, satisfactory study of thousand fold symptoms from plausible, understandable and mostly communicable public grounds. The ability of implying a near external to a faculty of knowledge, by virtue of not being mad (genius), must therefore be a work of talent when it comes to imagination.

I think it is fairly obvious what I shall propose next. By far external, I mean an influence which may be logical, but not reasonable; plausible, but not probable. It is a faculty that can be used to study metaphysics, abstractness and objects or things that have gone beyond their environment. In short, a far external is a method of study when near external is a failure. In the crudest terms when we, as human beings, tend to understand genius as an object of curiosity, we resort to pseudo scientific ways, like astrological sciences or else. I do not say that it is acceptable or right; what I say is that it is natural, and to quite an extent plausible without being right. It should then mean that the study of the far external is a suggestion for the study of genius in imagination, and I make this an understatement, open to debate that the word spirituality, a reference to the great internal energy of man, is in fact another study of the far external more than anything else.

There are two vulgar conclusions that can be drawn from the proposed premises: first, one should resort to far external(s) only when near external(s) is a failure. This has not by any means been my argument. These are independent faculties, subject to the whim of the technician. Genius, by an innate quality, often shows forth as greater and above talent. During such cases, one must not waste time binding oneself through evaluations of near externals when the other outpours its own share of curiosity.

Second, it is a common occurrence in all literatures that the man whose genius is proven in prose has a wobbly genius in his verse, or relies on his talent in another form of expression. Hardy’s poetry, though full of genius, is wobbly due to a poor manifestation of talent and flexibility. The same is true for Dickinson’s and Thoreau’s poetry. Rarely does someone who has proven his manifestation of genius in poetry show the same in prose. Therefore, by true imagination, or in the case of genius, one expects both an originality as well as perfect synthesis in intuition and thought, but this is the concern of the second part of my philosophical essay.

The last section of my discussion contains a relatively ignored word in the history of philosophy; it has been simultaneously called ‘Soul’ by Kant (Meredith 175), ‘inspiration’ by Hegel (Inwood 31) and ‘synthetic and magical power’ by Coleridge (Enright ed. 196). Except for Shelley, few have actually come close to the true description of Inspiration: “for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness” (Enright 250). Few have defined inspiration with such precision; yet it fails to describe what it truly is. I shall again attempt to know inspiration as it is.

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An inspiration, as has been claimed from time immemorial, is a state of mind where all, or everything has suddenly found order, symmetry and knowledge. It is spontaneous like lightning, and may be sustained by assiduous sagacity. Now, this sense of great order is the scheme of things is a fallacy, for it cannot be sustained. This fallacy of emotion has made poets theological, scientists Cosmic and left second hand authors disheartened. Now, since inspiration is the conceiving and cultivating of a vast amount of enormous energy that throws individuals into raptures and leaves them wiser than before in a matter of half a minute, I shall not call inspiration an exact emotion, but an instantaneous celebration of an unsustained ‘feeling’ that is far beyond the best human emotion. Since genius gives law or rule to art, and genius is brought into existence by inspiration, inspiration is wisdom giving. Dostoevsky had formerly claimed that “Savages love independence, wise men love order;” (Dostoevsky 78). Giving order to the world is wisdom, and the half second cosmic energy gives the creative being of mankind an instant but perfect order. Inspiration then becomes a celebration of the process of ideation, following which the idea is separated in course of time from its subsequent heavy emotion and given reasonable explanation. Inspiration might be related to the physiological process of man, for the person struck with inspiration must be twice struck by it – one presumably at the juncture of youth idealizing manhood, the other at middle age cogitating on the second youth of ripe life. I move on now to a more esoteric explanation of all these in the great Transcendentalist poet of prose, Henry David Thoreau.

II Love is anterior to life, posterior to Death. – Emily Dickinson

I have, in the first section clarified that genius is an imagination where the intuited thought is at once original and in a state of natural synthesis as contrasted with talent that is duplicate intuited thought even if natural and synthesized in appearance. My task here is to employ these devices and prove how Henry David Thoreau has been unable to manifest his talent, or emotion in his verse poetry in spite of his idea, and his work therefore remains one of genius (of ideas) and an unmanifested talent (emotion) in his verse.

It is no secret that none of the Transcendentalists (except Whitman and Dickinson) are poets of verse; they are the poets of prose. Bradbury, although in an impure relationship with the Modernists, slips by an accurate analysis of Thoreau: “Thoreau was also a poet (…) one of considerable moral power. (Not in his verse.) But he was no more the great poet Emerson was summoning” (Bradbury 128). This however is still slack. The perfectest of such statements comes from none other than Emerson himself: “His genius was better than his talent” (Richardson Jr. 364). This line in Emerson’s Thoreau is the central line of the essay, and my task here is to show how his poetry illustrates his abundance of genius and lack of talent.

Take this section from the beginning of ‘The Village’ from Walden: After hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing, in the forenoon, I usually bathed again in the pond, swimming across one of its coves for a stint, (…) or smoothed out

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the last wrinkle which study had made, and for the afternoon was absolutely free” (Thoreau 143, my emphasis) By ‘reading and writing’ Thoreau hints at the communication of thought, and bathing in a pond, literally and metaphorically, is the cleansing and generation of a practical emotion. Therefore, both intuition and thought are there, but is it original, or has it risen into imagination? It has, by the profound use of the word ‘free’. That which frees absolutely must have been free in its state of intuition and thought; free is equivalent to original in this case. If it is original and synthesized, then all of it must have risen to imagination. Now since it is so, this has possessed genius and talent both, talent because of the manifestation of ideas into the form of nature without allowing the idea to shout for itself.

Another example is germane here. I take this section from ‘Walking’. I personally prefer the ‘Living out of doors’ section, but I shall quote a smaller section here: “When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some sects of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods to themselves, since they did not go the wood, etc.”

(Miller 433) There is a doubleness of language here; when we walk, we naturally do not go to either unless one lives in a location complaisant to such an environment. What Thoreau means is that either ways, the act of walking in nature, at any point of time, would be thought ideal in a landscape that he describes. One ought therefore to cultivate the emotion of ideal walking even when not being able to do so. This is a creative emotion, original of its kind. I shall in all fairness call it Intuition.

Secondly, by the reference to ‘some sects of philosophers’, what Thoreau should mean is natural philosophers as opposed to academic philosophers. Since Thoreau makes this distinction on the basis of the conception of a ‘natural’ emotion, and since the idea of the philosopher is made different from the daily walker, one can sense that Thoreau is aiming at a synthesis of the emotion of walking and the idea of cogitating, or philosophizing. This synthesis being made, it can only be a work of imagination where the genius of originality in thought is manifested in the emotion or talent for walking. These two examples should suffice for the greatness of Thoreau’s prose.

I take the poem ‘Independence’ (Benet- Pearson 563) for my purpose. Thoreau begins in the second stanza, saying ‘Ye Princes, keep your realms/And circumscribed power/ Not wide as are my dreams/Not rich as in this hour.’ Understood, but what is the dream? Where is the manifestation of the dream in the poem? What Thoreau confesses to is that his thought in his dream is an original one, but where is the manifestation of the emotion that carries this idea of originality? Further, he says, “But a free soul- thank God-/ Can help itself.” This is a statement of freedom, but where is that freedom? And what kind of free soul can only help itself? This should also mean the lack of cultivating the talent for being specific about the nature of ‘genius’ in question here. The poem ends by claiming the idea without manifesting the variety of emotion: ‘The life that I

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aspire to live/No man proposeth me;’ Suddenly, the lack of manifestation of genius starts doubting the nature of genius itself; it now only ‘aspires’, and no longer ‘is’.

I take another poem before I rest my case. In a poem titled ‘I am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied’, (Moore109) Thoreau complains of ‘Dangling this way and that, their links/Were made so loose and wide,/Methinks/For milder weather.’ This composition therefore must be weather specific, as he himself claims. Whatever is specific belongs to talent, and whatever is talent is not receptive of genius, and that is what the disappointment is all about. Being desirous of genius, the author is enervated by his nature of genius, and chooses not to exploit it, as he himself talks of ‘The law/By which I’m fixed.’ Law being specific, and Thoreau’s ambition not being the law makes the poem a failure as soon as it begins and ends.

University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India References Hore, Shouvik N. “Emily Dickinson and The Metaphysics of Sceptical Positivism.” Gnosis, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 139-151, 2017.

Wu, Duncan (Ed.). Romanticism: An Anthology. Blackwell, 2000.

Yeats, W. B. & Swami, Shree Purohit (Ed.). The Ten Principal Upanishads. Rupa, 2003.

Meredith, James Creed (Ed.). Immanuel Kant: The Critique of Judgement. Oxford University Press, 1973.

Woolhouse, Roger (Ed.). George Berkeley: Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues. Penguin Books, 2004.

Christie, Agatha. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Harper, 2002.

Payne, E. F. J. (Ed.). Arthur Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Representation. Dover Publications, 1966.

Zeitlin, Jacob. (Ed.) Hazlitt on English Literature. AMS Press, 1970.

Russell, D. A. & Michael Winterbottom (Ed.). Classical Literary Criticism. OUP, 2010.

Banerjee, Dr. S. K. (Ed.). The Faerie Queene (Book One). Lakshmi Narayan Agarwal.

Hayward, John. The Oxford Book of Nineteenth-Century English Verse. OUP, 1970.

Inwood, Michael (Ed.). Hegel: Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics. Penguin Books, 2004.

Copley, Stanley & Andrew Edgar (ed.). David Hume, Selected Essays. OUP, 2008.

Enright, D. J. & Ernst De Chickera (ed.). English Critical Texts. OUP, 1975.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Dostoevsky: Short Stories. Wilco Books, 2010.

Bradbury, Malcolm & Richard Ruland. From Puritanism to Modernism. Penguin Books, 1992.

Richardson Jr, Robert D. (ed.). Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, Lectures and Poems.

Bantam Books, 2007.

Benet, William Rose & Pearson, Norman Holmes. (Ed.). The Oxford Anthology Of American Literature. OUP, 1956.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Maple Press.

Miller, Perry. The Transcendentalists: An Anthology. Harvard University Press, 1971.

Moore, Geoffrey. (Ed.). The Penguin Book of American Verse. Penguin Books, 2011.

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Admiration to Love, Love to Matrimony: A Russellian Reading of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice Ankita Sundriyal

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helley’s belief of unrestrained love is opposed by Russell on the very basis of his creative output. It seems as though wherever love comes easily, poetry cannot; and it is for this reason that his works find their way into the world.

The social continuum remains undisturbed when love sees a smooth requital and there does not arise a need for either a catalyst speeding the fulfillment of love or, a channel for expressing one’s grief and disappointment. On the other hand, if the social continuum is disturbed too heavily, romantic love might give up altogether. There is then required a “delicate balance between convention and freedom” (Marriage and Morals, 46) that may allow romantic love to revel in the restraints imposed upon it, but not wither under the pressure of stringency. What Darcy does in Pride and Prejudice is no less than love poetry, overcoming obstacles that seem insurmountable by social as well as personal standards.

Russell remarks that it was since the period of French Revolution that the idea of marrying for love found its way into the minds of the young. In the 19th century, he claims that the novels dealt with “the struggle of the younger generation to establish this new basis for marriage as opposed to the traditional marriage of parental choice” (Ibid., 46) and Austen’s novels too remained no stranger to utilising the force of such an idea. It is, therefore, my chief concern in this paper to navigate through various aspects of the love relation between Elizabeth and Darcy, ranging from gaining attention through admiration to love and finally entering the state of matrimony. Taking as starting points the Russellian interpretation of such concepts as conventional education, “ordinary day to day unhappiness”, “married love”, self absorption and “the good life”, I have divided the paper into four sections.

The first section deals with how an escape from unconventional training makes Elizabeth more lively and sincere than the other female characters of the novel, thus Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Vol. 42, No. 1 (172-181) © 2019 by Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute

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attracting Darcy’s attention. Her imperfect education has also rendered her expectations quite different from what Darcy is used to seeing in women. It urges him to reevaluate his way of life and choice of behaviour, and this particular refashioning is what I have focussed on in the second section. The third section argues how the various roles that Darcy embraces are witnessed by Elizabeth, thus giving her an idea of married life with Darcy. In the last section, I have discussed the nature of love that Russell deems best in marriage, the substance of which is already to be found in the attachment of Elizabeth and Darcy, thus predicting a successful marriage.

Admiration of the Unconventional Elizabeth’s lack of “conventional education” (Marriage and Morals, 77) that Russell mentions more than once is fundamental to her love relation with Darcy. In conventionally educated women, such as Jane and Miss Bingley, Russell claims a “physical reserve and an unwillingness to allow easy physical intimacy” (Ibid., 77). Charlotte and Elizabeth discuss the repercussions of such guarded behaviour: the latter believes that Jane’s behaviour is justified, since it is appropriate to guard one’s emotions in public while the former has keen observations on the matter. A lady may guard her emotions in the company of others, but “(i)f a woman conceals her affection with the same skill from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him” (Austen, 23-24).

It is in a similar manner that Jane behaves. Consider the following words in Darcy’s letter to Elizabeth: “I remained convinced from the evening's scrutiny, that though she received his attentions with pleasure, she did not invite them by any participation of sentiment” (Austen, 219). Jane’s reserved behaviour is misunderstood by Darcy as indifference, a problem he never has to face with Elizabeth. One could argue that Jane’s behaviour is not a consequence of her education but her reserved nature; however my reading inclines me towards the former. As evidence, I turn to Elizabeth’s opinion of her behaviour: Jane appears to her sister as not displaying enough emotion and possessing a “constant complacency” and no “great sensibility” (Austen, 231). Here, Elizabeth’s selection of words implies a deliberate choice on the part of her sister to act as she does.

Darcy’s suspicion of Jane and preference for the openness of Elizabeth’s emotions is a welcome move to the reader.1 Elizabeth is the only one who does not engage in active husband-hunting, and in fact is often keen on ruining Darcy’s attempts at courtship. The characters she shows an inclination towards are Wickham and Fitzwilliam, but never Darcy. There is no doubt that Elizabeth’s education is incomplete, and that this largely contributes to her shocking (at least to other characters) behaviour. Her resistance to an offer of dance does not insult Darcy’s pride and unexpectedly, he is found thinking of her with “complacency”. Moreover, the fact that she favours walking in the mud to see her sister is symptomatic of a careless attitude towards the required code of conduct (Miss Bingley calls her wild).

Darcy is conflicted when faced with such a situation: conventional conduct would demand that she not undertake such an exertion, considering firstly, she is a lady and it may tire her and secondly, her appearance may become untidy. “(D)ivided between

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admiration of the brilliancy which exercise had given to her complexion, and doubt as to the occasion's justifying her coming so far alone” (Austen, 36), Darcy’s line of thought pursues only the former path of concern. Moreover, her fine eyes are “brightened by the exercise” (Austen, 39). He is clearly not disturbed by her clear lack of accomplishments either. Elizabeth is deft enough to point out how his idea of a fully accomplished woman is realistically impossible and his question that soon follows is genuine and free of condescension: “Are you so severe upon your own sex, as to doubt the possibility of all this?” (Austen, 43). It is as though he waits eagerly for her opinion, when suddenly faced with gaps in his knowledge. 2 Elizabeth’s regard (or lack of it) for Darcy is known to him, and yet, he confesses his feelings to the former, believing that his fortune and connections are enough to win her hand in marriage. Therefore, it comes as a shock to him when she shows no inclination to marry for great social benefits. Darcy’s attraction is also based on, as previously mentioned, a lack of knowledge. A lack of conventional training makes Elizabeth an unpredictable woman who cannot fit into available models of femininity.

Her words are direct but her actions often escape his understanding and consequently, invite his attention.

Admiring the Unhappy Darcy The earliest account of Darcy begins by describing his mien as “noble” (Austen, 10-11); soon, however, his manners are found unpleasing, allowing him to be easily dismissed by the assembly as “proud” and “unworthy” and his countenance “forbidding” and “disagreeable” (Ibid., 10-11). He is also “above being pleased” (Ibid., 10). My reasoning attempts to go far beyond his displeasure with the present company.

Even in the presence of his friends, he remains grave and unyielding, often unwilling to disclose his thoughts. It must be obvious where my argument leads: Darcy is posited as the Byronic hero of the author’s domestic narrative (Wootton, 35). 3 I will not emphasize much; one has seen plenty of attempts to absolve Darcy of his faults by establishing him as one of the classic Byronic heroes. However, I am more concerned about the process that the hero undergoes to become an object of admiration for the heroine. Does he transform himself overnight out of love or is he readily domesticated by a strong and willful heroine?

There has been a great amount of scholarship about the heroines’ pursuit of happiness but hardly any that talks of Darcy’s lack of it. 4 Elizabeth is not only the prize of his pursuit but also the source of his happiness as the novel comes to an end.

What then causes Darcy’s initial unhappiness? At its simplest, Russell’s view of a narcissist can be summed up in two statements: firstly, a narcissist admires himself and looks unto others only with the object of being admired, and secondly, even when the narcissist is admired by others, he is never truly happy and this unhappiness leaves him listless and bored. With regards to the megalomaniac, Russell adds only one thing to the existing definition of a narcissist: the desire to be “powerful rather than charming…feared rather than loved” (The Conquest of Happiness, 9). Following these definitions, it would

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appear that Darcy is a curious mix of narcissist and megalomaniac. Since his narcissism and megalomania have not reached an extreme, they can be cured effectively.

Austen’s design in placing Darcy in a complete contrast to Bingley is evident: Darcy “declined being introduced to any other lady, and spent the rest of the evening in walking about the room...” (Austen, 11). Dancing with a lady in the room is compared by him to enduring a punishment since all of them are with “little beauty and no fashion” and “slighted by other men” (Austen, 18). At the Lucas residence too, he stands “in silent indignation…to the exclusion of all conversation, and was too much engrossed by his own thoughts” (Austen, 27). Conveniently situated within the bubble of his complacency, he refuses to take Elizabeth’s resistance seriously. At this point, he does not care about her thoughts: he is content to observe her from a distance like a spectacle or a curious object. The first time he shows any concern for her is when she walks all the way to Netherfield. This is soon followed by a desire to know her opinion on subjects such as that of accomplishments (something I have dealt with in the section “Admiration of the Unconventional”).

Darcy’s increasing admiration for Elizabeth is made plain to the reader, although Elizabeth’s shift in opinion is much more subtle and tricky to notice. Considering her low opinion of him in the beginning, where exactly lies the shift in her view? Various answers have been suggested: her latent sexual attraction towards Darcy, the content of Darcy’s second letter,5 the wealth and grandeur of Pemberley, her gratitude for saving Lydia and so on. I believe that the answer is more complicated than an isolated incident. Darcy’s repeated attempts to engage in conversation with her contribute to softening the verbal blow that she first received from him and it is from snippets of their conversations that she is later able to understand his character.

Although she expresses her hatred for Darcy’s behaviour at every turn, she never publicly insults him, thus admitting that he commands some semblance of respect.

Elizabeth’s first defense for Darcy comes against her own mother, alerting her to the fact that he must often be misunderstood for his direct manner of speech. Even though it is, in part, a cover up for her mother’s embarrassment, the conciliatory shift in Elizabeth’s speech is slight but noticeable. At the Netherfield ball, she is “determined to hate” (Austen, 101) him, signifying habit more than feeling and later, she grows “vexed” (Austen, 110) at Darcy overhearing her mother announce the insignificance of his presence. Their progress is halted by one episode or another for, at first Wickham engages her attention with his account of Darcy’s duplicity and, then, Fitzwilliam with his charm and unsuspecting disclosure of his cousin’s interference. This is also one of the chief reasons why one cannot follow Elizabeth’s warming up towards Darcy; something or the other comes up to undo his efforts.

Darcy’s lack of eloquence doesn’t recommend him either. The narrator points out: “He was not more eloquent on the subject of tenderness than of pride.” Moreover, talking of “his sense of her inferiority—of its being a degradation—of the family obstacles which judgment had always opposed to inclination… was very unlikely to recommend his suit” (Austen, 211). Although warm to the idea of making a self

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centered man fall in love, she does not take kindly to the truth. What he says, Elizabeth knows to be true, but she too follows the unspoken rule of not allowing an outsider to criticize one’s family. Dismissing his proposal as quickly as possible, she breaks his illusion of security. Darcy realizes that he needs to win Elizabeth with much more than lure of good fortune. And thus, he proceeds with rectifying the situation in a very linear manner. Getting to the bottom of Elizabeth’s dislike, he addresses the three allegations made against him in a letter.6 Wickham’s story is direct enough to require no explanation, but critics have always had qualms about his unapologetic tone in influencing Bingley. 7 I do not wish to dwell much on this charge, however, given his small circle of friends coupled with the genuine belief in Bingley’s innocence, Darcy extends his paternalistic concern to Bingley, whom he very often treats like a child.8 Elizabeth too has begun to understand this, for she says to Wickham, “When I said that he improved on acquaintance, I did not mean that either his mind or manners were in a state of improvement, but that from knowing him better, his disposition was better understood” (Austen, 260). 9 Furthermore, she realises that Darcy is also beyond ostentation. A visit to Pemberley has her admiring his taste when she notices how the furniture there is “suitable” and devoted to “elegance” (Austen, 272).

Elizabeth is tempted into thinking how she could have been the mistress of all the elegance that surrounds her at the moment.10 Overcoming temptation for the estate echoes the larger suppression of her desire for the owner. She had been certain of Darcy’s narcissism; however, the warm manner in which Mrs. Reynolds talks of him creates a ripple effect. Along with credibility, taste and loyalty, Darcy has added another point in his favour: he bears a good temper towards those in his employment. The various roles of Darcy that Elizabeth is introduced to are fundamental to her growing admiration. I intend to take this argument further in the next section. For now, it would suffice to say that Elizabeth’s discomfort when confronted with Darcy and “the alteration in his manner since they last parted” (Austen, 278) is a sign of things to come.

Just as Darcy’s growing admiration (or attraction) is followed by a wish to know Elizabeth’s thoughts, she too longs to know “what at that moment was passing in his mind; in what manner he thought of her, and whether… she was still dear to him” (Austen, 280). She realises that like her, Darcy is at unease, and like Darcy, she too is interested in knowing. His warm welcome to the Gardiners seems too good to be a compliment paid to her. Darcy’s linear manner of targeting Elizabeth’s misgivings is still at work. He has worked on forgoing his insulation and is now edging Elizabeth into his inner circle by first, mentioning that Bingley and his sisters are to make an appearance soon and second, expressing his sister’s desire to meet her. His efforts serve their purpose, for she has reached a point where she can claim to know Darcy’s character: “Elizabeth here felt herself called on to say…[that] his actions were capable of a very different construction; and that his character was by no means so faulty… as they had been considered in Hertfordshire” (Austen, 285).

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Elizabeth’s meeting with Georgiana is another attempt by Darcy to win her favour, and it is through observing Georgiana’s character that she entertains the idea of a Darcy who is not as proud as he is shy. Darcy’s linearity of efforts finds itself victorious in Elizabeth’s intense (and planned for) observation. Consider the following passage: …in all that he said, she heard an accent so far removed from hauteur or disdain of his companions, as convinced her that the improvement of manners which she had yesterday witnessed .… (T)he difference, the change was so great, and struck so forcibly on her mind… Never, even in the company of his dear friends at Netherfield, or his dignified relations at Rosings, had she seen him so desirous to please, so free from self-consequence, or unbending reserve as now, when no importance could result from the success of his endeavours, and when even the acquaintance of those to whom his attentions were addressed, would draw down the ridicule and censure of the ladies both of Netherfield and Rosings. (Austen, 290-291)

It is after this that Elizabeth acknowledges the absence of hatred towards him, the presence of respect for his character and the regard for his qualities; in addition, she is grateful to him for forgiving her after her hasty refusal and equally hasty misjudgment of his actions.

Elizabeth’s consciousness is laid bare for the reader to observe but not the same liberty is given to the reader with regards to Darcy’s psychology. The possibility of love and family enters Darcy’s life when he learns to expand his vision of interest and accepts the ability to depend on someone for happiness. Unable to cope with someone else being the source of his unhappiness, when it has always been his decision to be aloof and miserable, he resolves to confront the source only to realise that his problem has no easy solution. Darcy has to accept that his discontent is no longer his own doing, and the center of it has shifted. She has become its source and to bring this to an end, he must seek her company. The process is not so direct, and his actions and demeanour in past have not made him a potential match in her eyes. He has to overcome his own unhappy and miserable self before seeking her love.

Elizabeth’s Glimpse into Matrimony In the last section, I wish to discuss how Elizabeth’s acceptance of Darcy’s proposal is due to a glimpse into married life that he provides to her. Darcy begins by providing her a picture of good fortune and connections, which does not prove to be enough for Elizabeth. It is probable that at this point in the novel, she has not imagined what it would be to become the mistress of Pemberley. Her visit to the estate makes her realise how grand life could have been. However, this is mere material temptation; Darcy tempts her with far more than his wealth. He tempts her with his person more than he does with his purse. I have already discussed Darcy’s linear approach to woo Elizabeth and eliminate her misgivings about him. Through this approach, Darcy lets Elizabeth’s imagination feed upon a perfect picture of married life. Some aspects of the picture are deliberate, while others not so much.

Darcy’s coldness is far more unappealing to Elizabeth over anything else. His “lack of zest” (The Conquest of Happiness, 122) makes him unattractive to her, a lack she

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never faces in either Wickham or Fitzwilliam. Love acts enough of a motive for him to seek a solution. “The man who feels unloved…may make desperate efforts to win affection, probably by means of exceptional kindness” (The Conquest of Happiness, 122). Darcy is aware that acts of material kindness are not likely to win her over and now, his kindness must make an appearance. He begins by making an effort to clarify each act that he has indulged in. Here, he has convinced Elizabeth that she not only deserves confidence, but also explanation. Even after a hasty rejection of his proposal, he puts himself in her path again, only to put his pleasant self on display. Elizabeth’s prejudice is long forgotten by him since he never even remotely alludes to it.

At the outset, she has familiarized herself with the workings of Pemberley, thereby witnessing Darcy’s role as an efficient and kind patriarch. Later, he also introduces himself to her as the brother of Georgiana, a much more personal role. In his surroundings, he appears relaxed and engages in pleasant conversation. Darcy has given proof of bearing a paternalistic affection towards Bingley, and now looking at him with Georgiana, Elizabeth cannot help but view him as a father. Lydia’s rescue strengthens her opinion, and Darcy appears in her eyes as someone who fixes situations when they are beyond repair. Thus, presenting a consolidated picture of himself as an efficient patriarch, generous employer, indulgent brother, wise father figure, a warm member of the society and an amiable family man, Darcy offers Elizabeth a rosy view of how married life would be with him. She speaks her mind when she tells Lady Catherine: “(T)he wife of Mr. Darcy must have such extraordinary sources of happiness necessarily attached to her situation, that she could, upon the whole, have no cause to repine” (Austen, 394).

Married Love An intense pursuit of romantic love might lead one to a blind marriage wherein expectations are high and nothing seems unattainable. Strong love might lead one up to the stage of marriage but the life thereafter cannot be sustained on love alone. And this is where Austen allegedly chooses to stop. Anything after marriage disrupts her idealistic romantic picture, or taking the argument further (if one prefers the ironical readings of her narratives), exhausts her irony. In my opinion, however, Austen seems to portray a love that Russell deems best in marriage: intimate, affectionate and realistic.

The love portrayed between Darcy and Elizabeth goes far beyond a romantic one. Instead of a “glamorous mist” (Marriage and Morals, 77), Elizabeth appears to Darcy as “tolerable” and “slighted” and Darcy’s pride is easily discovered by Elizabeth. With such an honest disclosure of fault on both sides, it becomes impossible to retain any mystery within marriage. With all the potential difficulties removed, one can hardly argue that the marriage has a problematic future. The allegation, then, of Austen not dealing with love after marriage does not stand very strong since she has cleared the air, so to speak.

The relationship between the two characters does not begin at love or friendship and their expectations are at the lowest point possible. If Austen genuinely believes, as her narrator does, that being fond of dancing is one step closer to falling in love, she makes sure that Elizabeth makes a public vow never to dance with Darcy. It is easy for

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the Austen to lead the characters to a point higher than this and it is because they view each other in the worst light that they can progress into a state of realistic acceptance of each other’s faults, giving way to a successful match. Indeed for Darcy, the time taken to fall in love is much less than the time Elizabeth takes, but it is Darcy’s character that requires more development to be fallen in love with.

Their insistence on knowing about each other’s thoughts well has been discussed earlier. Darcy is clearly unable to persuade her into acknowledging him. With a growing interest, he does not remain satisfied with “thinking of her with some complacency” (Austen, 29) or “meditating on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of pretty woman can bestow” (Ibid., 29). Darcy is almost insistent upon making her talk, as if by merely hearing her talk, he may gain access to her thoughts and perhaps know of his chance at happiness. Elizabeth remains detached from Darcy for a long time, harbouring nothing more than a strong dislike. It is when she is aware of the emotional turmoil within her that she wishes to know his thoughts. For both the characters, their interest in each other begins with a strong desire to know the detailed workings of each other’s minds.

In a strategic move, Darcy reveals a secret that could ruin his sister’s reputation, the reputation that he has been most insistent upon preserving. He gives Elizabeth the chance to damage his social standing by making himself vulnerable. Even after Elizabeth’s refusal, he wishes to acquaint her with his sister. It is clear what Darcy is aiming for: intimacy. He is not the only one with a family secret however; Lydia’s elopement becomes another hush-hush affair. He promises Elizabeth to keep it a secret and even goes one step further: he makes sure that the matter is dealt with in a private manner, taking Lydia temporarily under his guardianship. I must quote Russell here: “Love…will lead intelligent people to seek knowledge, in order to find out how to benefit those whom they love” (The Good Life, 10). And this is what Darcy does when he leaves in pursuit of the eloped couple.

Their affection for each other extends to their families as well. Elizabeth takes an honest and immediate liking to Georgiana while Darcy leaves behind all his reservations.

Both are aware of the embarrassing aspects of each other’s families, having been at the end of two humiliating situations: Lady Catherine’s visit to Elizabeth and Mrs Bennett’s public shaming of Darcy on more than one occasion. In such cases, it is more a technique of evasion than genuine affection for some of each other’s relations. The relations that matter, however, such as Georgiana (for Darcy) and Jane (for Elizabeth), are handled with care. Their marriage entails not only taking liberties with each other but also learning new life values. Georgiana’s shock is proof of their successful married love: “(T)hough at first she often listened with an astonishment bordering on alarm, at her lively, sportive, manner of talking to her brother [but] (b)y Elizabeth's instructions she began to comprehend that a woman may take liberties with her husband…” (Austen, 430).

English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Lucknow, India

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Notes Bander makes an acute observation: Darcy is attracted to Elizabeth because of the same openness of nature that he appreciates in Bingley.

2 I believe it to be a genuine query as it is an open ended question. Darcy’s usual speech consists of statements, passed as indifferent and disinterested remarks that covet no response.

In this particular incident, he not only asks for her opinion but also dismisses a harsh remark made by Miss Bingley against Elizabeth, by cleverly turning it against the latter.

3 Wootton suggests that introducing the Byronic hero in a domestic narrative allows the reader to know him more intimately and in a more dramatic fashion.

4 Claudia Johnson’s chapter is one good example, although Johnson talks of what all characters, irrespective of their sex, seek to find happiness. The only exceptions are Darcy and Lady Catherine who deprive other characters of it by refusing to please them.

5 Again I refer to Bander’s analysis which cites Elizabeth’s reason for accepting Darcy as a result of a long process of introspection.

6 Although Darcy mentions only two offences in the letter, I read three in Elizabeth’s thoughts as expressed by the narrator. The third and the initial offence is that of pride, which Darcy does not address perhaps because he has already taken the pains to behave in a more open and indulgent manner towards Elizabeth.

7 Susan Fraiman refers to Elizabeth’s gratitude for Lydia’s rescue as “private softening” (363) and the later acceptance of proposal as “final, public surrender” (Ibid.). This reading looks at the power struggle between Darcy and Elizabeth, and concludes that Elizabeth ultimately submits to the paternal figure of Darcy.

8 Fraiman believes that Darcy’s paternalism extends to all his friends and dependants, however I think it only extends to those who he believes to be in a genuine need of it. I do not find any evidence of Darcy forcing Elizabeth into modifying her behaviour or apologizing for her mistakes.

9 I refer to Fraiman here once again, she states that, “I am arguing, however, that Darcy woos away not Elizabeth’s “prejudice,” but her judgment entire” (363). The admission of Elizabeth to Wickham in this particular instance is hardly an ignorant one however; Elizabeth is aware of Darcy’s character and does not let it escape her judgment, and she only begins to understand the reasons that give way to his disposition.

10 It is my understanding that Elizabeth prides herself on wanting to marry for love. Even though her thoughts lead her to view herself as the potential mistress of the estate, she can never fully make peace with the way Darcy sees her family.

1

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References Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Cambridge, 2006.

Bander, Elaine. “Neither Sex, Money, nor Power: Why Elizabeth Finally Says “Yes!”.” JASNA, no. 34, 2012.

England, Catherine. “Slipping into Marriage: How Heroines Create Desire by Risking Their Reputations”. Victorian Review, vol. 40, no. 2, 2014.

Fraiman, Susan. “The Humiliation of Elizabeth Bennet”. Pride and Prejudice. Edited by Donald Gray, Norton Critical Edition, 3rd ed., W.W. Norton, 2001.

Johnson, Claudia. “Pride and Prejudice and the Pursuit of Happiness”. Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Russell, Bertrand. Marriage and Morals. Routledge, 2009.

—. The Conquest of Happiness. Routledge, 2006.

—. What I Believe. Routledge, 2004.

Wootton, Sarah. ““The Byronic in Jane Austen’s “Persuasion” and “Pride and Prejudice””. The Modern Language Review, vol. 102, no. 1, 2007.

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FROM THE ARCHIVES

Aesthetic Perception1

Harold Osborne

M

any writers besides Bernhard Berenson have spoken about the enhancement of vital awareness—a more than usual energising of our perceptual grasp of things—which is, typically, attendant upon successful aesthetic engrossment with a work of fine art. In my own writings I have on various occasions put forward the suggestion that this expansion of awareness is as close as we can come to a key criterion for distinguishing aesthetic commerce from other kinds of preoccupation with the objective world. What l have in mind is a form of cognition characterised as direct apprehension or insight rather than analytical and discursive understanding, though sometimes it may follow from discursive analysis, and distinct from emotional response though sometimes it may be accompanied by or even excited by emotion. In this paper I try to elaborate in greater detail than before the nature of this aesthetic expansion of awareness and incidentally to suggest why I have proposed it as a criterion of aesthetic

activity. I shall begin with certain more general consideration and proceedtowards the particular. Everyone, I believe, would accept that the rough and ready distinction between sleeping and waking is too crude to encompass the realities of experience.

There are many stages between deepest sleep and full waking alertness. We may sleep profoundly or we may sleep superficially with the senses half triggered for response to any disturbance or interruption. There are intermediate states between sleeping and waking and sometimes, though awake, our actions are mechanical, our attention diffused rather than concentrated and we behave, as it is said, ‘as if in a dream’. At other times the senses are alert, the attention is fully focused either externally or internally, and we are keyed for action or keenly in control of a continuing activity. In addition there are rare moments—most people are familiar with them occasionally—when the faculties are raised to an unusual pitch of alertness, when we observe more keenly and rapidly, think more clearly, achieve

Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Vol. 42, No. 1 (182-188) © 2019 by Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute

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insights more penetrating than ever before or enjoy enhanced powers of will and decision. It is on occasions such as these that we seem most fully to be alive and life seems most worth-living. These peak experiences are the culmination of life’s meaning.

Man is at his best when he is meeting a challenge or engrossed in an activity which has importance and value For him. It is then that his faculties are stimulated to the highest pitch, his energies come most competently into play and he is charged with the fullness of life. When challenge and purpose are lacking the mind is depleted and directionless, a man is disoriented and at odds with himself. Colin Wilson grasped this point when he said: The mind is a concentrating machine. That is the purpose for which it was built: to enable us to focus and concentrate on meanings, in order to be able to pursue them consciously and purposively instead of gropingly and blindly. Whenever we use it for this purpose, the effect is rather like clenching your fist; it gains in hardness and weight, and we experience a sense of reality. If it is left “unclenched”, unconcentrated, for too long, the result is the feeling of “life failure”, of unreality.2 The human mind must be harnessed to a purpose in order to function. And purpose is tied up with the sense of value, importance, meaning, which cannot be artificially implanted or supplanted. In primitive societies the paramount needs of survival, material comfort, hunting and food gathering, protection of family and clan, defence of territorial claims, absorb available energies. The values of the individual are closely identified with those

of the clan and there is little or no incentive for the development of what civilised men call individual personality. Civilisation means the introduction of techniques and routines, including ever more elaborate techniques of collaborative effort, for satisfying the basic needs with less and less expenditure of energy so that energy is released for the pursuit of other purposes.

And when this happens other values become necessary if society is to avoid deterioration. The compensatory values which emerge in advanced civilisations are the values of what we compendiously refer to as ‘culture’. It is when these values are not taken seriously that civilised society falls ill. The sicknesses to which civilisation is prone result from boredom and purposelessness, the disorientation of individuals who are given the conditions but denied the impetus to develop personality. When living becomes routine and no longer demands the concentration of faculties harnessed to the pursuit of accepted values there ensues torpor and depression, a sense of unreality and frustration, what Kierkegaard and Camus called alienation, Sartre called nausea and the uncertainties of personal identity which the characters of Samuel Beckett display. The values of culture, a logically and practically necessary condition for the successful progress of civilisation, may be seen as emerging when faculties evolved in the interests of survival are diverted to other ends than the basic needs of survival and immediate sensory gratifications. As the urgencies of practical pressures diminish, these faculties are not allowed to fall into abeyance andatrophy but are cultivated deliberately, perfected into skills

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and exercised for their own sake or rather for the sake of the higher-level satisfactions attendant upon their own perfection and exercise. It is only when these values, which belong to the development and enrichment of personality, are set above more elementary gratifications and needs that civilised society remains in a healthy state. When cultural values are no longer taken in earnest but are regarded as a secondary luxury or a supererogatory refinement then society is eroded by spiritual demoralisation. This affliction has perhaps never been a more serious danger than today when unprecedentedly rapid advances in material technology have effected enormous reductions in the necessary output of energy not only on the part of a favoured minority but for the vast majority of civilised people while at the same time eliminating the satisfactions and pride which used to be attendant on good craftsmanship and when the same technological civilisation has induced a materialistic outlook leading to the devaluation of non-material aims as a pleasant but unnecessary indulgence.

There is greater necessity than ever before that educationalists should resolutely counter this attitude and inculcate from conviction the importance of cultural values. Cultural values, then, are values deriving from the satisfactions attendant on the cultivation and exercise of human faculties for their own sake rather than for ulterior ends of material comfort and gratification. They form one large category of intrinsic values. They may be classified, I think, into two main groups. In one group fall the manifold values which are

rooted in the cultivation of our reasoning powers and the exercise of thought for its own sake, culminating in logic, mathematics, theoretical physics, philosophy and metaphysics. Closely akin to these in the same group are values deriving from the cultivation of curiosity and exemplified in such disciplines as history, sociology and the taxonomic sciences. In the other main group are the values stemming from the cultivation of our perceptive powers and the exercise of percipience for its own sake. It is against this background that I now propose to elaborate on the idea of aesthetic expansion of awareness.

What we perceive and how we perceive it are determined by the nature of the interests which predominate at the time.

Perception is a selective and organising process and the principles of selectivity and organisation which it imposes are ordinarily dependent upon habits of attention built up from childhood by the stringencies of practical life. In practical life our predominant habits aredictated by the need to utilise perception as the main source of information about a world of things which are subject to our manipulation and to which we respond.

Therefore in everyday life perception is emasculated and jejune: it is an instrument for obtaining clues for action and it is allowed to impinge upon our awareness only to the extent of its serviceability for furnishing thesecues. Althoughâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;or becauseâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;sensory perception is our only direct contact with a world outside ourselves, it is ordinarily channelled and born to practical needs. We are not ordinarily interested in dwelling upon and

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savouring the unexpurgated content and quality of sensory experience. All this has, of course been said many times before. It is mentioned here only to point up the enormous revolution which occurs when perception is attended to, cultivated and enjoyed, not as a practical instrument, but for its own sake. Sometimes, on rare occasions, such a revolution of attitude occurs amid the routines of daily life.

Sometimes when we see the clear starry firmament at night or a field of ripening corn blazing with poppies in the sun, when we hear the song of many birds at early morning or the blending of bells in a medieval town at evening, we rejoice. Our attitude changes abruptly. We attend to the experience for itself and not for the information it gives about something other than itself. We experience an upwelling of richer vitality in such perceptive activity and this, I am maintaining, is the paradigm and prototype of aesthetic activity, elementary though it still is. The joy which attends such vital enhancement must he distinguished from the titillation of sensory pleasure. There is a theory which finds the paradigm of aesthetic experience in sensory pleasure such an the pleasant smell of a rose.3 Following Kant, I have argued—I hope convincingly that this theory leads in a wrong direction and implants a fundamental error at the heart of aesthetic understanding. It is not the physical pleasantness of a smell, a taste or a touch which gives rise to what we call the aesthetic. It is the change of attitude which occurs when, instead of wallowing in the physical pleasure, we turn attention to the nature of the experience itself, savouring and discriminating its intrinsic

quale. We can do this as well with sensation, and when attention is so deflected the impact of its pleasantness or unpleasantness recedes. Our joy has its source in the exercise of perception for its own sake and this is the prototype and paradigm of aesthetic experience. 4 This elementary aesthetic stance is capable of development along two distinct paths, which have not hitherto been systematically distinguished. I shall call them the refinement of discriminatory acuteness (what is sometimes more shortly called ‘sensibility’) and the enlargement of synoptic apprehension.

1. In his essay ‘Of the Standard of Taste‘ David Hume uses the term ‘delicacy of taste‘ with the meaning of discriminatory acuity, saying: ‘Where the organs are so fine as to allow nothing to escape them, and at the same time so exact as to perceive every ingredient in the composition, this we call delicacy of taste, whether we employ these terms in the literal or metaphorical sense.’ He illustrates this with a story front Don Quixote about kinsmen of Sancho Panza with a hereditary judgment of wine so sensitive that they could detect the presence of an iron key on a leather thong at the bottom of a hogshead of wine. Such refinement of discriminatory acuteness may be cultivated in particular fields by such persons as professional wine-tasters, those who savour, pronounce on and invent a descriptive vocabulary for perfumes, gourmets and connoisseurs of food, and so on. Skilled craftsmen could often judge the qualities of their materials by touch and taste. When such refinements of sensibility are cultivated and exercised for

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their own sake the attendant enjoyment is aesthetic, as with the delicate fingering of jade practised by Chinese connoisseurs.

Finely discriminating sensitivity is a necessary contributory factor to cultivated appreciation in all the arts, tor it it notorious that differences so minute as to be barely perceptible in themselves may have major effects on the balance and unity of complex works of art. Indeed it may often be the case that tue defect or felicity in the organisation of the whole work first impinges on our awareness and through that awareness we come to detect the point of detail. Although he did not draw appropriate conclusions from it, Wittgenstein among many others liked to call attention to the surprisingly massive consequences of very small errors of proportion in architecture or wrong balance of volume in music. In painting and sculpture very small differences of colour, shape, size, texture, etc. can have consequences for the artistic organisation as a whole which far outweigh in importance the more massive changes caused by major accidental damage, the fading of colours through time, and all the injuries due to wear and tear. In music very small differences of pitch may ruin a performance, causing us to condemn it as â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;out of tuneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, although certain folk melodies and some performances on stringed instruments gain emotional colour precisely by small departures from the scale of equal temperament. In the appreciation of literary art finely honed sensibility to the sound and rhythm of words, and to nice shades of meaning, is a sine qua non which the literary artist not only assumes but makes it his business to

galvanize and extend in his readers.

Without the power to make exceptionally fine discriminations appreciation is crummiest and inhibited in any of the arts.

2. A work of art is a construct existing for the express purpose of exercising and extending percipience when the faculty of perception is activated towards it without ulterior purpose. A work of art is judged to be successful aesthetically in the degree that it fulfils this function of extending and satisfying perception. The satisfaction and the joy which we experience is no recondite sensory pleasure but the satisfaction experienced in the exercise of a skilled faculty for its own sake. This is why we can properly speak of aesthetic satisfactions as cultural values. And this is why they carry an accrual of spiritual vitality.

The refinement of discriminative acuity is only a part, though a necessary part, of the expansion of perception brought into play in the appreciation of art objects.

More important still is the massive increase in the volume and depth of content. In practical life we habitually operate with relatively small perceptual units, combining these intellectually in the manner of clues.

But works of art, even those which seem superficially simple, are extremely complex organisational wholes, which must be apprehended directly in perception as wholes simultaneously with the apprehension of their parts. The elements of a work of art contribute to the composition of the whole as an organic unity5 in such a way that the whole is not constructed intellectually and analytically from its parts but is present no less directly to perception than the parts.

There is, moreover, in most cases a

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complex organisation of parts within parts at different hierarchical levels. Each whole at each level of containment manifests perceptual properties which are not present in the parts of which it is composed and which cannot be intellectually inferred from the properties of its parts and the relations in which they stand to each other. These are the properties which we call ‘aesthetic’— elegance, gracefulness, and a thousand for which there are no names. Indeed the aesthetic properties of every work of art are original and unique to it, even when they can be brought roughly within some named category. The art of the critic consists in conveying an impression of these properties through the medium of language which lacks the means to describe them. It is in the apprehension of artistic wholes that high-level aesthetic perception departs most notably from the practical awareness which operates in everyday life and it is for this that the cultivation of a special perceptive skill is most necessary.

The analogy of Gestalt perception is sometimes adduced in order to explain artistic apprehension, and provided that it is treated as an analogy only—and an imperfect one at that—there is nothing against it. We do indeed in ordinary life perceive certain fairly simple configurations as immediately as we perceive the elements from which they are composed. We see a triangle as directly as we see the three lines which compose it.

We do not first notice three lines, then notice the relations in which they stand to each other and then make a rapid intellectual inference: ‘This must be a triangle.’ We see the triangle directly.

Similarly we perceive an artistic

configuration directly and simultaneously with its constituent parts: we do not apprehend it by inference from the parts.

An artistic configuration has (aesthetic) properties which are not present in and cannot be inferred from the parts and their relations. But the differences are still more important than the similarities. Not only are artistic configurations immeasurably more complex even in the simplest works of art than the Gestalten with which ordinary perception operates: artistic configurations have the uniqueness of particularity whereas the Gestalten of ordinary perception are essentially generalisations. We are confronted with a near-square and we see a square, with a near circle and we see a circle-Gestalt, and so on. To see a Gestalt is to reduce to generality. In perception the Gestalt is akin to the concept in thought processes.

But a large part of the essential vitality of aesthetic perception derives from its avoidance of this generalising tendency.

Moreover, as many psychologists have demonstrated, in ordinary practical perception there is an active tendency to complete open or imperfect Gestalten, perceiving what we do not see. In cultivating the perceptive skills required for the appreciation of the arts one of the moat difficult tasks is to accustom oneself to perceive precisely and exactly what is there—without, of course, remaining blind to incomplete Gestalten when these arc introduced as a feature of the total composition—as, for example, in music piquancy may result from a withheld resolution and in the work of Leon Polk Smith, Ellsworth Kelly and other Hard Edge painters a special feature was often

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made of incomplete shapes suggesting completion outside the canvas.

It is the apprehension of richly and tensely organised perceptual material without practical implications that extends the perceptual faculties and brings about that expansion of awareness which, we have claimed, is the hallmark of aesthetic activity.

It is sometimes profitable to illustrate a point by contrast and with this in view it may be opportune to say a few words about so-called children’s art. The drawings of young children generally reveal a fresh and lively delight in colours and shapes. They are spontaneous and uninhibited, often manifesting what in an adult would be called a too glib facility.

Their colours are strong but crude, with little or no interest in subtle contrasts or blendings, without finer discriminations.

Shapes too are vigorous but unsubtle.

These drawings are concerned with representation, but with representation by means of standard configurations or Gestalten. They represent a world of things by means of visual conceptualisations with barely the most elementary attempts at individual discrimination. A house is a house; and a man is a man—walking or standing or speaking. In his drawings the child is repeating what he is learning in ordinary life, training and evolving practical habits of perception destined to facilitate finding his way about a world of things by the application of stock configyrations. The child’s picture may tell a rudimentary story—the man (papa) rides up to the house on a horse while the child (me!) shows joy and the woman (mama) stands watching. But beyond the needs of the story there is, except in the rarest

instances, no attempt to compose or organise forms in such a way as to invite or make possible unified perception of the picture as a composition. Up to the age of ten or twelve the child is discovering the rules and forming the habits of practical perception; there is lacking the powers of concentration as well as the deflection of practical interests which make possible an aesthetic approach. From this point of view—and what other point of view is there?— children’s drawings are not art. In general it is not until puberty that they need artistic guidance. Until then their work is not bad or indifferent art. It is without even the rudiments of that aesthetic interest which could warrant a drawing being judged as good art or bad. This does not mean, of course, that children’s drawings are without value or interest. But whatever value they have is not an aesthetic value.

References This paper was written for delivery at the Institute of Education, Landon University in February 1978.

2 Order of Assassins (1972), Ch. 8.

3 For example, “What Makes a Situation Aesthetic?” by J. O. Urtmon. Proc. Arist. Soc. Suppl., Vol. XXXI, 1957. Reprinted in J. Margolis (ed.) Philosophy Looks at the Art (I962).

4 See “Odours and Appreciation”, British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 17 No.1. and The Art of Appreciation (1970), Ch. 3.

5 See my paper “Organic Unity Again ”, British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 16, No. 3 criticised by Catherine Lord in ‘Kinds and Degrees of Aesthetic Unity‘, British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 18, No. 1.

1

London, UK Editor, British Journal of Aesthetics (BJA) (JCLA, Vol. 1, No. 1, Summer 1978)

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BOOK REVIEWS A STUDENT’S HANDBOOK OF INDIAN AESTHETICS. By Neerja A. Gupta.

Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017. 135 p.

The book fulfils the much-needed demand of the students of Indian Aesthetics of having an introductory concise guide to the key concepts of the field in much simplified way. Neerja A. Gupta, the author of the book, clearly mentions the motive behind writing this book in the preface by saying that the book is expected to stimulate and promote research interests in the area of Indian Aesthetics. This is possible only by acquainting the UG and PG students with certain concepts such as the notions of rasa and dhvani of Indian Aesthetics, and in this, the book largely succeeds. The appendices included in the book add extra feather to its cap by providing an access to the much researched and equally interesting articles suiting to the subject of the book.

The book contains seven chapters and five appendices that essentially support the stated goal of the book. The first chapter titled as ‘Concept of Indian Aesthetics’ surveying the development of the term, ‘aesthetics’, introduces some other significant aspects of Indian Knowledge System that helped the growth of this branch of philosophy that seems to be more associated with literature due to its assimilative application in it. The author sees the followers of Vedantic principles as the first seekers of aesthetic pleasure as Vedantic philosophy seeks “pleasure in both attainment and renouncement” (1). This chapter briefly gives an account of the growth of Indian Aesthetics from Vedas, Upani=ads, and other Indian Philosophical schools to Bharata’s Näöyaçästra. One of the principal texts of Indian Aesthetics, namely, Näöyaçästra, is considered to be the fifth Veda (Näöyaveda) by Bharata Muni himself.

The subsequent three chapters of the book are fully devoted to the discussion of Näöyaçästra detailing about the origin and conceptual framework of the treatise. These three chapters give a brief but comprehensive idea of Bharata’s Näöyaçästra by introducing all those aspects of the treatise that are required to be understood by a student in this area. The second chapter begins with enumerating the incident and cause of conception of Näöyaçästra as narrated in the treatise and then moves ahead detailing about the responsibility of the enactment of Näöya that was entrusted to Bharata and his hundred sons, and further the creation of gandharvas and apsaräs by Brahma who is said to have conceived this Näöyaveda on the request of all the Gods. The book selectively presents the account of histrionics and briefly describes about ten significant kinds of the drama as per Näöyaçästra. It introduces the reader with all the thirty-six chapters of Näöyaçästra, and explicates two chapters (VI & VII) called ‘Rasadhyaya’ and ‘Bhävadhyaya’ comprehensively which deliberate on the postulation of eight rasas and eight of their sthäyé and sätvikbhävas along with thirty-three sancäribhävas (transient emotions), eight colours and eight guardian deities. The book, further, introduces Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Vol. 42, No. 1 (189-192) © 2019 by Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute

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the ideas of anubhävas, and vibhävas illustrating the theory of rasa discussing the opinions and commentaries of later Indian poeticians starting from Anandavardhana to V. Raghavan.

Further, the contents in the book apparently show the wide range of reading and research of the author in the field before taking up this task of writing of this sort that presents the highly philosophical propositions in the simplest possible manner. The fifth and the sixth chapters of the book discuss another key theory of Indian Aesthetics i.e. dhvani theory propounded by Anandavardhana in his Dhvanyäloka. The book brings out the historical facts about the first known use of the word ‘dhvani’ that comes from the Atharva-Veda. It, surveying the chronicle of the term, from Veda, Upani=ads, guëa (excellence), dosa (defect), and alamkära (embellishment) informs the reader about how Anandavardhana brought it to its current use. In this chapter, the book delineates two kinds of sounds– primary and secondary sounds, and three types of poetry, namely, chitrakävya, dhvanikävya, and guëébhütakävya, and subsequently discusses about the types of dhvani. The author has used certain innovative techniques of explaining the further divisions of dhvani through a flow chart that facilitates a quicker understanding of the types. The distinctions that have been made in the book between dhvani and sphoöa, and between nada and dhvani analysing the opinions of great grammarians of Päëinian School like Patanjali and Bhartåhari add to the clearer understanding of the theory. The seventh chapter of the book summarises the outstanding contributions made by Abhinavagupta in the field of Indian Aesthetics through his seminal commentaries and texts such as Dhvanyäloka Locan, and Abhinavabharati in connection to the theories of dhvani and rasa respectively. This concluding chapter of the book further discusses about the commentaries and expositions of Bhatta Lollata, Sankuka, and Bhattanayaka on Rasasutra, and brings forth Naiyayikas’ and Mahimabhatta’s contending remarks on Anandavardhana’s theory of dhvani. It, in a way, by putting forth both Abhinavagupta’s advocacy and Mahimabhatta’s opposition to the theory of dhvani, balances the account of critical opinionson this pivotal theory. The book, further, brings certain concepts such as hådayasamväda propounded by Abhinavagupta to light to explain the concept of aesthetic psychology and its relevance to the appreciation of rasa in a piece of literature. In this regard, the author of the book notes, “hådayasamväda or tanmayébhävanä (sympathetic identification) is an essential constituent of the appreciation of rasa (rasasväda). This patterned structure of poetry is called racana or bandha.” (66).

The five appendices to the book add a lot to the research value of the text as they feature five significant and interesting articles in the field of Indian aesthetics that take the reader from textual understanding of the concepts of rasa and dhvani to the practical aspects of the theories. The article entitled, ‘Between Srinagar and Benares: Kashmir’s Contribution towards a Synthesis of Indian Culture’ by Sunthar Visuvalingam as the first appendix to the text details the importance of Kashmir in the greater corpus of Indian Culture. Despite Benares being the heart of Hinduism, significant developments took place in the peripheral Kashmir.

The Kashmir çaivism along with the role of Abhinavagupta is central to understanding the role of Kashmir in the Indian cultural epistemology. Though Indian philosophy revolves around the Brahminical-Buddhism conflict but it gives rise to multiple schools of thoughts.

The article chiefly deliberates on the different factors and debates around the centrality of Kashmir and the rise of Kashmir çaivism in the hands of scholars like Abhinavagupta and the Näga dynasty. It also shows a relevance of such a project for American students who are keen on understanding the complexities of the significance of Kashmir in the Indian cultural

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synthesis. The second appendix is an article by Umashankar Joshi, who talks about the need for an awareness of the seminal ideas of the Sanskrit Poetics with regard to how the ideas from the greats could be best availed for new pursuits of knowledge to be achieved. The article discusses about the terminology and the nuances in differences that exist across literary culture in relation to the terms like tragedy, metaphor, simile, rüpaka, samäsokti etc. Further, Joshi, in his article, addresses the problem of poetic creation in special reference to Eliot’s “objective correlative” (vibhäva) and his difficulty with Hamlet. The paper tries to distinctly locate the idea of poetic emotion in the theories of Valery, Kuntaka and Bhatta Nayak. This article also takes into account Rajashekhara’s bhävayitripratibhä and Abhinavagupta’s sahådaya to talk about the appreciative genius of the reader. The paper discusses three seminal ideas in Sanskrit Poetics - rasa sutra, dhvani and sädhäraëékaraëa and takes special consideration of the works of Acarya Abhinavagupta to whom it offers the honour of “the greatest single name in Sanskrit Poetics” (83). The author finally brings Philosopher Roman Ingarden’s views on aesthetic experience and aesthetic objects and condones the point that a judgement on a work of art is only valid when it is given on “the basis of an aesthetic process” (85) and has flown from the state of ‘bhava’.

The article entitled, ‘Does the Rasa Theory have Modern Relevance?’ by R. B. Patankar talks about building a bridge between the West and the East and also ancient and modern India, and discusses the importance of a comparative studies involving two critical traditions in carrying forward such a task. While limiting certain elements of rasa theory to be of only historical interest, the author argues that other central elements in it are intelligible and reliable with the understanding of any age and space. In this regard, he discusses the idea of sädhäraëékaraëa or universalisation especially in consideration with Abhinavagupta’s triple claims about Rasa. Patankar talks about the balance between the universal and the particular and also the degree of the two, one expects while creating or looking at a particular work. In this context, he discusses Freudian analysis about the effect of particular on a work, its assumed limitations and also the critical side to those assumptions. Patankar, in his essay, questions and complicates Abhinavagupta’s claims on rasa experience by talking about the aspect of pleasure, and a dependence of a rasa on other rasas and the need for universal significance in order to achieve that aspect. Patankar, finally, addresses the Sanskritists and puts forward his plea to take part in the dialogue between India and the West and to realise the need to modify the ancient theories. The other highly relevant and seminal article used as an appendix to the book is K. Krishnamoorthy’s ‘The Relevance of Rasa Theory to Modern Literature’ which delineates the significance of theory of rasa by showing how it is central to the study of art and literature. It explains the position of the theory of rasa keeping in view Bharatamuni and Abhinavagupta. The article also addresses the issues related to many translations and mistranslations of the foundational treatises of rasa theory that have created confusion about its perspective. Certain apposite instances have been given in the article to explain the theory of rasa in relation to modern literature.The fifth appendix to the book brings another insight for the reader where C. N. Patel compares and explains the simultaneity and associative fundamentals of catharsis and rasa as a nature of ‘aesthetic experience’ which is always pleasurable but different from ordinary experiences. The article states, “The transcendental view regards the experience of beauty as the reflection of the spiritual state on the human plane, whereas the empirical view regards it as one expression of man’s emotional nature to be understood in terms of its other expressions” (114). This article further expands

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the area of the book by bringing into discussion a western aesthetic concept that has been in the core of that knowledge system with the foundational aesthetic theory of India.

The book, due to its seven chapters, looks to be an authored book while its five appendices give it a touch of an edited volume containing valuable research outputs by different scholars of the area. It serves two purposes simultaneously by being an authored book and an edited volume which begins by introducing the basic concepts of the theories of rasa and dhvani, and finally, takes the reader to understand the practical aspect of the theories by showing quite interesting and far-reaching research outputs. Had the book included other theories and concepts of Indian Aesthetics such as anumäna, réti, guëa, aucitya, vakrokti, alamkära etc., it would have served even a greater purpose.

PRABHA SHANKAR DWIVEDI Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Tirupati POLITICS AND AESTHETICS OF THE FEMALE FORM, 1908–1918. By Georgina Williams. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 189 p.

Georgina Williams is an American artist, writer and independent researcher: she has been a visiting lecturer in UK, China and Singapore – at Winchester School of Art (2009, 2017 to now – Design), Suzhou Art and Design Technology Institute, part-time lecturer of Fashion and Textiles at the University of Portsmouth, and adjunct lecturer of Digital Design, Textiles for Fashion, and Cultural and Contextual Studies at LASALLE College of the Arts.

On the art field, Georgina Williams already has three solo exhibitions at Harbour Lights Picturehouse in Southampton: Industrialia: The Patina of Urban Degradation (a continuing photographic project, 2013), Exposed (paintings of the female form, 2011), and Brave New World (architectural photography, 2010).

Williams is also the author of the eminent research monograph Propaganda and Hogarth’s Line of Beauty in the First World War (Palgrave, 2016), as well as of “Advertising Conflict: Propagandist Aesthetics in 1914”, a contributory chapter to the collection on the European art avant-garde 1914: guerre et avant-gardes (Branland, M. et al., eds., Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2016), and “Curvatures of Cloth: William Hogarth’s Line of Beauty and ‘The Heart of True Eroticism’ in Serpentine Dance”, chapter in The Erotic Cloth: Seduction and Fetishism in Textiles (Kettle, A., Miller, L., eds., Bloomsbury, 2018).

In this rich and versatile professional context, her second book, Politics and Aesthetics of the Female Form, 1908–1918, appears to be a continuation and amplification of the author’s research and artistic interests in William Hogarth’s ‘line of beauty’and its use as a mechanism for re-evaluating artworks. True to Hogarth’s opposition to classicist aesthetic norms and banalized biblical stories, Georgina Williams follows the English sensualist in his unshakeable belief that beauty shall be objectively verified.

Not only that Hogarth was the founder of the social and critical movement in European art but he was also an ardent supporter of the English school’s realistic genre and portrait painting.

Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Vol. 42, No. 1 (192-194) © 2019 by Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute

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Moreover, as he sought to maximally extend the circle of art connoisseurs and experts, Hogarth refused traders’ mediation and created the practice of an exhibition-auction in his own atelier.

Just the same approach of presenting the complex and rich, colorful and dynamic world of art to the general public and to the broad circle of current curious readers and – why not – future art connoisseurs, lies in Georgina Williams’ latest book, examining the common ‘line of beauty’ in the aesthetics of pictorial women representation in Great Britain related to suffrage, the First World War, advertising and art movements during the 1908–1918 decade.

Thus, Williams manages to build a bridge back to the genealogy of recurring aesthetic and artistic motifs and techniques, the ‘line of beauty’ amongst the most important ones, to contemporary visual culture of the Western world.

The period of research comprises the years before and during the First World War, and, in concrete, the visual image of the female form represented by suffrage campaigns, advertisements, recruiting soldiers and support staff related to the war, as well as Modernist art movements like art nouveau, cubism, vorticism and symbolism – including the ways in which women pictorially represented themselves during that period. The years of Williams’ investigation follow immediately after the period of the so-called first wave of feminism in the late 19th and early 20th century, especially tangible in Great Britain after the example of the young emancipated European and American women with an independent career who were living their freedom and youth traveling, making art – drawing, singing, sewing, writing novels, travel notes, short stories and poetry, establishing women’s clubs (and even woman’s club movement).

For the first time in Western culture, a full expression of the female personality was given.

Many women writers of the end of the 19th century (like Olive Schreiner, Sarah Grand, Victoria Cross, Mona Caird, Ella D’Arcy, Ella Hepworth Dixon, George Egerton) have described the pursuit of self-determination of the ‘New Woman’, the feminist ideal but also real social role seeking professional and social freedom, educated, confident, open, adventurous, who has become the exemplary cosmopolitan heroine of the fin de siècle story – as opposed to the image of the Victorian woman as legally, financially and morally dependent on her husband, male relatives, social and charity institutions and, ultimately, as shaped by man John Ruskin’s form on the basis of an imaginary figure. Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex, 1949) went even further into her contemplation of woman in the Victorian ideal as a perfectly ahistorical, non-subjective, a purely negative essence: like a mirror, like the Otherness itself. It is precisely in the dynamic fin de siècle, or the “evening of the century” in Virginia Woolf ’s expression that the strict boundaries between the poles of the ‘second sex’ such as the ‘angel at home’ or ‘the fallen woman’ have been undermined as well.

After the historian Ruth Bordin’s words on Henry James’ characters (Alice Freeman Palmer: The Evolution of a New Woman, 1993), the term ‘New Woman’ expressed “American expatriates living in Europe: women of affluence and sensitivity, who despite or perhaps because of their wealth exhibited an independent spirit and were accustomed to acting on their own. The term New Woman always referred to women who exercised control over their own lives be it personal, social, or economic”.

This portrait of the modern educated and free woman was sealed in the thematic painting by the end of the 19th century, when the number of women’s artistic associations had grown considerably. On the other hand, publishers of women’s magazines got used to hire women for the illustrations that reflected their own perspective (here are the names of female illustrators

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like Rose O’Neill, Elizabeth Shippen Green, Violet Oakley, etc.). Besides the realistic artistic techniques, these generalized female images were often fulfilled by the spirit of secession, impressionism and preraphaelism: the accent was placed on the very colors, lines, contours, shapes, textures, the air and the light spraying in colors – just like inner emotions and perceptions, living out in the world outside the mind. In response to the “male perspective” in painting representing women as flowers in passive and ornamental compositions, a series of images of women drawing women in all the dynamics and inner inflorescences of their “florality”appeared (Anna Lea Merritt, Emma Lampert Cooper – cf. Stott, A., Floral Femininity: A Pictorial Definition, American Art No. 6, 1992).

In her illustrated monograph, Georgina Williams uses a vivid language and clear logical lines to describe not only the feminine image of that period as a whole, but also different tropes and semiotic objects like the aforementioned in order to reconstruct that first-wave “blossoming” of the female personality in full color. In Williams’s opinion, the decade of 1908–1918 appeared to be a significant ideological foundation for all the following phases of Western woman’s self-perception and self-determination.

Williams’ persistent research and artistic interest in the Western politics and aesthetics of the female form contributes not only to contemporary debates on women’s role throughout history, art and literature but also makes the ideological and political practices of visual use of stereotypes on gender roles more explicit.

SYLVIA BORISSOVA Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria A PHILOSOPHY OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY: BODY & TEXT. By Aakash Singh Rathore. New Delhi: Routledge (Taylor & Francis), 2018. 164 p.

T his slim volume does not bristle with quotations. It is only the words of the autobiographers themselves that Aakash Singh Rathore engages with. When an outside voice does intrude, it is brief: opening or closing the chapters. Instead there is only Rathore’s prose, interwoven with that of his interlocutors and weaving them together into new constellations. Though these exchanges are signaled already in the introduction (and made most explicit in the epilogue), there are constant appeals to the reader to hear the autobiographers in conversation among themselves. What emerges is the book’s most explicit theme: that of the body. In some chapters, it is simply the corporeality, the often-ignored bodily mass that comes forward. In others the body is a explicitly treated as a parallel path developed alongside the mind. Rathore finds in the genre of the autobiography all of the scant evidence of the importance of the body in the forging of the spirit. The chapter on Yukio Mishima, a figure clearly dear to the author, is the most overt treatment of how “Body and mind are synergized in spirit.” (93) With the introduction of ‘spirit’ we are tempted to fall back into one of those easy binaries Rathore warns against. The spirit—as abstract as the mind, and to which the body is as often Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Vol. 42, No. 1 (194-196) © 2019 by Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute

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contrasted to as the mind—is here the site of unity. If there is any danger that spirit merely replaces mind as a category above the body, it is not unacknowledged. Rathore takes for granted the unity but challenges the denigration of the body. He contends that it is precisely this oversight that leads to the paucity of ‘great spirits.’ And while we are certainly welcome to venerate the greatness of the selected figures- and perhaps it is because of this veneration we are willing to listen to their lessons- what is of greater importance is that they present embodied, imitable practices towards which we can orient ourselves in our search for moral guidelines.

While the goal is the discovery of archetypes, those Aristotelean megalopsychia (97), other themes emerge in the chapters and across chapters. It is as response to that appeal posited above and in with the purposes of highlighting some of these themes that the perhaps willful cobblings-together to come will be excused.

Rathore is by no means unaware of the extreme to which this process of self-creation can go. The chapters on Kamala Das, Ernest Hemingway, Andy Warhol and Friedrich Nietzsche all deal implicitly or explicitly with the invention of selves are themselves, at best, remote goals, or at worst, delusions and fabrications. What is at stake is not the factual veracity of the claims of the autobiographies. They are all, in the end; narratives, selections, framings.

Nietzsche prophesies the man that will embody the values of the coming time of dethroned truths. His critique of the super-sensuous was never a call for a return to the sensuous, a move that retains the system and its hierarchies. But his self-presentation is always as practice on the way and never as an embodiment. Warhol lies to be true to his art. The maker of genuine fakes would have been more dishonest had he presented unvarnished, unpretentious fact. What singles Das out among the others is that her autobiography is riddled with claims that are never substantiated, false stances and broken promises, the worst of which is the promise of My Story itself. Taken as the substantiation of an exemplary life, My Story fails to substantiate even its instances.

Why does Das then remain when so many other autobiographies that Rathore’s voracious consumption has encountered have been excluded? Perhaps because she nonetheless testifies to the body as a trap. Maya Angelou, Elie Wiesel, B. R. Ambedkar and Daya Pawar all feel the weight of the their bodies differently from Hemingway, who so often delights in it. Wiesel is robbed of the luxury of ignoring his body then of the luxury of thinking of himself apart from his body and finally of even seeing the body as a whole. And finally, he survives as a body, and then must survive his survival. With the chapters on Ambedkar and Pawar Rathore shows that in addition to a mind, the body might have abstractions of its own, invisible yet bodily marks. These marks go so far as to pose the question “…how can the feet, dirtier than the dirt below it, live the life of the mind?” (79) And while Maya Angelou’s body is more visibly marked it is just as far outside the centre as Pawar’s and Ambedkar’s. And yet, the flesh is neither sloughed off for the security of the mind, nor perversely delighted in. Rathore identifies an exemplary moment of the thick weave of word body and text when he writes: “Nigger: this is the flesh made word. A cage of a word to cage the dignity of the bird. But Maya- is this why she seems unrivaled in her beauty? - makes the caged bird sing.” (53) Other hints of reorientations towards the body are Weisel’s reclaimed faith and Warhol’s recalibration after recovering from being shot.

Gandhi and Mishima fall into conversation in Rathore’s presentation of their somatization.

While he explicitly characterizes Gandhi’s pursuit of political autonomy for his nation as beginning with his pursuit of self-control for himself there is certainly an embodied political

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performance in Mishima’s death. Similarly, Marjane Satrapi’s political commentary grapples with live bodies covered up and dead bodies displayed, culminating in Rathore’s characterization of Persepolis as positioning the body between the micro and macrocosm.

What he says of Gandhi could easily apply to many of the others: “The body is metric, the measure of what has or has not been achieved on the road to truth” (34) The body’s endurance of its truth is encountered in Hemingway’s description of faces, bloodied by boxing and limbs, mutilated by war. And there is certainly something to be said for Art Spiegelman’s father Vladek bathing in freezing rivers to make the day’s toil comparatively easy.

While Art’s own labors over the drawing board to embody his characters are not the focus of his chapter Rathore is attentive and sometimes critical of the visual elements of Satrapi’s Persepolis. The comments here do not privilege the visual, but treat it with the same importance as, for example, Daya Pawar’s use of pronouns to modulate the distance between himself and his reader.

But to simply leave A Philosophy of Autobiography with its thematic is to fail to heed its promptings. While Rathore says “All the details fall away to a chorus of revealing” (141); If there is a falling away, it is not as snakeskin shed but as—to return to an image from Hemingway—the oyster shells after the meat had been savored. Rathore always lingers on instances from the works he deals with. Whether it is Art Spiegelman toiling away atop a mountain of corpses, Maya Angelou being turned away by the dentist, Yukio Mishima’s seppuku or Gandhi’s experiments; it is always the lived, embodied detail that traces the path to the revealing.

NANDAN ROSARIO Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi

Aakash Singh Rathore through A Philosophy of Autobiography: Body & Text makes a strong case for unity of flesh and spirit as an essential element of human existence. This work becomes more powerful as the author is committed to explore the intersections of physicality and philosophy. As a practitioner of somatic possibilities and a student of psychoanalysis, he attempts to investigate into ‘how ought we to understand the life of the mind with relation to the body, or vice versa’ (13). This book, he affirms, is a result of his curious personal goals, which offers to us a significant juncture for the fundamental concerns of existential, philosophical quests.

A Philosophy of Autobiography touches upon enormous fields of enquiry—from Cartesian dualism, Christian theological positions, neuroscientific discoveries, to feminist phenomenology—and founds the relevance of ‘bodily lived experience’ as a crucial and promising aspect in answering the mind-body relativism. This review reflects upon certain elements of bodily lived experience, as discussed beautifully in the 12 autobiographies selected in the book, seeking a coherent unity of body and mind for an exemplary existence. I would discuss the elements of dualisms like ‘fact verses fiction’, ‘fact verses fake’, ‘fake verses fiction’; explicate how the ‘body’ is seen as fundamental to human existence; and finally argue that a unified self – body, mind, spirit, soul altogether – not only can serve as an exemplar but it is necessary for us to thrive in all these dimensions in order to live fully a human existence.

Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics Vol. 42, No. 1 (196-199) © 2019 by Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute

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Fact, Fiction and the Fake: One dominant dualism has been challenged by the author (fact vs. fiction), which he deals with explicitly in chapters on Ernest Hemingway and Art Spiegelman. Hemingway advocates that a great work of fiction can be created by writing just ‘what is true’. Rathore cites from his autobiography A Moveable Feast, ‘If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction’. (...) ‘But there is always a chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact’ (57-58).

Author-artist Spiegelman’s autobiography ‘MAUS forces us to consider how fictive form can serve as the vehicle for truth content’. The author criticises the manner in which students are ‘forced to read MAUS’, with questions like ‘Is this book a fiction? If not, explain how mice can talk in the real world’ (117). This is an important insight. The dualisms of this kind limit the possibility of creative engagement with texts that actually transgresses such boundaries, which otherwise can contribute enormously to the knowledge construction.

A similar phenomenon is about an author’s being fake and the consequent disgust among her critics. Rathore brings forth an amazing reflection about Andy Warhol’s autobiographies The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and POPism. Warhol ‘used to like to give different information to different magazines’. Highlighting this, he suggests, ‘aren’t these partly the essence of his art?’ (107). Rathore’s insight is intriguing, that is, why do we presume that an author cannot deploy an essential part of her creativity into her writing? She, very well, can and evidently, Warhol did. The author begins to admire him as a ‘genuine fake’ — ‘an authentic ‘something’ that nevertheless poses as ‘something’ else!’

This admiration for the ‘genuine fake’ does not grant the author’s leniency towards the ‘fake’, as we witness in the chapter on Kamala Das’ My Story. Das’ autobiography, he declares, ‘is not an honest one’. An admirer of her poetry and a careful reader interrogates the incoherence in her Story, ‘is she trying to fool us or herself?’ (88). There can be harsh criticism of Rathore’s position, but he cites her Obituary wherein ‘Das later admitted that there was plenty of fiction in My Story. Perhaps “biomythography” [rather than autobiography] would have been a fairer description of the book’ (91)!

Thus, a significant issue concerning literary works has been discussed keenly in the book.

We find, there is no absolute divide between fact and fiction or even fake. Interesting issues are raised in the book around the questions of authenticity, appropriation and ethics on the authors’ part. Rathore contemplates upon Y. S. Alone’s ‘Does your work lend itself over to an enabling process for the oppressed?’, and cautions against ‘paternalistic work’, encourages for facilitating ‘self-agency’ (43), using intriguing phrases like ‘surrogate insult’ (116), ‘dubious underbelly’ (119), and Daya Pawar’s own metaphor of ‘Dalit-Brahmin’ (75).

Body as Existence: As the survival literature predominantly shows and our experiences of abuse, mainly sexual abuse, make us see ‘body’ as ‘burden’ (126). In personal narratives of rape survivors, we find that they often hate their bodies and attempt to mutilate themselves as they find a distinction between their own and the culprit’s body. The chapter on Marjane Satrapi’s autobiography Persepolis elaborates on ‘body as vulnerability’ portraying bodily pain with ‘gaping wide mouth screams... whip lashed back of a tortured body’ (126-27), same as the corpses of people died in holocaust (118). As the chapter on Dr. Ambedkar’s autobiography Waiting for a Visa exhibits, ‘untouchability, is carried in the body but not on it’ (42); even the ‘spiritual rebirth’ through conversion does not emancipate an untouchable body from this status.

Body exhibits the nature of one’s living. ‘[D]elicate hands’ represent ‘higher class’, ‘business man rather than labourer’ (119). A crucial scene in famous Hollywood sci-fi film They Live

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(1988) portrayed same. The chapter on Daya Pawar’s autobiography Baluta mentions ‘a labouring Dalit girl, who has rough workers’ hands like iron rods’; and ‘[f]or Ashoka the King, [they] need someone fair’; also a heartbreak is evident by losing ‘weight’, ‘sagged cheek’, ‘sunken eyes’, ‘dark circles’ and heartmending begins with ‘exercise’ (78). We see that skin-colour, muscle-texture, or body-mass is deterministic in knowing one’s social identity.

Body affects one’s belief in herself. In Das’ words, ‘I hated to see myself as I really was in mirrors’, ‘I was plain, very brown’, which later turns into ‘my proud Dravidian skin’ (88). In the chapter on Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, ‘My skin looked dirty like mud... one day I woke out of my black ugly dream... I was really white... [my] cruel fairy stepmother, ... had turned me into a too-big Negro girl’ (50). Because the bodily appearance disgusted them about theirselves, both Angelou and Das created an alternative belief about their same bodies, accommodating their realities in a positive fortifying manner to flee from their inferiorities.

We talk about ‘survival of the fittest’; don’t we really know what is that which is ‘fittest’ herein? Rathore finds that ‘being a survivor is being a body’ (69). It is discussed extensively in the chapter on MAUS which is about surviving the survivor – Spiegelman’s father Vladek (120). In the chapter on holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel’s autobiography Night, he writes, ‘it was the body... that survived, that makes [one] a survivor’ (72). Primo Levi was another survivor of holocaust who later committed suicide, but Wiesel didn’t! Precisely this makes him a ‘survivor’; he survived being a holocaust survivor. Isn’t it a common sense, I wonder, it is the physical body which denotes death, birth, or existence of a living being! One’s physical body makes one exist.

Thus, the body is what makes our lives ‘burdensome’, ‘vulnerable’, ‘toiling’, ‘inferior’, ‘esteemed’, or ‘emancipatory’. We encounter the world with our physical existence and the world interacts with us considering our bodily existence. Rathore concludes, ‘the body is always there at the centre, the substance of the subject’ (136). Yes, indeed! But what is at the periphery, if body is at the centre?

Spirited Body as Exemplarity: What follows next is the body with something more. The evil oppressors around the world attempt to re-name, number and negate our human existence.

Wiesel writes, ‘I became A-7713. After that I had no other name’ (71). Spiegelman’s ‘father was reduced to a number’ and he ‘didn’t survive’ (121, 120). Angelou ‘broke to pieces’ a white woman’s most coveted dish ‘seeking revenge for being renamed’ (53). It is not mere body, but a name, an acknowledgment of our human living, what makes us exist.

More than a name, a spirit, is what a body needs to survive. Wiesel writes, at the Auschwitz ‘I was nothing but a body’, and while escaping the gas chambers ‘there was two of us; my body and I’ (71, 72). There were ‘strange looking creatures’, which were bodies of human, but void of human spirit, empty of emotions, hollowed out of feelings (70). Rathore intriguingly puts it ‘pre-dead corpses’ – those imprisoned, exploited and subjected to brutal death, and ‘post-dead corpses’ – those vacuous of any signs of humane values subjecting them to death. The former is dead with the death of their flesh (whose spirits are already murdered by their entry into the death camps), and the latter is dead with the death of their spirit.

The body and the spirit survive with an active mind that keeps the two intact. The prisoners at Nazi camps ‘bathed and did gymnastics’, ‘prayed’, and ‘played chess’. ‘Body, mind and spirit’, Rathore emphasises, ‘individually must survive’ (120). It is the mind of the teenager Satrapi which reflects, ‘[m]y mental transformation was followed by my physical metamorphosis’

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(129); and who ‘intuited a decade of the late Foucault’s teaching (on biopolitics and governmentality) and sketched it into a few little squares of a book of cartoons!’ (131).

Angelou contemplates, it is ‘terribly unfair to have a toothache and a headache and have to bear at the same time the heavy burden of Blackness’ (52). The 11 years old clearly states her opinion about ‘name-calling’, ‘the humourless puzzle of inequality and hate’, ‘Black pride’ and the brutal implications of losing in a boxing match (53). Both Satrapi and Angelou are perfect models of intelligence, beyond the conservatism of race, gender, class, religion, culture or even age.

Yukio Mishima, we find in his autobiography Sun and Steel, sought for an ‘intelligence matched by pure physical existence’ (100). That is precisely what is disallowed at the death camps: ‘[w]holeness – mind, body, spirit, and soul altogether’ (72). Why? Well, at Auschwitz humans were prepared to become ‘pre-dead and post-dead corpses’. But otherwise, even in a democratic society, aren’t we discouraged to have our mind, body, spirit unified? Why are there conventions? Why are we to conform to the norms? What is that we are kept from?

What happens with this ‘wholeness’? The conservative powers, the status-quo, fear the radical energy which an individual can produce when she explores all her possibilities to flourish in multiple dimensions. The wholeness is precisely what is required to be, and expected of, an exemplar.

Exemplarity is achieved by the rare few who could manage to keep their body, mind, soul and spirit thriving altogether. Aristotle’s virtue ethics regards it as megalopsychia – the ‘great of soul’ (97). Rathore regards Hemingway as ‘a true inspiration’ for ‘[n]ot just the body of his work, but also for his work on his body’ (65). Determining for ‘the harmony of the pen and the sword’, Mishima beautifully argues, ‘to combine action and art is to combine the flower that wilts and the flower that lasts forever’ (96, 97). There we find a vivid and powerful critique of the predominant orthodox superiority of mind over the body. Our resistance to keep away from the physical bodily endeavours has ‘steadily perverted and altered reality’ which connects us only to ‘shadows’ and not the real part of our beings (100). Finding our true selves demands working together on both – mind and body. That would render a ‘spirited body’.

All these authors together join chorus in revealing that we all bear the potential megalopsychia, to be an exemplar. Inspired from their bodily lived experiences, and benefitted from the philosophical engagement of the author, I argue that as part of our being humans we can equally flourish physically, mentally, and spiritually. In order to actualise our true selves, those of us engaged with the life of mind need to explore the life of body and vice versa.

Because we cannot excel in one field if we ignore another dimension of our existence.

To conclude three sections: Dualisms like ‘fact versus fiction’, ‘fact versus fake’, ‘fake versus fiction’ do not hold true in all cases; although these genres have differences they can always overlap one another. We have seen in different ways, how ‘body’ plays a central role to our human existence. Unity of mind, body, soul, spirit is a necessary factor for our thriving, for actualising our potentials, for being an exemplar, for living a truly human life. Rathore’s book is an amazing read which walks us through the lives of great spirited bodies of the world which we admire as exemplars.

SUNAINA ARYA Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

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The Journal of Somaesthetics is an interdisciplinary journal that investigates the experiencing purposive body (soma) in theory and in practice as the key instrument of action, locus and medium of perception, and site of creative self-expression. It is a peer-reviewed and open-access journal, based in Aalborg University, Denmark.

EDITORS Falk Heinrich, Aalborg University Richard Shusterman, Florida Atlantic University

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Books Authored by Richard Shusterman

The Object of Literary Criticism

Richard Shusterman

(Rodopi, 1984)

(Columbia, 1988)

(Wiley-Blackwell, 1992)

(Routledge, 1997)

(Cornell, 2000)

(Cornell, 2002)

(Cambridge, 2008)

(Cambridge, 2012)

(Hermann, 2016)

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