Ex-silentio Eloquence

poetry and philosophy in the middle of it

book review:

The Extravagant: Crossings of Modern Poetry and Modern Philosophy

by Robert Baker

reviewed by Camelia Elias

Footnotes

(1) The context for Gerard Manley Hopkins is a meditation on three kinds of poetic language induced by inspiration on different levels. (We find here Hopkins’s notions of different kinds of moods, or poetic idioms, such as the Parnassian and the Castalian (the lowest kind of inspiration).) “The second kind I call Parnassian. It can only be spoken by poets, but is not in the highest sense poetry. It does not require the mood of mind in which the poetry of inspiration is written. It is spoken on and from the level of a poet’s mind, not, as in the other case, when the inspiration, which is the gift of genius, raises him above himself. For I think it is the case with genius that it is not when quiescent so very much above mediocrity as the difference between the two might lead us to think, but that it has the power and privilege of rising from that level to a height utterly far from mediocrity: in other words that its greatness is that it can be so great.” (Letter to A.W. M. Baillie)

(2) Silesius (1624-1677) was a German mystic and poet from Silesia (Poland). His view of aesthetics, the claim that the experience of the infinite can only be experienced in a finite form, has influenced authors interested in formal experimental literature such as Jorge Luis Borges and Geoffrey Hill, whose theological vision employs some of Silesius’s Catholic imagery. Notable in this sense is Hill’s collection of poetry The Triumph of Love (2000). One of Silesius’s most often quoted phrases is one that alludes to the phenomenology of things that can be contained by a decision not to explain anything: “Die Rose ist ohne warum; Sie blühet, weil Sie blühet . . .”

(3) The temptation here is to go even more formalistically and at least mention the work of Nicolai A. Vasiliev who in 1910 presented a lecture, “On Partial Judgements, on the Triangle of Opposites, on the Law of Excluded Fourth,” in which he advanced a theory for logic to go the imaginative way as against Aristotelian logic which is constrained to laws of contradiction. What is fascinating about Vasiliev’s theory is that his notion of “imaginary logic” is free of the law of the excluded middle. As such, it is applicable and valid for other worlds and beings having other types of sensations that do not submit to contradiction laws. More current and interesting work in this area is done by Jaakko Hintikka. See for example Hintikka’s The Principles of Mathematics Revisited (1996) and Vincent F. Hendricks (ed.) Philosophy of Mathematics: 5 Questions (2006).

(4) In an analogy to physics, we find a correlate in quantum mechanics. Not only has quantum mechanics done away with the law of the excluded middle, but it has also done away with both ends.

(5) Says Arendt: “boundless [community] because action, though it may proceed from nowhere […] acts into a medium where every reaction becomes a chain reaction and where every process is the cause of new processes. […] This boundlessness is characteristic not of political action alone, […] the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of the same boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation. Action, moreover, no matter what its specific content, always establishes relationships and therefore has an inherent tendency to force open all limitations and cut across all boundaries” (Arendt, 190-191). I particularly like what Lynn Hejinian has to say about this in her essay “Reason,” from The Language of Inquiry (2000): “Authority over being is thus dispersed, not because of the boundlessness, but in the boundlessness. We don’t—as writers or as persons—go beyond “all limitations” and “all boundaries”—we enter and inhabit them” (352).