Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 6 Number 3, December 2005
___________________________________________________________________
The
Metaphysics of Art-Works and Process. An examination of George Steiner’s Real Presences:Is There Anything
In What
We Say?
Cardiff University
‘All
art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,’
wrote Walter Pater. Since his time this has been somewhat wilfully
deployed as an apologia for a unique power, sometimes felt as numinous, which
music possesses. In making the necessary comparison between different art forms
we note a number of reasons why Pater’s dictum poses grave difficulties, at
least in literature. Pater asserted that the ideal condition of art is for the
matter to be inseparable from the form, so that the more effectively the
material is fused in form the more
splendid the work of art. In literature this is difficult and perhaps impossible
to achieve. In the novel, poetry and drama the very fact of their reliance on
specific references to life, i.e. their fundamental concern with life values, is
what gives them coherence. Unlike music, literature strives with difficulty to
attain a purely structural and formal coherence without necessarily drawing in
the extrinsic, from life. The flow of words would have little value were they to
be appreciated for their sounds alone, as is most often the case with the basic
materials of music, at least
instrumental music. The sense of music is inherent, its meaning wholly
intrinsic, while words and
sentences cannot achieve coherence independently of their referents,
images, facts and meanings from life. As we have learnt from
I.A.Richards the auditory arrangement of the vowels, consonants, phonemes
and words have a design which needs to be more than simply sound content. A poem
is not really a perfect fusion of
content (meaning) and poetic technique
(form). The poetic line is self-evidently independent of the poetic rhythm
despite the wonderful examples that exist where one feels that a perfect unity
has been achieved. In his Practical
Criticism 1 Richards compares two trivial lines and points out the immense
difference between: ‘Deep into a gloomy grot’
and ‘Peep into a roomy cot’. He points out that the difference is not
ameliorated by the comparatively slight contrast between the sounds of each
line. A student’s contradiction of this (along the lines, ‘I should never
bother about the sense, the sound is enough for me’) provoked Richards to
drive home the point by composing a poem made up of nonsense syllables as a
‘double or ‘dummy’ to Milton’s On
the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,
xv, starting: ‘J.Drootlan-Sussling Benn/Mill-down Leduren N./Telamba-taras
oderainto weiring/Awersey zet bidreen/
2
Changing Milton’s content to what is clearly non-representational
illustrates the ontological chasm which exists between poetry and music . While
the coherence of the sound is the sine
qua non of the meaning of a piece of music, in literature the words and the
sentences cannot achieve coherence independently of their referents.
There is a similar case to be made with relation to painting, at least concerning representational works. In the same way that Mozart’s Symphony no.40 is not ‘about’ anything as Paradise Lost is, it is also not ‘of’ anything as the Mona Lisa is. We might not be so confident of this assertion if we chose Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique or Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, with their representational implications (conveyed, incidentally, and unlike Beethoven’s Ninth, without specific recourse to words).
Since music is such a direct utterance and deals more with feelings than with reason, more with imagination than concepts, aestheticians have had less to say about it than any of the other arts, for the reason that the emotions which music evoke do not lend themselves easily to the rationalisation that the more conceptual arts offer. Eduard Hanslick insisted that music can only reproduce the ‘dynamics’ of emotions, their ‘motion’. Susanne Langer later expanded on this sentiment as follows:
The
tonal structures we call ‘music’ bear a close
logical similarity to the forms of human feeling – forms of growth and
of attenuation, flowing and stowing, conflict and resolution, speed, arrest,
terrific excitement, calm or subtle activation and dreamy lapses – not joy and
sorrow perhaps, but the poignancy of either and both . . . Music is a tonal
analogue of emotive life.3
A piece of music is‘specifically musical’, and is non-conceptual in the manner that religious experience to many people is non-conceptual. No music criticism or musicology can tell us as much about the meaning of a piece of music as the performance of it. The story about Schumann being questioned as to what was the meaning of a piece he had just played is a telling confirmation of this point – the composer said nothing, and played the etude again.
In his book Real Presences: Is There Anything In What We Say?4 , George Steiner , with characteristically rhetorical verbal pyrotechnics, aims to grapple with the distinctions which exist between the theoretical functions when directed to surface forms and content, and those same functions when directed towards the depth content. Towards the end of his book his central concern with music comes to the fore. Pater is revisited (‘In music form is content, content form’ 5). But he goes further than Pater.The ‘depth content’ of music for Steiner is a power or meaning which is spiritual, and with a depth of being such as to prompt the question ’can there be art in the absence of “the rival Maker” ’? 6 For Steiner God is the premise for all worthwhile aesthetic activity. He makes a wager on meaning and understanding in the arts which he describes as ‘a wager on transcendence.’7 In this scenario it would be natural to see the artist himself as a god: ‘God is in reality nothing but another artist . . . declared Picasso, whose own appetite for invention, for self-recreation was, indeed, that of a demiurge.’8 Matisse was even more direct (‘Yes, but I am God.’) And James Joyce’s simile in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man conjures up a mysterious disaffection: ‘The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, pairing his fingernails.’9 The aura is of an otherness, an awe-fullness whose source is felt as the Maker. And it is a transcendental source not just in music but in other arts too, although they seem to be less adequately underwritten by the sacred. Rationality dictates that this is no more than presupposition. It is clearly a wager; the postulate cannot be proven.
Steiner intimates that we must respond to the world as if to the ‘real presence’ of the transcendental. He continuously admits that his opinions are just speculative and, to use the language of linguistic philosophy, ‘verification transcendent’. But seeing an art as transcendental, on the one hand, and, on the other, seeing God directly at work in the art form are two rather different things. We can be drawn through the mediating power of a poem or a painting or a piece of music to a higher plane than we might expect from the rational-logical apparatus of the art in question; the work in question might ‘leap out of nothingness . . . [so that] its enunciatory shape so new, so singular, to its begetter, literally [ leaves] the previous world behind.’10 But this does not necessarily mean that God’s hand can be seen. This is exactly what Steiner surmises; for him this transcendentalism is divine. The ‘quantum leap between the character as letter and the character as presence’11 is not of an aesthetic order (or only of an aesthetic order), it is specifically metaphysical, divine. He is unfazed by the fact that God has absented Himself so that, as Simone Weil said,’truth is secret’. And since His absence is essentially indescribable – being ineffable – then the question is raised whether anything at all can be said about such an intractable matter.
But he perseveres over 200 pages and more, encouraged by the fact that by charting the known in this world one may be able to fathom the mystery of the unknowable. If the intimations lie too deep for words, at least an attempt at specificity and careful attention to the ‘semantic markers’ of different art forms may provide ontological clarification. Steiner sees the pigments or incisions which externalize Grunewald’s Issenheim triptych or Brancusi’s Bird, or the notes, tempo markings etc. which ‘actualize’ Schubert’s posthumous Quintet as a
re-enactment, reincarnation via spiritual and technical means of that which human questioning, solitude, inventiveness, apprehension of time and of death can intuit of the fiat of creation, out of which, inexplicably, have come the self and the world into which we are cast.12
He continues by acknowledging the specific role of music as a paradox which unites the palapable with the inexpressible, echoing Leibniz’s famous definition of music as ‘the secret arithmetic of the soul unknowing of the fact that it is counting.’13There is an intuition of a ‘radical “non-humanity” within music’s power,’14 which locates its essence somehow outside the range of man. In music this power has very often manifested itself in a religious form, but of course it need not. We are not necessarily concerned here with the obviously religious – Mozart’s Requiem , Bach’s Mass in B minor, Michelangelo’s chapel, Gothic cathedrals. For the nature of art is beyond the religious confining of it into specifically sacred works of art. In other words, art has its independent source, as is so apparent when we become aware of the depth dimension in works (in all the arts) that are not explicitly religious. (Perhaps we should now remind ourselves that Michelangelo was more a product of the Renaissance than of Christianity).
When reviewing the book in The Times Literary Supplement, Roger Scruton reacted to Steiner’s extolling of the hierarchical supremacy of musical expression as follows: ‘Small hope, then, for the tone-deaf in Steiner’s Church.’15 This is not altogether fair, since, as we have noted, Steiner sees a ‘carrying over’ of the inexplicable in the more discursive or representational arts, especially where religion is specifically welded to myth. He cites different (very different) aspects of the one question that is ineradicable in man: is there or is there not God? as posed by Victor Hugo’s late epics on God and on Satan, Faulkner’s Light in August, Melville’s Moby Dick and Tolstoy’s The Brothers Karamazov (in the parable of the Grand Inquisitor.)16 But whether the ineffability is apparent specifically in the semantic markers of literature, as they are in music, must surely be open to question. If the ineffable is directly sensed in arts other than music then shouldn’t they contain the mysterious intrinsically, like music, in their semantic markers. In painting, perhaps this can be seen both in representational and modern abstract works. Or can it? Steiner asks a question rather similar to ours concerning poetry about representational painting’s ability (or shortcomings) in this respect. He asks, ‘In what possible regard . . . can we attach transcendent dimensions to a still-life, to the portrait, to the numberless depictions of the natural and domestic settings in which we lead our non-metaphysical lives.’17
We can attempt to answer this question when judging the capacity for transcendence in representational and non-representational art respectively. To take representational art first. We can take no more trivial artifacts as a subject for painting , but in this case redolent with meaning, than a worn-out pair of shoes. Van Gogh painted them and Heidegger meditated on them18 in a manner which brought out the integral reality beyond scientific analysis, (and also in a manner which anticipates the influential role Heidegger was to have on postmodernism). To use Heideggerian terminology the shoes have an inherent ’thereness’ or meaning which cannot be externalized because the meaning is ‘within-it.’ In them can be sensed the life and purpose of the peasant who wore them day in day out over many years. We read into the picture what it is for a man to live in a particular way. The shoes must be understood on the basis of what is at work in Van Gogh’s painting and not in just the ‘thingly’ character of the pair of shoes. The pair is a thing plus. The question is posed: what is man and what is humanity if these shoes are according to Heidegger’s explanation? In attempting to disclose the ‘truth of beings’ Heidegger expresses a deep-seated need often present in the work of aestheticians and art critics to disclose meaning that is hidden in spite of the specificity of the image. Heidegger argues that such a simple revelation is inherent in every work of art. In Van Gogh’s painting there is a a formal self-sufficiency on the side of the object , of the pair of shoes. It is the shoes that are depicted; but they are enhanced immeasurably by the artist revealing the creative dynamic in light and colour. It is because of the experience of van Gogh (and many another secular artist) that we should not be drawn to accord a special status to explicitly religious works, but rather pay heed to Paul Tillich’s statement somewhere that there was more religion in Cezanne’s apple than in Hofman’s Jesus! ( The absorption of the object into its affective world is explored also by Mikel Dufrenne when he describes ’the soft delicate tranquillity which is expressed by the interiors of Vermeer . . .not contained between the walls which the painting encloses. It radiates upon an infinity of absent objects and constitutes the visage of a world of which it is the potentiality.’ 19 )For Heidegger ‘world’ and ‘earth’ clearly presuppose a metaphysical challenge. Because of this, being representational has more value because it is grounded in man’s experience and therefore is redolent of life values. Paradoxically, according to this belief, the closer the art is to life-values, via its representational nature, the more authentic value it seems to have, and by implication the more transcendental it is.
With
reference to representational art Tillich resolutely disputes Heidegger’s
contention. While accepting that art indicates the character of a spiritual
situation, and that its symbols have something of a revelatory character not
found in scientific conceptualisation, which ‘must suppress the symbolical in
favour of objective adequacy,’20 he maintains that the forms of the ‘naturalistic and
impressionistic tendency’ in art are the perfect forms of self-sufficient
finitude, in naturalism on the side
of the object, [but]in impressionism on the side of the subject’, albeit with
great creative power and with the force of symbolism. But nowhere does one break
through to the eternal, to the unconditioned content of reality which lies
beyond the antithesis of subject and object.’21 When we turn to abstract art we find that planes, lines and
colours do not express life values, but represent both world values and life
values. For shapes and mathematical forms are inherent in life and earth and
have been artistically interpreted in works of seemingly mystical transparency.
For Tillich, when the dissolution of the natural forms of objects took on a
geometric character, then
planes,
lines and cubes . . . received an almost mystical transparency. In this case, as
in expressionism in general, the self-sufficient form of existence was broken
through. A transcendent world
is not depicted as in the arts of the ancients but the transcendental reference
in things to that which lies beyond them is expressed.
22
Clearly, a transcendent world is not depicted here in the same way as in romantic or impressionistic art, but the transcendental reference to that which lies beyond is unmistakable. The inherent quality of a work, its capacity to evoke the Other is found in what is intrinsic rather than extrinsic in it . The semantic meaning therefore achieves an autonomy and becomes full of meaning because the other- worldly reality is embodied in it. In the same way that, according to Heidegger, Van Gogh liberates experience from the drag of social and biological purposiveness, so does, say, Mondrian, for Tillich, liberate intelligence from the constraints of mathematical proofs and scientific verification.
To return to literature, and to admit that the semantic incompatibility we have noticed in representational and non-representational painting is no hindrance to our argument that Steiner’s wager may be justified, we can test the nature of our assertion by considering ‘presence’ in one small corner of the work of a notable pantheist, William Wordsworth. In his book, Wordsworth’s Theory of Poetry J.A.W Heffernan maintains that ‘For the rest of his life [Wordsworth] firmly believed that when a poet transforms visible universe by the power of his imagination he imitates the creative action of nature herself.’23 The poet’s connection with nature, furthermore, is seen as a quasi-divine manifestation. Wordsworth’s imagination works by analogy. In a well-known passage in Book X111 of The Prelude, Wordsworth’s ascent of Snowdon, Wordsworth describes what he saw from the peak , and it is a great moment in poetry. The certainty of its declaration that there is an imagination in nature analogous to that in man is awe-inspiring. In its consideration of Nature’s capacity to transform ‘as if with an imaginative power’ we see traced the analogy between the mind of man and nature. Heffernan seizes on the ‘as if’ line (actually found only in a fragmentary draft) and uses it to provide
a
clue to one of the most vexing questions raised by that passage: just what is
the ‘mighty Mind’ of the early version, or the lower-case ‘mind’ of the
later one? The answer, I think, can be best approached by means of an algebraic
proportion. What Wordsworth witnessed at Snowdon was the transforming effect of
mist and moonlight upon distant hills. This effect struck him as very similar to
the transforming effect that he, as a poet, often had upon the images he used in
his poetry. In poetry, he believed, such an effect was produced by the
imagination. But what produced it in nature? We have three givens and one
unknown – all the requisites for a standard algebraic proportion:
human imagination = X
_________________
_____________________
transformation of images transformation of natural inpoetry objects in actual experience
In ordinary English, the human imagination is to the transformation of images in poetry as X is to the transformation of natural objects in actual experience. With a formula something like this, not articulated but certainly felt, Wordsworth groped his way toward a definition of x, the unknown factor. What he concluded, I think, was this: the transformation of natural objects before his very eyes was ‘presumptive evidence’ – a favourite phrase of Wordsworth’s – that something like the human imagination was at work upon them. It was a mighty mind, an archetype of the human imagination; it exercised itself on natural objects ‘as if’ with imaginative power. What Wordsworth saw at Snowdon was an image, emblem, or shadow of that mind, a demonstration of its power for the human senses. But only in the visible demonstration – only in the emblem – could he perceive the mighty mind. In the Platonic language of the later Prelude, therefore, he ascended from ‘sense . . . to ideal form’ (X1V, 76). He went from the known to the unknown, believing that in its ideal form as in its sensible manifestation, the transforming power of nature must somehow correspond to the transforming power of his own imagination. Can we give the ‘mind’ a specific name? It is extremely tempting to call it God . . . But in fairness to Wordworth, we must resist [the temptation]. In the early version of The Prelude, Wordsworth tells us that the mighty Mind is exalted by ‘the sense of
God
‘(X111, 72), which surely implies that it is not identical with God. Further,
even though Wordsworth seems to separate the human imagination from the
‘Power’ of nature, which is its ‘Counterpart/ And Brother’ (X111,
89-90), he does not clearly separate it from the ‘mighty Mind.’24
The
poem, with its specific
statements conjuring up the divine
( and obviously done conceptually), is of a different order from
what can be found in music or in non-representational painting.
And in the same way that Tillich doubts the numenal capacity of
naturalistic painting so does
poetry, so it would seem,in its specificity, also lack a transcendental
capacity. Speech lacks the direct contact with the ineffable.
As
we have seen, God is very much part of the equation for Steiner. But in his
rhetorical manner he never succeeds in clarifying the exact nature of God’s
participation. One reason for this is that his process is emotional rather than
rational. His mode of address fails to explain certain logical aspects that
would have thrown some light on the problem. Instead, his book inhabits a
dim penumbral region full of vague, inarticulate feelings. A logically
coherent structure for imbuing works of art with transcendental values is called for.
One
convincing way of doing this must surely be
via the neo-Platonic ideas of Process philosophy as developed by Alfred
North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne and
others. Steiner’s thesis would
have benefitted from an injection of rationalism into its
colourfully empirical observations. Such a rational approach is provided
by Process philosophy where feeling and rationality are carefully balanced. For
Whitehead observed somewhere that no one has ever been a pure empiricist
and, likewise, no one has ever been a pure rationalist. Finding the proper
balance appropriate to the circumstances (Aristotle’s mean) is the challenge,
and we will now consider briefly how
Process’s approach to the arts is framed within a universal,
centred vision of reality, of all actual entities in the world. The
realities of art works are therefore perceived within a global reality which is
universal .
In
Whitehead’s universe, God affects the world by
providing each emerging actual entity with its ‘subjective aim’.
Divine activity is imparted to mundane actual entities through God’s
consequent nature weaving itself across His primordial nature. For Whitehead,
God is ‘dipolar’, both transcendental and immanent, and, in the second
capacity, dynamic rather than statically immutable. The immanent God returns a dynamism back into the world in a manner appropriate to the
world and through the shaping of subjective aims. Primordial envisagement of eternal objects is necessary to
make our inferior envisagemant of them possible.
Of course, some would argue that it is inconceivable that the
transcendent should also be immanent. Even Process philosophy’s chief
influence, Plato in the Parmenides
(134d ff.), stated that there cannot be a relation between
Forms and particulars.
(Through the mouth of Parmenides Plato says: ’We have agreed that those
Forms do not have their power in relation to things in our world, and things in
our world do not have theirs in relation to Forms, but that things in each group
have their power in relation to themselves.’ 25)
In the context of transcendence and immanence, and a
propos one of Whitehead’s most eminent students, Charles Hartshorne, we
accept that we cannot claim to have fully conceptualized God’s reality or to
have erased the mysteriousness of God’s nature. And we are mindful that
Hartshorne’s aim was no more than
to conceptualize God in a manner that is coherent with our contemporary
understanding of the world.26
So Process thinking generally seems to contradict Plato when it affirms that God ‘conditions temporal actuality as
a result of the divine prehension and synthesis of the world.’27
Elsewhere Whitehead writes:
‘God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles,
invoked to save their collapse. He is their chief exemplification.’28.
By virtue of the relativity of all things the world reacts upon God and
is objectified in him. This objectification of the world in God is his
Consequent Nature. For Whitehead God is the Principle of Concretion. As we have
noted, Whitehead sees one aspect of His nature as an ’actual entity’
generically comparable with, although specifically different from other actual
entitities.’ 29 The ground for the entry of unrealized eternal objects
into the actual, temporal process of reality as we know it is the primordial nature of God: ‘the ultimate, basic
adjustment of the togetherness of eternal objects [i.e. the Platonic forms] on
which creative order depends.’30 The
consequent nature of God,
composed
of a multiplicity of elements with individual self-realization . . . passes back
into the temporal world and qualifies this world so that each temporal actuality
includes it as an immediate fact of relevant experience . . .What is done in the
world is transformed into a reality in heaven and . . . passes back into to the
world . . .In this sense, God is the great companion – the fellow sufferer who
understands. 31
In
adapting these universal truths to art we should note that
Whitehead’s axiology is remarkable in giving aesthetic value a
metaphysical primacy over moral value. He claimed that the most fundamental
order of reality is aesthetic and that ‘The real world is good when it is
beautiful.’32
In turning to a literary gloss on this aesthetic position – and to note
, say, Wordsworth’s (and many others’) cloaking of philosophy in art, their
response to the imaginative world which they create, we perceive a basic insight
that man is wholly ‘in nature’, and thus to be perceived in a cosmological
perspective for which, according to Whitehead, all philosophical problems are to
be raised and resolved. In Whiteheadian language , when we read The
Prelude we may be drawn towards seeing through it towards a
theory of ‘propositions’ (Whitehead’s term) involving the transcendental.
Its text can be regarded as a configuration of linguistic symbols which tend to
elicit ‘a hybrid physical feeling of God, in respect to God’s conceptual
feeling which is immediately relevant to the universe“given” for that
concrescence.’33 Its nature is ‘
a derived conceptual feeling which reproduces for the subject the data and
valuation of God’s conceptual feeling.’34
So
authoritative and influential was Whitehead’s teaching that, at least among
his acolytes in the USA, process philosophy has assumed a significance
comparable to many of the most important philosophical movements of the
last three or four hundred years. Since,
today, postmodernist deconstruction would seem to
be the implicit condition of all discourse,
it is logical at this
present time to enquire how
postmodernism might respond, in its avowedly
sceptical and anti-authoritarianism manner, to a movement such as Process, that
offers universal explanation of important phenomena.
To start, Process’s bold reconstruction of the idea of God would surely
upset irreligious deconstructors, who, anxious to see the horizon wiped clean of
all traces of divinity, might
espouse a creativity untrammelled
by the ‘normative’
factors of Process’s ‘grand
narrative’. Contrary to expectations, however, there are at least three
leading proponents of Process, David Ray Griffin, Charles Birch and John B.
Cobb, who have aimed to show Process’s strong postmodern
quality. Whitehead’s comments in the
1930s and 40s in relation to inextactitude of language
prompted Cobb and others to make a connection with the postmodernist idea
of instability of language, and Whitehead’s
observations in
Science and the Modern World (1925)
strongly suggest a break
with modernity. (His critiques
generally are somewhat comparable, if expressed very differently, to
Heidegger’s, who has been acknowledged as one of the key precursors of French
deconstruction).
In
his paper ‘The “End of the Grand Metanarratives of Progress”?’ Raymond
Younis argues that
Whiteheads’
affirmation of ‘inexactness’ seems
to anticipate the indeterminacy of meaning affirmed by the likes of Lyotard and
Derrida. These are not identical positions to be sure, since Derrida seems to be
interested in pointing out cases of indeterminacy in arguments
and assertions in which systematic coherence or rigour
are rendered problematic and since Lyotard seems to be interested in
affirming the failures or the insufficiency of ‘grand metanarratives’ which
are employed to legitimise certain
restrictive Western methodologies and which, as he would have it, are
inextricable from metaphysics and its speculative content. 35
Thus
both Whiteheadian postmodernism and deconstructive postmodernism seek change.
While Cobb sees the deconstructive model as rather like peeling the onion,
process postmodernism has a different model for renewal, deriving
from Whiteheads’s detailed account of creativity --
the many becoming the one and increased by one -- in a pluralism implying
an unmasking, a deconstruction that positively reacts to the many,
generously aiming to relate all aspects without attacking established norms.
In encompassing all aspects Whitehead studiously avoids the error which
he named ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’. This involves
thinking
something, such as this table that I write on,
is concrete reality when in fact it is merely a belief or an opinion
about the way things are. However, my belief that this
indeed is a table that I write on is surely true. But Whitehead reminds
us that the table is also a myriad
collection of molecules. To ignore
this second possibility, as we
often do, counts as a fallacy of misplaced concreteness, which can have
have profound implications since we spend our lives assuming that the
objects of ordinary perception, an arrangement of concrete facts within an
abstract logical framework, are actual fundamental objects. For instance, in the
context of the present paper, we could say that if tradition is guilty of
committing the fallacy by mistaking familiar images and metaphors of God for
reality, then the Whiteheadian position (as touched on in this paper admittedly
in the restricted context of works of art) has its own postmodernist vigour and
originality. But this is less of the ‘peeling the onion’type, more of
‘seeking insights into the inexhaustible reality of the plenum of events,
wherever those insights can be found.’ 36
The
various theories which we have described all suffer from the negativism implicit
in their being ‘verification
transcendent’. We have been immersed in
ideas that are ‘felt
truths’ and as such these are
essentially beliefs ‘in’ rather than
beliefs ‘that’ or beliefs ‘about’. What is
the nature of the truths contained in beliefs ‘in’? Society’s
acceptance of objectivism has strongly affected our conception of truth
generally by exalting what we can prove and know. A
general submission to a
process of scientific verification
is normally required by us, usually via some form of
repeatability. Systems other than scientific ones,
including those in our present context, have a
verification problem. Many writers have aimed to produce logical
arguments, and none more persuasively than Tillich and Whitehead.
Tillich cautioned us against making the experimental, scientific method
of verification the exclusive pattern of all verification. In
more than one place he boldly asserted that verification of the experiential type, as opposed to the
experimental, has the advantage that it need not halt and disrupt the
totality of a life process in order to distil calculable elements out of it
(which experimental verification must do). Thus the verifying experiences of a
non-experimental character are truer to life, though less exact and definite. The question posed by
such a belief is whether the extending of the experiential into
metaphysics allays our inhibitions about
the intelligibility of such an
argument as Steiner’s, (presented, as it is, in
rather a shadow cast by his admission
of verification transcendence). Process philosophers
generally would have the necessary confidence that others lack in this
context. They would assert their belief ‘in’ the very notion of
non-conceptual thinking as part
of an inheritance from God
that is bound up with our nature and fundamental existence.
1.
I.A.Richards, Practical Criticism (London:1964),
p. 231.
2.
ibid., p.232. Of
course, we could cite Edward Lear to exemplify that value can be found
in
nonsense, but this is not really the point here.
3.
Susanne Langer, Problems of Art
(New York: 1937),p.37.
4.
(London:1989).
6 ibid., p. 217.
6.
See the dust-jacket of Real Presences.
7. ibid.,
p.214.
8.
ibid.,p.209.
9.
ibid.
10. ibid., p.202.
11.
ibid.,p. 211.
12. ibid., p.215.
13. See 'Principes de la nature et de la grace' in Die philosophischen Schriften von G.W.Leibniz,
VI
ed.Gerhards (Berlin:1890), p.588.
14. ibid., p. 217.
15. The Times Literary Supplement, May 19, 1989, p.534.
16.
See Steiner, op.cit., p.220.
17. ibid., p. 224.
18. Martin Heidegger, 'The Origin of the Work of Art' (1936), trans.
Hofstadter in Poetry, Language, Thought (New
York:1971), pp.17-87. Previously Steiner had acknowledged the potency of Van
Gogh’s ‘almost raging insistence that the placing of the piquant, of "
the yellow that is somehow inside the shadow of the blue", is, in the
severest observance of the term, a metaphysical act, an encounter with the
opaque and precedent authority of essence.’
Real Presences, p.211.
19.Mikel
Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic
Experience, trans.E.S.Casey et al. ( Evanston: 1972), p.181.
20.
Paul Tillich, The Religious Situation,
trans. H.R.Niebuhr (Cleveland : 1956), p.85.
21.
ibid., p.86-7
22.
ibid.,
p.88.
23.
J.A.W.Heffernan, Wordsworth’s
Theory of Poetry: The Transforming
Imagination (Ithaca: 1969.)
24.
ibid.,
p.102-04.
25.
Plato Complete Works ed. J.M. Cooper, trans. M.L.Gill and P.Ryan
(Cambridge, USA: 1997), p. 369.
26.
Charles Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity:
A Social Conception of God (New Haven: 1948), p.83.
27.
A.N.Whitehead,
Process and Reality revised edn.
Griffin and Sherburne (New York:1978), pp. 32,38 and 351.
28.
ibid.,
p.521.
29.
ibid.,p.154.
30.
ibid.,p.44.
31.
ibid.,p.496-7.
32.
A.N.Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (Cambridge,U.K:
1933), Ch. xviii, section iii.
33. Process and Reality,
p.225.
34.
ibid., p.225
35.
Raymond Younis, ‘The”End of the Grand Metanarratives of Progress”?’A
paper given at the Australasian Association for Process Thought Inaugural
Conference, Sydney, May 1997.
36.
John B. Cobb, ‘Two Types of Postmodernism: Deconstruction and Process’, Theology
Today, Vol 47, No.2 (July 1990),p.149.