Argument
is, of course, the life-blood of professional philosophy. I wouldn't
want to do away with argument, or professional philosophy; I am no
traitor to my trade! But when I am told -- as is often the case -- that
argument
is intrinsic to philosophy, I get rebellious. Take, for example, this poem:
"To sing jubilas at exact, accustomed times,
To be crested and wear the mane of a multitude
And so, as part, to exult with its great throat,
To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne on
The shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heart
That is the common, the bravest fundament,
This is a facile exercise. Jerome
Begat the tubas and the fire-wind strings,
The golden fingers picking dark-blue air:
For companies of voices moving there,
To find of sound the bleakest ancestor,
To find of light a music issuing
Whereon it falls in more than sensual mode.
But the difficultest rigor is forthwith,
On the image of what we see, to catch from that
Irrational moment its unreasoning,
As when the sun comes rising, when the sea
Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall
Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.
Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.
We reason about them with a later reason." Wallace Stevens
Stevens' poetry is more
philosophical than much professional philosophy (
recall). (Of course, it is not only philosophy.) In fact, the excerpt above (from “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”) tells a genealogy of how certain forms of philosophizing originate from a certain (religiously inspired) aesthetic experience and a history of poetry about religious experiences--Stevens' "heaven-haven" is a clear allusion to one of the metaphysical poets,
George Herbert ("The Size"), and
(I just learned),
Gerard Manley Hopkins.
In fact, in the passage Stevens plays out a dialectic between what I will call "true philosophy" ("the difficultest rigor") and "false philosophy" ("later reason") [
recall]. Later reason explains away. It can do so while speaking only truths. Later reason tells us that the sun rising transforms nothing; from the point of view of eternity, the sun rising has no intrinsic value. But "with later reason" we Kantianize: "we make of what we see, what we see clearly/And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves." So, later reason tells us to be mistrustful of aesthetic experiences ("the sun comes rising, when the sea/Clears deeply,") as a guide toward something higher. It turns aesthetic experience into something about us.
Yet, the whole stanza bespeaks an intellectual mistrust of the aesthetic (cf. the "facile exercise" of the joyous singers). So, while later reason speaks truths, it misses the point.
To be clear: this is a poet that poetically attacks the claims to transcendence in poetry.
Let's return to true philosophy. It asks from us to "to catch from that Irrational moment its unreasoning." Now as far as I can tell this catching of unreasoning is not done via argument. (How could it--argument is not the instrument to engage unreasoning with.) This activity cannot be easy we are affective beings--we are intrinsically "shaken" by our experiences and these generate irrational moments (as he puts it later in the poem, "The fiction that results from feeling.") In fact, the true philosopher recognizes (or is taught by Spinoza) our affectivity and learns to see...
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