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Tuesday, May 17, 2005
Sorting out Aristotle with Milosz
I struggled to understand Aristotle’s concept of Mimesis when I was taught it in college. I then proceeded to forget all about it in graduate school, where the classes I chose to take (most of them on contemporary theory) never went near the subject. But based on my recent interests (in Iris Murdoch, for instance), and on some of the conversations that have been occurring at The Valve, it seems like it might be helpful to sort out some basic things about Aristotle.
My understanding is pretty basic, along the lines of what the Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism says:
The principal source of our knowledge of Aristotle’s aesthetic and literary theory is the Poetics, but important supplementary information is found in other treatises, chiefly the Rhetoric, the Politics, and the Nicomachean Ethics. As expressed in these works, Aristotelian aesthetics directly contradicts Plato’s negative view of art by establishing a potent intellectual role for artistic mimesis. For Aristotle, mimesis describes a process involving the use by different art forms of different means of representation, different manners of communicating that representation to an audience, and different levels of moral and ethical behavior as objects of the artistic representation. Thus Aristotle distinguishes between tragedy and comedy essentially on the basis of the fact that the former represents “noble” or “morally good” agents, while the latter portrays “ignoble” or “morally defective” characters. All forms of mimesis, however, including tragedy and comedy, come into existence because of a fundamental intellectual impulse felt by all human beings. In the Metaphysics Aristotle describes this impulse as humanity’s “desire to know,” and in chapter 4 of the Poetics he identifies it with the essential pleasure we human beings find in all mimesis, the pleasure of “learning and inference."
I’m now going to pose some naive questions that come out of this, which will in all likelihood expose my shocking ignorance of classical philosophy:
--Is the emphasis on learning and inference in this definition accurate? It suggests that we should be talking more about didacticism and less about style or language.
--Is the emphasis on pleasure above accurate? If so, it almost gives the game away to the Platonists and, more recently, the cultural Philistines. The mimetic element in literature may be fundamental, but it is “for pleasure,” not an expression of a need, or an essential element of social order. (I tend to think that art is essential in a healthy society, not voluntary.)
--If the good is derived from human models rather than ideal (or absolute) ones, and if human beings are prone not to be good, why do we benefit from this way of thinking? Why not start with absolute ideals, and allow ourselves fall short?
--Does Aristotle have anything to say on the (admittedly more contemporary) question of whether serious art should be inherently oriented to moral questions?
--What is the role of the individual’s subjective experience in the shaping of the distinctive authorial voice? (Again, a modern question, but an inescapable one if we are going to have a theory of literary mimesis)
Let’s make this a little more concrete. One contemporary writer who struggles with the above questions in an Aristotelian (or at least, anti-Platonic) idiom is Czeslaw Milosz. There are many Milosz poems that get into it, but there is one in particular that I wish to quote, called “To Raja Rao,” which was written in Berkeley, in 1969. Below the fold, two excerpts from the poem, and some further thoughts.
[From “To Raja Rao"]
Raja, I wish I knew
the cause of that malady.For years I could not accept
the place I was in.
I felt I should be somewhere else.A city, trees, human voices
lacked the quality of presence.
I would live by the hopes of moving on.Somewhere else there was a city of real presence,
of real trees and voices and friendship and love.Link, if you wish, my peculiar case
(on the border of schizophrenia)
to the messianic hope
of my civilization.Ill at ease in the tyranny, ill at ease in the republic,
in the one I longed for freedom, in the other for the end of corruption.Building in my mind a permanent polis
forever depreived of aimless bustle.I learned at last to say: this is my home,
here, before the glowing coal of ocean sunsets,
on the shore which faces the shores of your Asia,
in a great republic, moderately corrupt.
A couple of things should be said. First, one might want to refer to some biographical background on Milosz. The “tyranny” above is Poland under the Nazis. One “republic” would have been Paris, where Milosz lived in the 1950s. After 1960 he lived in the U.S., the “great republic, moderately corrupt” mentioned above. Those places are important in Milosz’s writing more broadly (he has a lot to say about California in particular, which he was pretty ambivalent about).
Here, I like how Milosz extends the framework of the Platonic ideal to modern social and political anxieties. For him the “city of real presence” (clearly an allusion to Plato’s Republic) is longed for not just because it represents Truth, but because it represents something like a functional, happy community. That’s happiness. And it’s not that the “republic” doesn’t exist at all. Republics do exist, but they are all in some sense corrupt. By the last stanza quoted above, it seems like Milosz has taught himself to accept them as they are, far from ideal.
To continue (having skipped the middle part of the poem):
I hear you saying that liberation is possible
and that Socratic wisdom
is identical with your guru’s.No, Raja, I must start from where I am.
I am those monsters which visit my dreams
and reveal to me my hidden essence.If I am sick, there is no proof whatsoever
that man is a healthy creature.Greece had to lose, her pure consciousness
had to make our agony only more acute.We needed God loving us in our weakness
and not in the glory of beatitude.No help, Raja, my part is agony,
struggle, abjection, self-love, and self-hate,
prayer for the kingdom
and reading Pascal.
It might help at this point to also know a little about the person Milosz is addressing here, the Indian writer Raja Rao—who also led a very complex, nomadic, 20th century life. Rao, like Milosz, studied Catholic theology intensely. After living for a decade in France, then returning to India to join the freedom struggle, Rao eventually ended up in the U.S. too. In the section of the poem above, “liberation” seems to have somewhat of a political connotation, though clearly the primary emphasis is on Rao’s turn to a kind of idealistic spirituality, which Milosz cannot abide. (Rao’s early novel, Kanthapura is often taught in Indian literature classes mainly because of its politics, and its experimental language. Later novels like The Serpent and the Rope are almost never taught.)
The decisive turn away from Platonism in the last few stanzas above is partly posed as a turn to realism ("I must start from what I am"), and partly a nod to the lessons learned through experiencing the violence of the 20th century first hand. “I am those monsters which visit my dreams” is a way of talking about the unconscious, but I also read it historically, as a reference to Poland in the war. The lesson taught by the monsters that visit us in our dreams and memories is that we are the monsters, too. (Even if we look more like victims.)
There is a bit of a Christian theme at the very end—note that he says “Kingdom,” and not “Republic” in the last stanza. And I have to admit that I don’t fully understand the reference to Blaise Pascal. I presume he’s referring to the famous proof of God’s existence, but it smells like he’s going against the grain—a secularist take on Pascal. Or perhaps he’s thinking of Pascal the way T.S. Eliot thought of him?)
Comments
Pleasure is essential in a healthy society.
Pascal did not have a “famous proof of God’s existence” --he’s the guy who argued that it was safer to believe. Here is the most celebrated chapter of Pascal’s Pensées: <http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/pascal/pensees-b.html#SECTION VI>. It looks to me as if that was the sort of thing Milosz had in mind.
I am by no means an expert but will take a crack at Amardeep’s questions since they point to other questions of general interest.
If the good is derived from human models rather than ideal (or absolute) ones, and if human beings are prone not to be good, why do we benefit from this way of thinking? Why not start with absolute ideals, and allow ourselves fall short?
In the classical period there was no direct access to absolute ideals, although the philosophical method generally speaking was intended to lead to intuition of them (and divinely inspired poets etc. could also allegedly get glimpses). But the difficulties of access were not because these ideals were on another plane, but rather because they were experientially mixed up with the rest of the world, as an inseparable component part. Only later did Christian Neo-Platonism introduce some of the presuppositions of the above question, viz: that people would tend to bad, and we *do* have access to absolute ideals via the Revealed Word which the heathen philosophers had notably lacked.
Is the emphasis on pleasure above accurate? If so, it almost gives the game away to the Platonists and, more recently, the cultural Philistines. The mimetic element in literature may be fundamental, but it is “for pleasure,” not an expression of a need, or an essential element of social order. (I tend to think that art is essential in a healthy society, not voluntary.)
Pleasure is a highly loaded term in today’s context. Aristotle’s idea was probably closer to the contemporary use of “satisfaction”. There was pleasure in the exercise of duty, for example, but this kind of exalted pleasure was possible only to one who had undergone philosophical discipline.
What is the role of the individual’s subjective experience in the shaping of the distinctive authorial voice? (Again, a modern question, but an inescapable one if we are going to have a theory of literary mimesis)
That question is shaped by our development of the idea of subjective interiority. In the Classical period differences between artists were as obvious as differences between other craftsmen, but the expression of these differences was not one of the primary functions of art as it is for us.
So what’s the point? Aristotle is fun, but maybe I’ve got him all wrong. More importantly, what emerges from these discussions—I think—is how postmodernist arguments seem tailored to address specifically modernist arguments. The question arises how they stack up against the arguments that preceded the modernist arguments? And then the arguments before those? And before those? But it seems almost impossible to ask such questions. The difficulty seems not so much to lie in arguments but the presuppositions to arguments. (Wittgenstein might have had something to say about this—along the lines of how they constitute incommensurable language games—but that’s not a question of analytic philosophy. :-P)