Human beings are embedded in the a priori, which functions as a
determining
system.
Brett Bourbon - 1996 - Constructing a Replacement for the Soul
(This is not to say we do not make mistakes, but that there are limits.
I can, for example imagine that rocks rolling downmountainsaregods.
IfIaminthepathofsucharock,Icanstandthereand embracethisgodinamomentofexquisitehappiness.
Mylifemightbemoremeaningful than someone who thinks rocks are rocks, and they are better avoided when they reach a certainvelocity.
IfIclaimtherock-as-godpictureisequivalenttotherocks-are-hard
picture I have made a grammatical mistake. The rocks-are-hard school is superior if ones goal is to stay alive. The rock-god school might be superior if my goal is to die meaningfully in a mountain accident. Relativistic arguments often make confused comparisons. Inthiscasephysicsactsasalimitonhowsuccessfulabeliefsystemisasa survival system. The question remains: is it better to live a life o f fictional fantasy that may be meaningful, or a life o f scientific realism that may not be? . These may not be opposites in any real sense, but their application is fraught with confusions). Ontological
justification can describe the limits o f our involvement, and the meaning o f this involvement, in our language.
Poetry works through configuring ontological justification as a problem o f interpretation. This formulation can justify Ransom's vague description o f poetry as "ontological or metaphysical maneuver" (The World's Body, 347). In poetic use the demand for ontological justification appears as a demand for recognition, to use the creation ofmeaning as an expression ofself. The constitution or the making ofourselves marks our expressions o f value as expressions o f power; these expressions cannot supersede the systematic normative organization and functioning o f language, where the
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? accuracy o f statements becomes an acting through, agreement with, and description o f language. Our failure or success within these normative rules cannot be mediated through our self-constructions, but only by the determining structures o f society, language, biology. These normative rules urge or measure us; our ontological creation ofourselves and our world within language measures orjudges language. We can forgive our ontological failures but never our failures in clarity. Hill, quoting Chesterton's study of
Dickens says, "'a saint after repentance will forgive himselffor a sin; a man about town willneverforgivehimselfforafauxpas"'(7). Artisaconstructionwithinthe'density'
o f language, the normative resistance o f words and the incommensurability between different concepts, ideas, meanings, and language games. This poetic making delivers both the poet and our poetic responses "up to judgment"(14). Hill divides this judgment up between a (1) judgment o f our "empirical guilt" accompanying our possible failures and faux pas within the normative criteria of our language and social life and a (2) judgment of the "Sin" that Karl Barth understands as the 'specific gravity of human nature as such' (15). 6 This 'empirical guilt', or the normative force of language, has its own weight. "[I]t is at the heart o f this 'heaviness' that poetry must do its atoning work, this heaviness which is simultaneously the 'density' o f language and the 'specific gravity o f human nature'" (15).
The failure of clarity, the difficulty requiring interpretation in Finnegans Wake (and in a different way in Philosophical Investigations) forces the reader to mediate the normative rules through ontological justification (the radical need to determine the ontological status of its language as the exercise of its art), and to mediate the constitutive
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? force of ontological justification by the normative rules of our language (its humor, what Wittgenstein calls grammatical jokes). The normative rules o f language can function like the laws o f nature (the descriptions o f form as quantity) and our ontological justifications are judgments about how we function within these laws. Together these rules and
judgments constitute us within language and describes our intentionality, seemingly our qualitative mental relations. Finnegans Wake, therefore, can describe our constitution as humanbeingsasafunctionofacommentaryaboutitsownlanguage. Ournormative language while constituting the possibilities of meaning available to us can not function ontologically, that is, we can exist within and through these possibilities, but we can only exist at all, through the ontological or creative pressure attending the kinds o f ontological
judgments we make about the normative status of our language games, for example, 'Do I love you? ' 'Can I love? ' 'Is love possible? ' This explains why ordinary criteria can fail; why we are continually tempted by skepticism. 2 If I rewrite Hill's formulation of our deliverance up to judgment, I can suggest a vague canopy to include this play between ontology and epistemology as a moral crisis: "in the constraint of shame the [Wakean\ poet and [grammatical philosopher] [are] free to discover both the 'menace' and the atoning power o f his own art" (17).
Our survival in language requires an act of will. We must, however, take responsibility for the governance of our will, and not cede or abrogate our moral involvement within language to the confusion ofuse which distorts and hides this moral dimension within the confusions and entanglements between language games o f power
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? (ideology)disguisedasmoraljudgments. Somethinglikethissensemotivates Wittgenstein to remark his distrust oflanguage:
Human beings are profoundly enmeshed in philosophical--i. e. grammatical-- confusions. They cannot be freed without first being extricated from the extraordinary variety o f associations which hold them prisoner. Y ou have as it were to reconstitute their entire language. --But this language grew up as it did becausehumanbeingshad--andhave--thetendencytothinkinthisway. So you can only succeed in extricating people who live in an instinctive rebellion against language; you cannot help those whose entire instinct is to live in the herd
which has created this language as its own proper mode o f expression. (MS 213,
? 423; quoted in Kenny, "Wittgenstein on the Nature of Philosophy", 16).
Poetry and philosophy both constitute kinds of rebellion against language. This distrust of language constitutes a religious stance, a configuration of oneself as anything or anyone in relation to a negative limit which can determine our meaning and our world. What is it like to be trapped within a system of meaning within which you cannot escape but which you distrust? Finnegans Wake is a comic version o f Kafka's The Castle.
Coleridge, commenting on the mental schema articulated in Wordsworth's Prelude, redescribes the reciprocal relation between the senses and the world that constructs the mind. Following what he believes was "partly suggested by me . . . He
[Wordsworth] was to treat man as man--a subject o f eye, ear, touch, and taste, in contact with external nature, and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out ofthe senses"(188). This could seem a conquest ofa world, or the construction
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? o f a Khananite pleasure palace after such a conquest. Eliot, in 'Gerontion,' finds such a
world "a decayed house", where "In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,/ To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk/ Among the whispers"; where these whispers, these "vacant shuttles weave the wind" into a riddle about the consequences of
knowledge ["After such knowledge, what forgiveness? "]. Our ordinary needs eat, divide and drink the world into metaphors (cliches: whispers, weave the wind) that signal the loss, consumption and disappearance ofthe world. The organic world symbolizes its own loss. Eliotdescribesamoralterror,akindofknowledgethatcanappearasaskepticism generated from failing senses, but I think it is more likely a realization that a soul can fragment through a kind of self-reflection in which the indifference ofthe world and our own indifference generates a specific terror. Poetry can enact this terror as what we are. Thisstance-indifferentterror--isneitherexistentialnorstrictlyspeakingmoral. Eliot's poetry describes this terror as a realization that the soul (and our demand for redemption) and subjectivity (at least our speaking T ) describes the subjunctive: we live counterfactually. Eliot does not discover this. The possibilities of either idealism or modem skepticism, when understood as moral responses to scientific knowing, outlines
the soul, subject, self as subjunctive. (This does not mean the soul, subject, self are constructed; they may be given as perpetual possibility; making a soul or a mind follows as apossibilityofthispossibility). Eliot'sdiscoveryisoftheterrorgraspingandattending modemself-reflection. Heexposespartlywhatthis'subjunctive'means,teachingusthe consequence ofthis knowledge (ifit is 'knowledge'). Words describe ideal forms that our descriptions belie into algorithms of loss:
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? To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my site, smell, hearing, taste, and touch: How should I use them for your closer contact?
Age and terror and revulsion and the failure of our knowing and knowledge, the realization that not only can the mind and the world be confused for each other but that a failure o f courage, sense, or meaning can tempt us to deny our mind. Instinct, the algorithm describing the non-human, and our dying, the algorithm o f loss, sketch the limits ofour knowledge ofboth ofthese as despair: "What will the spider do,/ Suspend its operations, will the weevil Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled/ Beyond the circuit o f the shuddering Bear/ In fractured atoms. " The constellation Ursus Major can mean a " shuddering Bear", a promised stability o f meaning that cannot preserve the atoms ofanyone'sbody. MeaningdescribesthelimitbeyondwhichNothingbeckons.
For the Ancient Mariner the periodicity of the stars measures our human needs as our involvement in the world as a promise of a home. Hill offers Coleridge's prose gloss of the Ancient Mariner's loneliness as "an outstandingly beautiful image of the attainability of atonement":
In his loneliness and fixedness he yeameth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their
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? own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly
expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.
This description has the coherence o f a poem, a fragment: not a fragment o f the world it describes, nor of the longing it evokes but of a kind of self-reflection that the glosses accompanying the poem form on the poem, and in this case a coherence o f self-sufficiency that ironically refers to the complex worlds that include the poem, Coleridge, the heavens, us, the future ad infinitum. This is the promise o f the Romantic fragment. These fragments are a profound attempt, even in the anti-Newtonianism ofBlake, to configure
poetry as Schlegel describes Romanticism as kind o f aesthetic-moral formula describing itself and all worlds in which it would or will make sense:
"The whole history of modem poetry is a running commentary on the following brief philosophical text: all art should become science, and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one" (Critical Fragment 1 1 5).
The different ways of finding a text speaking to us, for us, at us, allegorizing us allows us to displace forms o f skepticism into fantasies o f intelligibility which animate the text into various forms o f animism. As a form o f animism, and, therefore, as a kind o f romanticism attempting to link science and art, the animation o f the text parallels the mechanical, like the animation of dolls, bodies, and clay heads, as if science gave us the truth of what we see, a common sense weeding out visions and spirits. Is this the kind o f animism we find
in Henry Adams' dynamo or in Yeats' Byzantine birds?
In "Byzantium" we are presented with three categories o f being: "Miracle, bird or
golden handiwork". These are what in "Sailing to Byzantium" Yeats called "bodily form".
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? "Once out of nature" the poet's voice rejects the form of natural things, the category "bird" in the later poem in order to enter the " artifice of eternity" as an aesthetic form "as Grecian goldsmiths make". This collapse of natural form into artifact is what Wittgenstein, in Investigations, called the sublimation o f the machine into a symbol: where the normative structures o f language, rules, conventions, etc. are confused as the causal structures o f our psychology determining what we actually say. A symbol built out o f this confusion can seem to stabilize our linguistic practices. The structure o f a symbol so constitutedoutofthisstabilityisdeterminedasaformofidentity. Thus,Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus:
Only the proposition has sense; only in the context o f a proposition has a name meaning. (3. 3)
Every part of a proposition which characterizes its sense I call an expression
(a symbol).
(The proposition itself is an expression. )
Expressions are everything--essential for the sense o f the proposition-- that propositions can have in common with one another.
An expression characterizes a form and a content. (3. 31)
Identity functions as a metaconcept, or rather as the logical possibility that allows propositions to be decomposed and recharacterized as expressions. In this sense propositions function as expressions when they have a sense, in Frege's picture when they can stand in for each other. This commonality or conceptual identity functions as a repeatability that lies behind and extends the Cartesian idea of animal
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? animation as mechanical, a rule-bound persistence, to that of the mind: a picture of the soul as a perpetual motion, or rather expression, machine. This is like the picture o f the soul in Swift's Tale o fa Tub as clothes or the kind of person described by Adams in his preface as "a manikin. . . clothes . . . the same value as any other geometrical figure o f three ormoredimensions,whichisusedforthestudyofrelation"(xxx). ForAdamsthe collapse into the mechanical attends a despair over the virgin's failure, the failure of spirit, to limit, let alone convert, human violence. This renunciation requires that he convert himself into a vision o f mechanical time and identity, into at least a metaphor o f the algorithmic: "Every man with self-respect enough to become effective, if only as a machine, has had to account for himself somehow, and to invent a formula of his own for his universe, if the standard formulas failed" (471-72).
This vision of self-transformation is quite different from what we find in Keats: "Even a Proverb is no proverb to you till your Life has illustrated it. " A proverb in its generality and structure is formulaic. This formula, however, is not applied to the world, but you interpret yourself as expressing it, that is, it becomes a proverb to you only when you can use it to describe your life. "Life" and a "Proverb" articulate incommensurable and irreducible domains, as do picture and text, and thus the aptness o f the word 'illustrate,' as a means o f mapping one domain onto another, as a picture illustrates a text. But what allows ones' life to be such an illustration? This is a question not only of application but of intentionality (the formulaic aspect calls for application: apply this formula across this domain; an application that leads to illustration opens up a problem of intentionality: what exactly is being illustrated? Matisse was commissioned to illustrate
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? Joyce'sUlysses. HeproducedaseriesofdrawingsillustratingHomer'sOdyssey,not having bothered to read Joyce's book. What if he had read the book would he have then been able to illustrate it? ) What an illustration picks out in a text is like an interpretation, but its application to the text remains unclear or even tenuous: Is a movie an illustration of a book? Is it a translation ofat least a word, or phrase, or character into another medium? A particular shot in a movie might be an illustration; the musical score might be an illustration; but the movie itself is an interpretation, an attempt to tell not illustrate.
Asking "What does it mean? " leads to interpretation; asking, "What is it like? " leads to illustration. The first gives us a logic or a language we can understand; the other shows us the answer to a riddle.
A proverb is a fragment, as Schlegel called it, a kind o f self-articulating totality pointing, however, beyond itselftoward the world or experience which it describes or to which it can be applied. Schlegel's fragments function organically; they are not analogized into machinery as in Modernism (poetries appealing to Newton under the pressure of further scientific and technological transformations), but, akin to Goethe's conceptualizations ofthe Urphanomen, the ground phenomena, the principle ofform out of which and through which all other forms metamorphosize. This principle of holographic gestalt, organic self-articulation does not describe the mutual identification of ontogenyandphylogeny,butratherthereductionofbeingintoorganicmorphology. For Schlegel this form was the hedgehog:
A Fragment should be like a little work of art, complete in itself and totally separated from the surrounding world like a hedgehog.
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? Ein Fragment muss gleich einem kleinem Kunstwerke von der umgebenden Welt ganz abgesondert und in sich selbst vollendet sein wie ein Ingel. (Athenaeum, 206)
Fragments define an holographic ecology: "Fragmentary totality, in keeping with what should be called the logic ofthe hedgehog, cannot be situated in any single point: it is simultaneouslyinthewholeandinthepart. Eachfragmentstandsforitselfandforthat from which it is detached" (The Literary Absolute, 44). Schlegel describes this symbolic function as constituting a mode ofbeing, a function ofa particular kind ofart: "I have expressed a few ideas pointing toward the heart o f things, and have greeted the dawn . . . from my own point ofview. . . Let anyone who knows the road do likewise . . . from his own point ofview. " (Ideas, 155). This is what Blanchot called "a totally new mode of completion" (358), the "demand posited by poetry that it reflect itself and accomplish itself through its reflection . . . poetry no longer wants to be natural spontaneity but solely and absolutely conscious" (353). This requirement displaces the site o f poetry away from the
"poetic work" and towards "the poetic activity" (357). The relationship between consciousness and the world takes place through animation. For human beings this describes knowing as a poetic activity and for the world describes its dynamism. Blanchot describes this as a "mode of completion" that "mobilizes . . . the whole through its interruption and through interruptions various modes" (358). Gasche explains this mode as the consequence o f "a cross-fertilization between the Romantics' practice o f writing andKantiandoctrine,which. . . dealswiththeuniversalconditionsofcompletion"(ix). I will tilt my way to one side of such a characterization of the relation between the two
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? senses o f the aesthetic playing out in Kant: the aesthetic as "reflective judgment" (in the Critique o fJudgment) and the aesthetic as the constitutivejudgment determining the relation between concepts and experience (in the Critique o fPure Reason).
Schlegel analogizes the relation between science and art as between the dissipating force ofthe individual mind and the organized rigidity ofa system. The systemic supports the ground o f the real and is thus necessary; the dissipating force o f the mind constitutes the subjectively true and is also necessary. Thus "it's equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two" (Athenaeum 53). This integration follows by constituting the individual as embryo system, and thus the implication between individual and system follows from phylogenesis: "All individuals are systems at least in embryo and tendency" (Athenaeum 242).
Human beings are embedded in the a priori, which functions as a determining system.
The categorical imperative universalizes the individual outside of the semantics of 'morality'. The force ofthis universalizing functions as an 'ought', a necessity determining the moral autonomy of any particular human as the microcosmic version of the universal law. The categorical imperative determines moral necessity "without reference to any purpose", but rather through the "form ofthe action and the principle from which it follows" ("Grounding for the Metaphysics ofMorals", 26). In Kant's picture, moral action measures the distance between someone who acts and rational moral criteria. This distance is measured by the special character o f 'ought' which marks the criterion for action and serves as the motive for action. Kant describes the criterion for moral action in a self-reflexive proverb which appeals to and contains another proverb:
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? "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law' ("Grounding", 30). The embedded proverb divides (1) an action (moral action) into a personal act in a particular situation and (2) an act ofwill universalizing this action. Kant's model for action, therefore, enacts the way of seeing described in Blake's "Auguries o f Innocence" as a description o f moral action:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm o f your hand, And Eternity in an hour.
Kant imagines human moral failure to be a failure in the application o f moral precepts. Underlying this assumption is a theological picture translated into a logical problem: how to translate the universal, in which the moral 'ought' and the ontological 'is' are related as a conditional (if x, then y), into the particular contingencies determining human action. Kant's 'is' is not Hume's: Kant's criterion for existence is not grounded in human practice but in the simultaneous demand for individual human moral autonomy (to act and
judge through and as being 'I') and the necessity of a universal moral law. The means by which he accomplishes the translation of the 'I' into the moral universal proceeds through our formal equivalence as human beings within the formal limits o f our identity as agents. Within the categorical imperative this takes the form of a textual self-reflection that in itselfservesasamodelforhumanaction. Thustheproverb"Actonlyaccordingtothat maxim" describes the application of "that maxim". This textual self-reflection functions as a means of application that displaces the implicit 'act as if. . . " in the embedded proverb
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? into the initial proverb concerning action. This initial "Act only. . . " assumes that we act outside o f moral commitments (and thus these commitments must be shaped and ordered). (I think this is a skewed picture but I cannot criticize it here).
Because ofthis assumption, however, this new proverb would require a proverb of application ad infinitum. Kant's response is to characterize 'acting' itself as a form of self-reflection: "Actinsuchawaythatyoutreathumanity,whetherinyourownperson or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end, and never as a means" (36). The particular concerns o f any action are dissolved in his designation o f humanity as the defactoobjectofanymoralact. Thisispossiblebecauseanyindividualisalsoanexample of humanity ("whether in your own person or in another"). Characterizing someone as an example (or even an exemplar) aestheticizes being human, and translates the question 'when are you a good person? ' into 'when are you human? ' This follows from Goodman's description of art in Ways o f WorldMaking (or mine ofFinnegans Wake in
the next section) as a function marked by the use or perception of something as an exampleofart. Thisfollowsfromthefailureofthequestion'whatisart? ' Artrequires the question 'when is art? ' Such a question replaces the quest for substance with a kind of dual perception of ourselves (when are we seeing art? ) and of an object or text (is this an example o f art? ). Kant has displaced the model o f a moral example (or exemplar) with a model of an ontological example (or exemplar). (Such a displacement is for Kant a requirement of morality, part of its universalizing demand). If we say 'he acted like a
monster' or 'he's no longer human' or 'he acted like an animal', do we imagine he is really a monster or some other species? Do animals murder in the way that humans do? Kant
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? provides a picture o f how content or qualities can be translated into form. T becomes a universal law through which we act toward and as our species being, our essential being, so that the universal law coalesces into the form of all moral actions as if it generated an animateuniversalbeing. AlthoughIcannotpursuethisfurtherhere,Iwanttosuggestthat Kant's attempt to integrate moral autonomy with necessity organizes the form o f the moral 'ought' and the universal law as the form o f our animation as human beings.
The problem with Goodman's picture is that he reduces the function o f art to the recognitionofart. Kantinhismodelreducesbothbeinghumanandbeingmoraltothe recognition of the human and the moral. The application of morals reduces to the recognition o f the form o f morality which further reduces to the recognition o f being human; these recognitions are applied to oneselfto such a degree that moral action becomes a species o f self-recognition.
The fragment can work as a fragment, that is, it can preserve its unity and coherence (seemingly) without a clear discursive context (what is its scope, its truth value, the discursive rules determining its use or expressive force as literature or philosophy or theology or whatever? ), by pointing beyond itself by pointing to itself. The fragment exists through the logic ofKant's categorical imperative read as a theory of meaning, as if the 'I' and the word invoked their context and significance through the same ontological claims or presuppositions about themselves. (Why the temptation to personify fragments and word? ). If the good is what can be universalized for all other individuals, then the systemic is split into the abstraction of universalizing, a mode of equality determined as
fundamental human identity, and the a prioric ground ofjudgment and subjectivity that
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? determines the scene ofmorality as the individual will. The world is dissolved into identity;theforceofthisdissolutionispartlythecrueltythatNieztschesmelled. Thissplit follows from the confusion between personhood and citizenship brought out in Locke. But this abstraction must be supported by the a priori conditions determining the human relation with the world: supported by metaphysics.
Stanley Cavell argues that "maintaining fragmentariness is part o f Emerson's realizationofromanticism"(TheNewYetUnapproachableAmerica,21). Ininterpreting Emerson's essay "Experience" as "a theory of the fragment" (21), the discoveiy that philosophy as a way ofgoing on is "a work ofmourning" (26), Cavell appeals to Schlegel (or rather the reading of Schlegel in L 'absolu litteraire) for an epigraph: "Many works of theancientshavebecomefragments. Manyworksofthemodemsarefragmentsright from their beginning [generation, Entstchung]. " (Athenaeum, 24; Cavell, 22): "In 'Experience,' the condition o f existing from birth, that is to say, existing from the condition of birth--call it the congenital--is taken as the condition of fragmentariness" (22). SuchfallenessrewritesPlato'sdivisionofouroriginaryandrogynousunityintomale and female with our continual alienation from God described in Genesis. The fragment functions here as the organic resistance to the mechanistic description o f the mind developed from Descartes mechanistic description ofthe body and the application of
Newtonian logic to the mind in the British empiricist tradition. The organicist fantasy (as ifwe know what 'birth' means as a description oftime or what the 'organic' means as a description of our thinking) and the mechanical fantasy (thinking our way out of our consciousness or replacing ourselves with higher level machines) each describe an extreme
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? (insane? ) response to loss. Schreber enacts this insanity: "As long as he remains male, Schreber is not subject to the travail of mortality. Only after he has mothered a new breed o f humanity, a new Geschlect (spirit), will he die a natural death and be assumed, bodies andsoul,intoheaven"(103). Self-generationisanadmissionofmortality;itsdenialan assertion o f continual identity.
Schlegel, in Vorlesungen uber schone Literatur und Kunst, asserts that art must mimic the generative process ofNature:
That means it must--creating autonomously like nature, itself organized and organizing--from living works which are not set in motion through an alien mechanism, like a pendulum-clock, but through an indwelling power. . . In this manner did Prometheus imitate nature, when he formed man out of clay of the earth, and animate him with a spark stolen from the sun . . . (281)
Art functions like a fragment, "itself organized and organizing,' animated not by mechanisms but by an "indwelling power", animated by animation. But would Schlegel suggest that Nature as a whole functions like a fragment? Prometheus embodies and enacts this "indwelling power" and thus is an extension, a fragment of this same natural creation. As an animating principle ofNature he creates man, who is, therefore, analogized to art. This animation as an extension or fragment o f Prometheus semantically or mythically describes the autonomous metabolism ("organized and organizing") constitutinglife. Oneisanimatedbycontinuallyre-animatingoneselfwithinthelimits defined by that which initially animated one. Nature, Prometheus, Man, Art, as if collapsing metaphor and metonymy into an holographic, ontplogical trope, are all
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? fragments, each a deus exfragmento or deus ex anima: "The more organic something is, the more systematic it is. --The system is not so much a species o f form as the essence o f the work itself' (Gasche citing Schlegel's Literary Notebooks, xii). Gasche comments that Schlegel equates "fragment=system=work=individual. In the closed-offindividualities of the fragment, unity is achieved in chaos, but at the expense o f any systematic relation as the absoluteness, or isolation, o f the fragment suggests" (xii). The absolute reduces to fragments within fragments: an infinite set o f finite sets.
The promethean generative power Coleridge calls the primary Imagination functions in the same way that the soul does for Keats, as a grammatical surrogate for the self and world: "the living Power and prime Agent o f all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM' (Biographia I. 13; 304). The creation o f these grammatical surrogates describe models o f a mind. Artificial Intelligence uses the mathematical syntax o f computer languages, or the potential syntax o f an idealized language and machine, as this kind o f surrogate. This mathematical syntax, as it does for Adams and Yeats, animates as a proximate cause a mind as a fragment. In Artificial Intelligence, the Infinite I AM is divided into the proximate cause within a mind, usually as consciousness (animation having been reduced to this) and into the interpretive complexity of our experience, and thus as an epiphenomenon resulting from a conscious machines interaction with its environment.
Wecannotspeakofcauseshere,butonlyofinterpretations. Theself-reflective attachments between the self-standing fragment and its reflective containment and expression o f systematic totality creates a symbolic distance that is meant to picture the
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? relation between T and 'world'. Within this economy o f mirroring there exists no conceptual outside (there is no, as Joyce calls it in Finnegans Wake, "surview over all the factionables" (FW285. 26). Interpretative meaning or significance must be generated from insidethissystem. Thetropethatallowsforthisisirony. Blanchotwrites:
The'T ' of the poet, finally, is what alone will be important: no longer the poetic work, but poetic activity, always superior to the real work, and only creative when it knows itself able to evoke and at the same time to revoke the work in the sovereign play of irony. (The Infinite Conversation, 357)
Irony here, however, is an act o f creation, an act o f creation that produces analogic knowledge at the site of our manifestation as descriptions (in writing), that as Keats suggests, we illustrate. This is not what Blanchot says, but it is an implication o f how he illustrates the romantics, who "bound to the act of writing as to a new knowledge they are learning to take up anew by becoming conscious ofit" (354). The dynamism ofthe mind describes an education (as it will also for Emerson and Adams). Lacoue-Labarthe and
Nancy translate this picture o f dynamic self-illustration into an aesthetic that more clearly reflects Kants' transcendental aesthetic. They claim that "[w]hat makes an individual, what makes an individual's holding-together, is the 'systasis' that produces it. What makes its individuality is its capacity to produce, and to produce itsel? first of all, by means of its internal 'formative force'-///e bildende Kraft inherited from the organism of Kant. . . " (49). Adams realizes that the ontological limits enacted within our scientific descriptions o f the world make this "capacity to produce . . . itself' impossible, except as biological and physical effects (as in the way our eyes 'reproduce' the world or our genes
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? reproduceus). Ifhumanbeingsarereducedtoan'acting'thatrequirestheapplicationof a moral maxim (as in Kant), then this reduction to biological effect means we cannot apply moral ideals as a function o f self-reflection (more o f this latter).
For Adams, the fragment (what he calls Multiplicity) is a consequence of science (pictured as broadly mechanical), whereas for Schlegel (and in the logic of Keats' proverb) fragments resist this mechanization. This difference is partly a battle between Newton and Goethe. Novalis writes in Grains ofPollen: "Fragments ofthis kind are literary seeds: certainly, there may be sterile grains among them, but this is unimportant if only a few of them take root"(2. 463). The play between particular and containing universal, figured here as a seed and its growth into its determining form, is a conception o f the infinite that, as in Hegel, unites self-reflection in infinite dynamism. Romantic poetry, both in particular poems and as a totality, "should forever be becoming and never be perfected" (A22).
Because these fragments (as models ofthe moment or instant) contain or describe a totality they are essentially infinite (describing a kind o f self-contained infinite divisibility as between the numbers 0 and 1), and in this describe gods or our godhood: "every infinite individual is god" and "there are as many gods as there are ideas. " (This set o f ideas will latter be limited and humanized by W. James when he says that one has as many selves as friends: this turns the infinity o f the individual into a void becoming through its interactions, this is one form o f modernism, but one failing against grammar). As Charles Rosen explains, such a fragment is a "closed structure, but its closure is a formality: it may be separated from the rest ofthe universe, but it implies the existence ofwhat is outside of itself not by reference but by its instability" (Romantic Generation, 51). This fragment
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? defines what a fragment should be, but such a definition transfers the ambiguity of "fragment" to what it means to be complete and separated" when this fragment-definition itselfpoints at itselfbut also at all other fragments, the ganz Welt, and the obscurity of being like a hedgehog. This instability is what Keats answers with "illustration": the fragment in its separateness and completeness invokes a logic or interpretative frame, but one that resists us, like a riddle.
What is to be illustrated is obvious--the proverb. Is the interpretation clear? Keats' claim about proverbs is itselfa proverb illustrating another proverb--"Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced. " Something becomes real in this sense when one views one's life as such an illustration. In this case, Keats offers us an ontological criterion in order to make sense, or rather to make the world in which the first proverb functions: Proverbs become proverbs to us when our life illustrates them, because nothing is real until we experience it. Experiencing is a kind of illustration--that turns the type (the proverb) into the token (the proverbfo r us: we can use it because we have become its token: this is an illustration of meaning from given types into particular tokens: from language to us). The proverb is meant to be true in all cases, let us say, within its world, or within the language game in which we mean (self-reflection or instantiation within the language game) as an illustration o f the proverb, where we can measure ourselves as real (as defined by the proverb: the proverb measures us), and we can measure the proverb as True: "'p' is p". Thus the proverb remains a mere type when we do not recognize ourselves as one ofthose cases, within the totality defined by that "all". Whatever is real
is something we have experienced, in which case everything we have experienced is real to
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? us. But this statement about what is real only functions as a proverb, let us say it is a true statement about what is real, i. e. , what we experience, when we recognize it as an accurate description o f what we count as real.
Proverbs for Keats, therefore, are curious examples of aspect seeing. Instead of seeing a duck or a rabbit, however, we see ourselves, our life--as a narrative? a picture? what do we see? But what is illustrated for whom? The proverb does not illustrate our life, weillustrateit. Thusitisseeingourselvesasanillustrationandtheproverbasa descriptiontobeillustrated. ThetransformationofProverbintoproverbandourlifeinto an illustration becomes an actualization--not as a change ofbeing but as a transformation of aspect. The proverb is not strictly speaking a description of our life but it is a way of our seeing ourselves, a description ofmeaning as opposed to experience; that is why we illustrate it.
Adams is calling for a more radical transformation, an objectification o f himself mirroringhisnarrationofhislifeinthirdperson. TheironyofAdams'provocationto become a formula in order to become effective in the world is that a loss o f humanity is required in order to be. Human beings have become fragments under the gears o f the totality o f the world. This inversion marks the end not only o f human beings but o f human beings as Newtonian machines, as clay pot with gears inside. It is as if the demands o f the world require that we become proverbs ourselves, not illustrations, become types not tokens, or, more specifically formulaic, descriptions ofthe world in order to enter into the conditionsofbeingandactingdeterminingwhatisreal. Ineffectourabilitytomeasure the proverb as True becomes impossible, collapses into our vanishing into a formulation of
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? the criteria determining the real. This is a way of saying that we are replaced by ontologicalcriteria. Ourexistenceisimpotentbeforeorwithoutthesecriteria,these determinations. Do we imagine someone in Adams' world asking "Is this formula true for me? " as one might about a proverb? Adams can only become real if he refigures himself as what counts as real in what he already knows and what he cannot resist as Real. Skepticism in this world begins as a case ofseeing oneselfas unreal and the world as real;
oneself as a projection, a fantasy, a dream: the world exists, but do I?
The systematic totalization of the real, where we are presented neither with objects
nor fantasies, but with the conditions of reality, where the criteria determining what counts asrealbecometheobjectswesee,removestheworldassomethingweexperience. Our science is not a science o f empiricism, but an attempt to determine and articulate ontological conditions or descriptions. By this I mean that empiricism has been replaced by metaphysics. The picture underlying much o f biology is "Genes determine what counts as a human being": it is not that we illustrate the genes--we manifest them in a particular way; we are determined by them, and, therefore, they are always ours in a way a proverb canneverbe. Aproverbisanideal,aplatonicformunderwhichwegainrealityandit
gains truth; a string o f nucleic bases describes us for the world, into the real, where being human as opposed to being a chimpanzee is the effect o f this description enacted through biochemistry. Are we true copies? Maybe, but that either means we are positing other determining factors, environment for example, or we lose our claim-usually our life, to being human. Genes make us real. Biology is becoming, as Chemistry has already become, o f course in varying degrees, engineering. One does- not have to think o f science
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picture I have made a grammatical mistake. The rocks-are-hard school is superior if ones goal is to stay alive. The rock-god school might be superior if my goal is to die meaningfully in a mountain accident. Relativistic arguments often make confused comparisons. Inthiscasephysicsactsasalimitonhowsuccessfulabeliefsystemisasa survival system. The question remains: is it better to live a life o f fictional fantasy that may be meaningful, or a life o f scientific realism that may not be? . These may not be opposites in any real sense, but their application is fraught with confusions). Ontological
justification can describe the limits o f our involvement, and the meaning o f this involvement, in our language.
Poetry works through configuring ontological justification as a problem o f interpretation. This formulation can justify Ransom's vague description o f poetry as "ontological or metaphysical maneuver" (The World's Body, 347). In poetic use the demand for ontological justification appears as a demand for recognition, to use the creation ofmeaning as an expression ofself. The constitution or the making ofourselves marks our expressions o f value as expressions o f power; these expressions cannot supersede the systematic normative organization and functioning o f language, where the
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? accuracy o f statements becomes an acting through, agreement with, and description o f language. Our failure or success within these normative rules cannot be mediated through our self-constructions, but only by the determining structures o f society, language, biology. These normative rules urge or measure us; our ontological creation ofourselves and our world within language measures orjudges language. We can forgive our ontological failures but never our failures in clarity. Hill, quoting Chesterton's study of
Dickens says, "'a saint after repentance will forgive himselffor a sin; a man about town willneverforgivehimselfforafauxpas"'(7). Artisaconstructionwithinthe'density'
o f language, the normative resistance o f words and the incommensurability between different concepts, ideas, meanings, and language games. This poetic making delivers both the poet and our poetic responses "up to judgment"(14). Hill divides this judgment up between a (1) judgment o f our "empirical guilt" accompanying our possible failures and faux pas within the normative criteria of our language and social life and a (2) judgment of the "Sin" that Karl Barth understands as the 'specific gravity of human nature as such' (15). 6 This 'empirical guilt', or the normative force of language, has its own weight. "[I]t is at the heart o f this 'heaviness' that poetry must do its atoning work, this heaviness which is simultaneously the 'density' o f language and the 'specific gravity o f human nature'" (15).
The failure of clarity, the difficulty requiring interpretation in Finnegans Wake (and in a different way in Philosophical Investigations) forces the reader to mediate the normative rules through ontological justification (the radical need to determine the ontological status of its language as the exercise of its art), and to mediate the constitutive
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? force of ontological justification by the normative rules of our language (its humor, what Wittgenstein calls grammatical jokes). The normative rules o f language can function like the laws o f nature (the descriptions o f form as quantity) and our ontological justifications are judgments about how we function within these laws. Together these rules and
judgments constitute us within language and describes our intentionality, seemingly our qualitative mental relations. Finnegans Wake, therefore, can describe our constitution as humanbeingsasafunctionofacommentaryaboutitsownlanguage. Ournormative language while constituting the possibilities of meaning available to us can not function ontologically, that is, we can exist within and through these possibilities, but we can only exist at all, through the ontological or creative pressure attending the kinds o f ontological
judgments we make about the normative status of our language games, for example, 'Do I love you? ' 'Can I love? ' 'Is love possible? ' This explains why ordinary criteria can fail; why we are continually tempted by skepticism. 2 If I rewrite Hill's formulation of our deliverance up to judgment, I can suggest a vague canopy to include this play between ontology and epistemology as a moral crisis: "in the constraint of shame the [Wakean\ poet and [grammatical philosopher] [are] free to discover both the 'menace' and the atoning power o f his own art" (17).
Our survival in language requires an act of will. We must, however, take responsibility for the governance of our will, and not cede or abrogate our moral involvement within language to the confusion ofuse which distorts and hides this moral dimension within the confusions and entanglements between language games o f power
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? (ideology)disguisedasmoraljudgments. Somethinglikethissensemotivates Wittgenstein to remark his distrust oflanguage:
Human beings are profoundly enmeshed in philosophical--i. e. grammatical-- confusions. They cannot be freed without first being extricated from the extraordinary variety o f associations which hold them prisoner. Y ou have as it were to reconstitute their entire language. --But this language grew up as it did becausehumanbeingshad--andhave--thetendencytothinkinthisway. So you can only succeed in extricating people who live in an instinctive rebellion against language; you cannot help those whose entire instinct is to live in the herd
which has created this language as its own proper mode o f expression. (MS 213,
? 423; quoted in Kenny, "Wittgenstein on the Nature of Philosophy", 16).
Poetry and philosophy both constitute kinds of rebellion against language. This distrust of language constitutes a religious stance, a configuration of oneself as anything or anyone in relation to a negative limit which can determine our meaning and our world. What is it like to be trapped within a system of meaning within which you cannot escape but which you distrust? Finnegans Wake is a comic version o f Kafka's The Castle.
Coleridge, commenting on the mental schema articulated in Wordsworth's Prelude, redescribes the reciprocal relation between the senses and the world that constructs the mind. Following what he believes was "partly suggested by me . . . He
[Wordsworth] was to treat man as man--a subject o f eye, ear, touch, and taste, in contact with external nature, and informing the senses from the mind, and not compounding a mind out ofthe senses"(188). This could seem a conquest ofa world, or the construction
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? o f a Khananite pleasure palace after such a conquest. Eliot, in 'Gerontion,' finds such a
world "a decayed house", where "In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,/ To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk/ Among the whispers"; where these whispers, these "vacant shuttles weave the wind" into a riddle about the consequences of
knowledge ["After such knowledge, what forgiveness? "]. Our ordinary needs eat, divide and drink the world into metaphors (cliches: whispers, weave the wind) that signal the loss, consumption and disappearance ofthe world. The organic world symbolizes its own loss. Eliotdescribesamoralterror,akindofknowledgethatcanappearasaskepticism generated from failing senses, but I think it is more likely a realization that a soul can fragment through a kind of self-reflection in which the indifference ofthe world and our own indifference generates a specific terror. Poetry can enact this terror as what we are. Thisstance-indifferentterror--isneitherexistentialnorstrictlyspeakingmoral. Eliot's poetry describes this terror as a realization that the soul (and our demand for redemption) and subjectivity (at least our speaking T ) describes the subjunctive: we live counterfactually. Eliot does not discover this. The possibilities of either idealism or modem skepticism, when understood as moral responses to scientific knowing, outlines
the soul, subject, self as subjunctive. (This does not mean the soul, subject, self are constructed; they may be given as perpetual possibility; making a soul or a mind follows as apossibilityofthispossibility). Eliot'sdiscoveryisoftheterrorgraspingandattending modemself-reflection. Heexposespartlywhatthis'subjunctive'means,teachingusthe consequence ofthis knowledge (ifit is 'knowledge'). Words describe ideal forms that our descriptions belie into algorithms of loss:
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? To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my site, smell, hearing, taste, and touch: How should I use them for your closer contact?
Age and terror and revulsion and the failure of our knowing and knowledge, the realization that not only can the mind and the world be confused for each other but that a failure o f courage, sense, or meaning can tempt us to deny our mind. Instinct, the algorithm describing the non-human, and our dying, the algorithm o f loss, sketch the limits ofour knowledge ofboth ofthese as despair: "What will the spider do,/ Suspend its operations, will the weevil Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled/ Beyond the circuit o f the shuddering Bear/ In fractured atoms. " The constellation Ursus Major can mean a " shuddering Bear", a promised stability o f meaning that cannot preserve the atoms ofanyone'sbody. MeaningdescribesthelimitbeyondwhichNothingbeckons.
For the Ancient Mariner the periodicity of the stars measures our human needs as our involvement in the world as a promise of a home. Hill offers Coleridge's prose gloss of the Ancient Mariner's loneliness as "an outstandingly beautiful image of the attainability of atonement":
In his loneliness and fixedness he yeameth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their
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? own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly
expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.
This description has the coherence o f a poem, a fragment: not a fragment o f the world it describes, nor of the longing it evokes but of a kind of self-reflection that the glosses accompanying the poem form on the poem, and in this case a coherence o f self-sufficiency that ironically refers to the complex worlds that include the poem, Coleridge, the heavens, us, the future ad infinitum. This is the promise o f the Romantic fragment. These fragments are a profound attempt, even in the anti-Newtonianism ofBlake, to configure
poetry as Schlegel describes Romanticism as kind o f aesthetic-moral formula describing itself and all worlds in which it would or will make sense:
"The whole history of modem poetry is a running commentary on the following brief philosophical text: all art should become science, and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one" (Critical Fragment 1 1 5).
The different ways of finding a text speaking to us, for us, at us, allegorizing us allows us to displace forms o f skepticism into fantasies o f intelligibility which animate the text into various forms o f animism. As a form o f animism, and, therefore, as a kind o f romanticism attempting to link science and art, the animation o f the text parallels the mechanical, like the animation of dolls, bodies, and clay heads, as if science gave us the truth of what we see, a common sense weeding out visions and spirits. Is this the kind o f animism we find
in Henry Adams' dynamo or in Yeats' Byzantine birds?
In "Byzantium" we are presented with three categories o f being: "Miracle, bird or
golden handiwork". These are what in "Sailing to Byzantium" Yeats called "bodily form".
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? "Once out of nature" the poet's voice rejects the form of natural things, the category "bird" in the later poem in order to enter the " artifice of eternity" as an aesthetic form "as Grecian goldsmiths make". This collapse of natural form into artifact is what Wittgenstein, in Investigations, called the sublimation o f the machine into a symbol: where the normative structures o f language, rules, conventions, etc. are confused as the causal structures o f our psychology determining what we actually say. A symbol built out o f this confusion can seem to stabilize our linguistic practices. The structure o f a symbol so constitutedoutofthisstabilityisdeterminedasaformofidentity. Thus,Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus:
Only the proposition has sense; only in the context o f a proposition has a name meaning. (3. 3)
Every part of a proposition which characterizes its sense I call an expression
(a symbol).
(The proposition itself is an expression. )
Expressions are everything--essential for the sense o f the proposition-- that propositions can have in common with one another.
An expression characterizes a form and a content. (3. 31)
Identity functions as a metaconcept, or rather as the logical possibility that allows propositions to be decomposed and recharacterized as expressions. In this sense propositions function as expressions when they have a sense, in Frege's picture when they can stand in for each other. This commonality or conceptual identity functions as a repeatability that lies behind and extends the Cartesian idea of animal
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? animation as mechanical, a rule-bound persistence, to that of the mind: a picture of the soul as a perpetual motion, or rather expression, machine. This is like the picture o f the soul in Swift's Tale o fa Tub as clothes or the kind of person described by Adams in his preface as "a manikin. . . clothes . . . the same value as any other geometrical figure o f three ormoredimensions,whichisusedforthestudyofrelation"(xxx). ForAdamsthe collapse into the mechanical attends a despair over the virgin's failure, the failure of spirit, to limit, let alone convert, human violence. This renunciation requires that he convert himself into a vision o f mechanical time and identity, into at least a metaphor o f the algorithmic: "Every man with self-respect enough to become effective, if only as a machine, has had to account for himself somehow, and to invent a formula of his own for his universe, if the standard formulas failed" (471-72).
This vision of self-transformation is quite different from what we find in Keats: "Even a Proverb is no proverb to you till your Life has illustrated it. " A proverb in its generality and structure is formulaic. This formula, however, is not applied to the world, but you interpret yourself as expressing it, that is, it becomes a proverb to you only when you can use it to describe your life. "Life" and a "Proverb" articulate incommensurable and irreducible domains, as do picture and text, and thus the aptness o f the word 'illustrate,' as a means o f mapping one domain onto another, as a picture illustrates a text. But what allows ones' life to be such an illustration? This is a question not only of application but of intentionality (the formulaic aspect calls for application: apply this formula across this domain; an application that leads to illustration opens up a problem of intentionality: what exactly is being illustrated? Matisse was commissioned to illustrate
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? Joyce'sUlysses. HeproducedaseriesofdrawingsillustratingHomer'sOdyssey,not having bothered to read Joyce's book. What if he had read the book would he have then been able to illustrate it? ) What an illustration picks out in a text is like an interpretation, but its application to the text remains unclear or even tenuous: Is a movie an illustration of a book? Is it a translation ofat least a word, or phrase, or character into another medium? A particular shot in a movie might be an illustration; the musical score might be an illustration; but the movie itself is an interpretation, an attempt to tell not illustrate.
Asking "What does it mean? " leads to interpretation; asking, "What is it like? " leads to illustration. The first gives us a logic or a language we can understand; the other shows us the answer to a riddle.
A proverb is a fragment, as Schlegel called it, a kind o f self-articulating totality pointing, however, beyond itselftoward the world or experience which it describes or to which it can be applied. Schlegel's fragments function organically; they are not analogized into machinery as in Modernism (poetries appealing to Newton under the pressure of further scientific and technological transformations), but, akin to Goethe's conceptualizations ofthe Urphanomen, the ground phenomena, the principle ofform out of which and through which all other forms metamorphosize. This principle of holographic gestalt, organic self-articulation does not describe the mutual identification of ontogenyandphylogeny,butratherthereductionofbeingintoorganicmorphology. For Schlegel this form was the hedgehog:
A Fragment should be like a little work of art, complete in itself and totally separated from the surrounding world like a hedgehog.
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? Ein Fragment muss gleich einem kleinem Kunstwerke von der umgebenden Welt ganz abgesondert und in sich selbst vollendet sein wie ein Ingel. (Athenaeum, 206)
Fragments define an holographic ecology: "Fragmentary totality, in keeping with what should be called the logic ofthe hedgehog, cannot be situated in any single point: it is simultaneouslyinthewholeandinthepart. Eachfragmentstandsforitselfandforthat from which it is detached" (The Literary Absolute, 44). Schlegel describes this symbolic function as constituting a mode ofbeing, a function ofa particular kind ofart: "I have expressed a few ideas pointing toward the heart o f things, and have greeted the dawn . . . from my own point ofview. . . Let anyone who knows the road do likewise . . . from his own point ofview. " (Ideas, 155). This is what Blanchot called "a totally new mode of completion" (358), the "demand posited by poetry that it reflect itself and accomplish itself through its reflection . . . poetry no longer wants to be natural spontaneity but solely and absolutely conscious" (353). This requirement displaces the site o f poetry away from the
"poetic work" and towards "the poetic activity" (357). The relationship between consciousness and the world takes place through animation. For human beings this describes knowing as a poetic activity and for the world describes its dynamism. Blanchot describes this as a "mode of completion" that "mobilizes . . . the whole through its interruption and through interruptions various modes" (358). Gasche explains this mode as the consequence o f "a cross-fertilization between the Romantics' practice o f writing andKantiandoctrine,which. . . dealswiththeuniversalconditionsofcompletion"(ix). I will tilt my way to one side of such a characterization of the relation between the two
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? senses o f the aesthetic playing out in Kant: the aesthetic as "reflective judgment" (in the Critique o fJudgment) and the aesthetic as the constitutivejudgment determining the relation between concepts and experience (in the Critique o fPure Reason).
Schlegel analogizes the relation between science and art as between the dissipating force ofthe individual mind and the organized rigidity ofa system. The systemic supports the ground o f the real and is thus necessary; the dissipating force o f the mind constitutes the subjectively true and is also necessary. Thus "it's equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two" (Athenaeum 53). This integration follows by constituting the individual as embryo system, and thus the implication between individual and system follows from phylogenesis: "All individuals are systems at least in embryo and tendency" (Athenaeum 242).
Human beings are embedded in the a priori, which functions as a determining system.
The categorical imperative universalizes the individual outside of the semantics of 'morality'. The force ofthis universalizing functions as an 'ought', a necessity determining the moral autonomy of any particular human as the microcosmic version of the universal law. The categorical imperative determines moral necessity "without reference to any purpose", but rather through the "form ofthe action and the principle from which it follows" ("Grounding for the Metaphysics ofMorals", 26). In Kant's picture, moral action measures the distance between someone who acts and rational moral criteria. This distance is measured by the special character o f 'ought' which marks the criterion for action and serves as the motive for action. Kant describes the criterion for moral action in a self-reflexive proverb which appeals to and contains another proverb:
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? "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law' ("Grounding", 30). The embedded proverb divides (1) an action (moral action) into a personal act in a particular situation and (2) an act ofwill universalizing this action. Kant's model for action, therefore, enacts the way of seeing described in Blake's "Auguries o f Innocence" as a description o f moral action:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm o f your hand, And Eternity in an hour.
Kant imagines human moral failure to be a failure in the application o f moral precepts. Underlying this assumption is a theological picture translated into a logical problem: how to translate the universal, in which the moral 'ought' and the ontological 'is' are related as a conditional (if x, then y), into the particular contingencies determining human action. Kant's 'is' is not Hume's: Kant's criterion for existence is not grounded in human practice but in the simultaneous demand for individual human moral autonomy (to act and
judge through and as being 'I') and the necessity of a universal moral law. The means by which he accomplishes the translation of the 'I' into the moral universal proceeds through our formal equivalence as human beings within the formal limits o f our identity as agents. Within the categorical imperative this takes the form of a textual self-reflection that in itselfservesasamodelforhumanaction. Thustheproverb"Actonlyaccordingtothat maxim" describes the application of "that maxim". This textual self-reflection functions as a means of application that displaces the implicit 'act as if. . . " in the embedded proverb
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? into the initial proverb concerning action. This initial "Act only. . . " assumes that we act outside o f moral commitments (and thus these commitments must be shaped and ordered). (I think this is a skewed picture but I cannot criticize it here).
Because ofthis assumption, however, this new proverb would require a proverb of application ad infinitum. Kant's response is to characterize 'acting' itself as a form of self-reflection: "Actinsuchawaythatyoutreathumanity,whetherinyourownperson or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end, and never as a means" (36). The particular concerns o f any action are dissolved in his designation o f humanity as the defactoobjectofanymoralact. Thisispossiblebecauseanyindividualisalsoanexample of humanity ("whether in your own person or in another"). Characterizing someone as an example (or even an exemplar) aestheticizes being human, and translates the question 'when are you a good person? ' into 'when are you human? ' This follows from Goodman's description of art in Ways o f WorldMaking (or mine ofFinnegans Wake in
the next section) as a function marked by the use or perception of something as an exampleofart. Thisfollowsfromthefailureofthequestion'whatisart? ' Artrequires the question 'when is art? ' Such a question replaces the quest for substance with a kind of dual perception of ourselves (when are we seeing art? ) and of an object or text (is this an example o f art? ). Kant has displaced the model o f a moral example (or exemplar) with a model of an ontological example (or exemplar). (Such a displacement is for Kant a requirement of morality, part of its universalizing demand). If we say 'he acted like a
monster' or 'he's no longer human' or 'he acted like an animal', do we imagine he is really a monster or some other species? Do animals murder in the way that humans do? Kant
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? provides a picture o f how content or qualities can be translated into form. T becomes a universal law through which we act toward and as our species being, our essential being, so that the universal law coalesces into the form of all moral actions as if it generated an animateuniversalbeing. AlthoughIcannotpursuethisfurtherhere,Iwanttosuggestthat Kant's attempt to integrate moral autonomy with necessity organizes the form o f the moral 'ought' and the universal law as the form o f our animation as human beings.
The problem with Goodman's picture is that he reduces the function o f art to the recognitionofart. Kantinhismodelreducesbothbeinghumanandbeingmoraltothe recognition of the human and the moral. The application of morals reduces to the recognition o f the form o f morality which further reduces to the recognition o f being human; these recognitions are applied to oneselfto such a degree that moral action becomes a species o f self-recognition.
The fragment can work as a fragment, that is, it can preserve its unity and coherence (seemingly) without a clear discursive context (what is its scope, its truth value, the discursive rules determining its use or expressive force as literature or philosophy or theology or whatever? ), by pointing beyond itself by pointing to itself. The fragment exists through the logic ofKant's categorical imperative read as a theory of meaning, as if the 'I' and the word invoked their context and significance through the same ontological claims or presuppositions about themselves. (Why the temptation to personify fragments and word? ). If the good is what can be universalized for all other individuals, then the systemic is split into the abstraction of universalizing, a mode of equality determined as
fundamental human identity, and the a prioric ground ofjudgment and subjectivity that
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? determines the scene ofmorality as the individual will. The world is dissolved into identity;theforceofthisdissolutionispartlythecrueltythatNieztschesmelled. Thissplit follows from the confusion between personhood and citizenship brought out in Locke. But this abstraction must be supported by the a priori conditions determining the human relation with the world: supported by metaphysics.
Stanley Cavell argues that "maintaining fragmentariness is part o f Emerson's realizationofromanticism"(TheNewYetUnapproachableAmerica,21). Ininterpreting Emerson's essay "Experience" as "a theory of the fragment" (21), the discoveiy that philosophy as a way ofgoing on is "a work ofmourning" (26), Cavell appeals to Schlegel (or rather the reading of Schlegel in L 'absolu litteraire) for an epigraph: "Many works of theancientshavebecomefragments. Manyworksofthemodemsarefragmentsright from their beginning [generation, Entstchung]. " (Athenaeum, 24; Cavell, 22): "In 'Experience,' the condition o f existing from birth, that is to say, existing from the condition of birth--call it the congenital--is taken as the condition of fragmentariness" (22). SuchfallenessrewritesPlato'sdivisionofouroriginaryandrogynousunityintomale and female with our continual alienation from God described in Genesis. The fragment functions here as the organic resistance to the mechanistic description o f the mind developed from Descartes mechanistic description ofthe body and the application of
Newtonian logic to the mind in the British empiricist tradition. The organicist fantasy (as ifwe know what 'birth' means as a description oftime or what the 'organic' means as a description of our thinking) and the mechanical fantasy (thinking our way out of our consciousness or replacing ourselves with higher level machines) each describe an extreme
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? (insane? ) response to loss. Schreber enacts this insanity: "As long as he remains male, Schreber is not subject to the travail of mortality. Only after he has mothered a new breed o f humanity, a new Geschlect (spirit), will he die a natural death and be assumed, bodies andsoul,intoheaven"(103). Self-generationisanadmissionofmortality;itsdenialan assertion o f continual identity.
Schlegel, in Vorlesungen uber schone Literatur und Kunst, asserts that art must mimic the generative process ofNature:
That means it must--creating autonomously like nature, itself organized and organizing--from living works which are not set in motion through an alien mechanism, like a pendulum-clock, but through an indwelling power. . . In this manner did Prometheus imitate nature, when he formed man out of clay of the earth, and animate him with a spark stolen from the sun . . . (281)
Art functions like a fragment, "itself organized and organizing,' animated not by mechanisms but by an "indwelling power", animated by animation. But would Schlegel suggest that Nature as a whole functions like a fragment? Prometheus embodies and enacts this "indwelling power" and thus is an extension, a fragment of this same natural creation. As an animating principle ofNature he creates man, who is, therefore, analogized to art. This animation as an extension or fragment o f Prometheus semantically or mythically describes the autonomous metabolism ("organized and organizing") constitutinglife. Oneisanimatedbycontinuallyre-animatingoneselfwithinthelimits defined by that which initially animated one. Nature, Prometheus, Man, Art, as if collapsing metaphor and metonymy into an holographic, ontplogical trope, are all
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? fragments, each a deus exfragmento or deus ex anima: "The more organic something is, the more systematic it is. --The system is not so much a species o f form as the essence o f the work itself' (Gasche citing Schlegel's Literary Notebooks, xii). Gasche comments that Schlegel equates "fragment=system=work=individual. In the closed-offindividualities of the fragment, unity is achieved in chaos, but at the expense o f any systematic relation as the absoluteness, or isolation, o f the fragment suggests" (xii). The absolute reduces to fragments within fragments: an infinite set o f finite sets.
The promethean generative power Coleridge calls the primary Imagination functions in the same way that the soul does for Keats, as a grammatical surrogate for the self and world: "the living Power and prime Agent o f all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM' (Biographia I. 13; 304). The creation o f these grammatical surrogates describe models o f a mind. Artificial Intelligence uses the mathematical syntax o f computer languages, or the potential syntax o f an idealized language and machine, as this kind o f surrogate. This mathematical syntax, as it does for Adams and Yeats, animates as a proximate cause a mind as a fragment. In Artificial Intelligence, the Infinite I AM is divided into the proximate cause within a mind, usually as consciousness (animation having been reduced to this) and into the interpretive complexity of our experience, and thus as an epiphenomenon resulting from a conscious machines interaction with its environment.
Wecannotspeakofcauseshere,butonlyofinterpretations. Theself-reflective attachments between the self-standing fragment and its reflective containment and expression o f systematic totality creates a symbolic distance that is meant to picture the
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? relation between T and 'world'. Within this economy o f mirroring there exists no conceptual outside (there is no, as Joyce calls it in Finnegans Wake, "surview over all the factionables" (FW285. 26). Interpretative meaning or significance must be generated from insidethissystem. Thetropethatallowsforthisisirony. Blanchotwrites:
The'T ' of the poet, finally, is what alone will be important: no longer the poetic work, but poetic activity, always superior to the real work, and only creative when it knows itself able to evoke and at the same time to revoke the work in the sovereign play of irony. (The Infinite Conversation, 357)
Irony here, however, is an act o f creation, an act o f creation that produces analogic knowledge at the site of our manifestation as descriptions (in writing), that as Keats suggests, we illustrate. This is not what Blanchot says, but it is an implication o f how he illustrates the romantics, who "bound to the act of writing as to a new knowledge they are learning to take up anew by becoming conscious ofit" (354). The dynamism ofthe mind describes an education (as it will also for Emerson and Adams). Lacoue-Labarthe and
Nancy translate this picture o f dynamic self-illustration into an aesthetic that more clearly reflects Kants' transcendental aesthetic. They claim that "[w]hat makes an individual, what makes an individual's holding-together, is the 'systasis' that produces it. What makes its individuality is its capacity to produce, and to produce itsel? first of all, by means of its internal 'formative force'-///e bildende Kraft inherited from the organism of Kant. . . " (49). Adams realizes that the ontological limits enacted within our scientific descriptions o f the world make this "capacity to produce . . . itself' impossible, except as biological and physical effects (as in the way our eyes 'reproduce' the world or our genes
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? reproduceus). Ifhumanbeingsarereducedtoan'acting'thatrequirestheapplicationof a moral maxim (as in Kant), then this reduction to biological effect means we cannot apply moral ideals as a function o f self-reflection (more o f this latter).
For Adams, the fragment (what he calls Multiplicity) is a consequence of science (pictured as broadly mechanical), whereas for Schlegel (and in the logic of Keats' proverb) fragments resist this mechanization. This difference is partly a battle between Newton and Goethe. Novalis writes in Grains ofPollen: "Fragments ofthis kind are literary seeds: certainly, there may be sterile grains among them, but this is unimportant if only a few of them take root"(2. 463). The play between particular and containing universal, figured here as a seed and its growth into its determining form, is a conception o f the infinite that, as in Hegel, unites self-reflection in infinite dynamism. Romantic poetry, both in particular poems and as a totality, "should forever be becoming and never be perfected" (A22).
Because these fragments (as models ofthe moment or instant) contain or describe a totality they are essentially infinite (describing a kind o f self-contained infinite divisibility as between the numbers 0 and 1), and in this describe gods or our godhood: "every infinite individual is god" and "there are as many gods as there are ideas. " (This set o f ideas will latter be limited and humanized by W. James when he says that one has as many selves as friends: this turns the infinity o f the individual into a void becoming through its interactions, this is one form o f modernism, but one failing against grammar). As Charles Rosen explains, such a fragment is a "closed structure, but its closure is a formality: it may be separated from the rest ofthe universe, but it implies the existence ofwhat is outside of itself not by reference but by its instability" (Romantic Generation, 51). This fragment
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? defines what a fragment should be, but such a definition transfers the ambiguity of "fragment" to what it means to be complete and separated" when this fragment-definition itselfpoints at itselfbut also at all other fragments, the ganz Welt, and the obscurity of being like a hedgehog. This instability is what Keats answers with "illustration": the fragment in its separateness and completeness invokes a logic or interpretative frame, but one that resists us, like a riddle.
What is to be illustrated is obvious--the proverb. Is the interpretation clear? Keats' claim about proverbs is itselfa proverb illustrating another proverb--"Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced. " Something becomes real in this sense when one views one's life as such an illustration. In this case, Keats offers us an ontological criterion in order to make sense, or rather to make the world in which the first proverb functions: Proverbs become proverbs to us when our life illustrates them, because nothing is real until we experience it. Experiencing is a kind of illustration--that turns the type (the proverb) into the token (the proverbfo r us: we can use it because we have become its token: this is an illustration of meaning from given types into particular tokens: from language to us). The proverb is meant to be true in all cases, let us say, within its world, or within the language game in which we mean (self-reflection or instantiation within the language game) as an illustration o f the proverb, where we can measure ourselves as real (as defined by the proverb: the proverb measures us), and we can measure the proverb as True: "'p' is p". Thus the proverb remains a mere type when we do not recognize ourselves as one ofthose cases, within the totality defined by that "all". Whatever is real
is something we have experienced, in which case everything we have experienced is real to
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? us. But this statement about what is real only functions as a proverb, let us say it is a true statement about what is real, i. e. , what we experience, when we recognize it as an accurate description o f what we count as real.
Proverbs for Keats, therefore, are curious examples of aspect seeing. Instead of seeing a duck or a rabbit, however, we see ourselves, our life--as a narrative? a picture? what do we see? But what is illustrated for whom? The proverb does not illustrate our life, weillustrateit. Thusitisseeingourselvesasanillustrationandtheproverbasa descriptiontobeillustrated. ThetransformationofProverbintoproverbandourlifeinto an illustration becomes an actualization--not as a change ofbeing but as a transformation of aspect. The proverb is not strictly speaking a description of our life but it is a way of our seeing ourselves, a description ofmeaning as opposed to experience; that is why we illustrate it.
Adams is calling for a more radical transformation, an objectification o f himself mirroringhisnarrationofhislifeinthirdperson. TheironyofAdams'provocationto become a formula in order to become effective in the world is that a loss o f humanity is required in order to be. Human beings have become fragments under the gears o f the totality o f the world. This inversion marks the end not only o f human beings but o f human beings as Newtonian machines, as clay pot with gears inside. It is as if the demands o f the world require that we become proverbs ourselves, not illustrations, become types not tokens, or, more specifically formulaic, descriptions ofthe world in order to enter into the conditionsofbeingandactingdeterminingwhatisreal. Ineffectourabilitytomeasure the proverb as True becomes impossible, collapses into our vanishing into a formulation of
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? the criteria determining the real. This is a way of saying that we are replaced by ontologicalcriteria. Ourexistenceisimpotentbeforeorwithoutthesecriteria,these determinations. Do we imagine someone in Adams' world asking "Is this formula true for me? " as one might about a proverb? Adams can only become real if he refigures himself as what counts as real in what he already knows and what he cannot resist as Real. Skepticism in this world begins as a case ofseeing oneselfas unreal and the world as real;
oneself as a projection, a fantasy, a dream: the world exists, but do I?
The systematic totalization of the real, where we are presented neither with objects
nor fantasies, but with the conditions of reality, where the criteria determining what counts asrealbecometheobjectswesee,removestheworldassomethingweexperience. Our science is not a science o f empiricism, but an attempt to determine and articulate ontological conditions or descriptions. By this I mean that empiricism has been replaced by metaphysics. The picture underlying much o f biology is "Genes determine what counts as a human being": it is not that we illustrate the genes--we manifest them in a particular way; we are determined by them, and, therefore, they are always ours in a way a proverb canneverbe. Aproverbisanideal,aplatonicformunderwhichwegainrealityandit
gains truth; a string o f nucleic bases describes us for the world, into the real, where being human as opposed to being a chimpanzee is the effect o f this description enacted through biochemistry. Are we true copies? Maybe, but that either means we are positing other determining factors, environment for example, or we lose our claim-usually our life, to being human. Genes make us real. Biology is becoming, as Chemistry has already become, o f course in varying degrees, engineering. One does- not have to think o f science
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