On Arguments that are carried to the garbage pile; On the Role of History in Renewal

From out of the bushes

sometimes someone still unearths

rusted-out arguments

and carries them to the garbage pile.--Wislawa Szymborska "The End and the Beginning"

Zadie Smith's "Two Directions for the Novel" in Changing My Mind, which inspired a post a few days ago, starts with a fragment from Szymborska "The End and the Beginning" (this is a change from the original piece in the NYRB). Smith's essay returns to Szymborska's poem when, in the middle of reviewing  Tom McCarthy's Remainder, she reports on being in the audience for an event involving the philosopher Simon Critchley and the novelist Tom McCarthy in New York on 25 September 2007 (where a manifesto of the International Necronautical Society (INS) was launched [I think it must be this]). In tracing the links I was struck that INS was founded in 1999, apparently with a the first manifesto advertised on p. 1 of the (London) Times. (I am not a 100% sure -- I got lost in the shadow history of purges from and additions to INS), but I think Critchley was not yet formally invoved with INS then.) She then notes, 'it's note unusual for avant-garde fiction writers to aspire to the concrete quality of poetry. Listening to the general secretary annunciate his list, emphasizing its clarity and unloveliness, I thought of Wislawa Szymborska, in particular the opening of The End and the Beginning." She then reproduces first four stanzas, and adds, "Even those who are allergic to literary theory will recognize the literary sensibility, echoed in this poem, of which the UNS forms an extreme, yet comprehensible part. The connection: a perverse acknowledgments of limitations. One does not see the secret, authentic heart of things." In fact, altogether, Smith's essay reproduces about half of Szymborska's poem.

 

One would have thought that the contrast to acknowledging limitation, that is one's finitude, is not to acknowledge it, which in my earlier post on Smith, I had treated as aiming to be unlimited beings (angels, god, etc.) that I associated with a Stoicizing-Ibn Rushd-Spinozistic strain in philosophy. But in reflecting on Szymborska's poem and returning to the part of Smith's essay I just quoted, I recognized that she is working with a different set of distinctions: contraries not contradictions, in which she contrasts acknowledging limitation with a search for hidden, metaphorical depths (where our authentic self resides). That is acknowledging limitation becomes an embrace of surface-reality, where the concrete resides, and the necessity (she is relying on Naipul) of inauthenticity.

 

Clarity and unloveliness are, of course, the great aesthetic themes of Carnapian philosophy, especially, the Aufbau (on the Carnap and clarity bit recall this), which keeps its distance from depth. And I was amused that from a high enough level of abstraction -- the ballooner in me rejoices -- Critchley could be seen as joining in Carnap's (modernist) and comic aesthetic. (A great paper on Carnap and the comic ought to be written.)

 

Szymborska's poem is, in part, about indifference of the local and world-historical kind ("All the cameras have left/ for another war" & "But already there are those nearby/starting to mill about/who will find it dull." ). More important she suggests that in the very act of reconstruction and renewal there is a kind of willful forgetting (the first stanza starts with, "After every war/someone has to clean up;" see also the quote above this post). These are indeed great themes of limitation. I am assuming that the final, beautiful haunting lines of the poem (which seems far from comic) depict a dead man left over from the war in which human possibility is terminated:

someone must be stretched out

blade of grass in his mouth

gazing at the clouds.

 I sometimes forget that the underlabourly, scholarly and professional practice of history of philosophy in which I engage when I unearth rusted-out arguments, can also be used in willful destruction (garbage pile) and forgetting. And that it is quite possible that such destruction may, in fact, be justified on utilitarian grounds in order to do away with the rubble of history and make progress possible. It is no surprise that Descartes and Carnap both allow themselves a version of this gesture. I had always assumed that to do history of philosophy was a modest act of defiance against such a stance in which old arguments are discard-able. But, in fact, given the way much professional history of philosophy is the subject of indifference and safely ghetto-ized, then it seems for many our role is no more than to be educated, garbage collectors.

 

Comments

[Jon Cogburn]

But you too are making order and clarity out of the garbage. No? This is different from merely collecting it and putting it in a landfill or taking to that hellish place near the end of Toy Story III.

I never thought about Carnap and the comic before. There was actually an article on one of the big web sites yesterday about Jorge Luis Borges as an underappreciated comic writer, and your comments made me go try to find it (I think there are clear connections between Borges and the history of analytic philosophy, including limitation results, which Carnap was the first major philosopher to try to take account of in the reflections on Goedel in The Logical Syntax of Language). But unfortunately, there are comic strips of Borges' works and as a result I can't find the article on google. In the hands of a better writer than me (Borges, Carnap) the way the two senses of the comic are so completely frustrating me right now would be subtly enunciated to comic effect.

[David Duffy]

So not Crossan Raid on the Articulate: Comic Eschatology in Jesus and Borges