Carols

The moon is high in a cloudless sky and we walk down the long farm track, puddles shining in the moonlight, to St Boniface Kirk for carols, the wind vigorous outside, the sea breaking against the rocks ... candles and torches, accordion accompaniment ... some century or other, light in darkness, what counts as darkness, what counts as light, Celtic priests with the vigilance of warriors, alert to every sound in the darkness, to every gleam of light, the form of consciousnesness without which ... not, as I sometimes dismissed them, early muscular Christians ...

Mars in the dawn sky

Well, dawn is a little after nine o'clock these mornings, though the winter solstice has almost arrived, but it has been wonderful to see the rosy fingers at the horizon with a turquoise blue above it and high in the sky the planet Mars.

The pictures are of the New Pier at Moclett Bay where, Jim tells me, pilgrims would land on their way to St Tredwell's chapel at the side of the loch.

The last few days have all been sunny and bright with hardly any wind, and that will surely change in the next day or two. Rosemary flew off to do some shoppping in Kirkwall this morning, Josephine and I wandered off up to the shop ...

...met a trainee GP on the island whose husband did philosophy at Liverpool in the early nineties ...

Back in Papay

We flew in this morning. Jim had left our car at the airfield for us, the heating was on, we have been to the shop and bought some provisions, christmas tree in the hall waiting to be freed from its netting. Josephine has been set up with a bed downstairs. A crowd of North Ronaldsay friends coming in at Kirkwall on the Islander, quick greetings before we board, beautiful calm weather ...

Claudius and Wilfrid

I have to confess to a curious resentment as I read about the occupation of Britain by the Romans, the sense of a conquered and subdued country forced to assimilate Roman ways: curious because it is, after all, nearly two millennia ago. The Irish always point out that the Romans didn't get there so that the old tribal ways endured: they had to wait for the British for their own subjugation. The connection with Wilfrid is that I went to a school, full of boys and priests with Irish surnames, which was named after a man who did Rome's work on the Christians of these isles at the Synod of Whitby. I love the image of the Celtic priests with their tonsures, shaved to behind the ears and the rest of the hair worn in a pigtail.

Ferocity and compassion

Interesting to read Hume on human nature, on our practice of seeing regularities across time and space, examples of avarice and ambition, generosity and public spirit. In some ways, perhaps, the best of Hume's work.

I have been in Norwich, talked to A about Nietzsche, and realised how easy it is to conflate 'the herd' with 'slaves'. I wrote about the herd or what is herdlike only a couple of days ago. One can easily be disdainful and dismissive in talking about Christianity, say, as a religion of slaves. But one needs to be more cautious than that. I think more and more that what we call morality has to be understood in terms of our primal emotions in conditions of (extreme) adversity, of terror and instability, where there is an intense need and desire for compassion or mercy, or pity. What is expressed in the gaze of a Mithras, as opposed to a Christ or a Buddha, and what is the source of our need to find something in that gaze? We are casually relativistic about the values of the warrior elite as opposed, say, to those of Buddhists or other religionists, and it is certainly true that the former are silent about or contemptuous of the latter. But, on the other hand, the warrior elites require values that are functional in maintaining their fitness to act, and, nevertheless, ferocity brings horror, carnage and devastation in its wake and awakens other values in us, born of a bone-weariness of slaughter, so that we cannot simply 'compare' two apparently incommensurable value- systems, but need to see the one emerging as a result of the other ... or as light in darkness ... and nor is there a neutral self that stands over against these possibilities to elect one or the other, the self is rather constituted by the conflict between them, and its orientation is already there in its language, by which I mean, roughly, that a preference for the light is already implied in the nature of our talk of 'temptation', etc. The significant thing is that out of our deepest consciousness we seek rescue, and it is this which is the source of our orientation. Nor is this to be understood in terms of some transcendent agency beyond the human, a redeemer, for instance, though we may project our yearning into the form of such a possibility. But of course, we also have to incorporate the values of the slaves into a larger morality that includes that of the masters, we don't want nerveless exhaustion ... or for that matter the passionate intensity of 'the worst'.

'Britannicus noster': The First British Thinker

Reading about Roman Britain reminded me of our first, extant British thinker, Pelagius Britto, Pelagius the Brit, whose dates are roughly 360CE to 430, though after he was condemned for heresy in c 420 he rather disappears, last seen in Egypt or Palestine, apparently. His views were attacked with a vindictive venom by Jerome, and Augustine also had a go at him. But what a ghastly doctrine of Original Sin, I'd prefer to go along with Pelagius. There is a traditional view apparently and for which there is no evidence that he returned to Britain, specifically to the place he had been as a child, Bangor-is-y-coed, a few miles south of Chester. Two or three years ago I had a strong urge to visit the place and was astonished to realise that it had been the site of a large monastic settlement, mentioned by Bede, a place where there was a massacre later in some battle between the Mercians and the Northumbrians (I need to check who the combatants were, and something about the Red Field). There is an interesting story in Bede about the reluctance of the British priests to help Augustine (of Canterbury) in the conversion of their colonial masters the Anglo-Saxons. They sent a delegation to see him, but were advised by an old priest (?) to take their cue from the demeanour of Augustine. If he greeted them with a suitable courtesy and modesty then okay, otherwise, no cooperation ... for which they were cursed .... He remained seated when they arrived ...

The other traditional view is that 'Pelagius' translates as Morgan, the man who comes from (across) the sea (so maybe he was (of) Irish (descent), though his father was supposed to be a decurion). His doctrines at least appear to have made it back to Britain perhaps via someone they call 'the Sicilian Briton' (to whom is attributed a passionate Pelagian essay against wealth as the cause of poverty) and and were preserved in Ireland, and that is supposed to explain the hasty mission of Germanus to Britain to stamp out the 'poisonous' doctrine of Pelagianism. They were pretty nasty, those guys. There is also a claim that there is something Druidic about Pelagius' version of Christianity (though I am not sure how the commentators I have read are so confident of their knowledge of Druid doctrine) and that it fitted into the Celtic tradition of warrior heroism. Anyway, after my trip to Bangor and a walk along the Dee I wrote about Pelagius, a bit stodgy in places and there is a grumble from Augustine in italics:

A place to die where in the wind
The trees that lean towards the river

Also creak and groan as I do now
But I am not, as I was, affronted

By the insult of old age
The distant hills still there and I

Recognised only by one old monk

ii

He was large and stout, grandis
Et corpulentus

Walked like a turtle
Fat and slow

Awash with porridge
Our Britisher in Rome, his home

For thirty years
Across the square he goes, to speak

Exquisitely with friends and strangers
Of Christ our light in darkness

Lingers over supper with the ladies
His head thrust forward with the concentration

Of an angry ram

Though he frowned with urgency

Not anger, his exasperation
With us, his conforming pagans

And our doctrines of convenience
To our luxury and torpor
Mildly expressed with charm and grace

There was never a man more gracious
Than the man, Pelagius
Nor a man more sharp, nor of cooler wit

What matters is what you do

And what you refuse to do


iii


So I had thought as well

A good man
Advanced in the faith

Till I saw how he tempted his disciples
To pride, an enemy of grace

No grace but the law and teaching
And our creation as free beings

He was not
As I was forced to be
Twice-born

Who could not act
Unless God raised me first
Raised me by force and sweetness

From my concupiscence and sin


iv

I need a stick and a sturdy boy
To get down here again to the river's edge

To settle my limbs a moment on a bench
And listen to the rush of water

As it runs, down to Carlegion, and the sea

v

Ah, a grace of nature shows me flowers
In winter, a kindly, friendly sign

A flurry of snowdrops along the bank
Shows me life emerge from death

The bridge that the river can be crossed
The church that death wakes us into life


I sang here


But wake from the same dream
Of my remote island, wet and green

And the mental scourges start to sting
Again, the sufferings of Christ

Lay on my soul the grace
Of the Father, I consent

And my resentment melts
That anxious, controlling intellects

Condemned me, ah, to what?
Another Flight into Egypt

And after interrupted sleep the dawn
Shows through the curtained door

And I watch the sun rise hugely
Between the two hills, see light

Race across the plain towards me
Flood me with illumination, and God's grace

vi

We are by God's good grace created
To choose or refuse the good

To be changed by the path we take
Into light or into darkness

Even to perdition, or salvation, never
Say my sin is not my choice

But my necessity
(How would it then be sin?)

If we choose evil, pride
Then the act is ours …

… So how can it not be ours
If we choose the good

Are my good deeds then not my deeds?
—Praise is for encouragement, not pride

As blame is for admonition
What is ours is given

What we are
Does not come from us

I have turned gladly towards his light
And sometimes stubbornly away

From what I saw was good
I have been shown what I need to see

The right book has come to hand
Opened at the page I need to read

The unexpected memory, the dream
The moral luck that rescued me

From what I knew too well I willed
But I cannot tell

Whether God prevents us …
Or our larger selves

In the swift perception of created spirit

vii

A natural shame and indignation
Recoil from the brutal act

That also satisfies, reveals
The will to good as well as evil

Native in the first blush
Of our God-created spirit, smothered

We thought we crushed it
In the fleshly habits of desire

We follow our father Adam in
Too stupefied to own our sin

Unknown the treasure buried deep

II

We shook from our heels
The dust of Syracuse

And took his books away
From the heat and accusation

And reached our northern islands
Where we dispersed

To teach Christ’s truth
Be cursed, and still obey

ii

So much reality, so dark
Occluded from the density of sense

By the red light of desire
But I was lifted in the spirit

Swirling and billowing out
I was the sail, the flimsy curragh, lifted

Whirled and tossed and racing, spun
In turbulent current, rushing, gusting wind

iii

I stood waist deep and naked
In the freezing winter river

Chanting the psalms and praising God
I fasted and kept night vigils, used the rod

Contending for the athlete's prize, austerity
Subdued the flesh but attuned

The body, payment for release
Of the bound spirit, straining to be free

iv

Miles out and dangerous, the Skellig rock
And a violent shock and wall of wind

To lean against and scream within its roar
News of the Christ to the restless, desperate sea.

A remarkably fine boar

Apropos of the fired up demonstrators who do not see Gillian Gibbons, a Liverpool primary schoolteacher, within their field of vision but only an archetype that lives vividly in their imagination, who are easily caught up into an imaginary world of monsters, demons and angels and who seek to destroy the demons ... both deeply within this imaginary world and tenuously but devastatingly outside it ... I have been reading a book on Roman Britain by Peter Salway, who talks, on page 33, of how religion provides the most telling evidence for the assimilation of Roman and native because it 'affected the deepest levels of consciousness'.

The book is very short and he moves quickly on, but there is an interesting ambiguity in the sentence. Does he mean that religion then 'affected the deepest levels of consciousness' (as opposed to now), or does he imply that this is a permanent feature of religion? If the former, then we should have to ask, and so what now 'affects the deepest levels of consciousness'? And if the latter, and maybe it almost comes to the same thing, how does religion affect these deepest levels? We could make it a criterion of 'religion' that it operates at these depths, and then the two questions coincide, particularly if we agree that formal religion at least has largely lost its grip on the imagination. So what is happening within our imaginations? Blake.

But perhaps the point is that 'religion' only works in extremis.

In any event, a Roman cavalry officer in Wearsdale gives thanks to Sylvanus 'for a remarkably fine boar that no one had previously been able to catch'. And 'Diodora, a Greek priestess, dedicated an altar at Corbridge in her own language to the demi-god Heracles of Tyre' (p 34). Surely we know both these people quite well. At least in the former case some muscular Christian officer in the British army might have offered up a similar prayer after a day's hunting. And the Greek priestess ... well, amulets, essential oils, crystals? But what is a Greek priestess doing in Corbridge on the A68. Maybe she was formidable rather than flakey.

There is some sense in the familiar thought that the good and evil, light and darkness, angels and demons dualism is deeply embedded within our pyches and is perhaps most apparent under conditions of existential extremity. Thus there is nothing at all Islamic in the commotion in Sudan, it is much more primeval than that: nor do I mean that they are primeval, whereas we are not. Much depends on how close one is to the edge, though that proximity is also in part a function of education. How does one negotiate with these deep sources of action except through the development of judgment: are we really dealing with demons and monsters here?-the moments of reflection available before and after engulfment. Standing alone and above what is herdlike in our nature, forming a new and free association ... but our own danger is that we forget how to fight monsters and do not recognise them when we see them.

sapere aude

Although these are not reflections suitable to an overcrowded prison cell in Khartoum, it really is interesting to observe the mechanisms of popular manipulation and the apparent attempts to minimise their impact (on the part of the judge). As they stream out of the mosques after Friday prayers the demonstrators are fired up in favour of the immediate beheading of Gillian Gibbons. Apart from the incongruity of 'taking offence' as a badge of religious commitment there is the total disconnection in this conduct between rhetoric and reality. Of course Rowan Williams is right to say that the sentence is an absurdly disproportionate response to a minor cultural faux pas, and one wonders how deeply cynical the agitators are ('conservatve clerics'). If we concede that it is monstrous and wicked to insult the Prophet then we can see why people might think that there should be severe punishment, why they might stream out into the streets in a fury. I suppose the point is that they don't get to consider the minor premise, that Gillian Gibbon is guilty of inflammatory insult etc. One has to suppose that the demonstrators are reacting because they have been told that some infidel Englishwoman has consciously insulted the Prophet, as part of a wider British plot to undermine Islam. And so they rage and rail against the image of a wicked woman, a ghastly Britannia, and Gillian Gibbon doesn't get a look-in, or a voice. But this happens all the time, reaction to an image which makes some sense of the reaction, but unaware of the reality. This is how manipulation happens, from the vile descriptions of the Jew in Nazi Germany (monsters of the infflamed imagination against whom one must in one's dream fight to the death with courage and firmness) to the routine savaging by the Opposition, synthetically worked up under a description of events which renders the reaction intelligible but without connection to the truth, and it is synthetic because they know that very well, which is what makes it all in its small way also vile. How sad to hear Cameron's insinuations against Brown's integrity, sad whatever one's opinion of Brown whose ordinary human flaws are out there on view, no longer exposed only to the private circle. And yet his integrity shines through his manifest mortification at the course of events.

'It is what I believed'

I watched the Aaronovitch interview with Blair the other night and was struck, once again, by his rhetoric of belief. "It's what I believe(d)", said with that emphasis of finality, of final appeal, offers us an ultimate token of authenticity and authority, as though there were never any questions about what one ought or ought not to believe. Tone of voice can be like a glaring light which makes everything else invisible. Should we have believed that Saddam Hussein was amassing WMD? 'Read the documents', he says. And it is true that most people thought that he must have had some. But, as the heroic Robin Cook, the French and other Europeans pointed out, this was not enough by itself as a casus belli. It was manifestly a pretext for a policy already determined on quite other grounds. Then there was the shameful misrepresentation of the French and Chirac about the famous second resolution. Blair defends himself and Bush, on the grounds that it was 'right' to 'go in' ('the right thing to do', like what he 'believed', in which all the rhetorical weight is placed upon the emphatic intonation of these phrases, rather than on the supporting facts of the case, the reasons that would normally clinch and justify their use, but where (in this case) the reasons are so slippery and shifting that no one would keep up with them or find them persuasive: as I recall there was a period in which official justifications altered almost daily as previous ones were challenged in the press). And although he says candidly enough that the horrors of subsequent events weigh heavily upon him, and weigh on him every day, he turns things around in his favour by representing what is happening in Iraq as an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. If there is a battle between good and evil it is relatively easy to be on the side of the angels, as he so manifestly wants to be, as we all want to be. It is much more difficult to know where the angels should stand when the situation is represented more closely in terms of the complexity of the political insurgency and internecine strife which was precisely the reason so many said it was crazy to invade in the first place. This was the forethought that should have deterred the invasion. But Blair then excuses himself by saying that it is the insurgents who are to blame for the present horrors ('troubles' seems too lightweight). And, of course, as we know, Iraq is at the centre of the great war on terror because we made it so by invading. The Americans could have done things so differently after their 9/11 experience. Iraq was the terrible and calculated sin which we first commit and from which then we instinctively exculpate ourselves, because how can we see ourselves otherwise than as shoulder to shoulder with angels.

Brag, sweet tenor bull ...

A beautiful, cold, blue-skied November morning in Birkenhead, down for coffee and newspaper in the new Caffe Nero, I read, to the background sound of Classic FM-type music, how much we are a client of America and that this is where the true loss of our sovereignty is to be located, not in our membership of the EU. And the football, we cannot reconcile ourselves to our new, modest place in the world. A nice piece by Simon Jenkins about how he was taught at the age of ten by the late Vernon Scannell who died in his eighties the other day.

I was listening to Ted Hughes' reading of Four Quartets this afternoon ... the backward half-look again ... but even Hughes cannot conceal the easy sanctimony of some passages. I must return to Leavis's critique of the poem. I listen to it warily enough becaue it still has enormous power and its rhythms get into your brain, which, while it shows that it is real poetry, sometimes you just don't want it in your brain. Years ago I read Basil Bunting talking to this effect, how as a poet he needed to keep his distance. As to the allegd murderer, Peter Tobin, and the primitive terror, the first instinct is one of a kind of glee or delight to hear that he has been attacked in prison: it is an instinct that I vigorously disown, but it starts up and reveals our origins to ourselves. I expect there are more advanced souls than me who have no such instinct, and I am glad of that ...

Remembering Simone

Peter Winch had us reading Simone Weil's The Iliad, Poem of Force quite early on. I first read it in Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks, and I still recall how stunned I was by its account of how force turns human beings into things, not just into corpses but into things that are still breathing. Much of human life is conducted far from hot baths ... But what I most remember is the idea that what pervades the poem but is never spoken is a burning sense of justice that is even-handed over the fates of the protagonists of either side.

To put it another way there is a perspective on the events that are described that is shown in the narrative, and it doesn't need to be stated in order to make its palpable presence felt, it is there in the tone of what is stated. Now of course I can refer to that perspective, after all I called it 'a burning sense of justice', but understanding that description depends upon feeling the impact of the persepctive itself. it is not the other way round: I gain access to the meaning through exposure to the perspective, not access to the perspective through an independent grasp of the meaning. This is what we call 'a burning sense of justice', this is what we call 'the majesty of death'. (cf Brian Clack's book on Wittgenstein and Frazer: you will need an Athens login to read this review, though)

But these reflections are prompted by my thoughts about the tribes because it seems so obviously one and the same thing. It is highly significant that there can be at least a tinge of sadness in the description of the warrior elite, the raiding parties, the killings, the reprisals, their description arouses something within us which focuses on just the futility of these things, something opens up within us because it is exposed to its object, to the natural object of its concern ... and someone else will say, no it doesn't, nothing opens up in me, speak for yourself. A certain kind of neocon might say this who thinks of the glory days that lie ahead for the New American Century, and their whole identity and sense of self is formed around this project, and these people will not think that the Iraq war was a disaster or its consequences a catastrophe, they really do think in the long term and they have emasculated or subdued their enemies for several generations, as they believe. I think this is the point of the clash between Socrates and his opponents in the Republic. A sense of what is just is instinct within us but requires to be awakened and the conversation between Socrates and the others is conducted between those who have not yet woken to this perspective and one who has. So there is no point of contact, certainly none around the concept of reason or rationality, or of morality commanding the assent of all rational beings. The idea that it should depends upon a trace memory of the Platonic notion of Reason which is for him a particular direction of desire. I think an analogue of this awakening is to be found in that sense one might sometimes have (I called it walking with the gods) of seeing the whole human condition spread out before one as an object both of joy and compassion. And yes, this is one reason for the claim that we created the gods, personified the discovery of 'something higher' ... nor is this hubris but rather a way of securing the perspective or its memory in our minds in a form that seems adequate to it. It is not a matter of understanding the gods in terms of a well understood conception of what it is to be human but a way of coming to terms with possibilities that stretch our understanding of what it is to be human at all. But, whichever way round, surely all we are talking about is Love as a reality into which we enter ever more deeply and cannot define its boundaries because we see none to define.... but such thoughts require a postscript. I suppose that it is too long ago that I talked with conviction about God, and the language I have appealed to here has been used by theists, God, after all, is Love, so one enters ever more deeply into the mystery of God, and so forth. But now I can see more clearly thepossibility of a different model, not the God of the process theologians, but simply that this possibility of Love continues to emerge, we can observe it and sometimes embody it, but that is all there is to say, we do not need to reinterpret theological language, we can simply abandon it ... and nothing gets lost.

On Wiping the Table after Breakfast

The philosophical significance of a simple act, you know the scene well enough, perhaps there is an oilcloth on the table, perhaps you have had marmalade on your toast and it has stuck to the newspaper which has then lain on the table and made it a bit sticky, and there are small spills and drips of milk from the jug and coffee stains from the mug. You find a dishcloth and put it under the hot tap, squeeze it out and start to wipe the table ... and from a certain angle everything looks clear and clean and you take the dishcloth back to the kitchen satisfied with your virtue. But then as you return you see the table from a slightly different angle ... and stains glint in the light from the window, stains that had been invisible before because you were not well-placed to see the light fall upon the surface, but for all that the stains were there!

No, gentle reader, this is not the lowest point of my philosophical life, but a significant moment. It shows something important about perspectives, that they can conceal as well as reveal, that what is concealed by one is revealed by another, that simply by changing your position you can see what you might otherwise have missed ... And let us take it further: on the first occasion you yourself stood in the light and so did not have the advantage of it; on the second occasion, you had moved out of the light ... Something of spiritual significance then in the act of wiping the table. Yes, yes, but everything now turns on the kind of examples you are going to give ...

Thinking about Kant

A first year lecture this morning on Kant's Groundwork ... actions done for the sake of duty ... actions done out of inclination lack moral worth even if the inclinations are towards sympathy or benevolence ... the problem is the assumption that one's inclinations are determined whereas the rational will is 'free'. But that concept of freedom is problematic, is too indeterministic and one's inclinations can be altered, strengthened or undermined. I wrote about this years ago in a paper called 'Moral Sentiments, Social Exclusion, Aesthetic Education' but it is often hard to recall what one's own position is, one has to work it all out all over again, start from scratch: I wrote some verse about this experience, put in the mouth of Socrates:

Thought is painful again and difficult
The material unyielding and unpromising

But better to say I've lost my way
Or that walls or undergrowth

And other obstructions on the path
Or the moonless night

Or a trackless landscape
—Let my dreams decide—

Bar my way or obscure my vision
Or leave me without a road

They don't know how confused
Agony and paralysis of mind

To be endured, suffered patiently
—And sometimes I endure, sometimes

I am hopeless like a patient bullock
That strains to the sting of his driver's goad—

Without clarity or focus or direction
As half-discerned a pattern’s shimmer fails

Not my choice the moment when it lifts
My condition of stupidity

In a spurt of excitement and speed of thought
Surge and surprise of connections

Then familiar ground, eerie memory:
Not an inch further than before

And only now does thinking start
Again creeping slowly forwards

But with such a calm of mind
Noticing everything

Effort precedes and follows
The brief freedom of vision

The vivid effortless moments they all praise
The commanding view from the tower

Where visiting is restricted
To a few, unannounced, summer days

Discovering the A68

Amy and I left Thurso at 0610 hrs and reached Leeds at about four o'clock, taking turns to drive. There was not much dawn light as we travelled down the A9 towards Inverness, except that we could see the lights of ships and boats out in the North Sea. But what was most memorable was driving down along the A68 from Jedburgh to Corbridge, across the Scottish-English border and along the tops of the hills of Northumberland, the home of the Brigantes. I have always wanted to be in that county and it was quite wonderful to drive across through that misty, mysterious landscape. Strange about the Brigantes ... I have been reading Hound by George Green, which is a re-telling of the story of Cuchullainn and Queen Maeve and the Red Branch, of Emer and Deidre of the Sorrows. (One of the things I like is the idea that story-telling might be woven around a basis of fact, and it recalls to me the strange transitional status of the Gospels, though I am probably completely wrong about that). Green uses the device of an outsider to guide us through some of the customs and history, the German charioteer washed up on the shores of Ulster. The thing about characters who are also devices is the extent to which their success as a character can match their function as a device. Sometimes it worked well, but at other times I could hardly distinguish him from characters from Lyndsey Davies or Stephen Saylor who have both written fictional accounts (of detectives) in the Roman Republic and early Empire). I have also started on a new version of The Tain by Ciaran Carson ... but, with the sense of the Picts in Orkney, etc., I am starting to see people as the descendants of the tribes. It is a bit like seeing the history of a face one knew of old in the lines of the face one sees now, exceept here it is reversed, one gets a sense of the earlier by looking at the later. In Orkney I feel as though I am surrounded by Vikings ... or of Picts or Celts, mostly living like crofters, with dark realities much more immediate, as immediate as it might be in an Afghan village, perhaps, a sudden alarm, and at least this man would be useful with a sword or other weapon ... And you know that under adverse circumstances, of alienation and neglect, young men in particular will revert to the darker aspect of tribal life, without the honour or the hospitality, as though our default positon, if we are not educated and nurtured, is that of war lords and henchmen (gangs, territory, raids, reprisals, revenge killings) Lord of the Flies, I suppose, and well enough known. Green's references to routine beheadings in skirmishes reminds one of some of the grim Al Quaeda videos. We are particularly shocked because we have forgotten all this ancestry, 'the backward half-look'. It comes to me the more strongly because Island life shows the possibility of the antithesis. Whatever might lurk uneasily beneath the surface, people are acknowledged ... and usually needed. And then one returns to Birkenhead and becomes anonymous again. But that is hardly it. One sees a kind of cultural dispossession and worse, the unemployment and the resentment and the alienation and the drugs and alcohol.

Rather washed out today after all the driving. Julia's Bistro next to the Ferry in Stromness was good.

The Storm

Not so bad so far, nothing blown away, though the wind is still sounding around the house and the rain washes against the windows. But all ferries were cancelled and no bus services on Mainland. It is sad that we are here for only a short time, for such a short time. We head back tomorrow afternoon, and will spend the night in Thurso again before driving south. Meanwhile, the gale's path from the north west is traced in spray and turbulence across the diagonal of St Tredwell's Loch. I can see how the constant noise of the wind can wear one down!

I have started to read A Jar of Seed Corn by Jocelyn Rendall, lucid and quietly ironic in tone.

Tonight we are off to supper.

I haven't done very much work, partly because I am too absorbed in my new surroundings, but I have been thinking about what I want to say. Suddenly I have a crowd of commitments, more than I am used to, though probably normal for the more professionally oriented academic. I am writing a paper for a collection on teaching philosophy, in which I shall try to use some material from Plato's Symposium that I have used elsewhere. (There is a draft further back in these postings). Then a paper for an RIP conference on Philosophy as Therapeia, then something for a symposium on the work of David Cooper at Durham, then a philosophy of religion paper for the RIP in London in February 09. More immediately I need to do a final version of my paper for the Philosophy as a Way of Life volume I am co-editing with Michael Chase.

Amy and I went to the shop against a strong wind and showers of splintering hail.

A powercut around five for several hours, so it was good to eat pizza and salad in a warm house bright with candles and an ample fire ... the lights came on as we sat eating our After Eights, then went off, then came on again. The wind is still strong but not quite as brutal ...

Weather

Severe storm force winds due tonight and tomorrow, coming in from Iceland, all schools and colleges will be closed ...

Wind from the West

I have been reading a brief history of St Boniface Kirk by Jocelyn Rendall, an elegantly written little book. It seems that it was part of a fairly large settlement, even though it now stands alone on the edge of the sea, with remains of a broch and other buildings still visible on the sea shore. "Monkerhoose" suggests a colony of monks in the vicinity. It is sobering to realise that there has been so much coastal erosion, that the kirk was once well back from the shore. JR suggests that it was called St Boniface because the saint's murder in Friesia was recent and well known.

I found that there was too much strong wind sweeping in from the West to inspect (with my amateur eyes) the remains below the church, in fact I was driven back by an icy flurry of slashing hail it was impossible to face head-on. But it makes you feel alive. It reminded me of my experience on Caldy forty years ago when I stood by the cliffs, leaning back comfortably on the wind.

There is a view of Eday far beyond St Tredwell's Loch from my bedroom window.

There was comedy and inconvenience on the way up. Soon after Lancaster the Toyota sprung a leak in the top hose, nothing worse than that, but the motoring organisation to which we belong by virtue of our bank account sub-contracted out and we received no visit from a resourceful knight of the road but a man with a trailer who was intent on 'recovering us' to John O' Groats, five hundred miles away: which he did, with some gallantry since it was a tough assignment. Anyway, lots of cancellations and new bookings, mostly done by Rosemary, and we finally made it after sailing from Scrabster across the deep and unsettling swell of the Pentland Firth and then into quieter waters as we came in to the beautiful Stromness ...

... on its metalled ways

An interesting discussion of Pierre Hadot in our small seminar group this morning, and the idea of spiritual exercises and their relationship with philosophy, in particular the idea of living in the moment and living as though this is the last day of your life. What is the point of such a practice? I think that its rationale has to rest in a prior lived experience that enters the culture as a known, empirical possibility, a prior lived experience that is known also to be fugitive, fleeting and unstable, even though it seems to provide a standard by which one judges what happens in its absence. So the practice is dependent on a kind of nostalgia, a wanting to return to one's home as John Moriarty might have put it in Nostos. Naturally this can lead to a kind of willed activity that is ultimately futile. And there are approaches to meditation that are merely narcissistic or auto-erotic as good pope Benedict once complacently opined of meditation itself. But to dismiss them in these ways is to misunderstand their function as practices ... C mentioned the experience of someone's death and the intensity of perception that followed it. A perspective that opens up and then is lost. But it is more than just a perspective opening up. That sounds too much like a simple hedonism, even though it is surely a healthy hedonism, to add to the narcissism and the auto-eroticism. I think the real point is the quietening of the passions and what they give way to, or, rather, make way for, not a merely vacant and neutral space, but a loving awareness of the world, responsiveness to others, that is occluded by the red light of the passions, and in whose absence we destroy ourselves. I remembered those fantastic words of Dennis Potter about the plum tree below his window in Ross: 'I see it is the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be ... the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous'. But we need the acute experience of contingency to find ourselves there. The sea is rising and the sheep dyke will not protect us.

Thurstaston

At Thurstaston the late September sun
The tide breaking below the little cliff

Loaded galleys slowly pull towards Deva
Beyond them hills, behind, the open sea

Where landing-craft edge the coast to Mona
And massacre, druids and the women

Chant the funeral rites, wait to fight and die
High in the bushes bright red rose hips shine

Late dog rose in the dazzle of low sun
Shrubs and trees bent and barbered by the wind

Frightened men, broken and exhausted, wade
Through mudflats to deep water and the ships

Piped in by sea birds wailing for the slain

Hilbre ahead surrounded at full tide
Did Cromwell's troops gather there to embark

On their mission to subdue the Irish
In the blue tranquillity of the sky

The light breeze, the breaking waves, the bird-song?

West Kirby and Samhain

They walk as though in a prison courtyard whilst others sail in sight of the Welsh hills.

The season of Samhain approaches when the veil between the worlds is thin and penetrable. Spoke to P today, who talked of transfiguration, not as a doctrine but an experience, a quality of the light that surrounds those who are departing from us ..

This is not language likely to commend itself to a good secularist but it still seems to me a good image of how we can sometimes be aware of possibilities beyond the horizon, as it were, possibilities that we are often too immersed in matter to notice. So, Samhain, a season to recall intimations of reality beyond the settled scope of our customary and clung to world. But even that language needs to be applied: what kind of thing are you trying to refer to? is a perfectly proper response. Oddly enough I felt very much like that last year after a couple of weeks on Rinansay, that returning was like being re-immersed in matter. Perhaps it is all best understood as an image of heightened poetic sensibility, something that flows and then ebbs away and remains as a memory, something glimpsed and then lost to sight. Or perhaps rather to hearing. The need for acute listening.

But the metaphor of being immersed in matter (or freed from it) has to be understood in some kind of moral, perspectival terms. It is always easier to see it in others than in oneself. But sometimes you do see it in others, perhaps especially in the shopping mall, this total immersion in the basic business of life, you see no horizons in their brows, as it were, and then at the moment of disdain and self-satisfaction. you also know yourself, there are no large horizons here, just the needs and cravings ...

The 'right to choose'

It's possible to be opposed to abortion and still support 'the woman's right to choose' on the grounds that it is a matter of moral choice and that the proper person to decide is the pregnant woman. She should not need to have permission from doctors. But the choice is still the exercise of a moral judgment. You don't need to agree with the judgment to acknowledge that it is their call and not yours. In other words there shouldn't be a law against everything that you think is morally objectionable. Otherwise some of us might still be stoning adulterers (some of us of course still are!).

However, if you think that abortion is murder then you would seek to ensure that the law will prevent women from making this choice . The extreme form of this is taking the law into your own hands ... It seems obvious to me that if, for instance and as it were at random, the Catholic Church had the power, it would make abortion illegal, along with much else.

(Talking about the woman's right to choose is problematic, though, in a way that doesn't undermine the view that she ought to be allowed to make her own choice in the matter. You only have a 'right' if it is legally sanctioned. Sometimes the rhetoric of 'rights' is just tantamount to claiming that someone ought to have the right. Similarly with the rights of the unborn child).

I belong to the group who think that the pregnant woman should make the decision but believe that abortion can be a morally regrettable act, but in a way that depends absolutely upon the circumstances, timing and the motivation. But 'regrettable' is a fairly mild word. We live in a messy world and I agree with Rowan Williams that sometimes an abortion is the least worst option. But I would qualify that by saying that we should have to be talking about a late abortion to justify this kind of language. I do not think that it is 'murder'. If I thought it was 'murder', if I thought of it under that description, I would expect the full weight of the law ... etc., as in any case of wilful murder, an expression which carries the weight of our horror at such an act. So, the Cardinal, if he had the power, would make it illegal/criminal because he thinks that it is a criminal act, and this because we are taking the life of a human being and a human being is a human being whether they are a skipping child or a vigorous youth or a foetus. I think that view depends upon an a priori view, a 'faith position', about the nature of the human being as endowed at conception with a soul. Well, in one way, even an embryo is a human being, at the earliest stage of its development, but I think also that the stage of development, and I have in mind the progression towards self-consciousness, makes a moral difference to the nature of the act of bringing its life to an end. Of course we are ambivalent about abortion in a way that we are not ambivalent about other forms of taking life. This ambivalence is one of the facts in the case. Calling it 'murder' is a way of registering the gravity of the act, resisting calling it murder registers the sense that it doesn't have the same gravity even if it is still grave. I have in mind relatively late abortions when I use the word 'grave'. But even there the measure of the gravity has to be balanced against the gravity of the circumstances. I cannot think in these terms about the morning after pill or very early abortions. But once you believe that the act is one of wilful murder and that no one realises what is being done then that will determine a passion of opposition and even a kind of despair, except that we don't have marches in London in the way we have against, say, the war in Iraq. This is not to say that a child can't be murdered in the womb as sometimes happens in the atrocities of war zones. But the main thing is that I am not a woman and have not been faced with the situation, and even to put it like that is to fail to distinguish all the kinds of case. Of course some people would say that this has nothing to do with it and the moral facts of the case are quite independent of one's situation ... But it is just in these kinds of case that deep differences rise to the surface. I have been reflecting on how I have been formulating these sentences and am acutely aware of my caution and uneasiness about using words like 'wrong' or 'objectionable' or 'dubious', partly because language reflects the deep differences I have just mentioned and words are snares for the unwary.

.... Partly because words like 'wrong' are never really the last word: 'you are causing suffering', 'you are taking a life', are the last word, I think. Do you have to add, as though to someone completely stupid ... 'and these things are wrong!'? As though they are startled into good behaviour not because they realise they are hurting someone but because they have recalled that doing so is wrong (dogs can get as far as that, you bad boy, Fido!).

A small philosophical point

To Cavendish Motors through Birkenhead Park to deliver the keys of the Toyota whose windscreen has been smashed by the usual sad suspects. I buy the Guardian and head to Costa for an Americano with milk. There is an article by Simon Tisdall about Saeed Jalili who has replaced Ali Larijani as top Iranian negotiator on the nuclear issue. Apparently Jalili is 'a man of strong moral views who believes spiritual values should inform political action'. He is leading a big debate 'about how to reinsert justice and spirituality into political life'. It's amusing how an expression like 'strong moral views' acts as code for 'inflexible and rigid'. 'He was a man of weak moral views'. So to the small philosophical point: many people would agree that spiritual values should inform political action. The trouble is that we differ profoundly about what would count as spiritual values informing political action. The Dalai Lama would take a different view from Ahmadinejad ... language conceals as well as reveals and we seek too eagerly to join together in the expression of such sentiments without looking too closely at how they are being grounded or what they are rooted in which is really what determines their meaning. Sometimes this works in diplomatic contexts but at least there everyone knows what everyone else means by the shared formulae.

I met Larijani once, when he ran the IRIB, the Iranian Broadcasting authority. The media are saying that his resignation indicates that Ahmadinejad's hand has been strengthened, but I'm not so sure. I think it is a move to isolate him further. Larijani still has the support of the Supreme Leader. Aristotle's 'mixed polity' is taken seriously in Iran. The Shia tradition has a strong connection with Aristotle.

Walker Art Gallery

A half attentive stroll through the gallery
Catching up with news, we had admired

The scene of Shelley’s funeral pyre burning
On a cold beach, Byron bleakly standing there

In a strained attitude of poised despair

We half notice a bent blue figure curled

Hopeless around a globe, a stringless lute
Clutched and cradled in her arms, my friend

Walks up eagerly, points out the single string
I peer at the card and see the title, ‘Hope’

ii

Then I saw what I did not know
That only the breadth of a hair

Separates my hope from despair
A single string still on the lute

Still keeps hope’s voice from falling mute
The tilt of the head is almost too low

But hope can only raise her head
When on her soul despair has fed

And gnaws too loud to hear what hope has heard
Which makes her turn where

When she looked before
She noticed nothing she could not ignore

And fell back to the mourning she was in
For half forgotten, half-maddening sin

—The thoughts that never go away
But in the mind hold constant sway—

(Sailing to) Byzantium: the Kantian Sublime

This is something I wrote about three autumns ago, autumn into winter:

Aestheticians and moral philosophers are wary of moving onto the shifting sands between the terrae firmae of their different disciplines. There is one issue, however, in which there appears to be reasonably secure and common ground, and that is the issue of the alleged beneficial effect on moral life of a developed aesthetic sensibility. The reasonably secure and common ground, the received wisdom, indeed, is that there is no such beneficial effect, and the usual supporting witness is the pitiless Nazi SS officer with a refined taste for Mozart and torture. But though his testimony can hardly be gainsaid, there is an unnoticed and unwarranted narrowing of the scope of aesthetic sensibility implicit in the very production of such a witness. In a word, aesthetic sensibility is reduced to a matter of what Kant called taste, which, for him, was a matter of judgments of the beautiful, whether in art or nature. What is neglected is the parallel Kantian notion of the sublime. Kant charges those who remain unaffected by the sublime not with a want of taste but a want of feeling, and he makes it clear that if we are to be moved by the sublime we must already be furnished with moral ideas. In that case, our question should not be whether there is a beneficial effect on moral life of a developed aesthetic sensibility, but whether moral life can affect aesthetic sensibility. But before we can address such questions we must look in more detail at Kant’s conception of sublimity, which appears to connect it, not just to the moral life and poetry but also to religion, in such a way, indeed, that we may come to the conclusion that the relationship between moral life and aesthetic sensibility is reciprocal, in the sense that whereas we may need to be furnished with moral ideas to be moved by the sublime, this and poetry (or the arts more generally), turn out to be a means of extending our conception of what constitutes moral life.

I make no attempt in what follows to offer a systematic account of what Kant writes about sublimity, ideas and art in the third Critique, and nor do I attempt to show any general cultural influence on the poet whose work I appeal to from time to time, W.B. Yeats. It is rather that I have been both moved and perplexed by Kant’s account of aesthetic ideas over a number of years, and though I have written about these issues elsewhere[1], further reading shows me the inadequacy of my previous understanding. Over the same number of years, and indeed for much longer. I have also been moved and perplexed by the great poems of Yeats’s The Tower and The Winding Stair, and I have sometimes thought that the poet and the philosopher can shed light on the meaning of each other’s work.

1.

There is a moment in Kant’s Critique of Judgment—it is one of many in which the heavy grip of the architectonic is relaxed—in which he seems to capture the sense of a perennial human experience, one about which, however, we may want to ask whether it is profound or illusory:

… the irresistibility of the power of nature forces us to recognise our physical impotence as natural beings, but at the same time discloses our capacity to judge ourselves independent of nature as well as disclosing an ascendancy above nature that grounds a self-preservation quite different from that which may be assailed and endangered by external nature. This saves humanity in our own person from humiliation, even though as human beings we have to submit to that violence. In this way nature is not estimated in our aesthetic judgement as sublime because it excites fear, but because it summons up our power (which is not of nature) to regard as petty what we are otherwise anxious about (worldly goods, health, and life), and hence to regard its power (to which in these matters we are certainly exposed) as exercising over us and our personality no such dominion that we should bow down before it, once the question becomes one of our highest principles and of our asserting or forsaking them. (§28 p 111)[2]

The passage itself is governed by the trope of reversal. Thus, we may discover an inner ascendancy over the forces of nature at just the moment that we might feel most vulnerable to them; and just where we feel our powerlessness before it most, we may discover a power within to disregard as insignificant what it can damage and destroy, in the light of what we realise is capable of being preserved. It can exercise no dominion over our essential humanity, our nature as moral beings. (So this is not a discovery about oneself over against others, but a discovery about oneself precisely in the humanity one shares with others). The political metaphor at the heart of this passage is sufficiently striking, highlighting the great Enlightenment theme of political freedom: one can almost see the Stoic Roman senator standing self-possessed and unafraid before the arbitrary will of the Emperor. This metaphor is in some ways apt enough. To stand there self-possessed and unafraid in the face of the sublime where others are in a state of fear and dread depends upon the condition that one’s mind is already furnished with ideas. Experience of the sublime is one of the occasions when ‘ideas’ are awakened, and they are said to ‘extend’ (erweitern) and ‘strengthen’ (stärken) the mind. It is easy to underestimate Kant’s references to ‘extending’ and ‘strengthening’ the mind (das Gemüt) in these contexts. There is a slightly submerged implication that ideas can be quite absent from the mind, and that when they are present they are either dormant or activated by the sublime or by works of art. But if they extend and strengthen the mind one must surely insist that they do so because they are formative of it, formative, that is, of the sensibility which seems implied in the German word—das Gemüt—that is translated by Meredith as ‘mind’. The criteria of identity for a state or condition of the mind would then make essential reference to the ideas that inform feeling, and it is such formation that constitutes the mind’s ‘ascendancy’ and ‘power to resist’. However, Kant speaks of the necessity for a ‘rich stock of ideas’ (§ 23, p 92) as a condition of the experience of the sublime, and at § 29 p 115 he writes:

The proper mental mood for a feeling of the sublime postulates the mind’s receptiveness towards ideas …
… without the development of moral ideas, what we who are prepared through culture call sublime, merely strikes the untrained person as terrifying.

It is tempting to think that Kant is caught here in a vicious circle, that the experience of the sublime awakens us to moral ideas, and that moral ideas are needed already if we are to experience the sublime as we should. There is no circle, though, if we distinguish different relations to ideas; they need to be present if dormant if they are to be excited and set the mind in motion.

Although Kant’s political metaphor incidentally discloses a political preoccupation that is admirable in itself, its use here must raise mild doubts for us about the place of the sublime in nature in Kant’s own imagination, or, indeed, in his (non-reading) experience. It also has the effect of superimposing on our experience of the overwhelming forces of nature an attitude of alienation, resistance and defiance that seems to belong more to the political sphere in which resistance is a genuine possibility, than to our attitude to nature even in its most powerful and threatening aspects. Kant remarks in dark Romantic mood that our power to
‘resist’ (widerstehen) is insignificant in the face of bold, overhanging, threatening rocks, storm clouds piled high in the heavens, thunder and lightning, volcanoes in their destructive force, hurricanes leaving devastation in their wake, and so on. But he insists that under the right conditions

They raise the forces of the soul beyond the ordinary measure, and discover within us a power to resist of quite another kind, one which gives us the courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature. (§ 28 p 111)

And because they do so, he says, ‘we readily call these objects sublime’ (ibid).

2

However, in asserting that the experience of the sublime is an occasion for the disclosure or rediscovery of our moral freedom (from natural inclinations within and natural forces without), Kant makes the further and connected claim that we are able thereby to regard as small and of no significance those things which otherwise we attach most importance to, our worldly goods, our health and our life itself. This is a remark which, like the reference to the forces of the soul, it is easy to disregard, but I want to highlight it as of vital importance for moral psychology when placed in the context of the total picture of the moral life to which it belongs. The implication is that the disclosure or recollection of our moral nature in the experience of the sublime is a singular form of self-consciousness: an attitude towards it, of awe or wonder, that Kant wrests from our previous attitude to the sublime in nature: we admire or venerate what is disclosed in a way that transforms our order of priorities, in other words, we find it an object of awe and wonder, find it sublime.

So, although we may question whether our experience of the sublime in nature takes the form and direction that Kant says it does, he nevertheless makes here an intriguing claim about the form and direction of our mental life. Not only is our moral nature something to which we need to be recalled, but it is also something whose revelation can astonish us with a power analogous to our experience of the sublime in nature, but it can become an object of such veneration or admiration that other things can seem trifling by comparison, indeed it becomes a standard of comparison, one by which our priorities are precisely ordered or re-ordered. This may seem merely pious. But the point is, we do not always simply acknowledge or recall ourselves to the presence of our moral freedom, but sometimes, perhaps rarely, it is recalled or disclosed in the form of a memorable experience of awe or wonder, of which the reordering of our priorities is a felt part. However, it is one thing to experience the palpable sense of that reordering and another to live or embody it. Some commentators have queried the notion of ‘respect for law’ in Kant’s moral philosophy, but it may be more intelligible in the light of this account of the force of the sublime upon our mind and sensibility, even if we withhold consent from his account of the Categorical Imperative and the dualism of Reason and Inclination as he conceives them, which is not to say that there is no tension between the forces of the soul and what we might call the forces of the flesh.

The idea of a natural re-ordering of our priorities is familiar enough in the history of philosophy: we find it for instance in Diotima’s speech in Plato’s Symposium where she discusses how we change our erotic allegiance from beauty of body to beauty of soul. It is also found among the poets, notably in Rilke’s image of Orpheus, whose singing silences the beasts of the forest into an attitude of attention or listening whereby their normal appetites and passions recede to the periphery, and new possibilities of consciousness emerge, fostered by this image of the work of art.

Kant’s talk of ‘raising the forces of the soul beyond the ordinary measure’ is apt, since this reordering can lose its grip in a loss of perspective in which the possibilities of moral freedom lose their efficacy and hold upon the mind. So how are those possibilities maintained in view? The mind in this sense is not stable, and its moral powers of action ebb and flow. To put it another way, the mind is not to be separated or detached from the moral standards to which we subscribe: we are subscribed. What I mean by this is that we do not stand in a relation of cool appraisal of the standards that form us, though sometimes the ‘soul’ has to be ‘animated’ by its own dormant principles, and when it is so animated, the ordering of desires falls into place. This is connected to this singular form of self-consciousness that emerges from Kant’s account, though it is difficult to categorise it. The judgment that something in nature is ‘sublime’ is grounded in feelings of awe and admiration, and in such a way that other things dwindle by comparison to insignificance. But if we transfer that judgment and that experience to the notion of our humanity and its place in the greater scheme of things, there is a question whether we can still properly call it ‘aesthetic’ since it is no longer directed at something in the natural world that we judge sublime. But that issue is a relatively trivial one. More to the point, what is the nature of this kind of self-consciousness in which we awaken to our own free nature with feelings of awe and admiration that are analogous to our feelings to the sublime in nature? The closest I can get to this is something like Hamlet’s ‘What a piece of work is a man?’ or the sudden disclosure of the ‘grandeur’ of the spirit, and there is no mere narcissism here, but a kind of awe in the face of what we find our nature calls forth from us, a compelled and projected self-formation. But such a projection of our moral and spiritual nature puts us in a state of tension and possible conflict with the internal natural forces of inclination, which must be presumed active and dominant when our ideas are dormant: but again one sees the image of the Stoic Roman senator …

3

This conflict between the flesh and the spirit is well expressed in familiar lines of the Irish poet W.B. Yeats, from the second stanza of Sailing to Byzantium:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore have I sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium

And this couplet, in particular,

Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;

appears close to what may now be seen emerging of a Kantian view of art. I asked a moment ago how the possibilities and demands of our moral nature are to be maintained in view, given that they can become submerged. The Yeatsian answer would seem to be that it is in the singing school in which it studies monuments of its own magnificence. Artistic genius acts like the sublime in the natural world, that is, it stimulates within us our sense of the realm of moral ideas, our sense of what Yeats calls ‘soul’, though what Yeats goes on to say shows, perhaps, some limitation in Kant’s account:—

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul

—though Kant himself uses an unexpectedly strong language of feeling when he talks about the sublime: it is ‘dead earnest in the affairs of the imagination’ and ‘the imagination finds itself at the edge of an abyss in which it fears to lose itself’ (significantly, Kant uses the image of an abyss to represent the sublime and its power over us).

Nevertheless, Yeats’s language is far stronger, and he talks explicitly of a connection between wisdom and purification by fire, describing, perhaps, more than the awakening of ‘soul’, the course of its struggle with its own mortal flesh and its desires, the process of purification or purging, An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve, describing transformations of felt experience. But we are now beginning to approach a view of the role of art. For Yeats the singing-masters are the ‘sages in God’s holy fire’, and the life of the soul requires its own song, or expression, not that of the flesh, and in the singing school we study monuments of the soul’s magnificence, monuments neglected when we are ‘caught in that sensual music’ of those dying generations ‘at their song’ (my italics).

‘Magnificence’ is a word that may come to our aid in the hammering out of what may appear a conceit, the connection between this poet and this philosopher, but the sublime object of aesthetic judgment is itself a kind of magnificence or grandeur, and what we admire or venerate when we are awakened to it we could reasonably call ‘the soul’s magnificence’. But in that case what precisely is the role of art? States of the soul are not only seen in demeanour and conduct, but are also expressed in ‘monuments of unageing intellect’, our singing school is the study of these, art may help to keep the soul alive and self-aware but must also therefore represent the purgatorial fires of its re-embodiment of the human being. As we shall see, Kant thinks of artistic genius as precisely the power to produce representations of the imagination that awaken us to our own faculty of ideas and its place in the supersensible, noumenal world. However, my earlier remarks about the singular self-consciousness that Kant describes shows that this is not a merely external, utilitarian view of the function of art. It is, rather, the natural expression and striving of that self-consciousness.

Something interesting and unexpected has emerged in just this idea of the felt sublimity of our 'supersensible' freedom. To repeat the point, not only does the experience of the sublime in nature disclose to us our own distinctively human sphere, but its disclosure is as an object of admiration, as something elevated, the apprehension of which makes other things dwindle in significance. Instead of the magnificence of the sublime in nature, we are converted to the magnificence of the sphere of our own freedom.

4

However, it is one thing to admire the prospect of a possibility, and another to admire its expressions, its ‘monuments’, and Kant does go on to refer briefly to something like this in his account of our proper disposition before the sublimity of God. Although we discover a pre-eminence of our minds over the most overwhelming might of nature, it would be folly, he says, to presume to such pre-eminence over against the might of the Creator, and though we may be inclined to think that on the contrary:—

instead of a feeling of the sublimity of our own nature, submission, prostration, and a feeling of utter helplessness seem more to constitute the attitude of mind befitting the manifestation of such an object (p 113).

—Kant suggests rather that this latter cast of mind is not intrinsically connected with the idea of the sublimity ‘of a religion and its object’, and that the recognition of divine sublimity does not depend upon losing the sense of the sublimity of our own nature, but on retaining it:

The man that is actually in a state of fear … because he is conscious of offending with his evil disposition against a might directed by a will at once irresistible and just, is far from being in the frame of mind for admiring divine greatness, for which a temper of calm reflection and quite free judgment are required. Only when he becomes conscious of having a disposition that is upright and acceptable to God, do those operations of might serve to stir within him the idea of the sublimity of this Being, so far as he recognizes the existence in himself of a sublimity of disposition consonant with His will, and is thus raised above the dread of such operations of nature. (114)

Crucially then Kant conceives of a development here, a movement in the experience of the sublime from the disclosure of freedom to a sublimity of disposition that is an expression of that freedom. But then he continues:

Therefore nature is here called sublime merely because it raises the imagination to a presentation of those cases in which the mind can make itself sensible of the appropriate sublimity of the sphere of its own being, even above nature (die eigene Erhabenheit seiner Bestimmung).

That this is not merely hubris is clear from what else Kant says. The sublime in nature awakens the mind not just to the rational concept of transcendental freedom, but also to that of the supersensible substrate of all phenomena. The sublime

… carries our concept of nature to a supersensible substrate (underlying both nature and our faculty of thought) which is great beyond every standard of sense (p 104)

However, we might have reservations about the way Kant expresses himself here. Do we call nature sublime merely because it raises us to an appreciation of the sublimity of the noumenal realm of our own freedom? It seems, unfortunately, that for Kant we do:

Sublimity, therefore, does not reside in any of the things of nature, but only in our own minds, in so far as we may become conscious of our superiority over nature within, and thus also over nature without us (as exerting influence upon us). Everything that provokes this feeling in us, including the might of nature which challenges our strength, is then, though improperly, called sublime, and it is only under presupposition of this idea within us, and in relation to it, that we are capable of attaining to the idea of the sublimity of that Being which inspires deep respect in us, not by the mere display of its might in nature, but more by the faculty which is planted in us of estimating that might without fear, and of regarding our estate as exalted above it. (p 114)

But this appears to be no more than an ungrounded refusal to acknowledge the magnificence of those aspects of nature (what we call the sublime in nature) that awaken us to the nature of our own humanity. There seems no point in the claim that the sublime in nature is not properly so called merely because it discloses a greater sublimity still. Indeed, we do not similarly cancel the estimation of the sublimity to be found in our own minds when we come to acknowledge the greater sublimity of the divine being.

II

When Kant comes to discuss artistic ‘genius’ in his Critique he identifies it as the ‘faculty of presenting aesthetic ideas’, which he distinguishes from ‘ideas of reason’, and he justifies his claim that such ‘representations of the imagination’ may be termed ‘ideas’ on the grounds that
they at least strain after something lying beyond the confines of experience, and so seek to approach a presentation of rational concepts … thus giving to these concepts the semblance of an objective reality.

So what is the relationship between these artistic representations or images that essentially express (aesthetic) ideas, and the ideas of reason that they are claimed to mediate? The point about ‘approaching a presentation of rational concepts’ needs to be understand in terms of the difference between these concepts and what Kant calls the concepts of the understanding. Whereas imagination in its empirical employment ‘presents’ to the understanding the manifold of intuition, so that it may be brought under empirical concepts, and issue in a determinate experience, there is nothing that could count as a ‘presentation’ (Darstellung) of such (rational) concepts as those of God, the soul, or creation, for instance, or indeed that of the supersensible substrate of all phenomena, which is not for Kant an object of knowledge: we do not know that there is such an intelligible substrate, we can only think the idea, an idea, though, which gives us a perspective on what does come within experience, as we shall see.

2

In Byzantium Yeats writes:

A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains
All that man is
All mere complexities,
The fury and the mire of human veins.

The starlit, moonlit dome is an evocative image: the image of a cathedral dome represented as illuminated by the light of stars and moon. So how might such an image mediate what Kant calls ideas of reason, seek to ‘approach a presentation’ of them? The poem already seems to offer a symbolic counterpart to what Kant has sought to articulate philosophically about the nature of the work of art. The burnished surface of this ‘monument of unageing intellect’ makes it suitable for reflecting and gathering a light from a distant source, which cannot be seen by day, and which cannot penetrate the denser darkness of the surrounding streets below, the place of the unpurged images of day, except through the medium of the reflecting dome itself, which causes us to look up and then beyond, and which draws attention to the unearthly quality of the light it reflects rather than illuminating the darkness of the familiar street. This light that attracts us and shows us the possibility of a point of view that ‘disdains’ ‘All that man is, All mere complexities, The fury and the mire of human veins’, and allows us to ‘resist’, to use Kant’s verb (widerstehen).

The power of genius, then, ‘presents’ (presumably to an audience) those representations of the imagination that Kant calls aesthetic ideas, and it is these artistic images or symbols that stand for and evoke the rational ideas that reveal our native noumenal realm beyond nature, beyond ‘mere complexities’.

3

But what we take to lie ‘beyond the limits of experience’ (Erfahrungsgrenze) depends on what we take to count as ‘experience’ at all, and Kant’s own doctrine of experience is notoriously attenuated. In the third Critique, however, a more ‘saturated’ notion is sometimes to be glimpsed, as we shall shortly see. But the first thing to notice is the ambiguity in Kant’s formulation.

The notion of ‘what lies beyond the bounds of experience’ might be taken to refer to what lies beyond the form of our experience as presently constituted (so that it makes sense to transcend or pass beyond it, into another and more ample form of experience), or it could refer to what lies beyond the form of any possible experience at all (so that it makes no sense to talk of going beyond it). As for the latter, however, Kant seems to envisage two rather different kinds of possibility, if we look at his examples:

The poet ventures to interpret to sense the rational ideas of invisible beings, the kingdom of the blessed, hell, eternity, creation, &c. Or, again, as to things of which examples occur in experience, e.g. death, envy, and all vices, as also love, fame and the like, transgressing the limits of experience he attempts with the aid of an imagination which emulates the display of reason in its attainment of a maximum, to body them forth to sense with a completeness (Vollständigkeit) of which nature offers no parallel.[3]

Earlier in this paragraph Kant has claimed that the aesthetic ideas produced by the poet are to be thought of as ideas precisely because they ‘seek to approach a presentation of rational concepts’. But now, although he goes on to list some explicitly rational ideas—those of hell, eternity, etc—he continues his list with ‘what we find examples of in experience’—death, envy, the vices, etc., and these realities of human experience (here is the more saturated notion) are hardly themselves ‘ideas’. But since the poet presents aesthetic ideas that represent these latter realities too, on Kant’s account, they must be taken to ‘seek to approach a presentation of rational concepts’ in their case also, so we need to think, not just of death, envy, etc., as things we experience or undergo, but also of intellectual or rational ideas of them. I suggest also that these ideas, suitably appropriated, may determine and alter the form of our experience, in precisely the way adumbrated in the account of the sublime, where the awakening of the faculty of reason is said to reorder how we relate to things. (The account of the sublime and its effect upon us in reordering our priorities is the ground note that sounds also in Kant’s account of artistic genius).

So the poet’s representations must not only be of the realities of the human experience of death and other aspects of the human condition, but be such as to display a perspective on them that, to put it obliquely for the moment, belongs to the awakening of ideas. Kant’s examples divide between rational ideas of what could not be experienced at all (God, the soul, etc), and ideas of what can be encountered in experience. In the former case, neither the alleged reality nor the rational idea of it can be ‘presented’ in experience, except in symbolic form; in the latter case, one may be tempted to say, it is only the idea that lies beyond the form of any possible experience.

But it is perhaps more complicated than that. When Kant talks of the realities of the human condition he claims that the poet makes examples manifest to sense with a ‘completeness’ (Vollständigkeit) not available in the examples we encounter in experience, and so it seems to be in this sense that the poet ‘ventures beyond the bounds of experience’. However, he then comments that ‘this faculty (sc. of aesthetic ideas) … regarded solely on its own account, is properly no more than a talent (of the imagination)’ (my italics). And then he offers a significant contrast, which reflects the distinction between poetic genius and mere talent:

If, now, we attach to a concept a representation of the imagination belonging to its presentation, but inducing solely on its own account such a wealth of thought (so viel zu denken) as would never admit of comprehension in a definite concept, and, as a consequence, giving aesthetically an unbounded expansion to the concept itself, then the imagination here displays a creative activity, and it puts the faculty of intellectual ideas (reason) into motion—a motion, at the instance of a representation, towards an extension of thought, that while germane, no doubt, to the concept of the object, exceeds what can be laid hold of in that representation or clearly expressed.

However, this passage is not entirely clear about where mere talent ends and genius begins—the common term is the Vollständigkeit of the poetic representation—and perhaps Kant is not very interested in defining the moment. The poet seems to show no more than ‘talent’ in displaying aspects of the human condition with some sort of ‘completeness’ that is not available in nature. Perhaps the point is that genius offers a particular completeness. But how are we to understand this Vollständigkeit, which seems interesting but also opaque?

It is plausible to suppose that Kant offers us here a seminal account of metaphoricity, and that the Vollständigkeit that is within the power of ‘talent’ as well as ‘genius’ consists in the evocativeness or metaphoric density of the particular representation, its ability to call forth a ‘wealth of thought’ in the sense of aspects, associations and connections that allow us a completer view than is normally available to perception: (yet this claim seems inconsistent with Kant’s later claim (opening §53) that beauty in nature is also the expression of aesthetic ideas).

Such representations are, to use a phrase of Yeats,

Those images that yet
Fresh images beget

The poet gives us ‘the sense of a universe’ as Valéry says.

So far we have a plausible candidate for poetic talent—the ability to deploy a metaphor or exemplary image—but what converts this to Kantian genius? Kant is sparing in what he counts as creative, and what he says relates it to our experience of the sublime: it consists in finding the representation that ‘sets in motion the faculty of intellectual ideas’. It is indeed a particular ‘completeness’ that constitutes genius, a particular aesthetic idea or representation, one that awakens ideas of reason. There seem to be at least two possibilities here.

4

One is that the creativity consists in producing a representation that awakens the faculty of ideas by offering it a suitable object. The creative, as opposed to the merely talented, artist will offer us a representation of fame, for instance, that awakens us to ideas by arousing and attracting to itself an idea of fame. It could do this by embodying the idea in the representation, displaying fame in a certain light (in the way an attitude to fame may be expressed in a certain demeanour towards it). The representation thus allows us to see fame in a way that accords with the primal Kantian experience of the sublime, in which we undergo a reversal or reordering of what we attach importance to.

We could go further, and say that an idea can determine the form of the experience of fame—and that form of experience can itself be represented by the poet—as a certain, Stoic estimation of fame determines a demeanour of indifference towards it. However, it may be objected here that we all already operate with some idea or conception of fame. In that case, what is distinctive or interesting about what Kant is trying to say?

It is at least clear that people do have different conceptions or ideas of fame. But none of this captures the particular perspective that seems to be implicit in Kant’s account, carried over from the experience of the sublime to that of art, of seeing the phenomena (the way things appear to us) as a determined totality. To have the idea of fame in a Kantian sense is coming, in Arnold’s phrase, to see it clearly and see it whole, but from a point of view not available in experience, from a point of view, crucially, not available in a life in which the faculty of ideas (soul) remains dormant.

But what kind of contrast is involved here? When Kant talks about ideas in the context of the sublime and of genius, he is mostly talking about moral ideas, so the contrast is one in which, on the one hand, there are views of the human condition (all that man is) that are internal reflections of our temporal or ‘worldly’ desires (the fury and the mire of human veins) and, on the other, one in which we see all of this as a totality, in that vision of sublimity that reorders our priorities and converts our attitudes. To put it another way, we are talking about an estimation of the significance of fame that depends upon the recognition of the final, perhaps absolute significance of something else, which, when we are awakened to it, puts fame and the rest precisely in their place. Kant’s characterisation of poetry in §53 may be helpful here:

Poetry … expands the mind by giving freedom to the imagination and by offering, from among the boundless multiplicity of possible forms accordant with a given concept, to whose bounds it is restricted, that one which couples with the presentation of the concept a wealth of thought (Gedankenfülle) to which no verbal expression is completely adequate, and by thus rising aesthetically to ideas. It invigorates the mind by letting it feel its faculty—free, spontaneous, and independent of nature—of regarding and estimating nature as phenomenon in the light of aspects which nature of itself does not afford us in experience, either for sense or understanding, and of employing it accordingly in behalf of, and as a sort of schema for, the supersensible.

The proposition that what we experience are appearances or phainomena is not grounded in the experience, but is an estimate of it grounded in thought, an estimate of the ‘world’ from a point beyond it as it were. There is an analogy in his mind, determined no doubt by the fact that for him our moral nature is located in the noumenal realm, outside the ‘world’ (and the ethical sense of that expression is obviously relevant here), between the relationship of noumena and phenomena, on the one hand, and the free humanity of our rational will and our determined or conditioned human nature on the other. And just as the experience of the sublime can awaken the faculty of thought that estimates nature in its totality as appearance, so the poetic representation can show us or otherwise put us in touch with a moral or even spiritual estimate of our determined human nature and the way it conducts itself: an estimate that is unavailable unless this dimension is awakened.

The poetic achievement ‘invigorates the mind by letting it feel its faculty … of regarding and estimating nature as phenomenon in the light of aspects which nature does not afford us in experience, either for sense or understanding’—or, perhaps less ponderously, and resuscitating the ‘dead metaphors’ in Kant’s prose, ‘it strengthens the mind and lets it feel it power … of looking at (betrachten) and judging nature as appearance (Erscheinung) from points of view (nach Ansichten) which it does not itself offer either for sense or understanding’. The point of view belongs to the sphere of Reason.

On several occasions Kant talks about the ‘inadequacy of the concept’ or of language to the aesthetic or rational ideas. The 'much thought' said to be induced by the poet’s representation is not to be understood as part of a further conceptual determination or description of the object represented, but rather as the content of the free play of imagination and understanding ('the quickening of the cognitive faculties') into responsive reflective activity. The reason that ‘language can never get quite on level terms’ with the aesthetic idea or ‘render [it] completely intelligible’ (§ 49, p 174) seems to be that the function of language is to give expression to our conceptual determinations of objects, and the wealth of thought induced by the artistic representation is not part of this, and since no concept is adequate to it then neither therefore is language, though Kant is operating with a restricted conception of language that his own incipient expressionism clearly undermines.

It is not merely the burgeoning and augmentation of a responsive mental activity that defies conceptual expression, but also the perspectives embodied in and determining the form of the representation that give rise to that responsiveness. Perspectives can be ‘named’, of course, but they have to be inhabited rather than described if we are to see things from the position by which they are determined. The 'concept' descriptively determines its object, in this case the artistic representation, and what the concept is not adequate to, what eludes its grasp, is the activated train of associated thoughts and isomorphic images that centre round the Vollständigkeit of the representation, but is not part of its description, and cannot itself be finally described, because it is essentially indefinite and open-ended. Although the representation satisfies the concept, as it were, it is not comprehended by the concept. The concept under which it falls is not adequate to its productive reality or to either its manifest or latent content. It is a complex particular which exemplifies a complex universal, or set of universals, which latter can, indeed, only be evoked, remaining resonantly unspoken and implicit, the crowded background set of instances which determine the sense of the particular. The luminous presence of the one example sparks the quickening of the cognitive faculties into an involuntary perception of the realities it exemplifies and evokes. There is no other way for the universal to be present. The universal cannot, of course, be described, but is present only in its open-ended and often surprising range of tokens. Frequently it is the work of art itself that represents the new, the surprising and baffling token, which puts the mind under pressure to find the connections and similarities, the world that makes sense of it, which then irrupts into the imagination in a sudden release.

This notion of a ‘world’—or sense of a universe—though not strictly Kantian, is a possible development of the notion of Vollständigkeit. It also allows us the idea of a more fully formed object of the awakened idea. The artistic representation presents a world which is the object of ideas, and those ideas shed a light on it; that illumination by ideas can also be shown in the representation, which can express an attitude to the very world that is represented. Again, this enhances the notion of that Vollständigkeit or ‘completeness’ that is supposedly not available in nature: it is the expressiveness in the representation of an attitude or perspective on the human experience.

5

A well-known passage from the writing of Simone Weil might be usefully rehearsed here, since it provides us with an image for understanding what might be involved in having a moral or spiritual idea of fame or of other temporal things:

The Gospel contains a conception of human life, not a theology … Earthly things are the criterion of spiritual things … Only spiritual things are of value, but only physical things have a verifiable existence. Therefore, the value of the former can only be verified as an illumination projected onto the latter.[4]

This seems to bear on Kant’s description of the experience of a reordering of one’s priorities, as an aspect of one’s experience of the sublime or of art, but also puts pressure on it. The reordering he talks about is not simply a matter of an experience, though it can be a revelatory experience, as Kant indicates in his own way. But revelatory experiences take the form of a vision which you can then fail to live up or lose, and there is a clear distinction between the revelatory experience of the possibility of transcending temporal or worldly desires (the flesh) and the embodiment of that transcendence in a life. A person’s demeanour towards ‘earthly things’ is the criterion of their spiritual condition. But let us return to this distinction between an intimated and a lived transcendence. The difficulty of the idea is brought out in the following passage from Winch:

expressions used with a religious emphasis may serve to articulate a standard from the point of view of which the disorder and wretchedness which so largely characterise human life in its fundamental aspects may be assessed and come to terms with.

He adds, significantly, 'Though what sort of 'coming to terms with' this is, I have neither the space nor the comprehension to say more about'. This is not a confession of philosophical obtuseness, but rather acknowledges, with a humility not common among philosophers, the possibility of a condition that lies beyond his reach. His remark implicitly reminds us that the point of view or perspective that marks the standard he refers to is not so easily put on or taken off as an item of clothing. It is rather that when we talk of the Kantian ideas we are talking of formations of subjectivity that cannot be assumed or discarded at will by an independent or unaffected self that stands unaltered over against them. Kant talks about them being ‘awakened’, about their 'strengthening' and 'extending' the mind or sensibility, but not about the perilous process of their embodiment. But if we take that seriously, then we need to ask how these particular formations arise and develop. For how is one supposed to gain even the sense of ‘a standard’ by which to assess and come to terms with the dense human realities of disorder and wretchedness, especially if one is immersed in them? How does one attain the sense of a possibility?

The idea of the sense of such a standard seems consonant with the Kantian notion of an awakening of the faculty of reason by the work of art or the sublime, allowing us at least to glimpse a perspective, however briefly, from which we see ‘the world’, in the ethical and spiritual sense of that word, as a limited whole and from a point beyond it, precisely the call of an ethical and spiritual life. A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains, as we have seen, ‘All that man is … etc’, but it also to that extent gives us the idea of a perspective on ‘The fury and the mire of human veins’. The cathedral dome stands as the image of a standard by which to judge, 'all that man is' in the poem, but that cannot be wholly right since this monument of unageing intellect itself represents a supreme human achievement, so that we have to correct our description of what it 'disdains', not 'All that man is', but 'All mere complexities' (hinting at the submerged, unrealised ‘simplicity’ of the soul, a simplicity of hammered gold and gold-enamelling only achieved in the furnaces of the Emperor’s smithies), 'The fury and the mire of human veins'. Or, if we stay with 'All that man is', then we have no choice but to ‘hail the superhuman’:

Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

These eerie lines with their multiple condensations, fractured syntax and fusions of sense that coherently collapse one thought into another, follow the slipping of consciousness into dream from the still unpurged fury and mire of human veins as at first the negative and only possible contrast with 'all that man is', so that the image of a man can only be that of one whose veins have been drained of life, in other words, a ghost or shade, but more image than a shade, because what floats before the poet's mind, who is describing both the forging of himself and of his own poem, is an image which allows other, connected, images to arise out of and reverberate around itself, as it shifts and dislocates and replaces itself with its implicit, associated surroundings, with images of Hades, the place of shades, then the image of a tomb, a mummy, an embalmed corpse, which shifts between Egyptian and Greek associations fusing into one another, an unravelling of life but also a thread through the labyrinth, a path out of Hades, ritual death and the mysteries, coalescing into the shocking mouth that has no moisture and no breath, into the notion that death and decay can themselves quicken the repelled imagination to the thought that even the negative associations of death can be unwound, and show a way back to life, not the life that has been left, but to a state he calls the superhuman, death-in-life and life-in-death.

These images track an interior movement between desolation and defiant hope, but they do so by a sequence of images that are natural objects of these mental states. Earlier, I dwelt on one way in which aesthetic idea can relate to the ideas of reason, one in which they offer themselves as objects and embodiments of those ideas. But there is another way in which they may ‘set the faculty of reason in motion’, in the way to be found, for instance, in the final stanza of Byzantium, in lines surrounding the two I quoted earlier:

Astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood,
Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,
The golden smithies of the Emperor!
Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget,
That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

In Greek legend the rescuing dolphin comes only with the poet, Arion’s, desperate final song before he drowns, in the sea of matter, perhaps; the dolphin which though itself of ‘mire and blood’ can rent the sea’s surface briefly, and have sight of land, and take Arion to the shores of his own element. Yeats has already written of ‘all that man is’, of ‘all mere complexities’, ‘the fury and the mire of human veins’, ‘all complexities of fury’, of breaking ‘bitter furies of complexity’ and shows us with a poet’s passion that is absent from Kant’s prose the intensity of the experience by which we undergo the struggle between the flesh and spirit, a struggle which includes the very recognition of the presence or the loss of soul. We have in the dolphin—and in the images that it begets— an image not of ‘awakening’ to a moral and spiritual dimension of life, but of rescue from the one and salvation by the other. The repetition of ‘fury’, ‘mire’, ‘complexity’ (an Augustinian angst that contrasts with Platonic calm) gives way to the image of drowning and being lost in matter or the flesh, the vision gone, but the sea’s surface can be rent and is disturbed and tormented by the sound of bells, the great Cathedral gong of the city of Byzantium, intimations of higher things, of transcendence. Transcendence here must mean more than the experience of a perspective, but the going beyond one condition or state of being to another, inhabiting that perspective, and Yeats describes the process, of ‘an agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve’, of the smithies of the emperor breaking the bitter furies of complexity and forging the tempered, hammered gold of the soul’s simplicity.

At the beginning of this paper I said that in writing about the sublime Kant had seemed to capture the sense of a perennial human experience. In retrospect, it seems more plausible to suggest that Kant offers us a religious or spiritual vision rather than a moral one. Some philosophers will resist what looks like a universal objective morality as determining the scope of artistic genius. But the argument about morality must be left to another place. I had also asked whether the Kantian vision was genuinely profound or merely illusory (though maybe it could be both). Is there indeed, in Winch’s words, ‘a standard from the point of view of which the disorder and the wretchedness which so largely characterise human life in its fundamental aspects may be assessed and come to terms with’? It has to be said that Kant writes with vexing serenity about the ideas of reason that are set in motion by the sublime and by the work of artistic genius. But, on the other hand, he makes no claim to knowledge, only to possibilities of thought. On the other hand, the more anguished Yeats seems to project a knowledge derived from experience.

Perhaps it has to be remembered that the rescuing dolphin comes only in the desperate last moments of the poet’s call, as we are told.

This paper is dedicated to the memory of the late Professor M.P. Rege

[1] In Transformations of Mind: Philosophy as Spiritual Practice, Cambridge University Press, 2000.
[2] References are to the Meredith translation, with some minor alterations by the author.
[3] ‘…in einer Vollständigkeit sinnlich zu machen, für die sich in der Natur kein Beispiel findet. Meredith’s translation slightly obscures an interesting repetition in Kant’s German of the word for an example (Beispiel): ‘the poet shows us things which we find examples of in our experience, death, envy, love and so on, but goes beyond the bounds of experience by displaying them with a completeness of which there is no example in nature’.
[4] Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks, p 147, quoted in Peter Winch, Trying to Make Sense, p 122


References

Kant, Immanuel, 1928. Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford, Clarendon Press
— 1957. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Wiesbaden, Suhrkamp
McGhee, Michael, 2000. Transformations of Mind: Philosophy as Spiritual Practice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Weil, Simone, 1970. First and Last Notebooks, trans. Richard Rees. Oxford, Oxford University Press
Winch, Peter, 1987. Trying to Make Sense, Oxford, Basil Blackwell
Yeats, W.B., 1992. Collected Poems, ed. Augustine Martin. London, Vintage