As Lord Bacon said, scientia potentia est: knowledge is power. Bacon warns the inquirer, the natural philosopher against the ‘four idols’-- various forms of social prejudice-- as obstacles to inquiry, and claims elsewhere that his inductive logic is superior to Aristotelian logic because it can be used to create new knowledge that makes life better, not merely to codify established truths. This seems like a great idea, science alleviating human misery; however, for Bacon, science can only investigate nature, it cannot inquire into matters of church and state.
The contradiction we see here coming to birth in Bacon is the contradiction that drives much discourse on the sciences: on the one hand, we have the general principle of scientific materialism--there is a real truth about the external world which can be revealed through sustained material engagement with reality, understanding it allows people to improve their lives--but, on the other hand, we have various forms of idealism which claim that there is no such truth about the organization of society, there can be no such truth about human history these are composed of other stuff.
Idealist thinkers fetishize the ‘scientific method,’ but they ignore the scientific orientation. Typically apostles of method will select a particular science and use some case studies from its history to demonstrate what appear to be general truths about science. Where its physics one is a positivist, where its biology one is a pragmatist. However, some of us grow weary of the merry-go-round of particulars held up as universal, and insist that there is a scientific approach to phenomena that all scientific endeavors have in common. This orientation seems to be little more than a vague adherence to materialism--the discovery of truth by making contact with an objectively existing external reality.
Are religious people disturbed when they think that none of their prophets knew how many continents existed and what they were like? I doubt they are. They should be disturbed only when their priests today deny such knowledge....they have no excuse
In every generation, someone makes the claim that philosophy is dead, and yet, like the ever-imminent Christian Apocalypse, this death never seems to come. History is done, philosophy is dead, the stars are not wanted now, put out every one, pack up the moon and dismantle the sun etc etc… This mentality of self-pity or whatever you want to call it usually is the result of taking some theological, philosophical or scientific hyperbolist a bit too seriously. Wittgenstein did not murder philosophy with the Tractatus, not Hegel with his Phenomenology, nor Fukuyama with his End of History, nor Dewey with his frightful pragmatist nonsense, what they did was to provide a certain type of enabling optical illusion, an excuse for the tired, for the weary for those whose fantasy was such a death to seize upon.
Philosophy will never die as a result of its problems being “solved” or “dissolved.” It will only be clinically dead for as long as a people lack imagination enough to practice it. The definition of philosophy in these terms falsifies it. Philosophy is about the creation of the problem, about posing a problem, about problematization, not about reconciliations or solutions. As soon as one “problem” is “(dis)solved,” life has already thrown another mountain in the way of the sensitive mind. As Emerson put it in his essay Circles:
There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us. The man finishes his story, - how good! how final! how it puts a new face on all things! He fills the sky. Lo, on the other side rises also a man and draws a circle around the circle we had just pronounced the outline of the sphere. Then already is our first speaker not man, but only a first speaker. His only redress is forthwith to draw a circle outside of his antagonist. And so men do by themselves. The result of to-day, which haunts the mind and cannot be escaped, will presently be abridged into a word, and the principle that seemed to explain nature will itself be included as one example of a bolder generalization.
What Emerson is saying here is beautiful. It can also be shown as its “photonegative” if you will. Every ‘finality’ has a hole in it; every theoretical machinery thrown before you is less than equal to the world to the cosmos, Reason, being or whatever, it has a flaw, it has an oversight, it has some authoritarian dogma that thrusts itself forward groundlessly that you can get your staff under in order to flip the entire edifice. Personally, I prefer Emerson’s formulation with its emphasis on the creative and active orientation, but we should understand that this depends on the negative, the lack, the surpassibility in all theoretical work as an enabling condition.
Personally, I commend the efforts of true philosophers toward closure. It ups the stakes for my thought after I read them. They seal their riddle tighter and thereby force me to work harder to transcend them. However, I deplore the efforts of their epigones to render unthinkable, to interdict, to taboo the sort of flexibility in thought and language that is necessary to get around the master. Philosophy should not provide a shelter for stupidity. Philosophy should try its best not to reproduce the structures of society that perpetuate stupidity. When the philosophical community uses practices of non-argumentative exclusion (i.e. violence) to secure some treasured dogma, or prevent the philosophical articulation of certain types of experience or certain problems, it becomes institutionalized stupidity, and regardless of the external pressures brought to bear, becomes a farce. The bureaucrats of the spirit thereby impose their formula by force much to the detriment of wisdom…
(b)proposal
Though there are surely a large number of propositions that could be advanced in aide of our gay science, I shall here limit myself to one and one half. Perhaps others can object that I have excluded a good idea, and they will be absolutely right. I shall limit myself to the proposal of an alternative institution and a brief statement of something that can be done there. Though some may find it strange to speak of an institution, expecting from me a theoretical proposition or something of that nature, I ask them to hold their skepticism in abeyance until the end of the proposal.
For the past couple of weeks, I have been traveling between my home and Lower Manhattan to attend a certain occupation there. This experience has wrought much positive change within and without the participants therein. We find ourselves together, a part of a sort of global movement. This movement has to do with combating austerity and trying to induce the birth of a new society. It is loosely organized, and was brought into existence through the force of example, and a philosophical call, like Marx issued in the manifesto, for the instantiation of a certain spirit in a concrete institution.
As a firm believer in philosophy as a human right, in philosophy for all, I was elated to observe the proceedings at Zucotti Park. What they had was a popular assembly, like those popping up around the world. The format of discussion permitted everyone to have a turn and to call any item of the agenda or the procedures into question. Though at first things were a bit tedious, once people got used to it, it worked very smoothly. The debates at the park, crucially, transitioned between theoretical and practical concerns, accommodating both, linking both into the eventual practices of the community—from marching to drafting manifestos signs and slogans.
My modest proposal is this: we should organize popular assemblies for philosophy in our own communities especially if we live away from the great centers. These should be open air spaces where people can come and go as they please, where free food and drink is provided, where nothing is off the table, and where the discussion can lead to manifestos creative productions and group actions. Most importantly, there should be extensive outreach to bring in non-university people. Philosophical education is perniciously denied to secondary school (and primary school) students in the United States and most other countries and this cuts off so many from an activity they could love if only they had the opportunity.
In what sense will this revitalize philosophy? For too long (since Kant’s day?) philosophy has been tied to the university. This institution is currently failing philosophy drastically. This institution is content to gut philosophy in the name of budgetary concerns and staff the departments with adjuncts. This institution promulgates the lie that philosophy is not important to society. This institutional ingrate denies its own dependence on philosophy in its historical evolution. It also cuts off philosophical research from broader currents in society. These assemblies can operate autonomously as a sort of supplement to the universities, allowing scholars to let their hair down and allowing everyone access to the philosophical. Lest we should forget, Socrates spent his days in the agora, the town square observing and problematizing the ways he saw there.
What should be discussed? I would advocate for the discussion of everyday life: work, food, technology, love, sex, music, books we’ve read and so on. This discussion should lead to communal reflection where people say aloud the ideas they have around these topics in a collective body that wants to hear them. Yes, something like group therapy, but also something like a seminar and something like a social movement.
Though I have not been able to fully articulate this possibility, I think it promising for the revitalization of philosophy the human being and society. Only practice will permit the articulation of this possibility, and that is not the concern of an individual mind, it is the work of numbers of people coming together and challenging one another. I am sure there are points I have missed and I regret that my descriptions have been short, but when do things ever come to a ‘fin’ so often in life things are arbitrarily terminated before their ripeness. I appreciate any feedback you can give….
(Utah Phillips)
Standing in your shadow, afraid to go outside
I could listen to your music all night long
But the world keeps on changing, there's still no place to hide
I know that we can't change it with a song
Chorus:
One hand on the keyboard, moonlight fills the room
One hand on the Ebro, no regrets
One hand on tomorrow, reaching for the sun
One hand on the sun that never sets
The white cliffs of Gandessa lie sleeping in the rain
I guess some places always have their kings
Now I hear you singing the forgotten songs of Spain
And I wish we could remember all those things
Chorus
I thought that I had trouble when I was on the loose
That must have been a carnival instead
And now I hear our children singing, 'What's the use?'
And they drop a little something for their head
Chorus
upon the professions of the money seekers, " When they
speak they lie; when they are silent they are stealing,"
an epigram deserving of perpetuation.
--Gustavus Myers, History of the great American Fortunes pg 488
"What are a few looted mansions compared with their looted lives? You don't care if the foreign armies with whom you're making secret deals march in and massacre the people You hope the people will be wiped out so you can flourish and when they are wiped out not a muscle will twitch in your puffy bourgeois faces which are now all twisted up in anger and disgust" Marat's messge to the tea party
"I am tired of being told there is no such animal by animals that are merely different.If I am a giraffe, and the ordinary Englishmen who write about me and say they know me are nice well-behaved dogs, there it is, the animals are different....Believe me you don't love me. The animal that I am you instinctively dislike--" D.H. Lawrence
Traditional determinisms have been deeply flawed, instead of looking for the direct influence of a single determinism on the person (knee-jerk determinism), we should view determinism as a multiple thing. Human beings are subject to multiple interacting determinisms. The freedom to choose is essentially constituted in relation to a deterministic cosmos in which it is used. I become free through the process of learning, by exposing myself to the stubbornness of the other beings in the world I come to liberate myself from my errors and to see the range of options available. It is only because the environment is composed of independent determinisms that the learning process can take place as a transformative dialogue. It is always in the context of our exposure that our choices are free, and to some extent we can choose what to expose ourselves to.
By showing a genuine interest in the thought processes of other people, and asking questions intended to reveal them to us, we have an impact on consciousness. We end up inducing philosophy in people. If we do this with non-atheists, we enrich atheism by exposing ourselves to problems and facts that are not current in 'our' discourses, and we encourage ourselves together with the non-atheist to think philosophically, not defensively, not just critically, but fearlessly and joyously.
These questions about the moral status of the human being have been settled long ago, or they are irrelevant or both, so we are told: the gods are in charge of that, and they register their pleasure or displeasure through inscrutable signs, textual and natural; to even speak of morals in such a sense is nonsense, morals are transacted between individuals, there can be no overall perspective without a god etc etc.... And alongside these glib rationalizations is plain old passive slack jawed ignorance--the inclination not to think if one does not have to. In our daily lives, filled as they are with significant duties and tasks--i.e. collaborate, serve the market in various forms, maintain technology, make purchases etc etc--it is necessary to allow such problems to fade into the background to some extent.
The 'moral report card' is composed half by historians and humanists of various kinds (literary scholars, psychiatrists, courts, etc etc.) and half by natural scientists. We can reduce it to two columns. Column A--intraspecies relations. Column B--interspecies relations. The first column is morals as we usually think of them; the second column is composed of ecology and stuff like that. This rectifies a common error made by many human beings: when thinking about the actions of their kind, they only take responsibility in a moral sense for less than half. There is a sphere of ethics--Column A, and a sphere of ontology--Column B. This is a deeply ingrained prejudice, a thoughtless cognitive activity that underlies and subverts thought. Once we examine this dualism, we see that there is always an overlap of A and B. There is something immoral about not feeding my dog, it is wrong to gratuitously waste resources etc etc. Contrary to the alleged immoral influence of the sciences, anomie, the murder of god and so on, their data and thought processes make a demand of morality, but it is a demand that many people are not sure how to hear-- include more.
Judged by any sane standard the human race fails on both columns. But that was obvious, wasn't it.
Antonio Damasio sees joy as a fundamental affective relation to the world. He works from his neurological studies and a reading of Spinoza. You will recall that for Spinoza joy is the feeling of the increase of a body and a mind's power of acting. Damasio extends this in a sense, he puts joy forward as a sort of fundamental affective index of the quality of our existence. If we are in a world where we flourish, we know the affect of joy, if we are in a world where we do not flourish we know the contrary affect of sadness.
Thus, joy/sadness are social-political categories. When we think about society and politics, we should think from these basic affective relations, these basic felt senses of what the world is and how we fit with it. The sense of joy or sadness is the individual person's most reliable index of social conditions. We speak often of intuition in this role, but intuition is not authentic, is not as rooted in the body and mind of the individual person as joy and sadness. Intuitions are components of a world-view, they are a mediation of the fundamental impulses of joy and sadness.
These first principles of social life are very inconvenient. They do not respond to argumentation. They respond to the actual material conditions of the individual life. (Take this individ stuff with a grain of salt, it is always lived in society). For example, if my individual life consists of a dull round of commute, work, commute, tv, sleep, commute, work, shop, commute sleep, and so on, I will have a basic and ineradicable sense of the poverty of my existence regardless of the amount of $$$ I make or the nobility of my sacrifice for the proletariat.
Societies have developed various means for mediating these basic affects. Currently we have 2 major ones: mass spectacle and institutions. Mass spectacle includes the media, actual spectacles like the Nuremberg Rallies, and so on; institutions include the family, the couple, the law and psychiatry--confinement of 'mentally ill people' and distribution of psychotropic drugs. there is no hard and fast distinction between these 2: a legal trial can easily become a media spectacle, and media can easily invade our conjugal lives etc etc.
The main point of these means of mediation is to put a distance between us, as political subjects/objects and the first line of defense that our bodies have against a bad society--our basic impulses of joy and sadness. If we just sit back for a moment and think about this problem, we realize that there is a continual discourse that denies the reality of what our bodies tell us. It is not the rhythm of emptiness and inhumanity no, no, it is your individual brain chemistry etc etc.
2. What philosophy can do
Philosophy should help people to clarify their desire. Desire is our striving toward that which would make us joyous. If we live in a world that begets sadness, we will find it difficult to imagine a world in which joy would be the order of the day. The path toward this would is somewhat scary, and philosophy can serve to affirm authenticity--being true to our joys---against the sophisms of the ministers of denial and sadness. I find (and this may seem odd) that Montaigne is a great example of this. In his essays he gives arguments that have emboldened him to stay true in his weakest moments. On the contrary, there have been many philosophers throughout history who have told us to resign ourselves, to renounce our instinctive striving toward joy in favor of a moral world order or some other form of 'discipline.' This sort of philosopher will tell us that our lives are not ours; our lives mustn't be lived for mere joy, we need to devote ourselves to state god church market economy law etc etc. Our philosophers will tell us that in order for life to be anything we need to stay true to our joys even when they make life in the world of sadness seem more difficult.
Thus, philosophy should inflame courage in us. It should embolden us to challenge that which enforces sadness as a way of life. Philosophers should uphold the higher value of joy, and should bring forward detailed analyses of how joy is blocked together with ideas for how to destroy the obstacles to it. Philosophers should be the ones who confront us with the union of beauty and truth in the statement that re-unites us with our joys and allows us to look down with contempt on the sadness. In this case, philosophy will act as a counter-measure to spectacles and institutions of sadness. This is possible because though the body is singular/unique for each of us, the body is also collective, our joys and sadnesses are shared though too often in separation and in silent desperation.
Overall, it is necessary for philosophers to break our of the dead end path imposed on a dying humanities in the bourgeois university and make itself relevant not to the government/corporate interests that write the grants, but to the people in the streets who are still reeling from the neo-liberal assault that began in 1973. When philosophy can be measured in terms of grant money, that is the death, and let the shocking digits be inscribed on its tombstone.
I. Background
A metanarrative is a story that would give universal meaning to history. There have been many metanarratives, and two of the most common are Christianity and Marxism, though there are many others. The Christian and Marxist metanarratives can also be called eschatologies, this word comes from the Greek for “last” (eschatos) and “study of” (-ology), and an eschatology is a story that is concerned with the ultimate destiny and meaning of the world, and of life. Both of these ways of thinking see history as a plane of unhappiness and alienation. The Christian eschatology culminates with a transcendent agency annihilating history for the sake of a higher realm, while the Marxist narrative ends with people within history bringing it to a close by ending alienation and exploitation through political and economic action. So, we can see that both of these eschatologies include much discussion of history, but culminate in something other than history. As a sort of midpoint between these two, we have the meta-narrative of Enlightenment modernity; according to this narrative, history is the story of the bold fight of an enlightened elite struggling to protect accumulated scientific knowledge and principle of the application of Reason to public institutions from superstition and authority; protecting the idea that public life should be based on freedom and equal rights and the idea that through change and action we can make life better.
According to Lyotard, people are increasingly skeptical toward this type of story. Something seems to have changed in the relation between the people and certain metanarratives. It seems that the once liberatory narrative of Enlightenment and modernity has lost its street credibility in the wake of a number of developments in the world including the betrayal of the revolution by Stalin, the abandonment of the revolution of ’68, capitalist incorporation of trade unions and workers’ parties, and so on. It has become increasingly apparent that the metanarratives of opposition and liberation, in order to remain metanarratives, needed to be complicit with the very power structures they would liberate people from. It can also be thought of as the autocannibalism of Reason, which neglected to neglect itself in the work of demystification.
II. Lyotard, Nietzsche, Heidegger
How does Lyotard’s postmodern condition look when we bring it into relation with Nietzsche’s “Death of God”? In the wake of this death, any transcendent value system, any beyond, becomes unbelievable; this includes knowledge, truth, reason, good, evil, and the other members of the secular pantheon. The rug is pulled out from under all symbolic values, especially those that propped themselves up against religion. In order to explain modernity and the transition from modernity to whatever follows, we should refer to two quotes from Nietzsche, first his statement that “God is dead; but given the ways of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.[1]”and second “The event itself is far too great, too distant, too remote from the multitude’s capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of as having arrived as yet.[2]”
Thus, we can understand ‘modernity’ as a bubble that opened up, wherein God had died or was dying, yet the residue of theology was left behind and adapted to ‘worldly ends.’ It seems that Lyotard is heralding the arrival of that death on a scale larger than was to be seen in Nietzsche’s day. However, this death is a process underway since long before the postmodern era; looking to Nietzsche, we see it underway in the late nineteenth century. Nietzsche’s thought on the matter of nihilism had a disciple of sorts in Martin Heidegger. Heidegger’s essay, “On the Question of Technology” is highly relevant for understanding the arrival of the death of God in contemporary society, and the technological nihilism that comes with it. First, we see the prevalence of one-dimensional technological rationality on an unprecedented scale. With this, we also face the increasing identification of being as a standing reserve, this includes knowing and thinking. Second, and inseparable from the first, we can see the revival of the Platonic doctrine of the noble lie by the neo-conservative movement; we can call this irony or cynicism, depending on our point of view, but it is a gesture of bold and daring nihilism. Between these two thinkers, we can see the ‘postmodern’ theorized under another name, namely nihilism, and it is my interpretation that Lyotard is recognizing a moment in the history of nihilism when he speaks of the postmodern. It seems that Lyotard attributed to the postmodern an unwarranted singularity as if some kind of rupture had occurred, when it is best viewed as a moment in the history of technihilism
Based on this context, there is much to be commended in Lyotard’s reading of the postmodern, but it seems that he was blind to the continuity involved. His summary definition of postmodernism can be assimilated to a preexisting explanation as put forward by Nietzsche and Heidegger. One can even be so bold as to claim that the era of technihilism began definitively with the
A proper theorization of postmodernism, if it is to be asserted that we live in such a time right now, would be content to accept the death of God and the rise of technological nihilism as background. It is a very good basis, a good context into which to place a theorization of the postmodern, as we have seen that postmodernity is a moment in the history of nihilism. What a good theory of the postmodern needs to do is to find the particularity of the postmodern as it stands over against the other moments in the history of technological nihilism. Lyotard’s formulation can only leave us hungry in that respect as it draws attention to the nihilism and the technologism without looking for the concrete instantiations the details of how that is playing out in the current day. If we place such a theory as I think it should be placed, different things, different features of the current time become salient to the investigator, become theoretically interesting. Lyotard, thoughtful though he is, may not prepare us for what we are dealing with today; his theorization does not provide us with tools for handling the change in the means of relating to metanarrativity which I feel characterizes the current era, the shift from modernist perspectives that deal in necessity to perspectives that embody a consciousness of radical contingency.
III. Strauss, Detournement, Populism
There are a few metanarratives that are flourishing right now. One of them, and the most farcical of all, is the neo-conservative oligarcho-imperialist populism metanarrative. As Thomas Frank once said, neoconservative propaganda in the
If we want to understand what we are living, we need to revisit Lyotard’s formulation and contextualize it within contemporary political events. While we can say that Karl Marx was the most influential political philosopher for most of the twentieth century, we may have to concede that thus far in the twenty first it has been Leo Strauss, the contemporary of Heidegger, and the patron philosopher of the neo-conservative movement. The Rudolph Giulianis, neo-conservatives, the Nixonians, the Reganites, the Thatcherites, these are postmoderns, these and the broader movement they are a part of are emblems of the era in which we are living; an era that has more in common with a Christian Fundamentalist punk band than it does with The Velvet Underground. We are now living in the age of the conservative revolution, the bizarre and monstrous inversion of the traditional distribution of ideas. We must recognize that the conservative revolution and all that comes with it are as
In this era the political ground has shifted under our feet revealing a radical contingency, we come to see that there is no necessary connection between forms (artistic or social) and positions within the class struggle, that all of these correlations come about through contingent historical articulation. We are living in a time characterized by a bizarre detournement in which conservative cultural revolution has become a serious force in political life. An excellent example of this is Bob Roberts; a film written and directed in 1992 by the American actor Tim Robbins. In this film, Roberts, a conservative folk singer and businessman, runs for a seat in the senate, all the while recording albums that contort the music of Woodie Guthrie and Bob Dylan into the shape of the resurgent right. It is very much as Marx said in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Naploeon, “ Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.[4] ”
As any person who knows a young republican/born again Christian/or jihadist can tell you, in this period there is no shortage of zealots of every kind; true believers swarm us from every direction, parties, religions, cults and so on have no shortage of followers. If we stick with a definition of the postmodern condition as skepticism, we render ourselves blind to the culture of farcical detournement, as well as the fact that our world is characterized by an almost medieval zealotry for metanarrative; it is best to view Lyotard’s pronouncement as an aspect of a moment in the development of nihilism, not as a new epoch in human history. If we must advance a definition of postmodernity our focus must be on radical contingency and reversal not on skepticism, it must be on appropriation not on contemplation.
[1] Friedrich Nietzsche. The Gay Science, Tr. Walter Kaufmann.
[2] Ibid, pg. 279, #343.
[3] Something like this claim can be found in his What's Wrong with
[4] Karl Marx. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/wor
For Shelley, language should be theorized in relation to social change as well as social foundation. If we accept that the “poetic faculty” is responsible for the articulation of founding social fictions, we have the starting point for a theory which is particularly well suited—due to its focus on creativity and innovation--to theorizing social change. To get started, let’s return to the Defense, and look at Shelley’s second most famous quotation about the quality of the poet’s language:
Their language is vitally metaphorical; that is it marks the before unapprehended relations of things, and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which re present them become through time signs for portions and classes of thoughts, instead of pictures of integral thoughts; and then, if no new poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse. These similitudes or relations are finely said by Lord Bacon to be "the same footsteps of nature impressed upon the various subjects of the world" and he considers the faculty which receives them as the storehouse of axioms common to all knowledge. (Shelley,5)
This quotation will be the point of departure for the rest of our discussion. Two important points are raised in this quotation; the first concerns the process of dissemination of the poetic insight. The second comes from the next sentence where Shelley cites Francis Bacon. Overall, Shelley is saying that the “vital metaphoricity” of poetic language is its ability to come up with new names and analogies (“similitudes”) for talking about and thinking about the world, but that these new insights need to be perpetually renewed, or “language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human intercourse.” In what follows, I will review Shelley’s thoughts on language and change in knowledge, opinion, and social forms. According to Shelley, the poetic function has great moral, political and epistemic power; it is capable of introducing a break with existing social and historical conditions. However, what happens when the poetic function is in decline? Shelley offers us an interesting theoretical take on the power of language under differing social conditions; in the final section, I will review this discussion.
( Poetic Function and Thought )
2.1.1 The Poetic Function and Thought
One of the most infamous ideas in the history of linguistics is the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or to be fairer to the linguists who worked with this hypothesis before it was named, the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Shelley’s thinking about the relations between language and thought is akin to this hypothesis, as are his remarks about the “vanity of translation.” In what is perhaps an extreme formulation, Whorf explains the hypothesis as follows:
We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated. …The relativity of all conceptual systems, ours included, and their dependence upon language stand revealed (Whorf, 214).
Shelley differs from what we might call ‘vulgar relativism’ by virtue of his inclusion of the poetic function in his theory of language. This frees him from some of the worst problems that arise from affirming linguistic relativity as well as various forms of historical determinism: often we are told that if our theory holds that thought is always relative to or strongly conditioned by language and history then it is impossible to explain change. Thus, Shelley is very focused on showing the way the poetic function allows for creativity in addition to conditioning. This is the genius in his idea that language itself is poetic or fictional: from the beginning, we see reciprocal conditioning at work, the poetic faculty explaining the genesis of language as a condition of our thought, but the poetic function within language allowing us to be creative even as we are shaped by the linguistic system.
For Shelley, the poetic function works “revolutions in opinion,” and it is for us as his expositors to inquire into some of the ways that this happens. Shelley holds that Francis Bacon was a poetic revolutionary because: “[h]is language has a sweet and majestic rhythm that satisfies the sense no less than the almost superhuman wisdom of his philosophy satisfies the intellect” (Shelley,26). This combination of new insight with pleasure is the key to the power of the poetic function in language, as Shelley puts it later in his Shelley:
Poetry is ever accompanied with pleasure: all spirits on which it falls, open themselves to receive the wisdom which is mingled with its delight. In the infancy of the world, neither poets themselves nor their auditors are fully aware of the excellency of poetry: for it acts in a divine and unapprehended manner, beyond and above consciousness: and it is reserved for future generations to contemplate and measure the mighty cause and effect in all the strength and splendour of their union. (Shelley,11)
In this section, we see repeated the association between knowledge and pleasure: the revolution in opinions is worked through aesthetic gratification as much as it is through intellectual conviction because any innovation at the fundamental level is displacing the very concept words that any such conviction would look to for confirmation. Pleasure causes people to open themselves up to receive the new, it is through pleasure that the challenge of determinism is overcome. Much has been written from a psychological angle about desire in language, and this is another way that Shelley fits into contemporary discourses on language.
Shelley said of Homer that his poetry, “opened up a desire of becoming like” the models that he held up in his verses (12). This echoes with Shelley’s statement about “determining the will of a social being to action,” implying that the poetic function in language works revolutions in opinions and knowledge by means of pleasure, using pleasure to activate the desire for new truths. Again, Shelley writes:
Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. ( Shelley, 14)
Let’s analyze what he is saying here: the mind is expanded, new thoughts are introduced, and the introduction of these new thoughts is pleasurable to the receiver. This activity of gratifying imaginative expansion results in ethical improvement. Ethics, at least under some readings, is that area of thinking which explores how we should live together, the social as opposed and related to the political. Therefore, Shelley is giving us a radically new way of looking not only at the relations between knowledge and poetry, but also at the relations between pleasure, truth, and politics.
Shelley presents several examples of this process in action. First, he deals with the transition from the decline of the Roman Empire to the rise of Christian civilization in Europe. He writes:
At length the antient system of religion and manners had fulfilled the circle of its revolutions. And the world would have fallen into utter anarchy and darkness, but that there were found poets among the authors of the Christian and Chivalric systems of manners and religion, who created forms of opinion and action never before conceived; which copied into the imaginations of men became as generals to the bewildered armies of their thoughts. ( Shelley,25 )
And he also discusses the downfall of the Inquisition, and the rise of science:
We might not at this moment have been congratulating each other on the abolition of the Inquisition in Spain. But it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton had ever existed;…The human mind could never, except by the intervention of these excitements, have been awakened to the invention of those grosser sciences, and that application of analytical reasoning to the aberrations of society, which it is now attempted to exalt over the direct expression of the inventive and creative faculty itself. (Shelley,36 )
We see the poetic function being taken up by creative artists and philosophers, we see epochal alterations in the form and content of human civilization. This brings us to an important point about Shelley’s image of thought as it is related to language: Shelley sees thought as something social, something that happens over long stretches of time, not as something done by an isolated individual subject, during one lifetime: it is akin to our modern notion of discourse. The poetic function in language, regardless of who takes it up, alters the historical trajectory of thought, and can change the form and direction of civilization.
Must there be conditions on this power of the poetic function, or can it just happen at any time that someone can use this function to change the course of history? A nice summary of the relations between language and thought can be found in this statement from Shelley: “The most unfailing herald, companion and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is Poetry. At such periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature” (Shelley,46). This brings us to our next section regarding social climates. In our next section, we will be looking at Shelley’s remarks about periods of social decline and great periods in history. We will see that it is also possible to look at particular languages as “in decline” which I feel is a very valuable theoretical possibility, and one that has not hitherto been taken seriously.
( Language in Different Social Climes )
We should study the means by which languages and institutions are produced and sustained: this involves attention to the influence exerted on language by social change, on social change by language, and the influence of language in maintenance of the status quo. This could also be called a focus on the performative-pragmatic aspects of discourse. Shelley’s thoughts on the different types of societies lead us to think of a comparative linguistic study of the variations language undergoes under different political conditions, but his thought here should inspire us to read the Paradiso along with the Inferno and to study the moments when the creative force of the poetic function is operating at its most potent.
( Conclusions )
3.0 Conclusions
This has been a very limited survey of the potential insights that Shelley might offer to students of language and linguistics. I hope to have shown that Shelley presents us with a complex and historical image of language, one in which the “poetic function” is crucially important to human civilization. This “poetic function” is to be differentiated from the poetic faculty because it is not the possession of an individual subject, but a potential creativity in linguistic communities which allows for the production of new forms. This exploration has opened a number of possibilities for further inquiry, but does not seem to have come anywhere near to exhausting its subject. In what follows, I offer a few possibilities for further thought.
First, if we are operating under Shelleyan assumptions, what are popularly called “paradigm shifts” in societies can become very important to linguistics. Studying the discourses in a society where a paradigm shift is taking place will reveal much about language, and lead to the development of great technical innovations in linguistics.
Second, we will not differentiate between literary and non-literary texts, but we will look for operations of the poetic function in societies and attempt to understand and explain them. These processes, which Lecercle substantially clarifies with his notion of the “Unknown Coiner,” will allow us to come closer understanding the full arsenal of powers possessed by language. Thinking back on the poetic 'namings' as founding fictions we can look to our present moment and ask: who or what wields this power? This focus on naming as an integral aspect of language also has the potential to generate many interesting insights.
Third, this sort of orientation will stimulate interdisciplinary research with political science, comparative literature, philosophy, economics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, criminology, pedagogical science, computer science, and many other disciplines. The emphasis on the integral role that language and the poetic function have played throughout the history of civilizations facilitates cooperation with classical studies and archaeology as well.
Fourth, a Shelleyan orientation allows language to shift more toward philology than computer science and mathematics. Mathematics is a very interesting field of research, but it is of dubious validity as a meta-language to describe language. Models are useful maps and technical rigor is very important even from this point of view, but our models need to be sensitive to histories in a way that mathematical models are not even intended to be. This would not be classical philology, but something different that comes when we mix philology, a radical focus on pragmatics, particularly the theory of the performative, and the idea of discourse.
All of this is tentative and subject to revision, but it was a pleasure to have done it.
[i]“ In conclusion, we see that in order to explain what can go wrong with statements we cannot just concentrate on
the proposition involved (whatever that is) as has been done traditionally. We must consider the total situation
in which the utterance is issued-the total speech-act if we are to see the parallel between statements and
performative utterances, and how each can go wrong. Perhaps indeed there is no great distinction between
statements and performative utterances” (Austin, 52).
[ii] “Fiction” From Online Etymology Dictionary www.Etymonline.com:
1398, "something invented," from L. fictionem (nom. fictio) "a fashioning or feigning," from fingere "to shape, form, devise, feign," originally "to knead, form out of clay," from PIE*dheigh- (cf. O.E. dag "dough;" see dough).
As we have already seen, “England in 1819” is filled with poetic naming of a polemical sort. If we focus on this aspect of language, we find ourselves outside of mainstream linguistics. Mainstream linguistics theorizes structures, not forces. It knows how to describe and explain the syntax, semantics and to some extent the pragmatics of discourse, but it does not prioritize the aspects of linguistics on which Shelley bases his account of language. However, this is not to say that Shelley’s reflections are not consistent with those of any linguist or philosopher of language. In fact, Shelley’s method of approach to language is broadly consistent with Jean Jacques Lecercle’s notion of a post-Galilean linguistic paradigm. Thus, in order to set the stage for an exposition of Shelley’s position, as it is developed in his Defense of Poetry, it will be necessary to discuss Lecercle’s concept.
Lecercle uses the idea of the post-Galilean paradigm as a heuristic to render Deleuze and Guattari’s metalinguistic reflections more intelligible. In their book A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari criticize what Lecercle calls the Galilean or positivist paradigm (Lecercle, 42) of linguistic study. This paradigm is represented by four postulates that constitute language as an object of scientific study for the Galilean linguist. They are as follows:
1. The function of language is to inform and communicate
2. Language is an abstract machine which admits no ‘extrinsic’ factor.
3. Language is a homogeneous system.
4. The object the linguist studies is the standard version of the language, not dialectal variations or individual style. (Lecercle,43)
Theses postulates create a prosaic and apolitical image of language: this idealized image of an unquestioned standard language (langue) is allowed to substitute in thought for the messier overall reality of language. The first postulate would have us believe that language is essentially a cooperative enterprise in which struggle has only an accidental role(Lecercle,43). The second implies that language is not essentially affected by anything ‘outside’ of it, and that the materiality of language is an accidental trait, irrelevant to scientific study(Lecercle, 47). The third and fourth postulates focus linguistic inquiry on seeking after universal, invariable rules which are held to be the essential structure of language(Lecercle, 48). The fourth, in particular, relegates the study of linguistic change to irrelevance.
Contrary to this picture of language, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize pragmatics as the fundamental discipline for linguistic inquiry (Lecercle, 42), as opposed to phonology, and syntax. Based on their reading of J.L Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, they set out to elaborate a new image of language. Contrary to the first postulate, Deleuze and Guattari hold that language is agonistic, a place for struggle between social forces. Given that informative statements are also a type of speech act, D&G ask why they should be privileged over other types. The position they take is that the emphasis on the indicative speech act and the cooperative image of language are axioms and because as axioms they are not demonstrable or necessary, can be replaced by other emphases. Instead of the declarative mood, Deleuze and Guattari privilege the imperative, in particular the command and the slogan. This is a sensible change if we look at the ontogeny of language, the asymmetry involved in acquisition: the child must be initiated into the language of the community, it is not a dialogue, but an invasion of sorts. According to Lecercle, this elevation of the command and the slogan leads to the conclusion that, “all speech is indirect speech” with the locus of meaning in institutions and groups instead of the individual speakers who function as their mouthpiece (Lecercle, 44). This is not to say that information and communication do not happen, but the communication of information from one self-sufficient subject to another is no longer taken to be the essential function of language. It is taken to be an effect.
Contrary to the second postulate, D&G hold that given the philosophy of speech acts, language can no longer be held to be ‘abstract:’ it does things in addition to representing things. In order for language to be able to operate in this performative mode, it needs to be meaningfully connected to social institutions: for instance, consider the classic example of a performtive utterance, “I now pronounce you man and wife.” This act relies for its force on the powers that confer social legitimacy on the ceremony in addition to the ceremonial words and gestures used. It culminates in a transformation of the couple into a married couple. We see here that language is not a homogeneous and abstract system of signs whose correspondence produces meaning, but instead it is a mixed system of signs, institutions and bodies whose functioning is perhaps better measured by the terms transformation and force rather than meaning. Deleuze and Guattari, following Austin, find the meaningful unity of language not in the system, but instead in the event[i](Austin, 52). Thus, D&G have less of a stake in the establishment and maintenance of universals—invariable rules within a language and for language as such—despite the numerous and inevitable counterexamples, than they do in studying the effects of variation. This allows D&G, as representatives of post-Galilean linguistic theory, to inquire into stylistic variation as something vitally important, not as something marginal or interesting: for them style is not the idiolect, but it is a heteroglossaic phenomenon which shows the tension between dialects within a linguistic community(Lecercle, 49) and in doing so highlights the political and historical aspects of language.
Overall, we can see the new paradigm taking shape. We can even venture four new postulates to summarize--if only tentatively--this new image of language:
1. The function of language is to order social elements. 2. Language is implicated with bodies, history and institutions. 3. Language is heterogeneous; it is caught up in events and social struggle. 4. The object of linguistic studies is the struggle between dialects.
This opens the door to a new way of doing linguistics, it breaks ground on a theory that takes as its object the literary text and the non-literary text, and attempts to theorize language is such a way as to comprehend both. This has been the object of numerous linguists’ aspirations for many years, as Jakobson put it, “All of us here, however, definitely realize that a linguist deaf to the poetic function of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistic problems and unconversant with linguistic methods are equally flagrant anachronisms” (Jakobson, 377). We will find that Shelley is also a partisan of this approach to language, as he writes, “the popular division into prose and verse, is inadmissible in accurate philosophy” (Shelley,23). Shelley’s reflections on language do not admit of a dichotomy between literary and non-literary language, nor do they permit a separation between language and the history or politics of the communities in which it is used.
In what follows, I will trace Shelley’s philosophy of language. I will begin with his ideas on the origin of language, moving on to his ideas about what language is, and continuing to elaborate his ideas about the social effects of language. Anticipating myself a bit, we will find that Shelley presents us with a complex and historical image of language, one in which the “poetic function” is crucially important to human civilization. In conclusion, I will bring together a few ideas about possible directions for research under a Shelleyan linguistic paradigm.
1. The Nature of Language—Imagination and Origins
Questions about the origin of language are taken to be interesting, but unanswerable. This conclusion came after Shelley’s time; in his era, this sort of speculation was rampant. Whatever our era may think of this sort of speculation, a review of Shelley’s thought in this area can give us insights into how Shelley sees language. For Shelley, language is essentially social, it is born out of the fact of coexistence:
In the youth of the world men dance and sing and imitate natural objects, observing in these actions, as in all others, a certain rhythm or order. And, although all men observe a similar, they observe not the same order in the motions of the dance, in the melody of the song, in the combinations of language, in the series of their imitations of natural objects. (Shelley,3-4 )
We coexist and this gives rise to metaphysical pluralism. How do we deal with the fact that we see things differently? We use politics. The fact that we do not see things the same way leads to struggle, and to instability: it also leads to change, which reveals that the linguistic and cultural system at any given time is not ‘natural:’ it is not a pure imitation of nature, but rather a product of imitation combined with the struggle of different social forces:
The social sympathies, or those laws from which as from its elements society results, begin to develop themselves from the moment that two human beings co-exist;… and equality, diversity, unity, contrast, mutual dependence become the principles alone capable of affording the motives according to which the will of a social being is determined to action… Hence men, even in the infancy of society, observe a certain order in their words and actions, distinct from that of the objects and the impressions represented by them, all expression being subject to the laws of that from which it proceeds. (Shelley, 3)
Thus, for Shelley language is primally determined by the social condition of human beings: we are together, but we do not see our togetherness in the same way. Language arises on analogy with the other imitations of nature such as imitation of motion in dance, imitation of sound in song, and the other diverse imitations of natural rhythms that are accessible to primitive human communities. However, language and the other arts are an excess over pure imitation:
the child seeks by prolonging in its voice and motions the duration of the effect, to prolong also a consciousness of the cause…The savage (for the savage is to ages what the child is to years) expresses the emotions produced in him by surrounding objects in a similar manner; and language and gesture, together with plastic or pictorial imitation, become the image of the combined effect of those objects and of his apprehension of them... (Shelley,2)
At this point, we should shift our focus to the mental apparatus that is responsible for this expression. He writes the following about the two psychological principles that are vitally important to language:
The one is the to poiein, or the principle of synthesis and has for its objects those forms which are common to universal nature and existence itself; the other is the to logizein or principle of analysis and its action regards the relations of things, simply as relations; considering thoughts, not in their integral unity but as the algebraical representations which conduct to certain general results. Reason is the enumeration of quantities already known; Imagination is the perception of the value of those quantities, both seperately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and Imagination the similitudes of things. (Shelley,1)
Language does not just emerge spontaneously; it is created by action in human communities. It does not have any linguistic ground to start from, but must originate from our bodily organs and our social actions. Shelley claims that language emerges from the action of the poetic faculty, which is intimately connected with the imagination,--to poiein as mentioned above--and taste. This faculty has two functions:
by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order (Shelley,38 )
This poetic faculty is connected with poetry but only through contingency: perhaps it is better called the creative faculty; it was there before poetry as we know it was formulated, and its action was the means by which people moved from unarticulated cries to linguistic expressions. This situation of primitive naming is the link between pre-linguistic communities and linguistic communities. According to a Shelleyan perspective, this naming is associated with the foundations of human civilization: values, laws and the other metaphysical co-ordinates within which people as communities make sense of the world. As he writes, those who wielded the poetic faculty were:
the authors of language and of music, of the dance and architecture and statuary and painting; they are the institutors of laws |&| the founders of civil society and the inventors of the arts of life and the teachers,...according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared were called in the earlier epochs of the world legislators or prophets…(Shelley,5)
Thus, the history of language is part of this history of civilization, and the poetic faculty has played a major part in the evolution of civilization. Shelley opens an interesting vista for us: if we shift from the perspective that emphasizes prose and the proposition as the essence of language to a perspective that emphasizes the poetic faculty, we may have a clearer picture of how language emerges from non-language. It is anachronistic to imagine primitive people spontaneously speaking in the articulated sentences and propositions which are the invention of civilized peoples, but if we take the poetic as the essential principle of language, we can imagine acts of legislation-naming which bridge the gap between the primal cry of response to stimuli and the articulated and iterable meaningful statement. This would also give us greater insight into the power of language in human societies, and cause us to inquire into the workings of what might be called call the “poetic function” in contemporary discourse.
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< text="The Being of Language">
2.0 The Being of Language—Social Fiction and Unknown Coiners
What is language? Based on what we have covered so far, we can say with confidence that language is a production of a creative faculty in its origin. Thus, we can also say that language is primally fictional[ii]: it is something that human beings make and have made, and which exceeds pure mimesis or description of reality. This is to be distinguished from the Saussurean dictum according to which language is arbitrary: Saussure’s way of looking at language focuses on the relationship between particular signifiers and their signifieds, and finds no ‘natural’ motivation for the association of a particular sound image and concept. Shelley himself said that language:
is a more direct representation of the actions and the passions of our internal being, and is susceptible of more various and delicate combinations than colour, form or motion, and is more plastic and obedient to the controul of that faculty of which it is the creation. For language is arbitrarily produced by the Imagination and has relation to thoughts alone; but all other materials, instruments and conditions of art have relations among each other, which limit and interpose between conception and expression. (Shelley,7)
Shelley is using the same term as has been used to translate Saussure, but in a different sense: he means that language is produced by the creative faculty in the absence of strong historical determinations. The perspective we are talking about will focus on the relationship between language and the history of civilization, and find that there are other types of motivation besides the ‘natural.’ While it is freely admitted that there is no ‘natural’ connection between signifier and signified, there can be political and historical connections that arise based on the association of signifieds and signifiers with particular historical forces.
This is especially apparent if we consider controversial signifiers like “democracy” which are civilizational values and frequently polemicized in discourse. Consider the following quotation from Thomas Jefferson, “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine” and the following from William Bennett, “America's support for human rights and democracy is our noblest export to the world”(American Democracy Project). Jefferson is working with a particular concept of democracy derived from a comparison between democracies and republics in eighteenth century debates concerning the possibility of non-monarchical government, whereas Bennett is working with a concept derived from Cold War comparisons between American ‘liberal democracy’ and Soviet ‘totalitarianism.’ In both cases, the connection between signifiers and concepts is not ‘natural’ but it is also not totally arbitrary: it is motivated by contingent historical connections. Jefferson and Bennett are using this signifier in connection with social forces that recommend particular visions of the past and allow them to imagine a desired future.
Both Jefferson and Bennett owe a debt to an anonymous production of the poetic faculty in ancient Athens, and to centuries of discourse which have added to and re-imagined this idea of democracy. Jean-Jacques Lecercle has given a name to this type of anonymous productions of the poetic faculty in language: in The Violence of Language, he explains by reference to the phrase ‘bonjour tristesse:’
First, a poet coins a phrase—an intentional act if ever there is one, but a move made against the background of and contrary to the rules of the system. Next, a novelist uses the quotation for a title, …the act is intentional, but the phrase soon grows popular, it becomes common linguistic property. The phrase is then made productive, so that any noun phrase can be substituted for ‘tristesse’. This step cannot be ascribed to an individual speaker—language has taken over. A clever advertising copy-writer uses the phrase for a euphonic slogan, an intentional move again. Last, by pure chance, the slogan fits the name of the minister and someone successfully parodies it. But who? The Unknown Coiner, the mythical figure who is the necessary and unknowable origin of every linguistic change. It would be more accurate to say, ‘the student movement’ what Deleuze and Guattari call a ‘collective arrangement of utterance’. (Lecercle,70)
Now, bonjour tristesse is not a piece of language of the same kind as democracy, but its history is equally illustrative of the process whereby from an initial poetic act new patterns of speech and thought are disseminated. They are fictional in their origin, but come to serve as the point of departure from which prosaic and factual discourses begin. It is as though they constitute the field in which other discourses play. In fact, this approach is similar in a certain sense to George Lakoff’s theory of framing: both acknowledge the importance of language as a medium through which social discourse happens. However, our perspective is different in two important ways: on the one hand, we are more concerned with the total picture of the words that come to be frames, not just with the mechanism of discursive enframing in particular contexts, but with the overall mechanism that allows for there to be framing and what it reveals about the power of language; on the other hand, we choose to locate these processes more toward the ‘outside,’ in the interaction of thought feeling, history, discourse and politics, instead of being good cognitivists and looking only within the mind of the individual subject for the principles that we would use to explain framing.
While reading Shelley in preparation for the stylistic analysis I undertook in this paper, it occurred to me that there was more to his work than a stylistic analysis based on the current standard model of language could capture. This led me to wonder what type of stylistics, what type of thinking about language could be more adequate to his work. Then, it occurred to me that he had written on the philosophy of language, and it could be profitable for this paper, and also in a broader sense for students of language generally, to inquire into the idea of language that Shelley had.
Thus, this paper is split into two sections: the first deals with two of Shelley’s poems, “Ozymandias” and “England in 1819,” and the second deals with his thinking about language. I argue that his thinking is consistent with what Jean Jacques Lecercle calls the “Post-Galilean Paradigm” in linguistics and philosophy of language. After analyzing the way he uses language in his poetry, I move on to develop his philosophical insights into the outline of a model of language, and suggestions for further research. In order to develop this model into a type of linguistics, it seems that further thinking about the implications of Shelley’s insights is necessary. However, given the constraints imposed by this paper, preliminary reflections will have to suffice until next time.
Again, Shelley chooses a complex perspective: this time, he shifts from a third person description in the first thirteen lines of the poem to a first person perspective in the final line. This shift is indicated by the presence of the first person plural pronoun in the final line. He starts by offering us a polemical description of the social order at that time; it is not a positive evaluation. However, in the last lines, we are treated to the possibility of something better emerging from this situation. This may mirror Shelley’s own ratio of feeling about his country’s politics: two parts hope twelve parts anger and indignation. Also, the poem seems to be making a statement about identity: the narrator is not a part of England as it is enumerated in the first twelve lines, but he associates himself only with the hope of better things to come.
( Perspective )
“England in 1819” uses ten verbs, six of which are intransitive (flow, neither see, nor feel, nor know, cling, drop, tempt and slay, may burst). Three verbs are transitive (makes, wield, illumine) and there is also one instance of the very ‘to be.’ The preponderance of intransitive verbs underscores the focus on the malignancy of the subject of the descriptive sentences. The reason for this can be clarified by considering the difference between transitive and intransitive verbs: the former need to take an object, whereas the latter are complete without one. Thus, intransitives can direct the focus of the reader toward the subject of the action. The use of the verb ‘to be’ signals the poems dominant metaphor and the reversal of meaning that comes at the end. In addition Shelley employs a modal in line thirteen seemingly to show that in contrast to the rest of the poem what is to be hoped for is not as certain as the existing evils.
[i] Bodleian Library MS Shelley e.4, fol. 85r. Facsimile edited by Paul Dawson, The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, gen. ed. D. H. Reiman (1988)
[iii] The Representative Poetry Online website offers the following as a gloss on “Ozymandias”:
“Diodorus Siculus, in his Library of History (trans. C. H. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 303 [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961]: I, 47), records the inscription on the pedestal of his statue (at the Ramesseum, on the other side of the Nile river from Luxor) as "King of Kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works."
According to Schleiermacher, the key to the solution lies in the plasticity of language. Because of this plasticity, even if the usages of words and hence the concepts expressed by the language into which the translation is to be done as it currently exists are incommensurable with the author's, it is still possible for a translator to “bend the language of the translation as far possible towards that of the original in order to communicate as far as possible an impression of the system of concepts developed in it.” (Note that this solution presupposes principle (5).) Consider, for example, a translator facing the challenge of translating Homer's word aretê into English. The translator will recognize that nothing in existing English exactly expresses this concept. He will therefore judge that the best way to convey it in English is to modify existing English usage in a systematic way for the course of the translation in order thereby to mimic Greek usage and hence meaning. He will begin by taking the word from existing English which comes closest to aretê in meaning, say the word virtue. However, he will recognize that the rule for use which governs this word in existing English is still very different from that which governs Homer's word aretê so that the two words are still quite sharply different in meaning - that, for example, the descriptive component of the rule which governs the word virtue in existing English makes it a solecism to ascribe virtue to a habitual liar or a pirate, but quite proper under certain circumstances to ascribe it to a physically weak man, whereas exactly the converse rule governs the word aretê in Homer. What therefore will the translator do? He will not simply resign himself to living with this discrepancy. Instead, for the duration of his translation he will modify the rule which governs the wordvirtue in order to make this rule conform (or at least more closely conform) to that which governs Homer's word aretê -- for example, he will drop the descriptive rule governing the word virtue which was just mentioned and switch to its converse instead, consequently for the duration of his translation writing quite happily of certain habitual liars and pirates as having virtue (e.g. Odysseus and Achilles, respectively), but scrupulously avoiding describing any physically weak man as having it. He will thereby succeed in expressing -- or at least come close to expressing -- in English the meaning of Homer's word aretê.
As the article explains, this type of translation moves the L1 toward L2 by importing structures. This type of translation can be taken even further, perhaps it already has by lousy machine translations. Casting to one side the impeccable aesthetic judgment of the philosopher, these texts can be used to facilitate acquisition of a second language. It also has other implications in areas outside language acquisition, rendering new ways of thinking accessible through print.
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