In Antwort auf: You can cultivate corn and roses and orchards— but who shall cultivate the mountain peaks, the ocean, and the tumbling gorgeousness of the clouds?
Refined aristocratic culture distracts democrats from themselves, persuades them to judge themselves only in reference to others, and thus subjects them to the worst kind of social conformity. Whitman is concerned that a culture such as this will prevent Americans from achieving literary greatness and thus the development of the spiritual democracy which he desires. In other words, Whitman thinks that only the elimination of aristocratic culture will permit America to give birth to a democratic one that, paradoxically, counteracts democratic leveling. George Kateb has written the best explanation of Whitman’s paradoxical belief that there is some unique form of democratic culture that is anti-democratic in the sense that it curbs the conformity produced by the principle of equality. In, “Walt Whitman and The Culture of Democracy,” Kateb attempts to define loosely what Whitman means by democratic culture: First, democratic culture is (or can be) the soil for the creation of new works of high art - great poems and moral writings, in particular. Second, democratic culture is (or is becoming) a particularist dress, ceremonies, folk traditions, and historical memories. Third, democratic culture is (or can be) the soil for the emergence of great souls whose greatness consists in themselves beings like works of art in the spirit of a new aristocracy.
Although Kateb’s description of democratic culture is not Whitman’s per se, it captures the essence of what Whitman is trying to convey about spiritual democracy and helps us to unpack this peculiar concept of democracy. When Kateb claims that democratic culture contains the “spirit of a new aristocracy,” he seems to be contradicting Whitman who clearly has no affinity for aristocratic culture. But, Kateb’s notion of “new aristocracy” is a distinct departure from Whitman’s critique of aristocratic culture. Kateb is referring to a form of individualism that is indeed aristocratic, but not of a refined or “cultured,” again in the pejorative sense, nature.
kotl
NID
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"Is not all life the struggle of experience, naked, unarmed, timid but immortal, against generalised thought?" (W.B.Yeats)
The past, being dwarf-like, is of no account to the makers of the present. Whitman has no fear that the past will hamper the aspirations of those living in the present. Humansare neither bound by the mistakes nor the successes of their predecessors, nor are they chained to a historical process whose end is predetermined. They are instead free to act and create without historical restriction. Understood in the context of Whitman’s notion of history, contemporary American democracy is only the seed of a full, spiritual democracy that has yet to sprout. This new beginning, however, is imperiled. Whitman’s cultural critique is aimed at illustrating to Americans that they have not yet generated a uniquely American culture to complement the formal democratic institutions which they already possess. This new culture is essential for the democracy of the future, but its emergence has been impeded by the corrupting influence of older forms of European culture that continue to influence literature and the arts. He writes:
Never, in the Old World, was thoroughly upholster’d exterior appearance and show, mental and other, built entirely on the idea of caste, and on the sufficiency of mere outside acquisition-never were glibness, verbal intellect, more the test, the emulation-more loftily elevated as head and sample-than they are on the surface of our republican States this day. The writers of a time hint the mottoes of its gods. The word of the modern, say these voices, is the word culture.
Americans, it seems, are more European, more “cultured” in the pejorative sense of the word, than the Europeans themselves. Concerned with appearance rather than essence, hierarchy rather than equality, and refinement rather than sincerity, Americans appear to Whitman to be the embodiment of a particular conception of European aristocratic culture. He writes that this form of European culture is the “enemy” because it consists of practices and moral perspectives which are hostile to the democratic principle of equality and to a life of “simplicity” and “transparency,” to borrow two notions from the cultural critic, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I invoke Rousseau in comparison to Whitman because, as I shall discuss in more detail below, they share a similar hostility toward an idea of aristocracy which includes notions of effeminacy, decadence, cosmopolitanism, falsity and inauthenticity. In lieu of what Whitman considers to be anexhausted aristocratic culture, he is convinced that American society is pregnant with an original, purely American and democratic culture that it can create ex nihilo in order to spiritualize an age that has lost its way. Whitman’s distaste for a particular kind of aristocratic culture is linked to his position on conformity. Following in a long tradition of anti-democratic thinkers traceable back to Plato, Whitman believes that America suffers from conformity that is produced by its principle of equality. He thinks that most democracies level their citizens, stifling all that is great in them and reducing them to a mediocre, herd-like status.
kotl
NID
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"Is not all life the struggle of experience, naked, unarmed, timid but immortal, against generalised thought?" (W.B.Yeats)
I felt a little oberwhelmed by listening to your last audio blog. You tender vice was explaining áll the implications of transcendence. So I am dedicating the following lines to you...
Husserl calls these links the "retentions" and "protentions" of the immediate experience. While perceiving an object, we almost automatically "appresent" that the object has an unseen background. By appresentation we refer to the connection between the object or event directly experienced and the object or event which is not immediately present to experience but constituted by our consciousness. Appresentation is a particular form of coupling or pairing by which we take experience intuitively as indicating or depicting significantly something else. The appresenting part of the couple "wakes" or "evokes" the appresented one. Moreover, "each appresentation carries along its particular appresented horizons, which refer to further fulfilling and confirming experiences..." (Schutz 1962a, 296). Appresentation is not tantamount to inference, and the appresented member must not be a physical object; it may be a recollection, a fantasm or a dream. Thus, transcendence consists in the belief that there is something experienced which is not identical with the act of experiencing itself. According to Schutz, the experience of transcendences can be distinguished on some levels. First, whenever anything transcends the actual, direct experiences, we may speak of the small transcendences of space and time. Our automatic assumptions that we can anticipate a future experience, that we assume that there will be things as soon as we turn around, that things out of reach can come into reach again are based on our routine to cope with these transcendences. Little transcendences are characterized by the fact that we can, in principle, experience them directly - in the future, by moving our body.
kotl
NID
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"Is not all life the struggle of experience, naked, unarmed, timid but immortal, against generalised thought?" (W.B.Yeats)
Thema von NietzscheIsDead im Forum Literaturtheorie und ä...
Hello across the ocean
Jauss's work in the late seventies, gathered in his ´Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik in 1982 (the first part was issued in 1977 and translated into English as Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics in 1982), moved toward a more hermeneutical interest in the aesthetic experience itself. Jauss distinguishes three basic experiences: a productive aesthetic praxis (poiesis), a receptive praxis (aisthesis), and a communicative praxis (katharsis), and he claims that a detailed study of these three elements can help literary history steer a course between an exclusively aesthetic and an exclusively sociological perspective. Central in this new phase of Jauss's thinking is the third, communicative aesthetic praxis, which is defined as "the enjoyment of the affects as stirred by speech or poetry which can bring about both a change in belief and the liberation of his mind in the listener or the spectator" Important here is both the active part of the recipient of the aesthetic object and the two opposites this definition avoids: the unmediated losing oneself in the object and the sentimental self-indulgence by the subject in itself. The aesthetic experience can have three functions in society: it can create norms, simply pass on existing norms, or refuse to conform to the existing norms. Both bourgeois and (neo-)Marxist literary theories have failed to see the continuum between a progressive change of horizons and the adaptation to existing norms. Whereas Jauss seems to have moved closer to Iser's insistence on the role of the individual reader, quite a number of his younger colleagues in Germany have concentrated on the sociological and empirical considerations of his early essays. On the basis of a "constructive functionalism" not unrelated to Habermas's communicative rationalism and to Imre Lakatos's critical rationalism, Norbert Groeben and Siegfried J. Schmidt have developed a theory of literature that opposes to the hermeneutical schools an empirical and functional view of literature.
ttyl
NID _____________________________________________
"Is not all life the struggle of experience, naked, unarmed, timid but immortal, against generalised thought?" (W.B.Yeats)
Thema von NietzscheIsDead im Forum Amerikanische Lyrik un...
Good afternoon across the ocean
Whitman understands history to be a radical process of change that moves in stages. He is highly attuned to the radically contingent nature of modern times and to the dizzying speed with which market forces and new forms of technology are progressively burying traditional ways of life. This view of how history unfolds animates his belief that cultural phenomena are ephemeral and thus capable of being destroyed and replaced by new kinds of practices. Whitman writes:
"While, current and novel, the grandest events and revolutions and stormiest passions of history, are crossing today with unparallel’d rapidity and magnificence over the stages of our own and all the continents, offering new materials, opening new vistas, with largest needs, inviting the daring launching forth of conceptions of literature, inspired by them, soaring in highest regions, serving art in its highest, (which is only the other name for serving God, and serving humanity,) where is the man of letters, where is the book, with any nobler aim than to follow in the old track, repeat what has been said before—and, as its utmost triumph, sell well, and be erudite or elegant? (Complete Poetry)
Here Whitman describes the incredible forces which are tearing the old forms of life asunder, inspiring new literature and art, and rendering traditional views of knowledge (the “man of letters”) useless. Seen in this light, history is progressive, opening “new vistas” or ways of life that are fully compatible with the new, democratic era. Whitman links knowledge with the past, denigrating it for perpetuating old ways of life and,in contrast, lauds literature whose aesthetic properties better serve God and man. Inspired by vast changes taking place during his life, Whitman, like so many other nineteenth-century thinkers, is captivated by the idea that human beings can make their own history. Along with his dynamic conception of history, Whitman introduces a notion of historical will that provides human beings with the belief that they can will themselves beyond the past, transforming present ideals into future, concrete realities. Whitman understands all-too-well that history is radically contingent or, in more poetic terms, that “we sail dangerous seas of seething currents, cross and under-currents....”
NID _____________________________________________
"Is not all life the struggle of experience, naked, unarmed, timid but immortal, against generalised thought?" (W.B.Yeats)
Thema von NietzscheIsDead im Forum Links und Buchempfehlu...
Fyi
The Collected Works of Charles S. Peirce Online: http://library.nlx.com/ 2. Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition (1857-1890), edited by The Peirce Edition Project, Vols 1-6 (Indiana U. Press, 1982-2000); more volumes are in progress. 3. The Peirce Edition Project Online: http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/ 4. Kenneth L. Ketner, A Comprehensive Bibliography of the Published Works of Charles Sanders Peirce with a Bibliography of Secondary Studies, 2nd edition (Philosophy Documentation Center, 1986). 5. Institute for Studies in Pragmatism Online: http://www.pragmaticism.net/resources.htm 6. Joseph Brent, Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (Indiana University Press, 1998). 7. Murray Murphy, The Development of Peirce’s Philosophy (Hackett, 1993).
warm regards
NID
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"Is not all life the struggle of experience, naked, unarmed, timid but immortal, against generalised thought?" (W.B.Yeats)
Luhmanns Ziel ist nun aber gleichwohl die "Analyse realer Systeme in der wirklichen Welt". Das soziale System Gesellschaft existiert real, ebenso das Bewußtseinssystem, das die Gesellschaft beobachtet. Der "radikale Konstruktivismus" ist dagegen eine Kognitionstheorie mit der Grundannahme, daß es unmöglich ist, die externe Realität in Erkenntnissen über die Welt abzubilden. Luhmanns "operativer Konstruktivismus" sagt: Realitätsaussagen des einen Beobachters lassen sich mit Realitätsaussagen eines anderen Beobachters vergleichen, aber nicht mit der Realität selbst. Wir haben es nie mit in den Aussagen abgebildeter Realität zu tun, sondern immer und ausschließlich mit konstruierter Realität
Good afternoon Nauplios & Temp
The bulk of the more general theory of knowledge done in the later stages of our discussions centers on a distinction between arguments – public speech acts, some of which suffer from the vice of begging the question – and on the other hand, reasoning processes – private episodes, some of which are virtuous despite being circular. My crucial concern throughout is with how we ought to proceed (both in terms of philosophical methodology and in terms of giving a semantic theory for our natural languages) as philosophers who ‘come to the table’ with certain beliefs and intuitions. In the case of TemporarySilent´s Forum, I argue that the beliefs that we come to the table with concerning a priori knowledge and its objects are too secure to be overcome by skepticism of any sort. This is not to say, however, that these beliefs are capable of receiving a argumentative defense – as philosophers who are also ordinary believers we may need to settle for knowledge that is secure, but without argumentative ground.
warm regards
NID
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"Is not all life the struggle of experience, naked, unarmed, timid but immortal, against generalised thought?" (W.B.Yeats)
Still listening to "Rosenwesen - Song". LOL, Blue and I appreciate your vivid sense of humour. You passed it off as a joke. Anyway,it was fun listening to your introduction of females . If you´d ever feel like becoming a stand-up-comedian we will promote you.
NID
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"Is not all life the struggle of experience, naked, unarmed, timid but immortal, against generalised thought?" (W.B.Yeats)
just reading your posting. Welcome to our Forum. So you are interested in Durkheim. Just dropping you a few lines. Guess Temp was introducing you neatly to the forum´s software. The German language tends to be critical to figure out somehow - esp. the FAQ´s. Temp, you are doing great .
By this very fact, the content of their consciousness is changed. On ordinary days, it is utilitarian and individual avocations which take the greater part of the attention. Every one attends to his own personal business; for most men, this primarily consists in satisfying the exigencies of material life, and the principal incentive to economic activity has always been private interest.
ttyl Con kotl Temp
NID
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"Is not all life the struggle of experience, naked, unarmed, timid but immortal, against generalised thought?" (W.B.Yeats)
Es ist ein Residuum der ersten Natur, welches die zweite auf fanatische Weise zu überwältigen versucht. In der Tat - Wetware( menschlicher Körper)!
Anmerk. von Temp : In der engl. Version meiner Antwort an NID hatte ich den Begriff Wetware eingeführt - dieser entfiel bei der deutschen Fassung des Textes - ich habe ihn durch "körperliche Verfaßtheit" ersetzt: Wetware ist angesiedelt zwischen Hardware und Software. Der Begriff stammt aus dem literarischen Sci-Fi- Genre des Cyberpunks ( vgl. Neuromancer, William Gibson) Der menschliche Körper (die Wetware) interagiert mit der Soft -und Hardware bzw. ist ein Bestandteil des Mensch - Maschine - Interfaces ( Hardware (hart) - Software (weich) - Wetware (nass)). Wetware hat als Terminus die Mediendiskussionen in den Geistes/- Sozialwissenschaften geprägt -----> zurück zu NID ....
Unbestreitbar ist, daß Zeichen tatsächlich anders als Körper funktionieren. Körper haben einen Ort und bilden um diesen Ort herum ein konzentrisches System von Horizonten aus; dieses System unterscheidet den Nahraum vom Umraum, und damit relevant von irrelevant. Der gesamte Sinnesapparat ist auf diesen Raum abgestellt. Die Nahsinne auf den physisch/chemischen Kontakt, das Gehör auf die Schwingungen der Luft und ihre Dämpfung, und der "Fernsinn" Sehen schließlich auf einen kaum größeren Raum, der sich am optischen Horizont zwangsläufig schließt.
Zeichen dagegen kennen solche Beschränkungen nicht. Zeichen, ganz im Gegenteil, kommen immer aus der Ferne.
In Antwort auf: It is the residue of that first nature which the second is so fanatically determined to overcome, wetware in fact!
It is indisputable that signs do, in fact, function differently from bodies. Bodies have a place, and around this location they form a concentric system of horizons; this system distinguishes the immediate environment from the wider one and, by implication, the relevant from the irrelevant. The entire sensory apparatus is tuned this immediate environment, the close-range to physical/chemical contact, the sense of hearing to the vibration and attenuation of air, and the "long range sense" of sight ultimately to a scarcely greater space which inevitably ends at the optical horizon. Signs, by contrast, have no such limitations - the very point of them is that they always come from far away.
ttyl Blue kotl Temp
NID
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"Is not all life the struggle of experience, naked, unarmed, timid but immortal, against generalised thought?" (W.B.Yeats)
Your work was superb esp. when it came down translating my postings. I know it must have been hell but you were doing excellent . You make me feel like coming home again. - so let me say "thx" for always being here in times of trouble. You are leading our debates with a lot of devotion and mutual caring. "Thou art so lovely and more temperate"
warm regards
NID
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"Is not all life the struggle of experience, naked, unarmed, timid but immortal, against generalised thought?" (W.B.Yeats)
In Antwort auf:Afaik this critical shift was confirmed and exemplified in the days of Deconstruction...
I would subscribe to your point of view . This critical shift was confirmed and exemplified in the days of Deconstruction, with studies like those written by Paul de Man from the 1950s on, that were later gathered in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984), which contradicted the approach of so-called New Criticism that tended to see the great romantic texts as eternal monuments that reached to a canonical Empyrean above the historical contingences of their production. Under the pens of these Modern Frankensteins, the texts lived again, sometimes in rather shocking and apparently unnatural ways. Then, while Deconstruction had striven to shake the Romantic poems loose from internal closure, New Historicism restored them to their historical context, yet no longer merely to read them as reflectors of their times, but in ways that showed how they too cast a new light on their historical epochs and perhaps even proved them to have played no negligible part in shaping the History of ideas. One exemplary work among many others in this vein is no doubt Jerome McGann’s The Romantic Ideology (1983), which demonstrates how much twentieth-century academic and critical responses to Romantic poetry is still dominated, more or less consciously, by ideas and beliefs that are the produce or the inheritance of Romanticism.
kotl NID _____________________________________________
"Is not all life the struggle of experience, naked, unarmed, timid but immortal, against generalised thought?" (W.B.Yeats)
Obviously poetry is much more than " a mind at work" . Romanticism belongs to the History of the Western world. Yet reading the Romantics today, reading them as if for the first time, skipping prefaces and other framing critical discourses, with the eyes of a scholar trying honestly to make his own mind about these works of the past: such an experience is bound to come as a surprise. For the dominant impression, soon building up into a conviction, is that what one is reading is different from what one had expected. It is obviously more complex, and truly much more problematic. These poets are still alive and questioning, and their works offer compelling fields of research. It seems that they have acquired a new lisibilité in the second half of the twentieth century, as if what had seemed for a time a stale and has-been period of literature had now started literally making sense again.
The wind may in fact have started turning with The Romantic Agony (1956), when Mario Praz made the innovative critical demonstration that “there is no opposite pole to ‘romantic’,” and that “classicism, then, is by no means alien to the romantic spirit” [14]. This amounted to the realisation that Romanticism is neither a style nor a set of ideas or preferences, but the artistic expression of the openness of intellectual process, the exaltation of “the artist who does not give a material form to his dream.”
kotl
NID
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"Is not all life the struggle of experience, naked, unarmed, timid but immortal, against generalised thought?" (W.B.Yeats)
In Antwort auf: The 1925 setting of "Schliesse mir die Augen beide" is in many respects a preparatory study for the Lyric Suite. The principal series in the song is the same as that of the first movement of the quartet. The boundary (first and last) pitches of this series are F and B, or in German notation, F and H.
Dear Blue, Metaphysiker and Temp
I am not a musician but I am amazed when I am listening to "Schliesse mir die Augen beide". So I bought a cd.
warm regards
NID
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"Is not all life the struggle of experience, naked, unarmed, timid but immortal, against generalised thought?" (W.B.Yeats)
In Antwort auf: Es wäre schade, dass nur aufgrund der Tatsache, dass diese Beiträge von NID ( Yeats, Rorty) und Blue (Schoenberg, WhiteNoise, Bauman) in englischer Sprache verfaßt werden, sie einer größeren Internetöffentlichkeit verschlossen bleiben würden
Hello across the ocean - Dear Temp & Nauplios
I won´t mind uploading our debates on Rorty or some single postings, i.e. Yeats´ symbolism. Do you think I should copy my postings directly (adding jpegs)? May I use a special ftp client? - Should I send some raw drafts to Nauplios? Actually he is hosting our webspace.
Well you are learning greek LOL. Time ´s too tight for studying - but it´s a great attempt
warm regards
NID
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"Is not all life the struggle of experience, naked, unarmed, timid but immortal, against generalised thought?" (W.B.Yeats)
please forgive me for staying the distance. So call me a defender, Temp . I am defending an inclusive aesthetic, one that attempts to integrate rather than isolate the rational and irrational dimensions of human experience. I am the one, who sees the poem as activating both the mind and heart . And yet, while the principles you are putting forth are attractively inclusive, your critical judgments of individual poets often seem eccentric and moralistic. But perhaps this perspective has limited the influence of his ideas on contemporary American poetry already.
kotl
NID
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"Is not all life the struggle of experience, naked, unarmed, timid but immortal, against generalised thought?" (W.B.Yeats)
Problems may arise in translating German texts into English also because the repertoire of possibilities for building up complex words is much more limited in English than it is in German. Where, therefore, a literal translation is possible in the one direction, when translating in the other direction one must also for this reason do violence to the text. The thesis of untranslatability cannot be exclusively a matter of certain simple syntactic differences between English and German however, since in many extra-philosophical fields there obtains a near-perfect equality in ease of translation in either direction. For many technical and commercial purposes there has obtained at least since the 19th century a mutual translatability not only between English and German but indeed between all the world’s major languages, reflecting Thus Hermann Glockner writes in the Introduction to his Hegel-Lexikon (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1935, p. XIII):
‘It is well known that Hegel in many respects speaks his own language and that this language, which one does not at all “understand” without further ado, must be read with the same “philological” dedication that one brings to ancient or medieval philosophy.’
The translation difficulties we are addressing here have, therefore, to do with certain characteristics of English and German philosophy. They turn in part on the fact that Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Saxon-oriented philosophers have allowed themselves to be more strongly influenced by the just-mentioned developments in the direction of linguistic standardization than have their German counterparts. The most talented Anglo-Saxon philosophers in our own century have indeed sought to distance themselves, step by step, from earlier, more literary associations of their discipline, committing themselves instead (and in different degrees) to the new formal logic and to the regimentation of language and meaning that goes together therewith. Everything that smacks of philology or exegesis, everything that has to do with an aesthetic fascination with language as such,and every inclination to enjoy struggling with difficulties of language for their own sake, has therefore waned, at least in the mainstream of Anglo-Saxon philosophy. Indeed it can paradoxically be asserted that the philosophers of ‘linguistic analysis’ are ex officio allowed to see no special (for example aesthetic) charm in the language with which they deal: the latter is either merely an instrument, or it is a pre-packaged object of investigation. A German philosopher, in contrast, may unshamefacedly enjoy a living relationship to his own language. He may revel in the possibility of utilizing an idiosyncratic and (from the Anglo- Saxon point of view) wilfully obscure style. Or he may attempt to force language into new and peculiar forms, for example in order to breathe new life into the concepts he wishes to employ, or in order to set loose normally unnoticed etymological powers lying hidden beneath our everyday linguistic forms. Untranslatability may then follow as a matter of course, for example because we are dealing not with utterances having standard meanings but rather with a peculiar sort of etymological word-play, whose constituent jokes have no available correlates in the target language. Consider, for example, the following passage, selected at random from Sein und Zeit:
Ich Nachhängen hat das Schon-sein-bei . . . den Vorrang. Das Sich-vorweg-imschon-sein-in . . . ist entsprechend modifiziert. Das verfallende Nachhängen offenbart den Hang des Daseins, von der Welt, in der es je ist, “gelebt” zu werden. Der Hang zeigt den Character des Ausseins auf . . . Das Sich-vorweg-sein hat sich verloren in ein “Nur-immer-schon-bei . . .”. Das “Hin-zu” des Hanges ist ein Sichziehenlassen von solchem, dem der Hang nachhängt. (Sein und Zeit, p. 195; trailing dots in the original.)
The point of this passage ) which is incidentally already untranslatable into any normally intelligible German ) turns upon a pun on ‘Hang’, which in German means both ‘slope’ and ‘tendency’ (as in `tendency to criminality’). The standard English version reads:
In hankering, Being-already-alongside . . . takes priority. The “ahead-of-itself-in- Being-already-in . . .” is correspondingly modified. Dasein’s hankering as it falls makes manifest its addiction to becoming ‘lived’ by whatever world it is in. This addiction shows the character of Being out for something. Being-ahead-of-oneself has lost itself in a ‘just-always-already-alongside’.
What one is addicted ‘towards’ to let oneself be drawn by the sort of thing for which the addiction hankers) of which the most that can be said is that it consists, in some degree, of English words.
warm regards
NID
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"Is not all life the struggle of experience, naked, unarmed, timid but immortal, against generalised thought?" (W.B.Yeats)
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04.06.2005 03:17
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