George Steiner on 'The poetry of thought'

A metaphor is merely a figure of speech. It may be suggestive and illuminating. But, if it is taken to be a fact about the world and another fact about the world is deduced from it, then the resulting 'meta-metaphor' can egregiously mislead.

Speaking metaphorically we may say 'Thought is a Language'. It isn't true but there may be some context in which this is a useful thing to say. One example is if you make a living peddling a 'talking cure' for trauma or neurosis. The notion is that nice words can make naughty thoughts go away.

What happens if you take the metaphor for a concrete fact? You may then say, in Language there is something more or less prestigious which is called Poetry. Thus Thought too must have Poetry. What would that involve?

The problem here is that most poetry is mediated by thought. It may be that a spontaneous cry- such as that attributed to the Sage Valmiki on seeing one of a pair of love-birds killed- is poetry without any mediating thought. But all subsequent 'shlokas' were mediated by a thoughtful adherence to a poetic form. Some may feel more spontaneous or 'mantic' than others. But this does not mean they aren't 'artful' or the product of a lifetime of considered thought.

The thoughts of poets composing poetry constitute the 'poetry of thought'. It is not the case that either Language or Thought exist independently of the beings who use language or think thoughts.

What happens if one assumes this is not the case? What happens when a savant commits to the concrete reality of a mere 'meta-metaphor'?

The answer is that you get an ex falso quodlibet explosion of nonsense. Consider George Steiner's 'The poetry of thought' (2011)

What are the philosophic concepts of the deaf-mute? What are his or her metaphysical imaginings? 

It is believed that Teresa Blankmeyer Burke is the first professional philosopher who is deaf. Her philosophical concepts and 'metaphysical imaginings' are as good or bad as that of any of her contemporaries.

It may be that, as more philosophy is done in Sign Language, new concepts and methods of argumentation take root in philosophy. But this also happens when there is contact with foreign schools of philosophy or indigenous religious traditions which are not mainstream.

Husserl thought there could be a 'science of philosophy'- phenomenology- which could say something about consciousness independent of anything empirical. But phenomenology never got round to say anything worth hearing. By contrast the Gastronomy of the Science of the Music of Socioproctological Philosophy says really smart things all the time- but only when nobody is listening. This is the answer to Husserl's question- 'What can remain, if the whole world, including ourselves with all our cogitare, is excluded?' 

Steiner, however, is not concerned with Pure Consciousness but Language. 

All philosophic acts, every attempt to think thought, with the possible exception of formal (mathematical) and symbolic logic, are irremediably linguistic.

No. They may be purely pictorial or plastic. A 'philosophical' act may be expressible technologically or architecturally or purely by a gesture. There is a story of Kalidasa winning a philosophical debate which consisted only of silent gestures. This was in a context where a 'mudra' represented a particular theological proposition.

This is not to say that natural language can't be the meta-language for any formal language. But it isn't the only one. For any specific purpose, we can formulate a purely physical 'meta-language' such that any given 'philosophical act' has a material implementation. Indeed, an Enterprise Head may say 'we must change our philosophy is such and such way' and approve a particular set of policies as the proper implementation of what she envisages. The same holds true in interior decoration or martial arts or any number of 'high value adding' professions.

The only things which are 'irremediably linguistics' are things which have no importance outside language. A poet may tinker endlessly with a panegyric to some wholly worthless patron. A verbose pedant may endlessly polish a turd like the following -

They (i.e. philosophical acts) are realized and held hostage by one motion or another of discourse, of encoding in words and in grammar.

This is simply untrue. An Intuition may be a philosophical act and, arguably, every philosophical act cashes out as an intuition. It is certainly possible that some algorithmic process can simulate or otherwise 'express' an intuition. But, unless P=NP, it will never be the case that 'intuition' will have an encoding in 'words and in grammar'. Thus, Philosophy can't possibly be held 'hostage' by any motion of 'discourse' any more than Eating or Shitting or anything else we can talk about is held hostage by Language.

Be it oral or written, the philosophic proposition, the articulation and communication of argument are subject to the executive dynamics and limitations of human speech. 

Fuck does 'executive dynamics' mean? Nothing at all. It is the sort of name a bogus Business Consultancy might give itself.

Nothing, including human speech, is limited by human speech coz a witty and well timed fart can always puncture the baloon of any fine talker.

It may be that there lurks within all philosophy, almost certainly within all theology, an opaque but insistent desire — Spinoza's conatus — to escape from this empowering bondage. 

It is more likely that all philosophy is stupid. That is its conatus. The thing may be instrumentalized as part of an credentialist Ponzi scheme and thus a few people may make a little money teaching it. I personally think of it as a type of 'displacement activity'. Smart people may indulge in it when their research project hits a wall. The thing may not be wholly useless. It could result in finding a different approach to proving the same thing- e.g. the Intuitionist program in Maths or Revealed Preference in Econ- and this may be helpful later down the line.

I suppose there are writers who know they are writing badly because they are resorting to cliches. They still want to write but don't want to do so in 'bondage' to something they nevertheless feel was 'empowering'. So they may try to find new bottles for old wine by writing a manifesto and claiming to represent some startlingly avant garde literary movement. But this is merely a question of fashion. 

Either by modulating natural language into the tautological exactitudes, transparencies and verifiabilities of mathematics (this cold but ardent dream haunts Spinoza, Husserl, Wittgenstein)

all of whom failed. Still, Spinoza was a nice guy who was saying 'be nice'. We can respect that. But Husserl and Wittgenstein were not even wrong. Maths moved on while they were writing ponderous nonsense.

or, more enigmatically, by reverting to intuitions prior to language itself.

But, if those intuitions are about language they can't be prior to it.

We do not know that there are any such, that there can be thought before saying.

Yes we do. I had a thought while walking in the park about how to get a better return on my paltry savings. I had to spend some time on Google before I could put the thing into words. I had correctly intuited that there must be some sort of financial product which answered to my needs. But I didn't know what it was called or where I could buy it.

We all have 'Eureka' moments which, however, we can't put into words immediately. We are constantly saying 'I've had a thought. Damn! How do I put into words?'  Often, it turns out our 'Eureka' was simply nonsense. Or so we are lead to believe by a Society which institutionalizes contempt for the feeble mental powers of Iyers.

We apprehend manifold strengths of meaning, figurations of sense in the arts, in music.

Especially when we are smoking cannabis.

The inexhaustible significance of music, its defiance of translation or paraphrase, presses on philosophic scenarios in Socrates, in Nietzsche.

But it also presses on stupid potheads.

But when we adduce the "sense" of aesthetic representations and musical forms, we are metaphorizing, we are operating by more or less covert analogy.

More commonly, we are babbling nonsense.

We are enclosing them in the mastering contours of speech.

My speech has no 'mastering contours'. People tend to move away from me in a marked manner when I get garrulous at a cocktail party.

Hence the recurrent trope, so urgent in Plotinus, in the Tractatus, that the nub, the philosophic message lies in that which is unsaid, in the unspoken between the lines.

But, in both cases, we know that what was 'unspoken between the lines' was stupid shit.

What can be enunciated, what presumes that language is more or less consonant with veritable insights and demonstrations, may in fact reveal the decay of primordial, epiphanic recognitions. 

Nonsense! Either the Magi were right and the Baby Jesus was the Son of God or they were wrong. It is not the case that there could be any decay of their epiphanic recognition. Christianity affirms Christ as Pantocrator. Nobody says 'Christ started off with super powers but they decayed over time. I hear he is thinking of getting a realtor's license and maybe moving out of his parent's basement one of these days.'

It may hint at the belief that in an earlier, Pre-Socratic condition, language was closer to the wellsprings of immediacy, to the undimmed "light of Being" (so Heidegger). But there is no evidence whatever for any such Adamic privilege.

Steiner understates the matter. If Darwin is right, there is nothing special about Language. It is merely a useful adaptation on a particular fitness landscape which may not endure very long.

Inescapably, the "language-animal," as the ancient Greeks defined man, inhabits the bounded immensities of the word, of grammatical instruments.

The Greeks did not define man as anything. There was no need to do so. They could see that some men could not speak- yet they were men.  They did consider rationality of a particular sort as definingly human. A mute person could easily do what was advantageous to himself and helpful to his neighbors. Heidegger takes zoon logon echon to mean having language, not having reason. But this is silly. Parrots have a lot of language and withal are pretty and very affectionate. But birds don't need the sort of rationality upon which Cities and Kingdoms are established. They do well enough for themselves flying around shitting on statues.

The Logos equates word with reason in its very foundations.

No. Only Scriptural religions which hold that God used a Word to cause Creation to come into being make any such equation. In India, Brahmanism- which asserts 'Nada Brahma'- places a lot of emphasis on the correct pronunciation of mantras. But the consensus is that a loving and loyal heart devoted to the Lord is something far more valuable.

Thought may indeed be in exile. But if so, we do not know or, more precisely, we cannot say from what.

Yes we do. If Thought is in exile it is because mortal creatures are in exile from the bosom of the Creator. If there is no Creator then Thought may be useful or it may be useless. But it isn't in exile.

It follows that philosophy and literature occupy the same generative though ultimately circumscribed space.

Nonsense! The Literature bookshelves are clearly distinguishable from the Philosophy bookshelves. Speaking generally, Literature has literary qualities. Philosophy may have nothing of the sort. There may be some good prose stylists who were also philosophers. Sadly, they are the exception to the rule.

If Steiner is correct then one could say 'Victorian porn occupies the same generative though circumscribed space as Anal-tickle Philosophy.' So does Accountancy and the Law and books on molecular gastronomy.

Their performative means are identical: an alignment of words, the modes of syntax, punctuation (a subtle resource). This is as true of a nursery rhyme as it is of a Kant Critique.

But, because it is equally true of Audited Accounts it is a useless truth. Why not simply say 'Philosophy is identical with farting?'

Of a dime novel as of the Phaedo. They are deeds of language. The notion, as in Nietzsche or Valery, that abstract thought can be danced is an allegoric conceit.

There is the story of Memphis, the mime, who could communicate the whole of the Pythagorean philosophy with but a twitch of his butt cheeks. As a matter of fact, anything that can be said with words can also be communicated by a well enough developed sign language or system of dance.

Utterance, intelligible enunciation is all.

Sadly, there were some religious traditions which discriminated against the deaf. But that was long ago.

Together they solicit or withstand translation, paraphrase, metaphrase and every technique of transmission or betrayal.

Things which are useful become the target of mimetic processes- though some bad things too may be imitated. Mimetic effects aren't frictionless. They are error prone. Still, what is the alternative? Man lives on an uncertain fitness landscape. Recipes have to be adapted to local exigencies. Some pedants may get worked up about this and maybe that is a good thing. Keeping track of transmission errors could be helpful.

Practitioners have always known this.

Failed practitioners always have some excuse about how they ought to have been jazz musicians. Indeed, the record of their folly should be looked at as a type of jazz solo.  Also, they didn't really grab the pussy of the young intern. It was very unfair of her to beat the shit out of them.

In all philosophy, conceded Sartre, there is "a hidden literary prose."

Sartre, it must be said, could write very well which is why John Ford got him to write a screen-play for him.

Philosophic thought can be realized "only metaphorically," taught Althusser.

Then it can't be realized at all. I may, metaphorically speaking, be a billionaire and married to Beyonce. But only in a manner of speaking which, frankly, is wholly mendacious if not pathetic.

Repeatedly (but how seriously?) Wittgenstein professed that he ought to have set down his Investigations in verse.

Why not? Verse is easy to write if you have the knack for it. Kant and the Germans read Pope's 'Essay on Man' with great attention. Indeed, Kant would recite long sections of it during the course of his Lectures.

Jean-Luc Nancy cites the vital difficulties which philosophy and poetry occasion each other:"Together they are difficulty itself: the difficulty of making sense."

This difficulty recedes if either has something useful to say. Kant had no difficulty understanding Pope. Once one understands that Kant was wrong about synthetic a priori judgments, reading him becomes easy. Why? Because Kant becomes useful in that he adumburates all the types of errors which that initial error involves.

Which idiom points to the essential crux, to the creation of meaning and poetics of reason.

Only if the thing is useless. If it is useful we quickly arrive at a 'good enough', cognitively very cheap, way of making sense. Some pedants may get paid a little money to make heavy weather of the thing. But, for everybody else, it quickly becomes second nature.

Meaning is simply a type of utility. Creating it, long term, must 'pay for itself' or the thing is dismissed as nonsense. As for the 'poetics of reason', we may as well speak of its booty shake or struggles with substance abuse.

What has been less clarified is the incessant, shaping pressure of speech-forms, of style on philosophic and metaphysical programs.

Surely, this is because those who attempt to do so can't think or express themselves clearly? The profession is adversely selective.

In what respects is a philosophic proposal, even in the nakedness of Frege's logic, a rhetoric?

In the same respects that it is a form of booty-shake. Frege's twerking was heavy and Teutonic. Russell's was limber and reminiscent of the young Josephine Baker.

Can any cognitive or epistemological system be dissociated from its stylistic conventions, from the genres of expression prevalent or under challenge in its time and milieu?

Yes. Anything useful has this quality. Sadly, the same is true of useless fads.

To what degree are the metaphysics of Descartes, of Spinoza or Leibniz conditioned by the complex social and instrumental ideals of late Latin, by the constituents and underlying authority of a partially artificial Latinity within modern Europe ?

To no degree whatsoever. That is why we can easily find similar ideas in Islam and Hinduism and so forth. The first Scottish philosophers, who so revolutionized European thought, originally lectured in Latin and only switched to English during the course of the Eighteenth Century. This did not diminish their influence.

At oher points, the philosopher sets out to construe a new language, an idiolect singular to his purpose.

But, more often than not, babbles nonsense.

Yet this endeavor, manifest in Nietzsche or in Heidegger, is itself saturated by the oratorical, colloquial or aesthetic context (witness the "expressionism" in Zarathustra).

Nietzsche was mad. Heidegger had been turned down by the Jesuits and failed to get a Theology Chair at a Catholic university. His trajectory has a lot to do with Bismark's failed Kulturkampf. But, to be frank, it is based on bad philology and atrocious thinking.

There could be no Derrida outside the wordplay initiated by Surrealism and Dada, immune to the acrobatics of automatic writing. What lies nearer deconstruction than Finnegans Wake or Gertrude Stein's lapidary finding that "there is no there there"?

There could be no Derrida without Husserl's stupidity. But the same could be said about Heidegger. It simply was not obvious that Husserl was talking nonsense.  At one time he seemed smart. His PhD was in Maths. He was Weierstrass's assistant. He was rated by people like Hermann Weyl. But he took a wrong turning and wasted his life.

It is aspects of this "stylization" in certain philosophic texts, of the engendering of such texts via literary tools and fashions which I want to consider (in an inevitably partial and provisional way).

This would only be a useful exercise if those 'philosophic texts' were not obvious nonsense.

I want to note the interactions, the rivalries between poet, novelist, playwright on the one hand and the declared thinker on the other.

Note this by all means if the 'declared thinker' makes a lasting contribution. Consider Cambridge Platonists like Henry More who introduced the notion of a 'fourth dimension' and was rediscovered by the Theosophists in the late Nineteenth Century. We may certainly find it rewarding to look at 'rivalries between poets' at that time in history and to see how this affected the very useful science of Sir Isaac Newton.

But what is the point of looking at the work of babbling fools and saying 'oh! this cretin is imitating such and such poet or novelist?'

"To be both Spinoza and Stendhal" (Sartre).

But Sartre made his name by writing about what he saw around him. For a time he may have appeared the equal of both Spinoza and Stendhal. Now? Not so much.

Intimacies and reciprocal distrust made iconic by Plato and reborn in Heidegger's dialogue with Holderlin.

Holderlin had been a chum of Hegel. The poor fellow went mad. Heidegger had some silly ideas about the specialness of Greek and his own barbarous German tongue. So Holderlin was useful to him. Where is there any 'intimacy or reciprocal distrust' between them?

Fundamental to this essay is a conjecture which I find difficult to put into words.

Because thought- even foolish 'conjectures'- is not itself linguistic. Some difficulty or cognitive cost is imposed by the task of expressing a thought with any degree of precision.

A close association of music with poetry is a commonplace.

No. There is a close association between music and those poetic forms, which evolved out of songs set to music. But there are other poetic forms where this is not the case.

They share seminal categories of rhythm, phrasing, cadence, sonority, intonation and measure.

No. Some poetic forms evolved alongside music. Others did not. Pedants may categorize things but those categorizations aren't seminal or menstrual or anything other than mere pedantry.

"The music of poetry" is exactly that. Setting words to music or music to words is an exercise in shared raw materials. Is there in some kindred sense "a poetry, a music of thought" deeper than that which attaches to the external uses of language, to style?

A succession of thoughts may indeed be considered 'musical' or 'poetic' or 'scrumptious' or 'elegant' or 'cuddly' or anything else. It may well be that drinking wine or smoking dope can make even a complete moron feel that she is having very beautiful or harmonious or thrilling thoughts. But what distinguishes good and worthwhile thoughts are that they can make life better for people. The guy who concentrates on thinking beautiful thoughts may turn himself into a useless cretin.
Steiner is so focused on 'great thinkers'- though the people he revers most were actually stupid fools- that he imagines 'thought' is something very special indeed.

We tend to use the term and concept of "thought" with unconsidered scattering and largesse.

So, Steiner is saying 'ordinary people don't have thoughts. Only the great thinkers whom I revere have thoughts.'

We affix the process of "thinking" to a teeming multiplicity which extends from the subconscious, chaotic torrent of internalized flotsam, even in sleep, to the most rigorous of analytic proceedings, which embraces the uninterrupted babble of the everyday and the focused meditation in Aristotle on mind or Hegel on self.

But both Aristotle and Hegel were ignorant fools because they didn't have access, as we do, to Wikipedia.

In common parlance "thinking" is democratized.

How dare the hoi polloi claim to have thoughts!

It is made universal and unlicensed.

Nobody should be allowed to say 'I think that x is the case' unless they are able to show that they have been licensed to have thoughts by a competent authority.

But this is to confound radically what are distinct, even antagonistic phenomena.

Steiner wrote some stupid shit about how there may be 'a music of thought'. But any drunkard or drug addict may find their thoughts musical or poetic. So, Steiner has to say only very special people can think. This means he can gas on about the 'music of thought' as if the thing was sublime rather than ridiculous.

Responsibly defined — we lack a signal term — serious thought is a rare occurrence. The discipline which it requires, the abstentions from facility and disorder, are very rarely or not at all in reach of the vast majority.

Nonsense! Serious thought occurs over serious matters. Everytime we take steps to guard against an existential threat or to exploit an evolutionary advantage, our thought is serious and taken seriously by those who wish to enjoy a like felicity. Idle, playful, thought too may turn out to be very useful. But it is utility which determines what is serious from what is mere moonshine of the sort Steiner dispenses.

Most of us are hardly cognizant of what it is "to think," to transmute the bric-a-brac, the shopworn refuse of our mental currents into "thought."

But, if we enter a useful profession, we are told by others that some of our thoughts are shit while others are valuable.  I suppose, Robinson Crusoe, on his desert isle, has to learn from bitter experience which of his thoughts were 'serious' and which were utterly shit.

Properly perceived — when do we pause to consider? —the instauration of thought of the first caliber is as rare as the crafting of a Shakespeare sonnet or a Bach fugue.

But both Shakespeare and Bach could churn them out like nobody's business! The thing isn't rare at all.

Perhaps, in our brief evolutionary history, we have not yet learned how to think. The tag homo sapiens may, except for a handful, be an unfounded boast.

But Steiner wasn't of that handful. He liked hanging out with them and got many opportunities to do so. But his 'thought' grew yet more worthless as the decades passed. Shite subjects may retain their place in great Universities. Professors of shite subjects may dine at High Table with the genuinely smart. But shite they and their subjects remain. Still, if the fees paid by students of shite subjects cross-subsidize worthwhile Departments, we may be tempted to say there is some point to this Ponzi scheme.  But that isn't the truth. This is a case of allocative inefficiency caused by information asymmetry. Everyone can be better off if we tell the truth about shite subjects and the retards who teach them.

Things excellent, admonishes Spinoza, "are rare and difficult."

Why is Spinoza pleading for esotericism? The answer is that in his age, all sorts of nutters wanted to kill 'free-thinkers'. But that age is long gone. If you think Religion is a swindle just say so. You don't have to beat about the bush.

Why should a distinguished philosophic text be more accessible than higher mathematics or a late Beethoven quartet?

I don't get this. Late Beethoven quartets are perfectly accessible. In any case, some entrepreneur can add a rock beat to the thing or rescore it in some way. Higher mathematical texts soon become so easily accessible that an innumerate C.E.O can change his Business Model in line with its predictions. If a 'distinguished philosophic text' is useful to ordinary people in that it helps them lead a better life then, lo and behold!, it suddenly becomes accessible to them in a cheap paperback. There are plenty of good people wot never went to Collidge who benefit from Spinoza or Aquinas or Shantideva or Lao Tzu

Inherent in such a text is a process of creation, a "poetry" which it both reveals and resists.

Only if some Straussian fear of persecution obtains. But, surely, few of us live in fear of the Spanish Inquisition or the NKVD.

Major philosophic-metaphysical thought both begets and seeks to conceal the "supreme fictions" within itself.

But why should we bother with 'Noble Lies'? What's the worst that can happen to us? Okay, we may get called a racist but that's still better than being labelled a sad fat loser.

The bilge-water of our indiscriminate ruminations is indeed the world's prose.

No. It is merely bilge-water. Hegel lived at a time when poets were considered to be superior to novelists. Now, in the English speaking world, the word 'poet' denotes the survivor of horrendous sexual and substance abuse. Novelists, like J.K Rowling, make billions of dollars and create jobs in the Film and Television industry.

No less than "poetry," in the categorical sense philosophy has its music, its pulse of tragedy, its raptures, even, though infrequently, its laughter (as in Montaigne or Hume).

But the same could be said of farting.

"All thought begins with a poem" taught Alain in his commerce with Valery.

And every fart begins as a poem uttered by the anus.

This shared incipience, this initiation of worlds is difficult to elicit.

Farts can be difficult to elicit. On the other hand, they may suddenly appear when least called for.

Yet it leaves traces, background noises comparable to those which whisper the origins of our galaxy.

The Big Bang left no 'background noises'. Microwave radiation is not audible. Similarly a fart does not leave echoes. It may leave a lingering smell.

I suspect that these traces are discernible in the mysterium tremendum of metaphor.

A metaphor is merely a figure of speech. To say 'traces are discernible' in a figure of speech is itself merely a figure of speech. This meta-metaphor has not increased your knowledge in any way. You are simply babbling nonsense though, if you take enough drugs, you may well believe that you are bumping uglies with the numinous.

Even melody, "supreme mystery among the sciences of man" (Levi- Strauss), may, in a certain sense, be metaphoric.

But only in the sense that things which aren't metaphoric can be metaphoric.

If we are a "language-animal," we are more specifically a primate endowed with the capacity to use metaphor, so as to relate with arc lightning, Heraclitus's simile, the disparate shards of being and passive perception.

Endowed by whom? Either we evolved by Natural Selection or we didn't. If we didn't, then it makes sense to puzzle over 'being' and 'passive perception' and so forth because maybe that's what our Creator wants us to do. But if Darwin was on the right track, then we must distinguish thought which promotes inclusive fitness from mere 'displacement activity'.

Where philosophy and literature mesh, where they are litigious toward one another in form or matter, these echoes of origin can be heard.

But anything at all can be called philosophy or literature and those who are so inclined can hear echoes of origin wherever they like.

The poetic genius of abstract thought is lit, is made audible.

Just as a fart can be set alight to burn with a hard gem-like flame.

Argument, even analytic, has its drumbeat. It is made ode. 

Joseph Pujol, Le Petomane, was a French Music Hall artist who could fart whole symphonies.

What voices the closing movements of Hegel's Phenomenology better than Edith Piaf 's non de non, a twofold negation which Hegel would have prized?

Pujol could have done a better job. Sadly, he gave up his arduous profession to open a biscuit factory.

This essay is an attempt to listen more closely.

But, it raises the question- did Steiner ever listen to himself? Had he done so, he may have done something useful- like quit the Academy to open a biscuit factory.