Ideas conveyed in philosophy can be hard to understand because of the way they are expressed in the essays written by philosophers. So much so that sometimes when I read some philosophical texts I understand the words, I know their meaning, but I am just not able to understand the meaning of the complete sentence.
For example in James' essay The Stream of Consciousness, there is a part about the 'Substantive' and 'Transitive' States of Mind. In one of the paragraphs he gives a few examples to illustrate his theory, but some sentences don't make sense to me: "Let anyone try to cut a thought across in the middle and get a look at its section, and he will see how difficult the introspective observation of the transitive tracts is." Or the following sentence: "[...] so, instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive thing, usually the word we were pronouncing [...]"
I feel like James is trying to express an important point, but because I don't understand the meaning of these sentences, I don't get his ideas.
As far as I am concerned, I thought that poetry was "only" about words themselves, their sounds, and how they create images in the reader's mind. Then, growing up, I discovered that poetry is also a means to convey a deeper meaning and make the reader think about deeper ideas. Actually, it is an attractive way of doing so thanks to the seduction effect that we talked about. For instance in Stevens' poems we find his ideas about notions in philosophy such as the truth or the importance of the experience in one's life, some of the very notions that James expressed in his essay. I quote Stevens' poem Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu:
"One likes to practice the thing."
As well as Connoisseur of Chaos:
"This proves nothing. Just one more truth, one more
Element in the immense disorder of truth."
As a result, poetry can be an attractive way of expressing philosophical ideas.
I think what you said about the two subjects is perfectly sound. Though I have read some poetry that had difficult sentences as well, most of the philosophy I have read has thrown out meaningful sentences that you can't help but get lost in translation. If you have read any of Heidegger's works, that is something one has to read a few times over just to extrapolate true meaning. Then you read other philosophy with more simplistic sentences that you find yourself passing over, when really, even those have a deeper meaning. So in other words, I think that goes both ways.
ReplyDeleteJulie, I think you've touched on some important points here. I have often thought that the best way to understand a difficult and opaque philosophical text is to find a work of poetry that embodies its ideas. SPenny mentioned the difficulty of Heidegger's works, and he is actually the first philosopher who comes to my mind on this topic because of the emphasis he placed on the poet and poetry as "shepherds of being," in his later work. According to Heidegger, it is the poets who capture the revelation of being, and through their message, the greatness of our truths endure. The poets whom Heidegger studies provide a great point of departure into the abstruseness of his literature. For example, when he quotes lines from Holderlin's poem "Patmos," “When the danger grows, the saving power also”, in his essay “The Question Concerning Technology” we realize that all his complicated discussion about “enframing,” and “standing reserves” boils down to is that we often times only come to our salvation when we are forced to find it, if we realize what resources have been granted to us as gifts and blessings, we will surely have more than enough to innovate. This is obviously a gross simplification of a very complex and technical essay, but this is the impress the text left on me after I encountered it; what, Pragmatically, I gleaned from the work that has better prepared me to understand and solve certain problems I face in the world and in experience. Perhaps it is a misread, but I really do not know how misreading is possible if one obtains Pragmatic benefits from such a caper. Now all of this is very far from our discussion of Plato and the Pragmatists, but, perhaps, it is not completely irrelevant. If Holderlin can help us to understand the difficulty of Heidegger, there is see no reason why James cannot help us to understand the difficulty of Stevens, and I think you have done an excellent job of demonstrating this in the passages you have quoted from both of them above.
ReplyDelete