ON LITERATURE
1. There are only two genres which are
absolute, and these are the aphorism and the lyric poem, as pertaining to
philosophy-proper and to poetry-proper respectively. The more absolute the philosopher, the more
he will adhere to aphorisms or maxims, as in the cases of La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère. This is par excellence an
idealistic, not to say an aristocratic, mode of philosophy, and thus its
employment in a materialist age will be the exception to the rule, increasingly
so as relative civilization becomes extremist, in deference to petty-bourgeois
criteria of literary progress. Anyone
who submits a volume of aphorisms or maxims (the two are approximately the
same, though I tend to treat aphorisms as being longer than maxims but shorter
than essays/essayettes) to a publisher these days is
either a fool or a saint, since even petty-bourgeois philosophers, not to
mention their bourgeois predecessors, steer clear of such flagrant concessions
to philosophical absolutism. How is it,
then, that one of the best-known and most widely discussed works of
twentieth-century philosophy happens to be aphoristic? (I am, of course, alluding to Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-philosophicus.) I think any cogent answer to this question
would have to take account of the fact that the milieu from which it arose,
namely Habsburg Vienna, happened to be a very aristocratic one, and that
Wittgenstein amply reflected this in his choice of, from the modern standpoint,
an obsolescent or overly idealistic genre.
2. Between what might be called the aphoristic
and poetic absolutes ... there exists a series of literary relativities: some,
like essayettes and essays, stemming from the
aphoristic absolute; others, like short prose and novels, aspiring towards the
poetic absolute; one genre, the dialogue, approximately balanced between the
two tendencies in a quintessentially bourgeois relativity. For thinking in class-evolutionary terms, one
may define those genres which stem from the aphoristic absolute as grand
bourgeois, and those, by contrast, which aspire towards the poetic absolute as
petty bourgeois. And yet, the individual
treatment of any particular relative genre will depend on whether it is in the
hands of a philosopher or an artist; for it sometimes happens that the essayette and the essay are treated in a poetical way,
short prose and the novel, by contrast, in a philosophical way. But, by and large, each of these genres
either side of the dialogue is treated in a manner appropriate to its station. In the case of petty-bourgeois philosophy,
however, it is usually short prose and the novelette that
serve as vehicles for philosophical expression, the essayette
and essay being more relevant to a grand-bourgeois epoch. As to the dialogue, it, too, can be written,
despite its balanced chronological status, from either a philosophical or a
poetical angle, depending on the type of author in question. (Schopenhauer
wrote from a philosophical angle, Wilde from a poetical one.) But, like the essayette
and essay, it has less applicability to a petty-bourgeois age than short prose
or a novel.
3. If a petty-bourgeois philosopher can write
philosophy, relative to the age, in short-prose and/or novelistic guise, could
one assume, in jumping ahead, that a proletarian philosopher should write
philosophy, relative to the proletariat, in poetic guise, since poetry
corresponds to an absolute, and proletarian writing, like proletarian society,
could not be other than absolutist in its definitive form? No, I shall assume no such thing, because the
treatment of an absolute poetic genre in a philosophical way would amount to a
contradiction in terms, unworthy of serious consideration. Poetry, especially when proletarian, could
only be written poetically, in deference to poetic absolutism, not be
bastardized through philosophical expression.
That poetry has been bastardized, in this manner
in the past, isn't altogether surprising, since whenever philosophical criteria
have predominated, as in the grand-bourgeois and even bourgeois epochs of
creative evolution, philosophy has overflowed its bounds, so to speak, and
invaded the realm of poetry, or a poetry susceptible to philosophical intrusion
by dint of its own relative backwardness, as intelligible within a
grand-bourgeois or bourgeois epoch, and consequent adhesion to appearance,
manifesting in regular rhythmic and rhyming devices.
4. True poetic writing only becomes possible in
a proletarian epoch, when poetry transcends appearance in a context of maximum
essence, achieved through abstract rhythm- and rhyme-defying arrangements
designed to free words from all forms of grammatical constraint and, by
implication, to elevate poetry from a relatively atomic to an absolutely
post-atomic (free-electron) level of impression. Where poetry, enslaved to appearance, had
formerly expressed some quasi-philosophical meaning or described some apparent
phenomenon, its absolutist manifestation would free it from such expression and
elevate it to a kind of 'thing-in-itself' abstraction only capable of
impressing upon the reader some notion of the transcendent. It will become, in its absolute commitment to
essence, fully poeticized.
5. Although I alluded to the possibility of a
proletarian philosopher a short while ago, in reality there can be no such
person; for philosophy, dedicated when most closely itself, to the
classification and elucidation of the apparent, i.e. the world, cannot outlive
a relative epoch or civilization, since it stems from the apparent absolute and
can fulfil no useful purpose in an epoch or civilization exclusively aspiring
towards the essential absolute. If,
however, the philosopher must be buried along with relative civilization, then
the philosophical theosophist, who may in some sense be regarded as his
successor, stands as the root universal influence for an absolute civilization,
which cannot come into being without his guidance, since he expresses the
theories and beliefs by which it will live.
In transcending all relative genres, including literary ones, he
transcends the category of philosopher, which is rooted in the aphorism and
inclined to the production of successive volumes of individualistic
philosophy. One could describe this
transcendence as signifying a convergence to omega on the level of philosophy,
but that would entail the notion that the Transcendentalist, far from being the
universalizing influence at the root of a future absolute civilization, was the
climax to philosophical endeavour, and thus the ultimate philosopher. However, such a notion would hardly do
justice to the fact that the Transcendentalist's theories are incapable of
being assimilated into relative civilization, but are very often diametrically
opposed to what philosophical tradition has upheld. Because the progression from
bourgeois/proletarian civilization to transcendental civilization presupposes
revolutionary upheaval, the philosophical theosophist cannot stand at the
climax of a relative tradition, as the ultimate philosopher, but appertains to
the spiritual inception of a new civilization, antithetical in constitution to
everything that preceded it.
6. By comparison with the philosophical tradition, the Transcendentalist's work marks a more radical
development of philosophical thought towards essence. In its earliest stages philosophy was predominantly
apparent, that is to say, concerned with a classification and description of
the phenomenal world. Metaphysics, as an
attempt to understand and elucidate a world beyond appearances, only entered
philosophy at a later date, and then very gradually, wherever civilization had
attained to a fairly extensive degree of urbanization and acquired, in
consequence, a metaphysical dimension.
There were, in the Christian West, different stages of metaphysical
development, corresponding to class-evolutionary progress from grand-bourgeois
Catholicism to petty-bourgeois mysticism via bourgeois Protestantism, and, not
surprisingly, philosophy mirrored and to some extent anticipated this
development, becoming, in due course, more essential, that is to say, less concerned
with the phenomenal world and correspondingly more concerned with a noumenal one.
However, in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, there issued a
materialist reaction against petty-bourgeois metaphysics, which took the double
form of a Marxist reaction against Hegel and of a Nietzschean
reaction against Schopenhauer - the one leading, with the twentieth century, to
Communism, the other ... to Fascism. A
similar reaction of Wittgenstein against Kierkegaard, though subordinate in
consequence to each of the other two, confirms the anti-metaphysical bias of
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century philosophy, a bias that went on to
develop, via Jaspers and Heidegger, into Sartrian
existentialism, which is still, to all appearances, the leading tone of contemporary
petty-bourgeois materialist philosophy.
7. The Philosophes of the
Enlightenment signify a bourgeois reaction against bourgeois Protestant and
grand-bourgeois Counter Reformation metaphysics, as do Voltaire and Rousseau,
the two outstanding materialist philosophers of the eighteenth century. Descartes, Pascal, Berkeley, Hobbes, Hume,
Leibniz, Spinoza, and other such metaphysicians all came under attack, much as
their grand-bourgeois predecessors had not escaped the scathing criticism of
Bacon, Montaigne, Machiavelli, and other such
sixteenth-century materialists. But the
Enlightenment led on, in due course, to the metaphysics of Kant and
Schopenhauer, Fichte and Hegel, Emerson and Carlyle,
as well it might, since evolutionary progress within relative civilization
passes from one class-stage to another, and petty-bourgeois metaphysics had no
less of a right to exist, for a given period of time, than its bourgeois and
grand-bourgeois precursors. The contemporary
materialist opposition to such metaphysics, however, will be superseded by the
acceptance of proletarian metaphysics, which is what, in transcendental terms,
the greater part of my work is essentially all about. Thus does philosophy progress, in a kind of
zigzagging fashion, towards its culmination in an anti-metaphysical
petty-bourgeois guise and subsequent (metaphysical) transformation into
philosophical theosophy - the most essential of all philosophical developments!
8. Oriental philosophy, unlike its Western
counterpart, is still metaphysical, and on approximately petty-bourgeois
terms. The essence of oriental
philosophy, now as before, is denial of the will in a Buddha-like quiescence
stressing awareness as the only good worth pursuing. This is not, of course, an erroneous assessment
of the good life, but it has the disadvantage of being shackled with
traditional adherence to naturalistic criteria, including a more or less
complacent acknowledgement of the 'divine Ground', the oriental equivalent of
the Christian Father, the Judaic Jehovah, and the Islamic Allah. Nor is Buddhism absolved from the
contradictions arising from a confounding of this 'divine Ground' with the
'Clear Light of the Void' or vice versa, so that alpha and omega, no less than
in certain other world religions, are all-too-predictably exposed, within the
relativity of human life, to the possibility of periodic interchange and/or
substitution. So, despite the appearance
of absolutism, Buddhism, like Hinduism and Shintoism,
retains a relative integrity rooted in nature, which precludes its evolving
towards a proletarian absolutism and thereby embracing extensively artificial
criteria, relevant to the technological aspect of long-term religious
evolution. Although yoga, meditation,
Buddhism, and other forms of oriental philosophy are in some ways preferable to
the anti-metaphysical bias of contemporary occidental philosophy, the fact that
no such anti-metaphysical philosophy has arisen in the East to challenge and
discredit the traditional metaphysical integrity of oriental philosophy
(Marxism being a Western import) precludes the possibility of a higher
metaphysics eventually arising to replace both traditional metaphysical and
anti-metaphysical philosophy alike.
Paradoxically, the Western attack on petty-bourgeois metaphysics to some
extent served me as an incentive to work out a proletarian metaphysics for the
future absolutist civilization.
9. The fact that, hitherto, poetry has been
written under the domination of literature in relative civilization means that it
has been confined to either philosophical or pseudo-poetical guise, depending
on the epoch in question and the temperament or proclivities of the individual
poet. As philosophy evolved from its
root aphoristic absolutism in a predominantly descriptive, analytical,
interpretative relationship to the phenomenal world ... through successive
bourgeois stages to its culmination in the novel, with a corresponding shift of
emphasis away from the phenomenal towards the noumenal
(though subject, as already noted, to periodic materialist reactions), so
poetry evolved from a predominantly descriptive stance in nature to an
increasingly instructive, expositional stance in the metaphysical, that is to
say, from the apparent to the quasi-essential, from hymns to beauty to
intimations of truth ... considered as the divine goal of evolutionary
striving. This latter development,
however, is still inadequate from a purely poetic standpoint, but may be
described, if somewhat colloquially, as 'the best of a bad job', since the use
of appearance, i.e. grammatical constructs of an expositional nature, to
intimate of essence marks, despite its inherent contradiction, a significant
evolutionary improvement on the use of a more radical appearance, employing
(besides the aforementioned ingredient) regular rhymes, metres, stanza
divisions, and other such traditional devices, to glorify the apparent, i.e.
nature and natural beauty in general. So
while, during the later stages of relative civilization, poetry has become more
essential, and therefore superior to what it formerly was, it is still short of
being genuinely poetical, by dint of the fact that such a status presupposes a
complete severance from the apparent in maximized essence, which is to say,
total abstraction. For not until poetry
becomes abstract, in an absolutist age, will it have come into its own, and on
terms diametrically antithetical to the absolutist inception of definitive
philosophy as maxim or aphorism concerned not with essence but with appearance,
as pertaining to the description and analysis of the phenomenal world. By contrast, genuine absolutist poetry will
provide, through impression, an intimation of the noumenal
world to come.
10. Although I referred, a short while ago, to
the materialist reaction against metaphysical philosophy, I do not wish to
leave the reader with the impression that petty-bourgeois philosophy ceased to
be written, in the twentieth century, along metaphysical lines; for that would
be very far from the truth! On the
contrary, from being essayistic such philosophy became largely novelistic, as
is only to be expected with the gradual evolution of philosophy away from
appearance and further into essence, this requiring, if consistency was to be
maintained between form and content, a corresponding advancement from
relatively philosophical to relatively literary genres, including works of
short prose (the philosophical equivalent of short stories) and the
novelette. Characteristic of
petty-bourgeois philosophers with a metaphysical bent are Aldous
Huxley, Hermann Hesse, Henry Miller, André Gide, and Jack Kerouac.
There were others, of course, with a non-metaphysical bent, including
Sartre, Koestler, Faulkner, D.H. Lawrence, and Camus. Generally
speaking, I would define those who, irrespective of their ideological bias,
also wrote essays as belonging to an earlier or lower stage of petty-bourgeois
philosophy - one stemming, as it were, from the bourgeoisie. By contrast, those who only specialized in
novels and/or short prose I would define as belonging to a later and higher
stage of petty-bourgeois philosophy - one aspiring, as it were, towards the
proletariat. Thus Hesse,
Huxley, and Miller would correspond to the earlier stage, Kerouac, Faulkner,
and
11. All these petty-bourgeois philosophers,
regardless of whichever side or stage to which they would seem to belong, have
taken theoretical speculation further into essence than their bourgeois
predecessors, and thus closer to poetry.
They may be defined, with reason, as pseudo-philosophers, since
philosophy-proper is concerned not with intimations of or theories about the
Divine Omega, conceived as transcendent spirit, but with a catalogue and
analysis of the phenomenal world ... as applying, in the main, to nature. The fact that philosophy gradually evolved
away from this root concern and abandoned its absolute form in the process ...
is an indisputable fact. And we may
contend that the further away from phenomena it evolved, the more pseudo it
became, especially from the bourgeois epoch to the current day. Yet philosophy-proper still survived on
something approximating to its own terms by progressing from a critique of
nature through a critique of morals to a critique of language; a progression,
in other words, from the natural to the artificial via an ethical compromise. There was thus a kind of class evolution of
philosophy, within the Western context, from grand-bourgeois (Bacon) to
petty-bourgeois (Wittgenstein) via bourgeois (Kant) stages. And it was possible to retain the aphorism
throughout this evolution or, at any rate, even with its climax, as
Wittgenstein demonstrated. And yet, even
though such a thematic evolution had been possible, indeed inevitable, the
critique of language becomes a pseudo-philosophy in relation to the critique of
nature, that root concern of philosophical exegesis. It is only 'genuine' philosophy in relation
to the novelistic writings of the pseudo-philosophers, both metaphysical and
anti-metaphysical, though particularly with regard to the former.
12. Unlike philosophy, the evolution of poetry
began in the pseudo, as a description of and hymn to the beauty of natural
phenomena, particularly nature and woman, and only gradually progressed away
from a 'philosophical' bias, under the hegemony of philosophy, towards a poetic
one, in which spiritual instruction began to outweigh the descriptive element
and, in some cases, to entirely supplant it.
But even with this gradual progression towards essence, poetry remained
pseudo, because composed from a relative angle, in accordance with the dictates
of a bourgeois age and civilization, and thereby falling short of total
abstraction, the criterion of any genuine poetry. In retaining meaning, poetry was obliged to
remain expressive in consequence of its enslavement to
appearance, the instructive approach to essence no less than the descriptive
approach to appearance. Only when it
becomes impressive, with the development of an absolutist
civilization, will poetry be genuine - wholly genuine in total abstraction, not
merely the least pseudo of poetic stages.
Mallarmé ten times over, so to speak, with a
word sequence that intimates, as no instruction ever can, of the
transcendent. A word structure, in
short, that breaks the connection with appearance by depriving words of their meanings.
