Since the time Plato wanted to banish poetry from his ideal state by accusing Homer of “imitation”, the tension between poetry and philosophy has made itself evident. Our study aims to rethink this highly controversial relationship and to question the relationship between logic, which is the basis of the intellectual sciences, directly connected to logos, and poetry, which is seen as closer to sensation and to “mythos”. This questioning about the possibility of logical thinking through poetics will (...) be realized through language, logic and poetics. In this context, our discussion ground will be the reception of Aristotle’s Poetics, which is accepted as the first work of philosophy of art, in Islamic philosophy, specifically in Avicenna. While commenting on Aristotle, muslim logicians and Avicenna included poetry in logic by placing Poetics in the Organon. This very inclusion invites us to think about the logical status of poetry for Avicenna. In this context, the question we will pursue with Avicenna will be essentially: What is the logical status of poetry and what is the possibility of poetic syllogism? According to Avicenna, poetry is related to the “possibles”, and in this respect, it allows to consider being and non-being together. While poetry addresses imagination, the fact that the imagination is between the sensation and the intellect, makes poetry’s position of “mediator” valuable. In order to show what this position means, we will try to discuss the relationship between poetry and logic through a number of basic themes of the Avicennian philosophy, such as powers of the soul, the relationship between sensation-imagination-intellect, the distinction of essence-existence, the importance of imitation, and types of syllogism. Finally, we will discuss, through particular examples, the place given to the poetry, and examine the possibilities of poetry and the relationship between the poetic and the logical, in terms of the aforementioned theory of poetry. (shrink)

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, –that is allYe know on earth, and all ye need to know”.Hippias of Elis travels throughout the Greek world practicing and teaching the art of making beautiful speeches. On a rare visit to Athens, he meets Socrates who questions him about the nature of his art. Socrates is especially curious about how Hippias would define beauty. They agree that "beauty makes all beautiful things beautiful," but when Socrates presses him to say precisely what he means, (...) Hippias is unable to deliver such a definition. The more Socrates probes, the more absurd the responses from Hippias become. This is one of Plato's best comedies and one of his finest efforts at posing the difference between particular things and universals.Aristotle's Poetics is best known for its definition and analysis of tragedy, but it also applies to truth and beauty as they are manifested in the other arts. In our age when the natural and social sciences have dominated the quest for truth, it is helpful to consider why Aristotle claimed "poetry is more philosophical and more significant than history." In this postmodern era when the arts have been separated from ethics, it is worthwhile to consider Aristotle's way of connecting goodness and beauty. (shrink)

Al-Farabi, Avicenna and Averroes, widely known classical rationalists in the Arabic/Islamic philosophical tradition and strongly infl uential sources for Latin philosophy in the High Middle Ages, all thought themselves to be following Aristotle’s lead regarding the intellectual abstraction of intelligibles in the formation of necessary and unchanging scientific knowledge. For Aristotle it is clear that sensation is a potentiality for apprehending or coming to be individual sensed objects found in the world exterior to the human soul. This takes place (...) by way of a separation of the forms of sensibles from matter and a reception of them as an actualization of the senses of the soul. 1 In an analogous fashion, intellectual knowing is a potentiality for apprehending or coming to be in act non-individuated intellectual forms that are somehow in individuated particular sensible things. Although Aristotle says that “the objects of thought are in the sensible forms”, the analogy with sensation breaks down when it comes to the objects intellectually known. The reason for this is that the nonindividuated or universal forms of human knowledge are not in the sensibles in act as they must be in the intellect. 2 Again following Aristotle De Anima 3.4 and 3.5, these thinkers hold for a part of intellect that is passive or receptive of all things and another part that is active in making all things, this latter described as a disposition like light, this as well describing the active agent as acting like light. This second part, which the Arabic tradition called the Agent Intellect, sometimes describing it also as Active Intellect, al-‘aql al-fa‘il, was understood per Aristotelem to be an eternal cause of the intellectual forms in the human intellect. It was accepted that, without a grounding in separate eternal intellect, there may well be generalization or abstraction – in some sense of the 57term? but scientific knowledge understood as true, necessary and unchanging will not be achieved. 3 Of course, in Posterior Analytics 2.19 Aristotle writes of sensory experience and provides the image of a retreat gradually coming to a halt, saying, “The soul is so constituted that it is capable of the same sort of process”. This process somehow establishes the universal in the soul even though perception is of the particular. He describes this as taking place by induction, writing, “Clearly then it must be by induction that we acquire knowledge of the primary principles, because this is also the way in which general concepts are conveyed to us by sense-perception.” These are “first things” or primary principles or premises required by demonstration. And the Arabic tradition understood Aristotle to hold for the necessity of demonstration in the formation of scientific knowledge, something that stringently requires not only proper syllogistic form but also first premises that are known to be true, not just supposed or simply generalized on the basis of experience. 4 For the Arabic tradition, Aristotle?s doctrine of intellectual understanding required the involvement of that separate Agent Intellect to provide a solid foundation for human scientific knowledge by way of intellectual abstraction. (shrink)

The paper concerns the Commentary on Aristotle's Poetics written by Avicenna (Ibn Sina : 930-1037AD). The paper is divided into two parts, the first of which examines Avicenna's account of poetic imagination and the use he makes of this concept in justifying a 'poetic syllogism' that accounts for aesthetic validity. The second part develops this account of the poetic syllogism to show that the completeness of the syllogistic requires us to consider the kind of commurlty (...) and moral validity sustained by poetic validity. To explain the first claim - for poetic syllogisms - the paper examines Avicenna's writings on logic and parts of his commentaries on the Prior and Posterior Analytics, linking these to issues in his commentary on the Poetics. To explain the relation of poetry to community, the paper develops issues from the commentary on the Poetics, especially Avicenna's use of the concept of 'themes'. (shrink)

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, –that is allYe know on earth, and all ye need to know”.Hippias of Elis travels throughout the Greek world practicing and teaching the art of making beautiful speeches. On a rare visit to Athens, he meets Socrates who questions him about the nature of his art. Socrates is especially curious about how Hippias would define beauty. They agree that "beauty makes all beautiful things beautiful," but when Socrates presses him to say precisely what he means, (...) Hippias is unable to deliver such a definition. The more Socrates probes, the more absurd the responses from Hippias become. This is one of Plato's best comedies and one of his finest efforts at posing the difference between particular things and universals.Aristotle's Poetics is best known for its definition and analysis of tragedy, but it also applies to truth and beauty as they are manifested in the other arts. In our age when the natural and social sciences have dominated the quest for truth, it is helpful to consider why Aristotle claimed "poetry is more philosophical and more significant than history." In this postmodern era when the arts have been separated from ethics, it is worthwhile to consider Aristotle's way of connecting goodness and beauty. (shrink)

Aristotle, great Greek philosopher, researcher, reasoner, and writer, born at Stagirus in 384 BCE, was the son of Nicomachus, a physician, and Phaestis. He studied under Plato at Athens and taught there ; subsequently he spent three years at the court of a former pupil, Hermeias, in Asia Minor and at this time married Pythias, one of Hermeias's relations. After some time at Mitylene, in 343?2 he was appointed by King Philip of Macedon to be tutor of his teen-aged son (...) Alexander. After Philip's death in 336, Aristotle became head of his own school, the Lyceum at Athens. Because of anti-Macedonian feeling there after Alexander's death in 323, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322. Nearly all the works Aristotle prepared for publication are lost; the priceless ones extant are lecture-materials, notes, and memoranda. They can be categorized as follows: I Practical: Nicomachean Ethics; Great Ethics ; Eudemian Ethics; Politics; Economics ; On Virtues and Vices. II Logical: Categories; Analytics ; Interpretation; Refutations used by Sophists; Topica. III Physical: Twenty-six works including astronomy, generation and destruction, the senses, memory, sleep, dreams, life, facts about animals, etc. IV Metaphysics: on being as being. V Art: Rhetoric and Poetics. VI Other works including the Constitution of Athens; more works also of doubtful authorship. VII Fragments of various works such as dialogues on philosophy and literature; and of treatises on rhetoric, politics and metaphysics. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Aristotle is in twenty-three volumes. (shrink)

This monograph explores the logical systems of early logicians in the Arabic tradition from a theoretical perspective, providing a complete panorama of early Arabic logic and centering it within an expansive historical context. By thoroughly examining the writings of the first Arabic logicians, al-Fārābī, Avicenna and Averroes, the author analyzes their respective theories, discusses their relationship to the syllogistics of Aristotle and his followers, and measures their influence on later logical systems. Beginning with an introduction to the writings of (...) the most prominent Arabic logicians, the author scrutinizes these works to determine their categorical logic, as well as their modal and hypothetical logics. Where most other studies written on this subject focus on the Arabic logicians’ epistemology, metaphysics, and theology, this volume takes a unique approach by focusing on the actual technical aspects and features of their logics. The author then moves on to examine the original texts as closely as possible and employs the symbolism of modern propositional, predicate, and modal logics, rendering the arguments of each logician clearly and precisely while clarifying the theories themselves in order to determine the differences between the Arabic logicians’ systems and those of Aristotle. By providing a detailed examination of theories that are still not very well-known in Western countries, the author is able to assess the improvements that can be found in the Arabic writings, and to situate Arabic logic within the breadth of the history of logic. This unique study will appeal mainly to historians of logic, logicians, and philosophers who seek a better understanding of the Arabic tradition. It also will be of interest to modern logicians who wish to delve into the historical aspects and progression of their discipline. Furthermore, this book will serve as a valuable resource for graduate students who wish to complement their general knowledge of Arabic culture, logic, and sciences. (shrink)

The paper is the first of two to be published in Cognitio which explore the hypothesis that the thought of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803- 1882), brilliantly expounded in the generation before Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), anticipated, if not provided the direct provenance of, Peirce’s mature metaphysical ideas. The papers provide running commentaries on Emerson’s later-phase essays, “Poetry and Imagination” (1854, published in 1876) and “The Natural History of Intellect” (1870). “Poetry and Imagination” is shown to contain the seeds (...) of Peirce’s objective idealism — namely, that “matter is effete mind,” or “mind hide-bound with habits,” — set within an evolutionary cosmology that grounds the human mind’s connaturality or affinity with the laws of nature, a doctrine subtending his abductory logic of scientific discovery. Mutatis mutandis, all these components were already present in Emerson’s essay. Peirce spoke of his “buddhisto-christian religion,” which was another name for Emersonian cosmosemiosis. His originality consisted in applying Emerson’s emphasis on the poetic to the scientific imagination, though the seeds of the latter are present in Emerson’s “The Natural History of Intellect” and other essays as well. (shrink)

Book synopsis: For the Pre-Socratic philosophers the soul was the source of movement and sensation, while for Plato it was the seat of being, metaphysically distinct from the body that it was forced temporarily to inhabit. Plato's student Aristotle was determined to test the truth of both these beliefs against the emerging sciences of logic and biology. His examination of the huge variety of living organisms - the enormous range of their behaviour, their powers and their perceptual sophistication - convinced (...) him of the inadequacy both of a materialist reduction and of a Platonic sublimation of the soul. In De Anima, he sought to set out his theory of the soul as the ultimate reality of embodied form and produced both a masterpiece of philosophical insight and a psychology of perennially fascinating subtlety. (shrink)

A critically important development in the tradition of philosophy, as understood by Arabic authors, was the inclusion of both rhetoric and poetics within logic. While these writers' conception of the logical Organon gave appropriate place to the theory of demonstration as found and defined in Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, they added to it the syllogism not only of dialectic, but of rhetoric and poetry as well. By attaching the latter two arts to logic, the Arabic philosophers created a contextual claim (...) about rhetoric and poetry which tended both to weaken the status of either one as a mode of nonlogical discourse and yet potentially to enhance their importance as tools of cognitive activity by recognizing in them some form of syllogistic reasoning. (shrink)

This book is an original and important study of philosophical issues in medieval Arabic poetics. Examining the commentaries on Aristotle's Poetics by Avicenna in the context of Aristotle's logical theory, the author shows how the philosophers justified the logical and moral power of poetic discourse.

continent. 1.3 (2011): 201-207. “Poetry is experience, linked to a vital approach, to a movement which is accomplished in the serious, purposeful course of life. In order to write a single line, one must have exhausted life.” —Maurice Blanchot (1982, 89) Nikos Karouzos had a communist teacher for a father and an orthodox priest for a grandfather. From his four years up to his high school graduation he was incessantly educated, reading the entire private library of his granddad, comprising (...) mainly the Orthodox Church Fathers and the ancient classics. Later on in his life he sold the library for money, only to buy a little more time before he went broke again: “I carry sorrow like a cage/ I got no birds/ as I come back from her hair/ I see the profit emptied/ cool from terror.” (1993, Ι, 101) Nowadays—and ridiculously recently—we are more than apt to speak of a certain insouciance pertaining to the Greek form of expenditure: expenditure without any type of investment, sometimes not (even) symbolic. In the vaults of the European unconscious, this imprudent stance still conjures a “capital punishment” in the form of de-capitation, reflecting back the fear of excess and the terror of its consequences.1 Thus the Greek way of living is very close to what a stranger could have termed as “the Greek way of dying.” Yet, what is not often understood is that the Greek esprit , the same one that invented the maxim μηδ?ν ?γαν (“nothing in excess”), does not experience death solely as an imminent fear of bankruptcy. For it miraculously combines its unconditional acceptance with the promise of a resurrection that is always there in the scents of Spring, from Dionysus to the orthodox Christ: “Everyone resurrects himself through dying [….] Resurrection is the switching of mortalities.” (2002, 94) Hence, if an entire library was imprudently traded for a plate with seven olives, a sliced tomato and some fresh goat cheese, let us not be fooled: this is not the meal of the pauper, but that of “an aristocrat from God” (1993, II, 491) feeding his eloquent loudmouth, ridiculously cut open in an otherwise rock-solid caput . *** To speak of the Greek experience is to speak about a half-dead language that still utters in life what is seemingly excluded from it and thus forbidden to be talked about: death. Death as anything that is out of this world, as something that will never return . Still, along with an experience of death that recently waned as a worn-out academic fashion, the Greek experience is dead too. Nearly 2300 years of written words separating Homer from the fall of Byzantium equal 500 books on a library traded for money: “I am with the killed. Hence my deepest solitude. I do not feel this tremendous macho society, beyond from the fact that it is a ruthlessly consuming one. It is me who pays all the time .” (2002, 57) Let us do the math and see how much this dealing with the Greek experience is costing the poet and how much dealing with the Greek experience might cost us today. *** “I do not guarantee a single word.” (Karouzos, 1993, II, 454) Through its various dialects and forms, the Greek language speaks through an incessant historical dissemination. Anyone who is aware of this terrifying polymorphy and still calls himself a poet, must stand against a white sheet of paper, pen-in-hand, with a very particular duty: to be as fully inconsistent as possible. In the formally ironic uniqueness of the poem, the poet functions as “a band-aid for lesser and greater antinomies.” (1993, I, 251) Of course these antinomies are not exhausted in language—they are historical, political and, alas, existential. Yet, beyond appearances , it is language that ruthlessly encodes them through history, submitting the poet to the temptation of placing them one next to the other on a single white sheet. The closer their neighboring, the greater the scattering of the writer in the ironic uniqueness of the paper. In a work where poetic license is described as a “freedom-impasse” (2002, 51), this task is undertaken in full conscience of its personal consequences: “what I am interested in is to escape my individuality (envisioning the non-ego) […] Nevertheless, my dissociations never achieve duration.” (2002, 74-75) Hence, though poetry is the “deserted direction of will,” (1998, 62) the stance of the poet is not that of a Nietzschean “great man.”2 Whereas drunkenness provides a thread between the poem and the excess it both presupposes and infuses (“Poetry always enlarges. ‘Drunkenness’ is nothing more than that,” (2002, 85)), whereas language flashes in loudmouth spurts of déraison (“When I am alone I do something else. I utter words. For example, while having my ouzo and listening to music I am most likely capable of randomly shouting ‘Electricity!’” (2002, 138)), the poet never gives in to the double affirmation that would eventually risk the “element of pleasure in discourse.” (2002, 80)” It is exactly because the gap of the antinomies is so vast that poetry is not meant to be written with a hammer. Neither does writing consist in a reevaluation of those elements. In short, poetry is not an affirmation of difference, but the surprising beauty of chiming antinomies. We might never transcend them, but it is up to us to put them together. Yet again, this voisinage is not to be identified with the necessity of chance as an eternal return.4 On the contrary it is a return from that very return : Let us treat Yes as a No to No and No as a Yes […] And let us not forget that this pissed affirmation crumbled down Nietzsche’s intellect in the dark paths of this world. (2002, 88) This return from the “vicious circle” should in no way be taken as a form of artistic prudence. Rather it can be seen as a dribble of demonic inconsistency as Dionysus transforms himself into a Christ that is in turn de-theologized: “Who can forbid that? Every man is capable of his own theology, nothing can stop him.” (2002, 73-74) This is a turn towards an existential vision of the world, historically coinciding with a particular political defeat of the Left, to which the poet devoted all his life: after the defeat of the popular front I raised the question “why do we exist?” while others were asking “why we failed.” (2002, 57)5 But most of all it is a return to poetry that exceeds the existential question itself, going beyond the issue of faith. Poetry comes in as a question of return after a defeat that is confessed in full profanity. Though it accepts the necessity of the defeat, it does not affirm it. Though it negates it, the negation is not in the name of a promise to be delivered in the kingdom of heavens. Following a historical and existential defeat, poetry is born post mortem . It signals a return to Christ as “groundless religiousness in the surprise of the real as such” (2002, 72) which is at once a return to the refuge of childhood. It is not a question of endurance towards an eternal return. Rather it is a question on the possibility of an existential return. Returning in a world as someone who cannot enjoy any returns exactly because he is averse to guarantees. A return without returns. *** PHOTOCOPY OF HAPPINESS When I was young I used to pin down cicadas and step on ant nests. I used to stand there silent for hours. With threads I decapitated bees. Now I am a dead man breathing. (Karouzos, 1993, II, 336.) The return to the “paradise of childhood” (2002, 68) constitutes the devouring refuge of its own memory when defeat becomes the synonym of adulthood. The political struggles of a young communist in a country torn up by a civil war right after World War II fraught with incarcerations and exiles. Historically they resulted in the defeat of the communist movement in Greece and opened up a long turbulent road that would peak in the dictatorship of 1967. Existentially they led to a series of disillusionments: mental breakdown, divorce, abandonment of studies in law school. To the question “why do we exist” the answer was poetry. Still this exposé should not be read as a sweeping chronography of a man. For it actually happens to coincide with the historical fate of a nation that after its modern constitution never stopped dreaming of the glories of its past youth, in a present that was (and is) sweepingly disappointing. But isn’t this return to youth finally a way of compensating for a loss of youth that necessarily results in a losing adulthood? Will Greeks, the eternal children of Plato and Nietzsche, ever learn? How to return without dying, how to remember without wasting time? WE ARE IN THE OPEN MEANING Living the coldest mauve night right across Parthenon I went to take a piss on some foliage and I was enjoying the foliage as it was steaming. (Karouzos, 1993, II, 340) Beyond the historical tragedies of modern Greece and away from any personal disappointments, the relation that this land holds with language and history is mediated through the Greek light—whose omnipresence is the very condition of its transcendence. All historical contradictions from Dionysus to Christ took place under this light; all those disseminated dialects were spoken beneath its warmth. To paraphrase Lévinas,6 light is both the condition of the world and of our withdrawal from it—a withdrawal towards the invisibility of God, of the dead, of meta-physics, resulting from the temptation that all is still here, behind this light the visibility of which they once evaded: “birds, the allurement of God.” (1993, I, 17) Under that luminous sky, if Greeks can do anything at all, it is to envision a return that will never come. All they can do is write poetry—which is doing nothing; other than lending an ear to a disseminated language whispering a unity that cannot be promised, as an adulthood in defeat is ready to recognize. Trying “to trap the invisible in visibility” (1993, II, 483) they forget that they have grown up and one day they die—with the promise of return. Hence an additional meaning must be given to this return to childhood. It does not signal salvation but rather its promise. To the ears of an aged continent it means that the return to/of poetry is a losing game, a return without returns. “Europe, Europe… you are nothing more than the continuation of Barabbas.” (1993, I, 295) *** “Life is not there to verify theories.”7 The records show that Karouzos was finally given a second-class pension from the Greek government, at the time when he was being recognized by the literary press as one of Greece’s major contemporary poets. Being neither a bourgeois nor a nobelist, he proclaimed himself to be an anarcho-communist, unconditionally faithful to the utopia of a classless society. He also drank, heavily. “Capitalism made an animal out of man/ Marxism made an animal out of truth/ Shut up.” (1993, II, 369) Perhaps one of the most scandalous divides of our times has been the one between the living and the dead, the latent prohibition that the living should not be concerned with the dead based on the mere impossibility of the dead to be concerned with the living in the first place. What adds to this scandal is that this divide abuses anything that cannot return to us by subsuming it under the same futility. Hence death is no longer “loss” in the usual sense. It no more refers to the things we lost but to our “loss” (of time, money and well-being) as we insist to dwell on them. Death is a waste —of time. It is this waste that we find in the insouciance of Greek expenditure; the waste in dealing with a language that most of its historical part is no longer spoken (a dead language); the waste in translating a poet who is ex definitio untranslatable; the waste of his vision, his money, his life. The waste of dealing with anything that cannot return and that cannot bring in any returns . But it is also the waste of life that poetry itself presupposes, the waste of dealing with invisibility, with anything that is out of this world and thus invokes the fear of death that is in turn—and surprisingly— nowhere to be found. Instead of death, what is there, beyond the light, is the being without us (to recall the Lévinasian il y a ), the mumble of our own nothingness which constitutes the price to be paid for writing poetry under an evergreek light. To understand this to-and-fro, is to realize that poetry is something out of this world that nevertheless takes place in this world, by virtue of this world. But to ridiculously equate this to-and-fro with death as non-existence, is to exile poetry along with its own possibility from this same old world: I do not believe that poetry will ever disappear from this world. […] But I am also sure that it does not have many chances of playing, as you say, a redemptive role in our vertiginous technological future. Without being endangered as a creative need, it will be placed on the side of history. (2002, 32) It is mainly there that we would like to locate the meaning of Nikos Karouzos’s poetry today. If we are willing to include the Greek original it is because we consider that it will be both a waste of time for us to do so (since most of you cannot read Greek) and because it might induce you to the even larger waste of learning it. We would additionally be glad if this small introduction served as an equally wasteful, academically useless piece of reading, gesturing towards a taboo of investing in anything Greek—that is in anything dead among the living, in anything that will never come back and maybe was never here in the first place. This is the only way to reserve for ourselves the possibility of poetry and preserve the light of its promise. “To return: that is the miracle.” (1993, I, 17) Athens, Greece July 10, 2011 NOTES 1 “ Capitale (a Late Latin word based on caput “head”) emerged in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries in the sense of funds, stock of merchandise, sum of money or money carrying interest.[…] The word and the reality it stood for appear in the sermons of St. Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444) ‘… quamdam seminalem rationem lucrosi quam communiter capitale vocamus ’, ‘that prolific cause of wealth that we commonly call capital’” (Braudel, 1992, 232-233). 2 “A great man – a man whom nature has constructed and invented in the grand style – what is he? First : there is a long logic in all of his activity, hard to survey because of its length, and consequently misleading; he has the ability to extend his will across great stretches of his life and to despise and reject everything petty about him, including even the fairest, ‘divinest’ things in the world.” (Nietzsche, 1968, 505, §962) 3 Cf. Deleuze, 1986, 186-9. 4 “Return is the being of becoming, the unity of multiplicity, the necessity of chance: the being of difference as such or the eternal return.” (Deleuze, 189)5 In this 1982 interview Karouzos refers to the defeat of the communist movement in Greece after the civil war of 1946-1949 between the Governmental Army and the Democratic Army of Greece, the military division of the Greek communist party. Karouzos’s father was a member of the communist National Liberation front (EAM) members of which formed the mainl resistance movement (ELAS) in Greece during WWII. The poet was a member of the United Panhellenic Organization of Youth (EPON), which was a youth division of EAM. After the end of the war, ELAS was called to disarmament in view of the formation of a National Army. The members of EAM resigned from the government of national unity and a series of protests led to a 3 year civil war between ELAS and the Government Army. After the defeat of ELAS the Communist party was outlawed and many communists were exiled in deserted Greek islands. Karouzos, who took action in the Greek resistance and was active during the Greek civil war, was exiled in Icaria on 1947 and in Makronisos on 1953 where he was called two years earlier to do his military service. 6 “Existence in the world qua light, which makes desire possible, is then, in the midst of being, the possibility of detaching oneself from being. To enter into being is to link up with objects; it is in effect a bond that is already tainted with nullity. It is already to escape anonymity. In this world where everything seems to affirm our solidarity with the totality of existence, where we are caught up in the gears of a universal mechanism, our first feeling, our ineradicable illusion, is a feeling or illusion of freedom. To be in the world is this hesitation, this interval in existing, which we have seen in the analyses of fatigue and the present.” (Lévinas, 1988,43-4) 7from a TV interview. THE POETRY OF NIKOS KAROUZOS From Redwriter [ Ερυθρογρ?φος ], in Collected Works, Vol . II, Athens: Ikaros. 1993, 463-4. [Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 9-10.] JESUS ANTI-OEDIPUS* Why were we once saving till the fifth day the Paschal lamb? The scriptures say: with this victim’s meat we ought to cleanse all of our senses. To give life to the whitest wave miraculous odors in the extension of the chest. Ideals to death. For us to witness the illustrious dawns of Absinthe and for the soul to be a deeply carved ornament on the fore we named will. Then many deer running amidst the evergreen growth with watery hymns, then, the unintended angels descending with heights spiraling in their momentum offer themselves to the luminous Adventure. Whence the need for speech and our sufferings covered with flags like the glorified dead. An incorporeal finger pointing at the flamboyant and fragrant holocausts within the tired horizons and the exhausted breadths with joys of the mistletoe on fire and shivering all of the green-leaved love. Something would have chirped again had we not driven it away— maybe the ewe’s grass. Something would have called us to the eternal resurrection— maybe the grace of spring. But now our heart is fiercely blinded, withdrawn to the appearances of Hades. Silence and ice incessantly cover the Infant Spirit in thatched times. While the cherry trees are dreaming faintly glowing in absolute darkness there’s nothing the Babylonians can contemplate in labs with automatic colored lights. How to rejoice now in the fifth day of the lamb? We have forked the stars. We’ve gradually become supposedly sublime with plucked chimeras in our hands. Avenged relentlessly by science. *Though the poem appears in a 1990 collection, it was actually written in 1968. Hence the reader must be aware in not associating Karouzos’ Anti-Oedipus with the famous 1972 work of Deleuze and Guattari, given that the former precedes the latter. ΙΗΣΟΥΣ ΑΝΤΙ-ΟΙΔΙΠΟΥΣ Γιατ? κρατο?σαμε κ?ποτε ?ς την π?μπτη μ?ρα το πασχαλιν? πρ?βατο; Τα κε?μενα λ?νε: μ’ αυτο? του θ?ματος το κρ?ας ?πρεπε να καθαρ?σουμε ?λες τις αισθ?σεις. Για να δ?σουμε κ?μα στη ζω? λευκ?τατο θαυμ?σιες ευωδι?ς στην ?κταση του στ?θους. Ιδανικ? στο χ?ρο. Για να βλ?πουμε τα λαμπρ? χαρ?ματα του ?ψινθου και να ’ναι η ψυχ? στ?λισμα βαθυχ?ρακτο της πλ?ρης που την ε?παμε θ?ληση. Τ?τε πολλ?ς δορκ?δες τρ?χοντας αν?μεσα στην καταπρ?σινη φ?ση με τους υδ?τινους ?μνους, τ?τε, κατεβα?νοντας οι αθ?λητοι ?γγελοι με κυλινδο?μενο το ?ψος στην ορμ? τους χαρ?ζονται της αστραφτερ?ς Περιπ?τειας. ?θεν η μιλι? γι’ αυτ? χρει?ζεται και τα δειν? σκεπ?ζονται ωσ?ν τους τιμημ?νους νεκρο?ς με σημα?ες. Ασ?ματο δ?χτυλο δε?χνει τα φλογ?δη και μοσχοβ?λα ολοκαυτ?ματα στους κουρασμ?νους ορ?ζοντες στα εξουθενωμ?να πλ?τη καθ?ς αν?βουν οι χαρ?ς του νερα?δ?ξυλου και τρ?μει ολ?κληρη η πρασιν?φυλλη αγ?πη. Κ?τι θα κελαηδο?σε π?λι αν δεν το δι?χναμε— μπορε? της προβατ?νας το χορτ?ρι. Κ?τι θα μας καλο?σε στην απ?ραντη αν?σταση— μπορε? του ?αρος η χ?ρη. Μα η καρδι? μας ?γρια τυφλ?θηκε π?ρασε στα φαιν?μενα του ?δη. Σιγ? και π?γος αδι?κοπα σκεπ?ζει στους αχυρ?νιους καιρο?ς το Ν?πιο Πνε?μα. Την ?ρα που ονειρε?ονται οι βυσσινι?ς και λ?μπουν αμυδρ? μεσ’ στο απλ?τατο σκοτ?δι τ?ποτα δε στοχ?ζονται οι βαβυλ?νιοι στα εργαστ?ρια με τ’ αυτ?ματα χρωματιστ? φ?τα. Π?ς να χαρο?με πια την π?μπτη μ?ρα του προβ?του; Φουρκ?σαμε τ’ αστ?ρια. Γ?ναμε σιγ?-σιγ? δ?θεν υπ?ροχοι με μαδημ?νες χ?μαιρες στα χ?ρια. Μας ν?μεται σκληρ? η επιστ?μη. From: Redwriter [Ερυθρογρ?φος], in Collected Works, Vol. II, Athens: Ikaros. 1993, 472. [Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 18.] DIALECTΙCS OF SPRING Christ the straight angle; Christ the Pythagorean theorem. Christ the infinitesimal calculus from above the blessed Sets Christ. Christ the tessellation of massive particles Christ the zero mass. Hence we spray numbers and fields of lust. We are carabineers of diseased logic plus something— Observed means observer and Hekate The darkness luminous and light in the dark Astarte banqueters demons from today. ΔΙΑΛΕΚΤΙΚΗ ΤΟΥ ΕΑΡΟΣ Χριστ?ς η ορθ? γων?α· Χριστ?ς το πυθαγ?ριο θε?ρημα. Χριστ?ς ο απειροστικ?ς λογισμ?ς ?νωθεν ?λβια Χριστ?ς τα Σ?νολα. Χριστ?ς η ψηφιδογραφ?α στα μαζικ? σωμ?τια Χριστ?ς η μ?ζα μηδ?ν. ?ρα ψεκ?ζουμε αριθμο?ς και πεδ?α λαγνε?ας. Ε?μαστε τυφεκιοφ?ροι νοσο?σης λογικ?ς και κ?τι-- παρατηρο?μενο σημα?νει παρατηρητ?ς και Εκ?τη σκ?τος το π?μφωτο και φως εν τ? σκοτ?? η Αστ?ρτη συνδαιτημ?νες δα?μονες απ’ ?ρτι. From: Redwriter [Ερυθρογρ?φος], Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 18. [1993, II, 472]. CREDO (as we are used to say in Latin) Α I believe in one Poet expelled from heavens / fugitive from the god and vagabond, Empedocles / and here on earth / exile on the earth etc. of Baudelaire /. Β I believe in one Computer inside thunder and through matter. Γ Suffering undefiled / substantive / the Poet uplifts himself slow-burning suicidal implying lengthy sleeps. Δ Cutting down on prospective mistakes. Ε Of all things visible and invisible officiating the onion-peelings. Ζ The Poet has nothing / see the departed /. Η I believe in one Poet that says: madness I enjoy; he ridicules existence; let me light up from my mana. Θ Syntax he doesn’t care about when musicality commands him. Along with still more licenses, and Ts are played according to the concept sound anywhere. E.g. the winters here, he winters there; it will not come—I will not rest, etc. etc. Ι The Poet exercises thought until it’s stripped down. Κ And if he’s Greek he must always study the fineness of Attica, in light, mountains, fields and sea. For this fineness teaches language. Λ And if he’s deeply destined the Poet expresses the unexplainable of the explained; he happens to be a rightful heir to the scientist and his predecessor. Μ On the froth he does not last; the Poet blusters at the bottom of the pot. Ν Flamebred and never redeemed. Ξ The Poet must sometimes say: what a consumption of presence — be a bit lonely for a change! Ο The Poet is twilit. Π He is susceptible of deaths and resurrections. Ρ He looks from the corner of his eye and exists in a glance. Σ He follows behind the mother. Τ Eveningless when it comes to age. Υ I believe in one Poet who says: let the purities coincide. Until the Corinth of the Universe or even further. Φ In a higher despair. Χ In a brighter quintessence. Ψ In one sensation that lifts off. Ω Forgiving everyone. CREDO (ως ε?θισται να λ?με λατινιστ?) Α Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν εκτ?ς ουρανο? / φυγ?ς θε?θεν και αλ?της, Εμπεδοκλ?ς / και επ? της γης / εξ?ριστος π?νω στη γη κ.λπ. του Βωδελα?ρου /. Β Πιστε?ω εις ?να Υπολογιστ?ν εντ?ς κεραυνο? και δια της ?λης. Γ Υποφ?ροντας ?χραντα / ουσιαστικ?ν / ο Ποιητ?ς ανατε?νεται βραδυφλεγ?ς αυτ?χειρας εξυπακο?οντας πολ?ωρους ?πνους. Δ Τα υποψ?φια λ?θη λιγοστε?οντας. Ε Ορατ?ν τε π?ντων και αορ?των ιερουργ?ντας την αποκρομμ?ωση. Ζ Ο Ποιτ?ς ?χει τ?ποτα / βλ?πε τους αναχωρ?σαντες /. Η Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν που λ?ει: η τρ?λα μ’ αρ?σει· γελοιοποιε? την ?παρξη· ας αν?ψω απ’ τη μ?να μου. Θ Συνταχτικ? δεν το γνοι?ζεται στην προσταγ? της μουσικ?τητας. Μαζ? και μ’ ?λλες ακ?μη λευτερι?ς, και τα νυ πα?ζονται κατ? την ?ννοια ?χος οπουδ?ποτε. Π.χ. τον χειμ?να εδ?, το χειμ?να εκε?· δε θ? ’ρθει – δεν θα καταλαγι?σουμε, κ. λπ. κ.λπ. Ι Ο Ποιητ?ς γυμν?ζει τη σκ?ψη σε απογ?μνωση. Κ Κι αν ε?ναι ?λληνας οφε?λει να σπουδ?ζει π?ντοτε της Αττικ?ς τη λεπτ?τητα, σε φως, βουν?, χωρ?φια και θ?λασσα. Διδ?σκει γλ?σσα η λεπτ?τητα το?τη. Λ Κι αν ε?ναι βαθι? πεπρωμ?νος ο Ποιητ?ς εκφρ?ζει το ανεξ?γητο του εξηγητο?· τυγχ?νει ν?μιμος δι?δοχος του επιστ?μονα και προκ?τοχ?ς του. Μ Στον αφρ? δεν ?χει δι?ρκεια· στο πατοκ?ζανο μα?νεται ο Ποιητ?ς. Ν Φλογοδ?αιτος και ποτ? ξελυτρωμ?νος. Ξ Ο Ποιητ?ς κ?ποτε πρ?πει να λ?ει: μεγ?λη καταν?λωση παρουσ?ας – γενε?τε και λ?γο μοναξι?ρηδες! Ο Ο Ποιητ?ς ε?ναι αμφ?φλοξ. Π Επιδ?χεται θαν?τους και αναστ?σεις. Ρ Ακροθωρ?ζει και υπ?ρχει σε ξαφνοκο?ταγμα. Σ Ε?ναι ουραγ?ς της μητ?ρας. Τ Αν?σπερος απ? ηλικ?α. Υ Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν που λ?ει: να συμπ?σουν οι αγν?τητες. Μ?χρι την Κ?ρινθο του Σ?μπαντος ? μακρ?τερα. Φ Σε αν?τερη απελπισ?α. Χ Σε φαειν?τερη πεμπτουσ?α. Ψ Σε μια α?σθηση που πτηνο?ται. Ω Συγχωρ?ντας τους π?ντες. From Large Sized Logic [ Λογικ? μεγ?λου σχ?ματος ], Athens: Erato, 1989, n.p. [1993, II, 521-3]. (shrink)

The [[sic]] Arabic contribution to literary criticism is still very imperfectly known among Western scholars. It is important not only for the history of Arabic poetry, but for Latin Europe as well. Al-farabi’s discussion of poetry in his Catalog of the Sciences was translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona and also incorporated into an important essay On the Division of Sciences by Dominicus Gundissalinus in the twelfth century. In 1256 Hermannus Almannus [[sic]] translated the Middle Commentary of (...) Averroës on Aristotle’s Poetics. This translation provided the first hazy glimpse of Aristotle’s theory of poetry available in the Latin west. It circulated widely in manuscript, it was printed in Venice in 1491, and it was reprinted in the Giunta editions of "Aristotle with Averroës" during the sixteenth century. (shrink)

"Al-Farabi of Baghdad (c. 870-950) is the first major representative of the medieval Arabic Aristotelianism which came to influence the Christian West so profoundly. In the Islamic world his writings on logic set the pattern for the future and virtually created Islamic philosophy. He is also important as a witness to the study of Aristotle in late antiquity, demonstrating a knowledge of Galen and the exegetical tradition of Porphyry. This translation is based on a fresh study of the Arabic manuscripts. (...) An introduction and notes make this intriguing document accessible to all for whom it contains important matter.Classicists, historians of philosophy and logic, medievalists, Arabists, students of Islamic thought."--. (shrink)

Like Plato, Aristotle uses dialectic to interpret and analyze ordinary discourse as well as to ascend to the first principles of philosophy and science. At the same time he says that it is intellect ( noûs ) that apprehends the first principle. With al-Fārābī and Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā), dialectic becomes relegated to dealing with ordinary language. For them demonstration in an ideal language from principles apprehended by the intellect suffices for the philosopher.

This volume of essays by scholars in ancient Greek, medieval, and Arabic philosophy examines the full range of Aristotle's influence upon the Arabic tradition. It explores central themes from Aristotle's corpus, including logic, rhetoric and poetics, physics and meteorology, psychology, metaphysics, ethics and politics, and examines how these themes are investigated and developed by Arabic philosophers including al-Kindî, al-Fârâbî, Avicenna, al-Ghazâlî, Ibn Bâjja and Averroes. The volume also includes essays which explicitly focus upon the historical reception of Aristotle, from (...) the time of the Greek and Syriac transmission of his texts into the Islamic world to the period of their integration and assimilation into Arabic philosophy. This rich and wide-ranging collection will appeal to all those who are interested in the themes, development and context of Aristotle's enduring legacy within the Arabic tradition. (shrink)

pt. 1. The attainment of happiness.--pt. 2. The philosophy of Plato, its parts, the ranks of order of its parts, from the beginning to the end.--pt. 3. The philosophy of Aristotle, the parts of his philosophy, the ranks of order of its parts, the position from which he started and the one he reached.

Resumo: O artigo trata da retórica na Antiguidade e na Idade Média a partir da perspectiva de onze filósofos – Platão e Aristóteles, Cícero, Sêneca e Quintiliano, a Retórica a Herênio, Agostinho, Marciano Capela e Isidoro de Sevilha, Bernardo de Claraval e Ramon Llull. Oferece, ainda, um extrato por nós traduzido da Retórica nova do filósofo catalão, a primeira tradução para a língua portuguesa.: This article deals with rhetoric in Antiquity and Middle Ages from the perspective of eleven philosophers: Plato, (...) Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Quintilian, the unknown author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, Saint Augustine, Martianus Capella, Isidore of Seville, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Ramon It also offers an extract translated by us from Llull’s Retorica nova. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 382-401 [Access article in PDF] Symposium:the Ancients Now Bo Earle Plato, Aristotle, and the Imitation of Reason THE DEBATE BETWEEN the philosophers and the poets was already "ancient" when Plato made his contribution. 1 Yet, as an ostensibly analytical "debate," there is a sense in which this dispute was always rigged in the philosophers' favor. This is due to the fact that an integral (...) part of philosophy consists in accounting for philosophy's place among the other disciplines and practices, whereas such accounting is not necessarily a part of poetry. Consequently, framing the debate in these terms obscures what is really at stake in it. For, what has made poetry such a longstanding source of irritation for philosophers is not that it pretends to offer an alternative account of the order of the disciplines and practices, but precisely that it does not pretend to offer such an account, does not engage that pursuit. The most obvious way to juxtapose Plato and Aristotle with respect to this difference is to say that Plato saw it as a difference of incompatibility, Aristotle as one of complementarity. But this is again already to approach the issue on the philosopher's terms. On the other hand, saying that poetry simply defies philosophical containment can all too easily lead to a romantic valorization of incommensurability that merely inverts Plato's repudiation. The following attempts to show that the tension between philosophy and poetry is registered by Plato's and Aristotle's philosophies of [End Page 382] poetry in a way that doctrines of complementarity and incommensurability cannot explain, and that thus illustrates both the ethical stakes of philosophical praxis, and the philosophical value of poetic elucidation of such praxis.Plato's philosophical objection to poetic imitation is two-fold, based in metaphysics and epistemology, on the one hand, and in ethics, on the other. The metaphysical-epistemological objection is that poetry has no stake in truth and thus cannot contribute to knowledge. There is no way of distinguishing valid from invalid interpretations of poems, Socrates complains in Protagoras, because the poets do not submit to dialectical interrogation about their work: "we cannot ask them questions about what they say." 2 If they cannot account for what they do, Socrates concludes that the work of the poets should be counted among the phenomena of nature and the acts of gods: "poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspiration, like seers and prophets." 3 Socrates criticizes poetry for seeming to penetrate the world's mysteries when it in fact propagates them.Yet Socrates' claim is not that poetry makes us take something to be true that actually is false. Rather, his point is that poetry simply has no stake in the truth to begin with. The problem with debates about poetry, Socrates continues in Protagoras, is that the disputants "wind up arguing about something they can never finally decide" (347e); consequently Socrates proposes that we "should put the poets aside and converse directly with each other, testing the truth and our own ideas" (Pr, 348a). The subject matter presented to us by poetry is directly contrasted with that which admits of dialectical truth-testing. That is, poetry does not "lie," it does not disguise falsehoods as truths; rather, it turns its back on the pursuit of truth altogether. It is something with respect to which truth oriented arguments "can never finally be decided" because it is something to which the category of truth does not apply. Indeed, our interest in poetic imitation derives precisely from the fact that such imitation does not pretend to be what it imitates, that it is liberated, in a sense, from the question of 'the truth' of the things, people and events it imitates belong. Since the poet offers "no worthwhile knowledge of the things he imitates," Socrates concludes that poetic "imitation is a kind of game and not something to be taken seriously" (R, 602b). Such imitation is disengaged from the realm of knowledge and truth-testing entirely, constituting an... (shrink)

Tracing the interrelationship among play, poetic imitation, and power to the Hellenic world, Mihai I. Spariosu provides a revisionist model of cultural change in Greek antiquity. Challenging the traditional and static distinction made between archaic and later Greek culture, Spariosu's perspective is grounded in a dialectical understanding of values whose dominance depends on cultural emphasis and which shifts through time. Building upon the scholarship of an earlier volume, Dionysus Reborn, Spariosu her continues to draw on Dionysus--the "God of many (...) names," of both poetic play and sacred power--as a mythical embodiment of the two sides of the classical Greek mentality. Combining philosophical reflection with close textual analysis, the author examines the divided nature of the Hellenic mentality in such primary canonic texts as the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Theogony, Works and Days, the most well-known of the Presocratic fragments, Euripides' Bacchae, Aristophanes' The Frogs, Plato's Republic and Laws, and Aristotle's Poetics and Politics. Spariosu's model illuminates the many of the most enduring questions in contemporary humanistic study and addresses modern questions about the nature of the interrelation of poetry, ethics, and politics. (shrink)

Richard Janko's acclaimed translation of Aristotle's _Poetics_ is accompanied by the most comprehensive commentary available in English that does not presume knowledge of the original Greek. Two other unique features are Janko's translations with notes of both the _Tractatus Coislinianus_, which is argued to be a summary of the lost second book of the Poetics, and fragments of Aristotle’s dialogue On Poets, including recently discovered texts about catharsis, which appear in English for the first time.

Contains the _Poetics _ and the first twelve chapters of the_ Rhetoric_, Book III.

continent. 2.1 (2012): 29–35. Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. "Politieke Poëzie: Enige aantekeningen, Poëtica bij N30 (versie 2006)." In Weerstandbeleid: Nieuwe kritiek . Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. L’égalité veut d’autres lois . —Eugène Pottier The modern poem does not have form but consistency (that is sensed), no content but a problem (that is developed). Consistency + problem = composition. The problem of modern poetry is capitalism. Capitalism—which has (...) no image: the unrepresentable Idea of “everything.” The problem is that a poem cannot be justified. There is no excuse for it. Political poetry— pure poetry—has to be problematic, though not in a mannerist way. Yes, its problem is first its own problem—poetry’s existence in the same world as the newspaper—but therefore also always everybody’s problem (the problem of any world at all). The cult of the sublime points at a suspect desire for transcendence, nostalgia for paradise lost (the womb?). Melancholia of the post-. But a problem neither sorrows nor mourns, it is alive, and the fact that it is alive is the problem—the problem for death (rigidity, the status quo). Our symbols and ideologies do not hide any god: symbolic = state; imaginary = human; real = money. Problem: the possibility of communal speech (poetry) in the absence of a “we.” Or: what is a “we” that is not a collective subject (or in any case is not a volonté générale )? What is a universal history that is not a History? This work was started in the shade of the anti-globalization protests at the end of November 1999. I considered N30 to be the closure of the nineties, of my adolescence, and of the a seemingly total extinction of social desire. From the beginning I was skeptical about the alterglobalization movement as the avant-garde of a new politics, but something was happening . Maybe this event did not show that, as the slogan would have it, “another world” is possible, but for me it indicated that such possibility was at least still possible. That naked possibility is carrying forward. And if the fundamental tone of this work sounds more desperate than utopian, this is not caused by the catastrophic sequence that since 1999 has plunged us ever deeper into the right-wing nightmare—a nightmare that this work also gives an account for—but because my hope as yet remains empty. Composition . Composition is no design, but the production of an autonomous block of affects (i.e. a POEM), rhythmically subtracted from the language of a community. A poem does something. Is something. New Sentence . Choosing the non sequitur as compositional unit has the advantage that an abstract composition is subjected to the stress of concrete, social references. Where there is a sentence, there is always a world. (This does not hold necessarily for words on their own.) And where sentences collide, something akin to a textual civil war takes place. It is not about “undermining” whatever, or de-scribing the raging global civil war, but about writing social (or even: ontological) antagonism -- including all its catastrophic and utopian possibilities. Minor resistance. Why would poetry be the no protest zone par excellence? It is nothing but protest, not simply qua “content,” but in its most fundamental essence: rhythm. Rhythm is resistance against language, time, and space, and the basis of (what we will continue to call) autonomy. Rhythm starts with the anti-rhythmic caesura as Hölderlin remarked about Sophocles, a disruption of the quotidian drone. The destruction of everything that is dead inside of us. The noise of the avant-garde has never been the representation of the noise of (post)modernity (from the television or shopping mall), but the sober noise of the systematic exchange of an unbearable worldview. The poet does not describe, but looks for a way out: There is a Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, tis translucent & has many Angles But he who finds it will find Oothoons palace, for within Opening into Beulah every angle is a lovely heaven William Blake was not mad. And there has always been only one poetry: the poetry of paradise. The principle is that there is something in art (the essentially creative element) that is disgusted by that which, unlike art, does not aim for the supreme. Wonder is not supreme, tranquility is not supreme, beauty is not supreme. Even amusement is not supreme! The supreme is supremely open, “das Einfache,/ Das Schwer zu machen ist” 1 : paradise. That is abstract. Literally. For me it is not about a concrete imagination, an idyll or utopia. There is no doubt a need for that, but it is not so much the supposed lack of imagination or ideals (human rights are ideals), but a fundamental lack of desire (human rights are no desires) that we suffer from, and from which we do not need to remove Nietzsche’s label of “nihilism.” “We.” George Oppen: “ Of Being Numerous asks the question whether or not we can deal with humanity as something which actually exists.” What is less actual than humanity? Nowadays it appears as a lifeless ideology of cynical power politics. Or as what makes one think. It is a shame to be human. The event is the caesura that defines rhythm. Writing toward the event is not the description of the event, but marking an abstract and intense space in which the event may unfold and keep itself. It is a task. “Remember that thou blesseth the day on which I seized thee, because such is thy obligation.” The event is a contraction (or a series of contractions) with its own rhythm and unique qualities. It is more than an explosion or demonstration. But at the same time less. The endless repetition of images and stories in the media points to a fear for the indeterminate and indeterminable void of the event. In the end there is nothing to see. We do not live in disaster’s shade or miracle’s light, but rather in the rhythm, which is contracted time, having little to do with omnipresent representations. For this book I did not intend a rhythm of evental representations (a narrative rhythm), but a rhythm which would be an event itself , because it draws the border between artwork and history. My desire for a direct engagement with the “extra-textual reality” has nothing to do with the representation of “rumor in the streets.” (What has less street cred than representation?) Naturally, a poem is no historical event and does not change anything. But a poem is a part of history that wants to be repeated forever, constructed in such a way that it is worthy of repetition. It is a part of desire (composition) made consistent (durable). The “historical event” flares up and burns down, and has to burn down to be effective. The leftovers are images and stories (representations), History—no event. The artwork—that is the ambition— remains event (though monumental and inefficient/inoperable). (No wonder that a historical singularity, a revolution, reminds us of a work of art; the resurrection yearns for a judgment, an affirmation; everything depends on it.) Hence the title does not summarize the book, let alone contract its “content” into a quasi-transcendental signifier. The title is juxtaposed to the book, like everything else inside the book, and in that relation it precisely forms a part of it. The ideal work is an open whole, lacking nothing but to which everything may be added. I have been interested in this “everything,” the world, or as I said above: capitalism. “Everything” is not the space for “wonder”—a code word, a shibboleth for petty bourgeois imagination (I recognize myself in the strangest things, a speaking dog, a canal, a pond standing straight—oh my god). No. The world is a social world, not YOUR world, poet. Power is number one. I will call “Dutch,” or “shitty,” whatever denies this power. That hurts, but this pain is an expression of the desire in the world to write another world, or as Blanchot says, “the other of all worlds” 2 : the world. Not as what “is there,” but rather as that which urges for an escape from what “is.” This is a testament of how radical reality has become, for me—or rather, a writing body—in a having-been-written. I am not interested in the problem of “meaning” as misunderstood by literary scholarsi: “order” in “chaos,” “symbolization.” Bullshit. What is there, hop, hope, now: the meaning of the taste in my mouth. Bullshit. I am not interested in the frustration of interpretation; I am writing for readers who do not want to interpret. I do not know how many “professional readers” will hear the music of a paragraph like: Sun. Sushi. Volvo. I hope more than I would think. There is a suggestion (or rather, an actual production) of speed and infinitive owing to the absence of plosives, i.e. articulations such as /k/, /t/, or /p/. Can you hear the slick suaveness? Driving car dark, vocal chiaroscuro of the word “sushi.” The unstressed /i/ stands in the middle of dark vowels and thus acquires its own special out of focus , like a momentary flash or brilliance—an obscure light. It is not about recognizing a story, but about avoiding any story whatsoever: the car disappears in the glow, cars and raw fish have nothing in common except their articulation in a language that brings them together, blurring them. A world appears in its disappearance. For a moment, light is a metaphor for language, though it cannot be reduced to tenor. It is not necessary to be a linguist or philosopher to hear this—a “difficult” poem all too often becomes an allegory of its own impenetrable being-language. The only demand: leave your hermeneutical fetish at home. This was no interpretation. Most shit has been stolen etcetera. That is no longer interesting. You cannot shoot the body with information and let your lawyers reclaim the bullets. So every sentence has been stolen. Also the ones “out” “of” “my” “head.” Why would I be allowed to steal from myself and not from others? Man takes what he needs to move forward. Whatever he encounters, finds in front of him, “occurs” to him. The writer as text editor, or singing pirate. Nothing new here. Important difference with for example Sybren Polet’s 4 montage technique: anti-thematicism. Most of the time ferocious citation from whatever I was reading, listening to, ended up in, and so on. I wrote chapter 12 on my laptop while watching CNN. On the air instead of en plein air . I often employed search engines to generate material. Chapter 20 offers the purest example of this. Often I stop recognizing a particular citation after some time. It is not uncommon for a stolen sentence to conform itself to the paragraph in which it finds itself. Sometimes I nearly arbitrarily replace words. Arbitrariness as a guarantee for absolute democracy. It is a poetics of the non sequitur : a conclusion that does not follow from the premises, the strange element in the discourse. A discourse of strangers. No logical, narrative, thematic unity. There is unity in speed/flight. It has to be read linearly, but not necessarily (not preferably) from beginning to end. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line, but this line precedes every point. The middle, the acceleration, comes first. A point occurs where two lines cross. It has been written from up close, at the level of the tension between sentences. Nothing to be seen from a distance: no form except the exchange of form, no geometrical or mythical meaning. You have to get in, “groping toward a continuous present, a using everything a beginning again and again” (Stein). 5 In Dutch, experimental poetry has been mainly dense: a small rectangular form filled with a maximum amount of poetic possibility. But at the moment the poem starts to relax, the anecdotical content seems to increase. This is what is called “epic”: long, narrative. I believe that an epic is more than that, in fact something completely different. An epic is “a poem including history,” 6 a long poem tied up with the life of community, that as a whole does not need to be narrative. The American poets of the twentieth century (Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, Oppen, Olson, Silliman) have put the epic back on the map by interpreting the poem itself as a map, and writing it as navigation. They have invented the experimental epic, a genre that has generated little original following in “our” poetry. N30 is the middle part—“always start in the middle”—of a trilogy, the contours of which remain as of yet unclear, although each episode investigates one of the three “ecstasies of time”—past, present, future—concerning society X. N30 concerns itself with the PRESENT: not with the description of actual facts but of the rhythm and the intense depth in which facts appear to us. Where are we? We are camping in the desert. Sometimes we are looking at the stars. As opposed to maximum density and minimal tension (a characteristic of most (post-)experimental lyricism), I have sought a minimal density and maximum tension in this book, considered as a long non-narrative prose poem. On the one hand, the minimal density is obtained by the inherent formlessness of prose, on the other hand by the conscious refusal of any active (formal, non-rhythmic) synthesis: the poem tells nothing, shows nothing, has no theme. I did not seek maximum tension either by loading the quotidian with epiphanic radioactivity (“wonder,” confirmation from above), or by means of the intensity of the linguistic structure. I want an abstract tension, but social in its abstraction, in other words, not neutralized by and subjected to Form. Instead of form (transcendent): composition (immanent). The concept is series. Ideal: every unit is necessary for the efficacy of the others and the whole, their relation is purely linear, i.e. non-hierarchic, non-syllogistic, non-discursive, non-narrative. Sentence related to sentence like paragraph to paragraph and chapter to chapter; the whole means nothing and represents nothing. Inside the sentence: syntax (Chomsky’s tree, a type of parallel circuit), outside: parataxis (coordination, an asyntactic line through language and world). I consider duration—the energy of duration (rhythm)—to be the fundament of a poem, the temporal inclination to delimit a “space.” Being as consistency, its consistency. A spatial part of time is not merely a metaphor for an inevitable trajectory, an inescapable time, something like “our time.” Not merely—because rhythm comes from language and is not projected onto it; the poem derives from the world like a scent and a color and a life from a flower. A series, a sequence: nothing potential, but truly infinite—the movement of an infinitude. The infinite series = everything minus totality. That means that there is no container—no Form, no Self, no Image, no Structure, not even a Fragment—just “the prose of the world.” No representation, but also no staging of the impossibility of representation (the postmodern sublime). These are no fragments, no image of a fragmented world or personality, no cautious incantations around the Void. It does not exist. It is a movement. Buying bread, a flock of birds, a bomb falling—they do not depict or represent anything, not literally, not metaphorically. There is an Idea, which is however nothing more than a rhythm, in the same way that capitalism is nothing more than a pure function. Parataxis: the white space between two sentences stresses, which is nevertheless always there, also between words, even between letters: the out of focus of idle talk, the gutter, the irreducible Mallarméan mist which renders even the seemingly most transparent text legible. The white space suggests a neutral medium for free signification, a substance of language. A non sequitur is an element from a foreign discourse, which stresses the white space as space, and problematizes freedom for supra-sentential signification. I start by withdrawing material, leaving the initiative to the sentences. In general a word presupposes less often a discourse than a sentence. What discourse is presupposed by “dog”? We could think of several, but why would we? It is more probable that, when faced with the naked word, we think of its naked (dictionary) meaning, of its denotative signified. By means of two simple interventions we may also write the word as sentence: Dog. In no way this suggests the discourse from which this sentence originates, but in any case we’re presupposing one. This is shown by questions like: “Whose dog? Who’s a dog? What kind of dog?” Etc. (Sentences are question marks.) A sentence implies/is a microcosm—a subject, a verb, an object, and so on. Even an incomplete or ungrammatical sentence does so. My main fascination while writing this book is the worldly and social aspect of language, an aspect that often becomes invisible, or rather, transparent in narrativity—the stretching of sentences into stories. Narrativity organizes a new discourse and a new world, and places a sometimes all too dispersing relation of transparence in between. The conventional novel is the brothel of being. I do not intend to prohibit brothels, and I have certainly not intended to write an anti-novel (THIS IS A POEM), but I do consider narrativity (in general, in poetry, in the news, in daily life) to be ontologically secondary with regard to an immediate being in the world through sentences, also if the latter have been withdrawn from a narrative or otherwise externally structured discourse (which in that case would therefore be chronologically primary ). Naturally, two or more sentences are always in danger of telling stories or arguing, just like the world is always in danger of becoming an objective representation, facing us, strangers. That is why need to wage war—against representation and against the interface, against interaction. AGAINST THE “READER.” To the extent that a sentence is worldly, writing is a condensed global war, and in so far as there is ultimately only one world and one open continuum of languages, it is a global civil war. Nice subject for an epic. The elaboration of a singular problem—prose as the outside of poetry, the form of the novel as purely prosodic composition scheme—“expresses” the universal problem: capitalism as Idea of the world vs. poetry as language of an (im)possible community. The paragraphs are blocks of rhythmically contracted social material. By choosing the sentence as the basic compositional component, an abstract whole may contain social sounds, without telling a story or showing an image. Composition is subrepresentative —a rhythmic, passive synthesis, or rather: a synthesis of syntheses. I never write large blocks of prose in one sitting, because there is no obvious organizational vector —plot, theme, conscience—outside the inherent qualities of the material itself. Usually I write down one sentence, sometimes two, but rarely more than three. Those sentences are usually placed in the text which I am editing at the time. In fact, there is no original composition, new chapters split off from chapters which became too long during the editing process. (Revision mainly consists of adding and inserting, displacing and dividing; only during the last phase, when the text has gained enough consistency, there may be subtraction to tighten the composition; each chapter requires a season of daily revision). This constant revision, accompanied by a continuous influx of collective background noise (to speak with Van Bastelaere), 7 makes every chapter a block condensed (“historical” and “personal”) time. The block itself is a-personal and a-historic; it is ontologically autonomous. If there is such a thing as a spirit of the times, I do not try to offer an image of it, but rather to cancel something of it by erecting a monument of its own excrement within its own boundaries. Tuning and dis-tuning , “in de taal der neerslachtigen een eigen geluid doen klinken,” 8 in other words, desiring in an Elysian way. In this sense I have intended to be able to write a political poetry. The ultimate political poem is the epic, “the tale of the tribe.” I consider N30 to be a prolegomenon to a future epic (of which it in the end will form a part a structural moment, as introduction-in-the-middle), an extended pile on top of an epic as narrative, a question of the tribe and question of its history. I was burdened by too much satire, too much bullshit. But: satire willy-nilly = the only justifiable satire. Against the abstract universalism of the market (“globalism”): concrete disgust, a positive way of saying “No.” Moreover, disgust is a specifically total attitude, which ultimately concerns the world as a whole. I hate this or that, but I am disgusted by EVERYTHING (when I am disgusted), and so it appears that satire is in fact related to the epic, in so far as it concerns society, the cosmos, history. Maybe it is no coincidence that the Dutch literary canon knows no great poet of disgust; what could be more fearful to us than society, the cosmos, and history? The T-tendency (T from Tollens 9 ) clearly points into the direction of the small, friendly, ironic, melancholic, acquiescent, wondrous, and so on. The anti-political, anti-cosmic, anti-historical. (Why am I so philosophical? To scare away the Dutchies.) And most of all: the “poetical” (the pseudo-mysticism from the backyard). Yes, the N in N30 also stands for the Netherlands (just like 30 indicates the number of chapters). I was not in Seattle, I do not live in Iraq. But is not the whole world bleeding to death on Dutch paving stones? Let’s hope that we mowed away something with this total satire, also “in myself.” The arrogant stupidity that definitely thinks to know the essence of freedom (the free development of esthetic needs inside the void), that cannot take anything serious, only believes in the disciplined bestiality of the individual (“norms and values”) and the mere functioning of a social factory which finds no justification whatsoever outside its functioning (“get to work”)… Who knows. A certain aimed destruction leaves grooves and craters, mapping out a next adventure. Pound’s periplum : sailing while mapping the coasts. Immanent orientation. The terrain changes with the map, history changes with the poem. Maps never merely organize the chaos, transcendent schemes imposed on a formless Ding-an-sich . They organize from within, surfing. But they are most of all routes back into the chaos or forward to paradise (final identity of chaos and paradise; Schlegel: “ Nur diejenige Verworrenheit ist ein Chaos aus der eine Welt entspringen kann ”10). A poem is not only a piece of history, it is also a flight from history. Maps give chaos to the form of reality , open escape routes, break through representations, make us shivery and dazed. Paradise is immanent to a fleeting desire. History is the history of labor—this is Adam’s curse—and the poet works too: For to articulate sweet sounds together Is to work harder than all these, and yet Be thought an idler by the noisy set Of bankers, school masters, and clergymen The martyrs call the world 11 But: the poet works in paradise. The paradox of the artwork, the work that is no work, the piece of history that cannot be reduced to History—this is explained by The Space of Literature , a virtual space, an autonomous rhythm, not outside, but in the midst of the noise, a piece of paradise in hell, a postcard from the vale of tears addressed to paradise, to X. Political poetry means: a poetry that dares to think about itself, about its language and about its world and about the problematic relation between both, which is this relation as problem. A poetry that thinks at all, articulates its problem. It has nothing to do with journalism or morality or debate, let alone the law or the state. It has nothing to do with “criticism” if this means the replacement of incorrect representations by other, more correct representations. It has something to do with ethics in the sense of learning to live. It has something to do with the community and the language of the community (whichever that may be) and the role of the poet regarding the community. It concerns justice without judgement or measure. In the end the just word is just a word , to paraphrase Godard: it is from a future that is unimaginable. It Is no rational engagement, but an aversion against everything that obstructs life, and love for everything what is worthy of having been loved. The world is engaged with me, not the other way round. First Exodus, then Sinai. A desire does not start with an agenda. To answer the question whether I am really so naive as to want to change the world: “We only want the world.” Justice is the world appealing to us to liberate it from all possible chains, from each organization and inequality, to be it, smooth, equal, under a clear sky—a desert and a people in a desert. That moment between Egypt and the Law. It is not a revolution, but the sky above the revolution. Poetry = the science of escape. There is no art that we already know. The weakness of modernistic epic poetry seems to me to be the unwillingness to completely abandon narrative as a structural principle, in favor of a composition “around” or from an event. The China Cantos and Adams Cantos are the low point, and the Pisan Cantos the high point of Pound’s poetry. Two types of research: archival representation of the past vs. ontology of the present (which virtually presupposes the entire history). Presupposing an event means that it is impossible for the poet to stage his own absence, but in no way makes the work personal. An event is the unknown, the new invading into the business as usual, so also the personal. The question heading this research is not: “Who am I?” but “What is happening?” The book is as little illegible as Mondrian’s work is invisible. Form is of interest only to the extent that it empowers liberation. Ron Silliman So no formalism, but what it means to live in this world and to have a future in it. I want something that holds together that’s not smooth. Bruce Andrews The past above, the future below and the present pouring down: the roar, the roar of the present, a speech— William Carlos Williams If my confreres wanted to write a work with all history in its maw, I wished, from the beginning to start all over again, attempting to know nothing but a will to create, and matter at hand. Ronald Johnson NOTES 1) “The easy thing/ that is difficult to make.” Bertold Brecht, Lob des Kommunismus . (All footnotes are the translator’s) 2) Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature , trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press (1989), 75. 3) Mettes uses the word “Neerlandicus,” which refers to scholars of Dutch language and literature. 4) Dutch poet. 5) Gertrude Stein. “Composition as Explanation.” A Stein Reader . Ed. Ulla E. Dydo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press (1993), 495-503. 6) Ezra Pound. 7) Flemish poet. 8) “Resounding an original sound in the language of the despondent.” A. Roland Holst, De afspraak . 9) Dutch poet. 10) “Only such a confusion is a chaos which can give rise to a world.” 11) W.B. Yeats, “Adam’s Curse.&rdquo. (shrink)

Selected aphorisms -- Enumeration of the sciences, chapter 5 -- Book of religion -- The harmonization of the two opinions of the two sages: Plato the Divine and Aristotle.

Introduction -- Epistemology, metaphysics, and rhetoric : contexts of imagination -- Aristotle, Phantasia, and the problem of epistemology -- Plato, the neoplatonists, and the vagaries of the sublunar world -- Phantasia and ecstatic knowledge -- A more skillful artist than imitation -- Dreams, doubts, and evil demons : Descartes and imagination -- Mediatio prima : certainty, the cogito, and imagination -- Imagination in the rules -- Meditatio secunda : the world of the cogito -- Descartes, Montaigne, and Pascal -- Analogies (...) and enthusiasm -- Excogitations : fabulating the cogito -- The reasonable imagination : Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy -- Imagination in the limits of pure reason -- Dreamers and madmen : imagination in the anthropology -- Natural art and sublime madness : imagination in the critique of judgment -- The highest point of philosophy : Fichte's reimagining of the kantian system -- The logics of positing intellectual intuition and the absolute subject -- Ecstasy, inspired communication, and philosophical genius -- Light, dusk, and darkness : the reconciliation of opposites -- The metaphysics of oscillation and the truth of imagination -- Reason fixations : arresting imagination -- A system without foundations : poetic subjectivity in Friedrich von Hardenberg's Ordo inversus -- A system without foundations -- Fantasy and the body -- Divine law and abject subjectivity : Coleridge and the double knowledge of imagination -- Divine imagination -- The abyss of the empirical self -- Coda: Imagining ideology. (shrink)

As well as producing one of the finest of all poetic traditions, ancient Greek culture produced a major tradition of poetic theory and criticism. Halliwell's volume offers a series of detailed and challenging interpretations of some of the defining authors and texts in the history of ancient Greek poetics: the Homeric epics, Aristophanes' Frogs, Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Poetics, Gorgias's Helen, Isocrates' treatises, Philodemus' On Poems, and Longinus' On the Sublime. The volume's fundamental concern is with how the Greeks (...) conceptualized the experience of poetry and debated the values of that experience. The book's organizing theme is a recurrent Greek dialectic between ideas of poetry as, on the one hand, a powerfully enthralling experience in its own right and, on the other, a medium for the expression of truths which can exercise lasting influence on its audiences' views of the world. Citing a wide range of modern scholarship, and making frequent connections with later periods of literary theory and aesthetics, Halliwell questions many orthodoxies and received opinions about the texts analysed. The resulting perspective casts new light on ways in which the Greeks attempted to make sense of the psychology of poetic experience—including the roles of emotion, ethics, imagination, and knowledge—in the life of their culture. Readership: Scholars and students of Greek literature, Greek poetics, and literary theory and criticism. (shrink)

v. 1. Nicomachean ethics. Politics. The Athenian Constitution. Rhetoric. On Poetics.--v. 2. Logic.--v. 3. Physics. Metaphysics. On the soul. Short physical treaties.--v. 4. On the heavens. On generation and corruption. Meteorology. Biological treatises.

This book is a guide to the poetics of the two Greek fountainheads of Western literary theory. Part I traces the development of Plato's great themes of inspiration and imitation but makes no attempt to reduce his disparate statements to a system. Part II demonstrates that Aristotle's Poetics embodies a powerful theory of literature that answers Plato's objections to poetry as an emotionally powerful, and therefore dangerous, communication of false opinion. Originally published in 1987. A UNC Press Enduring Edition (...) -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value. (shrink)

In his commentary on Aristotle’s Rhetoric al-Fārābī harmonizes Plato and Aristotle in terms of philosophic education by ordering Aristotle’s eight logical works onto Plato’s famous image of the cave. He represents the way out of the cave with Aristotle’s four logical works of ascent and the return into the cave through Aristotle’s four logical works of the descent. Al-Fārābī’s image of ascent and descent also alludes to Socrates’ conception of protreptic education in Book VII of the Republic. In essence, protreptic (...) education consists in the Socratic art that freely turns the soul from the images and political interpretations of things to being itself. In this essay I argue that for al-Fārābī the four logical works of ascent guide the soul to free itself from its habituations so as to contemplate real beings, particularly the good of one’s own soul and the souls of one’s fellow citizens. Yet the ruler needs to use the arts of “descent,” as demonstrated by Thrasymachus, in order to rule the city well. The way of Socrates consists of the logical methods used to come to possess knowledge of being, while the way of Thrasymachus comprises the methods of persuasion to habituate citizens and protect the philosophic quest for the truth. Al-Fārābī, I conclude, combines the way of Socrates and the way of Thrasymachus in order to show that both ways are useful and necessary for good governance. (shrink)

Together these two dialogues contain Plato’s most important work on poetry and beauty.

Benjamin Jowett's translations of Plato have long been classics in their own right. In this volume, Professor Hayden Pelliccia has revised Jowett's renderings of five key dialogues, giving us a modern Plato faithful to both Jowett's best features and Plato's own masterly style. Gathered here are many of Plato's liveliest and richest texts. Ion takes up the question of poetry and introduces the Socratic method. Protagoras discusses poetic interpretation and shows why cross-examination is the best way to get (...) at the truth. Phaedrus takes on the nature of rhetoric, psychology, and love, as does the famous Symposium. Finally, Apology gives us Socrates' art of persuasion put to the ultimate test--defending his own life. Pelliccia's new Introduction to this volume clarifies its contents and addresses the challenges of translating Plato freshly and accurately. In its combination of accessibility and depth, Selected Dialogues of Plato is the ideal introduction to one of the key thinkers of all time. (shrink)

Although Aristotle's Poetics is the most frequently read of his works, philosophers and political theorists have, for the most part, left analysis of the text to literary critics and classicists. In this book Michael Davis argues convincingly that in addition to teaching us something about poetry, Poetics contains an understanding of the common structure of human action and human thought that connects it to Aristotle's other writings on politics and morality. Davis demonstrates that the duality of Poetics reaches out (...) to the philosopher, writer, and political theorist and shows the importance of the ideal in our imaginings of and goals for the future. (shrink)

Includes selections from Metaphysics, Logic, Physics, Psychology, Ethics, Politics, and Poetics.

vol. I. Logic: Categoriae. De interpretatione. Analytica priora. Analytica posteriora.--vol. II. Natural philosophy: Physica. De caelo. De generatione et corruptione.--vol. III. Psychology: De anima. Parva Naturalia.--vol. IV. Metaphysics: Metaphysica.--vol. V. Ethics: Ethica Nicomachea.--vol. VI. Politics and poetics: Politica. De poetica.

After a very brief introduction, Davidson begins with an informed and detailed account of the views of Aristotle and his major commentators, whose writings had enormous influence on the development of the medieval traditions. Davidson's account is supplemented with a critical exposition of the relevant teachings from the Plotiniana Arabica, from al-Kindi, and from a treatise on the soul attributed to Porphyry in the Arabic tradition. Impressive as all this is, it is simply stage setting for Davidson's detailed accounts of (...) the doctrines and arguments of al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Songs of Degrees: Essays on Contemporary Poetry and PoeticsVirginia A. La CharitéSongs of Degrees: Essays on Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, by John Taggart; 254 pp. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994, $29.95 paper.John Taggart is a highly respected American poet whose passion for objectivism permeates his critical reading as well as his own creative works. The volume Songs of Degrees: Essays on Contemporary Poetry and (...) Poetics represents the first time that his various critical articles have been collected into a single work. Of the eighteen essays, all but one were previously published in various journals between 1975 and 1989; the eighteenth is an essay or “A Preface” on one of his own collections of poetry, Peace on Earth. By addressing his own poetry, Taggart’s volume cleverly includes himself as poet in this study of what he considers valuable in a work of art. [End Page 398]Finding a poem to be a simple composition of words (principle) and an image suggested by that composition (process), Taggart adopts the title Songs of Degrees from Louis Zukofsy’s seven short poems published in 1956 as Some Time. A song is then a poetic form, a continuing complete statement which actualizes the separate entities (words) of its expression. However, and most importantly, a song does not begin as a visual report; rather, a song moves towards being visualized. Consequently, everything depends on technique and everything turns on its structure, as the mind coordinates the information received by the eye. Degrees, then, emerge as variations of consonance and dissonance or word-sound functions. To write down is to compose; to compose is to create. Hence, a song of degrees is both an actual object and a metaphor for that object.Under the poetic of objectivism, Taggart’s essays are primarily concerned with poets whose work is in accord with his own: George Oppen (three essays), Frank Sampori, William Bronk, Louis Zukofsy (three essays), Bruce Andrews, Susan Howe (two essays), Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and Theodore Enslin. Taggart demonstrates here that he is a sensitive and intellectually alert reader. These essays on criticism are in actuality essays on Taggart’s concept of poetics. Implicit is Taggart’s bias as an objectivist poet who insists that poetry has a spiritual value in the visionary tradition of Robert Lowell and Robert Duncan and to an extent Wallace Stevens.But perhaps of even greater interest than Taggart’s superb readings of his poetic colleagues—and it can be justifiably argued that perhaps only Taggart can read these poets with the sympathetic eye that they deserve—is the inclusion of three essays on other arts: dance (Trina Collins), stained glass (Mark Rothko), and jazz (John Coltrane). By including these essays with those of literary criticism, Taggart expands the terms poetics and poetry to any text or object which is a moving line and complete at the same time. Form comes from language; language is then based on experience, not belief, and the resulting image is what is revealed and reflected, what is seen. A work (poem, song, text) is valuable because its visionary imagination captures the collective conscience to regain spiritual ascesis. The process of objectification is the metaphor or song, which emerges in degrees of interaction. The song has substance, it is tangible, and it has an objective existence of its own. To be critical is to objectify the composition or structure at hand. Critical is another term for technical, and indeed it is the technical aspect of writing poetry which Taggart so deftly elucidates in his volume of essays.For anyone interested in objectivist poetry, Taggart’s collection of essays is mandatory reading. His insights into this kind of cerebral poetry are invaluable, for he blends appreciation with analysis, information with inspiration, and logic with imagination. His own sensitivity to the struggle which is the poetic process brings a new consciousness to the poetics of poetry.Virginia A. La CharitéUniversity of KentuckyCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Poetry And MetaphysicsJoseph BottumIWe ought to begin with what is true: things stand over against us—over against philosophers, over against poets, over against us all. The sheer existence of a thing, the mute unspeakable “it” of it, is as impossible of being thought as it is of being said. Things confront us, always other; the other has no other face.Of course, the problem with trying to begin this (...) way is that language shies as soon as we begin. By existence, we mean the this (utmost concreteness, utmost particularity), while words speak of ideas, verba mentis, thoughts, abstractions. Philosophers and poets alike hear the swindle when we use the most abstract language—“being,” “thing,” “existent,” “this”—to speak of what is most concrete, the most general to speak the most particular. It is precisely because “Being” sounds so generic that Aristotle must insist Being is no genus. 1And skittish thought shies here as well. Just as language throws us when we come to speak the real, so thought slips sideways and refuses when we come to that same hurdle in the thing. What advance is made when the unthinkable is recognized as unthinkable? We certainly hold no infinite thought when we understand we cannot think the infinite; we do not grasp our death by understanding we cannot imagine being dead. So we miss somehow the thing and catch instead our thinking when we suppose unthinkability belongs to the unthinkable thing. Only in misdirection can we point to that with which we must begin. Logic might have warned us: there can be no answer to the question “What is this?” when what we mean by this is what is left when all the whats are stripped away. But our resistance to the real is not merely from the sort of logical contradiction that makes square circles or mountains without [End Page 214] valleys impossible to think. Though we know it is wrong to take resisting as an intention of the thing, nonetheless behind the passion that is our own being resisted we feel what seems to be an action of the other: the something-there for which thought itself does not account.We know, in other words, that existence is not a form, but we can only think existence as though it were some sort of form—the attempt to describe which leads us further and further from the existence we are trying to describe. Language is insufferable. Through the window I see my neighbor Mr. Wheeler over there across the lawn, raking while his daughters fill the dark green plastic bags with leaves. Between us and the real, a gap persists—though “persists” is not the word I need; we lack the words to posit a negation. The Wheelers have a birch tree in their yard, with half its strangely splayed yellow leaves still clinging on. The twigs and branches all point up; the leaves and autumn catkins all hang down like tatters that on the indifferent tree, turned inward for the winter, no longer notices. The stiff curls of parchment bark, the black scars in the white along the trunk, the—all of this is failure. I cannot create with words the tree, the unspeakable angle, color, shape, the overwhelming all-at-once thingness of it here now, existence. Reaching out with words to touch the tree, I am betrayed: the word “tree” barely stirs, “birch” just begins stretching out, but every word beyond them either breaks the thing apart to smaller things (the scarred trunk, the yellow leaves) or breaks off in abstraction.The failure of language to speak the real is a failure of language. My capacity to call it a failure, however, comes not from language but from my conviction (while I see the birch) that the real exists. “There are two principles which I cannot render consistent; nor is it in my power to renounce either of them,” writes David Hume, “that all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connexion among distinct existences.” 2 Because we encounter no things that are what they are, no existing essences, the sheer existence of a... (shrink)

Syllogism is a form of logical argument allowing one to deduce a consistent conclusion based on a pair of premises having a common term. Although Aristotle was the first to conceive and develop this way of reasoning, he left open a lot of conceptual space for further modifications, improvements and systematizations with regards to his original syllogistic theory. From its creation until modern times, syllogism has remained a powerful and compelling device of deduction and argument, used by a variety of (...) figures and assuming a variety of forms throughout history. The Aftermath of Syllogism investigates the key developments in the history of this peculiar pattern of inference, from Avicenna to Hegel. Taking as its focus the longue durée of development between the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century, this book looks at the huge reworking scientific syllogism underwent over the centuries, as some of the finest philosophical minds brought it to an unprecedented height of logical sharpness and sophistication. Bringing together a group of major international experts in the Aristotelian tradition, The Aftermath of Syllogism provides a detailed, up to date and critical evaluation of the history of syllogistic deduction. (shrink)

It is well-known that the Arab philosophers of the Aristotelian tradition, like some of their Alexandrian predecessors, attached rhetoric and poetics to logic, and supported this inclusion by the idea that the principal poetic procedure - that is, essentially, metaphor - is a kind of syllogism: the poetic syllogism. However, until now, no texts prior to those of Avicenna had been identified which render the structure of this syllogism explicit. In the present contribution, we present and translate (...) a passage from al-Fārābī which shows that for him, the poetic syllogism is an incorrect syllogism of the second figure - a different interpretation from that which will be given by Avicenna. (shrink)

I will focus on the following question: “Is Avicenna[aut]Avicenna an empiricist?”. I will introduce Avicenna’sAvicenna language of “signification”, “understood content”, “mentalMental impression” and “conception”. Then, following Kenneth P. Winkler[aut]Winkler, K. ~ P., I will distinguish between origin-empiricism and content-empiricism Empiricism and reinterpret the distinction in Avicenna’sAvicenna language as OEA and CEA. I will show that Avicenna’sAvicenna analysis of the relationship between knowledge, on the one hand, and sensation and imagination, on the other hand, includes three (...) empiricist themes. I use these themes to argue that that Avicenna is committed to OEA. Then, I will consider three “possible” limitations to Avicenna’sAvicenna origin-empiricism. I will show that a common empiricist solution, that relies on the compositionality of the “understood contentContent”, quia demonstration and relative conceptions, has significant limitations. I will argue that a careful examination of these limitations, and the epistemology of the primary conceptions, show that Avicenna is not committed to CEA. I will conclude that “Is Avicenna[aut]Avicenna an empiricist?” has no simple yes-or-no answer. This raises a parallel open question: “Is Avicenna a rationalist?”, in some sense. After briefly commenting on this question, I will consider a related, but generally dissociated, question on the reality of abstraction, namely “Is Avicenna an abstractionist?” I will explain how the common replies to both questions rely on different incompatibility principles, according to which emanation from the active intellect is incompatible with apprehension by or abstraction from sense-perception. I will end by outlining the elements of a reading of Avicenna that assumes neither of these incompatibility principles. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to build a parallelism between Aristotle’s debate with Plato on the merits of poetry and the debate of Hume with Smith on the nature of sympathy. My arguments is that the Aristotelian concept of pity, as presented in the Poetics, presupposes a mechanism of sympathy which is akin to the Smithian one, as articulated in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. Accordingly, I reconstruct Aristotle’s debate with Plato on poetry as a debate on (...) the operation and value of sympathy, and I trace an intriguing contiguity on the way Plato and Hume understood the mechanism of sympathy. (shrink)

The paper, which compares Plato and Aristotle's different approaches towards artistic activity, is divided into three parts. The first part discusses Plato's Ion on mimesis and technē, as well as the role that poetry plays in the Republic. The second section offers an account of Aristotle's idea of happiness as the end of action. The last section of this study deals with an attempt to reconcile Plato and Aristotle's attitude towards mimetic art in a treatise by a Neoplatonic renaissance (...) thinker, Torquato Tasso. El artículo compara las concepciones de actividad artística en Platón y Aristóteles y se divide en tres partes. En la primera, se discuten la mimesis y la technē en el Ion de Platón, así como el papel de la poesía en la República. En la segunda, se hace un recuento de la idea de felicidad de Aristóteles como fin de la acción. En la última se discute el intento de reconciliación de las posiciones de Platón y Aristóteles reali-zado por el pensador neoplatónico renacentista, Torquato Tasso. (shrink)

The Arabic philosophical tradition followed the Alexandrian school in including both the Rhetoric and the Poetics among the logical texts. Such inclusion raised the question of the nature of poetic validity and its role in forming a community. This question was of great importance for Arabic culture since poetry was not only the main art form but also the basis of education before the rise of Islam. Therefore, Arabic philosophers developed sophisticated studies of poetry and had to (...) contend with the views of the literary critiques. (shrink)