This as we have seen imparts a solidity, a grace, to both action and character. And it leads, K says, to a largeness, a surplus contained in each: “The peculiarity of ancient tragedy is that the action does not proceed from character alone, that the action is not reflected enough in the acting subject…. Whether the chorus approaches the substantiality of epic or the exultation of lyric, it still points in a way to that extra which will not be absorbed in individuality. The monologue, for its part,… its extra is what will not be absorbed in action and situation” (pg. 142). But in modern tragedy, “the tragic element can be exhaustively represented in situation and worlds, there being nothing whatever left over of the immediate” (pg. 143).
What is this extra? What is this immediate? What does he mean not reflected enough in the acting subject? It is no use to demand definite answers from Kierkegaard. We must allow these terms simply to float. That is, we must have faith. Why should we? Because the terms, murky as they are, are terribly suggestive. It is as if, in their ancient forms, where they are not required to render full account of themselves but are allowed to retain a certain opacity, action and character contain something—some dark expanse, some irreducible solidity—that vanishes in the face of interrogation and comprehension.
I am reminded here of Heinrich von Kleist’s essay “On the Marionette Theater.” (In the quotations below, I have combined two translations available online, this one, and this one.) The essay describes a conversation Kleist supposedly had in the winter of 1801 with a ballet dancer friend. In the course of the conversation, von Kleist relates the following anecdote:
About three years ago… I was at the baths with a young man who was then remarkably graceful. He was about fifteen, and only faintly could one see the first traces of vanity, a product of the favours shown him by women. It happened that we had recently seen in Paris the figure of the boy pulling a thorn out of his foot. The cast of the statue is well known; you see it in most German collections. My friend looked into a tall mirror just as he was lifting his foot to a stool to dry it, and he was reminded of the statue. He smiled and told me of his discovery. As a matter of fact, I'd noticed it too, at the same moment; but whether it was to test the quality of his apparent grace or to challenge his vanity, I laughed and said he must be imagining things. He blushed. He lifted his foot a second time, to show me, but the effort was a failure, as anybody could have foreseen. He tried it again a third time, a fourth time, he must have lifted his foot ten times, but it was in vain. He was quite unable to reproduce the same movement. What can I say? The movements he made were so comical that I could hardly keep from laughing.No inhabitant of the modern world, I think, will have trouble understanding this anecdote.
From that day, from that very moment, an extraordinary change came over this boy. He began to spend whole days before the mirror. His attractions slipped away from him, one after the other. An invisible and incomprehensible power seemed to settle like a steel net over the free play of his gestures. A year later nothing remained of the lovely grace which had given pleasure to all who looked at him. […]
5 comments:
Oh wow, I was reading over these recent blog posts of yours and was tempted to mention, before I read this one, this exact essay, “On the Marionette Theater”. But, the part I was going to mention was the conclusion:
“‘Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god.’
“‘Does that mean,’ I said in some bewilderment, ‘that we must eat again of the tree of knowledge in order to return to the state of innocence?’
"’Of course’, he said, ‘but that's the final chapter in the history of the world.’”
Probably it was even before I read Kleist’s essay for the first time that I dreamed of learning so much about the world that my actions would (once again?) become sure, unhesitating, uninhibited. But somehow, applied to humanity as a whole, Kleist’s story about the Tree of Knowledge doesn’t ring true to me. My instinct is that if there ever was a time when human consciousness rose up out of primal dark, it was a lot longer ago than ancient Greece.
(The idea that this was a recent development sounds to me more than a bit like Hegel, come to think of it, who I know Kierkegaard was so opposed to....)
- Lawrence
I'm not so sure today about my last comment on this post — or, at least, I feel like it had way too much shorthand. But right now, I just want to at least register how relieving a corrective this blog post feels to something like Douglas Hofstadter's "huneker" theory of souledness (in his I Am a Strange Loop):
"At birth, our repertoire of categories is so minimal that I would call it nil for all practical purposes. Deprived of symbols to trigger, a baby cannot make sense of what William James evocatively called the 'big, buzzing, blooming confusion' of its sensory input. The building-up of a self-symbol is still far in the future for a baby, and so in babies there exists no strange loop of selfhood, or nearly none.
"To put it bluntly, since its future symbolic machinery is 99 percent missing, a human neonate, devastatingly cute though it may be, simply has no 'I' — or, to be more generous, if it does possess some minimal dollop of 'I'-ness, perhaps it is one huneker's worth or thereabouts — and that's not much to write home about."
The fact that Hofstadter consistently links self-awareness, consciousness and having a soul — it's really like you and he are saying the exact opposite; and, at this point in time at least, what you're saying makes a lot more sense to me.
Thanks for these comments, Lonin. All very interesting. I almost cut the Marionette Theater excerpt, deeming it too loosely connected to my theme, so it's very affirming to hear this thread had already brought it to your mind at least.
I haven't read the Hofstadter text you refer to, but I do agree that I am opposed to his view. The following occurred to me while reading your comment, and I wonder if it would stand up to scrutiny: attempts to describe consciousness according to its coming-into-being during human infancy or during the evolution of the human species tend to produce what we could call "complexity-based models"-- basically models where the possession of a soul or of consciousness is a matter of having a sufficiently sophisticated information processing apparatus. Clearly this has dangerous implication (the more sophisticated your information processing, the more conscious you are, the more of a soulish soul you have) and the very fact of its obvious implications being bad ones should make us suspicious of its overall philosophical merit (veracity, beauty, utility, etc.), on the principle that an idea that leads directly to bad ideas is probably itself a bad idea. But there are other strong reasons to be suspicious of complexity-based models:
(1) They are grounded in the brain-as-computer metaphor, which, however natural it may seem at this historical juncture, really has no better status than the brain-as-steam-engine metaphors that were popular in the 19th Century.
(2) they have a kind of sneaky reductive force: behind the pseudo-reverent language of "How beautiful and wonderful it is that the laws of the universe can produce this phenomenon!" there is always the deeper fact that we are being told to view ourselves from the outside, as physical phenomena, in terms that render the words "beautiful" and "wonderful" meaningless.
I know you've partly disavowed your August 23rd comment, but I want to clarify one thing: I don't want to assume that I fully understand what you mean by consciousness rising "up out of primordial dark," but that is certainly not a way that I would describe the process of developing what Kierkegaard calls "reflective subjectivity"-- not only because (as I think you might anticipate) I would hardly describe the previous state as one of darkness, but because I would not even take the previous state as primordial: the form of consciousness that you or I experience is presumably the result of a development that has been ongoing since at least the advent of animals; I would argue since the beginning of the world.
(I chose not to substitute the word 'universe' for 'world' because I think it adds no definite idea of completeness; indeed, by positing something larger in which the world is but a small part, it only opens the door to a yet larger thing that the universe is a tiny part of, and so on; and, all else being equal or favorable to the word 'world,' I'll take Strunk & White's advice and choose the Anglo Saxon term over the Latinate one.)
Well, that's a weird misinterpretation you've caught me in. I clearly misunderstood Kierkegaard's "subjectivity was not fully conscious and reflective", but what's so interesting to me about it, I suppose, is that the terms I misunderstood it in seem to be ones I myself discredited in my second comment here, in which the ability to reflect on oneself features as an essential component in having any kind of awareness at all. I guess I imagined that Kierkegaard was saying that people in the ancient world weren't fully conscious, in the sense that — well, I suppose that they went about their lives in a dream, or something like that. ... I do have to say it's a little difficult to write even this comment, and disentangle various notions of consciousness from each other that have been linked together for a long time in my mind!
Now that I think about it, it's very difficult for me to think of an answer to the question of what times in my life I've been the most conscious; the answer certainly doesn't seem to be, however, the times when I've been most aware of my environment, so, from that perspective, "information processing" definitely seems like at least a red herring.
I wouldn't call your interpretation weird, Lonin. It seems to me quite defensible, and it's always possible that my reading of Kierkegaard is not in line with Kierkegaard's reading of Kierkegaard.
If we step back from "The Ancient Tragedy's Reflection in the Modern" to the larger context of Either/Or, he does sort of seem to be trying to set up a hierarchy of aesthetic-ethical-religious; and he does in fact seem to view Greek society as lying towards the bottom of this hierarchy (grounded in the aesthetic, the ethical only just emerging, the religious still unrealized). At the same time, one feels in K's writing a real reverence for Greek culture and for the aesthetic (e.g. to generate tragedy) and, additionally, a disgust with his own generation. There are layers of confusing factors here: "TATRM" is part of the section of Either/Or attributed by K to his fictional aesthete, so K seems to be saying that he does not necessarily avow any of the claims made there, that they are in fact the work of one in the thrall of the aesthetic, and they are later critiqued in the "Or" section by from an ethical point of view, by another fictional thinker.
But as I've suggested elsewhere, these kinds of schematic-systematic readings of K strike me as contrary to the real nature of his work, in which thought runs in many directions, rigorous and passionate but simply refusing to conform to the outlines he tries to draw for it. Reading the "Either" section of Either/Or, I cannot help but feel that, while K may _wish_ to subordinate his aesthetic ideas to ethical and religious ones, they in fact come to him not yet subordinated, but genuine and earnest. His reverence for Greek culture; his admiration for its "light-heartedness," its innocence, its "immediacy," its capacity for sorrow unmixed with guilt (all of which arise from the fact that, in it, "subjectivity was not fully conscious and reflective"); his sense of the poverty and isolation that arise from our modern, fully-reflective subjectivity-- all seem to me powerful and real and not cancelled out by ethical or religious considerations.
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