Does poetry tell the truth, and what sort of
truth could that be? Sceptics have long spoken of ‘poetic license’, and
matters are even more contested today. The most prominent school of
literary criticism, still called The
New Criticism, viewed truth as
irrelevant. Poetry was fiction, and at best could only give the
emotional equivalent of facts. Poems were complex, moreover, and many
operated by deploying meanings at different levels. Behind lines and
phrases lurked many ambiguities and paradoxes, which held the poem
together in creative tensions. The
New Criticism looked for three
characteristics. First was self-sufficiency: the poem should be
independent of biography, historical content or effect on the reader,
which were called the intentional, historical and affective fallacies.
Second was unity: the poem should be a coherent whole: a very
traditional view. Third was complexity: which was sometimes held to be
the central element of poetry. {1}
Other schools disagreed. The Marxist critics felt that literary
criticism ought to be a history of man's ideas and imaginings in the
(economic) setting which shaped them. {2} The Christian apologists felt
that the arts had a civilizing mission, and deprecated the subversive
attitudes of many Modernist writers. {3} And the historicists sought a
continuity between western industrial societies and the medieval past.
{4}
By contrast, contemporary poetry seems to have given up on truth
altogether. Post-modernists come in many embodiments, but share a
preoccupation with language. Reality is not mediated by what we read or
write, but is entirely constituted by
those actions. We don't therefore
look at the world through a
poem, and ask how whether the
representation is true or adequate or appropriate, but focus on the
devices and strategies within
the text itself. Postmodernist poetry
discounts The New Criticism‘s
stress on unity, moreover, and urges us
to accept a looser view of art, one that accords more with everyday
realities and shows how language suppresses alternative views,
particularly those of the socially or politically disadvantaged.
Postmodernist poems have moved on from their Modernist forebears. They
are wholly immersed in language, and make no reference to a world
beyond. What does concern them is estrangement, or the
defamiliarisation of the everyday, the arbitrary choice of words,
teased out by deconstructive techniques, the absence of a final
interpretation, i.e. avoidance of closure and artistic autonomy, the
repressions implicit in language, whether sexist, social or political,
and a wide subject matter, beyond the ennobling virtues championed by
humanism. {5}
So why the interest in poetic truth? Why investigate something that
poetry has long renounced? In this long article, I shall try to show
that:
1. Whatever problems language suffers from, the problems are just as
acute in other areas of life — in philosophy, mathematics and
science — where they are accepted and worked with.
2. Poetry’s current shadow-boxing with language is therefore misplaced,
and rather than create conundrums in Postmodernist poems, poetry would
do better to make the intellectual journey in other disciplines. Poetry
is not equipped for such enterprises, and should return to its more
traditional role, responding to the world as it is broadly seen and
understood.
3. Truth may not be embodied in logic and abstractions, but in the ways
communities operate and live together in common understandings. If that
is the case, poetry will not recapture a wider public until it embodies
more of those common understandings.
Readers wanting a more detailed and referenced account may wish to
consult chapters in Ocaso Press’s free Literary Theory,
from which most of this page is quarried.
What do we mean by calling something true? Most obviously we mean
according with or corresponding to ‘the facts’, but this correspondence
theory of truth has few followers among philosophers because of a naive
acceptance of ‘the facts.’ Even at its basic level, things in the world
are not directly given to us: we make interpretations and intelligent
integrations of our sensory experience, as Kant claimed and extensive
studies of the physiology of perception show all too plainly. {6}
Scientists make observations in ways guided by contemporary practice
and the nature of the task in hand.
What does this mean? That truth and meaning are mere words, brief
stopping places on an endless web of references? No. If we want a truth
and meaning underwritten entirely by logic — completely, each
step of the way, with no possible exceptions — then that goal has
not been reached. The match is close enough to refute the extravagant
claims of Postmodernism, but not complete.
But perhaps the enterprise was always over-ambitious. After all,
Russell and Whitehead's {7} monumental attempt to base mathematics on
logic also failed, and even mathematics can have gaps in its own
procedures, as Gödel {8} indicated.
Coherence
So what other approaches are there? Two: the theory of coherence and
that of pragmatism. The first calls something true when it fits neatly
into a well-integrated body of beliefs. The second is judged by its
results, the practical ‘cash value’ of its contribution. Theories of
coherence were embraced by very different philosophies, and pragmatism
is currently enjoying a modest revival in the States.
Stated more formally, {10} the coherence theory holds that truth
consists in a relation of coherence between beliefs or propositions in
a set, such that a belief is false when it fails to fit with other
mutually coherent members of a set. Though this concept of truth may
seem more applicable to aesthetics or sociology, even a scientific
theory is commonly preferred on the grounds of simplicity, experimental
accessibility, utility, theoretical elegance and strength, fertility
and association with models rendering such processes intelligible. {11}
But if the set of beliefs needs to be as comprehensive as possible,
what is to stop us inflating the system with beliefs whose only merit
is that they fit the system, to make a larger but still consistent
fairy-tale? Appeal to the outside world — that these new beliefs
are indeed ‘facts’ — is invalid, as our measure of truth is
coherence within the set of beliefs, not correspondence with matters
outside.{12}
Given that there will be more than one way of choosing a set of beliefs
from the available data, and no external criteria help us decide,
Rescher {13} suggested using plausibility filters. We select those
beliefs that seem in themselves most plausible, reducing the short-list
by further selection if necessary. But how is this plausibility to be
decided? If beliefs resembles Euclid's geometry, we might indeed accept
some of them — that parallel lines never meet, for example
— by an appeal to sturdy common sense, but most beliefs are not
of this nature, and even Euclidean geometry has its limits. How can we
be sure — a further problem — that our set of beliefs is
the most comprehensive possible if new investigations may yet turn up
data that is better incorporated in another set of beliefs?
Idealists like Bradley {14} argued that reality was a unified and
coherent whole, which he called the Absolute. Parts of the whole could
only be partly true, and even those parts were doubtfully true given
the uncertain nature of our sense perceptions. Better base truth in our
rational faculties, he thought, and look for consistency and
interdependence in what our thoughts tell us. But again there are
difficulties. How much interdependence? If everything in a set of
beliefs is entirely interdependent, then each one belief is entailed by
each other belief, which leads to absurdities. If the interdependence
is loosened, then the requirements for inclusion become less clear.{15}
Some Logical Positivists tried to get the best of both worlds.
Incorrigible reports on experience, which they called protocol
sentences, were based on correspondence of knowledge and reality, but
the assemblage of protocol sentences as a whole depended on their
consistency and interdependence, i.e. on coherence theory. But even
this happy compromise was dashed by Neurath who pointed out that
protocol sentences were not then the product of unbiased observation as
required, but of investigations controlled by the need for coherence in
the set of protocol sentences. What controls what? We are like sailors,
he said, who must completely rebuild their boat on the open sea. {16}
Pragmatism
What then of the third theory of truth: pragmatism? In its crudest
form, that something is true simply because it yields good works or
congenial beliefs, the theory has few adherents. But its proponents
— Pierce, James, Dewey and latterly Quine — put matters
more subtly. Reality, said C.S. Pierce, constrains us to the truth: we
find by enquiry and experiment what the world is really like. Truth is
the consensus of beliefs surviving that investigation, a view that
includes some correspondence theory and foreshadows Quine's web of
beliefs. William James was not so committed a realist, and saw truth as
sometimes manufactured by the verification process itself, a view that
links him to relativists like Feyerband. John Dewey stressed the
context of application, that we need to judge ideas by how they work in
specific practices. But that makes truth into a property acquired in
the individual circumstances of verification, perhaps even
individual-dependent, which has obvious drawbacks. {17}
But ‘The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it’,
wrote James.{18} ‘Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made
true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process, the process
namely of its verifying itself, its verification... Any idea that helps
us to deal, whether practically or intellectually, with reality, that
doesn't entangle our progress in frustrations, that fits, in fact, and
adapts our life to the reality's whole setting, will agree sufficiently
to meet the requirement. The true, to put it briefly, is only the
expedient in our way of thinking, just as the right is only the
expedient in our way of behaving.’ Expedient in almost any fashion, and
expedient in the long run and on the whole, of course. But what of
inexpedient truths, don't they exist? And what of truths as yet
unverified, but nonetheless truths for all that? Truth as something
active, that helps us deal with life, is an important consideration,
but pragmatism ultimately affords no more complete a theory of truth
than those of correspondence or coherence.
Though mathematics might seem the clearest
and most certain kind of knowledge we possess, there are problems just
as serious as those in any other branch of philosophy. What is the
nature of mathematics? In what sense do its propositions have meaning?
{19}
Foundations
Plato believed in Forms or Ideas that were eternal, capable of precise
definition and independent of perception. Among such entities he
included numbers and the objects of geometry — lines, points, circles —
which were therefore apprehended not with the senses but with reason.
‘Mathematicals’ — the objects mathematics deals with — were specific
instances of ideal Forms. Since the true propositions of mathematics
were true of the unchangeable relations between unchangeable objects,
they were inevitably true, which means that mathematics discovers
pre-existing truths ‘out there’ rather than creates something from our
mental predispositions. And as for the objects perceived by our senses,
one apple, two pears, etc. they are only poor and evanescent copies of
the Forms one, two, etc., and something the philosopher need not
overmuch concern himself with. Mathematics dealt with truth and
ultimate reality. {20}
Aristotle disagreed. Forms were not entities remote from appearance but
something which entered into objects of the world. That we can abstract
oneness or circularity does not mean that these abstractions represent
something remote and eternal. Mathematics was simply reasoning about
idealizations. Aristotle looked closely at the structure of
mathematics, distinguishing logic, principles used to demonstrate
theorems, definitions (which do not suppose the defined actually
exist), and hypotheses (which do suppose they actually exist). He also
reflected on infinity, perceiving the difference between a potential
infinity (e.g. adding one to a number ad infinitum) and a complete
infinity (e.g. number of points into which a line is divisible). {20}
Leibniz brought together logic and mathematics. But whereas Aristotle
used propositions of the subject-predicate form, Leibniz argued that
the subject ‘contains’ the predicate: a view that brought in infinity
and God. Mathematical propositions are not true because they deal in
eternal or idealized entities, but because their denial is logically
impossible. They are true not only of this world, or the world of
eternal Forms, but of all possible worlds. Unlike Plato, for whom
constructions were adventitious aids, Leibniz saw the importance of
notation, a symbolism of calculation, and so began what became very
important in the twentieth century: a method of forming and arranging
characters and signs to represent the relationships between
mathematical thoughts. {20}
Mathematical entities for Kant were a-priori synthetic propositions,
which of course provide the necessary conditions for objective
experience. Time and space were matrices, the containers holding the
changing material of perception. Mathematics was the description of
space and time. If restricted to thought, mathematical concepts
required only self-consistency, but the construction of such concepts
involves space having a certain structure, which in Kant's day was
described by Euclidean geometry. As for applied mathematics — the
distinction between the abstract ‘two’ and ‘two pears’ — this is
construction plus empirical matter. {20}
Principia Mathematica
Gottlob Frege (1848-1925), Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) and their
followers developed Leibniz's idea that mathematics was something
logically undeniable. Frege used general laws of logic plus
definitions, formulating a symbolic notation for the reasoning
required. Inevitably, through the long chains of reasoning, these
symbols became less intuitively obvious, the transition being mediated
by definitions. What were these definitions? Russell saw them as
notational conveniences, mere steps in the argument. Frege saw them as
implying something worthy of careful thought, often presenting key
mathematical concepts from new angles. If in Russell's case the
definitions had no objective existence, in Frege's case the matter was
not so clear: the definitions were logical objects which claim an
existence equal to other mathematical entities. Nonetheless, Russell
carried on, resolving and side-stepping many logical paradoxes, to
create with Whitehead the monumental system of description and notation
of the Principia Mathematica (1910-13). {21}
Many were impressed but not won over. If natural numbers were defined
through classes — one of the system's more notable achievements —
weren't these classes in turn defined through similarities, which left
open how the similarities were themselves defined if the argument was
not to be merely circular? The logical concept of number had also to be
defined through the non-logical hypothesis of infinity, every natural
number n requiring a unique successor n+1. And since such a requirement
hardly applies to the real world, the concept of natural numbers
differs in its two incarnations, in pure and applied mathematics. Does
this matter? Yes indeed, as number is not continuous in atomic
processes, a fact acknowledged in the term quantum mechanics. Worse
still, the Principia incorporated almost all of Cantor's transfinite
mathematics, which gave rise to contradictions when matching class and
subclass, difficulties that undermined the completeness with which
numbers may be defined. {22}
Logic in geometry may be developed in two ways. The first is to use
one-to-one correspondences. Geometric entities — lines, points,
circle, etc. — are matched with numbers or sets of numbers, and
geometric relationships are matched with relationships between numbers.
The second is to avoid numbers altogether and define geometric entities
partially but directly by their relationships to other geometric
entities. Such definitions are logically disconnected from perceptual
statements, so that the dichotomy between pure and applied mathematics
continues, somewhat paralleling Plato's distinction between pure Forms
and their earthly copies. Alternative self-consistent geometries can be
developed, therefore, and one cannot say beforehand whether actuality
(say the wider spaces of the cosmos) is or is not Euclidean. Moreover,
the shortcomings of the logistic procedures remain, in geometry and in
number theory. {23}
Even Russell saw the difficulty with set theory. We can distinguish
sets that belong to themselves from sets that do not. But what happens
when we consider the set of all sets that do not belong to themselves?
Mathematics had been shaken to its core in the nineteenth century by
the realization that the infallible mathematical intuition that
underlay geometry was not infallible at all. There were space-filling
curves. There were continuous curves that could be nowhere
differentiated. There were geometries other than Euclid's that gave
perfectly intelligible results. Now there was the logical paradox of a
set both belonging and not belonging to itself. Ad-hoc solutions could
be found, but something more substantial was wanted. David Hilbert
(1862-1943) and his school tried to reach the same ends as Russell, but
abandoned some of the larger claims of mathematics. Mathematics was
simply the manipulation of symbols according to specified rules. The
focus of interest was the entities themselves and the rules governing
their manipulation, not the references they might or might not have to
logic or to the physical world.
In fact Hilbert was not giving up Cantor's world of transfinite
mathematics, but accommodating it to a mathematics concerned with
concrete objects. Just as Kant had employed reason to categories beyond
sense perceptions — moral freedoms and religious faith — so Hilbert
applied the real notions of finite mathematics to the ideal notions of
transfinite mathematics.
Gödel
And the programme fared very well at first. It employed finite methods
— i.e. concepts that could be insubstantiated in perception, statements
in which the statements are correctly applied, and inferences from
these statements to other statements. Most clearly this was seen in
classical arithmetic. Transfinite mathematics, which is used in
projective geometry and algebra, for example, gives rise to
contradictions, which makes it all the more important to see arithmetic
as fundamental. Volume I of Hilbert and Bernays's classic work had been
published, and II was being prepared when, in 1931, Gödel's second
incompleteness theorem brought the programme to an end. Gödel showed,
fairly simply and quite conclusively, that such formalisms could not
formalize arithmetic completely.
Morris Kline {24} remarked that relativity reminds us that nature
presents herself as an organic whole, with space, matter and time
commingled. Humans have in the past analysed nature, selected certain
properties as the most important, forgotten that they were abstracted
aspects of a whole, and regarded them thereafter as distinct entities.
They were then surprised to find that they must reunite these supposed
separate concepts to obtain a consistent, satisfactory synthesis of
knowledge. Almost from the beginning, men have carried out algebraic
reasoning independent of sense experience. Who can visualize a
non-Euclidean world of four or more dimensions? Or the Shrödinger wave
equations, or antimatter? Or electromagnetic radiation that moves
without a supporting ether? Modern science has dispelled angels and
mysticism, but it has also removed intuitive and physical content that
appeals to experience. ‘We have seen the truth,’ said G.K. Chesterton,
‘and it makes no sense.’ Nonetheless, mathematics remains useful,
indeed vital, and no one despairs because its conceptions do not
entirely square with the world.
Most mathematicians do not fish these difficult waters. The theoretical
basis of mathematics is one aspect of the subject, but not the most
interesting, nor the most important. Like their scientist colleagues,
they assert simply that their discipline ‘works’. They accept that
mathematics cannot entirely know or describe itself, that it may not be
a seamless activity, and that contradictions may arise from unexpected
quarters. {25} Mathematics is an intellectual adventure, and it would
be disappointing if its insights could be explained away in concepts or
procedures we could fully circumscribe.
What is the relevance to poetry? Only that both mathematics and poetry
seem partly creations and partly discoveries of something fundamental
about ourselves and the world around. Elegance, fertility and depth are
important qualities in both disciplines, and behind them both lurks
incompleteness and unfathomable strangeness.
To the ancients, scientia meant knowledge
and experience: wisdom, in short. But science today implies something
else: knowledge collected by following certain rules, and presented in
a certain way. Scientists are realists: they believe in the existence
of an external reality which philosophers have never been able to
prove. The point is worth stressing. Science attempts to make a sharp
distinction between the world out there, which is real and independent
of us, and the individual's thoughts and feelings, which are internal
and inconstant and to be explained eventually in terms of outside
realities. {26}
Must science rest on strong logical foundations? Probably not. Much in
quantum theory is contra-intuitive. {27} Randomness enters into
relatively simple systems. {28} We deduce consequences from theories so
as to check them. And we induce theories from observations, which
Aristotle called generalizing. Scientific laws are often best expressed
in mathematical form — giving them precise formulation and prediction —
but mathematics does not rest on logic: the attempts last century by
Russell and Whitehead ended in paradoxes, and the formalist approach of
Hilbert was overthrown by Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
The Problem of Induction
Many problems were noted long ago. How much evidence needs to be
assembled before a generalization becomes overwhelmingly certain? It is
never certain. David Hume (1711-76) pointed out that no scientific law
is ever conclusively verified. That the sun has risen every morning so
far will not logically entail the sun rising in future. Effect is
simply what follows cause: laws of function are only habit. {29}
There are further difficulties with induction. Scientists make a large
number of observations from which to generalize. But these observations
are made with a purpose, not randomly: they are selected according to
the theory to be tested, or what the discipline prescribes as relevant.
Then the eye (or any other organ) does not record like a camera, but
interprets according to experience and expectation. Theory is to some
extent threaded into observation. Finally, there is the
reporting of observations, which must be assembled and regimented in
accordance with the theory being advanced or refuted.
Does this worry scientists? Not at all. Whatever the philosophic
difficulties, science works, and its successes are augmented every day.
Besides, the problem can be circumvented by employing statistical
relevance. We assemble the factors that might be relevant and see how
probability changes as a result. For example: if the probability of
Event E given Cause C is changed by Factor A, then A is relevant —
matters which can be set out in probability theory. {30}
Karl Popper: The Falsifiability Thesis
But if induction is the weak link in science, why not remove it
altogether? Science, claimed Karl Popper (1902-94), proceeds by guesses
that are continually tested, i.e. by conjectures and refutations. {31}
That is the real essence of science, not that its conclusions may be
verified, but that they can be refuted. Metaphysics, art and
psychoanalysis cannot be so falsified, and they are therefore not
science. {32}
Are scientists objective, carefully considering theories on the basis
of evidence, and that alone? Only to some extent. Scientists are human,
and their work is fuelled by their interests, career needs and
animosities like everyone else's. {33} But independence is claimed for
the end product. The scientific paper may not represent the twists and
turns of thought and experiment, but aren't the final results
objectively presented, earlier workers acknowledged, and arguments for
acceptance soberly marshalled? Not really. Papers do not let the facts
speak for themselves. The evidence is persuasively presented: there is
a rhetoric of science. {34} Papers are refereed, and maverick views
excluded. Vetting by peer-groups discounts or expunges work that starts
from different assumptions or comes to fundamentally unsettling
conclusions.
Kuhn's View: The Scientific Paradigm
Science, postulated Thomas Kuhn, employed conceptual frameworks, ways
of looking at the world that excluded rival conceptions. These
paradigms, as he called them, were traditions of thinking and acting in
a certain field. They represented the totality of background
information, of laws and theories which are taught to aspiring
scientist as true, and which in turn the scientist has to accept if he
is to be accepted into the scientific community. Scientific enterprise
is conservative. The paradigm legislates. What lies outside its
traditions is non-science. And for long periods science proceeds
quietly and cumulatively, extending and perfecting the traditions.
Anomalies, even quite large anomalies, are accepted for the sake of
overall coherence. But when the anomalies become too large, and
(crucially) make better sense in a new paradigm, there occurs a
scientific revolution. The old laws, the terminology and the evidence
all suddenly shift to accommodate the new paradigm. {35}
Imre Lakatos
The second challenge to Popper came from Imre Lakatos, who grouped
theories into ‘research programmes’ and made these the deciding
mechanism. Each such programme possessed a hard core of sacrosanct
information established over a long period of trial and error. Round
the core was a protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses and observations
that were being constantly tested and modified. Programmes guided
scientists in their choice of problems to pursue, and were attractive
(‘progressive’, Lakatos called them) to the extent that they
accumulated empirical support and made novel predictions. Above all,
programmes protected scientists from inconvenient facts and confusing
observations — necessarily, or many eventually successful theories
would have been strangled at birth.
Though the auxiliary belt served to protect the research programme
core, and was constantly being modified, these modifications could not
be made ad hoc, devised simply to get round a particular problem. They
had to be falsifiable: Lakatos agreed with Popper that sociology and
psychoanalysis were unscientific on this basis. But how is the
progressive research programme to be distinguished from the
degenerating one, except by hindsight? Kuhn accepted a leap of faith,
an intuitive feel for where the future lay, but Lakatos did not. {36}
Paul Feyerabend
Paul Feyerabend initially {37} won a considerable reputation as an
historian of science prepared to get down to precise scientific detail.
He was a realist in the Popper sense, and argued that science
progressed through proliferating theories, rather than coalescing into
a prevailing Kuhnian paradigm. Subsequently, to the horror of
colleagues and friends, he took a sociological and anarchistic line,
arguing that true science was being stifled by the scientific
establishment, an institution as self-serving and undemocratic as the
medieval Church. {38}
Implications
Kuhn's views, and more particularly Feyabend's, were seized upon as
evidence that the scientific world-view was simply one paradigm amongst
many. Despite its prestige and practical triumphs, science was as much
a myth as art or literature or psychoanalysis. Kuhn hotly denied this,
and backtracked very much from his earlier position. Both he and Popper
were dismayed to see their views hijacked by the relativists, as
support for the view that each person makes his own reality or concept
of truth. {39} Relativism is disliked by philosophers, and the
refutation is straightforward. If something is true only within a
confined system — one world-view, one person's consciousness — how are
we to know whether this has any currency in time or space? Even to
record our observations needs a language, and languages cannot be
wholly private. {40}
Those who attack science for its remote and reductive nature, its
cold-blooded efficiency and elitist decision-making should not forget
how well science actually works. Scientific observations may be
theory-laden, but those theories are tested in a communality of
practice. If once depicted as mechanical and predetermined, science
appears less so now that quantum and chaotic processes have been more
widely recognized. Science does bring great operational efficiency, and
its findings cannot be called myths in the sense understood in
anthropology or literary criticism. Science attempts not only to
understand nature, but to control nature, and there is hardly an aspect
of life today that could be conducted without its help. In short,
science does seem essentially different from the arts, and its
successes would be miraculous if there was not some correspondence
between its theories and ‘reality’, whatever that ‘reality’ may be.
Paradoxically, now that literary criticism
is adopting many of the previous methods and outlooks of science,
science itself is moving on. The newer sciences recognize the role of
scientists in their experiments, the pervasiveness of chaotic systems,
and the complex nature of brain functioning. Science is an abstraction,
and for all its astonishing success, can only make models that leave
out much that is important to human beings.
Dilemmas
But even in the hard sciences, the methodology has its problems. What
exactly are electrons? They behave both as particles and a wave action.
Perplexingly, they disappear when they meet their opposite number, the
positron. Worse still, they obey statistical laws, the Shrödinger wave
equations only indicating the percentage likelihood of an electron
being in a certain position with a certain speed. Of course we can
rationalize the situation, say that an electron is like nothing else
but an electron, and that the very act of observing upsets its speed
and position. But that is not the orthodox view, or very comforting.
The electron is a lepton, one of the fundamental building blocks of
matter, and if these blocks do not have solid objective existence, what
does? {41} The building blocks seem inter-linked in a way they should
not be, moreover, seeming to communicate instantaneously — faster than
the speed of light, which the General Theory of Relativity declares
impossible. {42}
And matters at the other end of the scale, in astrophysics, are equally
baffling. The universe may have originated out of nothing, a false
vacuum collapse, which co-created other universes that will always
remain outside our detection. And the fabric of the universe may be
constituted by superstrings, loops of incredibly small size. Originally
these superstrings had 26 dimensions, but 6 have compacted to
invisibility and 16 have internal dimensions to account for fundamental
forces. {43} Is this credible? The theory is contested, and may indeed
turn out to be pure mathematics — which is shaky in places, not only in
superstrings, but generally. {44}
But if the world is stranger than we can conceive it, it is no longer
in areas we cannot enter anyway, the very small or the very large.
Science has traditionally dealt with reversible, linear situations:
small causes that have small effects, and are totally predictable. But
most of the world is not that way at all. The cup slips from our grasp
at breakfast, we have a row with our partner for spoiling the new
carpet, go late to the office in a foul temper, fall out with the boss,
are fired, lose the home and partner and indeed everything from the
most insignificant incident. And that is by no means an exceptional,
one-off situation. Non-linear situations are common enough in
scientific investigations but were blithely ignored. Scientists only
reported the experiments that worked, that provided the simple
relationships they were looking for. {45}
Complex Systems
A new science accepts this web-like view of the world. Called by a
variety of names — study of dissipative structures, complex systems,
life systems {46} — it has grown from the unexpected fusion of two very
different fields. One is computer simulation of complex systems that
hover on the border between chaos and regularity. The other is the
behaviour of living organisms.
Complex systems are now an immense field of study, difficult to
summarize briefly, but their essential feature is non-linearity. The
future behaviour of the system depends on its prior behaviour and
through feed-backs has an inbuilt element of randomness. Such behaviour
is seen in very simple systems (e.g. one represented by X' = k x(1 - x)
where x is the value initially, and X the value at a later time) but
real-life examples are usually much more complicated, often resulting
from the interaction of several such systems. The system will exhibit
areas of simple behaviour: movement towards a single point, or
oscillation between two or more points, but there will also be areas of
chaotic behaviour where the smallest change in prior conditions causes
wild fluctuations later on. But even more characteristic of these
systems are strange attractors. The system revolves round certain
points, continually tracing trajectories that are very similar but
never exactly identical. {47}
Life Systems
What has this to do with life? Certain chemical reactions behave in a
similar way, and their behaviour mimics those of living systems, even
though the reactions involve non-organic compounds that would
individually behave quite straightforwardly. Given feedback mechanisms
— and many chemical reactions are reversible — there arise areas or
islands of order on the very edge of chaos. Most importantly, the
systems organize themselves, automatically, out of the web of
interacting reactions. They have emergent properties where behaviour is
different and not to be predicted from the behaviour at a lower level.
Living creatures may owe their structures to such self-organization of
their constituent chemicals: in the metabolism of cells, brain
functioning, even the way the DNA code is interpreted to produce the
right sequence of cells in the growing animal. On a broader field, that
of ecosystems and natural selection, it may be that species themselves
represent strange attractors, with parallel evolution in the likes of
whales and marsupial wolves. {48} Indeed the theory of networks can be
very generally extended. Life, according to the Santiago school of
Maturana and Varela, {49} is characterized by two features: cognition
and the ability to reproduce. Cognition means making distinctions and
is shown by all forms of life, even the lowliest. But only man, and
possibly the higher primates to some extent, know that they know, i.e.
have self-awareness and an inner world. Self awareness is closely tied
to language, which is not a mental representation or a transfer of
information, but a coordination of behaviour. Language is a
communication about communication, by which we bring forth a world,
weaving the linguistic network in which we live.
At a stroke, a good deal of philosophy's aims are thrown away. Mental
states embody certain sensations. Cognitive experience involves
resonance — technically phase-locking — between specific cell assembles
in the brain: e.g. those dealing with perception, emotion, memory,
bodily movement, and also involves the whole body's nervous systems.
Attempts to define, or even to illuminate, such concepts as
consciousness, being, truth and ethical value are no more than
knottings in the web of understanding. Words lead back to physiology
and bodily functioning, not to any abstract notions based on
irrefutable logic. {50}
Metaphor Theory
That is the view of metaphor theory, which suggests conventional views
of science, philosophy, society and even abstract disciplines like
mathematics have a basis in innate human dispositions. If we cannot
find an objective meaning for something as homely as money except as something reflecting and
facilitating transactions in human societies, when those societies
themselves evade full capture by rational processes, the reason may lie
in outmoded concepts of certainty. The world is inherently ambiguous,
and what seems but plain facts to one generation may be arrant nonsense
to the next. Always there is a need for evidence, and close
argumentation, but nothing in the humanities or sciences is ever
permanently settled, any more than widely differing political views can
be finally reconciled, or a definitive account be written of some
period in history. We select and abstract the evidence in ways that
seems important. We assemble that material in the patterns and pictures
we are comfortable with. We find comfortable largely what our
backgrounds, experience and personalities dictate. Those individual
aspects must conform in many ways to the societies in which we live,
and those societies in their turn are influenced by us. In such complex
and interlocking situations, all that we can make of viewpoints are
partial and transitory models that correspond to innate bodily
processes — models are what metaphor theory calls schemas.
Metaphor commonly means saying one thing while intending another,
making implicit comparisons between things linked by a common feature.
Scientists, logicians and lawyers prefer to stress the literal meaning
of words, regarding metaphor as picturesque ornament. But there is the
obvious fact that language is built of dead metaphors. Metaphors are
therefore active in understanding. We use metaphors to group areas of
experience (life is a journey), to orientate ourselves (my
consciousness was raised), to convey expression through the senses (his
eyes were glued to the screen), to describe learning (it had a germ of
truth in it), etc. Even ideas are commonly pictured as objects (the
idea had been around for a while), as containers (I didn't get anything
out of that ) or as things to be transferred (he got the idea across).
Metaphor is a commonplace in literature, and generally regarded as a
rhetorical device, simply a means of persuasion. {51} Metaphor has only
a supporting role in meaning, and certainly not seen as something
actually constituting meaning. Yet such is the suggestion of Lakoff and
Johnson. {52-53}
Metaphors reflect schemas, which are constructions of reality using the
assimilation and association of sensorimotor processes to anticipate
actions in the world. Schemas are plural, interconnecting in our minds
to represent how we perceive, act, react and consider. Far from being
mere matters of style, metaphors organize our experience, creating
realities that guide our futures and reinforce interpretations. Truth
is therefore truth relative to some understanding, and that
understanding involves categories that emerge from our interaction with
experience. Schemas are neither fixed nor uniform, but cognitive models
of bodily activities prior to producing language. The cognitive models
proposed by the later work of Lakoff and Johnson are tentative but very
varied, the most complex being radial with multiple schema linked to a
common centre. Language is characterized by symbolic models (with
generative grammar an overlying, subsequent addition) and operates
through propositional, image schematic, metaphoric and metonymic
models. Properties are matters of relationships and prototypes. Meaning
arises through embodiment in schemas. Schemas can also be regarded as
containers-part-whole, link, centre-periphery, source-path-goal,
up-down, front-back.
The approach is clearly technical and controversial. It contests the
claims of philosophy or mathematics to pre-eminence, and places
knowledge in a wider context. Meaning lies in body physiology and
social activity as well as cerebral functioning. Our temperaments and
experiences colour our thoughts, and the philosopher's search for
abstract and indisputable truth is an impossible dream. How human
beings act in practice is the crucial test, and in practice humans
paraphrase according to context and need. Comprehension can never be
complete, and specializations that would base truth on logic,
mathematics, invariant relationships in the physical world or in social
generalities make that comprehension even less attainable. Indeed the
approach is entirely misconceived. Multiplicity is what makes us human,
and we live variously in conceptions that arise from the totality of
our experiences — physiological and mental, private and social. Science
and the arts are slowly, very slowly, converging to give us a fuller
and more comprehensive view of the world, and that view is anticipated
by schema that draw no sharp line between rationality and
irrationality, between thought and emotion, between the world out there
and our private universes, between our mental and our bodily
activities. Yes, the distinctions can be made — and indeed have to be
made for practical purposes — but the distinctions represent a
narrowing of conception and possibility.
That meanings lie in the social purposes of words rather than any fiat
of logicians was the view of the later Wittgenstein, a proposal that
has wide acceptance. {54-55} If language is not a self-sufficient
system of signs without outside reference, nor a set of logical
structures, what else could it be? Social expression. Rather than pluck
theories from the air, or demand of language an impossibly logical
consistency, we should study language as it is actually used. Much that
is dear to the philosopher's heart has to be given up — exact
definitions of meaning and truth, for example, and large parts of
metaphysics altogether. And far from analysing thought and its
consequences, philosophy must now merely describe it. But the gain is
the roles words are observed to play: subtle, not to be pinned down or
rigidly elaborated. Games, for example, do not possess one common
feature, but only a plexus of overlapping similarities. To see through
the bewitchment of language is the task of philosophy.
Science itself recognizes the shortcomings in the old attitudes. The
descriptive sciences never fitted the formula well, and the social
sciences failed altogether. Many complex situations defy mathematically
modelling, and are best approached through successive approximation or
neural nets. Chaos theory destroys determinism in many areas,
emphasizing the importance of the contingent and unforeseen.
Knowledge Systems as Myths
So, to return to poetry, does art give us knowledge of the world? Most
would emphatically say yes. Not intellectual knowledge, exactly, not
knowledge as a construal of relations between abstract entities
representing human experience, but something more authentic, immediate
and sensory. Art is surely the great peacemaker, moreover, bridging
ideological differences and making real our common humanity. When we
remember how bitter and bloodstained have been the wars between
religions, each claiming knowledge of unknowables, should we not be
wary of the whole process of abstraction from experience, of what
really constitutes knowledge? Could we not say that logic and argument
were human propensities, something essential to us, but not wholly so
transcendent that we must follow them regardless of other perceptions
and inclinations? And if we look at what arguments must derive from,
intellectual foundations, we find, even in the most abstract of
disciplines — mathematics, philosophy, mathematics, science —
eventually only lacunae, paradoxes, matters resolved in working
agreements between practitioners? In short, rather than dress up
knowledge in high-minded principle and rarefied abstraction, should we
not look closely at how the communities creating knowledge do in fact
go about their business? Possibly knowledge is not ultimately decided
on argument and abstraction, but on the varied operation of many human
needs and desires.
Knowledge therefore involves myths, in the best sense of that word,
thought Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) {56} and Susanne Langer (1895-1985)
{57}. Cassirer extended Kant's a priori categories so as to represent
language, myth, art, religion and science as systems of symbolic forms.
These forms are mental shaping of experience. They are culturally
determined and are created by us. But they also and wholly constitute
our world: all ‘reality’ is a reality seen and understood through them.
Outside lies Kant's noumenal world, about which there is nothing we can
really say.
But most importantly, religion, science and art give meaning to life.
They are the emotion-laden, unmediated ‘language’ of experience, which
can’t be interrogated for a more primary intellectual meaning. And as
to where they came from, the ultimate ground of their representation,
we cannot ask: that’s extending everyday attitudes into areas where
they didn't belong. These systems of symbolic form are not
arbitrary creations, moreover, but have grown up to answer human needs.
Each system carries its own particular enlightenment. Langer ranged
over the whole field of artistic expression, though is best known for
her theories of music. Art had its own meaning or meanings. Even in our
simplest observations we transform a manifold of sensations into a
virtual world of general symbols: a world with a grammar of its own,
guiding our ear and eyes, highly articulated in art. In music we have a
symbolic expression about feelings. Music had a logic of its own,
expressing the forms of human feeling, and creating an inner lives.
Certainly music did not denote as propositional language must, but it
conveyed knowledge directly, ‘by acquaintance’ rather than ‘knowledge about’.
Feelings are therefore symbolically objectified in certain forms, with
a detail and truth that language cannot approach. But that’s to be
expected. Literature and music are different categories of art, each
with their own approaches and accomplishments, as are the different
disciplines noted above. Poetry should concentrate on what it does
best, and give up its current games with language until it has mastered
the relevant literature on truth (this article), meaning (Duplicities of Meaning: The Poetry of
Geoffrey Hill) and aesthetics (Aesthetics of Modernist
Poetry).
References can now be found in a free pdf compilation of Ocaso Press's Modernism articles.