The Orphic Voice, page 3
In its beginnings, language is acknowledged by scholars to have been essentially figurative, imaginative, synthesizing, and mythological rather than analytical and logical. Schelling, for instance, says, “Is it not evident that there is poetry in the actual material formation of languages?”1 And other writers have said the same. Myth and metaphor, living instruments of a lively speech, are not ornaments and artifices tacked on to language but something in the stuff of language and hence of the mind itself. Language is poetry, and a poem is only the resources of language used to the full.
We have come to believe, however, that there is another kind of language, not figurative but literal or logical. It is widely accepted that with advancing civilization comes a progress from imaginative and mythological and poetic turns of speech toward the logical, precise, nonfigurative.2 Within our own culture, philosophers, logicians, and scientists seem to have striven for this for nearly 400 years, anxious to purify language, in the name of precision, from this very element of unclearness we have glimpsed already, from myth, metaphor, and poetry. Analytical thinking—logic and mathematics, in unison—has been set up as the model to which word-thought was to conform. Recent endeavors to develop languages which are mathematical structures of propositions are the outcome. This is language-as-science, in its more or less extreme form.
At first sight this looks like another aspect of the general split between arts and sciences which the modern world acquiesces in. Goethe, writing in 1820, says of his own time that poetry and science seemed then to be in absolute opposition to each other, and this has persisted as the official view, despite the noble and authoritative voices raised to the contrary. Yet it is not as simple a division as it looks, for if we examine poetry and criticism we shall find here also a trend toward language-as-science, in the form of a positive desire for mathematical precision or a negative nostalgia for language-as-poetry which is being ousted by its rival. Erasmus Darwin draws a distinction between the looser analogies suitable for poetry and the stricter ones which alone are suited to science.3 “Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart?” asks Poe in his early sonnet to Science, continuing after a line or two, “Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?” anticipating by a hundred years the view put forward by I. A. Richards in his essay Science and Poetry (1926), which is still the classic modern statement on this theme. So Stephen Spender speaks of it in “Inside the Cage,” in The Making of a Poem (1955), and of the modern world as a place where it is believed that “all knowledge is in the minds of scientists. The walls of such a world have no ears for the songs of Orpheus.”
But the walls never did have ears: it was the poetry that had the power. To reject language-as-poetry or to bewail its loss of power is to affirm language-as-science. There has been wholesale withdrawal from mythological or metaphoric or poetic thought, now relegated to the emotive, the imprecise, symbolical, metaphysical-nonsensical. Neither linguistic philosophers nor critics nor, a far more serious matter, poets, trust language-as-poetry any more. Valéry reviles words for being unreliable and inexact; unscientific, one might say. T. S. Eliot does the same. Arnold was already deeply uneasy about poetic thought, and there are suggestions of such an uneasiness even in Goethe. One result has been the general tendency in modern poetry toward the dry, ironic, self-deprecating conversational tone, the deliberate ascetical abdication from that power which language-as-poetry wields, a tendency broken only by occasional despairing incursions of language-as-poetry into the world of magic. Criticism today shows similar tendencies, particularly the “New” criticism, which in its turn is directed toward logic and analysis by its preoccupation with the text of a poem as an abstract, self-contained, timeless system of formal relations; it is hampered in addition by something it shares with a number of scientific areas as well—a tendency toward dogmatism.
If contemporary poetry and criticism find themselves in a contradictory position, perhaps science has pursued a more logical course, taking logic as the model for scientific thinking and mathematics as the ideal “language” for that thought, to which word-language, when used, should strive to conform? Up to a point, it has; and it, too, is in difficulties. Science no less than letters has a suppressed civil war on its hands in this matter of language and thinking.
In science the friction occurs along the boundary where the exact sciences border upon those which are not “exact” in quite that sense. The line divides the areas where thought can be done in mathematics from those where it cannot. If you cannot think in mathematics, you have to think in words; but with words comes Orpheus, the poetic and metaphoric power of language operating on the mind. The scientists suppose they do not want these powers. Here are five examples of scientists saying so:
1. “Well, this is a fantastic description, perhaps less becoming a scientist than a poet. However, it needs no poetical imagination but only clear and sober scientific reflection to realize . . .”
2. “The analogies which the human mind perceives have an almost universal trend towards vitiating the abstract relations by presenting them in terms of sense-relations; we cannot help craving for the relief from mental effort which is provided by ‘picture thinking.’ ”
3. “An account of what happens rendered in dramatic terms is far more primitive than that which is rendered in scientific terms . . . We now relegate the answers to myth or poetry . . . In a scientific or natural interpretation . . . we take the order of nature as we find it under observation and experiment.”
4. “Metaphors, for example . . . at best are makeshifts . . . Science demands great linguistic austerity and discipline.”
5. “Kohler has defended his hypotheses against the criticism that they were purely speculative, mere brain mythology.”
A physicist writing on the nature of life, a botanist, two biologists, a Gestalt psychologist4—these can represent the boundary regions. From these regions Orpheus is to be exorcised, even by such liberal scientists as are all of these.
Biologists generally agree that mathematics is not suited, as a unique intellectual instrument, to the kind of subject matter they deal with. This is partly because time and change are of the essence of living organisms whereas mathematics is essentially a timeless discipline; partly because it is often impossible to reduce biological subject matter into units suitable for mathematical or logical manipulation. Buffon mentions this. So does Cuvier.5 It is Goethe’s main theme as a biologist. Even those biologists who are mathematical in their approach take account of the difficulty. D’Arcy Thompson mentions it in the first chapter of On Growth and Form (rev. ed. 1942). Von Bertalanffy picks it up,6 maintaining that mathematics is a universal instrument but saying that there are areas of biology which at present lack their proper mathematical tools, and speculating whether the answer may not be what he calls a nonquantitative or gestalt mathematics.
But now comes the difficulty. If thought cannot be done in mathematics, there is only language left to think with. Scientists reject language-as-poetry as an instrument of thought. There remains language-as-science. This attempts to make language approximate to the conditions of analytical precision which are characteristic of logic and mathematics. And it is generally agreed among biologists that mathematics by its nature is not suitable as an instrument for use on biological subject matter.
The vicious circle can be seen particularly well in the fate of Gestalt psychology. This school, which became influential in the 1920’s, recognized the difficulty, in part at least, as a problem affecting not only psychology but the whole of modern thinking. It was this clarity which gave the movement its considerable influence; there is much gain in the clear statement of a problem, and hope for an answer. The answer which Gestalt psychology gave is inadequate, but like all mistakes of such a kind, it is very helpful.
The need, as Gestalt psychologists saw it, was to find “whether a logic is possible which is not piecemeal.” In the ancient controversy between analysts and synthesists (one might call them more briefly, as taxonomers do, “splitters” and “lumpers”), Gestalt theorists insisted on the priority of wholes over parts: “the comprehension of whole-properties and whole-conditions must precede consideration of the real significance of parts.” They applied this, with great thoroughness and logic, to their subject matter and their method alike.7
At the first level, the study of how perception in organisms works, they put forward the idea that our senses, particularly the sense of sight, work not analytically but synthetically, so that we perceive in simultaneous wholes or groups or Gestalten, in figures or forms, which is what the German word means.
(There is an interesting passage in Goethe where he picks up the word and discusses it: “Germans have a word for the whole complex of existence in a living thing, the word Gestalt . . . But if we observe Gestalten, particularly organic ones, we find nowhere anything permanent or static or segregated. On the contrary, everything seems to hover in a perpetual change.”8 This shows one of the difficulties inherent in the term and concept of Gestalt: it is spatial rather than temporal.)
At the second level, the Gestalt theorists claim that the organism must be observed as a whole, by any methods which will allow of this, unconventional though they may be from the strictly scientific point of view. At the third level, they insist that the observer is part of the whole which he observes and he must take account of this fact.
Opposition to Gestalt theory came from the behaviorists, who wished to establish in psychology the impersonal rigor of observation and quantitative analysis applicable in the exact sciences. Gestalt theory came close to offering an alternative instrument for thought, and it was the failure to appreciate the need for this, in whatever terms, which was the undoing of the Gestalt movement, for it meant that there was no positive standard to offer against the opposing demand for mathematics, logic, and language-as-science. The only possibility seemed to be to make Gestalt psychology more precise, in the opponents’ terms, and so to fall back on language-as-science, and the movement petered out.
The history of this school is valuable because it is an example of what is happening inside the boundary sciences which cluster around biology, and also inside poetry and criticism. An antithesis of two terms is set up, or acquiesced in, and then an attempt is made to fashion and develop an instrument of thought which will fuse the two. Thus Gestalt psychology chose to operate in terms of wholes and parts, admitting the antithesis first and then trying to make language-as-science adequate for some new kind of thinking in wholes. The attempt may have been new, but the premises were very old. They are part of the split we have been looking at in the biological sciences and criticism, science versus poetry and art, mathematics versus words, analysis versus synthesis. What has happened in each case, over a longer or shorter period of time, is very interesting. These antitheses produce not instruments of discovery but more of the same, a recurrence of repetition of the premises with some monotony now after 300 years. The reason is that the antitheses on which all this thinking and activity is grounded, science and poetry, analysis and synthesis, mathematics and words, are not antitheses at all. Science cannot be set against poetry because they are structurally similar activities. Analysis cannot be set against synthesis because each is the precondition of the other’s working. Mathematics cannot be set against words because each is an instrument for myth in the mind.
Examples have been given of remarks made by scientists about poetry in its various aspects, and remarks made by poets and critics about science. We need to notice the assumption on which the speaker in each case bases his remarks: that he knows what he is talking about. This assumption by the speaker must lie behind any meaningful utterance, and it will be accepted similarly by the hearer; at the same time each side must accept the fact that the assumption may be unfounded. Perhaps I do not know what I am talking about after all. Both points of view are simultaneously necessary. An excess of the latter will lead to too much timidity to make any utterance at all, while an excess of the former—a much commoner symptom— will lead to laying down the law, an enjoyable but inappropriate practice if the flexible activity of conversation or thought is to be kept going.
This assumption is only an assumption in each of the two cases before us, a belief we are tacitly invited to entertain, a little myth in fact. Suppose that for a moment we withdraw our confidence; suppose that neither side knows what it is talking about. What follows from this small but quite legitimate maneuver on our part?
The first thing we shall notice is that the two sides do not seem to suffer from any lack of confidence. They think they do know what they are talking about. So we have the scientist setting science against poetry and seeing in the latter a loose, vague, drunken activity, liable to mislead thought by its procedures which are easier and less exacting than those of science, neither disciplined nor in contact with reality. No poet is going to recognize this as poetry; and quite right too.9 The poet and critic, on the other hand, speak of science as hostile to poetry, obsessed with an exactitude which is quantitative, mechanical, niggling, pedestrian, and, unfortunately for the poet’s argument, vulgarly successful. No scientist is going to accept this as science, and, again, rightly.
It seems only fair to suppose that science when it speaks about poetry in these terms simply does not know what it is talking about, and vice versa. A description of their respective activities on which, in theory at least, scientists and poets could agree might run something like this: poetry and science are activities in which thinker and instrument combine in some situation which is passionately exciting because it is fraught with possibilities of discovery. That is not meant to be an exact definition, obviously, but it will do for the moment.
This is only half the story, however. If the two activities seem to their respective practitioners to be so alike that they can be covered by a common description (even though each side may be unaware of their resemblance), may not the misunderstanding of the proceedings of the supposedly opposing discipline distort the scientist’s view of science, the poet’s view of poetry? To put it bluntly, suppose that the scientist does not know what he is talking about when he is talking about science in such terms, and similarly for the poet or critic and poetry? If science is opposed to poetry, it begins to look something very like what the poets damn it for being, to imitate its own caricature, and poetry likewise. So each error plays into the hands of the other side, and the whole situation is self-perpetuating. To misunderstand the nature of man’s thoughtful operation with any language, scientific or poetic, seems to make the mind liable to misunderstand its thinking procedures in general.
We can cheerfully vote for admitting that poets and critics misunderstand the nature of poetry, since that is the group we belong to and so can include ourselves in the general confession. To suggest that a scientist does not know what science is must be a much harder step. But it has to be said, for I believe it to be true. Fortunately it has been said already by those who have a right to say so, the scientists themselves.10
The important thing now is to move ourselves out of these useless antitheses on to that common ground where science and poetry are seen as related activities of human thought, instruments toward a particular end. This is where myth comes in, for it will be the means by which we shall explore that activity. We may be ready now to have more confidence in it perhaps, for if the current views on poetry and science are out of true, the same thing may hold for myth as well. As we examine those views, we shall find that they depend on two further worn-out antitheses, and once those are out of the way we can begin to see myth for what it is, a figuring of that very activity which we spoke about just now as at the heart of both science and poetry.
The word “myth” is used nowadays almost exclusively in a negative or even a disapproving way. It is held to relate to a belief or set of beliefs which are invented by fantasy and do not correspond, except figuratively, with anything real. A mythical being is one who does not exist. A mythical event is one which in fact never occurred. The term “myth” can be used purely descriptively or as a term of abuse, a characteristic it shares with the words “fiction” or “story” (as we talk of children telling stories).
We can take as a reasonably typical example of the modern attitude toward myth the work of Ernst Cassirer.11 Here is a scholar well enough disposed toward myth to devote much study to it, in the course of which he draws close parallels between mythological and scientific thought and claims that they have a common origin in the mind. Alongside this friendly attitude, however, goes the assumption (taken so much for granted that it is not even discussed) that a modern scholar will be bound eventually to set scientific thought over against mythological thinking and to give his allegiance to the former.
Where does this attitude spring from? We do not want to get involved in a history of attitudes toward myth; there are such statements already in existence, and it would certainly be beyond our competence. But a little background may be helpful. Cassirer himself calls Vico the discoverer of myth, and certain it is that Vico adopts for the first time an entirely positive attitude toward myth, regarding it as both subject matter and to some extent method for his Scienza nuova, a course which is followed up by Herder and Schelling. But Vico is in another sense less a beginning here than a development of something earlier; for before the Scienza nuova comes the Novum Organum, which Vico knew and admired, and in that an approach to myth is suggested with the germs of both future developments in it, the positive as exemplified by Vico, Herder, and Schelling, and the negative which sees in myth mere fables and toys, the prevailing attitude of the eighteenth century that was continued by Comte in his Cours de philosophie positive, in which he put forward his theory of the progression of humanity through the three stages of theological or fictive thought, metaphysical or abstract thought, to the final term, positivist or scientific thought.
