The Orphic Voice, page 5
By means of language, a second term, a second universe of discourse, is brought into being; and, for the first time, formal relations can be established between this and the universe of experience. By reason of the distinction between the two universes, the establishment of relations between them becomes possible.
There seem to be five such types of formal system: (1) dance and ritual, where the body as a whole is employed formally; (2) music and rhythm, where the forms come to the mind-body through the ear; (3) plastic art and all forms of visual pattern, where the form comes to the mind-body through the eye; (4) mathematics; (5) word-language. This is so far all we have. All are arts, and all are capable of serving as the second term in a relation in which the universe of experience is the first term.
The invention of a language entails the seeing of a distinction between the form constructed and used by the mind-body and the form as perceived in the material of experience to which the language is to correspond. This may have been a gradual process, perhaps akin to the perception of a self distinct from surroundings though remaining intimately linked with them, which is the nature of self-consciousness. Once the distinction is made, it alters the whole situation; in it, for instance, lies the difference between a bird’s music and human music. Only when the two are separated can they be correlated. Such a correlation is the ultimate purpose of language as an instrument of thought and comprehension. This is why language is capable of generating and transmitting ideas, an idea being the perception, by the body-mind of an individual, of a correlation between a structure it has itself invented or received and a structure perceived in the universe of which it is itself a part.
Notice how, in what we have been saying, one of our original pairs of antitheses has been doing a quiet dance on its own: analysis and synthesis. For this situation is an intimate mixture of twoness and oneness. What other relations than those of contradiction can we discover for distinction and union, our first pair of dancers? The nature of our approach means that these relations need to be expressed in linguistic terms. Our cultural tradition can provide us with what we need, an instrument which asks only to be put to use again. It was originally, very suitably, an instrument of education, concerned with language. This is the medieval trivium, the first three liberal arts, dialectic, rhetoric, and grammar: dialectic the art and operation of argument and distinction, rhetoric the operation of figurative speech directed toward persuasion, grammar, a much more difficult operation to define but we could think of it as those principles of movement and conjunction on which words operate in their use by the mind.
These three differing sets of relations are themselves activities. Here all the oppositions which made up our former antitheses will dance their individual dances under observable conditions, and so throw light on more things than just words. For what the medievals had here, whether they realized it or not, was a triple art of thought concerned with living behavior in general.
Since the antitheses have come in again, we will now deal with three sets of them, analysis and synthesis, science and poetry, intellect and imagination, considering them by means of dialectic and rhetoric. Then we will move on to grammar and the last two pairs, mind and body, mathematics and words, and then we shall be ready for other things.
It looks almost as if dialectic and rhetoric are only another form of language-as-science and language-as-poetry. We have now, however, a means of finding out what happens in each of these two fields of activity.
Dialectic is the art or science of logical argument. Its working method is logic. It proceeds by the sharpest possible distinction and analysis, by discovering logical flaws in its opponent’s case where there is an external opponent, or by constructing its own argument with no less care in logical analysis where the division is a purely internal one; one divides oneself in order to think, as Valéry says. This procedure is familiar to us in many settings, in the law courts, in politics (at least in theory), in all forms of scholarly and scientific controversy and discussion. This type of thinking has been extensively developed since the days of Aristotle and Plato. It is only perhaps in the comparatively recent past that we have glimpsed the odd turns it could take when over-pursued to the exclusion of other no less valid forms of thought: the impasses of dialectical materialism, the rigid narrowness of much so-called scientific thought, Lévy-Bruhl’s dialectique creuse et vaine, non-sense literature; and what might Charles Darwin have done if he had had the other two branches of the trivium at his disposal and in his confidence?
Rhetoric is a field in which we have as yet much less confidence, so that whereas dialectic is a simple technical term, rhetoric can also be used as an insult. This is the field of figurative speech, of language allowed to follow, develop, and even luxuriate in its inherent capacity for metaphor. Metaphor is not an analytic procedure; it sets up two terms only to unite them, drawing in the cooperation of the thinking mind in the process. It can never work in detachment; it is not objective. Shelley in the opening paragraph of the Defence of Poetry speaks of it as “mind acting upon those thoughts so as to colour them with its own light” and goes on to distinguish between reason and imagination, consigning poetry to the latter. This is the usual view. If dialectic seems to be the playground of the intellect, rhetoric is the place where the imagination may run riot.
Here then our antitheses seem to reach further expression. But now let us look at dialectic and rhetoric more closely and see what their first principles are. In so doing we find that each has to call in the working principle of the other apparently opposing system before it can get started at all. It has now been put forward, by a scientist, that science with its distinctive form of logical thought depends on an act of affirmation by the scientist, personally, in what he is doing, and that this basic assertion of personal commitment can never be verified by any logical means. This is the theme of Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge, and to this the reader is referred. It is the restoration of science once more to the company of the arts, giving science for its foundation the mythic or metaphoric or poetic situation where figure and agent become one and the same. Analysis, then—logic, dialectic—rest on a fundamental act of confidence and synthesis (or call it faith and love).
Now for rhetoric and metaphor. It in its turn cannot function without sharp discrimination, selection, and analysis in the separating out of the two terms of which the figure or metaphor is to be made. This is the exact science of the poet. It is described by Mallarmé, “Instituer une relation entre les images exacte, et que s’en détache un tiers aspect fusible et clair presénté à la divination.”21 Mallarmé’s syntax is as individual in his prose as in his verse, and it must not seem officious if I point out that the reader must construe “exacte” with “relation,” not with its immediate neighbor. If metaphor is a synthesis, it nonetheless begins with analysis into the separate units with which logical thinking works. Because things are perceived to be clearly and sharply and exquisitely separate, metaphor becomes possible. Indeed on the recognition of twoness, with the possibility of constructing from it certain forms of oneness, depends the whole operation of consciousness and of learning and discovery by language which we mentioned a little earlier.
What we have in the end is a situation where dialectic depends on synthesis and rhetoric on analysis (the process can go on backward indefinitely, so impossible is it to segregate these two). This holds good, by extension, for science and poetry and for reason and imagination. Each depends on the other for its very existence; and since they are so closely interdependent, we can resolve to hold to both of them and to be prepared to see in rhetoric no less than in dialectic a way in which the world of living forms may be thought about.
5
Man being no more, properly speaking, but intelligence, body and language, and language being as it were the mediator between the two substances of his nature
GRAMMAR, in one sense the most familiar member of the trivium, proves to be the hardest to grasp. This is not a weakness in the word, but a strength, an indication that we have here, as with philology, an essentially mythological, poetic, active field, which still awaits its due inquiry. The word has a considerable range of meanings (Renan says of the ancients that they were not dismayed by the extremely complex sense of their word for grammar),22 and those meanings are all in movement: a choreography of language and mind, a pattern of action and behavior as Newman uses the word in The Grammar of Assent (1870). It is one of the dynamic forms of mind and words working together, that word “form” bringing with it an interesting doubleness, meaning both complete abstraction and bodily shape. With the help of grammar and form we will discuss our last two pairs of antitheses, mind and body, mathematics and words.
Inside the moving structures of mind and language, there is a hint in grammatical theory and practice that the body is part of the working instrument active here. In other words, the body thinks. We are curiously inclined to think and speak as if the mind thought somewhere away by itself, and the body inside and through which it is doing its thinking could be ignored. Grammar does not treat language processes in this way. It treats them as bodily, and as sexual. There are general references to bodily life, such as the fact that verbs have “moods” and “voices,” but the majority of references of this sort are to bodily fertility, as if it were the chief contribution of the body to language activity and thought: in “copula” and “conjugation” in grammatical terminology, and most of all in the phenomenon of gender in nouns, where not necessarily just the object referred to but the noun itself will have a gender, and the two may be independent of one another.
This can be regarded as a relic of a primitive age when all thought was “mythical” in the imperfect sense of that word, and every object was endowed with a life and personality of its own, masculine, feminine, or neuter. This may be true but the notion that myth stopped, and ought to stop, ages ago will blind us to something supported by language in other ways as well, that the fertility of the body cooperates in the processes of thinking with language. There remains a great unsolved problem behind this, as behind the use of such words as “fertile” or “pregnant” of ideas, of the verb “to conceive” in intellectual terms. To relegate these simply to metaphor is to miss the whole point, for they are clues to something that is going on in this field of myth we are exploring. Grammar maintains that the body is operative there as much as the mind.23 The human organism thinks as a whole, and our division of it into mind and body is the result of overemphasis on logic and intellect in near isolation which has led us into so one-sided a view of the activity of thought, so gross an underestimation of the body’s forms of thought and knowledge. This is where mathematics enters in also, for it has come to be regarded as an almost disembodied universe of discourse, wholly mental, intellectual, all the things which words and the body are not, the most abstract and advanced expression of pure form that we know. But perhaps form in mathematics and words can be thought of rather differently.
The formalism and rigorous necessity of mathematics make it more rather than less akin to those formalizing tendencies of matter and of body as body which we were thinking about a little while ago. If a system of necessary form is something we share with matter, logic or mathematical process may be thought of as an inherent characteristic of matter itself in its own progress toward form. If mathematical activity is a development and prolongation by the human mind of those activities by which matter, inanimate and animate, operates on itself, this might explain why the results of mathematical thinking can be referred back to matter with such signal success. The extent of the correlation between mathematics and physical reality in contemporary physics might be not an astonishing correspondence of apparent opposites but the family agreement of two terms of a similar progression. Mathematics may be the evidence not of man’s emancipation from the material world but of his absolute solidarity with it.
If, for the living individual, the body is the original generator of forms, first its own form in structure and behavior, then forms which are in varying degrees separated from itself and which accordingly offer the mind-body scope for its formalizing tendencies, it may be true to say that all formal activity in the human mind has its origin and roots always in the physical. The mind-body may generate forms as languages or terms for metaphoric activity by which to understand itself and its experience; but all form, no matter how apparently abstract and intellectual, may never lose its connection with, its message for, the body. It seems possible that all forms observed by or constructed by the so-called mind are Gestalten or figures or forms in the recurring double sense of all those terms: that a figure is always an image; that a form, how abstract soever, calls forth from the body a physical response, is perceived as an image, if that is the right word, by the body which is the source of all forming activity.
Suppose that all forms are, whilst they are perceived as pure form by the mind-body, simultaneously perceived and enjoyed as images by the body-mind, if I may be allowed to shift that term so as to suggest a shift of emphasis. I do not mean that the body translates form, abstractly perceived, into pictures; rather, that all form addresses itself no less to the body than the mind, the former perceiving it by virtue of its own formalizing tendencies and uniting with it. The body mates with forms no less than the mind does. The more abstract they are, the more specialized, rarefied, perhaps even concealed an image they offer to the body; but that image is always there. This means that such constructions as logic, syntax, fugue, algebra, are enjoyed by the body as its own kith and kin. Those who do not respond to these webs of pure relation—the unmathematical, the unmusical—are no exception: they simply have not perceived the form in the first place, and consequently cannot respond to it with any part of themselves. The perception and glimpse of pure form—for instance, the moment when one first realizes, possibly very belatedly and in the teeth of all the education one has ever had, something of the point of mathematics—is accompanied by the double enjoyment of mind-body, the latter uniting itself with its fellow forms, even in that abstract state, no less surely than the former.
If the body always actively participates in all formal activity, including the most apparently abstract, the whole organism of self is equally always involved, as an open or hidden factor, in any of the figures by which we try to make sense of the world. At the level of myth which is that of the discovering, learning, thinking organism, the agent is never detached from the figures used. Indeed the agent frequently is the figure itself, and the notion of objectivity ceases to be useful. All formal operation is myth. Logic, under which we include all the highly developed forms of apparently purely formal mental activity, is a specialized form of mythologizing activity in which attention is not paid to the participation of the body, which is nonetheless, tacitly, part of the process and a vital part. That mathematics, for instance, is not a detached activity may be seen from the passion with which it is pursued and the use of such terms as “elegance” or “beauty” in connection with its workings. The relation between the organism and this purest of pure forms is in the end one of love, a function of mind and body jointly; and this is true of all the other forms which the human being can perceive, at whatever level. This suggests once again how mistaken is the notion that we progress, as individual or race, from metaphorical or poetical thinking to logic. The only choice for the mind lies not between mythology and logic but between an exclusive mythology which chooses to overlook the body’s participation and an inclusive mythology which is prepared in varying degrees to admit the body, the notion of the organism as a whole, as a partner in that very odd operation known as thought.
Word-language, in the course of its development, has itself acquired two modes of operation, a more exclusive and an inclusive one. The first is prose, which does not necessarily recognize the agent’s participation in the system of words and ideas under construction; the more it does so, the closer it may approach to poetry. Prose has as its aim to establish a form of words which shall be equivalent to experience, the self participating in the construction being disregarded. To examine an inclusive mythology we must turn to language’s other mode, poetry. Here the inclusion of the participating self (poet or reader, it is all one) is open, deliberate, an active ingredient in what goes on. Poetry is the most inclusive form of thought we have yet devised, a conscious call upon those resources of myth which underlie all language and all thinking. If the self is involved in any working system of thought, whether it is recognized or not, poetry, with its recognition of the self’s cooperation, is in fact nearest to reality. Exclusive mythology, in its preoccupation with abstract form, embarks on a wholesale game of make believe by the exclusion of the self. Poetry, metaphor, mythology are highly realistic and down to earth. It is logic and mathematics which are the imaginative and fantastical exercise.
With mathematics man invented, and goes on inventing, a mythology which could be regarded as nothing but form, by which to explain such forms in nature and experience as were patient of this approach. Word-language too has certain formal properties of its own, grammatical and other, as if it were a kind of mathematics. But it brings with it a new factor which alters the whole situation, making things at once much more difficult and full of greater possibilities. Words provide content as well as form. This is their incalculably great contribution to the five languages we spoke about earlier. By virtue of their content or meaning, words provide a double system of images and forms for the body and mind to work with in seeking to understand one system by another. Language has, as well as its own inner system, all the relations of the external world as connections between its elements, since words have the job of making sense, or truth. Thus form and content in word-language—grammar and syntax together with signification— cannot be separated from one another, any more than can mind and body in the individual. The result is that grammar becomes an area of constant interchange between form and content. Each of the two elements, form and content, reflects back on the other, and both together make up the history of the mind. It seems to be a recurring process in this field, and small wonder after all—for what we have really just said is the tautology that reflection is reflexive.
