The Orphic Voice, page 6
Grammar embodies and exemplifies this process. There are certain classes of words in grammar, notably pronouns and verbs, which are called “reflexive” by virtue of the trick they have of reasserting the agent, doubling the action back on the doer while at the same time carrying the meaning forward. French has a good many such verbs; so does German. There are not very many left in English. “To enjoy oneself” is an example; so is “to bethink oneself,” and though I do not want to make such a word, already slightly archaic, bear more than it should, there may be a clue here to the nature of mythological activity in thought, to be arrived at through grammar and language. Everything that thinks thinks about its thinking while also thinking about all sorts of other things. All arts may set the mind moving in this way; language and poetry will pursue it through the special contributions of meaning and the inclusion of the body and the self, “while biology itself appears in its turn as a process of life reflecting on itself” (Polanyi, Personal Knowledge).
We can now, after a long detour, come back to Orpheus, with an added reason for abiding by him. It might be asked, why Orpheus in particular? Would not any mythical figure serve for the exploration of myth? Yes, probably; but in this particular story, mythology is considering, in the person of the poet, the power and the fate of poetry or thinking or myth. In the Orpheus story, myth is looking at itself. This is the reflection of myth in its own mirror. It promises to give Orpheus a special significance: for myth as living thought and the very type of thought in action, and for all those other reflexive or self-reflecting forms; for the human organism as an indivisible whole trying to understand itself and its universe; for language and poetry reflecting back to the organism its own countenance and activity; for biology reflecting on the whole span of life in which thinking man appears as the last enigmatic development.
6
Consciousness, life, and thought are not far from winning the right to a scientific existence
MOST BIOLOGISTS would deny that their science can possibly keep such questionable company. That is absolutely all right, just as it is perfectly all right for anyone who finds them helpful to go on using the antitheses we have thrown out. No one opinion excludes or invalidates others in these speculative fields. It is only necessary to make clear what principles one proposes to work with oneself. All that has been and will be said about biology here is said from the poet’s point of view. This has its disadvantages, for one is of necessity an outsider. Perhaps this is not entirely a disadvantage, however, for we are in danger of forgetting that sciences and arts and poetry and all the occupations of man are directed not toward specialists but toward ordinary people. So we can give ourselves ordinary people’s scope here and make our own constructions and mistakes.
Biology’s own attitude to itself is, for the poet, one of the most interesting features of this whole area, for it is next to impossible to discover. The outsider looking at biology not for the facts it has to offer but for its methods of selection, classification, and general principles is bound to be struck by the real difficulty of finding out any of these things. One gets no help from the discipline itself —with one or two exceptions, of which Lamarck is the most outstanding; and perhaps his incursion into Philosophie zoologique did him no good in the rigorists’ eyes. Biology seems to show a marked apathy or resistance to formulating the principles on which its thinking works. There has been a good deal of interchange between biology and philosophy in Germany, much of it rather confusing, accounting for the ill-repute into which Naturphilosophie fell in the later nineteenth century. But there is no equivalent in this branch of science of practitioners of first-rate importance who were themselves concerned with self-examination, seeking to assess the principles of their discipline, its scope and potentialities. Here biology differs widely from mathematics and physics. The outside reader has therefore to do a good deal of groping in the dark, looking for methodological principles implicit in the works themselves but never clearly stated at any length.
This characteristic of biological thinking, a refusal of self-consciousness, may provide a clue to something that is going on. There is a very real problem at this spot. Biology has, as we have already discussed, adopted as a model for itself the conventional exact scientific methodology, with its exclusion of the observer as anything other than transparent or invisible mind, so to speak, observing processes which can be figured by that detached mind as determined mechanisms. His body, which he thinks inside of, or with, and his language, which he thinks inside of, or with, are to be excluded—that is to say, ignored or pretended out of existence. The desirable end product of this maneuver would be, for biology, wholly intellectual mind thinking about, ordering, and comprehending wholly material body.
So the very continuity which biology so splendidly affirms in the sweep and organization of its subject matter, the continuous development and process in time, is broken by awkward intrusions such as thought, consciousness, speech, which are left out of account—science holding them to be, as Sherrington said of just these phenomena, “none of her business,” while at the same time saying a little earlier in the same book, “Nature and Evolution deal with the individual, body and mind together, as a unity.”24 Nature and evolution may, but biologists do not; and to have one’s method totally different, in form, from what one is investigating leads to considerable difficulty. For all ways of thinking at their best establish a relationship between the formal properties of the system of thought being employed and certain properties in the subject matter. This is the central problem; there are other minor difficulties too, such as, for instance, the fact that the body is not so easily pretended away in biological studies which frequently demand a very high degree of skill and coordination of eye and hand as well as more abstract mental dexterities.
Biology has mistaken its mythology. It needs poetry rather than mathematics or language-as-science to think with; not an exclusive but an inclusive mythology to match the principle of inclusion inherent in all of its living and organic and synthetic subject matter. Its failure has added to the difficulties of the other boundary sciences we were talking about, for biology occupies a key position among them and its refusal to think fully with language has clamped down on the whole area, imprisoning us, as Teilhard de Chardin says, in old habits of thought which try to restrict the world to their own narrowness. Its fellow disciplines have for a hundred and fifty years or so been asking it for a lead. But biology had nothing to offer but an unsuitable method which it held as a dogma, and which even then and still more so now, is out of date, as Goethe already saw.
To turn poetry toward biology and to suggest a closer relationship between them is only to follow in a long line of similar suggestions made by other disciplines. Lamarck says as early as 1809 that the zoologist is bound to think about thought, an extension which is pleaded by outsider after outsider, without further response. Comte claims that all the analytical work of biology is only the preamble to its essential activity which has to do with man, and man as a social being. Renan in 1849 tries in L’Avenir de la science to move toward some more general synthesis of disciplines beyond those ordinarily accepted by the professionals, putting in a particular plea for an evolutionary point of view and an inclusion of language, poetry, and religion. Sainte-Beuve asks in his turn for an extension of biology to ‘Thomme morale,” as a help in the development of his own art of literary criticism. Later there is Levy-Bruhl, whose doubts about scientific method we have already considered, and Bergson; and we will consider in a moment what has been happening in the last twenty or thirty years. There is no doubt about the need, a need which Gestalt psychology tried and failed to satisfy.
There is comedy in this spectacle of biology, itself very uncertain where it stands, being solicited on all sides and urged toward greater inclusiveness by disciplines whose status, as pure and respectable science, was shakier even than biology’s own, and whose attentions could only be highly compromising. But if biology’s dilemma and absolute lack of response to these requests is amusing, it is at the same time a perfectly proper and honorable position. Had it accepted the exact science’s figure of exactitude, and thrown in its lot with mathematics wholeheartedly, there would be no problem, and no hope of advance. The recognition and acting out of a difficulty, even if the recognition is only implicit and finds little expression beyond hesitation and negation, is in itself a contribution. After all, biology is a comparative newcomer among the disciplines. Like most of our thinking it goes back to the Greeks, but did not really get started till the Renaissance, and even then was a slow starter. It has as yet no equivalent to the long magisterial tradition of mathematics and physics, and this is just what we might expect. The problems of biology in finding its instrument depend on the fact that that instrument, language, is the hardest of all and is only being developed slowly, with a long way still to go. Biology has lacked the kind of fully developed instrument of thought needed for its own special organic subject matter.
We are still only in the early stages of knowing how to make use of the very complex instrument which language offers us, with its double nature of form and content and its inclusion of the working agent as part of the process. But in language lies the possibility of elaborating an inclusive mythology by which to understand all those areas of experience not suitably figured by mathematics and exclusive mythology or by the other three arts or languages we have at our disposal. It is this instrument which is needed for thinking about living material. And it is poetry’s task to learn how to manage this kind of thinking and then to teach it. Poetry puts language to full use as a means of thought, exploration, and discovery, and we have only so far just about made a beginning and no more on its potential usefulness.
The argument put forward here may result merely in estranging both sides. For if to a biologist it may seem ludicrous to suggest that poetry has a vital bearing on his discipline, it will be no less shocking to those who dwell in the—as they suppose—opposite camp to suggest that poetry is highly useful and is bound, in nature, to justify itself biologically.25 It has become customary to exempt poetry and the arts in general from having to be useful. Indeed, their uselessness has at times been raised to the virtue almost of a principle of conscience.26 This is generally the view of those who set art in opposition to utilitarian science as they conceive of it. We prefer to think that both are useful, varying mythologies or figures for the mind, interdependent at every step, with poetry as the most perfect development of word-language to which is allotted the task of empowering as medium and instrument all the middle ranges of our thinking, including thinking about living things and ourselves. Poetry is one of our most practical inventions, but it is not completed and never will be. The poetic tradition to date is the record of what we have done and are doing with it, and in that tradition lie the seeds of further development along these lines.
It is going to be the theme of the rest of this book that for the last 400 years, with the coming of what one might call the modern age, poetry has been struggling to evolve and perfect the inclusive mythology on which language works and all thought in words is carried on, and that this type of thinking is the only adequate instrument for thinking about change, process, organisms, and life. The history of this struggle and evolution is occasionally explicit, more often implicit. This is where Orpheus comes in: for Orpheus is poetry thinking about itself, and every significant mention of Orpheus by a poet or scientist may bring the working methods a little nearer the surface, make them easier to grasp than they will be when they are bound up with all the other things poets think and write of. For we are not saying this is poetry’s sole task; poetry has not one task but many, which is why all approaches to it are allowable. We shall hear what the Orphic voices have to say on this matter. One of these is Linnaeus, the man who decided to name and classify the organic world by means not of a new symbolic formula but word-language, perhaps a decision whose significance has been overlooked, suggesting as it does a recognition, even if only half conscious, that living things can only be dealt with in their organic relationships by means of words. It is this man whom we find saying, in one of the addresses called Amoenitas Academici (1790), “Deberem dicere de . . . Orpheo, ejusque voce divina,” I ought to speak of Orpheus and his divine voice —this among the Deliciae Naturae. Here is a point at which the naturalist and Orpheus, natural history and poetry, had not parted company, and it only remains to try to bring them, after their long and wintry estrangement, back to one another.
7
Poetry was no longer a strange and irrelevant loveliness in a chaotic world; it was a necessary and consummate flowering on the great tree of life; it was the immanent purpose of the universe made vocal
THE TASK is becoming not the invention of something new but a revaluation and a making explicit of a long tradition. For that reason it will be helpful to gather up the voices in the immediate past which belong to this tradition too, all of whom have been saying, from their widely differing standpoints, that thinking needs rethinking on lines other than those currently accepted in the various academic disciplines, if modern thought is to reach out to its living material in dynamic ways and overcome the artificial barriers which have been allowed to hedge it in, the division between arts and sciences, for instance.
Things have been moving this way fairly steadily since the twenties. Names which come to mind are Agnes Arber, Teilhard de Chardin, Evelyn Hutchinson, Suzanne Langer, John Middleton Murry, Michael Polanyi, Herbert Read, Rebecca West, Lance Whyte. The disciplines involved range from archaeology and anthropology, botany, chemistry, zoology, and physics through philosophy and social thought to plastic art and literature. These are our immediate masters. Past these and past Gestalt psychology the principal line of descent goes back to the Romantics. George Boas, writing of Our New Ways of Thinking in 1930, points out the foreshadowing of this type of thought in “certain Romantic Germans, notably Schelling.”27 Jacques Barzun calls the shift of outlook which Romanticism brought about “a Biological Revolution.”28 Middleton Murry, describing the origins of his Metabiology says, “I became conscious that I was working towards a new theory of Romanticism.”29 And alongside Murry’s own work on Keats may be ranged Herbert Read’s Studies in Romantic Poetry, while in his turn Evelyn Hutchinson invokes Blake to elucidate the vision of Rebecca West.30 In Cassirer the Romantics appear as the rediscoverers of mythology and of Vico’s work. Goethe, as biologist and artist, is frequently mentioned (in Arber, Murry, Whyte, Polanyi, for instance). And it is Murry who takes us back one stage further, to the point at which we ourselves shall begin. “The Renaissance ... is the beginning of modern Romanticism. Shakespeare is its prophetic voice.”31
It is interesting to see that this tradition coincides fairly closely with the Orpheus lineage we drew up for ourselves in Section 1, and we can begin to draw up our own plan for tracing, above the surface and below, the work done on mythology, this flexible and exquisitely adjusted instrument for biological thought. We shall stick to the Orpheus line, starting with Bacon and Shakespeare, with a look backward at Sidney and forward at Milton; then move through Vico, Swedenborg, and Linnaeus to Erasmus Darwin and Goethe; then to the Romantics; and so through nineteenth-century France to Rilke, whose Sonette an Orpheus are the most recent statement of the theme.
Before we move ourselves back 400 years, however, there is one more point to be made. Our own method has to be mythological if it is to work properly, and so we shall use Orpheus and his story not merely as a guide but as an imaginative framework as well for our own constructions, figuring that there may have been a progression in this kind of thinking over the period we shall traverse, and the progression of the story may help us with it. The first period, Shakespearean and Baconian, will fall under the first part of the story, where Orpheus exercises his power over rocks and trees and animals. Eurydice and the journey to love and death will uphold the Goethean stage, and the Romantics; and with Rilke there will be the final high and mysterious figure, the severed prophetic head unconquered even in its destruction, and the human music among the stars, by the help of which we shall have to set poetry’s face forward if we can. For poetry’s task, for all of us, is to be not the nostalgic and complaining thing it has become in so many quarters, as if the modern air did not suit its delicate constitution, but what it has always been meant to be, an instrument of immense power with a scarcely foreseeable but wholly positive future.
PART II
Bacon and Shakespeare: Postlogical Thinking
1
To think of nature as a poem hidden in a secret and mysterious writing
IN ENGLAND something happened to thought between 1600 and 1610. It happened in the persons of Bacon and Shakespeare, our two great thinkers at that time. The results of what happened can be seen in their work. This transformation of thinking was effected and suffered (the two in this kind of operation being one and the same) by two minds apparently different yet fundamentally so similarly directed that their names have kept cropping up together ever since, in opposition, conjunction, or even identification. What they accomplished was a “Renaissance” action in the best sense, for they drew, out of a classical tradition as old as poetry, which is as old as language and thinking, the lines of possible development for the future. So they are balanced between new and old, men at once profoundly traditional and also, perhaps because of that, even more profoundly prophetic and forward- looking.1
