[lit-ideas] Re: T. S. Eliot, a Heideggerian Poet?
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 09:24:01 +0000 (GMT)
And one more (profound) thing...
"Never trust the artist, trust the tale."
That Eliot, Pound [and ,yes, Yeats] had 'fascist tendencies' is something to be
accounted for, not used as any kind of important knock-down of their output;
or, if a knock-down, then only of those utopian dreams that may partly underpin
their aesthetics. [Knock-down as, in perhaps P's most famous "quote", "To seek
heaven on earth only brings hell." But Popper was too much an aesthete hinself,
even if a somewhat puritannical one, to argue - as it were, in reverse-mirror
of totalitarians' demand that art serve the politics - that, in a world where
perfectionist political aims were a disaster and need to be replaced by
fallibilist ones, art should abandon concern with any claims of
'perfectionism'. Such a claim would never easily follow to anyone who deeply
appreciates art].
Popper's OSE was the first book of his I read (by lucky accident, as it had
Marx in the title, and I was studying Marx, so I took a look) and in its attack
on totalitarianism he identifies a large part of its appeal is in its
underlying 'perfectionism' or, we might say with negative connotations,
utopianism. If this is anything like the simple but profound point I take it to
be, it is no surprise perhaps that the
perfection-seeking aesthete is sometimes drawn to some kind of 'perfectionist'
political dream; indeed that some kind of such dream - whether obviously
political or not - underlies their art and its practice. [We might say desire
for democracy and liberty as impulses behind Beethoven and, say, his
_Fidelio_, are also a kind of aesthetic dream; and not be surprised by the
story of Beethoven being pro- then anti- Napoleon; of course, this dream is
better - but it is only an accident of history that Beethoven's music is also
of the greatest: the devil might have better tunes].
These comments were perhaps encapsulated in Mill's observation that, to
paraphrase, it is blind to think aesthetics is the criterion of ethics.
Donal
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