The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth-Century Thought
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The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth-Century Thought
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Overview
Sanford Schwartz situates Modernist poetics in the intellectual ferment of the early twentieth century, which witnessed major developments in philosophy, science, and the arts. Beginning with the works of various philosophers--Bergson, James, Bradley, Nietzsche, and Husserl, among others--he establishes a matrix that brings together not only the principal characteristics of Modernist/New Critical poetics but also the affiliations between the Continental and the Anglo-American critical traditions.
Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691604374 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #548 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 248 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d) |
Read an Excerpt
The Matrix of Modernism
Pound, Eliot, and Early Twentieth-Century Thought
By Sanford Schwartz
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1985 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06651-6
CHAPTER 1
"This Invented World": Abstraction and Experience at the Turn of the Century
Knowledge as Representation
At the turn of the century, many philosophers believed that they were forging a fundamentally new theory of knowledge. Announcing a major "inversion of Platonism" in Western philosophy, they claimed that reality lies in the immediate flux of sensory appearances and not in a rational order beyond it. Our conceptual systems, they argued, are not copies of eternal forms underlying the sensory flux; they are instrumental constructs that overlie an experiential stream irreducible to rational formulation. Despite the extraordinary progress of natural science in this era, philosophers (as well as certain scientists) denied that our knowledge reflects the essential structure of the external world. Indeed, the shifting attitude toward science — once the preserve of incontrovertible fact — provided the most conspicuous sign that a major change was taking place.
The new attitude toward science was a sharp break with that of the previous generation. During the third quarter of the nineteenth century, scientists believed that they would soon possess an exhaustive description of the physical universe. Building on the secure principles of Newtonian mechanics, physicists could rightfully boast of the spectacular advances they had made in thermodynamics, atomic chemistry, and electromagnetism in a single generation. Perhaps the supreme achievement was James Clerk Maxwell's field theory, which brought electricity, magnetism, and light into a unified framework and dramatized the remarkable power of modern physics to integrate an expanding range of natural phenomena. Most scientists believed that only a few minor problems blocked the way toward a definitive account of the physical world. Only a handful challenged the assumption that the laws of mechanics would eventually explain all physical processes.
The very success of the natural sciences, however, raised questions about the certainty of scientific knowledge. Well before relativity and quantum mechanics undermined the foundations of classical physics, philosophers and scientists were beginning to doubt that there is a one-to-one correspondence between scientific formulation and the external world. Paradoxically, the extraordinary pace of scientific development in the late nineteenth century actually fueled these suspicions. In 1904, William James articulated the epistemological problem succinctly:
"God geometrizes," it used to be said; and it was believed that Euclid's elements literally reproduced his geometrizing. There is an eternal and unchangeable 'reason'; and its voice was supposed to reverberate in Barbara and Celarent [mnemonic terms for the valid syllogisms of traditional logic]. So also of the 'laws of nature,' physical and chemical, so of natural history classifications — all were supposed to be exact and exclusive duplicates of pre-human archetypes buried in the structure of things, to which the spark of divinity hidden in our intellect enables us to penetrate. The anatomy of the world is logical, and its logic is that of a university professor, it was thought. Up to about 1850 almost everyone believed that sciences expressed truths that were exact copies of a definite code of non-human realities. But the enormously rapid multiplication of theories in these latter days has well-nigh upset the notion of any one of them being a more literally objective kind of thing than another. There are so many geometries, so many logics, so many physical and chemical hypotheses, so many classifications, each one of them good for so much and yet not good for everything, that the notion that even the truest formula may be a human device and not a literal transcript has dawned upon us.
James drastically foreshortens the history of Western philosophy, omitting a long tradition of skepticism and nominalism. More mysteriously, he fails to mention Kant, who had fundamentally altered philosophical speculation on the nature of knowledge. Yet James believed that his generation was confronting problems that had no precedent, and that these problems arose from the spectacular rate of scientific and technical development that had profoundly transformed the Western world in the century since Kant.
The reaction to Kant reveals how the situation had changed. For example, in Introduction à la métaphysique (1903) Bergson agrees with Kant that the intellect legislates the forms of possible knowledge, but criticizes him for perpetuating the traditional search for a universal system of knowledge. In Bergson's view, Kant merely shifts the foundation for this system from external reality itself to the structure of the human mind. While proving that absolute knowledge of things is impossible, Kant upheld that Euclidean geometry and Newtonian mechanics provide the necessary relations through which the intellect orders spatial and temporal experience. He simply replaced the static world of metaphysical essences with the equally static forms of a comprehensive science. Since he antedated the crucial developments in mathematics and physics that shook the authority of Euclid and Newton, Kant stopped short of the radical reevaluation of knowledge undertaken by his successors a century later.
The problem of geometry provides a concise illustration of this reevaluation of knowledge. For over two millennia almost everyone assumed that Euclid's Elements formalized once and for all the structure of physical space. The Euclidean system was considered a showcase example of logical rigor unlocking the door to physical reality. Mathematicians were never quite content with the last of Euclid's five postulates, but Euclid's authority remained unshaken. It was not until the 1830s that N. I. Lobachevsky and Farkas Bolyai, working independently, produced a successful alternative to Euclid's fifth postulate and thereby developed the first system of non-Euclidean geometry. At first the appearance of non-Euclidean geometry aroused interest solely among mathematicians. But in the late nineteenth century, philosophers and scientists became increasingly concerned about the correspondence between conceptual system and external reality, and at that point the epistemological problem raised by non-Euclidean geometries began to attract a good deal of attention: How can there be more than one coherent system for organizing physical space?
At the turn of the century, the mathematician Henri Poincaré proposed a solution to the problem of geometry. In La Science et l'hypothèse (1902), Poincaré claims that Euclidean geometry is neither a transcript of the forms of external space, as traditionally assumed, nor is it a necessary a priori form through which the mind orders spatial experience, as it was for Kant; instead, Poincaré argues that Euclidean geometry is one useful "convention" for organizing spatial relations. We should stop asking which geometrical system represents the actual order of the physical world. The question is simply meaningless:
In other words, the axioms of geometry ... are only definitions in disguise. What, then, are we to think of the question: Is Euclidean geometry true? It has no meaning. We might as well ask if the metric system is true, and if the old weights and measures are false; if Cartesian co-ordinates are true and polar co-ordinates false. One geometry cannot be more true than another; it can only be more convenient.
The Euclidean system is the simplest and the most convenient for everyday needs; it works well at the scale of ordinary experience. But we should remember that we employ Euclidean geometry not for its inherent truth but for its greater utility in our daily affairs. If we depart from the usual scale of human experience, we will find that non-Euclidean geometries are more convenient:
Experiment no doubt teaches us that the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles, but this is because the triangles we deal with are too small. According to Lobatschewsky, the difference is proportional to the area of the triangle, and will not this become sensible when we operate on much larger triangles, and when our measurements become more accurate?
When Poincaré wrote these words, non-Euclidean geometries were still the concern of mathematicians rather than physicists; they were intriguing constructs with no application to the physical world. But only a few years later Einstein began to "operate on much larger triangles" and applied non-Euclidean geometry to the magnitudes of interstellar space. By the 1920s both Euclidean geometry and Newtonian mechanics had lost their unquestioned authority. They still reigned over the world of ordinary experience, but at the cosmic and the molecular scale they no longer held sway. The world had to adjust to definitions of time and space that were unimaginable just one generation before.
Poincaré's "conventionalism" was no isolated phenomenon at the turn of the century. Many philosophers and scientists were arguing that rational constructs like Euclidean geometry were neither representations of external reality nor forms through which the mind necessarily organizes experience. Instead, they maintained that intellectual formulations are simply practical instruments for arranging the sensory flux in a convenient manner. Conceptual abstractions are in a sense the tools through which we establish intelligible order in the world around us. These concepts serve many of our existing needs, but in the future we may devise more efficacious tools and discard the ones we now use. Turning to Darwin for their model, some philosophers maintained that cognitive functions are bodily functions — practical mechanisms for transacting with the environment. The rational intellect is not a disinterested, contemplative faculty, but a complex bodily instrument for attaining practical ends. Our scientific systems arise not from dispassionate inquiry into the order of things, but from the needs, interests, and values of the inquirer. Once again, James makes the point graphically:
What now is a conception? It is a teleological instrument. It is a partial aspect of a thing which for our purpose we regard as its essential aspect, as the representative of the entire thing. In comparison with this aspect, whatever other properties and qualities the thing may have, are unimportant accidents which we may without blame ignore. But the essence, the ground of conception, varies with the end we have in view. A substance like oil has as many different essences as it has uses to different individuals. One man conceives it as a combustible, another as a lubricator, another as a food; the chemist thinks of it as hydro-carbon; the furniture-maker as a darkener of wood; the speculator as a commodity whose market price to-day is this and to-morrow that. The soap-boiler, the physicist, the clothes-scourer severally ascribe to it other essences in relation to their needs.
There is no essential form behind the stream of sensory appearances; there are as many "essences" as there are points of view through which to order experience. What our rational constructs reveal about the world is relative to the nature of our involvement with it.
At the turn of the century, philosophers from distinct and often competing traditions converged on this instrumental theory of knowledge. A short list of the most celebrated figures of the period would include the following: the "pragmatists" James, John Dewey, and F.C.S. Schiller; the "empirio-critics" Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius; certain neoKantians, such as Hans Vaihinger, author of Die Philosophie des 'Als-Ob' [The Philosophy of 'As-If'] (1911), and with certain qualifications Ernst Cassirer; the foremost representative of Anglo-American Idealism, F. H. Bradley, though again with certain qualifications; the "conventionalists" Poincaré, Édouard Le Roy, and Pierre Duhem; Bergson, with his roots in the "voluntarist" tradition of French philosophy; and finally Nietzsche, at once the child of the German tradition and its most trenchant critic. Not all philosophers supported this view, and developments well under way by the first decade of the century were already beginning to challenge it. There were also serious disagreements among those who did uphold the instrumental theory: William James and F. H. Bradley considered themselves members of rival camps; so did Ernst Mach and Ernst Cassirer. Nevertheless, the family resemblances among these philosophers are unmistakable. All of them acknowledge the instrumental efficacy of scientific constructs while denying that any one of them represents the essential order of external reality.
Philosophers of the period were eager to expose what Nietzsche called the "anthropomorphic error" — the error of identifying the practical constructs of the intellect with reality itself. For these philosophers, Euclidean geometry was only one manifestation of a habit that had plagued Western thought throughout its history. For example, in Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff [Substance and Function] (1910), Ernst Cassirer examines the traditional logic that led philosophers and scientists to assume that concepts mirror eternal essences underlying sensory impressions. Cassirer maintains that the history of science is littered with misguided efforts to hypostatize new mathematical "functions" into "substances" for which we have no direct evidence. We constantly forget that these hypothetical substances, such as the "aether" and the "atom," are not realities to be explored in themselves; they are rather "instruments produced by thought for the purpose of comprehending the confusion of phenomena as an ordered and measurable whole." Cassirer argues that scientists ought to abandon the search for hidden substances and remain content with purely mathematical relations. Substance and Function is in many ways typical of the period: while not every philosopher sought to eliminate substances from physical theory, many questioned the existence of entities like the "aether" and the "atom." These philosophers were determined to expose the Western syndrome of equating scientific constructs with reality itself, the syndrome that Whitehead later named the "Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness."
In order to expose the "anthropomorphic error," philosophers posited a sharp opposition between conceptual abstraction and the flux of concrete sensations. Reality, they claim, lies in the preconceptual flow of appearances, which is irreducible to rational formulation, and our concepts, far from representing a reality beyond the sensory stream, are merely instrumental devices for organizing it. Bergson's "real duration," James's "stream of consciousness," Bradley's "immediate experience," and Nietzsche's "chaos of sensations" — all of these expressions designate the original presentation of reality beneath the instrumental conventions we use to order it. Philosophers varied considerably in their description of the sensory flux, but they agreed on the essential points. All of them employed the stream of sensations as a counterpoise to the abstract systems that organize reality, and they regarded it as a kind of repository for aspects of experience that we habitually ignore. The opposition between abstraction and sensation is one of the most prominent features of turn-of-the-century thought, and it will play a central role in our study of Modernist poetics.
The new attitude toward the sciences is symptomatic of a widespread tendency at the turn of the century. Many intellectuals shared the belief that instrumental conventions determine not only conceptual knowledge but every aspect of conscious life. Bergson maintains that the intellect is only one of several mechanisms — psychic, linguistic, and social — that impose instrumental grids upon experience. These mechanisms define reality as we ordinarily know it; they isolate those elements from the sensory flux that serve our practical interests and screen us from the rest. As a result, we inhabit a world that is suited to our everyday needs, but we are detached from the original stream of sensations. Bergson's opposition between instrumental conventions and immediate experience is one expression of a pervasive intellectual phenomenon, and in the pages that follow I will explore this phenomenon both in his works and in those of his major contemporaries.
Bergson, James, Bradley, and Nietzsche
Many philosophers at the turn of the century regarded conceptual abstractions as instrumental forms that we impose upon the flux of sensations. But while they employ a similar distinction between abstraction and sensation, there are considerable differences between them. Bergson identifies the sensory flux with a deeper consciousness to which we may regain access. Nietzsche, on the other hand, treats the stream of appearances not as a form of consciousness but as a blank mass of fleeting impressions — a kind of sensory tabula rasa — upon which we project the fictional constructs that order our lives. In order to take account of these variations, I will first juxtapose several views of abstraction and experience and then identify systematically the relationships between them. We will emerge with a matrix that elucidates both the similarities uniting these philosophers and the differences dividing them, and this matrix will guide us in turn through subsequent chapters.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Matrix of Modernism by Sanford Schwartz. Copyright © 1985 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- CONTENTS, pg. vii
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, pg. ix
- INTRODUCTION, pg. 1
- CHAPTER I. “This Invented World”: Abstraction and Experience at the Turn of the Century, pg. 12
- CHAPTER II. Elements of the New Poetics, pg. 50
- CHAPTER III. Ezra Pound: Cultural Memory and the Visionary Imagination, pg. 114
- CHAPTER IV. Incarnate Words: Eliot’s Early Career, pg. 155
- CONCLUSION: The New Criticism and Beyond, pg. 209
- NOTES, pg. 216
- INDEX, pg. 225
What People are Saying About This
"This book makes a strong case for a radical revision of current views of the philosophy of modernism and also of the relation of that philosophy to the post-phenomenological fashions of the present time. . . . I am very impressed."—Frank Kermode