Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2002 15:42:42 -0600
From: allen scult <allen.scult-AT-drake.edu>
Subject: Re: America, America


At 9:41 PM -0800 1/13/02, Aristotelos wrote:
>  > So Guilio, et. al.,
>>
>>  What is this American idiom?  Emerson?  He spoke out of his own professed
>>  oversoul.  In convesation with Aristotle and Nietzsche.
>
>I made black bean humus today. Was just eating it while watching Dead Poets
>Society that I downloaded last night after reading Stevens for a while.
>Carpe diem, that's the saying of the movie and be yourself before it's too
>late. Emerson more or less says the same thing with an exaltation that
>really boils inside you. He writes in Intellect, "each mind has its own
>method. A true man never acquires after college rules. What you have
>aggregated in a natural manner surprises and delights when it is produced.
>For we cannot oversee each other's secrets. Do you think the porter and the
>cook have no anecdotes, no experiences, no wonders for you?" Thinking for
>emerson is best when it does determine what it will think, when it doesn't
>deliberate on anything and that's how he says the senses are opened up and
>obstructions are cleared away from the fact. He writes that "You cannot with
>your best deliberation and heed come so close to any question as your
>spontaneous glance." This glance is not a will but the senses open, cleared
>from their empirical determination, informed by a soul that is not an organ,
>function, power, will, faculty and so on. Poets are poets to the extent that
>they allow free course to this soul and that's what it means to act
>spontaneously, to act in a "natural" manner. And it just can't be painted,
>it "has no rose-color, no fine friends, no chivalry, no adventures, does not
>want admiration; dwells in the hour that now is, in the earnest experience
>of the common day -- by reason of the present moment and the mere trifle
>having become porous to thought and bibilous of the sea of light" (from The
>Over-Soul). No, it's Plato he talks to and Nietzche paraphrases Emerson.


Plato, of course.  But the Aristotle I was thinking of is in the 
Posterior Analytics:

"From experience--the whole universal that has come to rest in the 
[particular]soul, the one beside the many which is a single identity 
within them all--originates the skill of the craftsman and the 
knowledge of the man of science, skill in the sphere of coming to be 
and science in the sphere of being."

Though Aristotle sees the critical link in the chain to be  sense 
perception,   the rattling ( or prattling) which sets it all in 
motion is the rhetorical impulse, the putting to words of 
possibilities so strongly felt as to be satisfied only by words which 
bring us closer and closer to the things themselves. . .so that there 
is nowhere else to go, but straight ahead to those words, those 
things.

Carpe Diem indeed!  Where does Robin Williams get his energy?

>
>
>This band of grandees, Hermes, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Plato, Plotinus,
>Olympiodorus, Proclus, Synesius and the rest ... He goes on to say that what
>marks their "elevation and has even a comic look to us, is the innocent
>serenity with which these babe-like Jupiters sit in their clouds, and from
>age to age prattle to each other and to no contemporary." This is the
>Emerson that Nietzsche read with great admiration.

Both sublimely alone in their time.  Speaking only to others who 
spoke that way?   Is that the only way to talk sense. Choose your 
friends carefully.  Arendt sees such choices as a matter of good 
taste, essential to aesthetic (philosophic) judgment, that is, 
thinking worked hard enough to be put to words:

" For a cultivated man of good taste is one who knows how to choose 
his company among men, among things, among thoughts, in the present 
as well as the past.  Taste decides not only how the world is to 
look, but who belongs together in it."

I think that's what makes these "digressions" into poetry and music 
we like and don't like a part of the game.


>
>What is an idiom?
>
>
>It's a new question it seems involving the migration of ideas. How an
>influence comes to made one's own, how it is thrown off so to speak.

Like the "jazz idiom"?  You take a tune that rings true of something 
and roll it into a riff that means to be sort of funny, or at least 
ironic, if it means anything.  So an idea migrates from the world of 
Cole Porter to the world of Thelonius Monk.  Some of Plato's tunes 
migrate to Alexandria and are "thrown off" in a most peculiar way. 
Perhaps not thrown off at all, but thrown back and caught by a 
descendant of the Tristamigistus from whom they came.  Neoplatonism 
as Plato in a jazz riff.  I like that!



>  Harold
>Bloom's strong poetry where criticism comes to be based on a revival of
>kabbalistic wisdom is probably completely strange to a European and then
>there is the attempt to give it a freudian turn.


What makes Kabbalah possible I think is the universality of the 
symbol.  It's what everybody knows.  And yet it speaks in secrets. 
It's all in the letters!  Just watch them roll!

Allen


-- 
  Allen Scult					Dept. of Philosophy
HOMEPAGE: " Heidegger on Rhetoric and Hermeneutics":	Drake University
http://www.multimedia2.drake.edu/s/scult/scult.html	Des Moines, Iowa 50311
PHONE: 515 271 2869
FAX: 515 271 3826


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