Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2000 10:12:11 -0500 (CDT)
From: Louis F Caton <catonlf-AT-mail.auburn.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: The classical, the romantic



Isn't Alex really saying that if you decide to discuss the works of any
major-league philosopher, you can be assured that all of the standard
debatable issues  (transcendence, imminence, immediacy, contingency,
representation, and on and on) will have already been factored into
his/her writings.  So that to say Pomo doesn't concern itself with
transcendence is wrong.  Pomo rethinks transcendence into some other form
or vocabulary.  Good philosophers haven't left out issues; they have
rethought them and, one might say, reclassified them.  If you accept that
approach, then Alex would appear to be right.  From that perspective one
can't set-up clear oppositions.  You couldn't say that Plato and Descartes
are dualists and Nietzsche and Heidegger are not; you couldn't make than
claim because each deals with the issue of "dualism" and rethinks its
definition.

Alex's approach has appeal because it registers a deep sympathy for each
writer's ability to work out the standard philosophical issues.  But it
elides the force of difference.  And we need difference to be substantial 
in order to discuss with a sense of sharpness and distinction.  Alex
approach could lead to a "separate but equal" notion; no philosophy is
better than any other, just different.  This would seem a tragic outcome. 

Just some quick thoughts...

Lou Caton


On Sat, 9 Sep 2000, Alex Trifan wrote:

> 
> Friends, 
> 
> Sorry for not responding earlier to this thread. I am, like a lot of people
> these days, shamefully "busy". My life often appears to me postmodern one
> day, classical the next, tragic at times, decidedly romantic at others. Take
> my word for it... But it is important to stop and smell the roses at times,
> make time for truly important matters.
> 
> Which brings me to the point under debate here. Let's say I decide to go to
> an art museum today, rather than go to work: would you say this was an
> intrinsicly romantic gesture expressing a longing for some transcendence, a
> timeless appreciation of beauty in the classical mold, a modernist longing
> to connect to an unsullied past, or might it even be the postmodern
> posturing of one who ironically prefers art objects over contact with people?
> 
> Can it not be all these things at once? And isn't there something undeniably
> similar between all these impulses? Could it not be possible for classicism,
> romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism to coexist within the same person,
> and even at the same time? And is this not in fact the standard case with
> many people today, rather than a paradox and an exception? 
> 
> 
> Mr Herzberg refers to ....
> >...the point Alex Trifan made, i.e. that there are no 
> >significant distinctions between classicism, romanticism, modernism and 
> >postmodernism.
> 
> but in fact all I said was that.....
> 
> >....It is impossible to fully separate the romantic, from the classic, from
> the >modern, from the post-modern. It is misleading to even believe that
> there is a >progression taking place.....
> 
> My point is really metaphysical here. I am trying to suggest that all these
> currents, so deeply embedded in Western culture, where they actually recur
> stylistically and philosophically through the ages, have more in common than
> in opposition. Classicism, romanticism, modernism, and pomo, as somebody
> aptly observed, are all modes of philosophical transcendence, strategies of
> coping, aesthetic formulas, therapies of desire, modes of valuation, manners
> of sublimation, strivings for a kind of existential _distance_..... 
> 
> I am not denying that the terms can be employed taxonomically in a strict
> historical sense. If you insist on employing the terms in a strict
> historical sense, my assertions are then sheer idiocy. Of course Romanticism
> happens in the 18th Century, modernism in the early 20th, classicism in
> ancient Greece, etc--but that's really not what I'm talking about. I know
> about the fact that German neo-classicism follows on the heels of "Sturm und
> Drang" and that the British modernists draw on the work of the French
> symbolysts. But does that really tell you anything ----philosophical? 
> 
> My question to Howard and others was not whether we could classify "The
> Sorrows of Young Werther" as a Sturm und Drang novel or as a romantic work.
> My question is whether Werther, as a character in this work can be strictly
> defined as a romantic character, or as a classical personage. Is Werther's
> sophisticated rejection of society a mark of classicism, romanticism, or
> modernism? And is it not possible to see an essential connection between a
> Werther and a Prufrock, and an Ancient Mariner, and a Plato and
> ...whatever...you must get the picture of what I'm getting at, no? 
> 
> We cannot simply proclaim that this or that movement represents a new "mode
> of seeing", a "new way of reasoning" in Western culture. And that is
> basically what I'm saying here. What did Romanticism discover that was not
> already the subject of classical discourse? What did postmodernism for that
> matter? And Howard, I do believe that a separation between art and morality
> appears _way_ before the 18th Century in Western culture--perhaps not in the
> specific terms that you're looking for, but certanly this is a problematic
> as old as Plato, and later amply wrestled with by people like Sir Philip
> Sidney ("Defense of Poesy"), Milton ("Areopagitica") on the English critical
> side for example. Also, Macchiavelli, for example,  who was not English though. 
> 
> What is Macchiavelli at that, classic, romantic, modern or postmodern? What
> is Nietzsche, for that matter? Is he not all things _at once_, inescapably so?
> 
> I better stop. I am writing this rather fast, perhaps some of the points
> here are hastily made or obscurely addressed. I maintain that classicism,
> romanticism modernism, and pomo are more alike than different--in a
> metaphysical, strictly philosophical reading of these terms, if you all
> admit that they do suggest not merely historical movements but philosophical
> categories as well.
> 
> 
> Ciao,
> Alex Trifan
> Providence, RI
> 
> 
> 
> 
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