Posted By BillHeise on June 14, 2009

This is an article associated with the article “<a href=”http://william-heise.com/2009/06/12/15-memorable-books/”>15 Memorable Books</a>.” See the article for an explanation of this article.
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When I was an undergraduate, I was assigned a paper in which I was supposed to trace the critical heritage of an idea in criticism. I settled on the word known to all men” in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Hans Walter Gabler published his corrected version of the novel in 1984, and one of his major “discoveries” was that he had added back a speech in which it was revealed that “love” was the word known to all men, ending more than 50 years of speculation on the subject.

The subject was one of the first to interest me in all sorts of medieval and early modern speculative philosophy, including, but not limited to, the works of Jakob Böhme, Giordano Bruno, and Dante Alighieri. And, of course, the man that Dante himself calls maestro di color che sono: Aristotle.

Joyce himself was more interested in the mystical strains of Böhme, Bruno, and Dante; since he was trying to tie up the ancient learning in a Modern package. Modernism , it has been held, had inherited a broken universe. It was the project of the  Moderns to put it back together in a more stable and satisfying way. Joyce was therefore interested in Jakob Böhme’s cosmology in which

it was necessary for humanity to depart from God, and for all original unities to undergo differentiation, desire, and conflict — as in the rebellion of Satan, the separation of Eve from Adam, and their acquisition of the knowledge of good and evil — in order for creation to evolve to a new state of redeemed harmony that would be more perfect than the original state of innocence, allowing God to achieve a new self-awareness by interacting with a creation that was both part of, and distinct from, Himself. Free will becomes the most important gift God gives to humanity, allowing us to seek divine grace as a deliberate choice while still allowing us to remain individuals. (Wikipedia)

He was also interested in heliocentric view of Bruno, which was derived from

magical views of the universe inherited from Arab astrological magic, Neoplatonism and Renaissance Hermeticism. (Wikipedia)

Dante’s view of the reintegration of man from his fallen state back into a state of grace was accomplished through the maestro di color che sono. The pun on color was important. In the medieval view of the world, people had substance, which denoted an ontologically existent being, and accidents like color, which were covered substances. [I liken this in an as-yet-unpublished work as the difference between a substantial noun and an insubstantial adjective.]

Now I had been attempting to bridge the Modern gap myself, but I had failed in my first attempts. [see my Joseph Campbell post] Therefore I went looking to others to fill in what I could not. So I went and looked up Aristotle.

Now Joyce was interested in Dante and the others because they offered a path to reintegration of the individual soul with the larger universe. This was, as Wikipedia notes, derived from the mystical elements of Plato. However, the Works of Aristotle comprise the first scientific appreciation of the universe. And in his works, I found that Aristotle specifically rejects Plato’s mystical strains, calling the Allegory of the Cave a “poetic metaphor.”

As a result, Aristotle invented logic. This was intended, in part, to give the world something that they could build upon without the intrusion of metaphor into their universe. The whole of the universe was to be explained using nothing but the universe. This natural universe had been placed against the unnatural universe of Plato. Thinkers like Boethius, John of Salisbury, and Dante acknowledged the two camps. And since James Joyce had fallen in with the camp of Aristotle, I thought that I should read Aristotle, as well.

As I got older, I realized that Plato had responded to the charges that he had been dealing in “poetic metaphor.” He did not do this with the intention of dismissing the charge. Rather, he attacked Aristotle for believing that the universe could be explained without the intrusion of metaphor. [see Atlantis] [see also my dissertation on Parmenides].  In the Parmenides, Plato mixes up the time frame, making Aristotle a young philosopher and Socrates his elder. Socrates drives Aristotle to admit that when it comes to the foundational principles of metaphysics that Aristotle’s logical system breaks. One equals none, he concludes.

This breaking of systems was something I would have to deal with throughout my career as an academic. [That’s the subject of another post, however]. At the time that I was an undergraduate, however, all of this was before me. I still thought at this point that systems could be reintegrated.

My excursion into The Works of Aristotle was the direct response to James Joyce. However, like many of my naïve responses, I had misunderstood my source. Joyce thought he had found the principle of reintegration. I was still not sure. I was following others in the hope that they could do what I myself could not.

Aristotle carried me through graduate school. I had to learn to read tracts on logic, and I read them incessantly for four years before I felt that I knew what medieval thinkers were talking about in their very abstract logical works.

As I grew older and more confident in myself, I focused on the natural world of logic and science, rather than the mystical elements by which James Joyce had portrayed the world. I left behind the metaphysical pretensions of James Joyce, as well as the hope that I could ever be reintegrated into the universe completely through logic. This was largely due to my reading of Aristotle rather than Plato.

And this is something that put me at odds with my professors and eventually put a wall between my professors and myself. They thought they knew that there was nothing further from the study of aesthetics than the practice of logic. My professors thought I was bright. They also thought that I was utterly mistaken in my approach to art.

This was, in my view, simply a matter of my professors having taken on the divide between allegory and simple, which had only appeared in thought in the Romantic age. The problem, as I saw it when I was writing my dissertation, was that the postmodern thinkers had divided criticism into two camps: those who look backwards (conservatives) and those who look forward (progressives). But neither camp would allow logic to usurp the metaphysical orientation of art. Both camps could see no farther than that I held views that put me in the other camp.

When I realized this, I took my act on the road. But by the end of graduate school I was so tired of fighting this battle from outside the margins of what academics thought possible that I decided not to pursue an academic career. But for the life of me, I always thought that I was occupying a position at the center of the Modern and postmodern universes.

Categories: Books, Personal, Philosophy
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