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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
My purpose in this paper is to consider the reaction of certain literary artists to the ways in which language is used by philosophers. Such an investigation is I think worthwhile for the light it throws both upon the nature of philosophical thinking itself and upon the preoccupations of certain workers. In particular it makes us enquire what it is about philosophical thinking which can be exploited imaginatively.
1 S. Kierkegaard, quoted in M. Grene, Introduction to Existentialism, p. 35 (University of Chicago Press, 1959).
2 P. Valéry, Discours sur Bergson (in Œuvres, I, p. 885, Gallimard, 1951).
* The true value of philosophy is merely to lead thought back to itself. This effort requires of whoever wishes to undertake it the invention of a way of expressing himself which is appropriate to this aim, for language expires at its own source.
3 R.M. Rilke, Letter to Margo Sizzo-Gouz (1922), trans. by E. Rennie in Selected Letters, ed. by H.T. Moore (Doubleday, New York 1960), p. 325.
4 M. Merleau-Ponty, Eloge de la Philosophie et Autres Essais, p. 18 (Gallimard, 1953, 1960).
5 Ibidem, p. 98-9.
* We begin to read the philosopher by giving the words he uses their "common" sense, and gradually, through an imperceptible inversion, his work masters his language; and this is the use he makes of it, which ends by its taking on a new meaning, the philosopher's own. At this moment he makes himself understood and his meaning has been instilled in me.
6 D. Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, Book 1, Pt 3, Sect. 8.
7 P.F. Strawson, Philosophy, 24, 258 (1949).
8 M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 87 (trans. by C. Smith, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962).
9 Idem, Eloge de la Philosophie et Autres Essais, p. 238.
* Never has literature been so "philosophical" as in the nineteenth century, never has it reflected so much on language, on the truth, on the sense of the act of writing.
10 L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.54.
11 J. Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book 2, Ch. 11.
12 P. Valéry, Œuvres, Vol. I, p. 797-9.
* But so far as I know, literature until now has barely considered this immense treasure of subjects and situations. The reasons for this negligence are obvious. However, I must distinguish one from among them that you under stand especially well. It consists in the extreme difficulty which language poses for us when we wish to force it to convey the phenomena of the mind. What is to be done with these terms which cannot be stated explicitly, unless they are recreated? Thought, the mind itself, reason, intelligence, comprehension, intuition or inspiration?… Each of these words is in turn a means and an end, a problem and a resolvent, a state and an idea; and each of them, in each of us, is sufficient or insufficient according to the function which circumstance gives it. You know then that the philosopher becomes a poet, and frequently a great poet; he borrows the metaphor for us and, through magnificent images which instil our envy, he summons all of nature to express his profound thought.
* … The thirst for understanding is that of creating; of going beyond what others had achieved and of making oneself equal to the most illustrious… And then, the detail itself of the moments of mental action; the expectation of the gift of a form or of an idea, of the simple word that will change the impossible into a thing accomplished; the desires and the sacrifices, the victories and the disasters; and the surprises; the infinite patience and the dawn of a "truth"; and such extraordinary moments, as, for example, the abrupt formation of a kind of solitude, which suddenly declares itself, even in the midst of a crowd, and descends upon man like a veil, under which the mystery of an immediate revelation takes place… What do I know? All this suggests to us a poetry with inexhaustible resources.
13 J. Locke, op. cit., Book 3.
14 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Pt. 2, i.
15 References will be to World Classic's Edition (Oxford, 1903) referred to hereafter as TS.
16 K. Maclean, John Locke and English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Yale University Press, 1936); J. Traugott, Tristram Shandy's World; Sterne's Philosophical Rhetoric (University of California Press, 1954).
17 TS, Book 2, Ch. 31.
18 TS, Book 8, Ch. 34.
19 J.P. Sartre, "Intentionality," Nouvelle Revue Française, (1st January, 1939).
20 Inter alia, J. Fletcher, The Novels of Samuel Beckett (Chatto and Windus, 1964).
21 For example, TS, Book 1, Ch. 19.
22 For example, TS, Book 5, Chs. 42, 43.
23 S. Beckett, Watt, p. 73 (Calder, 1963).
24 Idem, Molloy, p. 64 (Calder, 1959).
25 TS, Book 2, Ch. 2.
26 S. Beckett, Malone Dies, p. 195 (Calder, 1959).
27 TS, Book 3, Ch. 10.
28 M. Blanchot, Celui qui ne m'accompagnait pas, p. 98-9 (Gallimard, 1953).
29 TS, Book 7, Ch. 33.
30 Molloy, p. 31; cf. Unnamable, p. 407-8.
31 A recent philosophical treatment is S. Schomaker, Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity (Cornell, 1963).
32 M. Blanchot, Thomas l'Obscur (Nouvelle Version), p. 36 (Gallimard, 1950).
* … He retained the thought, already deprived of sense, only in his person, while perched on his shoulders, the word He and the word I were beginning their carnage, remaining obscure words, fleshless souls and angels of words, which penetrated him profoundly.
33 Ibid., p. 50.
* He was, in death itself, deprived of death, a man dreadfully annihilated, arrested in naught by his own image.
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