Maker and breaker,
I am the ebb and the flood,
Here and Hereafter,
Sped through the tangle and coil
Of infinite nature,
Viewless and soundless I fashion all being.
TheTaker and giver, I am the womb and the grave,
Now and the Ever.
~ W. E. Henly, "I Am the Reaper"
I.
In my youth, I fancied that solipsism was the answer to all philosophical problems; that if I could only convince myself that I am all-in-all, then questions (so dominant at that time) of the relationship of self and other (and Other), bodies interacting with bodies, cultural identity, and all that post-modernist pseudo-ethic that amounts to sundry words ... well then, I could craft a high tower for myself and indulge in my own reveries far above the bustle of the increasingly (it seemed to me then) illusory world. Like so many delusions, this one did not last long. However, it led me to conclude that the boundary separating philosophy and science from poetry (and the literary art in general) is that the former declares "It Is," and strives to know it [e.g., Heidegger's question, in What is Metaphysics?: "Why are there beings (or Being) rather than nothing?] while the latter deals with the great "I Am," or to use the fine Septuagint translation of Exodus 3:14: ego eimi ho On. But these words are spoken by Yahweh, not by any human; and it was not until Christ echoed these words in the Gospel of John that anyone considered the power of the human will to declare itself autonomous, to remove the mask of mere functionary in a society and become a dynamic and free person, an hupostasis. Much has been made of this so-called transition from prosopon to hupostasis [especially in Orthodox Christian theology, which has had an immense influence on my thinking, despite my atheism] but I find it doubtful that Plato, for example, ever considered himself as anything less than an autonomous mind, capable of contemplating universal truth. Plato was, of course, of the Classical world, where civic responsibility was paramount. Voices were heard in the close quarters of the Athenian polis. In our time, in the age of the Internet, countless "voices" are lost in the vast wilderness of cyberspace.
While speaking to the void -- or writing for the desk drawer (or the lone laptop) -- has a certain romantic glamor [cf. Lucian Taylor in Machen's Hill of Dreams] the result, for the agent, is often depression, addiction, loneliness, and death. A solipsist may be extraverted, surrounding him or herself with friends and family, and performing numerous duties and activities; but, like Walter Mitty in Thurber's story, he will be so out of touch with reality that any beauty that may exist will be lost in a haze of intra-personal fantasy. Of course, it may be argued that there is no beauty in the world, and that only the inner life of the mind is worth living. The remonstrance then is this: Do not take in beauty (even if you believe it to be illusory) only to hoard it within your own mind; instead, transform something with your unique mental contents. And if it be not the world (a task I think impossible, pace Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, and company) then let it be a small portion of the vastness in which you dwell. It has been said of the universe, by way of analogy, that if three grains of sand were placed in a giant cathedral, that cathedral would be more densely packed with sand than the universe is with stars. Such being the case, it is all too easy to lapse into a state of indifference to human accomplishment, to see everything we do as ephemeral and unworthy of reverence (however modest). The worship of self-as-functionary (working, raising a family, mowing the lawn, making successful investments, etc.) and the moment becomes the mundane religion, and the notion that the grandeur of genius (a concept that nowadays requires defending, as in the later work of Harold Bloom [cf. his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human]) either no longer exists or (worse) was a myth all along now dominates the mental life of so-called intellectuals as well as the work-a-day "herd" that eat and sleep and feed and know not Beauty.
II.
If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living.
~ Henri Poincare
It was said of Wordsworth that he so loved mountains that if anyone else dared to wax poetic about them, he took it as a personal affront, almost as a theft of his property. This excessive love of nature is akin to the possessive love that the emotionally unstable among us feel for our beloved: a passion so strong that if anyone were to remark (however casually and innocently) on the virtues of our beloved, we would feel it as an assault upon a shrine where only we are permitted to worship. A symptom of residual solipsistic fantasy? Likely. That aforementioned tower inhabited not only by my lone self, but now shared with a presence divine, lofty, and solely my own to worship. In such a relationship there is no knowledge of the beloved, only a glorying in her (or his) presence. Beauty, in this case, is mere momentary experience (however prolonged) and not the transformative knowledge that is the substance of true Beauty. I realize that I am speaking like an old-fashioned Romantic here; but to quote Bob Dylan: "When something's not right, it's wrong." I think the great Romantics (like Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats -- Coleridge is a notable exception) threw themselves head-first into the various examples of beauty they found in the world, without seeking any foundation, and concept of Beauty. Of course, to be fair, these men were poets, not philosophers; this is why Coleridge is an exception. In his Biographia Literaria he dealt with theories of imagination and fantasy, the nature of language, sources of inspiration and meaning, etc.; and we know that in his numerous conversations he improvised intelligently on numerous metaphysical themes. Coleridge's poetry conformed, I think, largely to Sidney's idea, stated in his Defense of Poesie (and I paraphrase): poetry gilds nature with gold. In Christabel, for example, we find two idealized young ladies engaged in a relationship that hovers somewhere between heaven and earth (or hell, perhaps). Let us say they are carrying out their fate in the mists beneath the moon, as the Neoplatonists would have conceived it. This is symbolic of the mental space we inhabit when love of beauty becomes obsessive, idealized, unreal. There is a genuine pathos in this, but it is no substitute for knowledge of the form and substance which, when combined, gives birth to the Beautiful. That Coleridge illustrated this so clearly is why I consider him the greatest of the Romantics. However, I also consider the others mentioned (and Byron) to have been right in allowing their love of Beauty to so overtake their lives that they lost sight of objective reality (if such a thing exists) and came to inhabit self-conscious mental spaces that would be considered (most likely) by modern psychiatrists as severely neurotic. So I am opposed to the arguments of Irving Babbitt against Romanticism, and am nearly his polar opposite [it is curious that his books, written in the early twentieth century, are now being reprinted, with prefaces by contemporary scholars and critical apparatus]. My reason for saying this is that Beauty requires sacrifice. The greatest poets are the tragic poets, who struggled to find a mirror of themselves in the "outside" world, and either fell into despair, or into a love so strong it ended in ruin -- for the heart can only bear a finite level of emotion.
Byron, in his Stanzas to Augusta, demonstrates the almost salvific nature of the love of a genuinely devoted woman. "Your soft heart refused to discover / The faults that so many could find." This is the great fantasy of the semi-solipsist: to be himself, while receiving the devotion of one whom he worships with all his might -- precisely because she accepts him as he accepts himself. There is a touching warmth in this; for it is hard to declare that Byron was insincere. Without getting into the details of his life, and his various affairs, we know that one thing held fast: his love of his half-sister. In this, I think, we find a glowing coal of genuine personality amidst the scattered ashes of emotionally stunted beings. If there is such a thing as human nature, we find it in poetry such as Byron's. His work is worth not only the momentary joy of reading, but the assiduous task of studying. The nature of the physical cosmos and its mysteries is an important field of study. But as Emerson pointed out with such vigor, when we study things as such, without considering their relation to the cosmic whole and -- most importantly -- to the emotional and intellectual life of the human being, we are acting as automatons, and denying the glory of our inner lives. To open oneself to the transformative power of Beauty, and beautiful things (for the things give rise to the concept, of course) is to preserve one's dynamic inner life while at the same time learning to know beautiful things and -- most important of all -- beautiful people, without which no one can flourish in the short term we have on this earth that feeds us all.
III.
The viscous is docile. Only at the very moment when I believe that I possess it, behold, by a curious reversal it possesses me ... I want to get rid of the viscous and it sticks to me, it draws me, it sucks at me ... Here we can see the symbol which abruptly discloses itself: there exists a poisonous possession; there is the possibility that the In-itself might absorb the For-itself.
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
"Hell is other people." Such is the famous pronouncement by the male character in Sartre's play No Exit. I consider the opposite to be true: a closed casket of existence without interaction, without intimacy -- that is hell. Yet the "viscous" nature of certain relationships, those in which the physical attraction overcomes any attempt at knowing (in the intellectual, not the biblical, sense) the beloved, is indeed "poisonous" to the ever-developing personality of the ego. This is the one definite danger of Romanticism, with its semi-solipsistic character. When I encounter the one who mirrors me, the "In-herself" (to subtly alter Sartre), and discover that I am being overtaken by a purely external force, by a life with which I have no authentic connection -- for lack of knowledge, born of communication -- then I, "For-myself," become altered; and if this insidious process continues unchecked, I will fall away from myself, and the necessary inner life through which I engage the world and flourish will be sucked out of me, to find a home in the thoughts and actions of an other. This is a sickly love, one with which Edgar Allan Poe was especially acquainted, and of which he wrote so disturbingly in tales like Ligeia and Morella. So another remonstrance: Introduce some amount of Platonism into your relationship with your beloved; adore the mind and contents of the one you profess to love. If that is not possible, choose solitude and the inner life which, when aroused by a beautiful person (and such will happen over and over until the final toll of the bell) will be compelled to attempt to alter that small space that surrounds you, and to strive, in demiurgic manner, to unite the One and the Dyad, the Self and the Other, in a harmonious yet distinct coupling of minds and voices -- and bodies.
