In his "Talk On Mythology" (1799-1800), Friedrich Schlegel attempted to address the difficulty that the "modern poet" faces now that the scientific imagination has replaced the mythological one of "the ancients." This problem is analogous to that which faces the modern religious imagination: with the miraculous no longer credible, what is one to believe? It is a problem peculiar to Protestantism because of its emphasis upon belief, but all traditions are affected by this problem insofar as they depend upon the inculcated credulity of their adherents.
In response to the modern poet's dilemma, Schlegel proposed the invention of a new mythology developed from "that great phenomenon of our age," idealism. And yet, for Schlegel, it was an idealism that would give birth to "a new and infinite realism," one that "hover[ing] as it were over an idealistic ground, will emerge as poetry which indeed is to be based on the harmony of the ideal and real."
Interestingly, Schlegel considered Spinoza the great exemplar of this idealistically generated realism--most likely because, in his Tractatus, Spinoza looked to Nature as the ultimate source of the imagination, and he regarded the imagination as the stuff of prophecy.
This kind of Spinozistic/Romantic naturalism would inform the philosophy of George Santayana who would influence, in turn, the 20th century American poet, Wallace Stevens. Stevens would posit a tension between "the imagination" and "reality," and the "whole of Harmonium" that issued from it would, ultimately, fulfill Schlegel's prediction of a "new" [Modernist] mythology. Moreover, with Stevens we encounter an Alfarabian turn from metaphysics to rhetoric and from sui generis religion to spilled poetry.
[Quotations from Schlegel's Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms translated by Ernst Behler and Roman Struc, State College, Pa: The Pennsylvania State University Press (1968), pp. 81-88].
No comments:
Post a Comment