Also by George Steiner

The Poetry of Thought

We do speak about music. The verbal analysis of a musical score can, to a certain extent, elucidate its formal structure, its technical components and instrumentation. But where it is not musicology in a strict sense, where it does not resort to a “meta-language” par­asitic on music—“key,” “pitch,” “syncopation”—talk about music, oral or written, is a suspect compromise. A narration, a critique of musical performance addresses itself less to the actual sound-world than it does to the executant and the reception by the audience. It is reportage by analogy. It can say little that is substantive of the com­position. A handful of brave spirits, Boethius, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Proust and Adorno among them, have sought to translate the matter of music and its significations into words. On occasion, they have found metaphoric “counterpoints,” modes of suggestion, simulacra of considerable evocative effect (Proust on Vinteuils sonata). Yet even at their most seductive these semiotic virtuosities are, in the proper sense of the idiom, “beside the point.” They are derivative.

To speak of music is to foster an illusion, a “category mistake” as logicians would put it. It is to treat music as if it was or was very close to natural language. It is to transfer semantic realities from a linguistic to a musical code. Musical elements are experienced or classified as syntax; the evolving construct of a sonata, its initial and

secondary “subject” are designated as grammatical. Musical state­ments (itself a borrowed designation) have their rhetoric, their elo­quence or economy. We incline to overlook that each of these ru­brics is borrowed from its linguistic legitimacies. The analogies are inescapably contingent. A musical “phrase” is not a verbal segment.

This contamination is aggravated by the manifold relations be­tween words and musical setting. A linguistically ordered system is inserted within, is set to and against a “non-language.” This hybrid coexistence is of limitless diversity and possible intricacy (often a Hugo Wolf Lied negates its verbal text). Our reception of this amal­gam is to a large extent cursory. Who but the most concentrated— score and libretto in hand—is capable of taking in simultaneously the musical notes, the attendant syllables and the polymorphic, truly dialectical interplay between them? The human cortex has difficulty in discriminating between and re-combining entirely dis­tinct, autonomous stimuli. No doubt there are musical pieces which aim to mime, to accompany verbal and figurative themes. There is “program music” for storms and calm, for festivities and lamenta­tion. Mussorgsky sets to music “paintings at an exhibition.” There is film music, often essential to the visual-dramatic script. But these are justly taken to be secondary, mongrel species. Where it is per se, where it is according to Schopenhauer more enduring than man, music is neither more nor less than itself. The ontological echo lies to hand: “I am what I am.”

Its only signifying “translation” or paraphrase is that of bodily motion. Music translates into dance. But the enraptured mirror­ing is approximate. Stop the sound and there is no confident way of telling what music is being danced to (an irritant touched on in Plato’s Laws). But unlike natural languages, music is universal. In­numerable ethnic communities possess only oral rudiments of lit­erature. No human aggregate is without music, often elaborate and intricately marshalled. The sensory, emotional data of music are far more immediate than those of speech (they may reach back to the womb). Except at certain cerebral extremes, associated mainly with modernism and technologies in the west, music needs no decipher­ment. Reception is more or less instantaneous at psychic, nervous and visceral levels whose synaptic interconnections and cumulative yield we scarcely understand.

But what is it that is being received, internalized, responded to? What is it that sets the sum of us in motion? Here we come upon a duality of “sense” and of “meaning” which epistemology, philo­sophical hermeneutics and psychological investigations have been virtually helpless to elucidate. Which invite the supposition that what is inexhaustibly meaningful may also be senseless. The mean­ing of music lies in its performance and audition (there are those who “hear” a composition when silently reading its score, but they are rare). To explain what a composition means, ruled Schumann, is to play it again. To women and men since the inception of hu­maneness music is so meaningful that they can hardly imagine life without it. Musique avant toute chose (Verlaine). Music comes to possess our body and our consciousness. It calms and it maddens, it consoles or makes desolate. For countless mortals music, however vaguely, comes closer than any other felt presence to inferring, to forecasting the possible reality of transcendence, of an encounter with the numinous, with the supernatural as these lie beyond em­pirical reach. To so many religious people emotion is metaphorized music. But what sense has it, what meaning does it make verifiable? Can music lie or is it altogether immune to what philosophers call “truth functions”? Identical music will inspire, and seemingly artic­ulate irreconcilable proposals. It “translates” into antinomies. The same Beethoven tune inspired Nazi solidarity, communist promise and the vapid panaceas of the United Nations hymn. The selfsame chorus in Wagner s Rienzi exalts Herzls Zionism and Hitler s vision of the Reich. A fantastic wealth of variant, even contradictory mean­ings and a total absence of sense. Neither semiology nor psychol­ogy nor metaphysics can master this paradox (which alarms abso­lutist thinkers from Plato to Calvin and Lenin). No epistemology has been able to answer convincingly the simple question: “What is music for?” What sense can it have to make music? This crucial incapacity more than hints at organic limitations in language, limi­tations pivotal to the philosophic enterprise. Conceivably spoken, let alone written discourse are a secondary phenomenon. They may embody a decay of certain primordial totalities of psychosomatic awareness still operative in music. Too often, to speak is to “get it wrong.” Not long before his death Socrates sings.

When God sings to Himself, He sings algebra, opined Leibniz. The affinities, the sinews which relate music to mathematics have been perceived since Pythagoras. Cardinal features of musical com­position such as pitch, volume, rhythm can be algebraically plotted. So can historical conventions such as fugues, canons and counter­point. Mathematics is the other universal language. Common to all men, instantly legible to those equipped to read it. As in music, so in mathematics the notion of “translation” is applicable only in a trivial sense. Certain mathematical operations can be narrated or described verbally. It is possible to paraphrase or metaphrase math­ematical devices. But these are ancillary, virtually decorative margi­nalia. In and of itself mathematics can be translated only into other mathematics (as in algebraic geometry). In mathematical papers, there is often only one generative word: an initial “let” which au­thorizes and launches the chain of symbols and diagrams. Compa­rable to that imperative “let” which initiates the axioms of creation in Genesis.

Yet the language (s) of mathematics are immensely rich. Their de­ployment is one of the few positive, clean journeys in the records of the human mind. Though inaccessible to the layman, mathematics manifests criteria of beauty in an exact, demonstrable sense. Here alone the equivalence between truth and beauty obtains. Unlike those enunciated by natural language, mathematical propositions can be either verified or falsified. Where undecidability crops up, that concept also has its precise, scrupulous meaning. Oral and writ­ten tongues lie, deceive, obfuscate at every step. More often than not their motor is fiction and the ephemeral. Mathematics can produce errors, later to be corrected. It cannot lie. There is wit in mathemati­cal constructs and proofs, as there is wit in Haydn and Satie. There may be touches of personal style. Mathematicians have told me that they can identify the proponent of a theorem and of its demon­stration on stylistic grounds. What matters is that once proved, a mathematical operation enters the collective truth and availability of the anonymous. It is, moreover, permanent. When Aeschylus is forgotten, and already the bulk of his work is missing, Archimedes’ theorems will remain (G. M. Hardy).

Since Galileo, the march of mathematics is imperial. A natural science gauges its legitimacy by the degree to which it can be math- ematicized. Mathematics play an increasingly determinant role in economics, in prominent branches of social studies, even in the sta­tistical areas of history (“cliometrics”). Calculus and formal logic are the source and anatomy of computation, of information theory, of electromagnetic storage and transmission as these now organize and transform our daily lives. The young manipulate the crystal­line unfolding of fractals as they once manipulated rhymes. Applied mathematics, often of an advanced class, pervades our individual and social existence.

From the outset, philosophy, metaphysics have circled mathe­matics like a frustrated hawk. Plato’s exigence was clear: “Let no one enter the Academy who is not a geometer.” In Bergson, in Witt­genstein the mathematical libido is exemplary of epistemology as a whole. There are enlightening episodes in the long history of the philosophy of mathematics, notably in the early investigations of Husserl. But advances have been fitful. If applied mathematics with its inception in hydraulics, agriculture, astronomy and navigation can be located within economical and social needs, pure mathemat­ics and its meteoric progress pose a seemingly intractable question. Do the theorems, the interplay of higher mathematics, of number theory in particular, derive from, refer to realities “out there” even if as yet undiscovered? Do they, at however formalized a level, ad­dress existential phenomena? Or are they an autonomous game, a set and sequence of operations as arbitrary, as autistic as chess? Is the unbounded, one may say “fantastic” forward motion of math­ematics from Pythagoras’s triangle to elliptical functions, generated, energized from within itself, independent of either reality or appli­cation (though, contingently, the latter may turn up) ? To what psy­chological or aesthetic impulses does mathematics answer? Math­ematicians themselves, philosophers have debated the issue across millennia. It remains unresolved. Add to this the luminous puzzle of mathematical capacities and productivity in the very young, in the preadolescent. An enigmatic occurrence analogous with, and only analogous with virtuosities of the musical prodigy and the child chess master. Are there links? Is some transcendent addiction to the useless implanted in a handful of human beings (a Mozart, a Gauss, a Capablanca) ?

Being condemned to language, philosophy and philosophic psychology have found themselves more or less helpless. Many a thinker has echoed an ancient sorrow: “Would I have been a phi­losopher if I could have been a mathematician?”

In regard to the requirements of philosophy, natural language suf­fers from grave infirmities. It cannot match the universality of ei­ther music or mathematics. Even the most widespread—today it is Anglo-American—is only provincial and transient. No language can rival the capacities of music for polysemic simultaneities, for manifold meanings under pressure of untranslatable forms. The en­listment of emotions, at once specific and general, private and com­munal, far exceeds that in language. At some points, blindness is reparable (books can be read in braille). Deafness, ostracism from music is irremediable exile. Nor can natural language rival the preci­sion, the unambiguous finality, the accountability and transparency of mathematics. It cannot satisfy criteria of either proof or refuta­tion—they are the same—inherent in mathematics. Must we, can we mean what we say or say what we mean ? The implicit generation of new questions, of new perceptions, of innovative findings from within the mathematical matrix has no equivalent in oral or written speech. The forward paths of mathematics look to be self-sustained and unbounded. Language teems with shopworn specters and facti­tious circularities.

And yet. The very definition of men and women as “language- animals” put forward by the ancient Greeks, the nomination of lan­guage and linguistic communication as the defining attribute of what is human, are no arbitrary tropes. Sentences, oral and written (the mute can be taught to read and write), are the enabling organ of our being, of that dialogue with the self and with others which as­sembles and stabilizes our identity. Words, imprecise, time-bound as they are, construct remembrance and articulate futurity. Hope is the future tense. Even when naively figurative and unexamined, the substantives we attach to concepts such as life and death, to the ego and the other are bred of words. Hamlet to Polonius. The force of silence is that of a denying echo of language. It is possible to love silently, but perhaps only up to a point. Authentic speechlessness comes with death. To die is to stop chattering. I have tried to show that the incident at Babel was a blessing. Each and every language maps a possible world, a possible calendar and landscape. To learn a language is to expand incommensurably the parochialism of the self. It is to fling open a new window on existence. Words do fumble and deceive. Certain epistemologies deny them access to reality. Even the finest poetry is circumscribed by its idiom. Nonetheless, it is nat­ural language which affords humanity its center of gravity (note the moral, psychological connotations of that term). Serious laughter is also linguistic. It maybe that only smiling defies paraphrase.

Natural language is the ineluctable medium of philosophy. The philosopher may resort to technical terms and neologisms; he may, like Hegel, seek to crowd familiar idiomatic terms with novel signifi­cations. But in essence and, as we have seen, barring the symbolism of formal logic, language must do. As R. G. Collingwood puts it in his Essay on Philosophic Method (1933): “If language cannot explain itself, nothing else can explain it.” Thus the language of philosophy is “as every careful reader of the great philosophers already knows, a literary language and not a technical.” The rules of literature pre­vail. In this compelling respect, philosophy resembles poetry. It is “a poem of the intellect” and represents “the point at which prose comes nearest to being poetry.” The proximity is reciprocal, for of­ten it is the poet who turns to the philosophers. Baudelaire adverts to de Maistre, Mallarme to Hegel, Celan to Heidegger, T. S. Eliot to Bradley.

Within the disabling confines of my linguistic competence and drawing lamely on translation, I want to look at a pride of philo­sophic texts as these proceed under pressure of literary ideals and the poetics of rhetoric. I want to look at synaptic contacts between philosophic argument and literary expression. These interpenetra­tions, fusions are never total, but they take us to the heart of lan­guage and the creativity of reason. “What we cannot think, that we cannot think: we cannot therefore say what we cannot think” ('Tractatus, 5.61).

The incandescence of intellectual and poetic creativity in mainland Greece, Asia Minor and Sicily during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. remains unique in human history. In some respects, the life of the mind thereafter is a copious footnote. So much has long been obvious. Yet the causes of this sunburst, the motives which brought it about in that time and place remain unclear. The penitential “po­litical correctness” now prevalent, the remorse of postcolonialism make it awkward even to pose what may be the pertinent questions, to ask why the ardent wonder that is pure thought prevailed almost nowhere else (what theorem out of Africa?).

Manifold and complex factors must have been interactive, “im­plosive” to borrow a crucial concept from the packed collisions in atomic physics. Among these were a more or less benign climate and ease of maritime communication. Argument traveled fast; it was, in the ancient and figural sense, “Mercurial.” The availability of protein, cruelly denied to so much of the sub-Saharan world, may have been pivotal. Nutritionists speak of protein as “brain food.” Hunger, malnutrition lame the gymnastics of the spirit. There is much we do not yet grasp, though Hegel sensed its central role, con­cerning the daily ambience of slavery, concerning the incidence of slavery on individual and social sensibility. It is, however, evident

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 731