The theme of the first, of course, is due to H. Rider Haggard.
Ayesha in the Fire
This life beyond life no life can now bear,
fair beyond fair, and yet still more fair;
this fire and light beyond human desire
quicken the heart to nothing but fire.
No god are you, of endless grace,
but ape of god, of mortal race!
Though with the flame of heaven's rod
your light is graced, you are no god.
Defer all darkness by year and age,
yet it is Death who writes your page;
for long eons live, yet shall you die,
the dimness fall upon your eye,
the darkness drag your frame to dust,
and time turn back, betray your trust,
and ravish your spirit, your age-old name,
by fire that quickens your soul with flame.
Self-Critique
'Tis true he's not the greatest bard
to grace the human race;
his poems are filled with little lines
that hang in filler-space.
He has a certain fervor
(more a fever in the brain);
it substitutes for music,
thus all his lyrics strain.
And he preaches like a pastor
and lectures all the day;
I'd love to love his poems
but his words get in the way.
He is pompous and pretentious --
yes, a flash of wit thrown in,
but his taste is all the former,
the clunky prosist's sin.
And, boy, he likes a good conceit
(all conceited people do!),
writ in vain and empty words
dressed up like clerihew.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
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Anonymous
0 points
14 years ago
I have a hard time buying this sentiment as authentically Ryle's (and Google doesn't show anything substantiating it). Ryle wrote a generally positive review of "Being and Time", and when asked about SuZ later he didn't have much to say other than "Oh, yeah, I read that a long time ago and wrote a book review, which I worked hard on but no one ever asked me about. Haven't really thought of it since. Dunno whether it influenced me or not. I liked logical positivism more, at the time, but I might've found appealing anti-Cartesian/proto-behaviorist stuff in SuZ." (I paraphrase; the full quote is in the appendix on p. 290 of Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, which also reprints Ryle's book review from Mind.)
I also don't see what's wrong with the sentiment Ryle genuinely had about SuZ: There're helpful things to be gleaned from it, but the project as a whole isn't the way to go.
I don't know what his character has to do with whether, say, his criticisms of Husserl hit their mark, despite the fact that Being is all over the place in a lot of those; the fact that a Nazi says that everything he's done with his work had to do with his Nazism doesn't make it so. I've never seen a defense of Husserl which takes the form "But this criticism only holds water if you're a Nazi, ergo Husserl escapes the charge."
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Anonymous
0 points
14 years ago
I doubt it's Ryle's, as well; it's a Rylean-like summation, though, even if it's not Ryle's own opinion. But Polt doesn't get into questions of provenance.
Since Ryle's sentiment in the comment really doesn't tell us anything about how to handle the question of Heidegger's Nazism, I'm not sure how it's relevant. Likewise, whether or not Heidegger's criticisms of Husserl are untowardly connected is something that has to be determined, not assumed. The fact that a Nazi says something doesn't make it false, true, but it also doesn't make it non-Nazi in attitude, formulation, or substance; given that we are quite literally talking about a Nazi, that there is nothing about it that is Nazi has to be shown, not insisted upon a priori. As I say, it has to be unwound and then rewound in such a way as to show that there is no Nazi distortion in it. If we can do that, fine and dandy; before we do it, though, we have no license to pretend that all is obviously safe.
Much of the problem lies precisely in reasoning by analogy here, which generally involves merely fooling ourselves by glossing over obviously significant differences. Nazism isn't a limited foible like drinking too much or sexual perversion, that might affect some philosophical fringes here and there but no more. It is a large-scale commitment; and, contrary to the tendency to insist on it as 'politics', it's not a merely political commitment like deciding one will support the Green Party in local elections. It carries a vision of technology, society, humanity. And this is undeniably so in Heidegger's case; Heidegger's own characterizations of his involvement, vague and weasely though they often are, links it with some of this major philosophical concerns. We should not fall into the hubris of pretending to know prior to all evidence what distortions such a commitment may or may not introduce into a philosophical approach, method, position, or system.