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Open Book Publishers
Chapter Title: The Symbol of the Symbolists: Aleksandr Blok in the Changing Russian
Literary Canon
Chapter Author(s): Olga Sobolev
Book Title: Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry
Book Subtitle: Reinventing the Canon
Book Editor(s): Katharine Hodgson, Joanne Shelton, Alexandra Smith
Published by: Open Book Publishers. (2017)
Stable URL: https://wwwjstororg/stable/jctt1sq5v63.8
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Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry
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5. The Symbol of the Symbolists:
Aleksandr Blok in the Changing Russian
Literary Canon
Olga Sobolev
Прославленный не по программе
И вечный вне школ и систем,
Он не изготовлен руками
И нам не навязан никем.
Eternal and not manufactured,
Renown not according to plan,
Outside schools and systems, he has not
Been foisted upon us by man.1 |
Renown not according to plan,
Outside schools and systems, he has not
Been foisted upon us by man.1
The turn of the twentieth century has always been regarded as a period of extreme dynamism in Russian culture — a time when many traditional values were questioned and transformed. During this period the genuine creative power in verse and prose came from the symbolists, who drew upon the aesthetic revival inaugurated in the
1890s by Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, and freed it of spuriousness and selfgratifying over-refinement. In turning their backs on civic ideals and echoing Stéphane Mallarmé’s saying that poetry ‘yields the initiative to
1
Boris Pasternak, ‘Veter’, Izbrannoe, 2 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura,
1985), I, 439; Boris Pasternak, ‘The Wind’, Poems of Boris Pasternak, translated by
Lydia Pasternak-Slater (London: Unwin, 1963), p. 90.
© 2017 Olga Sobolev, CC BY 4.0
https://doiorg/10.11647/OBP.0076.05
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words’,2 the symbolists brought fascinating resources of language and craftsmanship to their metaphysical preoccupations. Often termed the
Silver Age of Russian art, this trend produced a whole host of illustrious authors, including such figures as Valerii Briusov and Konstantin
Bal′mont, Zinaida Gippius and Viacheslav Ivanov, Andrei Belyi and the most celebrated poet of the movement — Aleksandr Blok. Quite a few factors may account for Blok’s special position in the constellation of these eminent authors, one of which is directly related to the notion of a poetic canon, considered in the broadest sense of this cultural term.
Whether one looks at the idea of canonisation within the framework of institutionalised aesthetics or simply as a literary art of memory (as suggested by Harold Bloom3), Blok stands apart from the cohort of symbolist poets. Not only does he appear to be the only symbolist who was ever accepted in the Soviet-era literary canon, but he retained his status later, when the country was keen to dismiss anything related to the fallen Soviet regime. By analysing Blok’s critical reception throughout the twentieth century and beyond, this study will attempt to establish what aspects of his oeuvre made it central to the country’s literary agenda, as well as by what mechanisms this long-standing cultural value became firmly associated with the corpus of his works. Given that the formation of a canon is necessarily related to the questions of nationhood and self-determination, such an analysis will shed more light on some key issues faced by contemporary post-perestroika Russia, such as the shaping of national identity, and the ways of overcoming the division between the two cultures that was created by the policies of the
Soviet authoritarian state.4
The word ‘canon’ was originally used to designate a rule, measure or standard; and many subsequent uses of the term similarly invoke |
2
Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Crise de vers’, in Divagations (Paris: Bibliotèque Charpentier,
1897), pp. 235–51 (p. 246); translated in Rosemary Lloyd, The Poet and his Circle
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 55.
3
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (New York: Riverhead Books, 1995), p. 17.
4
Russian dissident culture emerged in the 1950s and the 1960s as intellectual opposition to Communist rule in a form of grassroots practice; it was largely associated with samizdat, a key dissident activity in the dissemination of censored cultural production (classified as a criminal anti-government activity), and it became a potent symbol of the rebellious spirit and resourcefulness of the Soviet intelligentsia; see for instance, Ann Komaromi, ‘The Material Existence of Soviet
Samizdat’, Slavic Review, 63 (2004), 597–618.
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5. Aleksandr Blok in the Changing Russian Literary Canon |
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5. Aleksandr Blok in the Changing Russian Literary Canon
the notion of restrictive authority, as when literary critics speak of the need ‘to open’ the canon, ‘to expand’ the canon, or ‘to dispense’ with the canon.5 In actuality, scholars agree that there neither is, nor has there ever been, any such thing as an inherent, strictly defined literary canon, and it is not ‘the reproduction of values but of social relations’6 that should be associated with canonical form; as John
Guillory puts it, ‘canonicity is not a property of the work itself, but of its transmission, its relation to other works in a collocation of works’.7
While recognising ‘the historicity of the cultural category of literature itself’, recent theorists of canon formation have begun to examine the interaction of literary taste (or even fashion8) with some larger structures of social and economic power.9 Pierre Bourdieu, for instance, offers the concept of cultural capital to describe how, within a given socio-economic setting, the knowledge of certain literary texts (or art, music and so forth) can be used to describe social competition and stratification, and he points out some ways by which this knowledge is obtained and enhanced: through direct experience and education; through popular culture, and through secondary or tertiary contacts
(book reviews, study guides, etc).10 The work of Bourdieu and other scholars on nineteenth-century texts suggests that similar mechanisms might be at work within Russian post-revolutionary culture, although, of course, these must be carefully specified and analysed in relation to that particular socio-historical setting.
The Soviet notion of culture, far from being based on a simplistic
Marxist conception of the ideological sphere as little more than a |
5
John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 34, 81.
6
Ibid., p. 56.
7
Ibid., p. 55.
8
Isaac D’Israeli, an early promulgator of this view, claimed that ‘prose and verse have been regulated by the same caprice that cuts our coats and cocks our hats […] and every age of modern literature might, perhaps, admit of a new classification, by dividing it into its periods of fashionable literature’ (Isaac D’Israeli, ‘Literary
Fashions’, in Curiosities of Literature (Boston: Lilly, Wait, Colman & Holden, 1833),
III, 35–39 (pp. 35, 39), quoted in Alastair Fowler, ‘Genre and the Literary Canon’,
New Literary History, 11: 1, Anniversary Issue II (Autumn 1979), 97–119 (p. 97)).
9
John Guillory, Cultural Capital, p. 60; Alastair Fowler, ‘Genre and the Literary
Canon’, pp. 97–119.
10
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, translated by
Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 1984).
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reflection of the social material base, emphasised the centrality of the cultural field in shaping and facilitating economic development.
Moreover, from the early years of the Soviet state’s existence, literature was considered an effective weapon of class warfare, and all interventionist post-revolutionary cultural campaigns (against illiteracy, religion and bourgeois morality) were conducted precisely in pursuit of this agenda. The official line was set out in a series of articles by Lenin, one of the most significant of which was Pamiati Gertsena (In Memory of Herzen, 1912) that outlined three stages in the history of the Russian revolutionary movement, and effectively defined both the periodisation and the methodology in all branches of the Soviet literary field.11 The first stage was that of a liberally-minded nobility, from the Decembrists to
Aleksandr Herzen (1825–1861); it was followed by the Populist period of
1861–1895, and culminated in the so-called ‘proletarian’ era, dating from
1895, the year in which Lenin’s Union for the Emancipation of Working
People was founded. When mapped onto the domain of scholarship and education, this later stage was commonly exemplified by the works of Maksim Gor′kii, and by the poetic writings of the Revolutionary
Populists, such as Vera Figner, Petr Iakubovich, Nikolai Morozov, and
German Lopatin, as well as by the group of certain younger proletarian authors with a distinct political concern. Chronologically, the major part of the symbolist movement also coincided with the ‘proletarian’ period, which immediately made it strictly out of bounds for Lenin and his supporters: symbolism was declared ideologically impoverished, aesthetically subversive, stimulating an unnecessary predilection for decadent romanticism that led away from the reality of socialist goals.12 |
11
Vladimir Lenin, Pamiati Gertsena (Moscow: Politizdat, 1980).
12
As early as 1896 Gor′kii characterised symbolist literature as ‘the songs of decaying culture’, impregnated with the feeling of ‘pessimism and complete apathy regarding actual events’ (Maksim Gor′kii, Sobranie sochinenii, 30 vols.
(Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1949–1955), 23 (1953), 122, 136); Trotskii in his Literature and Revolution (1924) speaks of symbolism as an expression of old
Russia’s ‘landlords and intelligentsia […] disgusting environment’ (Leo Trotskii,
Literature and Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), p. 105); and the chapter on symbolism, in the academic edition of The History of Russian Literature, entitled
‘Poetry of the Bourgeois Decay (Symbolism, Acmeism, Futurism)’ speaks for itself
(Istoriia russkoi literatury, 10 vols., edited by N. F. Bel’chikov (Moscow-Leningrad:
Akademiia Nauk SSSR, 1941–1956), X (1954), pp. 764–99).
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5. Aleksandr Blok in the Changing Russian Literary Canon
Two authors, nonetheless, presented a rare exception to the accepted canon. From the early 1920s, Blok and Briusov began to feature in the
Narkompros circulars and the lists of ‘indicative reading’.13 The choice of these two poets was far from coincidental, mainly because they were the only symbolists of the older generation who expressed a certain degree of sympathy (at least at the beginning) for the Bolshevik cause.
By 1924 most of the major figures of the Silver Age had already fled the socialist country, and did not miss the opportunity to express their critical attitude towards the newly established regime: Gippius and
Merezhkovskii had been residing in Paris since 1920, where they were soon joined by Bal′mont; Ivanov was the last to depart for Rome in
1924.14 |
Out of Blok and Briusov, who chose not to emigrate, Briusov seemed to be the most consistent supporter of the October upheaval, in which he saw a transformative historic event. In 1920 he became a member of the Communist Party and was very active in the People’s Commissariat for Education, acting as the head of its printing and library divisions.
Under Commissar Anatolii Lunacharskii, he became the head of
Moscow’s Public Libraries and the Chairman of the Union of Poets, and later on served as the Director of the Moscow Institute of Literature and |
13
Narkompros (the People’s Commissariat for Education) was charged with the administration of public education and most other issues related to culture, until it was transformed into the Ministry of Education in 1946. Since the early days of its formation (November 1917) Narkompros gained control over the content of libraries accessible to the mass reader. Its series of circulars drew attention to the role of books as a main source of dissemination of mass literacy and culture, while emphasising the importance of political control over such a large-scale undertaking, ‘so that the flow of these books was channelled in the right direction’ (N. K. Krupskaia, ‘O plane raboty po BD Vneshkol′nogo otdela Narkomprosa’, Narodnoe prosveshchenie,
6, 1918). In the context of Soviet official attitudes towards symbolist writers, it is interesting to note that the 1937 issue of the journal Literaturnoe nasledstvo dedicated to Russian symbolism was focused exclusively on three authors, Briusov, Blok and
Andrei Belyi, who appeared in the spotlight because of his close connections with
Blok.
14
Fedor Sologub also had a distinctly anti-Bolshevik orientation; in July 1921 he received permission to leave the country, but his wife’s death, just two months later, left him in such a profound state of mourning that he gave up any thoughts of leaving Russia and died in Leningrad in 1927. Hundreds of Russian intellectuals were also expelled from the country in 1922–1923, and transported abroad on the so-called ‘Philosophers’ boats’; see Lesley Chamberlain, Lenin’s Private War:
The Voyage of the Philosophy Steamer and the Exile of the Intelligentsia (New York: St
Martin’s Press, 2007).
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Arts until his death in 1924. Briusov edited the first edition of the Soviet
Encyclopaedia and supported young proletarian writers (such as, for instance, Andrei Platonov), prioritising their work over the aestheticism of his fellow modernist authors (Osip Mandel′shtam’s Second Book of poems (1923) was reviewed by Briusov in a very negative way15). In the words of Clarence Brown, ‘his embrace of Bolshevism and the new order of things was more fervent by far than that of Maiakovskii, the unofficial poet-laureate of the Revolution’.16 Briusov’s own writing, on the other hand, never moved away from the elaborate symbolist experimentation of his pre-1917 work. Even his later post-revolutionary poems, such as the collections Dali (Horizons, 1922) and Speshi! (Hurry up!, 1924), were too sophisticated and too formalistic for the working masses. Classified as sheer ‘academic avant-gardism’ by Mikhail
Gasparov,17 they presented little material for the enlightenment and instruction of the working people. Blok’s position in this respect was of a different order.
Surprisingly for his admirers, as well as for his closer literary circle,
Blok also welcomed the proletarian coup. Gippius recalls that it was utterly frustrating to think of him as a friend of the Bolsheviks, to the extent that she was reluctant to shake hands with the poet when they accidentally met on a tram journey in Petrograd in September 1918.18
Unlike the majority of his fellow symbolists, Blok refused to emigrate from Russia, claiming that he had to support the country during these difficult times. Never before able to cooperate with society (as he wrote in 1909 to his mother, ‘either one should not live in Russia at all […], or |
15
In Briusov’s words, Mandel′shtam’s poetry, ‘cut off from contemporary life, from social and political interests, cut off from the problems of contemporary science, from the search for contemporary world view’, had nothing to offer. Valerii
Briusov, ‘Vtoraia kniga’, Pechat’ i revoliutsiia, 6 (1923), 63–66 (p. 66); quoted in
Donald Loewen, The Most Dangerous Art: Poetry, Politics, and Autobiography after the
Revolution (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2008), p. 40.
16
Clarence Brown, Mandelstam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 111.
17
Mikhail L. Gasparov, Akademicheskii avangardizm: priroda i kul′tura u pozdnego
Briusova (Moscow: RGGU, 1995). Mandel′shtam viewed the late Briusov in a very negative way, saying in 1922 that ‘such a vacuity is not to be ever repeated in
Russian poetry’ (Osip Mandel′shtam, ‘O prirode slova’, Sobranie sochnenii, 4 vols., edited by P. Nerler (Moscow: Artbiznestsentr, 1993), I, 217–31 (p. 230)).
18
Zinaida N. Gippius, Stikhotvoreniia. Zhivye litsa (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1991), pp. 248–49.
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5. Aleksandr Blok in the Changing Russian Literary Canon |
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else isolate oneself from humiliation — that is to say politics and “social activities”’), he now accepted several administrative posts.19 From 1918 to 1921 he worked as a lecturer at the Journalism School, as the head of the German Section of the World Literature publishing house, as the deputy head of the Literature Department of Narkompros in Moscow, and as the chairman of the Petrograd Section of the All-Russia Union of
Poets; he served on the State Committee on the publication of Russian classics; in the repertoire section of the Petrograd Theatre Department of Narkompros; on the editorial board of the journal Repertuar; and quite a few others.20 However, he quickly became disillusioned with the
Bolsheviks and their methods — as he once put it in a conversation with
Gor′kii, his ‘faith in the wisdom of humanity’ had ended.21 He did not write a single line of poetry for three years: ‘All sounds have stopped for me’, he mentioned to Kornei Chukovskii, ‘Can’t you hear that there are no sounds any longer?’.22 From time to time he performed his verse for audiences in Petrograd and Moscow. His last public speech,
‘O naznachenii poeta’ (‘On the Poet’s Calling’, January 1921), was dedicated to the anniversary of Aleksandr Pushkin’s death. Centred on the conflict between freedom of expression and the absolutism of the
Tsarist authoritarian state, it contained unmistakable references to the contemporary agenda;23 and sounded like a doom-laden prophecy for literature in the oppressive climate of the socialist regime.
Nevertheless, taking into account Blok’s initially liberal (albeit only fleeting) attitude towards the Soviet state, and the fact that he was undoubtedly a major poet of his age, it was his legacy which was appropriated by the system, and for years to come was preserved, |
19
Aleksandr Blok, letter to his mother, 13 April 1909, in Aleksandr Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, 8 vols., edited by V. N. Orlov, A. A. Surkov and K. I. Chukovskii
(Moscow-Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1960–1963), VIII, 281.
20
V. L. Shepelev and V. N. Liubimov, ‘“On budet pisat′ stikhi protiv nas”. Pravda o bolezni i smerti Aleksandra Bloka (1921)’, Istochnik, 2 (1995), 33–45 (pp. 34–42). For a more detailed account of Blok’s life and work see Avril Pyman, The Life of Aleksandr
Blok, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).
21
Maksim Gor′kii, ‘A. A. Blok’ (1923), in Sobranie sochinenii, XXIV, 425–27 (p. 427).
22
Kornei Chukovskii, ‘Vospominaniia o Bloke’, in Sobranie sochinenii, 6 vols. (Moscow:
Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1965–1969), II (1965), p. 311.
23
At this time Blok was already terminally ill (and died eight months later); his application for permission to leave the country in order to obtain the required medical treatment in Finland was rejected by the Politburo (and more specifically by
Lenin) in spring 1921; see Shepelev and Liubimov, pp. 34–42.
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reproduced and disseminated as an expression, or more precisely as an artefact, of the state approved culture. This fact in no way compromises the value of Blok’s oeuvre; but the mechanism of his canonisation requires a more in-depth consideration in this context: firstly, because it consists of much more than a simple text-to-reader relation (as a carrier of cultural capital, a canonical work can become a vector of ideological motifs not necessarily embedded within the work itself); and secondly, because there may be several different canons circulating within a specific culture during a particular historical stage. When speaking of the formation of boundaries to existing literary knowledge or expression, Alastair Fowler describes six major types of literary canons: the potential canon would theoretically contain all works of written and oral literature; the accessible canon, in contrast, would consist of those works readers would actually come into contact with. Different criteria further narrow the accessible canon to produce selective canons. Some of these include the official canons shaped by mechanisms of patronage, education or censorship; the critical canons evidenced in trends in literary scholarship; and the personal canons of any individual reader’s tastes and knowledge.24 Below we shall examine Blok’s position within the spectrum of the given canonical strands. |
Considering the official canon, shaped through the mechanisms of censorship and education, it is worth bearing in mind that starting from the mid-1920s, Soviet Russia had begun to reconfigure the platform of its cultural agenda. Trotskii’s idea of a world-wide revolution had been gradually phased out; and in 1925 the Party Conference put forward a different aim of constructing socialism in one country.25 The emphasis was on building the nation, which involved creating a new ethnic entity — the Soviet people. This required a radical shift in the government’s ideological policies: a step back to conservative values, a
24
Alastair Fowler, ‘Genre and the Literary Canon’, p. 98.
25
The resolution was read by Lev Kamenev, who claimed: ‘By pursuing the right policy, namely reinforcing the socialist elements in our economics, we will show that despite the reluctant tempo of the international revolution, socialism must be built, can be built together with the representatives of peasants in our country, and it will be built’; XIV konferentsiia Rossiiskoi Kommunisticheskoi partii (bol’shevikov): stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow and Leningrad: Gosizdat, 1925), p. 267.
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vindication of the past and a re-establishment of the concept of cultural heritage.26 |
vindication of the past and a re-establishment of the concept of cultural heritage.26
The new focus referred to continuity and tradition, and Blok fitted nicely into the scheme. Due to his considerable output and the broad thematic spectrum of his oeuvre, his legacy presented a vast store of material for the Soviet principle of selective reading.27 His first cycle of poems, Stikhi o Prekrasnoi dame (Verses on the Beautiful Lady, 1904) saturated with the religious mysticism of Vladimir Solov′ev, was completely sidelined; and attention was fixed entirely on the patriotic pathos of his writings, exemplified, for instance, by the cycle Rodina
(Native Land, 1907–1916) or Na pole Kulikovom (On the Field of Kulikovo,
1908). The description of St Petersburg that Blok crafted for his earlier collection Gorod (The City, 1904–1908), was both impressionistic and eerie. Representing his idea of an ‘artificial hell’, it was often based on the conflict between the Platonic theory of ideal beauty and the disappointing reality of perilous industrialism (‘Neznakomka’
(‘The Unknown Woman’, 1906)). Gorod was read as an expression of disapproval and interpreted along the lines of social criticism of the
Tsarist regime.28 Generally speaking, Blok was seen as a useful resource for filling the gaps in the newly established cultural progression, since he was a generic example of a transitional author who highlighted the decay of the capitalist order in such poems as ‘Fabrika’ (‘The Factory’,
1903), ‘Rossiia’ (‘Russia’, 1908), or ‘Na zheleznoi doroge’ (‘On the
Railway’, 1910). Due to his origins and imperfect class orientation, |
26
David Elliot, New Worlds: Russian Art and Society 1900–1937 (London: Thames and
Hudson Ltd., 1986), pp. 22–26.
27
Within the framework of partiinost’ (party-mindedness), any literary work was considered from a purely political perspective, comprising such aspects as a selective approach to the content, which was supposed to direct its readers towards interpreting a text along the lines of the Party aims; an appreciation of the characters as representatives of a specific social stratum, and a class-defined viewpoint on the analysis of the form: ‘Our analysis, conducted in a Marxist way, will open our eyes not only on the characters, but also on their author, who does have the power to guide them and who does determine everything in literature, but whose mentality, in turn, is preconditioned by his class-related psycho-ideology’; V. V. Golubkov and
M. A. Rybnikova, Izuchenie literatury v shkole II stupeni. Metodika chteniia (Moscow:
Gosizdat, 1929), p. 36.
28
Programmy srednei obshcheobrazovatel’noi shkoly. Literatura 4–10 klassy (Moscow:
Prosveshchenie, 1983), p. 54.
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however, he lacked the necessary political consciousness to embrace the principles of socialist art. |
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however, he lacked the necessary political consciousness to embrace the principles of socialist art.
It is true that Blok’s poetry was by nature less esoteric, simpler, and, perhaps, less abstract than that of some other Silver Age authors. Over the years he evinced an extraordinary ability to evoke life as it is in both its happy moments (‘O, vesna bez kontsa i bez kraiu’ (‘Oh, spring without an end and without a limit’, 1907), ‘I vnov’ — poryvy iunykh let’ (‘And again — the impulses of youth’, 1912)) and its most depressive manifestations, represented in such poems as ‘Pliaski smerti’ (‘Dances of Death’, 1914), ‘Golos iz khora’ (‘A Voice from the Chorus’, 1914) or
‘Miry letiat. Goda letiat’ (‘Worlds fly past. Years fly past’, 1912), which, thanks to their doomed and negative perspective, were often seen as an expression of the ruthless realism of the poet’s nib. Like many Russian intellectuals of the time, Blok was aware of the real gap separating the intelligentsia and the Russian people, as he put it in his famous speech
Narod i intelligentsia (The People and the Intelligentsia, November 1908):
There is a line between two camps — the people and the intelligentsia
[…] these two camps still do not see each other and do not want to know each other; and those who are looking for peace and concurrence are still treated as traitors and deserters by both the majority of people and the majority of the intelligentsia.29 |
Blok challenged the intelligentsia’s assumption of their shared identity with, and their leading position towards, the Russian people, and appealed to them to surrender their high culture to the popular stikhiinost′ (element). He himself also tried to break out of the artificially created world of aestheticism towards the uncomplicated, down-toearth life of simple people. ‘I still live very quietly, on my own’, he wrote to Belyi, ‘I work a lot and everything is profoundly simple’.30 Russia became a major focus of his writing at the time — a theme in which he found his vocation, his civic responsibility as a creator:
I face my theme — the theme of Russia […]. To this theme I consciously and irrevocably dedicate my life. This is the most significant question,
29
First published as ‘Rossiia i intelligentsia’, Zolotoe runo, 1 (1909); Sobranie sochinenii,
V, 321–27 (p. 324).
30
Blok, letter to Andrei Belyi, 5 April 1908, in A. A. Blok-Andrei Belyi: Perepiska (Munich:
Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969), p. 229.
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the most vital, the most real. I have been approaching this question for a long time from the beginning of my conscious life, and I know that my road in its basic aspiration is as straight and as purposeful as an arrow.31 |
Although he pursued this vocation with almost suicidal sincerity, fervour and dedication (for his world had always been the world of absolutes), his yearning for a simple life was constantly undercut by profound depression and despair, his feeling of spiritual emptiness and isolation, as well as his disgust in the face of the society he lived in.
This is not to say that the element of social concern in his writings was entirely contrived, but it was clearly generated by both his repulsion with the world and a horror at his own condition. To a certain extent he always remained the poet of intoxication: whether in surrendering himself to the flow of the popular stikhiinost′, or drowning in the ecstasy of oblivion in poems such as ‘V chas, kogda p′ianeiut nartsissy’ (‘In the Hour when Narcissi are Intoxicated’, 1904) and ‘Ia prigvozhden k traktirnoi stoike’ (‘I am nailed to the bar in the tavern’, 1908). |
As regards the Revolution, during the last period of his creative work, Blok did put forward some political comments, pondering on the messianic destiny of the country, in Vozmezdie (Retribution, 1910–1921) and ‘Skify’ (‘The Scythians’, 1918). Influenced by Solov′ev’s doctrines, he had vague apocalyptic apprehensions and often vacillated between hope and despair: ‘Behind the storm, there opened a ferocious void of the day, menacing, however, with a new storm and concealing within itself a promise of it. These were the inter-revolutionary years that have exhausted and worn out body and soul. Now there is another storm’, he wrote in his diary during the summer of 1917.32 Quite unexpectedly
(at least for his close circle) he accepted the October Revolution as the final resolution to these apocalyptic yearnings. The official Soviet stance on Blok, however, was configured in a somewhat different way. Blok was presented as a severe critic of bourgeois society, who displayed a suffocating picture of Tsarist Russia and revealed its social injustice with a strong emphasis on the motif of retribution — hence the title of his major cycle of seventeen poems (1908–1913), as well as his verse epic
Vozmezdie. The Revolution was seen as a cathartic power, which ignited
31
Blok, letter to Konstantin Stanislavskii, 9 December 1908, Sobranie sochinenii, VIII,
265.
32
Blok, diary entry, 15 August 1917, Sobranie sochinenii, VII, 300–01.
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Blok’s poetic inspiration, manifesting itself in his two best-known poems ‘Skify’ and Dvenadtsat′ (The Twelve, 1918). |
Blok’s poetic inspiration, manifesting itself in his two best-known poems ‘Skify’ and Dvenadtsat′ (The Twelve, 1918).
In Dvenadtsat′, Blok included some eloquent poetic speculation on the meaning of the Revolution in the relentless spiral of human history.
It depicts a group of twelve Red Army soldiers (a clear allusion to the twelve apostles) marching through revolutionary Petrograd, led by the mysterious figure of Jesus Christ ascendant at the end (an image whose symbolism defied a straightforward interpretation and which was therefore commonly disparaged by the critics who held sway after the Revolution).33 Ambivalence pervades the poem, and contrast is its structural principle, analysed in great detail in Sergei Hackel’s monograph The Poet and the Revolution.34 The opening line ‘Black night. / White snow’ sets out the polarising framework for the poem’s discourse, which alternates revolutionary marching songs with the orthodox liturgy for the dead, colloquial slang, and popular folk songs; clear and chopped rhythms and repetitive array of symbols all help to capture the mood of the time, as well as the poet’s own uncertain view of the events.35 In the words of Maiakovskii, who was one of the most faithful admirers of Blok’s talent: ‘two contrasting apprehensions of the
Revolution linked fantastically in his poem Dvenadtsat′. Some read in this poem a satire on the Revolution, others a celebration’.36
Despite all its controversy (Kamenev and Trotskii, for instance, always denied the revolutionary content of Blok’s writings: ‘To be sure,
Blok is not one of ours’, wrote Trotskii in 1924, ‘but he reached towards us. And in doing so, he broke down’), the poem became popular straight after its first publication on 3 March 1918: it was widely recited and publicly performed.37 |
33
For a modern interpretation of the finale of Dvenadtsat′, see Sergei Averintsev et al.,
‘Final “Dvenadtsati” — vzgliad iz 2000 goda’, Znamia, 11 (2000), 190–206.
34
Sergei Hackel, The Poet and the Revolution: Aleksandr Blok’s ‘The Twelve’ (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1975).
35
Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, III, 347–59. In her bilingual edition of Dvenadtsat′ (Durham,
UK: University of Durham Press, 1989), Avril Pyman lists seventeen translations of the poem available to date; for the purposes of this chapter a more literal translation of the text by Hackel (pp. 205–29) is preferred.
36
Vladimir Maiakovskii, ‘Umer Aleksandr Blok’, in Sobranie sochinenii, 13 vols., edited by E. I. Naumov (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1955–1961), III (1957),
474.
37
Leo Trotskii, Literature and Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), p. 111; V.
N. Orlov, Zhizn′ Bloka (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2001), p. 544.
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A veil was drawn over the inconvenient fact that it was first published not by the Bolsheviks, but in the oppositional Socialist Revolutionary newspaper Znamia truda.38 The text was configured along the lines of the Soviet state’s current ideological aims and at times censored to the extent of turning into self-parody. The best example of this would be the version which, according to Evgenii Evtushenko, was read in the
Red propaganda units, and in which the unwanted figure of Jesus was substituted with that of a proletarian sailor, who nevertheless still kept the garland of white roses: ‘V belom venchike iz roz — / Vperedi idet matros’ (‘With a garland of white roses spliced — / Up in front is a sailor’).
Having realized how ridiculous this image, verging on caricature, was, the post-war Stalin-era censors made an executive decision and simply cut out the baffling episode altogether.39 |
Dvenadtsat′ entered the school curriculum as ‘the first poem of the October Revolution in Soviet literature’.40 For years it became a trademark of the poet; and for many it remained the only piece of Blok’s writing that they actually knew. It was largely due to Dvenadtsat′ that
Blok has never been effaced from the palette of recommended canonical reading and escaped the condescending remarks directed towards his fellow symbolist authors: ‘Our contemporary literature is also full of outstanding literary influences’, wrote the author of a teachers’ handbook of 1928:
There are organic trends coming from the past (Pushkin, Gogol′,
Tolstoi, Dostoevskii); there are examples of influences of contemporary poets on each other (Maiakovskii-Bezymenskii-Zharov; Blok-EseninAleksandrovskii), and there are some instances of temporary accidental literary imitations such as the ‘bal′montism’ of Gerasimov.41
In this context, the name of Maria Rybnikova deserves special consideration. As a leading methodologist in the field of Soviet secondary education and the author of numerous school anthologies and teachers’
38
Blok, ‘Dvenadtsat′’, Znamia truda, 3 March 1918, p. 2. From spring 1918 the newspaper was in active opposition to the Bolsheviks and Lenin’s politics, and was closed down after the Socialist-Revolutionary uprising in July 1918.
39
Strofy veka. Antologiia russkoi poezii, edited by Evgenii Evtushenko (Minsk-Moscow:
Polifakt, 1995), p. 82.
40
Programmy srednei obshcheobrazovatel’noi shkoly. Literatura, p. 54.
41
M. A. Rybnikova, Russkaia literatura. Voprosnik po russkoi literature dlia zaniatii 7, 8 i 9 grupp shkol 2-i stupeni i dlia pedtekhnikumov (Moscow: Mir, 1928), p. 120.
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handbooks (republished in the 1980s), she expended significant effort in securing Blok’s place in the canon through education. Rybnikova was a long-term admirer of the Russian symbolist poets, and her particular sphere of interest was focused on Blok. She wrote a number of scholarly articles on his poems, the most prominent of which was the essay A.
Blok—Hamlet, published as early as 1923.42
Within the canon shaped by the framework of scholarship and so-called Blok studies, Blok’s poetic output has always enjoyed a vast amount of attention, despite the fact that the poet himself expressed his utmost dismay at the prospect of becoming a subject of scholarly concern. In his poem ‘Druz’iam’ (‘To My Friends’, 24 July 1908) he writes:
Печальная доля — так сложно,
Так трудно и празднично жить,
И стать достояньем доцента,
И критиков новых плодить…
Зарыться бы в свежем бурьяне,
Забыться бы сном навсегда!
Молчите, проклятые книги!
Я вас не писал никогда!43
Depressing fate: to live a life,
So complex, hard and festive,
Only to end as young dons’ prey,
And serve to breed new critics…
Let me delve deeper into weeds,
And sleep oblivious forever!
Be silent cursed books!
I never wrote you, never!
In terms of his impact on the art of poetic composition, Blok was undoubtedly one of the most influential authors of the symbolist movement, and as regards this branch of literary research, it is worth
42
M. A. Rybnikova, A. Blok — Gamlet (Moscow: Svetlana, 1923).
43
Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, III, 125–26; translated in Hackel, p. vii.
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5. Aleksandr Blok in the Changing Russian Literary Canon |
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5. Aleksandr Blok in the Changing Russian Literary Canon
mentioning the works of Viktor Zhirmunskii and Vladimir Orlov,
Pavel Gromov and Dmitrii Maksimov, and the detailed analysis of his prosody and poetics by Mikhail Gasparov, as well as the works of the
Tartu-Moscow Semiotic school, namely those of Iurii Lotman, Aleksei
Losev, and Zara Mints. It is important to bear in mind, however, that for many years Soviet scholarship was predominantly centred on the textual analysis of Blok’s writings (conducted within the framework of literary theory, semiotics, poetics, and topical research), while the metaphysical basis of his oeuvre remained, broadly speaking, a marginal and largely unexplored field (the only systematic study of the philosophical aspects of Russian symbolism in the Soviet period was carried out by Valentin Asmus).44 Two main factors account for this restricted approach. Firstly, up until the late 1950s, there was a sheer lack of material and information. Blok’s letters, notebooks and diaries were published in a more or less complete and systematic form only in the 1960–1963, eight-volume edition of the poet’s Collected Works. Prior to this date these materials were released only sporadically and with considerable omissions. As highlighted by Orlov in his major review article on the legacy of the poet, the two volumes of Blok’s Diaries published in 1928 were largely incomplete and contained the following explanation for editorial interventions:
Our ambition was, of course, to publish the diaries in their authentic and comprehensive form. However, due to the fact that many of the records refer to the living members of our society, we were obliged to make certain textual omissions, which, nonetheless, are of very little significance […]. Moreover, we had to encode a number of proper names; and in order to avoid any unnecessary guessing, they were substituted by asterisks rather than initials.45 |
44
V. F. Asmus, ‘Filosofiia i estetika russkogo simvolizma’, Izbrannye filosofskie trudy, 2 vols. (Moscow: Moscow University, 1969), I, 187–237; Iu. N. Davydov,
Begstvo ot svobody. Filosofskoe mifotvorchestvo i literaturnyi avangard (Moscow:
Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1978) also contributed to the area.
45
V. N. Orlov, ‘Literaturnoe nasledstvo Aleksandra Bloka’, Literaturnoe nasledstvo
(Moscow: Zhurnal′no-gazetnoe ob′′edinenie, 1937), XXVII–XXVIII, 505–74 (p. 559).
The first volume of Blok’s diaries contained the diaries of 1911–1913 and the second those of 1917–1921: Dnevnik Al. Bloka, edited by P. N. Medvedev (Leningrad:
Izdatel′stvo leningradskikh pisatelei, 1928); the diaries of 1901–1902 were published by Orlov later in 1937: ‘Iz literaturnogo naslediia Aleksandra Bloka. Iunosheskii dnevnik’, edited by V. N. Orlov, in Literaturnoe nasledstvo (Moscow: Zhurnal’nogazetnoe ob′′edinenie, 1937), XXVII–XXVIII, 299–370.
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In practice, these omissions went far beyond the designated frame and, according to Orlov’s scholarly analysis, resulted in a significant distortion of the author’s text. Blok’s notebooks, printed by Priboi (The
Surf) in 1930, were subjected to even more severe excisions, so that, in the words of the editor, ‘certain notebooks had to be omitted in their entirety, and the material of the others was drastically reduced’.46 The same practice applied equally to Blok’s letters and continued all way through the Khrushchev Thaw.47 Although in the mid-1960s Orlov pointed out that it was time to release a new, comprehensive academic edition of Blok’s works and correspondence, and in 1973 Zil′bershtein reiterated the matter, no such edition was issued until 1997.48 |
The second reason was directly related to the dominance of state censorship in the Soviet cultural field, which meant that scholarly works that focused primarily on textual analysis and literary techniques enjoyed a somewhat higher degree of freedom of expression, remote from ideological and political concerns. This partly explains the prominence of semiotic and structuralist analysis in Blok studies. Apart from the enormous power and grace of his writing, where formality merged with freedom, elevated language with vulgarity, public discourse with personal reflections and with song, his greater innovation was the emancipation of Russian metrics. The regular syllabic-accentuated scheme elaborated in the eighteenth century, and used almost without exception thereafter, was in many of his poems shifted to a purely stress metric — a development, of course, with close parallels in the history of modernist Western prosodies. Such major scholars as Lotman, Mints,
Losev and Gasparov presented an in-depth examination of Blok’s style |
46
Orlov, ‘Literaturnoe nasledstvo Aleksandra Bloka’, p. 560.
47
Prior to the 1960s edition of Blok’s collected works (8 vols.), his letters were released sporadically and in various editions: Pis’ma Aleksandra Bloka, edited by S.
M. Solov’ev, G. I. Chulkov, A. D. Skaldin and V. N. Kniazhnin (Leningrad: Kolos,
1925), with four introductory articles by the editors, who were also the addressees of the letters; Pis’ma Aleksandra Bloka k rodnym, 2 vols., edited by M. A. Beketova
(Moscow-Leningrad: Akademiia, 1927–1932); Pis’ma Al Bloka k E. P. Ivanovu, edited by T. S. Vol’pe (Moscow-Leningrad: AN SSSR, 1936).
48
V. N. Orlov, Blokovskii sbornik, Trudy nauchnoi konferentsii, posviashchennoi izucheniiu zhizni i tvorchestva A. A. Bloka, mai 1962, edited by Iu. M. Lotman et al. (Tartu:
Tartusskii gosudarstvennyi univesitet, 1964); I. S. Zil′bershtein, Literaturnaia gazeta,
4 April 1973, p. 8, quoted in Hackel, p. 237; Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v 20 tomakh, edited by A. N. Grishunin (Moscow: Nauka, 1997–1999).
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5. Aleksandr Blok in the Changing Russian Literary Canon
and poetics, drawing attention to his daring rhymes and innovative versification, to the intricate language of his symbols, and to the vast connotative spectrum of his verse.49 Having added an extra layer of complexity to the subject of their studies, these works (together with some other factors) conjured a complementary image of the poet, opening up new avenues in the reception of his oeuvre, accessible to those who were prepared to extend their reading beyond the limits of prescriptive curriculum lists. |
As regards Blok’s position and function within this kind of alternative, and essentially dissenting canon, these can be best understood by looking closely into the processes of its configuration and the contingencies of its subsequent transmission and preservation. One of the factors to be taken into account is the history of publishing in the Soviet Union. Curiously enough, the cultural activities of the elite were less directly touched by state-led initiatives than those of the masses (specifically in education).
As Anthony Kemp-Welch describes it, ‘NEP permitted considerable freedom to Russia’s brilliant elites […] cultural experiments were […] exuberant — constructivism, suprematism, utopian architecture and innovative theatre — offering an artistic counterpart to the political revolution’.50 The Bolsheviks understood that what influenced the political outlook of the masses was far more significant than writings aimed at the refined taste of the elite. Although in the first decade of
Bolshevik control private publishing houses printed only a small and ever-diminishing share of the total output of the literary material, they nonetheless made a contribution to the variety of texts available to the Soviet reader, bringing out a significant proportion of editions on philosophy, the works of fiction and translations. For instance, authors whose pro-Bolshevik credentials were not remotely flawless, such as
Merezhkovskii, Nikolai Berdiaev, Semen Frank and Nikolai Losskii, were still published (by private publishers) in the mid-1920s; the same
49
Zara Mints, Poetika Aleksandra Bloka (St Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 1999); Iurii Lotman,
‘A. A. Blok. Anne Akhmatovoi’; ‘Blok i narodnaia kul′tura goroda’; ‘“Chelovek prirody” v russkoi literature XIX veka i “tsyganskaia tema” u Bloka’, in Iurii
Lotman, O poetakh i poezii (St Petersburg: Iskusstvo, 1996), pp. 211–20, pp. 653–69, pp. 670–75.
50
Anthony Kemp-Welch, Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 1928–1939 (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1991), p. 34. |
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can be said about the symbolist poems of Blok that were produced in
Petrograd by the Alkonost publishing house.
Another relevant factor is that up until the 1960s, quite a few people who knew Blok personally were still active on the Soviet literary scene.
Through their social conversations and published records (for instance, those of Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Iurii Annenkov and many others), they moulded and passed on their own image of the poet — that of a refined aesthete, a herald of divine beauty — an echt embodiment of poetic inspiration itself. The reminiscences of Chukovskii, and more specifically his description of Blok reading Neznakomka at one of the gatherings in Ivanov’s ‘tower’, are particularly exemplary in this respect:
And Blok, sluggish, looking calm, young and sunburnt (he always got his tan already in early spring), climbed up some huge iron armature, connecting telephone wires, and in response to our unceasing begging, for the third, and even for the fourth time in a row read this everlasting ballad with his measured, muffled, monotonous, docile and tragic voice.
And, while absorbing its ingenious phono-scripture, we have been suffering in anticipation that this enchantment would come to an end, whereas we all wanted it to last for hours.51
The fact that Blok was one of the most influential poets of his time is difficult to overlook. The richness of his images, which he conjured out of the most banal surroundings and trivial events (eg. ’V restorane’ (‘In the Restaurant’) or ‘Na zheleznoi doroge’ (‘On the Railway’)) inspired generations of younger poets: Sergei Esenin, Akhmatova, and Boris
Pasternak. Compare, for instance, Blok’s poem ‘Rus′’ (‘Russia’, 1906) with the poem of the same title written by Esenin (1914), which effectively invokes the same metaphor of an impenetrable and ghostly land:
Русь, опоясана реками |
Русь, опоясана реками
И дебрями окружена,
С болотами и журавлями,
И с мутным взором колдуна.52
51
Kornei Chukovskii, Sovremenniki. Portrety i etiudy (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia,
1967), p. 250.
52
Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, II, 99.
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Rus′ is embraced by rivers
And surrounded by thick forests,
With marshes and cranes,
And with a hazy look of a sorcerer
И стоят за дубровными сетками,
Словно нечисть лесная, пеньки.
Запугала нас сила нечистая,
Что ни прорубь — везде колдуны.53
And behind the array of oaks, there
Stand tree-trunks, like wood demons.
We were all scared by these evil spirits,
A sorcerer looks out of every ice-break.
Likewise, one can find numerous echoes of Blok’s patterns in
Akhmatova’s poems. Zhirmunskii — one of the first major scholars of Russian symbolism — once pointed out that this was not a case of imitation in its most traditional sense, but rather a kind of ‘contamination’ of her writing with Blok’s means of expression, imagery and certain metrico-syntactic structures.54
И такая влекущая сила,
Что готов я твердить за молвой,
Будто ангелов ты низводила,
Соблазняя своей красотой.55
And it is such an appealing power, that
I am happy to follow the rumour, acting
As if you brought angels down from heaven,
seducing them by your beauty.
53
Sergei Esenin, Sobranie sochineni, 7 vols., edited by Iu. L. Prokushev (Moscow:
Nauka-Golos, 1995–2002), II (1997), 17.
54
V. M. Zhirmunskii, ‘Anna Akhmatova i Aleksandr Blok’, in Izbrannye trudy. Teoriia literatury. Poetika. Stilistika (Leningrad: Nauka, 1977), pp. 323–52 (p. 339).
55
Blok, ‘K muze’ (1912), Sobranie sochinenii, III, 7.
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И такая могучая сила
Зачарованный голос влечет, |
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И такая могучая сила
Зачарованный голос влечет,
Будто там впереди не могила,
А таинственной лестницы взлет.56
And such a compelling power
Draws the bewitched voice on,
As if ahead there were no grave,
But a flight of mysterious stairs.
Maiakovskii, whose own style and convictions were hardly comparable to Blok’s vision of aesthetics, was absolutely enthralled by the mastery of the poet’s writing; and, according to the memoirs of David Burliuk, could easily recite from memory the vast majority of Blok’s poetic collections.57 These examples are manifold and stretch far beyond the literary domain. In music, Blok inspired Arthur Lourie’s choral cantata Dans le temple du rêve d’or (In the Sanctuary of Golden Dreams,
1919), Shostakovich’s lyric song cycle for soprano and piano trio, Seven
Romances of Aleksandr Blok (1967), and Sergei Slonimskii’s cantata A Voice from the Chorus (1963–1976); in art one might immediately think of the series of eye-catching illustrations to Blok’s poems created in the early
1980s by the then oppositional artist Il′ia Glazunov.58 All these primary, and in the case of art and music, secondary references to Blok’s writings are, of course, of major cultural importance: they affirm the canonical status of the original, and constitute an effective mechanism of attaching value to the poet’s oeuvre.59 This aspect, however, has an extra political dimension in the Russian context. Curiously enough, the majority for whom Blok provided an inspiration were, in one way or another, at |
56
Anna Akhmatova, Sochineniia, 2 vols., edited by M. M. Kralin (Moscow: Tsitadel’,
1997), I, 284; translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, The Complete Poems of Anna
Akhmatova, edited by Roberta Reeder, 2 vols. (Somerville: Zephyr Press, 1990), II,
685.
57
Burliuk, quoted by E. I. Naumov in his commentary to Maiakovskii’s obituary
‘Umer Aleksander Blok’, in Maiakovskii, Sobranie sochinenii, III, 653.
58
Aleksandr Blok v illiustratsiiakh I. Glazunova (a set of 16 postcards) (Moscow:
Iskusstvo, 1982).
59
The representation of Blok in Soviet cinema as an affirmation of the canon delivered to the mass viewer is a matter of separate investigation: Olga Sobolev, Appropriated by the Revolution: Blok and the Socialist Realist Cinema, presented at the AAASS
Conference, Boston, November 2013.
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odds with the Soviet system (the aforementioned authors are exemplary in this respect), which in itself, and not without a reason, had some bearing on the ideological reputation of their source. |
In other words, the representation of Blok in Soviet culture can be characterized by a so-called double exposure. The first layer, configured by the school curriculum, firmly wedded the poet to the Revolution.
It highlighted the patriotism of his lyrics; the revolutionary echoes in Dvenadtsat′; and associated his legacy with the notion of socially engaged writing. One can say that as an object of cultural capital, Blok’s oeuvre was clearly appropriated by the dominant class. The second layer was available only to ‘the happy few’ — those who (through superior judgement or benefit of learning) were prepared to go beyond this artificially created frame. For all its greatness, Dvenadtsat′ could not be made to stand for all of Blok; and for many he essentially remained a lyric poet in the Romantic tradition — one of the last heirs of the nineteenth-century Russian intellectual elite. By the mid-1950s Blok had become a canonical emblem of this elite — an epitome of poetic refinement, of sublime aestheticism, and spiritual elevation, but always with the double connotation of an angel fallen from grace. Gradually
(from the early seventies and throughout Brezhnev’s years), these particular undertones acquired a distinctly political dimension, which, in a way, reflected the overall status of the intelligentsia in the Soviet state. Leonid Trauberg, an eminent Russian film director, testified that he and his fellow artists secretly preferred Blok to Maiakovskii: ‘he was much closer to our hearts’, he reckoned, ‘but we were deeply ashamed to voice these thoughts’.60 At that time the Russian intelligentsia saw itself as a hostage of the system, and such qualities of Blok’s writings as their charming sadness and vulnerability, the sense of spiritual isolation and sacrificial suffering were profoundly internalized (the circumstances of his death were widely known among cultural circles).61 He became an |
60
V. Shcherbina, ‘O gruppe estetstvuiushchikh kosmopolitov v kino’, Iskusstvo kino, 1
(1949), 14–16 (pp. 14–15).
61
A vivid reflection of this atmosphere can be found in Stanislav Rostotskii’s 1972 film
А zori zdes’ tikhie (And the Dawns Here Are Quiet). The film is set in 1942: five young girls from the division of the anti-aircraft gunners are sent on a doomed mission to stop a detachment of German paratroopers. During her night-watch duty, Sonia, the only heroine with a university background, characteristically recites Blok’s poem ‘Rozhdennye v goda glukhie’ (‘Those Born in the Years of Stagnation’), which is charmingly mistaken for a prayer by her village-man commander Vas’kov.
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echo of the hopeless cry of a trapped generation, bidding farewell to the end of the liberal Thaw. As Pasternak claimed in his 1956 poem:
Но Блок, слава Богу, иная,
Иная, по счастью, статья.
Он к нам не спускался с Синая,
Нас не принимал в сыновья.
Прославленный не по программе
И вечный вне школ и систем,
Он не изготовлен руками
И нам не навязан никем.62
But Blok is, thank Heaven, another,
A different matter for once,
He did not descend from Sinai
And not accept us as sons.
Eternal and not manufactured,
Renown not according to plan,
Outside schools and systems, he has not
Been foisted upon us by man. |
Renown not according to plan,
Outside schools and systems, he has not
Been foisted upon us by man.
The fact that Blok was canonised by the Russian intelligentsia as an expression of its self-image is in no way coincidental. The poet had always identified himself with and had a troubled attitude towards the intelligentsia, which effectively made him a typical representative of this social group. In his diary entries for January 1918, he repudiates
‘the intelligentsia’, referring to its negative view of the revolution, its instinctive ‘hatred of parliaments, institutional gatherings and so on’, and bitterly remarks that ‘the smart alecks of the intelligentsia do not want to get their hands dirty with work’. In the same entries, however, he identifies with that very intelligentsia, calling it ‘dear’ and ‘native’ scum.63 He claims that the removal of the gap between the intelligentsia and the people requires the former to love Russia as ‘a mother,
62
Pasternak, ‘Veter’ (see note 1 above; the reference to ‘his adopted sons’ in the fourth line is an allusion to Stalin, who was regarded as the father of the Soviet people).
63
Blok, diary entry, 5 January 1918, Sobranie sochinenii, VII, 315; diary entry, 18 January
1918, Sobranie sochinenii, VII, 321.
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5. Aleksandr Blok in the Changing Russian Literary Canon |
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5. Aleksandr Blok in the Changing Russian Literary Canon
sister and wife’, and places himself in the role of that wife’s lover by repeatedly stressing his status as ‘a member of the intelligentsia’.64
According to Mints, the same type of identification is reflected in his poetic compositions, namely in the cycle Rodina and his verse drama
Pesnia sud’by (Song of Fate, 1908); in these writings the poet-protagonist is repeatedly presented as Russia’s suitor or her promised husband, which, Mints maintains, irrevocably leads the reader to interpret him as a synecdoche for the intelligentsia.65 At the same time, in a series of articles and speeches at the end of 1908, Blok argued that the intelligentsia was simply obsolete as a driving social force.66 He accused it of pursuing a fatally individualistic course, expending its energies in literary novelties, nebulous philosophical speculations, and mechanical political activities, which had no connection with the needs and desires of the Russian people. Intellectuals, he wrote, loving ‘individualism, demonism, aesthetics, and despair’, were imbued with the ‘will to die’, thus becoming fundamentally opposed to the people, sustaining ‘from time immemorial — the will to live’.67 This, for Blok, was the cornerstone of the problem, making the intelligentsia incapable of national advocacy and moral leadership. |
The feelings of self-doubt, ethical questioning, and reflection are, evidently, a constant factor in intellectual life, not least in that of the
Russian intelligentsia. During the decades of Soviet power their old task of moral criticism and articulating national ideals acquired a new vitality in opposition to the regime. Moreover, throughout the apathy of the Brezhnev era, this was enhanced by the profound sense of disillusionment of many who had by and large been prepared to carry out the role allotted to them — a metaphysical rejection of the present and a psychological denigration of the possibility of change became the mode.68 Effectively, each element of this quintessential array — spiritual
64
Blok, ‘Rossiia i intelligentsia’, Sobranie sochinenii, V, 321; 319; 327.
65
Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, III, 251–54; IV, 148–49; Mints, Poetika Bloka, p. 351.
66
His critical essays on the topic include: ‘Russia and the Intelligentsia’ (1908) and
‘Nature and Culture’ (1908); for a more detailed analysis of Blok’s views on the
Russian intelligentsia see Jane Burbank, Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism, 1917–1922 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 9–11.
67
Blok, ‘Rossiia i intelligentsia’, Sobranie sochinenii, V, 327.
68
For a more detailed account of the changes in the intelligentsia’s views in the Soviet period see Catriona Kelly, ‘New Boundaries for the Common Good’, in Constructing
Russian Culture in the Age of Revolution 1881–1940, edited by Catriona Kelly and
David Shepherd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 238–55.
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abandonment, introspective reflection, despair and self-loathing — had a distinct parallel in Blok’s own social and cultural position, turning him ipso facto into a canonical icon of the intelligentsia’s views. His legacy (as well as his own image) began to function as a symbol of an alternative culture, and in this sense offered a perfect example of social conceptualisation brought about entirely by the grassroots activities of a particular group.
The first years of the post-Soviet period were characterised by a distinct reconfiguration of the country’s cultural agenda. The abolition of state censorship and, consequently, of the official canon, the changes in the educational system and a tremendous increase in the number of privately printed books gave a new impetus to the debates on the function and value of literature, as well as on the formation of a canon of important works. When looking at the position of Blok (and the cohort of symbolist authors) in this newly developed context, two main issues should be considered. Firstly, the beginning of the
1990s was characterized by an unparalleled growth of interest in the legacy of the Silver Age. This can be demonstrated by the publication of such rare volumes as the collected poems of KR (the Grand Duke
Konstantin Konstantinovich Romanov), edited by Askol’d Muratov, as well as a series of critical articles concerning his artistic output; the selected poems of Konstantin Sluchevskii, Solov’ev, Semen Nadson,
Konstantin Fofanov, and Gippius; and, for the first time since 1914, an edition of poems by Merezhkovskii.69 Moreover, the emphasis had now shifted considerably: it was transferred onto the philosophical platform of the symbolist authors, with a distinct attempt to establish an interdisciplinary approach to the field.70 An increasing number of |
69
D. S. Merezhkovskii, Sobranie sochinenii, 4 vols., edited by O. Mikhailov (Moscow:
Pravda, 1990).
70
S. N. Broitman, Russkaia lirika XIX — nachala XX veka v svete istoricheskoi poetiki
(Moscow: RGGU, 1997); Vladimir Solov′ev i kul′tura Serebrianogo veka, edited by E.
A. Takho-Godi (Moscow: Nauka, 2005); S. P. Bel′chevichen, Problema vzaimosviazi kul′tury i religii v filosofii D. S. Merezhkovskogo (Tver′: Izdatel′stvo Tverskogo universiteta, 1999); E. Andrushchenko, Vlastelin ‘chuzhogo’: tekstologiia i problema poetiki D. S. Merezhkovskogo (Moscow: Vodolei, 2012); S. Sapozhkov, ‘Russkaia poeziia
1880–1890-kh godov: “konstruktivnost” khaosa ili “esteticheskii immoralizm”?’,
Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 75 (2005), 338–47; G. Obatin, Ivanov-mistik: Okkul′tnye motivy v poezii i proze Viacheslava Ivanova (Moscow: NLO, 2000); E. A. Takho-Godi,
‘Vladimir Solov′ev i Konstantin Sluchevskii. K istorii vzaimootnoshenii’, in Kontekst:
1993. Literaturno-istoricheskie issledovaniia (Moscow: Nasledie, 1996), 323–40.
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works were released by a variety of specialists in literature, philosophy and cultural studies, and in this respect the studies of Efim Etkind and
Aleksandr Etkind are particularly notable.71 Symbolism started to be treated as a complex and far-reaching movement, which set out the framework for exploring the interaction between philosophy and art.
The analysis of such interactions contributed to the appreciation of the philosophic theories of such major thinkers as Solov′ev, Nietzsche, and
Schopenhauer, and their impact on the creative output of the symbolist writings of Merezhkovskii and Ivanov, Belyi, Feodor Sologub and Blok. |
The second issue is related to the tendency to denigrate virtually the entire artistic output promoted in Soviet Russia before Gorbachev’s years of perestroika and glasnost′. It became fashionable for iconoclastic critics to attack ‘liberal’ or ‘dissident’ writers of the socialist realist tradition from various different angles: either because of the conventional style of their work and the conservative nationalist viewpoint espoused by some, or because of the political and cultural compromises the artists were obliged to make with the system. In the 1990s vociferous adherents of alternative literature belittled virtually any cultural product of the post-Stalin era which displayed the moral or political concerns of its creator.72
One would think that the interaction of both trends would undermine
Blok’s position in the newly configured canon. The so-called accessible canon became broader, the competition in the field became stronger, and attention should have been drawn to the newly emerging, previously unknown names rather than to established figures. The mechanisms of the selective canon also should not have worked (at least in theory) in favour of a formerly classic writer, recommended and promoted by a now denigrated regime. This rather ill-fated combination, however, did not seem to weaken the poet’s viability within the post-Soviet canon: his name still has the same weight in secondary education and features in literary anthologies with a considerably wider spectrum of verse. As far as indirect references to Blok’s oeuvre are concerned, in the 1990s |
71
E. G. Etkind, Tam vnutri: O russkoi poezii XX veka (St Petersburg: Maksima, 1997); A.
M. Etkind, Sodom i psikheia. Ocherki intellektual′noi istorii Serebrianogo veka (Moscow:
Its-Garant, 1996), A. M. Etkind, Eros nevozmozhnogo: Istoriia psikhoanaliza v Rossii
(St Petersburg: Meduza, 1994); A. M. Etkind, Khlyst: Sekty, literatura i revoliutsiia
(Moscow: NLO, 1998).
72
See, for instance, V. Erofeev, ‘Soviet Literature: In Memoriam’, Glas, 1 (1991), 225–
34; M. Kharitonov, ‘Apologiia literatury’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 19 June 1991, 11.
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his writings reached an even wider audience through popular culture, when his poem ‘Devushka pela v tserkovnom khore’ (‘A Girl Sang in a Church Choir’, 1905) was used by Slavianskii Bank in a series of its commercials Poeziia v reklame (Poetry in Advertising), shown in the cinema and on the major Russian TV channels.73 Initially the series was based on four authors, Blok, Mandel′shtam, Pushkin and Pasternak — all with a distinctly non-conformist attitude towards the system; the advertisements using poems by Esenin and Daniil Kharms, added later, made these undertones even more pronounced. At first glance Blok’s legacy appears simply inexhaustible, but on closer consideration one cannot fail to notice that its reproduction and representation remain largely defined by the poet’s perceived social connotations. In the school curriculum, followed universally throughout Russia as a major mechanism of engraving cultural views, Blok is indeed no longer classified as a revolutionary poet,74 but it is nonetheless the motif of
Mother Russia and the elements of his socially engaged writing which still dominate the questions offered in the exams (bearing witness to the prevailing priorities).75 This, of course, ties in well with the nationalistic drift in Putin’s current policies; and curricular intervention in this context simply reaffirms the concept of desirable cultural assets, embodied in or associated with canonical works.76 |
73
The text in the clip using Blok’s poem (shot by Timur Bekmambetov) is read by
Vladimir Mashkov, a cult figure in Russian cinema, which added to the public appeal of the venture. The initiative of using poetry in advertising has now been picked up by another major company Mobile Tele-Systems (MTS), which in 2005 created its own clips based on poems by Blok (‘Night, street and streetlamp, drugstore’ (1912)) and Igor′ Severianin.
74
This absurd attempt to turn Blok into a revolutionary poet (prevalent in the Soviet era) was parodied in Viktor Pelevin’s widely read novel Chapaev i Pustota (1996): to heighten his pro-Bolshevik credentials the poet himself amends the finale of The
Twelve, using the infamous image of a ‘sailor’ (see note 39): ‘With a garland of white roses spliced — / Up in front is a sailor’ (Viktor Pelevin, Chapaev i Pustota (Moscow:
Vagrius, 1999), p. 36).
75
The list of Blok’s poems specified in the programme of the Unified State
Examination in literature (EGE) speaks for itself. It includes: ‘The Twelve’, ‘The
Unknown Woman’, ‘Russia’, ‘Night, Street and Streetlamp, Drugstore’, ‘In the
Restaurant’, ‘On the Field of Kulikovo’, ‘On the Railway’, ‘Factory’, ‘Russia’ (‘Rus′’),
‘On Courage, Heroic Deeds and Glory’: Kodifikator elementov soderzhaniia i trebovanii k urovniu podgotovki vypusknikov obshcheobrazovatel′nykh uchrezhdenii dlia edinogo gosudarstvennogo ekzamena 2010 goda po literature (Moscow: Federal′nyi institut pedagogicheskikh izmerenii, 2010), p. 7.
76
Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 310.
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As regards scholarly studies of Blok, this domain represents, perhaps, the most interesting terrain in terms of reconfiguration of the canon, and provides some noteworthy material on the interaction of the sociopolitical and cultural currents in the absence of any direct steer from the state. Russian literary scholarship continues to be overwhelmingly based on the conviction that the value and quality of any major work are in inverse proportion to the level of political interference in the conditions of its production. Furthermore, despite the removal of the official Sovietera canon, and the achievement of freedom of intellectual expression, one can, nonetheless, demonstrate that the emphasis in the scholarly response to Blok studies is still related, though less conspicuously, to the overall drift in the social agenda, and that the course of its re-orientation is largely directed by the changing political priorities. |
The general socio-political atmosphere of the early 1990s, with its prevailing nihilism, its critical attitude towards the dying system and its destructive tendencies towards communist art, facilitated a series of works that highlighted the apocryphal motifs in Blok’s writings, centred on the notion of theodicy, and on the subversive spirit of his poems, intended to desecrate everything concerning the accepted order. In this context, it is worth mentioning the works of Al’bert Avramenko and
Irina Prikhod’ko, who argued the importance of Manichean philosophy in Blok’s oeuvre; the monographs of Sergei Slobodniuk and Gennadii
Glinin, who looked at Blok’s poetry from the gnostic perspective; and the writings of Oleg Smola and Valentin Nepomniashchii, who highlighted the elements of Satanism and demonism in his verse.77 One of the most prominent characteristics of these studies is a completely different interpretation of Dvenadtsat′, which (in order to outline the researchers’ platform) can be best illustrated by a comparative reading of the following extract from the poem: ‘Freedom, freedom, / Yeah,
77
A. Avramenko, A. Blok i russkie poety XIX veka (Moscow: MGU, 1990); G. G.
Glinin, Avtorskaia pozitsiia v poeme A. Bloka ‘Dvenadtsat′’ (Astrakhan’: Izdatel′stvo
Astrakhanskogo pedagogicheskogo instituta, 1993); V. Nepomniashchii, ‘Pushkin cherez dvesti let’, Novyi mir, 6 (1993), 230–38; S. L. Slobodniuk, Idushchie putiami zla (St Petersburg: Aleteia, 1998); I. S. Prikhod′ko, Mifopoetika A. Bloka (Vladimir:
Vladimirskii pedagogicheskii universitet, 1994); O. Smola, ‘Chernyi vecher. Belyi sneg…’. Tvorcheskaia istoriia i sud′ba poemy Aleksandra Bloka ‘Dvenadtsat′’ (Moscow:
Nasledie, 1993).
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yeah, without a cross! / Rat-a-tat-tat!’ (‘Svoboda, svoboda, / Ekh, ekh, bez kresta! / Tra-ta-ta!’).78 |
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yeah, without a cross! / Rat-a-tat-tat!’ (‘Svoboda, svoboda, / Ekh, ekh, bez kresta! / Tra-ta-ta!’).78
In Soviet literary scholarship the reading of this passage was traditionally centred on the second line; the alienation from the holy cross (‘Yeah, yeah, without a cross!’) was seen as a manifestation of the poet’s atheism and anti-religious views. Orlov argued that: ‘everything that was established as a Christian dogma was alien to him‘, and
Leonid Dolgopolov maintained that Jesus, leading the Red soldiers, as it appears in the ending of the poem, represented ‘the ultimate objective of the Revolution’ (‘sverkh zadacha revoliutsii’).79
By contrast, the scholars of the 1990s saw Dvenadtsat′ in the light of a demonic canto — a text which positioned the Revolution within the framework of a black mass.80 The title was read as an allusion to the
‘twelfth hour’ — the time of Satanic shabash, which, according to the
Russian folk tradition, takes place between midnight and four o’clock in the morning (as, for instance, in Gogol′’s short story Vii). The setting of the opening also contributed to the point: the bewildering combination of the night, the wind and the snow storm created the atmosphere of a nightmarish orgy, with a clear intertextual reference to Pushkin’s poem
‘Besy’ (‘Demons’).81
Черный вечер.
Белый снег.
Ветер, ветер!
На ногах не стоит человек.
Ветер, ветер —
На всем божьем свете!82 |
Черный вечер.
Белый снег.
Ветер, ветер!
На ногах не стоит человек.
Ветер, ветер —
На всем божьем свете!82
78
Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, III, 349.
79
V. N. Orlov, Gamaiun: Zhizn’ Aleksandra Bloka (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel′, 1980), p. 190; L. K. Dolgopolov, Poema Bloka ‘Dvenadtsat′’ (Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1979), p. 79.
80
Prikhod′ko, Mifopoetika A. Bloka, p. 106, p. 118; Nepomniashchii, ‘Pushkin cherez dvesti let’, p. 230; M. Petrovskii, ‘“Dvenadtsat′” Bloka i Leonid Andreev’, in
Aleksandr Blok: Literaturnoe nasledstvo (Moscow: IMLI, 1987), IV, 226.
81
Petrovskii, ‘“Dvenadtsat′” Bloka i Leonid Andreev’, p. 226; Smola, ‘Chernyi vecher.
Belyi sneg…’, p. 77; Nepomniashchii, ‘Pushkin cherez dvesti let’, p. 238.
82
Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, III, 347.
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Black night,
White snow.
Wind, wind!
Knock you flat before you know,
Wind, wind!
Filling God’s wide world!
Мчатся тучи, вьются тучи;
Невидимкою луна
Освещает снег летучий;
Мутно небо, ночь мутна.83
Clouds are whirling, clouds are swirling;
Though invisible, the moon
Lights the flying snow while blurring
Turbid sky and night in one. |
Though invisible, the moon
Lights the flying snow while blurring
Turbid sky and night in one.
Finally, the actions of the protagonists also tied in well with the proposed reading. The disposing of the cross in the passage quoted above (‘Yeah, yeah, without the cross! / Rat-a-tat-tat!’), was seen by some scholars as an essential attribute of the satanic service, complemented by the blasphemous sayings and actions of the characters, such as ‘Pal′nem-ka pulei v Sviatuiu Rus′’ (‘Let’s put a bullet into Holy Russia’).84 Slobodniuk, for instance, pointed out that the shooting sounds reverberating in the air may well refer to characteristic rituals widespread among demonic sects and known as ‘shooting the Invisible [Christ]’ (also involving gunning down a crucifix, as a symbol of the demise of the Holy Spirit).85
83
A. S. Pushkin, ‘Besy’, Sobranie sochinenii, 10 vols. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1977), III, 167.
Translated as ‘Demons’, in Aleksandr Pushkin, Complete Works, 15 vols. (Downham
Market: Milner & Co. Ltd, 1999–2003), III (2000), 160.
84
Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, III, 349.
85
Slobodniuk, Idushchie putiami zla, p. 297.
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Трах-тах-тах! — И только эхо
Откликается в домах…
Только вьюга долгим смехом
Заливается в снегах…
Трах-тах-тах!
Трах-тах-тах…86
Rat-a-tat-tat! Only the echo
Bounces round the buildings there…
Only the blizzard, laughing, laughing,
Roaring with laughter in the snows…
Rat-a-tat-tat!
Rat-a-tat-tat…
According to Slobodniuk and others, all of the above highlighted the destructive spirit of the Bolsheviks’ venture, and related them to a group of the Devil’s disciples. |
The beginning of the twenty-first century witnessed yet another change in the canon. With the proliferation of authoritarian trends and consolidation of power in Putin’s Russia, and with the instrumentalisation of religion as an additional mechanism of state manipulation, Blok’s writings now tend to be configured towards the idea of an all-embracing unity. Following the new political direction, the accent is placed on Blok’s theosophical reflections, on the symbolist concept of the omnipresent divinity of Sophia, as well as on his syncretic metaphysical doctrine.87
Very much along these lines, the new trend in Blok studies consists of apprehending his creative output in its entirety: for instance, the three volumes of his poems are seen as an overarching epic work equivalent to a novel (following Blok’s own comment in the preface to the first edition of his Collected Verse: ‘every poem is necessary to
86
Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, III, 359.
87
T. V. Igosheva, Ranniaia lirika A. A. Bloka (1898–1904): poetika religioznogo simvolizma
(Moscow: Global Kom, 2013); S. L. Slobodniuk, Solov′inyi ad. Trilogiia vochelovecheniia
Aleksandra Bloka (St Petersburg: Alataia, 2002); I. V. Grechanik, ‘Osobennosti liriki
Bloka: filosofskie osnovy, stil′’, Religiozno-filosofskie motivy russkoi liriki rubezha XIX–
XX vekov (Moscow: Sputnik, 2003), pp. 59–111.
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form a chapter; several chapters make up a book; every book is part of a trilogy; and this trilogy can be called a “novel in verse”’).88 These studies argue that the entire set of Blok’s poems can be characterized by a polyphonic structure of voices in its Bakhtinian, novelistic sense.89
The focal point is the analysis of the first person narrative in its formal grammatical terms (the so-called lyrical self) and its conceptual dependence on, and correspondence to, the variety of different subjects of poetic consciousness, which even in the setting of the first volume of the Stikhi o Prekrasnoi dame can be interpreted as a whole spectrum of literary characters. As a result, the three volumes of Blok’s poems are regarded as a novelistic trilogy in verse, unified through a number of specific elements of his poetics. Among these elements one can name the overarching fabula, which differs from the notion of the lyrical plot in the traditional cycle of poems, as well as a set of well-defined poeticpersonae with a clear line of character-building throughout the cycle.
Another interesting line of inquiry, which has recently come under the spotlight, concerns the unity of the Apollonian and Dionysian in
Blok’s writings — the interaction of philosophy and the arts, of the rational and irrational in the process of creativity.90 This dichotomy was one of the fundamental concerns of the Russian symbolist movement, and is now regarded as a useful lens for reflection on contemporary cultural thought.
Summarizing all of the above, it is worth pointing out that Blok’s poetry, his works for the theatre, his literary criticism, and his prose, have always been a subject of extensive literary investigations; and the very fact that their appeal does not seem to be on the wane brings to mind the idea of ‘exclusive completeness’91 often seen as quintessential |
88
Blok, Sobranie sochinenii, I, 559; the same idea is mentioned in his letter to Belyi of 6
June 1911 (Blok-Belyi: Perepiska, p. 261).
89
A. I. Il′enkov, ‘O skrytoi kompozitsii liricheskoi trilogii Aleksandra Bloka’, in
Arkhetipicheskie struktury khudozhestvennogo soznaniia, edited by E. K. Sozina
(Ekaterinburg: Izdatel′stvo Ural’skogo Universiteta, 2002), pp. 124–38; G. G.
Glinin, Avtor i geroi v poemakh Bloka (Astrakhan′: Izdatel′stvo Astrakhanskogo universiteta, 2006); A. F. Burukina, ‘Formy avtorskogo prisutstviia v proze A.
Bloka’, Gummanitarnye issledovaniia, 4 (2007), 56–62.
90
A. V. Korniukhina, ‘Misticheskii anarkhizm kak stadia formirovaniia russkogo simvolizma’, Vestnik Moskovskogo Gosudarstvennogo oblastnogo universiteta. Seriia
Filosofskie nauki, 2 (2006), 176–81.
91
Fowler, ‘Genre and the Literary Canon’, p. 98.
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in the definition of a canonical work. When thinking of the reasons for such a persistent interest in the development of this domain, three main factors have to be brought into the discussion. Firstly, there is a vast amount of material that has only recently been released from the archives and that has been processed and examined in detail. There is, therefore, an expectation of a radical step forward, a long awaited breakthrough, which would bring the accumulated quantitative investigation onto a completely new qualitative level of research. Secondly, there is still a strong urge to revise the cultural legacy of the Soviet era, liberating this area, including Blok studies, from the tarnish of ideologically imposed compromise. Whether this can be achieved is highly debatable, because, as has been demonstrated, the newly shaped tendencies in the literary canon remain closely related to the overarching currents of the social and political agenda. It seems that the very idea of institutionalised critical thinking entails an obvious internal contradiction, but the current drift in itself is certainly welcome, for it is the desire for reification of a pluralistic critique that (in a liberal society) stands behind any form of canon revision. |
Finally, when looking at this phenomenon from a more general perspective, one has to consider that, not unlike the post-perestroika years, the Silver Age represents a liminal stage in the history of Russian culture — a time which can be largely characterized as a deep existential crisis, and a time when poetry and art made a significant contribution to the development of the conceptual social doctrine.92 Overcoming fragmentation, and moving towards the construction of a new sociocultural reality by virtue of their artistic creativity — these were the major concerns of the turn-of-the-century symbolist thinkers, which have their parallels and repercussions in the actuality of the present day.
Having overcome the existential crisis of the 1990s, Russia is nowadays also making an attempt to construct a new national and cultural identity.
Discussions on the value of literature, the new canon, its orientation and its function have become an integral part of the intellectual and literary
92
This crisis developed as a result of a series of failures in the socio-political structures of the time and encompassed a philosophical crisis (the disillusionment with positivism and with the cult of intellectual enlightenment); a religious crisis
(Christianity was increasingly losing its standing as a dominant social authority); and a crisis in aesthetics (the shortcomings of realist art were becoming obvious) as well as politics (related to the failure of the Populists).
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5. Aleksandr Blok in the Changing Russian Literary Canon
landscape; and any analysis of the reflective algorithms, elaborated within a similar context by the eminent generation of the turn-of-thetwentieth-century cultural elite, would have a meaningful impact on this process. As regards the position of Blok in this newly emerging canon, as Avril Pyman has put it in one of her latest articles on the poet: |
Blok has never lacked readers, but he has lacked objective critics. He has repeatedly been claimed or rejected for political or cultural-historical reasons which have little to do with his practice as a poet: innovative to the end, yet always mindful of tradition. Now that time is rolling him away, now that he stands roughly equidistant between us and Goethe,
Byron, Derzhavin and Pushkin, it is enough to know his poetry has outlived the events to which it bore witness, just as the Iliad outlived
Troy and the Psalms David.93
93
Avril Pyman, ‘The Last Romantic’, Russian Life (Nov.–Dec.2000), 34–43 (p. 43).
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MIND AND COSMOS
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Possibility of Altruism
Mortal Questions
The View from Nowhere
What Does It All Mean?
Equality and Partiality
Other Minds
The Last Word
The Myth of Ownership (with Liam Murphy)
Concealment and Exposure
Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament
MIND AND COSMOS
Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception
of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
Thomas Nagel
OXFORD
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MinJ anJ i.:osmos: why the materialist neo-Darwinian i.:oni.:t!ption
of natUrt! is almost i.:ertainly false / Thomas Nagel.
P· i.:m.
ISBN 978-0-19-991975-8 (alk. paper)
1. Cosmology 2. Cosmogony. 3. Beginning. 4. Creation. 5. Sdt!ni.:e-Philosophy.
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PrinteJ in the UniteJ States of Amerka
on adJ-free papt!r
To Anne
This page intentionally left blank
CONTENTS
Preface
1. Introduction
2. Antireductionism and the Natural Order
3. Consciousness
4. Cognition
5. Value
6. Conclusion
Index
ix
3
13
35
71
97
127
129
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PREFACE
The two people who, in very different ways, have had the most influence on the thoughts expressed in this book are Sharon Street and
Roger White. I was also much instructed and stimulated by the discussions of a research group on science and religion organized at the
New York Institute of Philosophy with the support of a Mellon
Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award, and I am grateful to
the Mellon Foundation for making it possible. The group, which met
from 2006 through 2009, brought together faculty and graduate students of the philosophy department at New York University with
regular and occasional participants from other universities and other
fields. Street and White were members of that group, and I would
also like to thank in particular Paul Boghossian, Laura Franklin-Hall,
Philip Kitcher, Matthew Kotzen, H. Allen Orr, Alvin Plantinga,
Elliott Sober, and Michael Strevens. Sober also read the manuscript
of the book for Oxford University Press, and offered useful suggestions. I presented some of the material at the Colloquium in Legal,
Political, and Social Philosophy that Ronald Dworkin and I have
conducted for many years, and I am grateful to him and to the other
ix
PREFACE |
conducted for many years, and I am grateful to him and to the other
ix
PREFACE
participants for their help. In view of the unorthodoxy of the result,
I hope these thanks will not give offense.
During the writing of the book I received research support from
the Filomen D'Agostino and Max E. Greenberg Faculty Research
Fund of New York University School of Law.
New York, October, 2011
x
MIND AND COSMOS
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Chapter 1
Introduction
The aim of this book is to argue that the mind-body problem is not
just a local problem, having to do with the relation between mind,
brain, and behavior in living animal organisms, but that it invades
our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history. The physical
sciences and evolutionary biology cannot be kept insulated from it,
and I believe a true appreciation of the difficulty of the problem
must eventually change our conception of the place of the physical
sciences in describing the natural order.
One of the legitimate tasks of philosophy is to investigate the
limits of even the best developed and most successful forms of contemporary scientific knowledge. It may be frustrating to acknowledge,
but we are simply at the point in the history of human thought at
which we find ourselves, and our successors will make discoveries
and develop forms of understanding of which we have not dreamt.
Humans are addicted to the hope for a final reckoning, but intellectual humility requires that we resist the temptation to assume that
tools of the kind we now have are in principle sufficient to understand the universe as a whole. Pointing out their limits is a philosophical task, whoever engages in it, rather than part of the internal
pursuit of science-though we can hope that if the limits are recognized, that may eventually lead to the discovery of new forms of
scientific understanding. Scientists are well aware of how much they
MIND AND COSMOS |
scientific understanding. Scientists are well aware of how much they
MIND AND COSMOS
don't know, but this is a different kind of problem-not just of
acknowledging the limits of what is actually understood but of
trying to recognize what can and cannot in principle be understood
by certain existing methods.
My target is a comprehensive, speculative world picture that is
reached by extrapolation from some of the discoveries of biology,
chemistry, and physics-a particular naturalistic Weltanschauung
that postulates a hierarchical relation among the subjects of those
sciences, and the completeness in principle of an explanation of
everything in the universe through their unification. Such a world
view is not a necessary condition of the practice of any of those
sciences, and its acceptance or nonacceptance would have no effect
on most scientific research. For all I know, most practicing scientists
may have no opinion about the overarching cosmological questions
to which this materialist reductionism provides an answer. Their
detailed research and substantive findings do not in general depend
on or imply either that or any other answer to such questions.
But among the scientists and philosophers who do express views
about the natural order as a whole, reductive materialism is widely
assumed to be the only serious possibility.1
The starting point for the argument is the failure of psychophysical reductionism, a position in the philosophy of mind that is largely
motivated by the hope of showing how the physical sciences could
in principle provide a theory of everything. If that hope is unrealizable, the question arises whether any other more or less unified
understanding could take in the entire cosmos as we know it. Among
the traditional candidates for comprehensive understanding of the
relation of mind to the physical world, I believe the weight of |
relation of mind to the physical world, I believe the weight of
!. For a clear statement, see Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1992) 1 chapter 3.
4
INTRODUCTION
evidence favors some form of neutral monism over the traditional
alternatives of materialism, idealism, and dualism. What I would
like to do is to explore the possibilities that are compatible with
what we know-in particular what we know about how mind and
everything connected with it depends on the appearance and development of living organisms, as a result of the universe's physical,
chemical, and then biological evolution. I will contend that these
processes must be reconceived in light of what they have produced,
if psychophysical reductionism is false.
The argument from the failure of psychophysical reductionism
is a philosophical one, but I believe there are independent empirical reasons to be skeptical about the truth of reductionism in
biology. Physico-chemical reductionism in biology is the orthodox
view, and any resistance to it is regarded as not only scientifically
but politically incorrect. But for a long time I have found the materialist account of how we and our fellow organisms came to exist
hard to believe, including the standard version of how the evolutionary process works. The more details we learn about the chemical basis of life and the intricacy of the genetic code, the more
unbelievable the standard historical account becomes.2 This is just
the opinion of a layman who reads widely in the literature that
explains contemporary science to the nonspecialist. Perhaps that
literature presents the situation with a simplicity and confidence
that does not reflect the most sophisticated scientific thought in
these areas. But it seems to me that, as it is usually presented, the
current orthodoxy about the cosmic order is the product of governing assumptions that are unsupported, and that it flies in the face of
common sense. |
common sense.
2. See Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (New York: Norton, 1986)1 for a canonical exposition, which seems to convince practically everyone.
MIND AND COSMOS
I would like to defend the untutored reaction of incredulity to
the reductionist neo-Darwinian account of the origin and evolution
oflife.3 It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is
the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the
mechanism of natural selection. We are expected to abandon this
naive response, not in favor of a fully worked out physical/ chemical
explanation but in favor of an alternative that is really a schema for
explanation, supported by some examples. What is lacking, to my
knowledge, is a credible argument that the story has a nonnegligible
probability of being true. There are two questions. First, given what
is known about the chemical basis of biology and genetics, what is
the likelihood that self-reproducing life forms should have come
into existence spontaneously on the early earth, solely through the
operation of the laws of physics and chemistry? The second question is about the sources of variation in the evolutionary process
that was set in motion once life began: In the available geological
time since the first life forms appeared on earth, what is the likelihood that, as a result of physical accident, a sequence of viable
genetic mutations should have occurred that was sufficient to permit
natural selection to produce the organisms that actually exist?
There is much more uncertainty in the scientific community about
the first question than about the second. Many people think it will be
very difficult to come up with a reductionist explanation of the origin
oflife, but most people have no doubt that accidental genetic variation is enough to support the actual history of evolution by natural
selection, once reproducing organisms have come into existence. |
selection, once reproducing organisms have come into existence.
However, since the questions concern highly specific events over a
3. For an illuminating account of Darwin's own views about the most basic forms of explanation, see Elliott Sober, "Darwin's Discussions of God;' in Did Darwin Write the "Origin"
Backwards?: Philosophical Essays on Darwin's Theory (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books,
2ou), 121-28.
INTRODUCTION
long historical period in the distant past, the available evidence is very
indirect, and general assumptions have to play an important part. My
skepticism is not based on religious belief, or on a beliefin any definite
alternative. It is just a belief that the available scientific evidence, in
spite of the consensus of scientific opinion, does not in this matter rationally require us to subordinate the incredulity of common sense.
That is especially true with regard to the origin oflife.
The world is an astonishing place, and the idea that we have in
our possession the basic tools needed to understand it is no more
credible now than it was in Aristotle's day. That it has produced you,
and me, and the rest of us is the most astonishing thing about it. If
contemporary research in molecular biology leaves open the possibility oflegitimate doubts about a fully mechanistic account of the
origin and evolution of life, dependent only on the laws of chemistry and physics, this can combine with the failure of psychophysical
reductionism to suggest that principles of a different kind are also
at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order
that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic.
I realize that such doubts will strike many people as outrageous, but
that is because almost everyone in our secular culture has been
browbeaten into regarding the reductive research program as sacrosanct, on the ground that anything else would not be science. |
My project has the familiar form of trying to meet a set of conditions that seem jointly impossible. In addition to antireductionism,
two further constraints are important: first, an assumption that
certain things are so remarkable that they have to be explained as nonaccidental if we are to pretend to a real understanding of the world;
second, the ideal of discovering a single natural order that unifies
everything on the basis of a set of common elements and principlesan ideal toward which the inevitably very incomplete forms of our
actual understanding should nevertheless aspire. Cartesian dualism
MIND AND COSMOS
rejects this second aspiration, and the reductive programs of both
materialism and idealism are failed attempts to realize it. The unifying conception is also incompatible with the kind of theism that
explains certain features of the natural world by divine intervention,
which is not part of the natural order.
The great advances in the physical and biological sciences were
made possible by excluding the mind from the physical world. This
has permitted a quantitative understanding of that world, expressed
in timeless, mathematically formulated physical laws. But at some
point it will be necessary to make a new start on a more comprehensive understanding that includes the mind. It seems inevitable that
such an understanding will have a historical dimension as well as
a timeless one. The idea that historical understanding is part of
science has become familiar through the transformation of biology
by evolutionary theory. But more recently, with the acceptance of
the big bang, cosmology has also become a historical science. Mind,
as a development of life, must be included as the most recent stage
of this long cosmological history, and its appearance, I believe, casts
its shadow back over the entire process and the constituents and
principles on which the process depends.
The question is whether we can integrate this perspective with |
principles on which the process depends.
The question is whether we can integrate this perspective with
that of the physical sciences as they have been developed for a mindless universe. The understanding of mind cannot be contained
within the personal point of view, since mind is the product of a
partly physical process; but by the same token, the separateness of
physical science, and its claim to completeness, has to end in the
long run. And that poses the question: To what extent will the
reductive form that is so central to contemporary physical science
survive this transformation? If physics and chemistry cannot fully
account for life and consciousness, how will their immense body of
truth be combined with other elements in an expanded conception
of the natural order that can accommodate those things?
INTRODUCTION
As I have said, doubts about the reductionist account of life go
against the dominant scientific consensus, but that consensus faces
problems of probability that I believe are not taken seriously
enough, both with respect to the evolution of life forms through
accidental mutation and natural selection and with respect to the
formation from dead matter of physical systems capable of such
evolution. The more we learn about the intricacy of the genetic
code and its control of the chemical processes of life, the harder
those problems seem.
Again: with regard to evolution, the process of natural selection
cannot account for the actual history without an adequate supply of
viable mutations, and I believe it remains an open question whether
this could have been provided in geological time merely as a result of
chemical accident, without the operation of some other factors determining and restricting the forms of genetic variation. It is no longer
legitimate simply to imagine a sequence of gradually evolving phenotypes, as if their appearance through mutations in the DNA were unproblematic-as Richard Dawkins does for the evolution of the eye.4 |
With regard to the origin of life, the problem is much harder, since
4. See Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 77-86. Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini
argue in the first part of their book What Darwin Got Wrong (New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 2010) that Darwinian evolutionary theory assigns much too much of the explanatory burden for the functional character of organisms to the external influence of natural selection, and not enough to the sources of genetic variation. This point is independent of their attack on the alleged intentionality of the idea of natural selection in the second part of the book-which seems to me, as to others, to be based on a misinterpretation.
There are also more mainstream figures who insist that the evidence calls for a more restricted account of the sources of variation in the genetic material. Marc W. Kirschner and
John C. Gerhart, in The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin's Dilemma (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2005), suggest that genetic variation is biased to facilitate evolutionary change, though they do not imply that this calls for a revision of the larger reductionist conception of nature. Stuart Kauffman suggests in several books that variation is not due to chance, and that principles of spontaneous self-organization play a more important role than natural selection in evolutionary history. See At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995);
Investigations (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000 ); Reinventing the Sacred: A New
View of Science, Reason, and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 2008 ).
9
MIND AND COSMOS
the option of natural selection as an explanation is not available. And
the coming into existence of the genetic code-an arbitrary mapping
of nucleotide sequences into amino acids, together with mechanisms |
of nucleotide sequences into amino acids, together with mechanisms
that can read the code and carry out its instructions-seems particularly resistant to being revealed as probable given physical law alone.5
In thinking about these questions I have been stimulated by
criticisms of the prevailing scientific world picture from a very different direction: the attack on Darwinism mounted in recent years
from a religious perspective by the defenders of intelligent design.
Even though writers like Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer are
motivated at least in part by their religious beliefs, the empirical
arguments they offer against the likelihood that the origin oflife and
its evolutionary history can be fully explained by physics and chemistry are of great interest in themselves.6 Another skeptic, David
Berlinski, has brought out these problems vividly without reference
to the design inference.7 Even if one is not drawn to the alternative
of an explanation by the actions of a designer, the problems that
these iconoclasts pose for the orthodox scientific consensus should
be taken seriously.8 They do not deserve the scorn with which they
are commonly met. It is manifestly unfair.
5. Indeed there may be something deeply confused about the request for such an explanation-for a reason pointed out by Roger White, which I discuss in chapter 4.
6. See Michael]. Be he, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1996); Be he, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism
(New York: Free Press, 2007); Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (New York: HarperOne, 2009 ).
7. See David Berlinski, "On the Origins of Life," Commentary, February 2006, reprinted in
Berlinski, The Deniable Darwin, and Other Essays (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2009 ).
See also Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed Its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity
(New York: Scribner's, •994 ). |
8. There are also criticisms of current theories from those who nevertheless expect a reductive solution; for example Robert Shapiro, Origins: A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth (New York: Summit Books, 1986); Shapiro, "A Simpler Origin for Life," Scientific
American, February 12, 2007. A very clear explanation of multiple aspects of current research into the origin of life and the possibility of extraterrestrial life is Steven Benner,
Life, the Universe and the Scientific Method (Gainesville, FL: FfAME Press, 2008). Though
10
INTRODUCTION
Those who have seriously criticized these arguments have
certainly shown that there are ways to resist the design conclusion; but the general force of the negative part of the intelligent
design position-skepticism about the likelihood of the orthodox reductive view, given the available evidence-does not appear to me to have been destroyed in these exchanges.9 At least,
the question should be regarded as open. To anyone interested
in the basis of this judgment, I can only recommend a careful
reading of some of the leading advocates on both sides of the issue-with special attention to what has been established by
the critics of intelligent design. Whatever one may think about
the possibility of a designer, the prevailing doctrine-that the
appearance of life from dead matter and its evolution through
accidental mutation and natural selection to its present forms has
involved nothing but the operation of physical law-cannot
be regarded as unassailable. It is an assumption governing
the scientific project rather than a well-confirmed scientific
hypothesis. |
the scientific project rather than a well-confirmed scientific
hypothesis.
he assumes this is a task for chemistry, he does say (287 ), ''A real potential exists that current theory will never solve the problem at hand, keeping open the possibility for a true revolution in the related and surrounding sciences:' Of course he doesn't mean intelligent design.
A problem with the most salient current research is that the synthesis of individual components of the genetic material is so heavily controlled and guided by the experimenters that it provides little evidence that the process could have occurred without intelligent guidance. And the crucial question of how these components could have combined into an information-rich coded sequence is left unaddressed.
9. The literature is extensive. See for example Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin's God: A
Scientist's Search for Common Ground between God and Evolution (New York: Cliff Street,
1999); Philip Kitcher, Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Elliott Sober, Evidence and Evolution: The Logic
Behind the Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008); for a sample of both sides of the debate, see Neil A. Manson, ed., God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 2003).
11
MIND AND COSMOS
I confess to an ungrounded assumption of my own, in not finding
it possible to regard the design alternative as a real option. I lack the
sensus divinitatis that enables-indeed compels-so many people to
see in the world the expression of divine purpose as naturally as they
see in a smiling face the expression of human feeling. 10 So my speculations about an alternative to physics as a theory of everything do
not invoke a transcendent being but tend toward complications to
the immanent character of the natural order. That would also be a
more unifying explanation than the design hypothesis. I disagree |
more unifying explanation than the design hypothesis. I disagree
with the defenders of intelligent design in their assumption, one
which they share with their opponents, that the only naturalistic
alternative is a reductionist theory based on physical laws of the type
with which we are familiar. Nevertheless, I believe the defenders of
intelligent design deserve our gratitude for challenging a scientific
world view that owes some of the passion displayed by its adherents
precisely to the fact that it is thought to liberate us from religion.
That world view is ripe for displacement, in spite of the great
achievements of reductive materialism, which will presumably continue for a long time to be our main source for concrete understanding and control of the world around us. To argue, as I will, that
there is a lot it can't explain is not to offer an alternative. But the
recognition of those limits is a precondition oflooking for alternatives, or at least of being open to their possibility. And it may mean
that some directions of pursuit of the materialist form of explanation will come to be seen as dead ends. If the appearance of conscious organisms in the world is due to principles of development
that are not derived from the timeless laws of physics, that may be
a reason for pessimism about purely chemical explanations of the
origin oflife as well.
10. I am not just unreceptive but strongly averse to the idea, as I have said elsewhere.
12
Chapter 2
Antireductionism and
the Natural Order
1
The conflict between scientific naturalism and various forms of antireductionism is a staple of recent philosophy. On one side there is
the hope that everything can be accounted for at the most basic
level by the physical sciences, extended to include biology.1 On the
other side there are doubts about whether the reality of such features
of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, purpose,
thought, and value can be accommodated in a universe consisting at |
thought, and value can be accommodated in a universe consisting at
the most basic level only of physical facts-facts, however sophisticated, of the kind revealed by the physical sciences.
I will use the terms "materialism" or "materialist naturalism" to
refer to one side of this conflict and "antireductionism" to refer to the
other side, even though the terms are rather rough. The attempts to
defend the materialist world picture as a potentially complete
account of what there is take many forms, and not all of them involve
reduction in the ordinary sense, such as the analysis of mental concepts
in behavioral terms or the scientific identification of mental states with
brain states. Many materialist naturalists would not describe their view
1. This program has been pursued with dedication in the writings of Daniel Dennett.
13
MIND AND COSMOS
as reductionist. But to those who doubt the adequacy of such a world
view, the different attempts to accommodate within it mind and related phenomena all appear as attempts to reduce the true extent of
reality to a common basis that is not rich enough for the purpose.
Hence the resistance can be brought together as antireductionism.
The tendency of these antireductionist doubts is usually negative.
The conclusion they invite is that there are some things that the physical sciences alone cannot fully account for. Other forms of understanding may be needed, or perhaps there is more to reality than
even the most fully developed physics can describe. If reduction
fails in some respect, this reveals a limit to the reach of the physical
sciences, which must therefore be supplemented by something else
to account for the missing elements. But the situation may be more
serious than that. If one doubts the reducibility of the mental to the
physical, and likewise of all those other things that go with the mental, such as value and meaning, then there is some reason to doubt |
that a reductive materialism can apply even in biology, and therefore
reason to doubt that materialism can give an adequate account even
of the physical world. I want to explore the case for this breakdown,
and to consider whether anything positive by way of a world view is
imaginable in the wake of it.
We and other creatures with mental lives are organisms, and
our mental capacities apparently depend on our physical constitution. So what explains the existence of organisms like us must also
explain the existence of mind. But if the mental is not itself merely
physical, it cannot be fully explained by physical science. And then,
as I shall argue, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that those
aspects of our physical constitution that bring with them the mental
cannot be fully explained by physical science either. If evolutionary
biology is a physical theory-as it is generally taken to be-then it
cannot account for the appearance of consciousness and of other
14
ANTIREDUCTIONISM AND THE NATURAL ORDER
phenomena that are not physically reducible. So if mind is a product
ofbiological evolution-if organisms with mental life are not miraculous anomalies but an integral part of nature-then biology cannot
be a purely physical science. The possibility opens up of a pervasive
conception of the natural order very different from materialismone that makes mind central, rather than a side effect of physical law.
It seems clear that the conclusion of antireductionist arguments
against materialism cannot remain purely negative forever. Even if
the dominance of materialist naturalism is nearing its end, we need
some idea of what might replace it. One of the things that drive the
various reductionist programs about mind, value, and meaning, in
spite of their inherent implausibility, is the lack of any comprehensive alternative. It can seem that the only way to accept the arguments against reduction is by adding peculiar extra ingredients like |
qualia, meanings, intentions, values, reasons, beliefs, and desires to
the otherwise magnificently unified mathematical order of the physical universe. But this does not answer to the desire for a general
understanding of how things fit together. A genuine alternative to
the reductionist program would require an account of how mind
and everything that goes with it is inherent in the universe.
I am just turning a familiar argument on its head in order to challenge the premises. Materialism requires reductionism; therefore the
failure of reductionism requires an alternative to materialism. My
aim is not so much to argue against reductionism as to investigate the
consequences of rejecting it-to present the problem rather than to
propose a solution. Materialist naturalism leads to reductionist ambitions because it seems unacceptable to deny the reality of all those
familiar things that are not at first glance physical. But if no plausible
reduction is available, and if denying reality to the mental continues to
be unacceptable, that suggests that the original premise, materialist
naturalism, is false, and not just around the edges. Perhaps the natural
15
MIND AND COSMOS
order is not exclusively physical; or perhaps, in the worst case, there is
no comprehensive natural order in which everything hangs together-only disconnected forms of understanding. But whatever
may be the result, we must start out from a larger conception of what
has to be understood in order to make sense of the natural world.
2
My guiding conviction is that mind is not just an afterthought or an
accident or an add-on, but a basic aspect of nature. Quite apart from
antireductionist arguments in the philosophy of mind, there is independent support for the step to such an enlarged conception of reality in one of the background conditions of science. Science is
driven by the assumption that the world is intelligible. That is, the
world in which we find ourselves, and about which experience gives |
world in which we find ourselves, and about which experience gives
us some information, can be not only described but understood.
That assumption is behind every pursuit of knowledge, including
pursuits that end in illusion. In the natural sciences as they have
developed since the seventeenth century, the assumption of intelligibility has led to extraordinary discoveries, confirmed by prediction
and experiment, of a hidden natural order that cannot be observed by
human perception alone. Without the assumption of an intelligible
underlying order, which long antedates the scientific revolution,
those discoveries could not have been made.
What explains this order? One answer would be that nothing
does: explanation comes to an end with the order itself, which
the assumption of intelligibility has merely enabled us to uncover.
Perhaps one level of order can be explained in terms of a still deeper level-as has happened repeatedly in the history of science. But in
the end, on this view of the matter, understanding of the world will
16
ANTIREDUCTIONISM AND THE NATURAL ORDER
eventually reach a point where there is nothing more to be said,
except "This is just how things are."
I am not disposed to see the success of science in this way. It
seems to me that one cannot really understand the scientific world
view unless one assumes that the intelligibility of the world, as
described by the laws that science has uncovered, is itself part of the
deepest explanation of why things are as they are. So when we prefer
one explanation of the same data to another because it is simpler
and makes fewer arbitrary assumptions, that is not just an aesthetic
preference: it is because we think the explanation that gives greater
understanding is more likely to be true, just for that reason.
This assumption is a form of the principle of sufficient reasonthat everything about the world can at some level be understood, |
and that if many things, even the most universal, initially seem arbitrary, that is because there are further things we do not know, which
explain why they are not arbitrary after all.
The view that rational intelligibility is at the root of the natural
order makes me, in a broad sense, an idealist-not a subjective idealist, since it doesn't amount to the claim that all reality is ultimately appearance-but an objective idealist in the tradition of Plato and
perhaps also of certain post-Kantians, such as Schelling and Hegel,
who are usually called absolute idealists. I suspect that there must be
a strain of this kind of idealism in every theoretical scientist: pure
empiricism is not enough.
The intelligibility of the world is no accident. Mind, in this view,
is doubly related to the natural order. Nature is such as to give rise to
conscious beings with minds; and it is such as to be comprehensible
to such beings. Ultimately, therefore, such beings should be comprehensible to themselves. And these are fundamental features of the
universe, not byproducts of contingent developments whose true
explanation is given in terms that do not make reference to mind.
17
MIND AND COSMOS
3
The largest question within which all natural science is embedded is
also the largest question of philosophy-namely, in what way or ways
is the world intelligible? Clearly natural science is one of the most
important ways of revealing intelligibility. But in spite of the great accomplishments of the natural sciences in their present form, it is
important both for science itself and for philosophy to ask how much
of what there is the physical sciences can render intelligible-how
much of the world's intelligibility consists in its subsumability under
universal, mathematically formulable laws governing the spatiotemporal order. If there are limits to the reach of science in this form, are
there other forms of understanding that can render intelligible what
physical science does not explain? |
there other forms of understanding that can render intelligible what
physical science does not explain?
But first we should consider the view that there are no such limits-that physical law has the resources to explain everything,
including the double relation of mind to the natural order. The intelligibility (to us) that makes science possible is one of the things
that stand in need of explanation. The strategy is to try to extend
the materialist world picture so that it includes such an explanation, thereby making the physical intelligibility of the world close
over itself. According to this type of naturalism, the existence of
minds to whom the world is scientifically intelligible is itself scientifically explicable, as a highly specific biological side effect of the
physical order.
The story goes like this: There is no need for an expanded form
of understanding; instead, the history of human knowledge gives
us reason to believe that there is ultimately one way that the natural
order is intelligible, namely, through physical law-everything that
exists and everything that happens can in principle be explained by
the laws that govern the physical universe. Admittedly, we can't
ANTIREDUCTIONISM AND THE NATURAL ORDER
grasp the natural order in its full manifestation because it is too
complex, and we therefore need more specialized forms of understanding for practical purposes. But we can attempt to discover the
universal principles governing the elements out of which everything is composed, and of which all observable spatiotemporal
complexity is a manifestation. These are the mathematically stateable laws of basic physics, which describe the fundamental forces
and particles or other entities and their interactions, at least till a
still more fundamental level is uncovered. The most systematic
possible description of a material universe extended in space and
time is therefore the route to the most fundamental explanation of
everything. |
time is therefore the route to the most fundamental explanation of
everything.
Physics and chemistry have pursued this aim with spectacular
success. But the great step forward in the progress of the materialist
conception toward the ideal of completeness was the theory of
evolution, later reinforced and enriched by molecular biology and
the discovery of DNA. Modern evolutionary theory offers a general
picture of how the existence and development of life could be just
another consequence of the equations of particle physics. Even if no
one yet has a workable idea about the details, it is possible to speculate that the appearance of life was the product of chemical processes governed by the laws of physics, and that evolution after that
is likewise due to chemical mutations and natural selection that are
also just super-complex consequences of physical principles. Even if
there is a residual problem of exactly how to account for consciousness in physical terms, the orthodox naturalistic view is that biology is
in principle completely explained by physics and chemistry; and that
evolutionary psychology provides a rough idea of how everything
distinctive about human life can also be regarded as an extremely
complicated consequence of the behavior of physical particles in
accordance with certain fundamental laws. This will ultimately
19
MIND AND COSMOS
include an explanation of the cognitive capacities that enable us to
discover those laws.
I find it puzzling that this view of things should be taken as more
or less self-evident, as I believe it commonly is. Everyone acknowledges that there are vast amounts we do not know, and that enormous
opportunities for progress in understanding lie before us. But scientific naturalists claim to know what the form of that progress will be,
and to know that mentalistic, teleological, or evaluative intelligibility
in particular have been left behind for good as fundamental forms of |
in particular have been left behind for good as fundamental forms of
understanding. It is assumed not only that the natural order is intelligible but that its intelligibility has a certain form, being found in
the simplest and most unified physical laws, governing the simplest
and fewest elements, from which all else follows. That is what scientific optimists mean by a theory of everything. So long as the basic
laws are not themselves necessary truths, the question remains why
those laws hold. But perhaps part of the appeal of this conception is
that if the laws are simple enough, we can come to rest with them
and be content to say that this is just how things are. After all, what
is the alternative?
That is really my question. The implausibility of the reductive
program that is needed to defend the completeness of this kind of
naturalism provides a reason for trying to think of alternativesalternatives that make mind, meaning, and value as fundamental as
matter and space-time in an account of what there is. The fundamental elements and laws of physics and chemistry have been
inferred to explain the behavior of the inanimate world. Something
more is needed to explain how there can be conscious, thinking
creatures whose bodies and brains are composed of those elements.
If we want to try to understand the world as a whole, we must start
with an adequate range of data, and those data must include the
evident facts about ourselves.
20
ANTIREDUCTIONISM AND THE NATURAL ORDER
4
As a way of marking the boundaries of the territory in which the
search for such understanding must proceed, I would now like to say
something about the polar opposite of materialism, namely, the position that mind, rather than physical law, provides the fundamental
level of explanation of everything, including the explanation of the
basic and universal physical laws themselves. This view is familiarly
expressed as theism, in its aspect as an explanation of the existence |
expressed as theism, in its aspect as an explanation of the existence
and character of the natural world. It is the most straightforward way
of reversing the materialist order of explanation, which explains mind
as a consequence of physical law; instead, theism makes physical law
a consequence of mind.
Considered as a response to the demand for an all-encompassing
form of understanding, theism interprets intelligibility ultimately in
terms of intention or purpose-resisting a purely descriptive end
point. At the outer bounds of the world, encompassing everything
in it, including the law-governed natural order revealed by science,
theism places some kind of mind or intention, which is responsible
for both the physical and the mental character of the universe. So
long as the divine mind just has to be accepted as a stopping point in
the pursuit of understanding, it leaves the process incomplete, just
as the purely descriptive materialist account does.
For either materialistic or theistic explanation to provide a complete understanding of the world, it would have to be the case that
either the laws of physics, or the existence and properties of God
and therefore of his creation, cannot conceivably be other than they
are. Physicists do not typically believe the former,2 but theists tend
2. Though Einstein seems to have regarded it as an open question, the question, as he put it,
"Did God have any choice when he created the universe?"
21
MIND AND COSMOS
to believe the latter. This doesn't mean that a theistic world view
must be deterministic: God's essential nature may lead him to create
probabilistic laws and beings with free will, whose actions are
explained as free choices. But some kind of divine intention would
underpin the totality.
The interest of theism even to an atheist is that it tries to explain
in another way what does not seem capable of explanation by physical science. The inadequacies of the naturalistic and reductionist |
world picture seem to me to be real. There are things that science as
presently conceived does not help us to understand, and which we
can see, from the internal features of physical science, that it is not
going to explain. They seem to call for a more uncompromisingly
mentalistic or even normative form of understanding. Theism
embraces that conclusion by attributing the mental phenomena
found within the world to the working of a comprehensive mental
source, of which they are miniature versions.
However, I do not find theism any more credible than materialism as a comprehensive world view. My interest is in the territory
between them. I believe that these two radically opposed conceptions of ultimate intelligibility cannot exhaust the possibilities. All
explanations come to an end somewhere. Both theism and materialism say that at the ultimate level, there is one form of understanding. But would an alternative secular conception be possible
that acknowledged mind and all that it implies, not as the expression
of divine intention but as a fundamental principle of nature along
with physical law? Could it take the form of a unified conception of
the natural order, even if it tries to accommodate a richer set of
materials than the austere elements of mathematical physics? But let
me first say a bit more, for dialectical purposes, about the opposition between theism and materialist naturalism and what is lacking
in each of them.
22
ANTIREDUCTIONISM AND THE NATURAL ORDER
s
The place at which the contrast between forms of intelligibility is
most vividly presented is in the understanding of ourselves. This is
also the setting for the most heated battles over what physical science
can and cannot explain. Both theism and evolutionary naturalism are
attempts to understand ourselves from the outside, using very different resources. Theism offers a vicarious understanding, by assigning it to a transcendent mind whose purposes and understanding of |
the world we cannot ourselves fully share, but which makes it possible to believe that the world is intelligible, even if not to us. The form
of this transcendent understanding is conceived by extrapolation
from the natural psychological self-understanding we have of our
own intentions. Evolutionary naturalism, by contrast, extrapolates to
everything, including ourselves, a form of scientific understanding
that we have developed in application to certain other parts of the
world. But the shared ambition of these two approaches, to encompass ourselves in an understanding that arises from but then transcends our own point of view, is just as important as the difference
between them.
What, if anything, justifies this common ambition of transcendence? Isn't it sufficient to try to understand ourselves from withinwhich is hard enough? Yet the ambition appears to be irresistible-as
if we cannot legitimately proceed in life just from the point of view
that we naturally occupy in the world, but must encompass ourselves
in a larger world view. And to succeed, that larger world view must
encompass itself.
Any external understanding, however transcendent, begins from
our own point of view (how could it not?) and is usually supposed to
be consistent with the main outlines of that point of view even if it
also provides a basis for significant criticism and revision as well as
23
MIND AND COSMOS
extension. With respect to human knowledge, for example, both
theism and naturalism try to explain how we can rely on our faculties
to understand the world around us. At one extreme there is Descartes' theistic validation of perception and scientific reasoning by
the proof that God, who is responsible for our faculties, would not
systematically deceive us. At the other extreme there is naturalized
epistemology, which argues that perceptual and cognitive faculties
evolved by natural selection can be expected to be generally reliable
in leading us to true beliefs. |
evolved by natural selection can be expected to be generally reliable
in leading us to true beliefs.
Neither of these proposals provides a defense against radical skepticism-the possibility that our beliefs about the world are
systematically false. Such a defense would inevitably be circular,
since any confidence we could have in the truth of either a theistic
or an evolutionary explanation of our cognitive capacities would
have to depend on the exercise of those capacities. For theism, this
is the famous Cartesian circle; but there is an analogous naturalistic
circle.3 In addition, evolutionary naturalism offers an explanation of
our knowledge that is seriously inadequate, when applied to the
knowledge-generating capacities that we take ourselves to have. I
will return to this claim below.
But even if these two projects of self-understanding do not refute
skepticism, I believe there is a legitimate aim of transcendence that
is more modest and perhaps more realistic. We may not be able to
rule out the skeptical possibility, and we may not be able to ground
our normal capacity for understanding on something in which we
can have even greater confidence; but it may still be possible to show
how we can reasonably retain our natural confidence in the exercise
of the understanding, in spite of the apparent contingencies of our
3. See Barry Stroud, The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984) 1 ch. 61 "Naturalized Epistemology."
24
ANTIREDUCTIONISM AND THE NATURAL ORDER
nature and formation. The hope is not to discover a foundation that
makes our knowledge unassailably secure but to find a way of understanding ourselves that is not radically self-undermining, and that
does not require us to deny the obvious. The aim would be to offer a
plausible picture of how we fit into the world.
6
Even in this more modest enterprise both theism and naturalistic reductionism fall short. Theism does not offer a sufficiently substantial |
explanation of our capacities, and naturalism does not offer a sufficiently reassuring one.
A theistic account has the advantage over a reductive naturalistic
one that it admits the reality of more of what is so evidently the
case, and tries to explain it all. But even if theism is filled out with
the doctrines of a particular religion (which will not be accessible
to evidence and reason alone), it offers a very partial explanation
of our place in the world. It amounts to the hypothesis that the
highest-order explanation of how things hang together is of a
certain type, namely, intentional or purposive, without having anything more to say about how that intention operates except what is
found in the results to be explained.
The idea is not empty, because any intentional explanation
involves some interpretive assumptions, even about God. An intentional agent must be thought of as having aims that it sees as good,
so the aims cannot be arbitrary; a theistic explanation will inevitably
bring in some idea of value, and a particular religion can make this
much more specific, though it also poses the famous problem of
evil. To my mind, apart from the difficulty of believing in God, the
disadvantage of theism as an answer to the desire for comprehensive
25
MIND AND COSMOS
understanding is not that it offers no explanations but that it does
not do so in the form of a comprehensive account of the natural
order. Theism pushes the quest for intelligibility outside the world.
If God exists, he is not part of the natural order but a free agent not
governed by natural laws. He may act partly by creating a natural
order, but whatever he does directly cannot be part of that order.
A theistic self-understanding, for those who find it compelling
to see the world as the expression of divine intention, would leave
intact our natural confidence in our cognitive faculties. But it would
not be the kind of understanding that explains how beings like us fit |
not be the kind of understanding that explains how beings like us fit
into the world. The kind of intelligibility that would still be missing
is intelligibility of the natural order itself-intelligibility from
within. That kind of intelligibility may be compatible with some
forms of theism-if God creates a self-contained natural order
which he then leaves undisturbed. But it is not compatible with
direct theistic explanation of systematic features of the world that
would seem otherwise to be brute facts-such as the creation oflife
from dead matter, or the birth of consciousness, or reason. Such
interventionist hypotheses amount to a denial that there is a comprehensive natural order. They are in part motivated by a belief that
seems to me correct, namely, that there is little or no possibility that
these facts depend on nothing but the laws of physics. But another
response to this situation is to think that there may be a completely
different type of systematic account of nature, one that makes these
neither brute facts that are beyond explanation nor the products of
divine intervention. That, at any rate, is my ungrounded intellectual
preference.
The problem with naturalistic theories is different: Rather than
being reassuring but insufficiently explanatory, materialist theories do
try to make the natural order internally intelligible by explaining our
place in it without reference to anything outside. But the explanations
26
ANTIREDUCTIONISM AND THE NATURAL ORDER
they propose are not reassuring enough. Evolutionary naturalism
provides an account of our capacities that undermines their reliability,
and in doing so undermines itself. I will have more to say about these
problems of reductionism later; here let me sketch them briefly.
Inevitably, when we construct a naturalistic external selfunderstanding, we are relying on one part of our "sense-making"
capacities to create a system that will make sense of the rest. We rely on |
capacities to create a system that will make sense of the rest. We rely on
evolutionary theory to analyze and evaluate everything from our
logical and probabilistic cognition to our moral sense. This reflects the
view that empirical science is the one secure, privileged form of
understanding and that we can trust other forms only to the extent that
they can be validated through a scientific account of how and why they
work. That still requires reliance on some of our own faculties. But
some faculties are thought to merit more confidence than others, and
even if we cannot provide them with a non circular external justification,
we must at least believe that they are not undermined by the external
account of their sources and operation that is being proposed. A core
of cognitive confidence must remain intact, even if some other faculties
are rendered doubtful bytheir evolutionary pedigree.
Structurally, it is still the Cartesian ideal, but with the leading
role played by evolutionary theory instead of by an a priori demonstration of divine benevolence. But I agree with Alvin Plantinga
that, unlike divine benevolence, the application of evolutionary
theory to the understanding of our own cognitive capacities
should undermine, though it need not completely destroy, our
confidence in them.4 Mechanisms of belief formation that have selective advantage in the everyday struggle for existence do not
warrant our confidence in the construction of theoretical accounts
of the world as a whole. I think the evolutionary hypothesis would
4. Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), ch. 12.
27
MIND AND COSMOS
imply that though our cognitive capacities could be reliable, we do
not have the kind of reason to rely on them that we ordinarily take
ourselves to have in using them directly-as we do in science. In
particular, it does not explain why we are justified in relying on |
particular, it does not explain why we are justified in relying on
them to correct other cognitive dispositions that lead us astray,
though they may be equally natural, and equally susceptible to
evolutionary explanation. The evolutionary story leaves the authority of reason in a much weaker position. This is even more
clearly true of our moral and other normative capacities-on which
we often rely to correct our instincts. I agree with Sharon Street that
an evolutionary self-understanding would almost certainly require
us to give up moral realism-the natural conviction that our moral
judgments are true or false independent of our beliefs.5 Evolutionary naturalism implies that we shouldn't take any of our convictions seriously, including the scientific world picture on which
evolutionary naturalism itself depends.
I will defend these claims in later chapters, but here let me say what
would follow if they are correct. The failure of evolutionary naturalism
to provide a form of transcendent self-understanding that does not
undermine our confidence in our natural faculties should not lead us
to abandon the search for transcendent self-understanding. There is
no reason to allow our confidence in the objective truth of our moral
beliefs, or for that matter our confidence in the objective truth of our
mathematical or scientific reasoning, to depend on whether this is
consistent with the assumption that those capacities are the product
of natural selection. Given how speculative evolutionary explanations
of human mental faculties are, they seem too weak a ground for putting
into question the most basic forms of thought. Our confidence in the
5. Sharon Street, ''A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value," Philosophical Studies
1271 no. 1(January2006): 109-66.
ANTIREDUCTIONISM AND THE NATURAL ORDER
truth of propositions that seem evident on reflection should not be
shaken so easily (and, I would add, cannot be shaken on these sorts of |
shaken so easily (and, I would add, cannot be shaken on these sorts of
grounds without a kind of false consciousness).
It seems reasonable to run the test equally in the opposite direction: namely, to evaluate hypotheses about the universe and how we
have come into existence by reference to ordinary judgments in
which we have very high confidence. It is reasonable to believe that
the truth about what kind of beings we are and how the universe
produced us is compatible with that confidence. After all, everything we believe, even the most far-reaching cosmological theories,
has to be based ultimately on common sense, and on what is plainly
undeniable. The priority given to evolutionary naturalism in the
face of its implausible conclusions about other subjects is due, I
think, to the secular consensus that this is the only form of external
understanding of ourselves that provides an alternative to theismwhich is to be rejected as a mere projection of our internal selfconception onto the universe, without evidence.
7
Even if neither evolutionary naturalism nor theism provides the
kind of comprehensive self-understanding that we are after, this
should not threaten our more direct confidence in the operation of
our reason, though its appearance in the world remains a mystery.
We can continue to hope for a transcendent self-understanding that
is neither theistic nor reductionist. But this also means rejecting a
third response to the problem that does not seem to me sustainable,
though it has distinguished adherents-namely, to give up the project of external self-understanding altogether and instead to limit
ourselves to the sufficiently formidable task of understanding our
29
MIND AND COSMOS
point of view toward the world from within. Physical science is one
aspect of this human point of view, but it can exist side by side with
the other aspects, without subsuming them. This pluralistic method
is what P. F. Strawson calls "descriptive metaphysics,"6 and it has |
is what P. F. Strawson calls "descriptive metaphysics,"6 and it has
much in common with Wittgenstein's antimetaphysical conception
of the proper task of philosophy.
But while internal understanding is certainly valuable, and an
essential precondition of a more transcendent project, I don't see
how we can stop there and not seek an external conception of ourselves as well. To refrain we would have to believe that the quest for
a single reality is an illusion, because there are many kinds of truth
and many kinds of thought, expressed in many different forms of
language, and they cannot be systematically combined through a
conception of a single world in which all truth is grounded. That is
as radical a claim as any of the alternatives.7
The question is there, whether we answer it or not. Even if we
conclude that the materialist account of ourselves is incompleteincluding its development through evolutionary theory-it remains
the case that we are products of the long history of the universe since
the big bang, descended from bacteria over billions of years of natural selection. That is part of the true external understanding of ourselves. The question is how we can combine it with the other things
we know-including the forms of reason on which that conclusion
itself is based-in a world view that does not undermine itself.
6. See P. F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Methuen, 1959 ). |
6. See P. F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Methuen, 1959 ).
7. I am very much in sympathy with the following statement by Jaegwon Kim: "Metaphysics is the domain where different languages, theories, explanations, and conceptual systems come together and have their mutual ontological relationships sorted out and clarified. That there is such a common domain is the assumption of a broad and untendentious realism about our cognitive activities. If you believe that there is no such common domain, well, that's metaphysics, too." Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental
Causation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998) 1 66.
30
ANTIREDUCTIONISM AND THE NATURAL ORDER
Our own existence presents us with the fact that somehow the
world generates conscious beings capable of recognizing reasons for
action and belief, distinguishing some necessary truths, and evaluating the evidence for alternative hypotheses about the natural
order. We don't know how this happens, but it is hard not to believe
that there is some explanation of a systematic kind-an expanded
account of the order of the world.
If we find it undeniable, as we should, that our clearest moral and
logical reasonings are objectively valid, we are on the first rung of
this ladder. It does not commit us to any particular interpretation of
the normative, but I believe it demands something more. We cannot
maintain the kind of resistance to any further explanation that is
sometimes called quietism. The confidence we feel within our own
point of view demands completion by a more comprehensive view
of our containment in the world.
In the meantime, we go on using perception and reason to construct scientific theories of the natural world even though we do not
have a convincing external account of why those faculties exist that
is consistent with our confidence in their reliability-neither a
naturalistic account nor a Cartesian theistic one. The existence of |
naturalistic account nor a Cartesian theistic one. The existence of
conscious minds and their access to the evident truths of ethics and
mathematics are among the data that a theory of the world and our
place in it has yet to explain. They are clearly part of what is the case,
just as much as the data about the physical world provided by perception and the conclusions of scientific reasoning about what
would best explain those data. We cannot just assume that the latter
category of thought has priority over the others, so that what it
cannot explain is not real.
Since an adequate form of self-understanding would be an alternative to materialism, it would have to include mentalistic and rational elements of some kind. But my thought is that they could belong
31
MIND AND COSMOS
to the natural world and need not imply a transcendent individual
mind, let alone a perfect being. The inescapable fact that has to be
accommodated in any complete conception of the universe is that
the appearance of living organisms has eventually given rise to consciousness, perception, desire, action, and the formation of both
beliefs and intentions on the basis of reasons. If all this has a natural
explanation, the possibilities were inherent in the universe long
before there was life, and inherent in early life long before the
appearance of animals. A satisfying explanation would show that
the realization of these possibilities was not vanishingly improbable
but a significant likelihood given the laws of nature and the composition of the universe. It would reveal mind and reason as basic
aspects of a nonmaterialistic natural order.
This is not just anthropocentric triumphalism. The entire animal
kingdom, the endless generations of insects and spiders in their
enormous, extravagant populations, all pose this same question
about the order of nature. We have not observed life anywhere but
on earth, but no natural fact is cosmologically more significant. |
on earth, but no natural fact is cosmologically more significant.
However much we come to understand, as we are in the process of
doing, the chemical basis of life and of its evolution, the phenomenon still calls for a greatly expanded basis for intelligibility.
To sum up: the respective inadequacies of materialism and theism
as transcendent conceptions, and the impossibility of abandoning
the search for a transcendent view of our place in the universe, lead to
the hope for an expanded but still naturalistic understanding that
avoids psychophysical reductionism. The essential character of such
an understanding would be to explain the appearance of life, consciousness, reason, and knowledge neither as accidental side effects
of the physical laws of nature nor as the result of intentional intervention in nature from without but as an unsurprising if not inevitable consequence of the order that governs the natural world from
32
ANTIREDUCTIONISM AND THE NATURAL ORDER
within. That order would have to include physical law, but if life is
not just a physical phenomenon, the origin and evolution oflife and
mind will not be explainable by physics and chemistry alone. An
expanded, but still unified, form of explanation will be needed, and
I suspect it will have to include teleological elements.
All that can be done at this stage in the history of science is to
argue for recognition of the problem, not to offer solutions. But
I want to take up some of the obstacles to reduction, and their consequences, in more detail, beginning with the clearest case.
33
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Chapter 3
Consciousness
1
Consciousness is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive naturalism that relies only on the resources of physical science.
The existence of consciousness seems to imply that the physical
description of the universe, in spite of its richness and explanatory
power, is only part of the truth, and that the natural order is far less |
power, is only part of the truth, and that the natural order is far less
austere than it would be if physics and chemistry accounted for
everything. If we take this problem seriously, and follow out its
implications, it threatens to unravel the entire naturalistic world
picture. Yet it is very difficult to imagine viable alternatives.
Let me begin with a brief history of what has brought us to our
present predicament. The modern mind-body problem arose out of
the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result
of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution.
Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise
quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and
time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such
as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among
them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand-how this physical
world appears to human perception-were assigned to the mind,
and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be
35
MIND AND COSMOS
analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting
on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances
and the human mind-as well as human intentions and purposesfrom the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere
spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop.
However, the exclusion of everything mental from the scope of
modern physical science was bound to be challenged eventually. We
humans are parts of the world, and the desire for a unified world
picture is irrepressible. It seems natural to pursue that unity by
extending the reach of physics and chemistry, in light of their great
successes in explaining so much of the natural order. These successes |
successes in explaining so much of the natural order. These successes
have so far taken the form of reduction followed by reconstruction:
discovering the basic elements of which everything is composed and
showing how they combine to yield the complexity we observe.
It has become clear that our bodies and central nervous systems
are parts of the physical world, composed of the same elements as
everything else and completely describable in terms of the modern
versions of the primary qualities-more sophisticated but still
mathematically and spatiotemporally defined. Molecular biology
keeps increasing our knowledge of our own physical composition,
operation, and development. Finally, so far as we can tell, our mental lives, including our subjective experiences, and those of other
creatures are strongly connected with and probably strictly dependent on physical events in our brains and on the physical interaction
of our bodies with the rest of the physical world.
Perhaps it is these developments in neurophysiology and molecular biology that have encouraged the hope of including the mind in
a single physical conception of the world; at any rate, the consensus
in that direction is recent. Descartes thought it couldn't be donethat mind and matter are both fully real and irreducibly distinct,
CONSCIOUSNESS
though they interact. In the dualist view, physical science is defined by
the exclusion of the mental from its subject matter. There has always
been resistance to dualism, but for several centuries after Descartes, it
expressed itself primarily through idealism, the view that mind is the
ultimate reality and the physical world is in some way reducible to it.
This attempt to overcome the division from the direction of the mental extends from Berkeley-who rejected the primary-secondary
quality distinction and held that physical things are ideas in the mind
of God-to the logical positivists, who analyzed the physical world as |
of God-to the logical positivists, who analyzed the physical world as
a construction out of sense data. Then, in a rapid historical shift whose
causes are somewhat obscure, idealism was largely displaced in later
twentieth-century analytic philosophy by attempts at unification in
the opposite direction, starting from the physical.
Materialism is the view that only the physical world is irreducibly real, and that a place must be found in it for mind, if there is
such a thing. This would continue the onward march of physical
science, through molecular biology, to full closure by swallowing up
the mind in the objective physical reality from which it was initially
excluded. The assumption is that physics is philosophically unproblematic, and the main target of opposition is Descartes' dualist picture of the ghost in the machine. The task is to come up with an
alternative, and here begins a series of failures.
One strategy for putting the mental into the physical world picture
is conceptual behaviorism, offered as an analysis of the real nature of
mental concepts. This was tried in several versions. Mental phenomena
were identified variously with behavior, behavioral dispositions, or
forms of behavioral organization. In another version, associated with
Ryle and inspired by Wittgenstein/ mental phenomena were not
i. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949); Ludwig Wittgenstein, Phil·
osophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953).
37
MIND AND COSMOS
identified with anything, either physical or nonphysical; the names of
mental states and processes were said not to be referring expressions.
Instead, mental concepts were explained in terms of their observable
behavioral conditions of application-behavioral criteria or assertability conditions rather than behavioral truth conditions.
All these strategies are essentiallyverificationist, ie., they assume |
All these strategies are essentiallyverificationist, ie., they assume
that all that needs to be said about the content of a mental statement
is what would verify or confirm it, or warrant its assertion, from the
point of view of an observer. In one way or another, they reduce
mental attributions to the externally observable conditions on the
basis of which we attribute mental states to others. If successful, this
would obviously place the mind comfortably in the physical world.
It is certainly true that mental phenomena have behavioral manifestations, which supply our main evidence for them in other creatures. Yet all these theories seem insufficient as analyses of the
mental because they leave out something essential that lies beyond
the externally observable grounds for attributing mental states to
others, namely, the aspect of mental phenomena that is evident
from the first-person, inner point of view of the conscious subject:
for example, the way sugar tastes to you or the way red looks or
anger feels, each of which seems to be something more than the
behavioral responses and discriminatory capacities that these experiences explain. Behaviorism leaves out the inner mental state itself.
In the 1950s an alternative, nonanalytic route to materialism was
proposed, one that in a sense acknowledged that the mental is
something inside us, of which outwardly observable behavior is
merely a manifestation. This was the psycho-physical identity
theory, offered by U. T. Place and J. J. C. Smart2 not as conceptual
2. U. T. Place, "Is Consciousness a Brain Process?" British Journal of Psychology 47 (1956):
44-50;].J. C. Smart, "Sensations and Brain Processes," Philosophical Review 68 (1959): 141-56.
CONSCIOUSNESS
analysis but as a scientific hypothesis. It held that mental events are
physical events in the brain:'¥=<!> (where'¥ is a mental event like
pain or a taste sensation and<!> is the corresponding physical event |
pain or a taste sensation and<!> is the corresponding physical event
in the central nervous system). Since this is not a conceptual truth,
it cannot be known a priori; it is supposed to be a theoretical identity, like "Water= H 20," and can be confirmed only by the future
development of science.
The trouble is that this nonanalytic identity raises a further
question: What is it about<!> that makes it also'¥? It must be some
property conceptually distinct from the physical properties that
define <!>. That is required for the identity to be a scientific and not a conceptual truth. 3 Clearly materialists won't want to give a dualist
answer-ie., that <!> is '¥because it has a nonphysical property in
addition to its physiological ones (eg., a nonphysical experiential
quality). But they have to give some answer, and it has to be an
answer that is consistent with materialism. So defenders of the identity theory, in spite of their wish to avoid relying on conceptual
analysis, tended to be pulled back into different kinds of analytical
behaviorism, in order to analyze the mental character of brain processes in a way that avoided dualism. What makes the brain process
a mental process, they proposed, is not an additional intrinsic property but a relational one-a relation to physical behavior.
A causal element was now added to the analysis: "the inner state
that typically causes certain behavior and is caused by certain
stimuli:' This was prompted by the need to explain the two distinct
nonsynonymous references to the same thing that occur in a nonconceptual identity statement. Materialists had to explain how
"pain" and "brain state" can refer to the same thing even though their
3. This is Max Black's objection to the identity theory, reported in Smart, "Sensations and
Brain Processes," 148nu.
39
MIND AND COSMOS
meaning is not the same, and to explain this without appealing to
anything nonphysical in accounting for the reference of"pain:'4 |
anything nonphysical in accounting for the reference of"pain:'4
These strategies have taken increasingly sophisticated form,
under the headings of causal behaviorism, functionalism, and other
theories of how mental concepts could refer to states of the brain in
virtue of the causal role of those states in controlling the interaction
between the organism and its environment. But all such strategies
are unsatisfactory for the same old reason: even with the brain
added to the picture, they clearly leave out something essential,
without which there would be no mind. And what they leave out is
just what was deliberately left out of the physical world by Descartes
and Galileo in order to form the modern concept of the physical,
namely, subjective appearances.
Another problem was subsequently noticed by Saul Kripke. Identitytheorists took as their model for'¥=<!> othertheoreticalidentities
like "Water= H 2 O" or "Heat= Molecular Motion:' But Kripke argued
that those identities are necessary truths (though not conceptual and
not a priori), whereas the '¥ /<!> relation appears to be contingent.5
This was the basis of Descartes' argument for dualism. Descartes said
that since we can clearly conceive of the mind existing without the
physical body, and vice versa, they can't be one thing.6
Consider "Water= Hp;' a typical scientifically discovered theoretical identity. It means that water is nothing but H 2 0. You can't have
H 20 without water, and you don't need anything more than H 20 for
water. It's water even if there's no one around to see, feel, or taste it. We
ordinarilyidentifywater by its perceptible qualities, but our perceptual
experiences aren't part of the water; they are just effects it has on our
4. See D. M. Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
i968).
5. Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, i980 ).
6. Rene Descartes, Meditation 6.
40
CONSCIOUSNESS |
40
CONSCIOUSNESS
senses. The intrinsic properties of water, its density, electrical conductivity, index of refraction, liquidity between o and 100 degrees centigrade, etc., are all fully explained by Hp and its properties. The
physical properties ofH20 are by themselves sufficient for water.
So if '¥ really is <!> in this sense, and nothing else, then <!> by
itself, once its physical properties are understood, should likewise
be sufficient for the taste of sugar, the feeling of pain, or whatever it
is supposed to be identical with. But it doesn't seem to be. It seems
conceivable, for any<!>, that there should be<!> without any experience at all. Experience of taste seems to be something extra, contingently related to the brain state-something produced rather than
constituted by the brain state. So it cannot be identical to the brain
state in the way that water is identical to H 2 0.
I have given only a brief sketch of the territory. A voluminous
and intricate literature has grown up around these problems, but it
serves mainly to confirm how intractable they are. The multiple
dead ends in the forward march of materialism suggest that the
'¥ /<!> dualism introduced at the birth of modern science may be
harder to get out of than many people have imagined. It has even led
some philosophers to eliminative materialism-the suggestion that
mental events, like ghosts and Santa Claus, don't exist at all.7 But if
we don't regard that as an option and still want to pursue a unified
world picture, I believe we will have to leave materialism behind.
Conscious subjects and their mental lives are inescapable components of reality not describable by the physical sciences.
I suspect that the appearance of contingency in the relation
between mind and brain is probably an illusion, and that it is in fact
a necessary but nonconceptual connection, concealed from us by
7. See Paul K. Feyerabend, "Mental Events and the Brain;' Journal of Philosophy 60 (1963):
295-96.
41 |
7. See Paul K. Feyerabend, "Mental Events and the Brain;' Journal of Philosophy 60 (1963):
295-96.
41
MIND AND COSMOS
the inadequacy of our present concepts.8 Major scientific advances
often require the creation of new concepts, postulating unobservable elements of reality that are needed to explain how natural regularities that initially appear accidental are in fact necessary. The
evidence for the existence of such things is precisely that if they
existed, they would explain what is otherwise incomprehensible.
Certainly the mind-body problem is difficult enough that we
should be suspicious of attempts to solve it with the concepts and
methods developed to account for very different kinds of things.
Instead, we should expect theoretical progress in this area to require
a major conceptual revolution at least as radical as relativity theory,
the introduction of electromagnetic fields into physics-or the
original scientific revolution itself, which, because of its built-in
restrictions, can't result in a "theory of everything," but must be seen
as a stage on the way to a more general form of understanding. We
ourselves are large-scale, complex instances of something both objectively physical from outside and subjectively mental from inside.
Perhaps the basis for this identity pervades the world.
2
So far I have argued that the physical sciences will not enable us to
understand the irreducibly subjective centers of consciousness that
are such a conspicuous part of the world. But the failure of reductionism in the philosophy of mind has implications that extend
beyond the mind-body problem. Psychophysical reductionism is an
essential component of a broader naturalistic program, which cannot
8. I say more about this in "The Psychophysical Nexus;' in Concealment and Exposure, and
Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 194-235.
42
CONSCIOUSNESS
survive without it. This naturalistic program is both metaphysical |
End of preview. Expand
in Data Studio
THEORY SOONibus (#1)
May be used for Continuous Pretraining, such as via this NOTEBOOK
An eclectic selection from the library of books, articles, papers, and varied textual curios I've amassed over the years.
Contains works in English, Russian, and French, including a wealth of critical theory, philosophy, translation theory, comparative literature, literary ethics, radical/revolutionary politics (mainly Marxist-Leninist, Libertarian Communist, Anarchist, Situationist, AltWoke/PostWoke, or Post-Anarchist), psychology, sociology, anthropology, biology, mathematics, computer science, deep learning, history, and much more!
Hopefully this collection might contribute, even if ever-so-minutely, to the emergence of more ideationally prescient, versatile, and challenging models/agents.
For those who've stumbled on this whilst searching around for datasets, models, spaces, or anything at all of a more radical ilk on here, I may offer some suggestions:
pkd/marxism-medium| {train} column | 85,200 itemsallura-org/the-anarchist-library| {text} column | 7700 items | (by Allura-MOE, a "a queer/trans/plural-run AI-finetuning collective")sweatSmile/marx-dataset| 1000 rows | SCHEMA:Conversations | Sample: [ { "from": "human", "value": "When was the Manifesto of the Communist Party written?" }, { "from": "assistant", "value": "Late 1847." } ]- Deleuze Thinking Machine Space/App by wisdomfunction
- The MarxGPT-2 model by pkd
- Various models + datasets by the highly disciplined vanguardists of WokeAI
- My yesteryearly agitprop generation LoRAs, like this one, made for the Revolutionary Communists of America
- Speaking of RCA, check it out HERE
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