Extracts.000001.The Impersonality of Art

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)

from Selected Letters (1857)

THE IMPERSONALITY OF ART

With a reader such as you, Madame, one who is so understanding, frankness is a duty. I therefore answer your questions: Madame Bovary is based on no actual occurrence. It is a totally fictitious story; it contains none of my feelings and no details from my own life. The illusion of truth (if there is one) comes, on the contrary, from the book’s impersonality. It is one of my principles that a writer should not be his own theme. An artist must be in his work like God in creation, invisible and all-powerful; he should be everywhere felt, but nowhere seen.

Furthermore, Art must rise above personal emotions and nervous susceptibilities. It is time to endow it with pitiless method, with the exactness of the physical sciences. Still, for me the capital difficulty remains style, form, that indefinable Beauty implicit in the conception and representing, as Plato said, the splendor of Truth.

For a long time, Madame, I led a life like yours. I too spent several years completely alone in the country, hearing in winter no sound but the rustle of the wind in the trees and the cracking of the drift-ice on the Seine under my window. If I have arrived at some understanding of life, it is because I have lived little in the ordinary sense of the word; I have eaten meagerly, but ruminated much; I have seen all kinds of people, and visited various countries. I have traveled on foot and on camel-back. I am acquainted with Parisian speculators and Damascus Jews, with Italian ruffians and Negro mountebanks. I made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and was lost in the snows of Parnassus—which may be taken symbolically.

Do not complain; I have been here and there in the world and have a thorough knowledge of that Paris you dream of; there is nothing to equal a good book at your fireside, the reading of Hamlet or Faust on a day when your responses are keen. My own dream is to buy a little palace in Venice, on the Grand Canal.

So there, Madame—part of your curiosity is gratified. To complete my portrait and biography, add only this: I am thirty-five, five feet eight, with the shoulders of a stevedore and the nervous irritability of a young lady of fashion. I am a bachelor and a recluse.






James Joyce (1882-1941)

from Stephen Hero (1903-4)

THE EPIPHANY

He was passing through Eceles’ St one evening, one misty evening, with all these thoughts dancing the dance of unrest in his brain when a trivial incident set him composing some ardent verses which he entitled a “Vilanelle of the Temptress.” A young lady was standing on the steps of one of those brown brick houses which seem the very incarnation of Irish paralysis. A young gentleman was leaning on the rusty railings of the area. Stephen as he passed on his quest heard the following fragment of colloquy out of which he received an impression keen enough to afflict his sensitiveness very severely.

The Young Lady—(drawling discreetly) . . . O, yes . . . I was . . . at the . . . cha . . . pel. . . .
The Young Gentleman—(inaudibly) . . . I . . . (again inaudibly) . . . I . . .
The Young Lady—(softly) . . . O . . . but you’re . . . ve . . . ry . . . wick . . . ed. . . .

This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany. Cranly questioned the inscrutable dial of the Ballast Office with his no less inscrutable countenance.

—Yes, said Stephen. I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin’s street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany—
—What?—
—Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised.





Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

from Letters (1907)

ARTISTIC OBJECTIVITY

That is why I must be cautious in trying to write about Cézanne, which naturally tempts me greatly now. Not the person (I really ought to see that at last) who takes in pictures from so private an angle is justified in writing about them; one who could quietly confirm them in their existence, without experiencing through them more or other than facts, would surely be fairest to them. But within my own life this unexpected contact, coming and making a place for itself as it did, is full of confirmation and pertinence. Another poor man. And what progress in poverty since Verlaine (if Verlaine wasn’t already a relapse), who under “Mon Testament” wrote: Je ne donne rien aux pauvres parce que je suis un pauvre moi-même, and in almost all of whose work this not-giving was, this embittered displaying of empty hands, for which Cézanne during the last thirty years had no time. When should he have shown his hands? Malicious glances did often find them, whenever he was on his way, and lewdly uncovered their indigence; we, however, are given to know from the pictures only how massive and genuine the work lay in them to the end. This work, which had no preferences any more, no inclinations, no fastidious indulgences; whose smallest component had been tested on the scales of an infinitely sensitive conscience and which with such integrity reduced the existent to its color content that it began, beyond color, a new existence, without earlier memories. It is this unlimited objectivity, which declines to interfere in any other sphere, that makes Cézanne’s portraits so outrageous and absurd to people. They apprehend, without realizing, that he was reproducing apples, onions, and oranges with sheer color (which to them may still seem a subordinate device of pictorial practice), but when they come to landscape, they miss interpretation, judgment, superiority, and where portraiture is concerned, why, the rumor of intellectual conception has been passed on even to the most bourgeois, and so successfully that something of the kind is already noticeable even in Sunday photographs of engaged couples and families. And here Cézanne naturally seems to them quite inadequate and not worth discussing at all. He is actually as alone in this salon as he was in life, and even the painters, the young painters, already pass him by more quickly because they see the dealers on his side.







TE Hulme (1883-1917)

from “Romanticism and Classicism” (1914)

ROMANTICISM AND CLASSICISM

I want to maintain that after a hundred years of romanticism, we are in for a classical revival, and that the particular weapon of this new classical spirit, when it works in verse, will be fancy. And in this I imply the superiority of fancy—not superior generally or absolutely, for that would be obvious nonsense, but superior in the sense that we use the word in empirical ethics—good for something, superior for something. I shall have to prove then two things, first that a classical revival is coming, and, secondly, for its particular purposes, fancy will be superior to imagination.

. . . .
Put shortly, these are the two views, then. One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance; and the other that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To the one party man’s nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical.

One may note here that the Church has always taken the classical view since the defeat of the Pelagian heresy and the adoption of the sane classical dogma of original sin.

It would be a mistake to identify the classical view with that of materialism. On the contrary it is absolutely identical with the normal religious attitude. I should put it in this way: That part of the fixed nature of man is the belief in the Deity. This should be as fixed and true for every man as belief in the existence of matter and in the objective world. It is parallel to appetite, the instinct of sex, and all the other fixed qualities. Now at certain times, by the use of either force or rhetoric, these instincts have been suppressed—in Florence under Savonarola, in Geneva under Calvin, and here under the Roundheads. The inevitable result of such a process is that the repressed instinct bursts out in some abnormal direction. So with religion. By the perverted rhetoric of Rationalism, your natural instincts are suppressed and you are converted into an agnostic. Just as in the case of the other instincts, Nature has her revenge. The instincts that find their right and proper outlet in religion must come out in some other way. You don’t believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don’t believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. In other words, you get romanticism. The concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience. It is like poring a pot of treacle over the dinner table. Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion.

I must now shirk the difficulty of saying exactly what I mean by romantic and classical in verse. I can only say that it means the result of these two attitudes towards the cosmos, towards man, in so far as it gets reflected in verse. The romantic, because he thinks man infinite, must always be talking about infinite; and as there is always the bitter contrast between what you think you ought to be able to do and what man actually can, it always tends, in its later stages at any rate, to be gloomy. I really can’t go any further than to say it is the reflection of these two temperaments, and point out examples of the different spirits. On the one hand I would take such diverse people as Horace, most of the Elizabethans and the writers of the Augustan age, and on the other side Lamartine, Hugo, parts of Keats, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Swinburne.

I know quite well that when people think of a classical and romantic in verse, the contrast at once comes into their mind between, say, Racine and Shakespeare. I don’t mean this; the dividing line that I intend is here misplaced a little from the true middle. That Racine is on the extreme classical side I agree, but if you call Shakespeare romantic, you are using a different definition to the one I give. You are thinking of the difference between classic and romantic as being merely one between restraint and exuberance. I should say with Nietazsche that there are two kinds of classicism, the static and the dynamic. Shakespeare is the classic of motion.

What I mean by classical in verse, then, is this. That even in the most imaginative flights there is always a holding back, a reservation. The classical poet never forgets this finiteness, this limit of man. He remembers always that he is mixed up with earth. He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas.

You might say if you wished that the whole of the romantic attitude seems to crystallise in verse round metaphors of flight. Hugo is always flying, flying over abysses, flying up into the eternal gases. The word infinite in every other line.

In the classical attitude you never seem to swing right along to the infinite nothing. If you say an extravagant thing which does exceed the limits inside which you know man to be fastened, yet there is always conveyed in some way at the end an impression of yourself standing outside it, and not quite believing it, or consciously putting it forward as a flourish. You never go blindly into an atmosphere more than the truth, an atmosphere too rarefied for man to breathe for long. You are always faithful to the conception of a limit. It is a question of pitch; in romantic verse you move at a certain pitch of rhetoric which you know, man being what he is, to be a little high-falutin. The kind of thing you get in Hugo or Swinburne. In the coming classical reaction that will feel just wrong.

. . . .

I object even to the best of the romantics. I object still more to the receptive attitude. I object to the sloppiness which doesn’t consider that a poem is a poem unless it is moaning or whining about something or other. I always think in this connection of the last line of a poem of John Webster’s which ends with a request I cordially endorse:

End your moan and come away.

The thing has got so bad now that a poem which is all dry and hard, a properly classical poem, would not be considered poetry at all. How many people now can lay their hands on their hearts and say they like either Horace or Pope? They feel a kind of chill when they read them.

The dry hardness which you get in the classics is absolutely repugnant to them. Poetry that isn’t damp isn’t poetry at all. They cannot see that accurate description is a legitimate object of verse. Verse to them always means a bringing in of some of the emotions that are grouped round the word infinite.

The essence of poetry to most people is that it must lead them to a beyond of some kind. Verse strictly confined to the earthly and the definite (Keats is full of it) might seem to them to be excellent writing, excellent craftsmanship, but not poetry. So much has romanticism debauched us, that, without some form of vagueness, we deny the highest.

In the classic it is always the light of ordinary day, never the light that never was on land or sea. It is always perfectly human and never exaggerated: man is always man and never a god.

But the awful result of romanticism is that, accustomed to this strange light, you can never live without it. Its effect on you is that of a drug.

There is a general tendency to think that verse means little else than the expression of unsatisfied emotion. People say: ‘But how can you have verse without sentiment?’ You see what it is: the prospect alarms them. A classical revival to them would mean the prospect of an arid desert and the death of poetry as they understand it, and could only come to fill the gap caused by that death. Exactly why this dry classical spirit should have a positive and legitimate necessity to express itself in poetry is utterly inconceivable to them. What this positive need is, I shall show later. It follows from the fact that there is another quality, not the emotion produced, which is at the root of excellence in verse. Before I get to this I am concerned with a negative thing, a theoretical point, a prejudice that stands in the way and is really at the bottom of this reluctance to understand classical verse.

It is an objection which ultimately I believe comes from a bad metaphysic of art. You are unable to admit the existence of beauty without the infinite being in some way or another dragged in.

The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description. The first thing is to recognise how extraordinarily difficult this is. It is no mere matter of carefulness; you have to use language, and language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise—that which is common to you, me and everybody. But each man sees a little differently, and to get out clearly and exactly what he does see he must have a terrific struggle with language, whether it be with words or the technique of other arts. Language has its own special nature, its own conventions and communal ideas. It is only by a concentrated effort of the mind that you can hold it fixed to your own purpose. I always think that the fundamental process at the back of all the arts might be represented by the following metaphor. You know what I call architect’s curves—flat pieces of wood with all different kinds of curvature. By a suitable selection from these you can draw approximately any curve you like. The artist I take to be the man who simply can’t bear the idea of that ‘approximately.’ He will get the exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an idea in the mind. I shall here have to change my metaphor a little to get the process in his mind. Suppose that instead of your curved pieces of wood you have a springy piece of steel of the same types of curvature as the wood. Now the state of tension or concentration of mind, if he is doing anything really good in this struggle against the ingrained habit of the technique, may be represented by a man employing all his fingers to bend the steel out of its own curve and into the exact curve which you want. Something different to what it would assume naturally.

There are then two things to distinguish, first the particular faculty of mind to see things as they really are, and apart from the conventional ways in which you have been trained to see them. This is itself rare enough in all consciousness. Second, the concentrated state of mind, the grip over oneself which is necessary in the actual expression of what one sees. To prevent one falling into the conventional curves of ingrained technique, to hold on through infinite detail and trouble to the exact curve you want. Whatever you get this sincerity, you get the fundamental quality of good art without dragging in infinite or serious.

I can now get at that positive fundamental quality of verse which constitutes excellence, which has nothing to do with infinity, with mystery or with emotions.







James Joyce (1882-1941)

from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

THE AESTHETIC EMOTION

Stephen went on:
—Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.
—Repeat, said Lynch.
Stephen repeated the definitions slowly.
—A girl got into a hansom a few days ago, he went on, in London. She was on her way to meet her mother whom she had not seen for many years. At the corner of a street the shaft of a lorry shivered the window of the hansom in the shape of a star. A long fine needle of the shivered glass pierced her heart. She died on the instant. The reporter called it a tragic death. It is not. It is remote from terror and pity according to the terms of my definitions.
—The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use the word arrest. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I used the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.
—You say that art must not excite desire, said Lynch. I told you that one day I wrote my name in pencil on the backside of the Venus of Praxiteles in the Museum. Was that not desire?
—I speak of normal natures, said Stephen. You also told me that when you were a boy in that charming Carmelite school you ate pieces of dried cowdung.
Lynch broke again into a whinny of laughter and again rubbed both his hands over his groins but without taking them from his pockets.
—O, I did! I did! he cried.






James Joyce (1882-1941)

from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

THE IMPERSONALITY OF ART

Even in literature, the highest and most spiritual art, the forms are often confused. The lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of emotion, a rhythmical cry such as ages ago cheered on the man who pulled at the oar or dragged stones up a slope. He who utters it is more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion. The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea. This progress you will see easily in that old English ballad Turpin Hero which begins in the first person and ends in the third person. The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in a reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
—Trying to refine them also out of existence, said Lynch.
A fine rain began to fall from the high veiled sky and they turned into the duke’s lawn to reach the national library before the shower came.
—What do you mean, Lynch asked surlily, by prating about beauty and the imagination in this miserable Godforsaken island? No wonder the artist retired within or behind his handiwork after having perpetrated this country.







TS Eliot (1888-1965)

from “Hamlet” (1920)

THE OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. If you examine any of Shakespeare’s more successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence; you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series. The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine to this point: that Hamlet’s bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face of his artistic problem. Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It is thus a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action. None of the possible actions can satisfy it; and nothing that Shakespeare can do with the plot can express Hamlet for him. And it must be noticed that the very nature of the données of the problem precludes objective equivalence. To have heightened the criminality of Gertrude would have been to provide the formula for a totally different emotion in Hamlet; it is just because her character is so negative and insignificant that she arouses in Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable of representing.







Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976)

NON-OBJECTIVE SCIENCE AND UNCERTAINTY (1927*)

In the nineteenth century nature still appeared as set of laws in space and time in which man and man’s intervention in nature could be ignored in principle, if not in practice.

Matter was thought of in terms of its mass, which remained constant through all changes, and which required forces to move it. Because, from the eighteenth century
onwards, chemical experiments could be classified and explained by the atomic hypothesis of ancient times, it appeared reasonable to take over the view of ancient philosophy that atoms were the real substance the immutable buildingstones of matter. Just as in the philosophy of Democritus, the differences in material qualities were considered to be merely apparent; smell or colour, temperature or viscosity, were not actual qualities of matter but resulted from the interaction of matter and our senses, and had to be explained by the arrangements and movements of atoms, and by the effect of these arrangements on our minds. It is thus that there arose the over-simplified world-view of nineteenth-century materialism: atoms move in space and time as the real and immutable substances, and it is their arrangement and motion that create the colourful phenomena of the world of our senses. . . .

The first, but not yet very dangerous, incursion into this world-view took place in the second half of the last century with the development of the theory of electricity, in which not matter but fields of force were considered to be the real explanation. Interactions between fields of force without any matter to propagate the force were very much more difficult to understand than the materialist picture of atomic physics, and introduced an element of abstraction and a lack of clarity into what appeared otherwise to be so reasonable a world-view. Attempts were not lacking to return once more to the simpler concepts of materialist philosophy by way of the ether, which was supposed to be an elastic medium transmitting these fields of force; yet no such attempt had any real success. Even so, one could take comfort from the fact that changes in the fields of force could still be considered as processes in space and time, and that they could be described objectively, i.e., without any reference to the manner in which they were observed, and thus in accordance with the generally held idealized view of laws of space and time. Furthermore, fields of force, i.e., forces which can only be observed by their effect on atoms, could be considered as produced by atoms, and so as explaining atomic movements in some way. Thus atoms still remained as the actual essence, and between them there was empty space, real only inasmuch as it was a transmitter of fields of force.

In this world-view it did not matter overmuch that after the discovery of radioactivity at the end of the last century, the atoms of chemistry could no longer be considered as the ultimate indivisible building-stones of matter. These were now thought to consist of threekinds of basicunits-the protons, neutrons and electrons of today. The practical consequences of this new knowledge have been the transmutation of elements and the rise of atomic physics, and they have thus become extremely important. Basically, however, nothing has been changed in principle by our acceptance of protons, neutrons and electrons as the smallest building-stones of matter, if we interpret these as the real essence. What is important for the materialistic world-view is simply the possibility that such small building-stones of elementary particles exist and that they may be considered the ultimate objective reality. Thus, the well-constructed world-view of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was preserved, and thanks to its simplicity it managed to retain its full power of conviction for number of decades.

But in our century it is just in this sphere that fundamental change have taken place in the basis of atomic physics which have made us abandon the world-view of ancient atomic philosophy. It has become clear that the desired objective reality of the elementary particles is too crude an over-simplification of what really happens, and that it must give way to very much more abstract conceptions. For if we wish to form a picture of these elementary particles, we can no longer ignore the physical processes through which we obtain our knowledge of them. While, in observing everyday objects, the physical process involved in making the observation plays a subsidiary role only, in the case of the smallest building particles of matter, every process of observation produces a large disturbance. We can no longer speak of the behaviour of the particle independently of the process of observation. As a final consequence, the natural laws formulated mathematically in quantum theory no longer deal with the elementary particles themselves but with our knowledge of them. Nor it is any longer possible to ask whether or not these particles exist in space and time objectively, since the only processes we can refer to as taking place are those which represent the interplay of particles with some other physical system, e.g., a measuring instrument.

Thus, the objective reality of the elementary particles has been strangely dispersed, not into the fog of some new ill-defined or still unexplained conception of reality, but into the transparent clarity of a mathematics that no longer describes the behaviour of the elementary particles but only our knowledge of this behaviour. The atomic physicist has had to resign himself to the fact that his science is but a link in the infinite chain of man’s argument with nature, and that it cannot simply speak of nature “in itself.” Science always presupposes the existence of man and, as Bohr has said, we must become conscious of the fact that we are not merely observers but also actors on the stage of life…

When we speak of the picture of nature in the exact science of our age, we do not mean a picture of nature so much as a picture of our relationships with nature. The old division of the world into objective processes in space and time and the mind in which these processes are mirrored-in other words, the Cartesian difference between res cogitans and res extensa-is no longer a suitable starting point for our understanding of modern science. Science, we find, is now focused on the network of relationships between man and nature, on the framework which makes us as living beings dependent parts of nature, and which we as human beings have simultaneously made the object of our thoughts and actions. Science no longer confronts nature as an objective observer, but sees itself as an actor in this interplay between man and nature. The scientific method of analysing, explaining and classifying has become conscious of its limitations, which arise out of the fact that by its intervention science alters and refashions the object of investigation. In other words, method and object can no longer be separated. The scientific world-view has ceased to be a scientific view in the true sense of the word….

The use of the concept of causality for describing the law of cause and effect is of relatively recent origin. In previous philosophies the word causa had a very much more general significance than it has today. Thus scholasticism, following Aristotle, spoke of four kinds of “causes”: the causa formalis which might be considered as the form or the spiritual essence of a thing, the causa mataerialis which referred to the matter of which the thing consisted, the cause finalis or the purpose for which the thing was created, and finally, the causa efficiens. Only the causa efficiens corresponds to what is meant by the word “cause” today.

The transformation of causa into the modern concept of cause have taken place in the course of centuries, in close connection with the changes in man’s conception of reality and with the creation of science at the beginning of the modern age. As material processes became more prominent in man’s conception of reality, the word causa was used increasingly to refer to the particular material event which preceded and had in some way caused, the event to be explained. Thus even Kant, who frequently did what at root amounted to drawing philosophic consequences from the developments in science since Newton’s time, already used the word “causality” in a nineteenth-century sense. When we experience an event we always assume that there was another event preceding it from which the second has followed according to some law. Thus the causality became narrowed down, finally, to refer to our belief that events in nature are uniquely determined, or, in other words, that an exact knowledge of nature or some part of it would suffice, at least in principle, to determine the future. Nowton’s physics was so constructed that the future motion of a system could be calculated from its particular state at a given time. The idea that nature really was like this was perhaps enuncitaed most generally and most lucidly by Laplace when he spoke of a demon, who at a given time, by knowing the position and motion of every atom, would be capable of predicting the entire future of the world. When the word “causality” is interpreted in this very narrow sense, we speak of “determinism, “by which we mean that these are immutable natural laws that uniquely determine the future state of any system from its present state.







Wyndham Lewis


from “Physics of the Not-Self” (1932)

THE ENEMY OF THE STARS


If “truth” is the word we give to that disintegrated not-self principle which every man necessarily must harbour (but which he can be trained quite easily to paralyse), then every altruism can be traced to the activities of this same principle. But from this it must not be supposed that the destruction of this principle in a man cuts him off from “his fellows.” That would be a great mistake. The contrary is, in fact, the case.
The man who has formed the habit of consulting and adhering to the principle of the not-self participates, it is true, in the life of others outside himself far more than does the contrary type of man, he who refrains from making any use at all of this speculative organ. But he is not, for that reason, more like other people. He is less like them. For is he not one in a great many thousand? And to be like other people he certainly should be less them and more himself. Hence his altruism only results in differentiating him, and in leaving him without as it were a “class,” even without a “kind.” For this ultra-human activity is really inhuman: even it frustrates its own purpose by awakening suspicion instead of trust. It is regarded as a breaker down of walls, a dissolvent of nations, factions, and protective freemasonries, a radio-active something in the midst of more conservative aggregations, as naturally it is. It is an enemy principle. It is heartily disliked. Since, again, by its very nature, it awakens love, that is not in its favour either. Love being the thing that is most prized by men, the individual who (in league with the diabolical principle of the not-self) appears to be attempting to obtain it by unlawful means is at once without the pale. By way of the intellect he is necessarily reaching what the force and fraud of brute nature are otherwise combined to obtain (and of which they get very little).
The intellect, or the seat of that forbidden principle of the not-self, is the one thing that every gentleman is sworn, however hard pressed, never to employ. What cannot be obtained by way of self—by that great public road of private fraud—must be forgone. That is understood, universally recognized (by all White Men and pukka “sports”). The intellect is the devil, it could be said. But more than that, there is something indefinably disreputable about it. It is not “clean.” It cannot be described confidently. It is irreparably un-pukka. It is, in the last analysis, the enemy of all the constellations and universes.
We have one life, and we have one individuality. It is a ration, as it were. It is an “obligation” (so people say sometimes about “art”) to devote all our energies to that one self, and not to poach. We were not born twenty men, but one. It is our duty “to remain in our class.” Equally it is our duty to remain in our self—our one and only. But if we must go outside our self—if we are so wrong-headed—then at least it is our “bounden duty” to see that we do not, at least, despoil ourselves for others. We must go outside in order to take, not in order to give. But it is far more dignified to remain closeted with one’s inalienable physical possessions—like a sedate hen upon its eggs—from the cradle to the grave. Oh, yes: that certainly is so.