Equipoise
In Critical Revolutionaries, Eagleton covers literary criticism in the period between World War One and the Great Depression. It's an entertaining look at intellectual upheaval in the epoch of world revolution. I have posted several reading excerpts: here, here, here, and here.
The below excerpts related to the concept of equipoise struck me as worth docketing.
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Chapter 1: T. S. Eliot
[....] A classical age is one of stability, shared belief, common standards and subtle shades of feeling. The world in Virgil's view is characterised by order, equipoise and civility, and so must be the poetry which portrays it. The closest English literature comes to a classical period is the eighteenth century, not least in the poetry of Alexander Pope; but the range of feeling of the age is too constricted for Eliot's taste, lacking the amplitude and versatility of the genuine classic. The period suggests a certain feebleness of spirit, and Eliot is notably lukewarm about even its most exemplary literary art.
There is, however, a problem here. A classical civilisation represents Eliot's social and cultural ideal, and the classical author who moulds his mind most deeply is Dante. Yet though he produces a stunning pastiche of Dante's verse in a passage in Four Quartets, the influence is strictly limited when it comes to the composition of his own work. There are two reasons why this is so. If the classical work thrives on shared values and standards, the liberal pluralism which Eliot finds so displeasing in modern society means that there can be precious little of this. Poets can no longer assume that they and their readers share the same sensibility. There is no longer a community of meaning and belief. At the same time, if a classic is to capture the spirit of an entire civilisation, it must be in touch with its common life and language. Poetic discourse should not be identical with daily speech, but it should display the finest virtues of prose, which brings it close to the everyday. But to stay faithful to the common life and language of early twentieth-century Europe involves registering a sterility and spiritual devastation which is nearer to Baudelaire than to Dante. It is thus that Eliot announces that the modern poet must see not only the beauty and the glory but also the boredom and the horror of human existence.
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Chapter 2: I. A. Richards
[....] Art, then, does not instruct us in how to live by what it says, but by what it shows – by its unity, harmony and equipoise. One might say that its very disinterestedness is didactic. The supreme value is to find oneself in a state of perfect self-possession and self-sufficiency, which Richards also regards as the highest form of freedom; and it is this that a successful poem or painting accomplishes. It is from its form rather than its content that we learn how to live. Richards is disdainful of what he calls 'message hunters', meaning those who raid literary works for their moral content. The moral lesson they fail to recognise is the poem itself. A poem is not a sermon or bulletin but an experience put into words; and in Richards's view its words are not just expressive of the experience but constitutive of it. It is as though the experience forms in the act of communication, and cannot be abstracted from it.
There are problems with Richards's Benthamite case, as there are with any ethical theory. It seems to assume, for example, that all our so-called impulses are inherently positive, and that only the frustration of them is wrong. William Empson, who accepted this view of value in general, inquires in his book Milton's God whether it applies to the desire to inflict pain. It is, in short, too innocent a view of the mind, compared, say, with the Gothic horrors that Freud excavates; but Richards, despite his Eliot-like belief that poetry springs from the deepest roots of the psyche, harbours a typically English scepticism of psychoanalysis, one common among academic psychologists both then and now. Yet if all our appetencies are intrinsically worthy, what of my overpowering urge to strangle my bank manager? Richards would retort that such an appetency is illicit because it thwarts a number of my other desires. But there is also the question of the bank manager's right to fulfil his needs, which would not be easy if he were dead.
Besides, it is strongly counter-intuitive to claim that, say, genocide is wicked simply because it throws us into psychic disarray. The theory is curiously self-centred. The fact is that genocide is immoral because of what it does to others, not primarily because of what it does to the perpetrators. Richards argues that unjust or aggressive behaviour deprives us of a whole range of important values, so that in behaving injuriously to others we inflict damage on ourselves. But not all those who harm their fellow humans are morally bankrupt themselves. There is always the case of the sensitive, compassionate con man. To commit a monstrous act does not necessarily mean that one is a moral monster. It is also far too convenient for the virtuous to claim that deep down the villainous are miserable because of their wickedness. Anyway, one could tolerate a spot of moral misery if it meant living for the rest of one's days off the proceeds of a lucrative bank robbery.
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Chapter 3: William Empson
[....] Even when a poem focuses on something definite, it implicitly appeals to a broader, vaguer backdrop of human experience which is all the more intrusive because it cannot be named. Any language gives us a rich, obscure practical knowledge which can be felt hovering in the background of whatever is actually articulated. Poets do not need to be in full control of their experience to write effectively: Empson's fifth ambiguity is a matter of 'fortunate confusion' or 'fruitful disorder', when authors are in the process of discovering their meaning in the act of writing, or not holding all of it in their mind at once, or are in transition from one idea to another. Truth is dishevelled, and so is inimical to rigid conventions or images of an ideal order. Artists, Empson believes, generally live in a muddle (he certainly did himself, as we shall see below), whereas Richards's goal is a life of equipoise.
Empson shares Richards's view that metaphor is the normal condition of language, and agrees that words resonate with past contexts and usages. Yet whereas Richards's interest in language is primarily philosophical, Empson's aim is to put social history back into speech, as he does most memorably in The Structure of Complex Words. He also endorses his teacher's Benthamite ethics. He, too, holds that the greatest variety of satisfactions is central to the good life. Given its pursuit of self-gratification, Benthamite morality has sometimes been accused of egoism; but Empson, commended by his friends and colleagues as a man remarkably free of ego, seeks to turn this apparent defect to advantage. He believes that others are satisfied when one satisfies oneself, not least because the latter involves acting out a number of generous impulses, with which he considers human beings to be plentifully equipped. You fulfil more impulses of your own, he claims, if you have a tendency to fulfil those of others. The great adversary of the Benthamite view, he argues, is Buddhism – not because it lacks a belief in value, but because it lacks a belief in the individual. Since he was deeply attracted to Buddhism, this may be an example of holding two contradictory views in creative tension.
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[....] Some such ambiguous relationship lies for Empson at the heart of pastoral literature, in his own idiosyncratic use of the term. Pastoral presents us with both aristocrats and peasants, courtiers and rustics; and the aristocrats must acknowledge their difference from ordinary people while being mindful of the humanity they share in common. It is sometimes a good thing, Empson argues, to stand apart from your society so far as you can. This is his nonconformist persona speaking, disdainful of conventions and herd-like consensus. Like the face of the Buddha, the ideal is to be both blind and all-seeing – blind to tribal prejudices, but therefore able to expand and enrich the self in an openness to the reality of others. 'Some people are more delicate and complex than others', he writes, and 'if such people can keep this distinction from doing harm it is a good thing, though a small thing by comparison with our common humanity' (SVP, p. 23). The last phrase evokes the more sociable, socialistic Empson; so that it is a question of affirming individual difference and independence while continuing to prize what we share in common. Pastoral is among other things about this equipoise, which we shall find in a different form in the work of F.R. Leavis. The nobleman not only finds himself reflected in the rustic, but can also learn from him in a spirit of humility. Empson imagines him thinking:
I now abandon my specialised feelings because I am trying to find better ones, so I must balance myself for the moment by imagining the feelings of the simple person. He may be in a better state than I am by luck, freshness, or divine grace . . . I must imagine his way of feeling because the refined thing must be judged by the fundamental thing, because strength must be learnt in weakness and sociability in isolation, because the best manners are learnt in the simple life. (SVP, pp. 22–3)
Empson learned from Buddhism the value of an organic relationship to Nature, an affinity with the world which prefigures today's ecological thought; and this he considered the only tolerable philosophy, one sharply at odds with what he regarded as the vile Christian cult of sacrificing Nature, or various parts of it, to a vindictive God. In the latter case, the One (Christ) is sacrificed to the Many, destroyed for its sake, while in pastoral the One contains the Many, rather as the all-seeing artist does. The scapegoat, who is sacrificed on behalf of the people as a whole, thereby unites the One and the Many, and like Christ is both high and low, unique and representative, victim and redeemer, hero and swain. Empson also learnt from Buddhism a way of balancing the claims of individual freedom with social responsibility. The Buddha is sufficient to himself yet full of universal charity. Individual distinction and common humanity, which in the process of living are a matter of constant trade-offs, compromises and contradictions, are reconciled in this utopian vision.
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Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read (1922) by Terry Eagleton
Jay
6 May 2022
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