Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: Among the Nightmare Lovers of Hades
- 1 Eliot as Revolutionary
- 2 Goethe and Modernism: The Dream of Anachronism in Goethe's Roman Elegies
- 3 Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano
- 4 Does Time Exist?
- 5 The Age of Authenticity: An American Poet in England
- 6 Whitman and Wilde in Camden
- 7 Dangerous Thoughts, Puzzling Responses
- 8 Scaling the Wall
- 9 Mass Death and Resurrection: Notes on Contemporary, Mostly American, Jewish Fiction
- 10 Rilke, Einstein, Freud and the Orpheus Mystery
- 11 Shrouds Aplenty (on poems of Janowitz, et al)
- 12 Ambushes of Amazement (on poems of Wakoski)
- 13 Dangerous and Steep (on poems of Jacobsen)
- 14 Small Touching Skill (on poems of Ponsot)
- 15 Language Mesh (on Paul Celan)
- 16 Sweet Extra (on poems of Cuddihy, Ray)
- 17 Maze of the Original (on translating poetry)
- 18 Approaching the Medieval Lyric
- 19 Dark Passage (on poems of Stafford)
- 20 Mistress of Sorrows (on Ingeborg Bachmann)
- 21 The Innocence of a Mirror (on poems of Oliver)
- 22 Peskily Written (on Sade)
- 23 Is There Sex after Sappho?
- 24 Saving One's Skin (on medieval poetry)
- 25 Brilliant White Shadow (on poems and prose of Saba)
- 26 Serpent's Tale (on Minoan archeology)
- 27 How Honest Was Cellini?
- 28 The Poetry of No Compromises (on poems of Rehder)
- 29 Assigning Names (on poems of Nurkse)
- 30 History and Ethics: Bruni's History of Florence
- 31 Virgil's Aeneid Made New (a translation by Robert Fagles)
- 32 Painting with Poetry (on the poems of Annie Boutelle)
- 33 Vampires and Freedom (on the work of Erik Butler)
- 34 How the West Learned to Read and Write: Silent Reading and the Invention of the Sonnet
- List of Publications
- Index
7 - Dangerous Thoughts, Puzzling Responses
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface: Among the Nightmare Lovers of Hades
- 1 Eliot as Revolutionary
- 2 Goethe and Modernism: The Dream of Anachronism in Goethe's Roman Elegies
- 3 Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano
- 4 Does Time Exist?
- 5 The Age of Authenticity: An American Poet in England
- 6 Whitman and Wilde in Camden
- 7 Dangerous Thoughts, Puzzling Responses
- 8 Scaling the Wall
- 9 Mass Death and Resurrection: Notes on Contemporary, Mostly American, Jewish Fiction
- 10 Rilke, Einstein, Freud and the Orpheus Mystery
- 11 Shrouds Aplenty (on poems of Janowitz, et al)
- 12 Ambushes of Amazement (on poems of Wakoski)
- 13 Dangerous and Steep (on poems of Jacobsen)
- 14 Small Touching Skill (on poems of Ponsot)
- 15 Language Mesh (on Paul Celan)
- 16 Sweet Extra (on poems of Cuddihy, Ray)
- 17 Maze of the Original (on translating poetry)
- 18 Approaching the Medieval Lyric
- 19 Dark Passage (on poems of Stafford)
- 20 Mistress of Sorrows (on Ingeborg Bachmann)
- 21 The Innocence of a Mirror (on poems of Oliver)
- 22 Peskily Written (on Sade)
- 23 Is There Sex after Sappho?
- 24 Saving One's Skin (on medieval poetry)
- 25 Brilliant White Shadow (on poems and prose of Saba)
- 26 Serpent's Tale (on Minoan archeology)
- 27 How Honest Was Cellini?
- 28 The Poetry of No Compromises (on poems of Rehder)
- 29 Assigning Names (on poems of Nurkse)
- 30 History and Ethics: Bruni's History of Florence
- 31 Virgil's Aeneid Made New (a translation by Robert Fagles)
- 32 Painting with Poetry (on the poems of Annie Boutelle)
- 33 Vampires and Freedom (on the work of Erik Butler)
- 34 How the West Learned to Read and Write: Silent Reading and the Invention of the Sonnet
- List of Publications
- Index
Summary
Does knowledge force people into guilty acts? Are ethical disasters, as well as material, emotional and spiritual benefits, its inevitable result? Unstated but implicit, tacit yet as frightful and alluring as a beautiful serpent coiling about a tree, these questions haunt three Western myths that have attracted fresh, considerable and increasing attention over the past couple of centuries, those of Adam and Eve, Prometheus and Faust. The questions themselves are as old as Western philosophy. They animate Western theology. Plato, in his fourthcentury BC Protagoras, condemns the Promethean brand of technological knowledge, if unaccompanied by political savvy, as sloshing into a social mess. St. Augustine, in his sixth- century Confessions, describes all men and women as the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, whose gobbling at the tree of knowledge of good and evil doomed them to banishment from paradise. Disobedient munching led to inescapable sinning. The Faust myth looks trickier along these lines, chiefly because its versions disagree. The sixteenthcentury Faust book is not Marlowe, is not Goethe, who had not read Marlowe when he wrote Faust: Part One. Their attitudes toward “forbidden” knowledge do not match up, though some penalty seems required in each case for prying into the divine cupboard: one suffers, or causes others to suffer, for sneaking a peek at God's secret stash.
Crucial to each case is the premise that knowledge is a pivotal advance over merely knowing things. One may know information and grasp facts, however these are defined, without feeling an irresistible compulsion to act. Knowing about an in- progress genocide, for instance, may no more affect one's natural indolence than observing that an afternoon is bright and sunny. Knowledge, however, impels one beyond informational lassitude. It seems to be a state of understanding or misunderstanding, rather than of rote recall. It insists that one take action, or abstain from action, or appreciate a situation— with the impulse often equally powerful in each direction— on the basis of information and facts, and even misinformation, a not quite begging- the- question definition because it presupposes a developing ethical outlook: the information and facts or even false data at one's disposal have come to be perceived as good or bad or beautiful or ghastly, and something must be done, or not done, about them.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Poetry and FreedomDiscoveries in Aesthetics, 1985–2018, pp. 55 - 64Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2020