Poetry as epistemological inquiry: reading Bernstein reading Cavell reading Wittgenstein [Elektronische Ressource] / vorgelegt von Ursula Göricke
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Poetry as epistemological inquiry: reading Bernstein reading Cavell reading Wittgenstein [Elektronische Ressource] / vorgelegt von Ursula Göricke

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Publié le 01 janvier 2003
Nombre de lectures 22
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Poetry as Epistemological Inquiry:
Reading Bernstein Reading Cavell Reading Wittgenstein
Von der Philosophischen Fakultät der Rheinisch-Westfälischen Technischen Hochschule
Aachen zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades einer Doktorin der Philosophie genehmigte
Dissertation
vorgelegt von
Ursula Göricke
aus
Geilenkirchen (Kreis Heinsberg)
Berichter: Universitätsprofessor Dr. Richard Martin
Universitätsprofessor Dr. Ludwig Jäger
Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 24.03.2003
Diese Dissertation ist auf den Internetseiten der Hochschulbibliothek online verfügbar.Für meine ElternContents
Acknowledgments 4
0 Introduction 5
I Philosophy and Literature 17
I.1 Philosophy's Aspiring to Literature 17
I.2 Literature's Aspiring to Philosophy 33
II Politics 50
II.1 The Social Contract 50
II.2 The Politics of Poetic Form 73
III Skepticism 93
III.1 The Truths and Wrongs of Skepticism 93
III.2 The Poetics of Negative Capability 111
IV Reading Dark City 143
V Conclusion: Redemptive Reading 215
Works Cited 2394
Acknowledgments
During the writing of this thesis, many people have been supportive of my efforts. I wish to
express my gratitude to the professors on my dissertation committee Richard Martin and
Ludwig Jäger. I also wish to thank my dear friends: David Kessler who carefully read and
proofread a considerable part of the manuscript. I thoroughly enjoyed our transatlantic
exchange. Birgit Schütz who supplied encouragement and support for the final stage of this
dissertation during our stay in Austria. And last but not least Dr. Jan Schneider for his
continuous inspiration. I very much enjoyed our weekly conversations about Wittgenstein's
Philosophical Investigations.
Very special thanks are due to professor Marjorie Perloff for reading my dissertation and
discussing its issues with me. I am grateful for her continuous support, advice and
encouragement.
I wish to express my gratitude to the Graduiertenförderung des Landes Nordrhein-
Westfalen for three years of funding which made this work possible and the DAAD for
granting a three month period of research at Stanford.
I wish also to acknowledge help received from my husband Helmut Göricke whose support
during the work on the exposé for this thesis was the beginning of our love.
And finally I am greatly indepted to my parents Gisela Nobis and Dr. Klaus Nobis to
whom this dissertation is dedicated. I wish to thank them for supporting me all those years
and always showing a great interest in my work.5
0 Introduction
Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form
of poetry. (Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur
dichten.)
Ludwig Wittgenstein (Culture and Value)
Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or
another handkerchief, and attached themselves to
some one of these communities of opinion. This
conformity makes them not false in a few particulars,
authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars.
Their every truth is not quite truth. Their two is not
the real two, their four not the real four; so that every
word they say chagrins us and we know not where to
begin to set them right.
Ralph Waldo Emerson ("Self-Reliance")
In his 1986 essay "Writing and Method," the poet Charles Bernstein claims that "forms of art
[…] investigate the terms of human experience and their implications." And concludes that
"poetry and philosophy share the project of investigating the possibilities (nature) and structures
of phenomena" (Content's Dream 220). He thereby clearly defines the alignment and concern
of his work. His affinity with philosophy, in particular with the work of Ludwig
Wittgenstein and Stanley Cavell, however, does not make him into a philosopher nor does it
mean to obliterate the distinction between philosophy and poetry. But it gives expression to
the mutual attraction of poetry and philosophy. Bernstein describes the relation like this:
"the natural condition of philosophy is to aspire to ("reunification" with) literature and that
of literature to aspire to the power of philosophy to speak to and of our lives" (168). It thus
comes to no surprise that the philosophers to which Bernstein is in particular indebted,
Wittgenstein and Cavell, also hold a threshold position between philosophy and literature.
While still holding to their status of philosophy, for Bernstein, they aspire to literature:
Wittgenstein in claiming that "philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of
poetry" and Cavell in, as Bernstein has it, "making the case for immersion inside moods,6
fears, hopes--not to make philosophy literature but to call philosophy back to its sources of
judgment" (Content's Dream 168). In this dissertation I want to claim that literature is the
only adequate medium for such an epistemological inquiry. Only the realm of aesthetics in
which the production of a work of art takes place is able to provide an access to the sources
of judgment. Chapter I elucidates this peculiar relation between epistemology and
aesthetics and by extension epistemology and literature.
The epistemological project of poetry, however, also has a political dimension, which can be
justified in Cavell's comparison of Wittgenstein's "possibilities of phenomena" (Philosophical
Investigations 90) or differently put "our agreement in judgments" (242) with Rousseau's
concept of "consent" (to the membership in a society) which he develops in The Social
Contract. It prepares the ground for my second claim that poetry as epistemological inquiry
fulfills more than a philosophical function but is motivated by a political need. The need of
the politically mature citizen to know what he or she has consented to. Cavell's discovery of
the similarity and comparability of Wittgenstein's concept of "agreement in judgments" and
Rousseau's concept of "consent," thus gives a political dimension to epistemology which
1often goes unnoticed, furthermore it illustrates the inseparability of ethics and aesthetics ,
which has also been claimed by Wittgenstein in his dictum from the Tractatus that "ethics
and aesthetics are one" (6.421).
Another aspect of epistemology which falls squarely into the realm of literature and
philosophy is skepticism. According to Cavell both disciplines are drawn toward, perhaps
struggling with the "truths and wrongs of skepticism." He, for instance, reads the work of
2Shakespeare as an incessant reflection on skepticism . One of the truths of skepticism,
Cavell draws our attention to, is the human being's "metaphysical finitude" which I relate to

1 For a similar view of the inseparability of ethics and aesthetics see the Language poet Joan Retallack. In her
essay "The Poethical Wager," Retallack coins the term "poethics."
2 For instance in The Claim of Reason. Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. and Disowning
Knowledge. In Six Plays of Shakespeare.7
Bernstein's poetics of "negative capability," a term he borrows from Keats who describes it
3as the quality to "remain content with half-knowledge," to "accept the limits of knowledge"
(Content's Dream 328). In this way negative capability has a therapeutic function and serves
as a constant corrective against metaphysical delusions and confusions.
An explanation of the philosophical background informing Bernstein's work is given in
chapters I.1, II.1 and III.1. It supplies an aid for approaching his poetry by introducing and
recreating the spirit in which his work is written. Such knowledge of the political and
philosophical breeding-ground is essential for an adequate understanding of the work. In
the second part of chapters I, II and III, Bernstein's poetics will be brought in relation to the
epistemological background introduced in the first parts. This approach provides a view of
Bernstein's poetics which to the present moment has not yet been given. The dissertation at
hand takes seriously Bernstein's claim that "poetry and philosophy share the project of
investigating the possibilities of phenomena." It takes this claim as a point of departure and
investigates its meaning in all its implications, acknowledging its political, philosophical
and aesthetic interrelations. As a consequence, such an analysis necessarily has to be
multidimensional. Or differently put, only an interdisciplinary approach is able to fully
realize the political and philosophical relevance of Bernstein's poetry and to do justice to it.
As the reception of Bernstein has shown, the interpretation of Bernstein's poems is not an
easy task. Perloff describes the issue as follows:
most critiques of Bernstein's work, as of Language poetry in general, have raised the
issue of the work's nonreferentiality. Thus Eliot Weinberger dismisses Language
Poetry as "an endless succession of depthless images and empty sounds, each
canceling the previous one;" it is made up of words set free of any possible meanings,
sentences that ignore or contradict what has just been said, w

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