Redemption in Poetry and Philosophy: Wordsworth, Kant, and the Making of the Post-Christian Imagination

1. Concepts, Metaphors, and Wordsworth

21 s Concepts, Metaphors, and Words­ worth 1 Poetry, Philosophy, Romanticism In one form of thinking with language—let us call it poetry—moral life, the life of character, behavior, and value, of emotion and virtue, is primarily rendered metaphorically. In this form of thought (and its form is essential to it: meter in verse, for example, or rhetorical qualities in general, perform a distinctly metaphorical function), general moral terms or concepts such as courage, wisdom, envy, anger, patience, or pride, vital (in both senses) as they are in the development of character , in the activity of recognizing oneself or one another as something (though not as some thing), are still no more than enhancing, equivalent sub-organisms, constantly evolving or morphing within the fuller life they help to sustain, enrich or realize. “My heart’s subdued / Even to the very quality of my lord,” says Desdemona; but even “jealousy” itself is subdued to Othello’s quality (as “anger” is subdued to the quality of Achilles). The poetry resists our reductive, Iago-like inclination to over- or pre- or mono-conceptualize. Indeed even Iago, having planted the dangerous conceptual seed (“beware, my lord, of jealousy”), immediately metaphorizes it, emphasizing this rhetorical shift through his insistent rhythms (“it is a green-eyed monster”). Othello says at the end of the play that he is “not easily jealous.” This can be seen as a conceptual point as well as a moral and psychological one. He is not easily or straightforwardly made jealous, constructed simply as “jealous”; 22 Redemption in Poetry and Philosophy s indeed criticism has notoriously found it unsatisfactory to pigeonhole him in this way. When he goes on to say that “being wrought” he was “perplexed in the extreme,” it is as if jealousy itself has been “wrought” or “perplexed” by the play, by its metaphors and by other concepts (including perplexity), into something richer and stranger. This particular concept is one focus of the play’s thought, not, as it has too often been made to seem, its source. (The same might be said of modern master-concepts such as “race” and “gender,” by the way, which nowadays too often occlude thought about the play and the thought of the play, while having little or no purchase within its own language.) Enriching or perplexing, the concept is part of the play’s achievement. So with Anne Elliot, in the final chapter of Persuasion: “She had not mistaken him. Jealousy of Mr Elliot had been the retarding weight, the doubt, the torment.” She comes, the novel has come, to recognize Wentworth in the concept as much as the concept in Wentworth, but character and novel still metaphorize it at once, or rhetorically and accumulatively distribute its weight across other concepts, as they have throughout: not quite as a monster but still as an internal eatingaway or weighing-down . . . a doubt . . . a torment. Anne makes sense of the concept in this metaphorical way, enables herself to think it, to assimilate it. This is “life with concepts,” as Cora Diamond puts it.1 They enrich moral life, they enable it, especially in large numbers: but they are not identical with it. This is life with concepts. They play their leavening role in an otherwise metaphorical dough, but the dough is life itself, malleable into the same shapes as our human clay. Such concepts are still necessary elements in this kind of moral life with language, as characters, like the real people they plausibly and metaphorically emulate, navigate between their raw feelings and their tangential, analogous words: something they can do only from within their language practice. (This is why we are in the territory of the humanities, where to think is also to participate: not of the social sciences,2 where the thinker stands aloof from the material.) But here, in poetry, the concepts do not govern the thought in their own mode; they do not set its style. One might say that in such an environment the concepts (con-capere, “taking to oneself,” grasping the mass of appearances as something) themselves start to behave somewhat like metaphors (meta-pherein, “bearing across,” analogical transfers or migrations s Concepts, Metaphors, and Wordsworth 23 of meaning away from the literal) as they become acclimatized. This metaphorical and rhetorical environment affects them, notably, even as they come into conflict with, or just approximate, each other, and especially as they proliferate. In multiple approximation...