Voor ik het
in het vorige blog aangekondigde gedicht van de joodse dichteres Allison
Pitinii Davis breng wil ik eerst nog één aspect van Eliot behandelen: n.l. zijn
anti-semitisme.
Avner Falk schrijft in Anti-semitism: A History and Psychoanalysis
of Contemporary Hatred [ABC-CLIO, 2008] op p. 114 – books.google in een paragraaf over Masud Khan die me
hier verder niet interesseert:
«
The British literary scholar Anthony Julius studied the anti-Semitism of the
American-British homosexual poet Thomas Stearns Eliot (Julius 1995). Linda
Hopkins compared Eliot's anti-Semitism with that of Masud Khan:
Anthony
Julius suggests that in calling a person an anti-Semite, we should address the
question of what kind of anti-Semite they are. Speaking of T.S. Eliot, he
writes: "Anti-Semites are not all the same. Some break Jewish bones,
others wound Jewish sensibilities. Eliot falls into the second category. He was
civil to Jews he knew, offensive to those who merely knew him through his
work." »
Dat Eliot
homoseksueel was vind ik voor mijn onderwerp minder van belang, maar zijn
eventuele antisemitisme is dat wel. Ik wendde me om er meer over te weten
daarom tot het boek van Anthony Julius en ontdekte dat hij een uitgebreide
passage heeft waarin hij Eliot’s houding t.o.v. Spinoza onderzoekt in:
Anthony
Julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and
Literary Form. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995;
New Edition with a preface and a response to the critics. New York: Thames and
Hudson Ltd., 2003 – books.google
In The Guardian van 7 juni 2003 verscheen toen
deze heruitgave uitkwam, dit stuk van Anthony Julius: “The poetry of
prejudice" [cf.]. Ik neem aan dat het aan z’n nieuwe voorwoord met
antwoord aan zijn critici is ontleend. Daarin schetst hij nog eens zijn
overtuiging “that the question of Eliot's anti-semitism mattered. [..] Most critical studies neglected this aspect
of the work.” De antisemitische dichtwerken vormen een minderheid in Eliot’s
werk, het gaat om: «
"Burbank," "Gerontion," "Sweeney Among the
Nightingales," "A Cooking Egg," and the posthumously published
"Dirge". »
Julius schetst als zijn aanpak: “We ought not to seek to outlaw Eliot's poems,
but neither can we submit to them. We should not ban them; but we must not
abandon ourselves to them. Instead we must contest that poetry, with strategies
that acknowledge both its value and its menace.”
Hij heeft het over “Eliot's contempt for Jews” en ik ben benieuwd hoe dit t.a.v. Spinoza uitpakt.
Hij heeft het over “Eliot's contempt for Jews” en ik ben benieuwd hoe dit t.a.v. Spinoza uitpakt.
T.S. Eliot
over Spinoza
Na een tekst
over joodse vrijdenkers, gaat Anthony Julius vervolgens uitgebreid in op Eliot’s
Spinoza (ik neem die tekst hier op mét de nummers van de eindnoten, zodat die hier bij books.google na te lezen zijn):
In Eliot's early work,
Spinoza, one such free-thinking Jew, is ‘unquestionably a hero, a symbolic hero
of modern Europe'.29 He represents pure intellect, his philosophy
the product of a mind untouched by the demon 'emotion': 'Certain works of
philosophy can be called works of art: much of Aristotle and Plato, Spinoza...
clear and beautifully formed thought.'30 Of that clichéd pair ‘the
head and the heart' Eliot's examples are reading Spinoza and falling in love,31
yet he defends Spinoza against the charge of frigidity made by 'emotional
people — such as stockbrokers, politicians, men of science — and a few people
who pride themselves on being unemotional'.32 It was Spinoza's
ostensible freedom from human attachment, and the geometric harmonies of his
thought, that appealed to the Eliot of The
Sacred Wood. He also invoked Spinoza's `amor intellectualis Dei' in support
of the Kantian aesthetic adumbrated in that book.33 But Eliot later
regarded Spinoza differently. He was susceptible to the romantic notion that
Spinoza, whose work offers a refuge from despised ‘emotion', paid a high
personal price for his detachment. Spinoza's inability to share the convictions
of either the Jewish society into which he was born, or the Christian society
into which he was exiled, looms large in Eliot's sense of the philosopher. This
double alienation is the romance of Spinoza's life: ‘I am not altogether sure
that Spinoza's isolation was not rather a misfortune to be pitied, than a quality
to be admired."’34
It is by the
development of this theme of isolation that the link between Eliot's praise of
Spinoza and his contemptuous dismissal of the generality of free-thinking Jews
is disclosed. In his introduction to the Catholic Josef Pieper's Leisure the Basis of Culture (1952),
Eliot characterises Spinoza's work as a ‘one-man philosophy', one which is
merely ‘a projection of the personality of its author, a disguised imposition
of his own temperament with all its emotional bias, upon the reader'. Pieper's
mind, by contrast, 'is submissive to ... the great, the main tradition of
European thought' and ‘his originality is subdued and unostentatious'. Pieper ‘accepts
explicitly a dogmatic theology' and ‘his presuppositions are in full view, instead
of being, as with some philosophers who profess complete detachment, concealed
from both author and reader'.35 Spinoza, thus, is doubly at fault
where once he was exemplary; his detachment is suspect, and his work is
corrupted by an emotional bias. The work is individualistic and dissenting. Its
originality is overt and ostentatious, and it hides the premisses from which it
is derived.
Blinded by Spinoza's
ethnic origin, Eliot failed to discern the philosopher's place in Western
philosophy. Spinoza's work cannot be excluded from ‘the great, the main
tradition of European thought' merely because he was indifferent to
Christianity. Eliot mistakes personal detachment for cultural rootlessness;
Spinoza was an European philosopher, even though a Jew by origin and a
non-Christian by choice. A secular Jew, Spinoza's contribution is within the
European intellectual tradition; this is largely, but neither by origin nor
wholly, a Christian tradition. He did not, in Santayana's ugly phrase, `live
... in the crevices of the Christian edifice'.36 On the contrary.
His philosophical relation to the work of Descartes, and his wider intellectual
debts, make him a thinker in communion with ‘the mind of Europe'.37
Why does Eliot deny the patent, as in his statement that Spinoza's work
conceals its presuppositions, or in his statement that Spinoza stands outside
the principal intellectual tradition of Europe?
Eliot imagines ‘the
Christian intellectual tradition' (let me assume so readily isolable a thing
exists) to be the only tradition available to Spinoza, and thus overlooks the
Jewish aspect of his thinking. Spinoza remained philosophically indebted to
Jewish sources even following his excommunication; intellectual influence
cannot so easily be shrugged off as can synagogue membership.38
(Eliot dismissed Jewish philosophy as 'theological hocus-pocus '.39)
Even if, which one would deny, Spinoza stood outside 'the main, the great
etc.', this does not mean that there was no other tradition for his work. The
choice need not be either 'the main,
the great etc.', or a 'projection' of
one's own personality. There are other traditions that, furthermore, do not run
in parallel lines to each other, but criss-cross repeatedly so that in the end
one sees not a collection of separate lines but a pattern to which they all
contribute. Indeed, as Judith Shklar has noted, Europe has always had a
tradition of traditions.40 Eliot remained unable to concede this
throughout his life. As late as in Notes
he was still insisting upon the determinative importance of Christianity; in E.
M. Forster's summary of its main theme, 'Where there is not Christianity there
is nothing’41— or only 'strange gods'.
After Strange Gods has a certain notoriety. It is known as the book that was offensive
about Jews, the one that Eliot would not allow to be republished. The book is
studied not so much for what it says about its subject but for what it
discloses about its author. It is regarded as a resource for the biographer,
not a text for the critic. Etc….[tot zover- Spinoza komt niet meer aan bod[
Het interessante review door Gregory S. Jay [van “Discovering the Corpus”] staat op zijn academia.edu
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