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What is fascinating in the reading given above, is that it is given by a devout catholic, but there are Aristotelian, Kantian Freudian, and Wittgensteinian themes that are in turns explored. I intend in this first part of my review to explore some of the themes of four quartets from a Hylomorphic Aristotelian point of view referring to Aristotle’s “Poetics”, “Metaphysics”, and “On the Soul”.
Aristotle begins his work on “Poetics”(The Literary Arts) by promising reference to “first principles” and the “plot” of a work which is categorically an imitation of reality by means of language. Man, we are told, learns through imitation and takes delight in such imitations, even if we are being confronted by a narrative of the most terrible scenes of, for example, the Pelopennesian War. Aristotle, with what we mean by poetry in mind, also refers to “metre”. and “Rhythm”, techniques which Eliot uses in varying degrees. For Aristotle, it is Homer who is the paradigm artist whose objects are the actions of men better than us, but there are also tragedians such as Aristophanes whose objects are the actions of men better than us but with significantly flawed characters. We know Eliot was also a playwright but his poetry unusually contains characters such as J Alfred Prufrock, Tiresias, the fisher-king, fishermen, and travellers using Public transport.
Pity and Fear, the traditional cathartic elements of Greek tragedy are important elements of Eliot’s writings and are used to move us toward the “overwhelming question”–the Platonic and Aristotelian ideas of the Good:
“Every Art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good: and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim”(Aristotle NE 1: 1094a 1-3)
Add to this remark that, in the Metaphysics, it is claimed “All men desire to know”, as well as the claim of Aristotle that the most difficult kind of knowledge man can acquire is knowledge of the soul, then we can perhaps begin to fathom the depth of difficulty of Eliot’s poetry. The end of the four quartets(Little Gidding) claims that all things will be well and all manner of things will be well on the conditions of simplicity and giving up everything(e.g. ones life):
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Eliot had earlier claimed that the death and logos of fire was to be consumed by fire. For this to end in a rose of fire is, of course, a long way from the peace and tranquility of the garden(the natural home of the rose), which, apart from its mythical significance, enables us to be distracted from distraction by distraction. The garden develops into the fiery city which we built after wandering in the desert waste land. Gardening is, of course, an activity we engage in , in our cities, and it is one form in which sublimation transforms our pity and fear into something else, but this nevertheless is a Good Aristotelian end to an unpromising beginning(our animal nature). The cost of achieving this end, of course is not less than everything: a simple equation for Eliot. For Aristotle and Kant, the achievement of the good required not merely the desire for the good, but also considerable effort in accordance with the ideas of areté(virtuous activity: doing the right thing at the right time in the right way) and epistemé(knowledge). Eudaimonia or the good-spirited flourishing life would be the result of a lifetimes desire and work. In Tragedy and Epic there is a beginning a middle and an end in which thought and action is the focus of the movement of the plot. Eliots images are sometimes dramatic but insofar as thought is concerned they seem always to be reaching for the formulation and solution to an “overwhelming question” related to life and death.
Thomas Howards recommendation that Eliot’s images ought not to be construed as “symbolic” but more straightforwardly as a “case in point”, is a useful piece of advice if one is to avoid the more exotic metaphysical interpretations of his work. Thinking, for Eliot, as for Aristotle, is irrevocably tied up with spoken discourse. Aristotle defines the essence of being human as being a rational animal capable of discourse, and Eliot claims there are 4 kinds of thinking, namely, discourse with others, discourse with one other, discourse with oneself, and finally discourse with God (reported in Northrop Frye’s “T S Eliot(Edinburgh, Oliver and Boyd, 1963, P.34). Eliot weaves thought and action in his plot in accordance with Aristotelian “Form” that is a potentiality for the human form of life, namely, that we are, a form in which our being is always a question for us. Aristotle claims in the poetics:
“The end is everywhere the chief thing.”(Poetics 1450a: 22)
The role of language, for Aristotle is clear. The poet, he claims, does not describe things that have happened, but rather the possible kind of thing that can happen which can be either the probable or necessary outcome of the series of events recounted in the plot. Eliot, like all good catholics, believes in “salvation” and in “being born again” through the right kind of self-knowledge. This may be one meaning of the image “And the fire and the rose are one”. Thomas Howard offers us an Aristotelian hylomorphic “image” of an acorn harbouring the oak within as a potentiality, requiring simple conditions, and demanding a complete transformation of its substance into something completely different, i.e. the acorn sacrifices its being for the end of being a majestic oak. The hylomorphic message is that all life forms, being mortal, share this hylomorphic feature with the acorn. The human life form, for both Aristotle and Eliot, however, is unique in its ability to attempt to understand immortality and hope for divine”everlasting life” as part of its brief sojourn in this world. These “intimations of immortality” do not tolerate distractions or the guesses of horoscopes, palm readers, tarot card readers, but rather, require the eye and hand of a surgeon and his “sharp compassion”(not to mention his knowledge) which saves life. Eliots poetry is meant in this spirit.
Earth, Air, Water and Fire are also Aristotelian elements which together with the processes of hot and cold, wet and dry “form” our environment and its cyclical weather patterns which begin and end and begin again, ad infinitum, like an ever turning wheel:
In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.
(East Coker: 1)
Thomas Howard rightly claims that “Four Quartets” is a work about “time”. “There is a time for everything under heaven”, we learn from Ecclesiastes, and we are reminded here of Wittgenstein’s investigations into the limits of language, and its attempts to bewitch our intellects with nonsensical questions such as “Is it 5 o clock on the sun?” Time, for Aristotle, was defined as the “measurement of motion in terms of before and after”, and implied in this account, is that this motion is, of course, measured by the motion of heavenly bodies such as the sun. The sun, in this scenario, becomes the still point of the turning world ,which does not move. It becomes something like an “unmoved mover”. We humans are not cyclical beings that can return from the ashes and begin again. This poignant fact wounds our hope for immortality: a wound which no surgeons science and art can address. Houses, however can continue over centuries(The house of Windsor) and this allows us to invest our hopes for a better world in our children, whilst sheltering from the un-compassionate wind. But the winds of destruction will eventually remove even these houses. The idea of what might be, however, lead poets to write poems about the rise of houses, and the reversal of fortunes that befall them. These writings might even outlast these houses and this might also be true of historical accounts which preserve the memory of dead families and their activities in a spirit of “sharp compassion”. Aristotle claims that it is the task of the poet to “put the actual scene as far as possible before his eyes”(Poetics 1455a 22-3).
One question that ought to put to Eliot is whether his is a dramatic tragedy(confining itself to one story) or an epic attempting to tell several stories. Four Quartets, we maintain, is intended as a whole, and the story is the story or logos of man, the so-called “rational animal capable of discourse”. The story begins with the trees of life and knowledge in a garden, and ends in a garden where the task is to strive for a good-spirited flourishing life in the face of multiple distractions: a striving where one is prepared to risk ones life( through wondering in the desert- waste-land) for the life to come, and the sight of the descending dove and heavenly descending fire.
Eliot projects his sense of space and place in this work using Virgil and Dante rather than the more temporally oriented Greek Philosophers, who saw clearly the limitations of materialistic explanations of the phenomena associated with psuche. His sense of time is best expressed in The Dry Salvages where the voices of the Gods are intimated:
The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.
The salt is on the briar rose,
The fog is in the fir trees.
The sea howl
And the sea yelp, are different voices
Often together heard: the whine in the rigging,
The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water,
The distant rote in the granite teeth,
And the wailing warning from the approaching headland
Are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner
Rounded homewards, and the seagull:
And under the oppression of the silent fog
The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.
(Dry Salvages 1)
The river has a beginning, a middle and an end and the end is the sea whose movement is cyclical, moving in toward the land or up the river and out to sea again, ad infinitum. The time of the sea is not our time, it “measures” time differently. The river is within us and the sea is all about us, Eliot claims, but it is the silent saint, and not the oracle or the philosopher who keeps the secret of Time, a secret intimated by the voice of the sea crying out only when the ground swell heaves the groaner and the bell. This is far from the arena of civilisation and the fiery city which requires areté and epistemé from the city dwellers(the firemen).This fiery city is the arena for human activity aiming at the good, and it is the space where memory leaves its traces sedimented: traces such as city walls that seem even to withstand the winds sweeping over the hills and the sea. The traces of Rome are preferred by Eliot to the traces of Athens or Jerusalem. Individual salvation appears to be preferred to the salvation of the city or civilisation, which the military Janus worshipping Romans failed to provide. Man is a political animal, Aristotle argued, but arché played the fundamental role in determining the importance of laws and the establishment of diké. The city, for Aristotle, is an organic phenomenon because the city, as Socrates observed, is the soul(psuche) writ large. The earthly city we know ,for Augustine, contain the seeds of its ruin and destruction: a state of affairs that the Delphic oracle warned the philosophers about(everything created by men is doomed to ruin and destruction). The Catholic view is that it is De Civitate Dei that we, who are saved, wish to dwell in. It is in this Delphic Prophecy that the Greek and the Christian message of man being a sinner correlate. For the Greeks, however, it is not the “smells and bells “, rituals, and mystery of the mass that will rescue civilisation, but rather areté epistemé and diké. The images of the scenes of modern life that we find in both “The Waste Land” and “Four Quartets” are, of course provided in the Freudian spirit of “Civilisation and its Discontents”, and they are meant to function as Thomas Howard points out, as “cases in point” of the lack of meaning in the modern world. Yet these images are all images of De Civitate Terrana, and as such prove nothing for the spiritual being who seeks to live in De Civitate Dei. As Aristotle pointed out in his “Poetics”:
“The poet being an imitator just like the painter or other maker of likenesses, he must necessarily in all instances represent things in one or other of three aspects, either as they were or are, or as they are said or thought to be or to have been,, or as they ought to be.All this he does in language…..”(Poetics 1460b 25 8-11)
The ought-use of language is not to be confused with the hypothetical-use in which one abandons ones representation upon being confronted with the facts of the matter, e.g. death is said or represented to be an evil, but this is abandoned as soon as one witnesses the relation of Socrates to his own death and what he said about it. The ought-use of language is, as Kant maintained, categorical, and is rather used to evaluate contrary representations in order to pass judgements upon them, e.g. “One ought to keep promises” This universal judgement does not fall as a principle of action just because a king or politician breaks a promise they have made. In such a case, we judge the action of breaking the promise to be evil, or unlawful, and retain our representation of the good that is achieved by keeping a promise one has made. Eliot is using language in accordance with all three of the above “aspects”, and we ought not to confuse one aspect with another, as Wittgenstein would have pointed out in relation to the language games of reporting and the language game of promising. The “temporal city” is based on laws, made not in a hypothetical spirit ,but in a categorical spirit typical of the spirit of diké. Solon, for example, passed laws which categorically freed the poor from their enslavement by the rich, and began the project of “building the middle class” which is continuing to this day in the Aristotelian spirit of the “golden mean”. Both Solon and Aristotle were aiming at the Good which resembles De Civitate Dei, a state of civilisation many hundred thousand years in the future , if we are to believe Kant and his vision of the cosmopolitan society of the “Kingdom of Ends”.
Both Aristotle and Kant assumed that the city-state was an organic hylomorphic phenomenon maturing over time, and consequently assuming different forms over time in accordance with a potentiality requiring the occurrence of particular circumstances before actualising that potential. Like all organisms, and all human activity, it aimed at the Good in spite of the difficulty in achieving an identity of what was good in itself with what was good in its consequences. This lack of identity is behind the Delphic prophecy that “everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction”. Man is not as fully rational as he ought to be, and therefore his city-states are not as stable as they ought to be, but he is not naturally sinful as a species , as would be the case if he intended evil in his actions. He lacks both the knowledge and the reasoning power to ensure the creation of the kingdom of ends, at this point in time, but both the principles of knowledge and reason are within his grasp and his understanding. Much of Eliot’s “Four Quartets” can be read as an attempt to free us from our current imprisonment in the current forms of De civitate terrana, by establishing the conditions for the existence of De civitate dei which would be described as fundamental for the good-spirited flourishing life(eudaimonia).
Aristotle’s “on the Soul”, is a response to the Delphic Challenge to “know thyself”, and whereas one can argue that popular religious descriptions of the soul as being detachable from the body at the point of death(so called substance dualism) is anathema to the hylomorphic account which focuses instead upon a deeper understanding of “substance”. Substance, in Aristotle’s earlier work, is primarily related to particulars characterised in terms of a “this something”. In his later work “substance” is characterised more in terms of “logos” or an account/essence of the thing, as a result of some kind of investigation motivated by a desire to understand the world as such. It is not curiosity about the particular species of frogs which prompts our investigations into them in the form of observing their behaviour and dissecting them to observe their organ systems, but rather a desire to understand the world as such via universal principles(arché). It is principles we seek after in our attempts to subsume all the facts we know about frogs under an essence specifying characterisation or definition. This investigation is prompted by a conviction that the psuche of a frog is to a great extent determined by its organ and limb system. It is to be distinguished from systems of nutrition/reproduction such as living plants, by the fact that plants do not experience “sensation”, and therefore cannot be said to “perceive” anything in their world. For Aristotle, such investigations will attempt to determine the powers of the plant and the frog, and will reveal that both plants and frogs do not have sufficiently complex “organ” systems to support the more complex powers such as “being capable of discourse” and “rationality”. This kind of biological investigation led by Aristotle was, of course a precursor to that led by Darwin in his attempt to understand questions such as natural selection and the evolution of the species of animals. Both thinkers had to be wary of popular religious theories of the origin of man.
Eliot’s references to the “voices” of the gods of the sea and the river, and the significance of fire and the rose do not necessarily constitute an “imaginative” anthropomorphisation of a physical nature, which, for Aristotle, is better characterised in terms of the potentiality for being perceived, understood, and theorised about. This kind of understanding of the logos of potentiality surpasses the mere striving to legitimate “facts” via a use of language that attempts to “picture” the world. For Aristotle the “powers” of understanding and reason demand, not just the production of particular truths, but knowledge(justified true belief) such as the knowledge we have of the human soul, which he believes is satisfactorily characterised by the essence specifying definition “rational animal capable of discourse”. In such an account, the relation to the external world is a relation to a world of matter which is a world of actuality and potentiality at various levels which also varies in relation to the different powers of perception or thought. In Aristotle’s account, God is a different kind of Being in comparison to man, insofar as we are concerned, and is to be characterised more in terms of the kind of thinking God is capable of than his ability to create and shape a physical universe and its contents. This latter view of God as a craftsman would, in the view of Aristotle, be an unnecessary anthropomorphization of God, a view shared by general opinion in ancient Greece which relied on an intervening power of the Demiurge for such an instrumental pragmatic relation to the world of matter. The world of “Forms” or “principles” explaining “what” we experience is paramount in the hylomorphic system which prioritises the question “Why?”. This latter question, Aristotle argues, satisfies a deep desire we possess to understand the “broad structure of reality”. We have no direct insight into divine thought, and Aristotle in his metaphysics characterises this tentatively, in terms of “thinking about thinking”, or “thinking about himself”. There is in this hylomorphic account, a systematic continuity in the relation of the powers of man and the power of the divine. God is pure form in a continuity that reaches down to a level of “prime matter”(which is pure potentiality). “Form “, in this context, is to be understood in terms of “Logos” or principle(arché) at a level which ,for us, is difficult to investigate and understand. Given this characterisation, there can be no objection to the kind of metaphorical account we find in Eliot’s poetry. “Immortality of the soul”, for example, can be characterised in terms of “timeless” but “timeless” does not mean “living forever”, which may be impossible to conceptualise, but rather “enduring in some form” over very long periods of time. “Intimations of immortality” can therefore be understood in such terms.