THE OBJECT OF HIS SUBJECTION

In this comment-thread Charles Reece is good enough to imply that I'm a subjectivist with this winsome phrase:

"I can't much help you if you want to insist that the stick actually bends in the water."

Since I'm not a subjectivist, any more than I was an essentialist, I'll hold forth a little about why I think he made this mistake.

What I have argued consistently is that there is a domain of literary quality that one may call, following Cassirer, the "expressive," because it deals with that part of literature that expresses emotional tonality. Expressivity is manifestly not some sort of loosey-goosey "get in touch with your feelings" attitude, nor does it have anything to do with dismissing all questions of objective quality as they pertain to literature. Expressivity is, for Cassirer, the fundamental rock on which the house of man's intellect is built:

"Whatever we call existence or reality, is given to us at the outset in forms of pure expression. Thus even here we are beyond the abstraction of sheer sensation, which dogmatic sensationalism takes as its starting point. For the content which the subject experiences as confronting him is no merely outward one, resembling Spinoza's 'mute picture on a slate.' It has a kind of transparency; an inner life shines through its very existence and facticity. The formation effected in language, art and myth starts from this original phenomenon of expression; indeed, both art and myth remain so close to it that one might be tempted to restrict them wholly to this sphere."-- Cassirer, THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE, p. 449.

Note that though Cassirer says that one might be "tempted" to restrict art and myth to the domain of expressivity, he does not say that one should do so; merely that they both remain intimately bound up with the expressive modality. More on that in another essay.

Now, I suppose some might look askance at phrases like "inner life" and judge Cassirer some sort of fatuous Romantic. But I would say that Cassirer's logical description of emotional states is not itself emotional, certainly not to the extent that the following quote (supplied by Mssr. Reece from Karl Marx's POWER OF MONEY) is:

"Assume man to be man and his relationship to the world to be a human one: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return – that is, if your loving as loving does not produce reciprocal love; if through a living expression of yourself as a loving person you do not make yourself a beloved one, then your love is impotent – a misfortune."

Given that the materialist Marx would probably qualify as one of those to whom Cassirer imputes "dogmatic sensationalism," I find it interesting that a comparison of the two quotes shows Marx to be more reliant on a subjective position. Cassirer gives us an "is" proposition with respect to the way human emotion has been the foundation of language, art and myth. Marx gives us an "ought" as soon as he proposes that the only proper "exchange value" should be "love only for love, trust for trust, etc." He, it seems, is just as concerned about the "inner life" of man, but paradoxically he's the one proposing an economic theory of man's civilization that marginalizes everything that is not economic.

I suggest for this reason and others that even though many of Marx's disciples worship at his fane because they believe he has thrown some objective light upon the status of mankind (as well as man's art and myth), Marx is actually successful with his disciples because he is a master of a subjective metaphor that stirs emotion.

True metaphors, according to Paul Ricoeur, are "alive." I may not like a lot of things Marx or his disciples chose to bring to life with their invocation of the evil-conspiracy metaphor, but I can't doubt that the central metaphor's got a great range of expression.

However, it's perhaps not much better off in its real applications than was the Greek nymph Echo in her quest for Narcissus-- that is: to be forever a subject looking for its object.