The Poet's Freedom

A Notebook on Making

Susan Stewart

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780226773872, 9780226773865
• eBook ISBN: 9780226773841
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism
• Index: Literature

Why do we need new art? How free is the artist in making? And why is the artist, and particularly the poet, a figure of freedom in Western culture? The MacArthur Award–winning poet and critic Susan Stewart ponders these questions in The Poet's Freedom. Through a series of evocative essays, she not only argues that freedom is necessary to making and is itself something made, but also shows how artists give rules to their practices and model a self-determination that might serve in other spheres of work.

Stewart traces the ideas of freedom and making through insightful readings of an array of Western philosophers and poets—Plato, Homer, Marx, Heidegger, Arendt, Dante, and Coleridge are among her key sources. She begins by considering the theme of making in the Hebrew Scriptures, examining their accountof a god who creates the world and leaves humans free to rearrange and reform the materials of nature. She goes on to follow the force of moods, sounds, rhythms, images, metrical rules, rhetorical traditions, the traps of the passions, and the nature of language in the cycle of making and remaking. Throughout the book she weaves the insight that the freedom to reverse any act of artistic making is as essential as the freedom to create.

 

A book about the pleasures of making and thinking as means of life, The Poet's Freedom explores and celebrates the freedom of artists who, working under finite conditions, make considered choices and shape surprising consequences. This engaging and beautifully written notebook on making will attract anyone interested in the creation of art and literature.

1 / BEGINNING

A genuine Transcendence is more than a limit concept: it is a presence which brings about a true revolution in the theory of subjectivity. It introduces into it a radically new dimension, the poetic dimension. At least such limit concepts complete the determination of a freedom which is human and not divine, of a freedom which does not posit itself absolutely because it is not Transcendence. To will is not to create.

—PAUL RICOEUR, Philosophie de la volonté¹

Initium . . . ut esset, creatus est homo, ante quem nullus fuit.

—AUGUSTINE, City of God 12.20²

I The Freedom of the Maker

How free is the artist in making? And why is the artist, at least in Western culture, but surely in some others as well, a figure of freedom? How is it that artists create their own rules, and how might such self-legislation serve humankind in other spheres of life? When we consider these perennial questions, we are confronted with a pair of inevitable, interwoven, truths: first, freedom is necessary for making—at least for making anything that is actualized beyond mere repetition—and second, freedom is both inalienable to human life and itself something that we make or actualize.

To begin to think about freedom is to think about causality, for if nature is the outcome of an endless series of causal forces, our human being is only partially bound by such natural laws. Even the most cursory review of the intellectual history of the idea of freedom reveals a concept continually shaped within the tension between natural law and human will. In the Nicomachean Ethics (3.6), for example, Aristotle suggests that whereas the nonhuman universe is ruled by material and teleological necessity, human events are contingent and under-determined. Further, he holds that the ends we place in store for ourselves are determined by the kind of person we are; he finds an intrinsic connection between our character and what we bring about in the world. Particularly concerned with the problem of our responsibility for our actions, Aristotle also realizes that such responsibility can be damaged by ignorance or violence.

Medieval Christian concepts of freedom, embedded in problems of theodicy, are similarly concerned with the relations between freedom and action and are perhaps most succinctly framed by Augustine’s insistence that the will, under the weight of divine love, may be inclined toward the good, but human action is performed freely. More continuous in Western thought than discontinuous, this emphasis upon human freedom and human powers of self-fashioning, even within a divinely planned world, culminates in Renaissance humanism. The most well-known proclamation of that movement, Pico della Mirandola’s “Oration on the Dignity of Man” of 1486 establishes an analogy between the free making of the Hebrew god, who is a “supreme Architect” (il Sommo Padre, Dio architetto) and “Artisan” (l’Artifice) creating by “the sublime laws of His ineffable Mind,” and the free choosing of human beings, who must establish for themselves the “limits and bounds” of their nature. Pico declares to his fellow human beings: “With free choice and dignity, you may fashion yourself into whatever form you choose.” The Neoplatonic frame of Pico’s thinking emphasizes humanity’s ascent from plant and animal nature to the powers of a contemplative intelligence, where each man and woman is a “divinity clothed in flesh.” Yet in line with his just as strongly held occultism, Pico concludes that human beings should disdain both earthly things and “the things of heaven.” Humans do not hold a “lower place” than angelic creatures, he contends, but rather one close to God, whose choices in making include endowing them with choices in making.³

Eventually a paradox emerges in thinking about the causal conditions of freedom: if natural laws account for all changes and events in the world, then human choices cannot be free. But if human actions are not only exercised freely but also capable of bringing about changes in the natural world, then not every action is subject to purely physical laws and universal determinism cannot hold. The emerging modern revelations that the laws of nature are subject to vagaries of perception, that the laws of physics are thereby contingent, and that the task of knowing nature may never be completed, led, on the one hand, to Descartes’s separation of mind and matter and Kant’s separation of the world of freedom from the world of nature and, on the other, to the determinist claims of Spinoza, Leibniz, and Hume, who wrote that we may think our acts are free, but this is because their determining causes elude us. Hegel and Marx in turn pursue dialectical answers to the problem of material and willed causes. Seeking freedom through processes of externalization and expression, they look toward the future and the problem of ends. For Hegel, freedom has a political character and finds its end in the state. For Marx, freedom is realized through a reordering of the terms and conditions of existence itself as human agents discover and shape their common interests.

Yet the concept of freedom is of course not merely a matter of philosophical debate. It is an idea that we feel and pursue. We recognize, and at times are forced to recognize, that our behavior is not consonant with our desires and motivations. Our capacities for self-consciousness and self-deception, our abilities to deliberate, reflect, and judge, all open our existence beyond the panoply of contingent and necessary forces that shape us. We live, like the rest of nature, in the present; and we live as well, unlike the rest of nature, beyond the discernible horizon. We are able to speculate about the sources of things and on into futures of imagined possibilities; so far as we know, we are the only beings who can form their own desires, withdraw at will, and suffer regret. The concept of freedom continually invites us to initiate, to choose, and to judge.

Freedom thus in many ways is tied to issues of beginnings, and where we begin when we conceive of it makes all the difference in our relation not only to its causes but also to its consequences. It is a commonplace of the philosophical discourse on freedom to distinguish, for example, between negative and positive freedoms. Negative freedoms, or freedoms from, rely on prior causes and involve independence from existing powers, whether such powers stem from the divine, the state, or elsewhere. Under this paradigm, being free is expressed as becoming free or breaking free, casting off fetters or overcoming limitations.⁴ When we conceive of negative freedom, we thereby begin, like the partisans of any liberation movement, in situations that determine the shape and direction of whatever freedom might be exercised; by definition, negative freedoms are concrete and reactive. Indeed, arguments about negative freedom, with their inherent tensions between “external” forces and “internal” desires, tend to restrict our concerns and hopes to the limits of our bodies. Such negative freedoms grant from the outset that power is something that must be wrested away from what is outside of our bodies and the limits of our bodily extension.

Positive freedoms, however, involve acts of affirmation—they are experienced not as away from but as toward. The prevailing theme of negative freedom is our mortality; that of positive freedom, our decision to live. This notion of positive freedom has been popularized by the Cold War writings of Isaiah Berlin,⁵ but its most forceful statement could be said to have come more than a century and a half earlier, in the discussion of teleological thinking at the close of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. There Kant emphasizes that whereas there are some facts, such as things or objects of nature, that can be established by means of experience, and other facts, such as mathematical ideas of magnitude or geometry, that can be established by being presented to the reason, only one fact, as an “idea of reason,” bridges the relation between experience and reason itself—the fact of freedom. Kant remarks that it “is quite remarkable [that] there is even one idea of reason (which is in itself incapable of any presentation in intuition, thus incapable of theoretical proof of its possibility) among the facts, and that is the idea of freedom. . . . It is the only one among all the ideas of pure reason whose object is a fact and which must be counted among the scibilia [knowable things].”⁶ Thus for Kant, our freedom, inalienable and intrinsic to our human being, is not an object derived from what we think of as “external” experience. As a nonmaterial idea with a “particular kind of causality,” it is manifested or exercised through actions and intelligible in that world of space, time, and indeed causality that we inhabit. Poised between natural causality and this causality of “a particular kind,” human freedom becomes, in Kant’s thought, the link between nature and the moral laws we create through our practical judgments. We in turn could say, in line with such a notion of positive freedom, that freedom is exercised or played upon the world rather than wrested from it.

In Kant’s writings, our practical freedom involves independence from determination by particular sensuous impulses that we might have or—to come closer to their effects—that might occupy us at any given moment. But from Kant’s perspective this independence is not asserted, as it might at first seem, as a negative freedom. Once the will is able to act spontaneously and autonomously, that is, without dependence on some antecedent and external cause, our capacity for transcendental freedom is absolute and positive; through it, we are able to issue actions and events from ourselves, to be self-legislating.

Human beings thereby are able to evade the determinacy that rules the empirical world, not merely because we act according to principles but also because we always can choose to do otherwise, and the choices we make in turn are subjected to further judgments of praise and blame. Our freedom is bound to the fact of our status as living beings; the open decision to act in one way rather than another is rooted existentially in the always prior and fundamental decision to continue to live. In the realm of moral choices, such a capacity for transcendental freedom becomes a precondition for practical freedom, and not the other way around.⁷ At least since the slave Epictetus’s claim that “if you will, you are free,” a transcendental freedom is the Stoic’s birthright.⁸ If for later thinkers, such as Hannah Arendt, “inner freedom” was a retreat from the world consequent to the denial of external, negative freedoms,⁹ in this contrary tradition running from the Stoics to Kant, freedom is present whenever human beings think of themselves as living, willing intelligences.

Kant’s concerns with the cosmological and positive dimensions of human freedom are carried forward in a number of otherwise often incommensurable later philosophies. To choose some representative voices: Friedrich Schelling, Martin Heidegger, Arendt, and Stuart Hampshire have each proposed concepts of freedom inextricably linked to issues of causality, self-determination, acting, and making. Schelling’s 1809 Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters takes up the question of freedom not only in relation to human actions but also within a more general concern with issues of theodicy. In contrast to Kant, Schelling views the fundamental condition of freedom not as reason liberated from its ground in the sensuous but as action willed from necessity; humans exercise this will in a process of becoming that is inseparable from other natural processes. Like Aristotle, Schelling emphasizes the force of personality as a consciousness emerging in nature; prior to existence proper, human self-creation is infused with a “lively feeling” of freedom that is inherently capable of good and evil. Schelling introduces a felt sense of peril into his account of human freedom as he describes the free person as a dizzy man poised on a precipice who has a desire to jump into the abyss.

More than a century before Freud’s writings on the death instinct, Schelling writes of the analogous urge to withdraw from our powers: “The fear of life itself drives man out of the center in which he was created; for this center is, as the purest essence of all will, a consuming fire for every particular will; in order to be able to live in it man must be mortified in all his ownhood, for which reason he must almost necessarily attempt to step out of it and into the periphery, in order to seek rest there for his selfhood.” In the end, Schelling’s theology of freedom holds that God is “not a system, but a life” that can incorporate, in a continual process of overcoming, both personal existence and the ground or condition against which that existence comes into relief. Schelling holds that humans are creatures who cannot integrate the conditions or ground of existence into such an absolute personality; we are finite, and in that finitude, like the finitude of all natural beings, we suffer the melancholy of our incapacity to overcome ourselves. Yet he also emphasizes that, unlike other natural beings, humans are continually becoming conscious. He concludes that in Christianity human existence finds its value “as the beginning of a new covenant” wherein humanity mediates the relation between God and nature: “since man himself is combined with God, God . . . also assumes nature and integrates it into himself. Thus man is the redeemer of nature, and all its prototypes point toward him.”¹⁰ In Schelling’s philosophy, as in Pico’s “Oration,” human beings find their freedom within the precarious, indeterminate, and yet finite situation that characterizes their existence between natural causes and near-divine powers of self-making and self-comprehension.

In his Freiburg lectures delivered in 1930–32, as he took up the terms of those arguments regarding freedom that he had found in Kant and Schelling, Martin Heidegger, too, emphasizes that human beings are uniquely capable of understanding their freedom. Heidegger concludes in a transposition of Kant’s arguments about freedom: “Freedom must itself, in its essence, be more primordial than man. Man is only an administrator of freedom.” The problem of beginning and absolute beginnings continues in Heidegger’s writings as well to be an intrinsic feature of thought about freedom. Freedom is revealed as a power of self-origination and hence must somehow precede human being.

Hannah Arendt, who had been Heidegger’s student, sees the administration of freedom as embedded in means of social relations that are unpredictable and indeterminate. The Stoics had imagined such bonds to other persons as in truth not the fruit of human freedom but rather as the web that entangles humans in relations of violence, submission, and obligation. Arendt, to the contrary, breaks freedom away from determination by necessity. She contends that freedom need not be tied to sovereignty and that a notion of action as open-ended process can enable us “to begin something new . . . of not being able to control or foretell its consequences.” Our faculties of forgiving and promising, the first overriding the past and the second actively shaping the future, help us create a free relation to time that—rather than being rooted in regulation and domination—emerges, she argues, in the actual forging of social relations. These faculties are exercised in free will and turn out to have a binding power necessary to action.¹¹

More recently, Stuart Hampshire has explored the relation between self-legislation and the creation of human desires. For Hampshire we are not the products of our desires so much as the makers of them. He writes, “Desires do not only occur; they may also be formed, and formed as the outcome of a process of criticism . . . if a man can identify his desires to act in certain ways as satisfying certain descriptions, and can therefore reflect upon them, he may also evaluate and criticise them. They are his, in a strong sense of authors...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Sand Castle
• 1. Beginning
• 2. Praising
• 3. Freedom From Mood
• 4. Freedom From Imagination
• 5. Forming
• 6. Rhyming
• 7. Meeting
• 8. Persons as Makers
• The Sand Castle
• Endnotes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Notes