WISE MEN IN THEIR BAD HOURS- ROBINSON JEFFERS

Wise men in their bad hours have envied
The little people making merry like grasshoppers

In spots of sunlight, hardly thinking
Backward but never forward, and if they somehow
Take hold upon the future they do it
Half asleep, with the tools of generation
Foolishly reduplicating
Folly in thirty-year periods; the eat and laugh too,

Groan against labors, wars and partings,
Dance, talk, dress and undress; wise men have pretended
The summer insects enviable;
One must indulge the wise in moments of mockery.
Strength and desire possess the future,

The breed of the grasshopper shrills, "What does the future
Matter, we shall be dead?" Ah, grasshoppers,
Death's a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made
Something more equal to the centuries

Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.
The mountains are dead stone, the people
Admire or hate their stature, their insolent quietness,
The mountains are not softened nor troubled
And a few dead men's thoughts have the same temper. 

DIALECTIC- G.A. COHEN

In Hegel's theory of knowledge, there is an epistemological ascent in three stages. The point of departure is sensuous consciousness, the summit is reason, and understanding lies along the route between them. The initial position is the most primitive encounter between mind and the world, predating any form of reflection. The mind does not experience itself as divided from the world, and is incapable of distinguishing things and aspects in what lies before it. The elements of the object are merged, and the subject is merged with them. Understanding is the sphere of analysis: the subject asserts a distinction between itself and the object, of an absolute kind, and is able to discriminate parts and features of the object. Understanding is a necessary phase in the acquisition of knowledge, but it must be surpassed by reason, which maintains understanding's distinctions, yet also recognizes deeper unities beyond understanding's competence. Reason recaptures the integration understanding suspended, without renouncing the achievements premised on that suspension.

Epistemology is not the only area Hegel trisected in the manner just sketched. While I do not seek endorsement of his procedure in epistemology or in general, I do submit that the rhythm realized in the progress exhibited above sometimes occurs in a person's development. With respect to categorially various items to which a person may be related-his spouse, his family, his country, his job, his role, his body, his desires-it seems possible for him to sustain something like each of the three attitudes we have separated. He may fail in significant ways to distinguish himself and what he is from the other to which he is related; he may possess a strong sense of its otherness, so that it seems alien to him; or he may have that sense, yet find it compatible with close engagement. What is more, it sometimes happens that he occupies the three positions successively, in the order Hegel thought canonical in epistemology and elsewhere.

A domain offering examples of the sequence Hegel favored is that of marriage. In its early stages a person may feel his interests and purposes to be identical with those of his spouse. Both may feel that way, and thus combine their lives to an extent which from outside looks artificial or moronic. But then one or both may revolt against fusion, and become hostile to continued connection. Finally, a new harmony may supervene, not through relapse into complete mutual absorption, real or pretended, but by discovery of a unity which is not antagonistic to the individuality of each.

Referring to this sequence in intimate relations, Hegel wrote in his fragment "On Love" that "the process is: unity, separated opposites, reunion."2 He thought the course of true love always has this structure, but we need not agree when we acknowledge that there is such a structure, and that it deserves attention. The term "dialecticar' will hereafter be applied to processes of the envisaged kind. I shall say that a subject undergoes a dialectical process if it passes from a stage where it is undivided from some object, through a stage where it divides itself from it in a manner which creates disunity, to a stage where distinction persists but unity is restored. I shall label the successive stages "undifferentiated unity," "differentiated disunity," and "differentiated unity."

(Cohen, G.A. (1974), Marx's Dialectic of Labour, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 235-37)

To A Young Artist- Robinson Jeffers

It is good for strength not to be merciful
To its own weakness, good for the deep urn to run
over, good to explore
The peaks and the deeps, who can endure it,
Good to be hurt, who can be healed afterward: but
you that have whetted consciousness
Too bitter an edge, too keenly daring,
So that the color of a leaf can make you tremble
and your own thoughts like harriers
Tear the live mind: were your bones mountains,
Your blood rivers to endure it? and all that labor
of discipline labors to death.
Delight is exquisite, pain is more present;
You have sold the armor, you have bought shining
with burning, one should be stronger than
strength
To fight baresark in the stabbing field
In the rage of the stars: I tell you unconsciousness
is the treasure, the tower, the fortress;
Referred to that one may live anything;
The temple and the tower: poor dancer on the flints
and shards in the temple porches, turn home.

"He in his madness prays for storms,
and dreams that storms will bring him peace"
-Lev Tolstoy

Rock and Hawk - Robinson Jeffers

Here is a symbol in which
Many high tragic thoughts
Watch their own eyes.

This gray rock, standing tall
On the headland, where the seawind
Lets no tree grow,

Earthquake-proved, and signatured
By ages of storms: on its peak
A falcon has perched.

I think, here is your emblem
To hang in the future sky;
Not the cross, not the hive,

But this; bright power, dark peace;
Fierce consciousness joined with final
Disinterestedness;

Life with calm death; the falcon's
Realist eyes and act
Married to the massive

Mysticism of stone,
Which failure cannot cast down
Nor success make proud.