Re: [HM] Poetry and Mathematics
Robert Tragesser (RTragesser@compuserve.com)
Wed, 15 Dec 1999 04:59:08 -0500
Perhaps I missed a post on this thread, but does the quote from
Kovalevskaja given by Alfred Ross, which quote (of K.) contains
presumably an indirect quote from Weierstrass on the need of a
mathematician to be something of a poet, provide the context --
requested by Hans Lausch -- in which Weierstrass uttered that remark?
Or does it provide only a gloss by Kovalevskaja on the Weierstrass
quote?
[[Forgive me if I missed a post. . .but these sorts of not
keeping matters straight are awfully common on HM; perhaps that is what
Julio had in mind when he complained of the weakness of much of the
writing here?]]
It is a sign that Kovalevskaja was clueless about the nature of
poetic thought -- and so in no position to gloss Weierstrass -- that he
proceeds by considering generalizations about poetry rather than, say,
"turning" _aridity_ (of which mathematics had been accused), redeeming
it (as one might redeem "dappled things").--There are those for whom
_the arid_ can approach the sublime; in the hands of a strong poet,
the arid can be brought to within the sublime, or at least redeemed
_for everyone_. After all, if someone has the impression that
mathematics is "arid", then such a turning would begin with what they
know of mathematics and lead them to a appreciation of the mathematics
they know (by of course, leading them beyond the mathematics they know).
In response to Hans Lausch -- he is quite right that it is
appalling, this quoting out of context that is so often aimed at
rhetorical or cheap pedagogical effect rather than real thought (one
only has to speed-read through all those severely muddled very widely
read essays by the toy-(sometime)historian Stephen Jay Gould to realize
we are confronting a pathology here, nay, an insanity -- the sort of
madness both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein found to be the condition of our
world, especially where it supposes itself to be thinking). At the
same time I dare say that it never happens that "knowing" the context
really settles the sense of the utterance, although it can rule out
_some_ extreme readings (of the sort Hans mentions), but not for long
(as anyone who has reviewed some of the Talmudic hermeneutics would
remark). Kovalevskaja does at least look like he/she is on the right
track, but does not travel along it -- mentioning an unintended
interpretation -- imagination as a source of fiction only, and then
suggesting that poetic imagination can be a way of getting to what is,
though it is disconcerting that he doesn't say how and in what sense
(did he just not think the matter through, or was the quote incomplete.
. .if he didn't think the matter through, it is odd he should have made
the point, and that is a kind of ineptitude or madness). It does look
like it ought to be the task of the historian to provide the range of
senses (even given "the context"), and to think of what the strongest
or deepest or most cogent sense of a remark might be. After all,
Weierstrass may have had a pitifully weak understanding of the poetic,
for example weak like that of the average Professor of Literature (see
the american poet Ivor Winters on this!), so that quoting him on poetry
and mathematics would have a negative effect.
rtragesser of the negev