|
Joseph S. Salemi _________________
ENSLAVEMENT TO THE CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE ___________________________________
I certainly am not saying that a poem should have no meaning, and not contain some kind of message that the poet intends to bring across. As I have tried patiently to explain, in formal classical English poetry written in standard English with intelligible syntax and grammar a meaning will always be present and some sort of message will come across. That’s what happens when you use a common language in the accepted way. If you’re going to write in some stupid Dadaist-Surrealist English, then that of course is another story.
Meaning and message become dangerous if they are the primary motive in the poet’s mind when composing. That’s when he loses sight of aesthetics, and produces sermons, sentimental posturing, and emotional appeals. But any poet who writes in clear English is going to produce meaning and message.
The real danger is with morals, or morality, or ethical systems. That is the treacherous quicksand pit. Ethical systems use meaning and message to present their claims to readers. And the perilous thing about ethical systems is that by their very nature their claims are absolutist. To understand this, we need to look at some history.
In the distant past, acceptable behavior was determined by inherited cultural custom, religious sanction, or by political decree. You acted in the ways that your honored ancestors acted, or that orthodox religion taught, or as the king or emperor legislated. In any traditional culture all three of these things were in play, and as long as these three sources did not come into conflict your society had a measure of order and peace. In fact, in these past societies the main task of the rulers and clerisy was to ensure that custom, religious sanction, and politics did not bump into each other.
The real problem started when philosophers began to conjure up ethical systems that they claimed existed independently of custom, religious sanction, or political decree. This was a disaster, and the most prominent and poisonous example of it was Immanuel Kant’s invention of the Categorical Imperative. In an eighteenth century when religious belief was facing serious critique, when time-honored customs were threatened, and when political authority was everywhere under attack, Kant came up with a totally fictitious and crackpot way of determining what was morally acceptable and not acceptable.
The Kantian Categorical Imperative is an idea, a concept, a notion, a belief—a fantasy, if you like—that is meant to govern all your actions with an absolutely tyrannical totality. It brooks no qualifications, no exceptions, no compromises, and above all no questioning. You are to obey the Categorical Imperative without the slightest doubt or hesitation. In French you might call it une idée fixe; in psychiatry you might call it a manic delusion. In Kant’s famous formulation, you should make moral choices with the assumption that what you do can be understood as a universal law that must be followed by all persons at all times. In plainer language, do it because it is the right thing to do, and insist that everyone else make the exact same choice.
Well, what exactly does a Categorical Imperative look like? It can usually be put into the form of something that you should or ought or must do. Notice that all of those words indicate obligation or duty. You are meant to conform, on no grounds other than abstract requirement, and the same is expected from all other persons everywhere and at all times. Here are some very common expressions of the Categorical Imperative:
We should be saving the planet!
In essence, the Categorical Imperative means Doing the Right Thing (whatever you happen to think that is) regardless of whatever inconvenience, pain, useless trouble, annoyance, and disaster it creates for yourself and for others. It is a blanket phrase for all of the idealistic, wide-eyed, euphoric, enthusiasm-driven mania that the sane segment of humanity quietly recognizes as posturing bullshit. It is the kind of thing that is generally tolerated in teenagers, Bible-thumpers, Democrat politicians, and the more ethereal sort of ministers.
The Categorical Imperative is not real. It is something that you either accept or reject, like the literal inerrancy of the scriptures, or the political dogma that all men are created equal—neither of which can be proven on empirical or logical grounds, but which are the subject of passionate commitment for some persons. Persons suffering from such delusions might be called “ideologists,” because they are committed to a system of ideas that are unshakable for them; or they might be called “professional religionists,” because what they believe is held on faith and trust rather than on rational verification.
I hasten to add that not all religionists are mentally deranged or credulous. Far from it. Many of them are highly intelligent and learned. And many of them make all of the normal compromises and shortcuts that are essential for human activity in the real world. But a significant (and highly activist) percentage of them—the ones I call “professional religionists”—are in thrall to some Categorical Imperative that makes their lives and the lives of those around them a sheer torment.
By the way, when I use the words “professional religionists” I don’t refer simply to believers in religious doctrine, and members of churches, sects, and cults. In the world today, many formal agnostics, atheists, and freethinkers are “religionists” as well, since they are enslaved to Categorical Imperatives. In fact, I venture to guess that millions of persons who think of themselves as completely secular, modern, up-to-date worldlings, with no religious commitments at all, are “religionists” as I use the term. It’s just that their Categorical Imperatives are secular rather than scriptural or doctrinal. They are quite as fanatical as the Bible-thumpers about what they think we must do.
Does this have any connection to poetic composition and literary discussion? Well, normally it should not but these days it unfortunately does. A great deal of contemporary poetry is infected with Categorical Imperatives, either overtly or surreptitiously. Genuine poetry is fictive mimesis, and it inhabits a licensed zone of hyper-reality. In the simplest of terms, this means that poets make up stuff, and that they can do it in whatever style or manner they see fit.
But someone driven by a Categorical Imperative will not admit that. For him, poetry is not an end in itself, but a means of addressing the world on some important subject. His poetry is didactic, hortatory, and evangelical. His purpose is not to delight with language, but to further an agenda or cause. Such poets are like Amway dealers, pushing their products with a hard sell, and desperate to sign you up as an associate.
It would be bad enough if poets of this type just composed their stuff, but they inevitably judge the work of others by standards that are rooted in their own Categorical Imperatives. Rather than analyzing a poem by literary criteria they will ask Why is this poem not edifying? Or Why is it not redemptive? Or Why does this poem not deal with the pressing social problems that we face? It’s as if they were churchwardens from the Parish Ladies Aid Society getting sniffy about short skirts, or trannies at an academic conference making a big fuss about proper pronouns.
What lies behind this kind of misapprehension? It is the false notion that poetry is a convenient container for meaning, and that the meaning is more important than the container. Whenever you hear someone whining about a poem’s “message,” or who objects to “factual errors” in it, or who is upset by “indecorous subject matter,” or who wants to know why “God is left out” or why “toxic masculinity isn’t addressed,” you are dealing with someone who is enslaved to Categorical Imperatives.
The poems written or favored by such persons may be openly didactic and hortatory, like a catechism, but they might also be disguised, hiding what they really want to say under a cover of rhetoric and figurative code-language. Such poems often have an undertone that seems to whisper the scriptural injunction “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” If you finish reading a poem and you somehow feel manipulated, as if the poet were suggesting that you need to pray more, or join an environmentalist group, then you have probably read one of these pious poems. They are almost always a drag.
Real poems are exciting, funny, provocative, daring, and insouciant. They bring up interesting and unexpected subjects. They are intriguing and sometimes shocking or scary. They don’t give a swiving hump about edifying or converting the reader, but only amusing and entertaining him. Can they teach you something or deliver a message? Sure. But that is not their main task.
Don’t be enslaved to the Categorical Imperative. And if you really want to send a message, forget poetry and just call Western Union.
Joseph S. Salemi has published poems, translations, and scholarly articles in over one hundred journals throughout the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. His four collections of poetry are Formal Complaints and Nonsense Couplets, issued by Somers Rocks Press, Masquerade from Pivot Press, and The Lilacs on Good Friday from The New Formalist Press. He has translated poems from a wide range of Greek and Roman authors, including Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Horace, Propertius, Ausonius, Theognis, and Philodemus. In addition, he has published extensive translations, with scholarly commentary and annotations, from Renaissance texts such as the Faunus poems of Pietro Bembo, The Facetiae of Poggio Bracciolini, and the Latin verse of Castiglione. He is a recipient of a Herbert Musurillo Scholarship, a Lane Cooper Fellowship, an N.E.H. Fellowship, and the 1993 Classical and Modern Literature Award. He is also a four-time finalist for the Howard Nemerov Prize. His upcoming books, Gallery of Ethopaths, and a collection of critical essays, are forthcoming. |
Persons
in the poetry world sometimes ask me why I have placed a red danger sign
around the words “meaning, message, and morals.” They honestly don’t
understand why those three things are real pitfalls for poets, and why
they should be avoided. 