Month: January 2020

The Soul and the Harpy


Marble relief from the Harpy Tomb (chest with reliefs on all four sides which
originally surmounted a Lycian sepulchral tower). Xanthus, Turkey. 480BC-470BC.

Literature is the ‘middle term’ par excellence, and its ‘educational’, ‘realistic’ function consists precisely in training us without our being aware of it for an unending task of mediation and conciliation. Literature (which, like the reality principle and the doxa, prospers in periods of social stability and suddenly appears ‘impossible’ or ‘useless’ during wars and revolutions) indicates how deeply rooted is our desire to make the ‘adjustment’ to the existing order coincide with some idea of ‘happiness’. Makes us realize that ‘consent’ – feeling that we ‘want’ to do what we ‘have’ to do – can be one of the highest aspirations of the individual psyche. It tells us, in other words, that in the absence of great battles (and therefore – the point cannot be suppressed – in the absence of what could be great tragedies) it is inevitable that from time to time one will try to convince oneself that this is really the best of all possible worlds.

If so undeconstructive and unliberating a notion of literature still seems disagreeable, or unconvincing, I can only draw on an image that has often come back to me in the course of this study. It is a bas-relief of an ancient Greek tomb in the British Museum. It shows a harpy – the upper half of its body a woman, the lower a bird of prey – carrying off a small human body: according to the experts, the soul of the deceased. Below, the harpy is clutching the soul tight in its claws, but higher up her Greek arms are holding her in an attentive and tender embrace. The soul is doing nothing to get out of the harpy’s clutch. It seems calm, relaxed even. It probably does not like being dead: if it did there would be no need for harpies. But at the same time the soul must know that there is no escape from the grip of the claws. For this reason it does not lower its gaze, but rests its head trustingly on the harpy’s arms. Precisely because there is no escape it prefers to delude itself about the affectionate, almost maternal nature of the creature dragging it away with her in flight. Can we blame it?

—Franco Moretti, “The Soul and the Harpy: Reflections on the Aims and Methods of Literary Historiography”, tr. David Forgacs, Signs Taken For Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, Verso, 1988, pp. 40-41.

Herman Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

“We fear death, we shudder at life’s instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. Thus, when artists create forms, pictures, colors and thinkers search for the laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do.”

Psychosomatic Medicine and the Phylosophy of Life

Since we have mentioned feeling, we would like to conclude by indicating its importance for any philosophy of life. Although it is difficult to pinpoint the precise level, at some level of life the organism’s relationship with the world becomes a relationship of feeling: many organisms are sensitive to elements in their environments. Again this applies to individual cells as well as to conglomerates of cells and whole organisms. Sensitivity is the first glimmering of subjectivity in organisms, if we may apply the word “subjectivity” to even the most primitive and elemental kinds of feeling. And as we move up the living kingdom to more and more complex organisms, sensitivity too becomes more complex; and at a certain point we can speak of organisms perceiving items composing the environment. It would, of course, be difficult to mark the progressive difference between an elemental sensitivity to the outside and an actual perception of it, for any form of felt sensitivity may already count as an experience, at least of a very basic sort. Our point here is, however, that the first glimmerings of subjectivity arise relatively early in the phylogenetic scale. And once subjectivity appears, it grows in complexity, refinement, and acuity. “Mind,” then, is certainly not the exclusive privilege of human beings. It is not even the exclusive possession of the higher animals. Mental life begins where sensitivity to the outside is felt [8,15].

(Source)