Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

1. Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

2. Benjamin Lee Whorf Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

3. Benjamin Lee Whorf Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

4. Benjamin Lee Whorf Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

5. Benjamin Lee Whorf Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

6. Benjamin Lee Whorf Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

7. Fragment from The Song of Creation Benjamin Lee Whorf Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

8. Benjamin Lee Whorf Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

9. (1) The very existence of . . . a common stock of conceptions, possibly possessing a yet unstudied arrangement of its own, does not yet seem to be greatly appreciated; yet to me it seems to be a necessary concomitant of the communicability of ideas by language; it holds the principle of this communicability, and is in a sense the universal language, to which the various specific languages give entrance." (36)

10. (2) I find it gratuitous to assume that a Hopi who knows only the Hopi language and the cultural ideas of his own society has the same notions, often supposed to be intuitions, of time and space that we have, and that are generally assumed to be universal. In particular, he has no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future, through a present, into a past; or, in which, to reverse the picture, the observer is being carried in the stream of duration continuously away from a past and into a future. (56)

11. (3) Just as it is possible to have any number of geometries other than the Euclidean which give an equally perfect account of space configurations, so it is possible to have descriptions of the universe, all equally valid, that do not contain our familiar contrasts of time and space. The relativity viewpoint of modern physics is one such view, conceived in mathematical terms, and the Hopi weltanschauung is another and quite different one, nonmathematical and linguistic. (58)

12. (4) In [the] Hopi view, time disappears and space is altered, so that it is no longer the homogeneous and isntantaneous timeless space of our supposed intuition or of classical Newtonian mechanics. At the same time, new concepts and abstractions flow into the picture, taking up the task of describing the universe without reference to such time or space—abstractions for which our language lacks adequate terms. These abstractions, by approximations of which we attempt to reconstruct for ourselves the metaphysics of the Hopi, will undoubtedly appear to us as psychological or even mystical in character. . . . [They] are definitely given either explicitly in words—psychological or metaphysical terms—in the Hopi language, or, even more, are implicit in the very structure and grammar of that language, as well as being observable in Hopi culture and behavior. They are not, so ar as I can consciously avoid it, projections of other systems upon the Hopi language and culture made by me in my attempt at an objective analysis. (58-59)

13. (5) Is the Hopi world view mystical? no more than the "flowing time and static space of our own metaphysics, which are au fond equally mystical." Like us, the Hopi struggles to "save the appearances" (59)

14. (6) "The objective or manifested comprises all that is or has been accesible to the senses, the historical physical universe, in fact, with no attempt to distinguish between present and past, but excluding everything that we call future." (59)

15. (7) "The subjective or manifesting comprises all that we call future, but not merely this; it includes equally and indistinguishably all that we call mental—everything that appears or exists in the mind, or as the Hopi would prefer to say, in the heart, not only the heart of man, but the heart of animals, plants, and things, and behind and within all the forms and appearances of nature in the heart of nature, and by an implication and extension which has been felt by more than one anthropologist, yet would hardly ever be spoken of by a Hopi himself, so charged is the idea with religious and magical awesomeness, in the very heart of the Cosmos itself. (59-60)

16. (8) "The subjective realm (subjective from our viewpoint, but intensely real and quivering with life, power, and potency to the Hopi) embraces not only our future, much of which the Hopi regards as more or less predestined in essence if not in exact form, but also all mentality, intellection, and emotion, the essence and typical form of which is the striving of purposeful desire, intelligent in character, toward manifestation—a manifestation which is much resisted and delayed, but in some form or other is inevitable. It is the realm of expectancy, of desire and purpose, of vitalizing life, of efficient causes, of thought thinking itself out from an inner realm (the Hopian heart) into manifestation. It is a dynamic state, yet not a state of motion—it is not advancing toward us out of a future but already within us in vital and mental form, and its dynamism is at work in the field of the eventuating or manifesting, i.e. evolving without motion from the subjective by degrees to a result which is the objective." (60)

17. (9) "[The] nearer edge of the subjective cuts across and includes a part of our present time, viz. the moment of inception, but most of our present belongs in the Hopi scheme to the objective realm and so is indistinguishable from our past. There is also a verb form, the inceptive which refers to this edge of emergent manifestation in the reverse way—as belonging to the objective as the edge at which objectivity is attained; this is used to indicate beginning or starting, and in most cases there is no difference apparent in the translation from the similar use of the expective." (60-61)

18. (10) "The inceptive, referring to the objective and result side, and not like the expective to the subjective and causal side, implies the ending of the work of causation in the same breath that it states the beginning of manifestation." (61)

19. (11) "If we were to approximate our metaphysical terminology more closely to Hopian terms, we should probably speak of the subjective realm as the realm of hope or hoping." (61)

20. (12) "Every language contains terms that have come to attain cosmic scope of reference, that crystallize in themselves the basic postulates of an unformulated philosophy, in which is couched the thought of a people, a culture, a civilization, even of an era. Such are our words 'reality, substance, matter, cause," and . . . 'space, time, past, present, future.' Such a term in Hopi is the word often translated 'hope'—tunatya—'it is in the action of hoping, it hopes, it is hoped for, it thinks or is thought of with hope,' etc. . . ." (61)

21. (13) "Most metaphysical words in Hopi are verbs, not nouns as in European languages." (61)

22. (14) “The word tunatya contains in its idea of hope something of our words 'thought,' 'desire,' and 'cause,' which sometimes must be used to translate it. The word is really a term which crystallizes the Hopi philosophy of the universe in respect to its grand dualism of objective and subjective. It is the Hopi term for subjective. It refers to the realm of the subjective, unmanifest, vital and causal aspect of the Cosmos, and the fermenting activity toward fruition and manifestation with which it seethes—an action of hoping; i.e. mental causal activity, which is forever pressing upon and into the manifested realm. As anyone acquainted with Hopi society knows, the Hopi see this burgeoning activity in the growing of plants, the forming of clouds and their condensation in rain, the careful planning out of the communal activities of agriculture and architecture, and in all human hoping, wishing, striving, and taking thought; and as most especially concentrated in prayer, the constant hopeful praying of the Hopi community, assisted by their exoteric communal ceremonies and their secret, esoteric rituals in the underground kivas—prayer which conducts the pressure of the collective Hopi thought and will out of the subjective into the objective." (61-62)

23. (15) "The inceptive denotes the first appearance of the objective, but the basic meaning of tunatya is subjective activity or force; the inceptive is then the terminus of such activity. It might then be said that tunatya 'coming true' is the Hopi term for objective, as contrasted with subjective, the two terms being simply two different inflectional nuances of the same verbal root, as the two cosmic forms are the two aspects of one reality." (62)

24. (16) "As far as space is concerned, the subjective is a mental realm, a realm of no space in the objective sense, but it seems to be symbolically related to the vertical dimension and its poles the zenith and the underground, as well as to the 'heart' of things, which corresponds to our word 'inner' in the metaphorical sense. Corresponding to each point in the objective world is such a vertical and vitally inner axis which is what we call the wellspring of the future. . . . From each subjective axis, which may be thought of as more or less vertical and like the growth-axis of a plant, extends the objective realm in every physical direction, though these directions are typified more especially by the horizontal plane and its four cardinal points." (62)

25. (17) "To the Hopi there is no temporal future, there is nothing in the subjective state corresponding to the sequences and successions conjoined with distances and changing physical configurations that we find in the objective state." (62)

26. (18) "The objective is the great cosmic form of extension; it take in all the strictly extensional aspects of existence, and it includes all intervals and distances, all seriations and number. Its distance includes what we call time in the sense of the temporal relation between events which have already happened. . . . The element of time is not separated from whatever element of space enters into the operations." (63)

27. (19) "Hopi, with its preferences for verbs, as contrasted to our own liking for nouns, perpetually turns our propositions about things into propositions about events." (63)

28. (20) "As the objective realm displaying its characteristic attribute of extension stretches away from the observer toward that unfathomable remoteness which is both far away in space and long past in time, there comes a point where extension in detail ceases to be knowable and is lost in the vast distance, and where the subjective, creeping behind the scenes as it were, merges into the objective, so that at this inconceivable distance from the observer—from all observers—there is an all-encircling end and beginning of things where it might be said that existence, itself, swallows up the objective and the subjective." (63)

29. (21) "So the dim past of myths is that corresponding distance on earth (rather than in the heavens) which is reached subjectively as myth through the vertical axis of reality via the pole of the nadir—hence it is placed below the present surface of the earth, though this does not mean that the nadir-land of the origin myths is a hole or cavern as we should understand it." (64)

30. (22) "It is evident to a linguist that thinking as defined by Jung, contains a large linguistic element a strictly patterned nature, while feeling is mainly nonlinguistic, though it may use the vehicle of language, albeit in a way quite different from thinking. Thinking may be said to be language's own ground, whereas feeling deals in feeling values which language indeed possesses but which lie rather on its borderland. There are Jung's two rational functions, and by contrast his two irrational functions, sensation and intuition, may fairly be termed nonlinguistic. (66)

31. (23) "'Common sense' is unaware that talking itself means using a complex cultural organization, just as it is unaware of cultural organizations in general. Sense or meaning does not result from words or morphemes but from patterned relations between words or morphemes." (67)

32. (24) “We tend to believe that our bodies can stop up this energy, prevent it from affecting other things until we will our bodies to overt action. But this may be so only because we have our own linguistic basis for a theory that formless items like 'matter' are things in themselves, malleable only by similar things, by more matter, and hence insulated from the powers of life and thought. It is no more unnatural to think that thought contracts everything and pervades the universe than to think, as we all do, that light kindled outdoors does this. And it is not unnatural to suppose that thought, like any other force, leaves everywhere traces of effect. Now, when we think of a certain actual rosebush, we do not suppose that our thought goes to that actual bush, and engages with it, like a searchlight turned upon it. What then do we suppose our consciousness is dealing with when we are thinking of that rosebush? Probably we think it is dealing with a ‘mental image’" which is not the rosebush but a mental surrogate of it. But why should it be natural to think that our thought deals with a surrogate and not with the real rosebush? Quite possibly because we are dimly aware that we carry about with us a whole imaginary space, full of mental surrogates. To us, mental surrogates are old familiar fare. Along with the images of imaginary space, which we perhaps secretly know to be only imaginary, we tuck the thought-of actually existing rosebush, which may be quite another story, perhaps just because we have that very convenient "place" for it. The Hopi thought-world has no imaginary space. The corollary to this is that it may not locate thought dealing with real space anywhere but in real space, nor insulate real space from the effects of thought. A Hopi would naturally suppose that his thought (or he himself) traffics with the actual rosebush—or more likely, corn plant—that he is thinking about. The thought then should leave some trace of itself with the plant in the field. If it is a good thought, one about health and growth, it is good for the plant; if a bad thought, the reverse.” (149-50)

33. (25) “We shall no longer be able to see a few recent dialects of the Indo-European family, and the rationalizing techniques elaborated from their patterns, as the apex of the evolution of the human mind, nor their present wide spread as due to any survival from fitness or to anything but a few events of history—events that could be call fortunate only from the parochial point of view of the favored parties. They, and our own thought processes with them, can no longer be envisioned as spanning the gamut of reason and knowledge but only as one constellation in a galactic expanse. A fair realization of the incredible degree of diversity of linguistic systems that ranges over the globe leaves one with the inescapable feeling that the human spirit is inconceivably old; that the few thousand years of history covered by our written records are no more than the thickness of a pencil mark on the scale that measures our past experience on this planet; that the vents of these recent millenniums spell nothing in any evolutionary wise, that the race has taken no sudden spurt, achieved no commanding synthesis during recent millenniums, but has only played with a few of the linguistic formulations and views of nature bequeathed from an inexpressibly long past. Yet neither this feeling nor the sense of precarious dependence of all we know upon linguistic tools which themselves are largely unknown need be discouraging to science but should, rather, foster that humility which accompanies the true human spirit, and thus forbid that arrogance of the mind which hinders real scientific curiosity and detachment. (218-219)

34. (26) “Every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyzes nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness.” (252)

35. (27) “In more subtle matters we all, unknowingly, project the linguistic relationships of a particular language upon the universe, and see them there. . . . We say ‘see that wave’—the same pattern as ‘see that house.’ But without the projection of language no one ever saw a single wave. We see a surface in ever-changing undulating motion. Some languages cannot say ‘a wave’; they are closer to reality in this respect. Hopi say walalata, ‘plural waving occurs,’ and can call attention to one place in the waving just as we can. But, since actually a wave cannot exist by itself, the form that corresponds to our singular, wala, is not the equivalent of English ‘a wave,’ but means ‘a slosh occurs,’ as when a vessel of liquid is suddenly jarred.” (262)

36. (28) “To restrict thinking to the patterns merely of English, and especially to those patterns which represent the acme of plainness in English is to lose a power of thought which, once lost, can never be regained. It is the "plainest" English which contains the greatest number of unconscious assumptions about nature. . . . I believe that those who envision a future world speaking only one tongue, whether English, German, Russian, or any other, hold a misguided ideal and would do the evolution of the human mind the greatest disservice. Western culture has made, through language, a provisional analysis of reality and, without correctives, holds resolutely to that analysis as final. The only correctives lie in all those other tongues which by aeons of independent evolution have arrived at different, but equally logical, provisional analyses.” (244) Benjamin Lee Whorf Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

37. (29) “Too long has the public mind considered religion to be synonymous with priestcraft. Studies that show the actual functioning of a religion, not merely as a cult, but as an indissoluble part of the life of a people, a kind of social cement almost as essential and characteristic as a language, indeed a kind of cultural language, have then a prime educational value for world civilization, as eradicators of error and an illusion long cultivated by modern Western culture.” (1.1: 13) Benjamin Lee Whorf Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

38. (30) “[Modern Western culture] has been gradually losing this social cement [of religion], and has attempted to make a virtue out of the loss. It has represented to itself the decay of that active, functioning religious element in the home life and public life as a process of emancipation from superstition and as the liberation from a priestly oppression. . . . Actually, we are not heroic rebels defying powerful priests; we are drifting participants in a process of slow cultural change, the final result of which may be not a gain but a terrible loss. And this we have begun to realize. In almost any newspaper, writers, scientists, and scholars, tell us that the present chaos is the culmination of the destruction of faith.” (1.1: 13) Benjamin Lee Whorf Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

39. (31) “The types of language used by the sciences and fields of learning have become to specialized they are almost like mutually unintelligible dialects. In attempting to translate them into the cultural layman's English, the principles of cosmic order, which are the real science and wisdom of the whole thing, very easily drop out, and then the would-be interpretation merely gives the layman what amounts to a demonstration of low-grade magic.” (1.3: 12) Benjamin Lee Whorf Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

40. (32) “Back in the middle of the last century Mendeleeff and Lothar-Meyer discovered what had also been a poet's intuition, that "the atoms march in tune," i.e. that they form an evenly graduated sequence, like the notes of a musical scale. Emerson was a student of chemistry as well as a philosopher and poet; he believed in a synthesis of awareness; that all ways of getting understanding, science, poetry, religion, intuition, are glimpses of the same ultimate vista. He and a few others succeeded in getting New England really excited about this integrated wisdom—almost succeeded in making it a truly American viewpoint. We don't think we are dragging in something to remote her, for the "golden day" as Lewis Mumford calls it, of American wisdom and the Chemistry of Mendeleeff and Meyer, were not entirely without connection, but were sister episodes in the development of our culture which are due eventually for large and related fruitions.” (1.3: 12-13) Benjamin Lee Whorf Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

41. (33) “These devices and the radiant tracer particles carried along with other matter act like extensions of our limited senses and enable us to perceive as though we had more penetrating senses. If we had such senses we should not see things in as isolated a way, stopping short at such marked boundaries as we now see. There would be zones of flowing atomic matter extending out from objects; metals and chemicals would seem almost alive for we should see motion going on within them and outflowing from them—fine matter would be wandering and streaming about, flowing away from them and right through other pieces of metal. Substances that we call catalysts we should see helping forward these interpretations. We can detect all this now with the isotopic tracers.” (1.3: 13) Benjamin Lee Whorf Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

42. (34) “Montague brings the resources of science and philosophy to bear on the problem of how a meager system of physical particles in a germ plasm or a brain can contain the nearly infinite aggregate of patterns preserving the pasts of heredity and memory.” (1.4: 10) Benjamin Lee Whorf Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

43. (35) “In terms of this theory [of W.P. Montague's] sensation and consciousness are essentially kinds of growth, i.e. accumulation of a growing deposit of pattern in the space-time explored by the growing and enduring entity. The rich of this deposit is a measure of evolution. Thus enriched with manifolds of fluxions, the meager molecular groupings absorb energy from light-waves and also chemical energy from air, water, and food, changing both into potential energy on which they impress their latent patterns. Plants build both kinds of energy into molecular structure; animals build molecular energy into molecular structure and radiant energy into patterns of fluxions that preserve the images of memory. Photosynthesis in the plant kingdom is the analogue of sensation in the animal and sensation plus rational self-consciousness in man—of all these are precisely the faculty of absorbing energy 'neat' from radiation, converting it into the potential energy of structure in plants and of a memory-deposit in animal and man.” (1.4: 10) Benjamin Lee Whorf Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

44. (36) Assessing the "consequences" of Montague's theory: • “The theory thus works particularly well as a vibration theory of existence; and it shows us a gamut of possible vibratory order which is not the familiar spectrum of radiation, but is at right angles to it in time, so to speak; because each interval is a fluxion of the one preceding it—which of course is not the case with the successive frequencies of the ordinary physical spectrum. Now such a gamut of vibratory orders may be said to establish a series of grades or sub-planes of existence, for each gamut degree would be a wave-field of its own just as the little ripples on the big ocean waves establish a wave-field of their own. On the analogy of nature as already known, each wave-field might be expected to contain (a) orders of phenomena almost entirely confined to its own domain, (b) phenomena that take in "vertically" a column down through the gamut. ‘People’ would be phenomena of the b class.” (1.4: 10) Benjamin Lee Whorf Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

45. (37) “The theory says that scanty matter in a germ plasm bears an inconceivably rich, invisible yet mechanistically conceivable form, a true latent image, which is a pattern of fluxions and or a column of forces, for a fluxion may also be conceived statically as a stress or force. This image is essentially indifferent to the specific matter on which it is impressed, since it may [be] transferred to new matter acquired from food, water, and air. Being indifferent, it can be associated with any kind of particles, e.g., with a cloud of electronic corpuscles, or with no particles at all but with waves of pure radiant energy, for waves may bear fluxions as well as particles. As a corollary to this indifference to specific matter, Montague shows that immortality is not impossible. He thinks that memory-deposits continue to exist after the meager systems to which they were attached in brain-tissues are gone,—preserved by being members of a whole universe of similar entities.” (1.4: 10-11) Benjamin Lee Whorf Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

46. (38) “[Montague's theory] enables us to think of, and—who knows?—perhaps to utilize, the energies of emotion and though as one would electricity, i.e., as mechanistic patterns of forces, objectively and independently existing somewhere—occupying a kind of space, though not three-dimensional space.” (1.4: 11) Benjamin Lee Whorf Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

47. (39) “Certain psychically sensitive people get vivid and often amazingly correct impressions of the thoughts, emotions, and personal characters of others as moving, vibrating, spatial figures or designs, with the wave-characteristic of color; and they see the cloud-like substance which bears these patterns impress them upon other cloud-like bodies—this being a crude description, naturally. Such people, who seem to "see" mechanistic force-like operations and configurations in a dimensioned space-field, may perhaps be more highly developed and nearer the truth of things than ordinary people who merely "feel" or "sense" qualities called emotions or thoughts. But even ordinary people have occasional tendencies to receive "images" of intangible qualities as if the latter had a trace of extensional form, in a dim and darkling way visible or visual.” (1.4: 11) Benjamin Lee Whorf Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

48. (40) “In the same kind of space in which we "see" our memory pictures, and to the same degree of visual vividness, many of us get traces of distinctive outlines when we think of intangible like a year, dates, the number series, names, melodies, etc. Some on hearing music receive dim visions of phytoid or rocket-like forms flowing and expanding. Rhythms are translated in the mind into designs. And Montague's theory calls attention to the omni-present rhythm which pervades everything in the universe. For patterns of fluxions are patterns of subtle rhythms as well as intricate bundles of forces which continue the past of heredity and memory into the present and future.” (1.4: 11) Benjamin Lee Whorf Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

49. (41) “It is not sufficiently realized that the ideal of world-wide fraternity and co-operation fails if it does not include ability to adjust intellectually as well as emotionally to our brethren from other countries. The West has attained some emotional understanding of the East through the esthetic and belles-lettres types of approach, but his has not bridged the intellectual gulf; we are no nearer to understanding the types of logical thinking which are reflected in truly Eastern forms of scientific thought or analysis of anture. This requires linguistic research into the logics of native languages, and realization that they have equal scientific validity with our own thinking habits.” (1.3: 13-14) Benjamin Lee Whorf Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens

50. (42) Speaks admiringly of Reiser's conception of "the union of high-grade feeling (that which in a low grade is called emotion) with intellection (union of heart and brain), for mystical and intuitive insight, for a non-static, creative universe and a super-physical that is not a supernatural—all of these reconciled and wedded to science in a way that does no violence to clear thinking." (1.5: 12) Benjamin Lee Whorf Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens